Love Compatibility Test: How will I know he's the one?

It would really be great if such a thing existed out there in the world. All you’d have to do is get out your trusty credit card, put in your number and the perfect questions to tell you each whether you were compatible would pop right up. And off into the sunset you’d go – either together or apart - depending on the results of the test.

That might have worked when you were 14. Some teen magazine created the test. You took it and found out yes or no.

Or you might count on the info you get from your local or online astrologer. Maybe they do know but truly, how to know if he’s the one or not is not that hard. The information is right there inside you.

Every time he makes you happy, he’s the one. Every time he does something that upsets you, angers you, hurts your feelings or makes you feel small, he is not the one. If he continues to hurt your feelings and make you feel small, he is not the one.

Now I am not so naïve as to think it’s that simple. But it could be. Here’s what you have to do to make it that simple. You have to find a way to listen to, discern and trust the emotional feedback your body gives you. You know what I’m talking about although you may not realize it.

Next time you get angry or feel sad, notice what’s going on in your body. Next time you are wildly happy, notice that and what it feels like in your body. What are you feeling right now? Are you having what you’d call a good day? Or are you having what you’d call a bad day? It isn’t the events that usually make the day good or bad. It is your emotional reaction to the events that make you interpret it as good or bad. When you start looking internally, you will know the information you are looking for when it comes to the person you are trying to know your compatibility with.

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase, “It’s an inside job.” It is an inside job because human beings have a full range of biochemicals that flow throughout our bodies and let us know if we are happy or sad, angry or joyful. So that’s where the compatibility test answers are – inside you.

But you searched and found this article because you aren’t clear - which means something is blocking you from knowing your own truth. These are the kinds of things that block women from knowing:

1. They have a hard time understanding their emotions.


2. They started a physical relationship before they really knew the guy and become confused because their hormones and emotional vulnerability is totally triggered. This is not a moral judgment but rather a reality for women.


3. They are carrying a lot of emotional baggage from the past and it is confusing the current situation.


4. They have low self esteem and want to hold onto anyone as long as someone will stay with them.

So if you want to know if he is the one, you have to allow yourself to feel your feelings and acknowledge what they are telling you. If all this idea does is leave you feeling confused, then I can promise you you need some help in getting back in touch with your feelings. Go seek help before you make any decisions about who is “the one”.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Having a Mindfulness of My Age

Law of Attraction and Aging

With our human mind's penchant for assigning meaning to things, we have all assigned meanings to certain ages. I know you will easily be able to imagine a 2-year-old, a 22-year-old, a 70-year-old. Easy, you say. You may all have a different picture of each age because your mind assigns it one "look" and mine assigns it another but it'll be close. I'd guess that this is somewhat societally and/or culturally influenced also. But if we could draw what we imagined, we'd probably often have a similar picture.

Other places on this site and other things you might have read have informed you how we create our lives. We have a thought; the thought creates feelings; our feelings create a certain vibration; our little super highway in our brains, our neuronet, keeps thinking the thought and we keep creating the feelings which create our predominant vibration and - voila! - it (whatever we've been thinking about over and over) is created in our lives. So over and over and over we think and picture and feel about being 35 or being 60 and when we get there to that age, there we are. We created just what we thought of over and over and over.

I am 71. My mother died at 57 so I don't really know what a 71-year-old woman looks like in my family - and that's a good thing (not good that my mother died so young but good that I have no picture of it). So I just look like and feel like a person who has woken up each morning for over 69 years, breathing and in the same body.

So to me any age means how long you have woken each day and fulfilled the requirement of breathing through that day . That's all it means.

So what does age mean to you? The thing is, you are free to choose.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Even Life Coaches Need Self Help Solutions

Law of Attraction and Me

When you read around this blog, you might get the impression that I have it all under control. Many experts talk and act as if they have resolved every issue in their lives - particularly the ones they teach about. Let me assure you that although I feel as if I have something to teach and offer you, I don't feel I have it all down. I still have me to deal with.  I need my own self help solutions. My perspective on that is that I need reminders of what it's like so I keep fresh in my teaching. Having watched a person become famous and how challenging that is for the ego, I think it helps in that aspect too.

So, I do teach and talk about the Law of Attraction and what it takes to create what you want. I talk about the neuronet and the emotions and how to create your own self help solutions. This page has a good array of those topics. Here I'd like to talk about two I haven't mentioned yet. I need these to change my emotional viewpoint when I woke up today.

• Talking yourself down - Abraham Hicks talks about this. Example: this morning I woke up seeing the glass half empty. A few days ago over 650 people came to look at my site. I was so excited and the day after, when that number went down to the 100+ area, I told myself that the 650 was a great place to keep focused on and visualize and expect. Well, today I could only see low, low, low. So here's the first thing I did. I started talking myself down saying things like this to myself: "OK. So you feel this way now and you've felt this way before about things and you know pretty soon this will change. Your thoughts and feelings come and go. Remember when you just knew that the big number was just a point of power not a point to beat yourself up about." As I did this I started to feel a little better. Instead of resenting my husband for the lousy way he completed the kitchen clean-up, I let in a few thoughts about how great he was to keep helping. Then, instead of taking what felt like the longer route of continuing to talk to myself, I hit on the idea of #2.

• Uplifting distraction - I put on my IPOD and listened to my favorite music.  I usually listen to music while doing housework instead of just do cleaning.  I lose myself in my music and don't even realize what I'm doing. And best of all, all thoughts immediately stop. By the time I'm finished, I feel good about my accomplishment and the music has done its magic.  I  like John Denver, Shanti Shanti, the Beatles and other folks who do music that inspires me - often with spiritual themes.

So those are two more of my tricks to self-coach me which you certainly can borrow. Most important is my attitude that no bad mood is worth the so-called luxury of feeling lousy. Find out what self help solutions work best for you.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Self Worth? Resistance Revisited

Most of my work on myself and my continuing journey is to expand my self-love and self-care having followed a lifelong path out of self esteem and self worth issues.

In light of that and because my muscles start hurting if I don’t do it, I’ve taken up yoga. I love it. So as I was showering this morning I was noticing resistance. And I don’t like resistance and I don’t want it but if I push against it, it pushes back.

So instead I asked myself what the resistance to yoga was about. And here’s what I got: it’s about allowing myself the time. My mind says, “You could be working on your coaching programs or washing dishes or .....” whatever.

I realize that my mother never let herself spend any time on self care and unwittingly made it a value to be taken on and honored. She told me with great disdain for our neighbor walking down the street in her tennis dress: “Exercising is vain.”

So, "Resistance, you are just a mask for keeping me loyal to that unconscious value. You may leave. Your job has been done. You tried very, very hard and long to hide the truth from me and did a  really great job of it.

Now I know a different truth, I AM WORTHY OF MY OWN TIME AND ATTENTION."

What are you resisting that is really good for you?


YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

13 Ways to Improve Self Esteem

Many people go through life with low self esteem. This is a sad, but true, fact that is made sadder by the fact that it doesn't have to be that way. Every person on the planet is a special, unique person and deserves all good that comes along. Everyone deserves to feel good about themselves. Many of the littlest things in life can do so much to improve self esteem.

To improve self esteem you can:

• Smile at the people who come across your path today.
• Find something funny to laugh about.
• Turn negative thoughts into positive ones and see what happens.
• See what you can learn from what happens in your life.
• List all your positive attributes.
• Ask your close friends and family what they love about you - and let it in.
• Do something for someone that they don't expect and let them express gratitude.
• Do something wonderful and kind for someone that they know nothing about.
• Compliment the grocery checkout person.
• Make a "To Do" list and check off each thing as you accomplish it.
• Do something that scares you a little.
• Learn something new.
• Forgive someone.

These things are so simple to do that you will be amazed at what happens when, for example, you do something nice for someone for no reason, do something that scares you a little, learn something new and you feel better about yourself. What have you accomplished besides spreading some joy? You have worked to improve self esteem.

There are endless possibilities to love others and yourself. And remember to accept what you can't change. Give it a shot for a day or two and see how much better you feel about yourself.

Self esteem is not a static thing. If you pay close attention and focus on each day instead of making broad statements about yourself and to yourself, you may begin to see that some days you feel not so bad about yourself. Those would be good days to improve self esteem so that on your low self esteem days, you can begin to look back and see that you are doing something to change it. Even acknowledging to yourself that you are working towards feeling differently about yourself, will help you improve your self esteem. It is not very much fun to walk around feeling badly about yourself. It tends to be a self perpetuating situation where feeling badly about yourself supports you to do things that make you feel badly about yourself. Work done to improve self esteem will change your world and you are worth it.

You University Emotion-Based Coaching

How To Deal With Long-Term Depression

by Gina Bendel

For most of my life I suffered from depression.  I tried to understand it, tried to soothe it, tried to sweep it under the rug and ignore it.  I even tried to cover it up with laughter and a well-thought up façade – my mask to the world!  I tried counselors, tried medication – the list goes on and on!!  Nothing seemed to work for very long and I was REALLY sick and tired of feeling so miserable all the time.

Because of an amazing life coach whose program, YOU University, I credit to saving me from myself and because I was truly ready to overcome the feelings of deep depression I had lived with since I can remember, I learned that I needed to delve deeper to the roots - the core beliefs and experiences from the time I was born and up until my current life – all of which brought me to where I was (and where I was would be considered desperate – hanging on a cliff by only my fingernails)!  I needed to face all I had learned by my experiences, analyze it and learn new habits and thought patterns that would give me back my authentic self – the real genuine Gina that was hidden beneath all the crap.

To overcome long-term depression takes dedication and real work.  I learned the things that did not work for me long term (or for any of the people I know suffering from long-term depression).  Some of these are:

• Anti-depressants (this only numbs the depression for short periods of time and doesn’t deal with the core issues)


• Covering it up with what you think the world wants to see


• Pretending it doesn’t really exist & refusing to discuss your feelings


• Self medicating by numbing the painful feelings with alcohol or drugs


• Being unwilling to work on uncovering and resolving the issues


• Holding emotions inside and not resolving them


• Carrying resentment, anger, shame, guilt and/or not being able to forgive someone who has hurt you deeply in some way


• Running away from the problems

Here are a few things I have learned DO work:

1. Get to the root of the depression – be willing to look in depth at how you came to be depressed in the first place.


2. Learn tools to replace the negative self-talk and self-loathing or “victim mentality” that often accompanies depression with positive self-talk and love for yourself.  Be willing and open to creating new life-time habits.


3. Imagine what it feels like to be happy – paint a picture in your mind of this new, happy you.  What do you look like?  Where are you living?  Who are you with?  See it, smell it, taste it and create a visual piece that you can look at every day.  What you envision, you can attract!


4. Write about it.  Journaling has enormous benefits in helping you to get your emotions out in a constructive, healthy way.   Simply pick up a piece of paper and start writing whatever is on your mind or in your heart.  It truly is remarkable how much better it can make you feel by releasing your emotions in this way!


5. Start a gratitude list. Every time you think of it or notice yourself feeling badly or talking about what’s wrong, go write on your list.I know how debilitating long-term depression can be.   Nobody should have to continue that downward spiral.  If anything in this article resonates with you and you would like some guidance, please check out the following site where you can read about the journey I took through YOU University.

Radical Self Acceptance/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Addictions To Work?

Workaholic Who Loves Her Work?

Do "good" workaholics figure out how to love their work so they can still work a lot?

I think society defines a workaholic as someone who uses work as an addiction. And addictions are supposed to be about running away from feelings or dealing with feelings in an unhealthy manner.

So what I am asking is - am I still a workaholic even though now I love my work?

Many years ago I was a financial planner/financial salesperson. I worked at that job addictively. I think the feeling I was running away from with that job was guilt for not working enough and making enough money.  What a lose/lose proposition that my ego set up: if I overwork, I don't feel guilty for not working but in order to not feel guilty for not working, I had to work 70-80 hours a week. No matter I hated the job. No matter I had young kids and left them a lot. No matter that although I did make very good money, I didn't have the positive feelings of self worth or consciousness to be able to feel comfortable with it and so it magically disappeared all the time.  It was an addiction.

Today, I totally love what I do for a living. I coach people to move from one place in their life to another place they'd rather be. Usually I'm working with them closely as they grow as a person in all areas of their lives from relationships to work to writing or creating other ways and many other aspects of their lives they begin to look at through their new glasses or more self worth and a higher level of self acceptance. Since watching people grow is my favorite activity, I love every minute of it.

Also, my work allows me to teach. I get  to watch my own process to see how I have grown or how I wish to grow. I watch my husband, my kids, my friends. I keep learning and teaching. And I get to write about all of this growth and my observations about it.

And yesterday I noticed something about myself. I have a little trouble just doing nothing. I'm fine if I have an activity scheduled over the weekend but just plain do-nothing time, feels uncomfortable.

Could a symptom of workaholism be feeling guilty if I'm not working - even on the weekend and even if I love my work?

Another question I have is - are negative aspects catchable from our partners? My husband usually appears to feel a little guilty when he isn't working enough. I think I caught it guilt-for-not-working from him.

Or maybe it was the fact that my mother made a very big deal to my sister and I about how hard and how many hours my father worked to take care of us. This, I believe, was her attempt to control us and keep us from asking for too many material things so she wouldn't feel guilty saying no. Additionally, to give it a double whammy, she bitched at my father without cease about his working all the time - how it was his way of running away from his family.

Looking back with adult, non-victimy eyes and from many years distance, I think that my mother's impact is the source of my incipient workaholism. Also, as a kid I think I absorbed the righteousness of working a lot. In a certain way it sounded martyrish and even attractive to "sacrifice for your family". I think I thought if I worked and sacrificed, I'd be admired and appreciated.

Oh, what an awful muddle  the past's effects are on us!

Radical Self Acceptance/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching