Keeping a Gratitude Journal

Expressing Gratitude - Start Now

One of the ways to stay focused on the habit of expressing gratitude is by writing in a gratitude journal.

The benefits:

• Being grateful for what you have right now opens a window for more blessings to enter into your life.
• When you write down what you are grateful for, it puts things in an entirely new perspective.
• You start to realize how abundant your life is right now at this very moment.

Keeping a gratitude journal keeps you focused on all that is good in your life and subconsciously you begin to expect more good things. It can be a simple notebook or a decorative journal. Your journal is very personal and should reflect who you are. Don't worry about writing the wrong thing or any spelling errors. Let your thoughts flow and write whatever first comes to mind. If you experience writer's block, start by writing..."I am so happy and grateful for..." Start out with a list of at least 10 things you're grateful for. Try this out for 30 days and your awareness for prosperity and abundance in your life will greatly increase.

I met a beautiful, vibrant woman recently who weighed 88 pounds, in a wheelchair given a week to live. That was 20 years ago! She met Dr. Bernie Siegel, who taught her to keep a gratitude journal. She said the first day she could only find one thing of the five he suggested she list. So repeated "I am grateful for the ray of sun through the clouds" five times. She said by day 30 she had over 130 things on her list. She is a traditional health person, as is Bernie Siegel, and she teaches all her patients the power of keeping a gratitude journal.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

How to Be Happy with Yourself – That Is the Question

Oh, my mother would have loved to tell me how to be happy with myself.

• She’d tell me to make sure I looked good whenever I go out because you never know who you’re going to meet. What she meant by that was that maybe I’d meet the right guy that would come and take care of me the rest of my life.
  
  
  
  • Well, right away this was a problem for me since I thought I was fundamentally defective and couldn’t look good.
  
  
  • She’d tell me go to the right college (so I’d find that same right guy that I might meet when I went out looking good). I did just that. I went to Rutgers University and graduated in 3 ½ years. And I even met a guy. Today I’d call him the “right guy” because married to him I learned that how I looked or what college I graduated or choosing a guy just because he looked good enough would never make me happy. That big long 19 year relationship lesson taught me that being happy with myself is an inside job.

So if the guy’s not the answer and how I look isn’t the answer and going to a top college isn’t the answer, how can I be happy with myself?

Stop for a moment and go look in the mirror. What do you see? Is all you see only what’s wrong with you?

Or if I told you to go write a list of your accomplishments would you have a little voice piping up and letting you know that those things are no big deal? Does it say you didn’t do such a great job or that someone else did better?

Or do you know your accomplishments and like how you look in the mirror and STILL aren’t happy with yourself?

If you said yes to any of the above, you are living with some level of damaged self-esteem. Babies don’t have damaged self-esteem. They are quite pleased with themselves. You were a baby and when you were, you were quite pleased with yourself. So what happened? Why are you not happy with yourself now?

Because I grew up in a family that ended up making me feel quite lousy about and with myself and the feelings got more than I could stand, I’ve made a study of how to feel happy with myself for over 40 years. And it’s worked. I feel quite happy with myself.

So how did I do it? Or more importantly, how can you do it? How can you learn to feel happy with yourself?

I’ve discovered that the method is like a 3-legged stool. If you only have 2 of the legs, the stool will topple. If you don’t deal with all three of the areas I’m going to talk about, you probably won’t learn to feel good about yourself i.e. the stool won’t work.

Let’s talk about BELIEF as the first leg of the stool. You have some mistaken beliefs about yourself that you picked up somewhere between that baby who was happy with herself and the adult who’s reading this because you don’t feel happy with yourself. Now you may try or have tried some of the tricky things you find in self-help books or online sites and you still really can’t seem to change your inner belief that you’re somehow not ok.

The second leg of the stool is HEALING. This is the one that most people neglect. We all have a past. Something or some things happened between the happy-with-self baby you were and the unhappy-with-self adult you’ve become. If you are willing to heal your past, then you will be able to change your beliefs about yourself. Your past is holding you to those erroneous beliefs as if you had invisible leg irons keeping your there. If healing the past sounds like something you resonate with, take a look at how this emotion-based program, might help.

Now once you heal the past and can begin to see the falseness of your negative beliefs about yourself and a very interesting thing occurs. You learn how to take INSPIRED ACTION – the third leg of the stool. In other words, you trust your gut, your intuition, your hunches on how to proceed in your life and soon enough because you are connecting to your own inner wisdom, you discover you are quite happy with yourself.

This is not an overnight process but it doesn’t take too long either. In a matter of a few months, you can be on your merry and happy way with tools to take you through a fabulous and very happy rest of your life.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

On The Phone- How Does Life Coaching Work?

I Don't Have an Office

How does life coaching work over the phone? 100% of the life coaching I do is over the telephone. I live in California and coach people in N.J., Florida, N.Y., Nevada. I even have clients who live in England and Scotland. Since long distance is so inexpensive these days, it's easy. It also means the coach does not have to have an office. She just has to have a phone and a place to sit down - at minimum. She can have (and most do) a good headset and a nice, non-distracting setting in which to sit.

But you might wonder if it is most effective for the client and I will wholeheartedly answer, YES!

I have the ability to read energy. A quote from Gia Combs-Ramirez who says,

Reading energy is our ability to perceive vibrations in our surrounding environment and interpret them correctly. The human body has many mechanisms for doing this, most notably the energy field that surrounds us.

I could have probably quoted some science to prove my point but you can prove it yourself. How do you know someone is angry with you when they smile and say nothing? Or, how do you know when a baby is satisfied when they can't talk?

Start noticing if this is a gift you have developed. I think I developed this gift as a child because I was very afraid of my mother and was always energetically checking in to see how she was feeling so I'd be prepared for her emotional onslaughts. I used to just be hyper-vigilant. Now I live a happy, peaceful life and so I have honed this skill and use it to communicate with my clients and feel what's going on with them.

So that's why I find phone coaching so effective. It allows me to totally tune into my clients with no visual cues to get in my way.

And if I'm not sure, I don't just presume. I ask. So then I am modeling good communication skills which is one of the areas most clients want to improve.

So how does life coaching work over the phone? Very well!

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Are you asking how to improve your self esteem?

Is Asking How to Improve Your Self Esteem Even Important?

Self-esteem may not seem that important to some (they're probably feeling fine about themselves) but it has a huge impact on your daily life. It has an effect on your moods, your reactions and how people treat you. So it is important to ask how to improve your self-esteem.

Seek learning on how to get past negative emotions like anger, jealousy and blame and not let them overshadow your thinking.

Everyone experiences small episodes of these harmful emotions but if you let them be your whole focus, you will never be happy and everyone you meet will know it.

In addition, these emotions build up and create harmful physical conditions like heart disease and high blood pressure. Make sure you laugh every day. Watch a comedy show to lift your mood. You can’t possibly feel hopeless or angry if you are laughing.

Following are more ways how to improve your self-esteem:

1. Increase your self-esteem by doing nice things for other people. They don’t even need to know you did it. In fact, it might is better if they don’t. It will make you feel very good about yourself though, and that is what is important.
2. Stop criticizing every little mistake you make. Watch the words you say about yourself. No more "stupid" or "dummy". Everyone makes mistakes.
3. Take all those negative things you are thinking about yourself and turn them into positive thoughts and your self-esteem will be on the rise one little step at a time.
4. Learn to choose how you respond to whatever situation you may find yourself in. You can decide to calmly handle a situation with as little stress and bad feelings as possible or you can freak out yell, scream, cry and make a bad situation worse.
5. And if your emotional residue from the past is so large it doesn't feel like you have a choice, seek help – self-help, coaching or therapy. Whatever suits you.
6. Another way to make yourself feel better and give your self-esteem a little boost is to dress up now and then for no reason. It will make you feel good knowing that you look good. Do not allow yourself any criticisms about how you look, only good thoughts.
7. If you up for a real stretch, ask 3 people what they like about you. Let what they say about you wash over you. Let it in and just say, "Thank you".

The next time you ask how to improve your self-esteem, think back to this list and get to work.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Is Self Confidence Elusive For You?

Boost Your Self Confidence

Self confidence is all about how you feel towards yourself and how confident you are in your life and the situations you encounter. High self esteem means you truly love yourself and who you are inside.

For example,

• I know I am a truly good person.
• I know I wish everyone well. I also know I am an authentic person.
• I know there is no big gap between what I think and feel about something or someone and how I act.

I love those qualities within myself. I very much like who I am as a person.

Self confidence may change on a regular basis depending on the things that are happening in your life on a daily basis. The change could even be linked to not enough sleep or having a very stressful few days or even hours. Everyone has good days and bad days but if most of your days tend to be bad and you feel stuck where you are and not willing to try new things, you probably have low self confidence and, my guess is, you most likely know it. I suffered from low self confidence for years and I certainly knew it.

The good news is that you can build your self confidence but it will likely take time. With some work and a serious commitment there are techniques that you can use to build your own self confidence. You will find many of them on this site.

First you must commit to remaining positive. A positive attitude is crucial to the success of building your self confidence. Then you must stop listening to anything negative that you or anyone else says. And since this is mostly an inside job, the voices you have floating around in your head, are the most damaging or most beneficial. Good self messages sound positive. Low self esteem inner messages are negative, critical and have lots of shoulds in them.

1.   Don't allow yourself to compare yourself to other people. You are your own unique person with your own purpose for being here and it doesn’t matter what others do, say or accomplish. It has nothing to do with you – except as far as you let it run your life.
2.    Associate with positive people.
3.    Spend your time doing work and activities that you truly love.
4.    Do not go over your past mistakes in your head. Forgive yourself and move on.

Start small and celebrate all of your successes. As time goes on, your small successes will become larger successes and you will be on the road to much higher self confidence and many more opportunities to be happy.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching

Life Coaches Can Help You Take an Objective Look at Why You Aren'tMoving Forward

Your Life Coach Can Help You with Procrastination

Life sure does seem to be happening faster and faster. Can a life coach help with any of this?

Maybe it's my age but I hear lots of younger people voice the same observation. For whatever reason, no matter how fast-paced your life seems to be, you may still feel like you are spinning your wheels and getting nothing done and getting nowhere.

Whether you procrastinate and put off the important things you need to do or if you constantly seem to come up against a brick wall at every turn, sometimes it takes someone else to help you look at your life situation with an objective eye and see what some of the underlying issues may be. Sometimes it's self doubt and low self esteem. Sometimes it's just a shortage of needed skills. Maybe it's a combination of both.

Fear and self doubt may blind you to what is really happening. Feelings and emotions may be in the way and you may never grow past these issues and become prosperous and self-respecting. If you are working hard and still feel like you are getting nowhere, a life coach could be the key to helping you see what the issues are that are standing in your way and moving forward past them to a whole new future. Make a serious commitment now and deal with the situation before it is too late and you have missed many incredible opportunities. Go pick up the phone.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching 

Why we all don't have what we want

Personal Power For All

I've been involved in the human potential movement or on a personal power path for 40 years. When I started on my path I didn't know I was on a path; I just knew I was in so much angst about my life and my body that I had to do something. What I did was go to a 12-Step program and found a spiritual answer or rather I began to understand how life really works - not what I had learned from my parents who actually didn't have a clue. It's not that at 37 I found all the answers. I found out there were questions. Much more important.

So my journey has wound and wound and found me living in L.A., Sausalito, Mill Valley, Petaluma, Dallas and Las Vegas - in no particular order.

• It took me out of my first marriage of 15 years into single parenthood with 4 children with lots of low self-esteem.

• It took me to other 12-Step programs. It found my second husband of 6 mos. in that 12-Step program and led me out of the marriage and the program again.

• It found me at an obscure workshop called Making Love Work by the then very unknown Barbara deAngeles and John Gray.

• It found me discovering my childhood abuse and back into another 12-Step program.

• It took me back to John Gray and Men Are from Mars . It found me my 3rd husband of 23 years.

• It took me to coaching and writing - and many other places.

My life is a miracle to behold. I have 4 lovely adult children, 6 amazing grandchildren, 2 beautiful daughters-in-law. It gave me a most precious and special relationship with my stepdaughter. It gave me friendly but far-away relationships with my other stepchildren and grandchildren.

Why did a woman who was emotionally and sexually abused as a child, who suffered from very damaged self-esteem, married 3 times(!), who saw herself as a victim etc. etc etc. get such a great current life. THE ANSWER IS SIMPLE. I DO THE WORK I UNDERSTAND MY NEEDS TO HEAL, TO GROW AND I DO IT 100%. Even when I didn't have the emotional tools to move on, I had the personal power.  Whether it's with a coach, without a coach, in a 12-step program or out - NO MATTER WHAT, I do and have done the work.

If you have that kind of personal power and commitment to your path, you have anything you want. I promise.

YOU University Coaching/Life Coach Training and Life Coaching