When I’m working with my clients, one of the most important things we discuss is energy. It doesn’t matter if you’re figuring out how to make life work after a divorce, deciding what choices to make to further your career, or rediscovering yourself after a major life change. All of these transitions can make every single of us feel confused and scared when we realize that everything we knew as normal life is gone. When you’re sitting in the unknown, anxiety, fear, and brain fog reign. Until we start consciously working on energy.
So what is energy?
Energy, very simply, is the ability to do work – we need it to create any type of change. Another way of stating this is that energy is how much usable power any system (including us humans!) has. Don’t be fooled, though – energy doesn’t just mean physical energy.
We also have spiritual, mental, emotional, social and even environmental energy in our lives. When your energy is low in any of these areas, you can experience those feelings of anxiety, fear, worry, self doubt, low motivation, and resistance. On the other hand, when you consciously work in alignment with your energy, you begin to experience peace, calm, full engagement in the present moment, and confidence in your decisions.
I enjoy guiding my clients in learning how to use their energy to work for them. As they learn to align their energy with who they are, who they want to be, and what they want to accomplish, everything starts to fall into place for them. They leave the energetic ups and downs behind, and being to create consistent results in their lives. One of the best parts of this experience is that they begin to be able to make quick adjustments on the fly when they encounter a challenging situation.
So, how’s your energy? Is it working for you or against you? How much more would you enjoy your relationships, personal life and even work life if you were able to learn how to consciously work with your energy?
I’d love to explore how your energy is showing up in your life, and come up with some suggestions on how you can start working with your energy to reduce your stress and raise your confidence. Click here to schedule a free 45-minute strategy call with me.
If you’re a mom going through a divorce, it’s pretty unlikely that you’re able to completely cut ties with your soon to be ex-spouse. It can be a real challenge to figure out what your new relationship should look like as you move forward through the divorce process. With emotions running high and feeling overwhelmed with so many decisions to make, it’s completely normal for you to be questioning what behaviors and interactions are appropriate.
The truth is that if you don’t set new boundaries within your relationship, not only can your post-married life be more stressful, but your divorce process can also drag on because you’re stuck in those old habits of how to interact with one another. It’s not easy to ignore all the verbal and non-verbal cues that you’ve grown accustomed to during your marriage, and it’s impossible to erase years of memories.
However, the whole point of the divorce process is to work together to solve the real world problems of separating your financial lives, creating coparenting plans, and moving forward with your new life. So, what can you do?
The CoWorker Rule
When you’re going through your divorce, you’re really starting to see that continuing to treat your soon to be ex-spouse in the same ways that you did when you were married is not serving you, and possibly not serving your children, as well. You still need to interact to make mutually agreeable decisions and to coparent your children as you move forward. This is a great time to put the CoWorker Rule into action.
Treat your soon to be ex-spouse the same way you’d treat a coworker.
Nope, you don’t hurl uncontrolled anger at your coworker. You don’t overshare intimate details about your life with your coworker. You don’t engage in reaction-seeking behaviors or needlessly make your coworker angry.
You do act like a professional who remains calm and composed. Ask yourself if what you’d like to say or do is something you’d say or do to a coworker. If the answer is no, then it’s unlikely that you should say or do that to your soon to be ex-spouse.
By exercising restraint, you’ll be ale to keep personal conflicts minimized while focusing your energy on productive decision making and on maintaining a healthy co-parenting relationship as you move ahead.
This is an extremely powerful too for you to use through your divorce process and in your post-married life. If you’re having troubles putting this into action and you’d like some support to get you feeling more confident, I’d love to get a on a free strategy call with you. Click here to schedule your free call.
I’ve been speaking with my clients a lot over these past few weeks about forgiveness. We’ve been exploring what forgiveness means to each of us, and what the true power of forgiveness really is.
So many women who go through divorce don’t feel their ex deserves to be forgiven. They feel they’ve been wronged so deeply and they their ex hasn’t earned their forgiveness. And, you know, it makes total sense that they’d feel this way. If we believe that forgiveness is the same as forgetting, condoning or excusing past actions, reconciliation, or a sign of weakness, then no wonder we have a hard time forgiving someone when we’ve been hurt so deeply.
The truth is that forgiveness is usually a challenging process that takes time and effort. Deciding to pursue the goal of forgiveness is usually where most people start their journey of letting go of negative thoughts, feelings and actions toward the person who has wronged them. The goal is to transform all that negativity into more positive thoughts, feelings and actions.
But, why?
Forgiveness is for your benefit. Besides being able to remove the emotional baggage of your pain, forgiveness has been proven to help your physical, mental, and spiritual well-being. Forgiveness has been proven in studies to be associated with fewer physical ailments, less fatigue, and even better sleep. It’s associated with decreased depression and increased feelings of being connected with a higher being.
One of the biggest questions you can ask yourself is if not forgiving someone is punishing them or you? Considering the consequences you’ve experienced by not forgiving can help you decide if you’re ready to begin your forgiveness journey.
If you’re not ready to begin your journey to forgiveness, that’s ok. Take the time to process your feelings. You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be.
One of the tools that I love to use with my clients is “reframing” which can be defined as changing your perspective or the meaning that you’ve attached to an experience. That meaning that we’ve attached to our experiences significantly impacts how we respond to the situation. We can feel stuck in one perspective or we can create new conclusions, feelings and meanings by exploring potential shifts in perspective.
The point of reframing isn’t about pretending that everything is fine or even searching for silver linings in any experience. Reframing is actually about creating a shift in consciousness that allows us to find solutions we couldn’t see before. When we shift consciousness, we’re changing the energy associated with the situation and allowing us to see things differently than before the shift.
Sound like woowoo to you? How about a real life example to get a better grasp of the concept and see how it all works?
Recently during an intense conversation, someone said the following phrase to me: I’d do anything to protect my children. My first reaction was to interpret that statement: it was a gut wrenching, sinking feeling that someone important to me was judging me and calling me a bad mom who never protects her children. My inner nasty voice was repeating that I’m a terrible mom over and over while my irreverent humorous inner voice kept saying “That escalated quickly.”
So let’s take a side break to examine this. Someone else making a statement that they’d do anything to protect their children could have been meant to make me feel bad. It also could have been meant simply that the person would do anything to protect their children. Dare I challenge the thought that the intention behind the statement doesn’t even matter? It doesn’t matter what the intention was, because I can’t change someone else. I only have control over how I deal with anything presented to me. That being said, let’s get back to the example…
Awareness is the first step to being able to reframe. Lucky (?) for me, I have that irreverent voice inside me that tends to cue me to the fact that something is up. I knew once I heard “that escalated quickly” that I was having an intense emotional reaction to what was said to me. Oh hell yes, I felt attacked and then angry. But here’s the kicker. I didn’t want to stay in feeling like a victim and being angry all day (or longer). I wanted to move on. So it was time for some reframing.
One of my favorite reframing questions to ask is “How true is that for you?” So I asked myself about what the nasty inner voice was telling me over and over again: How true is it that I’m a terrible mom who doesn’t protect her children? The magic is that I KNOW I protect my children in appropriate ways and I work hard to be a good mom. Why? Because I value being a good mom. I value doing my best to help my children be their best people. So, its not very true that I’m a terrible mom that doesn’t protect her children.
What does this question do to me? It makes the perceptive shift. It reminds me of my values and what I am continuously working toward. It makes me be aware that I am not perfect and I make mistakes, but that I’m doing the best I can and try to be better each day.
That perspective shift of reminding myself these things changes my energy from being a victim and being angry to being back in the place of learning, growth, and more positive energy. Instead of running those nasty voices over and over in my head, I was able to consciously choose how I want to react to this situation. I choose not to remain in those negative feelings and move towards the positive feelings. Because answering that question allowed me to tap back into my values and see my truth, this isn’t a search for the silver lining, it actually changes my energy.
I wanted to bring this to you so when you’re in a situation that has your inner voice saying nasty things to you, one place to start shifting your energy is to ask “how true is this for me?” Allow yourself to tap into your truth and allow the shift to happy so you can find new perspective and create new ways of reacting to the situation.
If you need some help walking through a situation and applying the tool of reframing, I’d love to work with you. Click here to set up a free call.
Several months ago, I had the pleasure of speaking with Lottie Kent, the personality behind @divorcefinancialplanner on Instagram. Lottie is a Chartered Financial Planner in the UK, and she specializes in divorce planning. Besides having an amazingly friendly and kind personality, Lottie is an expert in divorce finances and gets true fulfillment from helping people during the hardest time of their lives.
While I’m located in the US, Lottie had some great financial advice for people entering divorce no matter where in the world you are located. Here are the three questions Lottie believes are the most important financial things to understand as you enter the divorce process:
-What do you need from the settlement to be OK for the rest of your life, from a capital, income and income in retirement perspective?
-What does the proposed settlement mean to you and your future? Is it sufficient for your needs both now and for the rest of your life?
-Once the divorce is finalized, how will you create a simple plan that gives you the confidence that you will be able to maintain your standard of living for the rest of your life?
The key thing is that you get the financial advice and support that you need from a financial specialist during your divorce process. While I know that may sound scary when you’re already concerned about finances, speaking with a specialist like Lottie will help you avoid pitfalls in your future.
Thank you, Lottie, for the wonderful discussion! For the rest of you, please go check her out on Instagram @divorcefinancialplanner for words of wisdom no matter where you are located in the world! If you’re in the UK, you can check out her website here.
While out exploring instagram a few months ago, I came across this amazing person who was sharing her vibrant art that revolved around her divorce. I immediately started following @divorce.art.heal because her work resonated so deeply with me.
Eventually, I reached out to her to dig a little deeper into who she is and what her story is. I’m so glad I did, and I’m excited to introduce you to her and pass on her tips for getting started with art journaling as a means of self expression and processing emotions.
When Beth began art journaling, she was overwhelmed with the emotions surrounding her own divorce. Ironically, even though she is an art therapist, art journaling itself was a completely new way of processing her experience. Her therapist encouraged her to share her art when she felt ready.
Understandably, her immediate reaction to that suggestion was a firm no. However, her therapist planted the seed, and when the time came, she remembered that suggestion. Beth points out that she “didn’t know if she would ever have thought to do this if it weren’t form someone else commenting on how helpful her art could be for others.”
She was in overwhelm and art journaling was her visual outlet to process all those emotions we go through during divorce. It was meant purely for herself. She had no intentions of ever sharing her art – even her kids knew not to go into her journals. Beth found her art was a way to articulate the “tsunami of feelings” she couldn’t put into words. It was cathartic, an energy release that allowed her to continue moving forward in her healing process.
Lucky for us, Beth did get to the point of healing that made her feel the desire to share her art with the divorce community. As an art therapist and as a divorcee, Beth wanted to pass on to others the value of using art as a way to heal. Once she created @divorce.art.heal on Instagram, she began to see how much her art journaling has been resonating with others.
Getting Started
The supplies you need to get started with art journaling are pretty minimal: some kind of paper and something to make marks with. So grab anything: a sheet of paper, sketchbook, notebook, bullet pad – any paper will do. Then go find a pencil, colored pencils, pens, markers, crayons, paint – anything to start making marks.
Since this is about the process, not about the product, Beth says to be kind to yourself and to remember that “mistakes are not only allowed, but encouraged.”
Beth suggested starting with picking a feeling. What color is it? How big is it? Are there other colors? What kinds of lines or shapes does it feel like to you? Do you need to cut it with scissors or tear it with your hands?
If you’re more artistically inclined, feel free to create a full on drawing, collage, or painting. Is there a quote that seems right to include on your page? Go ahead and add it if that feels right to you.
The key is to do what it takes for you to process that feeling you chose. That may mean that all you do is scribble on the page. That’s wonderful. Whatever feels right to you is the right way to go.
Art journaling is about self expression and letting the heavy emotions out. It’s also a great activity when you’re looking for an outlet for emotions that could possibly escalate certain situations in a divorce to places that won’t be helpful to you.
The only rules to art journaling are:
-This is for your eyes only, unless you CHOOSE to share your art with someone. This is only for you.
-Create a no judgement zone for your art journaling. Allow yourself the safety net for health self expression and emotional release.
-Own your work.
Conclusion
Beth had stressed to me throughout our conversation that “art journaling is about the process, not the product.” She urges anyone getting started to remember this about you and your healing process. It doesn’t need to be fancy, you don’t need to be an artist, it doesn’t need to be expensive, and it can take as much or as little time that you’d like.
In looking back at her art journals, Beth expressed to me what a gift they are truly are:
“In documenting my journey this way, I’ve been able too ee the change in my art and my well being. It’s rewarding to see the growth. I can see a piece of journaling and remember the feelings, but I’m not inside of it any more.”
As Beth continues to grow and heal, she finds that her art has evolved toward being more future oriented. Goals, positivity, and self care makes themselves loud and clear in her artwork now. Yet another sign of growth and healing.
I urge you to go follow Beth on Instagram @divorce.art.heal to be inspired by her art journaling. Don’t be afraid to dip your to in the water of this type of emotional processing. You just may find it’s exactly what you need to move forward in your own healing.
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