Wouldn’t it be nice if your child/teenager did just what you needed them to do, right when you wanted them to? YES! Unfortunately, that’s rarely the case, and most often you find yourselves butting heads or in a screaming match. Sigh. . . However, there is a very different approach that will get your child/teenager on board with what you want and need. In this podcast you’ll explore in specifics just how you might be able to accomplish that.
https://www.youtube.com/@Dr.NoelleNelsonUp
Some days it feels like life is one endless hamster wheel, where you go round and round and round in the same way day after day. You know the drill: chores-work-kids-chores-bed, rinse and repeat. Oh, sure, there’s the occasional crisis to change things up, maybe the occasional vacation or happy surprise, but mostly it’s chores-work-kids-chores-bed: what the French call “Metro, boulot, dodo” (metro, work, sleep).
BORING! As in depressing. As in why get up in the morning? There’s no seeming rhyme or reason to this continuous plod through life.
Ah but, there is. Really. All it takes is one simple question: “Why am I doing this?” For example, dog poop. My dogs are too big for me to walk, so I have a decent-sized yard, which is their agility center, play area, and (you guessed it) all-purpose bathroom--which they haven’t learned to clean up yet (you’d think . . .). So, I do it. Regularly. It’s boring. Tedious. Not the most fun thing on my list. But when I remember to ask myself “Why am I doing this?” my answer makes me happy. “Because I like a clean yard. The yard smells better and looks prettier. I can actually enjoy spending time in it. And I (or the dogs) don’t risk stepping in stinky stuff which then requires yucky clean-up.”
Now, I grant you, cleaning up after your dog isn’t nearly as thrilling as world peace or winning the lottery. However, most of our lives are about the mundane--losing/gaining weight, saving/earning money, dealing with kids/partners/co-workers and so on.
But here’s the thing. When you assign purpose to whatever it is you are engaged in, suddenly everything changes. It’s an energy shift that allows you to go from bored/depressed to interested, all the way to happy. Purpose. So if losing/gaining weight is fueled by the purpose of getting healthier, it’s less of a task and more of an adventure. Same with saving/earning money. Once there’s a purpose attached, such as a family vacation or getting out of your teeny apartment into an actual house, you’ve got a dream to pull you forward through the mechanics of saving/earning rather than getting stuck in the dreary got-to-dos of it all.
It doesn’t matter what you must do in your day to day. What matters is how you approach it. Asking yourself regularly, “Why am I doing this?” until you come up with a response that lights you up.
Purpose rocks! And so will you.
Photo attribution: By Doenertier82, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=642841
How do we manage to stay so very connected with everyone on the planet via all our devices, yet somehow disconnect from what our own bodies are trying to tell us? We tend to ignore our bodies’ messages until they get so big, we can’t do anything else than succumb to illness or some other health issue. In this podcast, you’ll learn the incredible value of the mind-body system, and how to listen to your body so you can have the best life possible.
https://www.youtube.com/@Dr.NoelleNelsonUp
What is ‘character’ anyway? And what does ‘character’ have to do with you? ‘Character’ matters, it’s what tells you if someone is trustworthy or not, and trustworthiness is fundamental to good relationships of all kinds. In this podcast, you’ll discover what ‘character’- or lack of it - looks like, and how to determine if someone is likely to be trustworthy or not.
https://www.youtube.com/@Dr.NoelleNelsonUp
We are a quick-fix species, we humans. We want ‘it’ – whatever ‘it’ is – NOW! The money, the lover, the job, the car, the child to behave, the partner to behave (oops!), the boss to quit micro-managing: the list goes on and on.
So too with self-care. Few of us think of what self-care really entails, so we grab whatever will make us feel better – NOW! Which is great, totally understandable, and works. Well, works short-term. That latte does calm you down (interesting paradoxical effect of caffeine), the ice cream brings comfort, the movie did distract you from your worries, and that new bling perked you right up. Temporarily. Because as soon as the ‘feel better’ wears off from the quick-fix, you’re back where you were. Mildly (or very) depressed, grumpy, low energy, anxious, your choice.
It doesn’t have to be this way! Self-care is best approached from the inside, not the outside. Especially when we are dealing with mental and emotional self-care*. This is why trying to deal with your emotional well-being with lattes and ice cream isn’t going to work. What will, is what was best expressed by the phrase painted on the back of a passing truck: “just love yourself.”
I kid you not. I was driving home one day when I happened to end up behind a truck with “just love yourself” painted on the back. I followed the truck for a bit, wanting to make sure I wasn’t imaging things. The truck driver pulled over to the side of the residential street we were on, thinking no doubt that I wanted to pass him. I didn’t. I drove up beside him, made the “roll down your window please” sign, and said to him, “Thank you!! I love your truck slogan!” I’m not sure he understood or heard what I said, he probably just thought “crazy lady” but that’s OK. It was a wonderful moment.
So what does “just love yourself” mean? In simple terms, it means to be patient with yourself, to accept that you are doing the best you can, with what you’ve got, from where you are. And to think the same of the others in your life. Because, you see, when you acknowledge that you (and others) are doing the best you can, given where you’re at, with the resources (inner and outer) that you have presently available to you, you free yourself from judgment and blame. That in turn frees you up to look for/explore/discover other resources, to consider other approaches, to look at the situation from a different perspective.
Ah, sweet relief. Now, about that latte . . .
As I stood in line waiting for a table last week, a couple of people were leaving the restaurant. One of them was complaining about the fo...
