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Category “change & challenges”

Why Letting Ourselves Feel Bad Is the Key to Feeling Better

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“The more you hide your feelings, the more they show. The more you deny your feelings, the more they grow.” ~Unknown

For as long as I can remember, I have been on a quest to heal myself. From a very young age I can remember feeling different from my peers. I was always painfully shy and paralyzed with insecurity and fear, which left me in a constant state of self-criticism.

Hardships in my young life, including the suicide of my father, left me with the belief that life was just hard.

Unfortunately, I also thought that it wasn’t supposed to …

Letting Go of the Lies That Make Us Feel Bad About Ourselves

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“Genuine forgiveness does not deny anger but faces it head-on.” ~Alice Duer Miller

The man who I thought was my soul mate walked out on me fourteen years ago. He immediately remarried a lovely, beautiful woman who was everything I was not.

I am desperate to fall in love. I’m thirty-eight. I want a baby. I want a relationship. I feel alone.

A year ago, I fell unexpectedly in love with my photographer. Yes, star-struck romantics, it was just like the movies. Shy, awkward woman gets pictures taken for her brand-building website, and she is completely unraveled by his boyish …

How Pain from the Past Can Be a Gift in the Present

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“When something bad happens you have three choices. You can let it define you, let it destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you.” ~Unknown

Don’t hate your past. No matter what it contained or what it did to you, the past shapes who you are, not just for the things you felt damaged you but for the lessons you can take from it.

I love working with the people I call the world shakers. They’re the people who want to make a difference in the world so that they leave it in a slightly better way than they …

How to Really Live Instead of Merely Existing

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“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.” ~Norman Cousins

“Come here and take Dora out to get some milk.”

With those simple words, I knew my father’s time was short. Not a man to ask for help, I knew that milk was just an excuse to get me to come to his side.

My father was a gruff, angry, bitter man who had sealed himself off from nearly everyone. I spoke with him at 7:00 am every Saturday morning for fifteen years. In those conversations he complained about …

A Message for Anyone Who’s Been Abused and Has Kept It Inside

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TRIGGER WARNING: This content deals with an account of sexual abuse and may be triggering to some people.

“Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.” ~Maria Robinson

My uncle molested me from the time I was about four until I was in my early twenties. He held me too long and hugged me too tight. He would growl in my ear like an animal in heat, his warm, wet, often alcoholic smelling breath overwhelming me.

This is how he greeted me at every occasion. When I was really …

When You Feel Down or Stuck: How to Effectively Be What You’re Not

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“Success is achieved by developing our strengths, not eliminating our weaknesses.” ~Marilyn vos Savant

I often hear the words “be yourself.” I love those words, and I truly believe that everyone should strive to be the truest version of who they are. There’s nothing more attractive than a person who is just so utterly themselves, even when society tries to push them the other way.

Strong willed people are some of my favorite types. They can be righteous. They can be overly moral. However, they know what they want, they know who they are, and they know that nobody else …

Setting Emotional Boundaries: Stop Taking on Other People’s Feelings

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“The way you treat yourself sets the standard for others.” ~Sonya Friedman

The longer I stayed on the phone, the more agitated I became. My mother was on the other end, as usual, dumping her emotions on me. I had moved to Los Angeles for graduate school in part to escape all of this—my mother’s unhappiness, my sense of responsibility, the pressure to be perfect.

When I hung up the phone, I felt an overwhelming sense of anger. At the time, I could not (correction: would not) allow myself to admit that I was angry with my mother. I …

Change Your Life by Changing Your Mind About Yourself

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“The way you treat yourself sets the standard for others.” ~Sonya Friedman

I’d had enough.

Once again, I’d sent follow-up emails to guys who had shown interest in my dating site profile. Once again, I’d included full-length photos with those emails, unlike the headshot that went along with my online profile.

And once again, days later, my inbox was a virtual ghost town.

Didn’t these guys know how much courage it took for me to set up a profile in the first place? I was twenty-six years old and been on fewer than a dozen dates in my life—including my …

6 Things to Do When You Feel Small and Insignificant

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“Tough times never last, but tough people do.” ~Robert Schuller

On nights when the stars shine bright in the Arizona desert, I remember to tell myself to pay attention to the universe’s handiwork. From space, the Earth is a mere speck in the galaxy. I am humbled by this knowing, by my smallness. I call it my Ratatouille moment.

Ratatouille is an animated movie that tells a story of a dreamer, a remarkable rat named Remy, who aspires to be a chef. Emerging from the sewers one day, Remy was shown a different vantage point of the city.

To his …

6 Lessons from a Brave Little Girl About Living a Love-Filled Life

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“One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: that word is love.” ~Sophocles

I can’t believe it was almost four years ago that I met *Holly. Her story is still deeply embedded into my heart. Who would have thought that one can learn so much from a ten-year-old child?

At the time, I was working in Kenya as a children’s rights researcher. Knowing about my psychology background, the principal of a primary school I was working at asked me if I could talk to one of their students. Since I would only be able to meet …

Taking Big Chances and Knowing If It’s Worth the Risk

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“Life is inherently risky. There is only one big risk you should avoid at all costs, and that is the risk of doing nothing.” ~Denis Waitley

Taking risks isn’t the secret to life, but taking risks does mean we are never at risk of doing nothing.

Nine months ago, almost to the day, I stepped off a plane onto German soil. I left behind everything I knew, and almost everyone I knew. I moved to a place where I couldn’t understand anyone to live with someone I had never lived with before.

But let’s back up. What exactly made me …

Breaking the Rust: 7 Tips to Move Forward When You Feel Stuck

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“Change is inevitable. Growth is intentional.” ~Glenda Cloud

The squeak emanating from my office chair had finally become unbearable. Like a slow drip of acid on the surface of my psyche, it had finally burned its way into my head.

I stopped working on the article I was writing and strode into the garage to retrieve my toolbox. Time to replace that rusted out wheel with the shiny new one that I’d bought months ago.

I leapt into action purposefully. Today, things would change.

Three of the four bolts holding the wheel in place were out when things ground to …

How to Use Your Flaws as Creative Inspiration

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“If you are always trying to be normal, you will never know how amazing you can be.” ~Maya Angelou

I love my skin because not only does it protect and make me human, it also inspires me to make art.

Being an artist, I’m always finding inspiration in my day-to-day life. Well, ten years ago that came in the form of irritating and weird looking welts that appear on my skin when I barely scratch. It was so embarrassing when people would see the itchy welts and ask, “What’s wrong with you?”

I have dermatographia. It’s a skin condition in …

Coping with the Pain of Loneliness After a Breakup

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“Relationships are like glass. Sometimes it’s better to leave them broken than hurt yourself trying to put it back together.” ~Unknown

I am at a phase in my life right now where I’m struggling with loneliness.

Most of the time, I feel a deep sense of disconnection from the world around me and the people I share it with.

The mere fact that I am writing this in the small hours of the morning, deafened by the ear-splitting silence of an empty flat, unable to sleep, simply emphasizes this point to me even harder.

The empty flat in question is …

5 Steps to Deal with Emotional Baggage So It Doesn’t Define You

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“Sometimes the past should be abandoned, yes. Life is a journey and you can’t carry everything with you. Only the usable baggage.” ~Ha Jin

You’ve probably heard of the fear of missing out but what about the fear of letting go?

My father was volatile and mentally unstable. Criticism was his preferred method of communication. As a child and teenager, I learned to keep my thoughts and feelings locked away and became an expert at deflecting personal questions.

Without realizing it, I carried this habit into adulthood, avoiding any talk about my feelings or turning them into a joke. …

Honoring Our Inner Voices to Make the Right Choices for Us

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“Our lives improve only when we take chances and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.” ~Walter Anderson

After high school I moved to the northern tip of Vancouver Island to live with my aunt and uncle and work at their fishing resort. It was a busy tourist destination at the time. Every summer the town filled with young people, home from university and eager to earn money.

I loved my time up there. I met many interesting, colorful people from around the world who came to fish, whale watch, kayak, or …

Keep Shining Your Light, Even When You Feel Broken

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“I wish I could show you, when you are lonely or in darkness, the astonishing light of your own being.” ~Hafiz

I keep a prism hanging near the entrance to my home. Its beauty, made possible only by the broken nature of the glass from which it is constructed, serves as a constant reminder that even the broken pieces within each and every one of us can serve as a source of light. It’s a lesson that took me some time to learn.

Shortly after graduating from college, I took a long, brutally honest look at my life and realized …

How to Respond to Negative People Without Being Negative

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“Don’t let the behavior of others destroy your inner peace.” ~Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama

A former coworker seemed to talk non-stop and loudly, interrupt incessantly, gossip about whomever wasn’t in the room, constantly complain, and live quite happily in martyrdom.

It seemed nothing and no one escaped her negative spin. She was good at it. She could twist the happiest moment of someone’s life into a horrendous mistake. She seemed to enjoy it, too.

At first, my judgmental mind thought her behavior was quite inappropriate. I simply didn’t approve of it. But after weeks of working with her, …

How to Overcome Envy So It Doesn’t Poison Your Relationships

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“Enjoy your own life without comparing it with that of another.” ~Marquis de Condorc

I struggled to offer a tight smile to a friend who had achieved a life-changing career break.

Although I was thrilled and excited for my friend, I was sad and disappointed in myself. I, too, had worked hard and waited patiently, but unlike my friend, my work and my wait continued, unacknowledged and unrewarded.

At first I didn’t notice I had been bitten by envy. But its invisible poison infected my bloodstream, polluting my future interactions with my friend. I was guarded, afraid of being hurt …

Getting Unstuck: Work Through Fear and Change Your Life

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“When you become comfortable with uncertainty, infinite possibilities open up in your life.” ~Eckhart Tolle

We’ve all been there. Feeling stuck is very distressing, and it can often make a situation feel even more difficult than it already appears to be.

Many of us may have felt trapped in a job, a relationship, a place; any unfavourable situation, really, that we see little way out of can leave us feeling deeply discouraged.

The uncertainty of it all becomes overwhelming and, over time, paralyzing.

I have felt the frustration, the sadness, and the hopelessness that accompany this predicament many times.

In …