A New Layer Revealed, Personal Integrity Journey 2019

New Year’s always brings out the philosophers and the ideas for what life has been, and what life can be.  I’ve always found resolutions to be interesting.  Finding ways and times to assess life is important.  Discovering what’s working in life and what’s not is the best way to make choices of how to move forward. 

How do we stick to the effort to follow through on a resolution?  When I decide to make a change, I call upon my past experiences and all the times I put forth that effort and it paid off tenfold.  You see, by linking past experiences to present and future, you may be more able to stick to your evolutionairy plan.  The other tactic I use to raise my courage is to take a moment to listen to my bodies’ reaction to my idea.  If I feel a sensation of stirring in my gut or a tickle to the back of my neck along with a little anticipation, I know the effort is worth my time.  The result is likely to be more happiness because this outcome has been true in the past.  Not everyone is this clear or fortunate enough to have a string of positive experiences.  To me, finding your first clear successful resolution may be the reason to try.  If the alternative is unhappiness or suffering, making a different choice seems to be worth the risk. 

I recently left a career defining job because the fit was not for me, and I’m so grateful that I removed myself from that situation.  The knowing began in my body as tension, which I tried to ignore.  By the end of my time in this job, I had physical symptoms of stress like eczema (newly acquired), brain fog, and inflammation.  My body was my clear teacher in what choices, wrong choices, could do to me.  However, quitting was not as simple as I wanted it to be, which is an example of having responsibilities. Life got in the way. I am fortunate that I have many skills that can earn me a living, and the change in my career has been wonderful!  On the home front, my wellness and personal integrity journey includes making my own meals because my prescribed diet is limited.  What a triumph to become a wizard in the kitchen!  My body and mind are recovering and healing through my newfound wizardry and attention.  

This New Years, I encourage you to try this experiment.  First, find a quite place where you can be alone for a couple of minutes.  Then, close your eyes and think of your life as it is.  Place your hand on your stomach or forehead or both.  Breathe.  Ask yourself if this is the best version of your life you can imagine.   Breathe.  What elements do you love about your life?  Breathe.  What elements do you wish were in your life?  See what comes to you. Try not to force any ideas, let the ideas float into you.  Discover if your body might have some ideas to offer that your mind may not have been fully aware of… until now.

May you have a wonderful, courageous, and an evolutionairy New Year!

Copyright 2018 Heather L. Corwin, Ph.D.

Simplify

You've heard of a gratitude journal, now I introduce you to the idea of a simplify journal.  At different times in our lives, we need things.  At others, we don't.  So, ridding our spaces of things we don't need anymore is a useful annual project.  Many people choose the holidays to do this because others are more acutely aware of needs during this time.  So what do you do?

1. Write your own personal mission statement that reflects how you want to live your life, what you want to do in it (including career and leisure), and the type of people with whom you want to surround yourself.  Try to be as concise as possible (3 sentence or less).  
2. Using your personal mission statement, now look around in your space and your closet and see what does and doesn't fit into your life with this as your lens. This doesn't mean you have to end friendships, thought it might.   This does mean you can begin to work with your support systems in ways that actively engage with your life mission. 
3. De-clutter.  Get rid of anything in your closet that you haven't worn for a year.  Anything.  If you haven't worn it, you won't next year.  If you've changed sizes, you might box a few things up, but know that by the time you get back to that size (if you do), you may not want to wear that again anyway.  That ugly nick-nack that's taking up space has got to go.  Make space for expansion.
4. For the next week, record how you spend your time and your actions.  This will help you understand if your every day life aligns with your mission.  Creating awareness around your way of being will help you make thoughtful choices for your life.

Let me know what you figure out!  Life is too short to not make it your best life.

Change Inspires Growth

As the holidays approach and a snow day extended our Thanksgiving break a day for our family, I'm reminded that every choice we make has many impacts.  What is often overlooked is the fact that change doesn't always come in the form of choice.  However, what you do with  or how your react to those things that happen help define your happiness.  Specifically, I'm referring to your life satisfaction.

I'll use the snow day as an example.  Now, our family had been together all day since Wednesday.  We didn't have much drama at home, we had play dates and hosted Thanksgiving.  When the snow came, we all were thankful for one more day together to play games (charades, Scrabble, Life, Duel, Lords of Waterdeep, etc.).  We could have been sick of each other and the change could have been frustrating, I'm sure it was for some families who were looking forward to getting back on routine.  We rolled with the change.  This doesn't always happen.

As some challenges in the form of change occur in your life, I encourage you to take the time to breathe, find a useful lesson that helps you see the change as one that helps you become a better person, and move forward.  When we dwell on things over which we have no control, we give away energy that could be used to make us happy.  I'm not saying this process is easy or even welcome at times.  I am suggesting that every time I have adjusted my perspective on events, I have found greater meaning and satisfaction in my life.  Let me know if this works for you too.

Happy Holidays!

Copyright 2018 Dr. Heather Corwin

Forgive Yourself

I've had a rough run lately where I felt like the world was against me.  That might sound rather dramatic, but accurate in many ways.  How I got here was through a rough run where I engaged with people at my job who were demanding, underhanded, and dishonest.  This was intermittent, but persistent.  Their behavior did not bring out my best behavior.  Most of the time, I found myself wanting to completely disengage and remove myself from them to avoid the uncomfortable situations.  It's easy to blame other people, but I was most angry at myself for putting myself in that situation, even though there's no possible way I could have known how the experience would be for me.

So I did what most people do and languished in a job I did not feel supported in, found as much solace in the people who were terrific around me, and looked for opportunities that made me happy.  Parts of the job were delightful, but those too became less so.  As the opportunities and joys shrunk, I became more angry at myself thinking that I'm a bright person, I should be able to fix this. 

Should.

That word has illuminated almost every time in my life when I have been mean to myself.  Magical thinking is what they call it in psychology - believing that one event happens caused by another event without a causal link.  I'm smart so I can fix this.  Nope. So how do I end the languishing?  I quit.  I remove myself from the situation that's causing me distress.  Then I move toward events, people, and things that make me happy. 

First, I have to forgive myself for making choices that I thought were the best for me and my family that turned out to be ugly and painful.  I don't need forgiveness from those who hurt me, I need to forgive myself.  This is the beginning of my healing.  Yes, I still have anger, but I don't have to wallow in it and make the ugly a badge of honor.  I'm thankful to hand the ugly to the wind and move into the parts of me that I enjoy to heal this wound.  Forgiving myself is actually harder than I thought, but doing so is necessary.  I feel lighter than I have in a long while.

Copyright 2018 Dr. Heather Corwin

Articulate Your Experience

Often overlooked and undervalued is the process of articulating what is happening and what happened to you through your experience.  By naming the elements of what you're experiencing to yourself and others, you're better able to make choices about what directions you want to move toward.  Plus, there's great value in sharing what your experience is versus what other people might be experiencing.  Because we all have different focuses in our lives, the things you observe may not be perceived by others.  This alone can deepen experiences for others.

Sometimes, life can give you experiences that challenge you.  When that happens, finding the words to explain to yourself and others what's happening can help you understand what's important to you.  Whether or not people agree with you is not the important part of this process.  What's important is that you know what's true for you. 

Copyright 2018 Dr. Heather L. Corwin

When People Make You Angry

The most common reason for anger is because someone or something is stopping you from reaching a goal. When I think about anger in this way, I recall when people have inspired anger in me.  As a person who values loyalty as a foundational component to any relationship, anger also fires up in me when people pretend to be in allegiance with me.

When you acknowledge that your situation in life does not match the elements of support and encouragement (or whatever you deem crucial to your enjoyment in your career or relationships), change it.  If people exist who do not subscribe to your needs, either set out to educate those people so they are able to address your needs, or make those relationships less important and time consuming altogether.  This idea sounded difficult to me, at first.  But when I put this simple idea into practice, two things happened.

The first outcome was the people who cared about me stepped up to the plate and engaged with me in ways that were satisfying and helped grow both of us.  The second result was the people who were not interested in working together to continue our relationship in mutually satisfying ways ended.  What I took from this was some people are worthy of investment and others are not.

A prime example of both outcomes was a person in my life who was a subordinate, we'll call him Jim.  Jim was good at completing tasks which he was interested in, but not those in which he was not.  Problems came to a boiling point when Jim's disgruntled resentment surfaced in a confrontation about what he thought he should be doing rather than what his job demanded.  Jim expressed his opinion, I was not able to change what the job demands were.  Jim couldn't listen to what I needed as his boss, and Jim needed to move on.  Jim also directed anger at me for remaining clear in my stance that the work needed to be done, regardless of his point of view.  This type of situation is familiar to many; we all have been on one side or the other at times.

Try out the simple strategy and see what you discover.  I'd love to hear your outcomes!!!

Copyright 2018 Dr. Heather Corwin

Be The Change You Wish To See In The World

As an adult and a parent, I find that I spend time reflecting on what I was taught, how I was taught, and lessons that I value.  When I took a Film Studies class in high school, I recall vividly the opening of the Western movie "The Wild Bunch" where kids are torturing a scorpion.  The idea that director Sam Peckinpah was conveying, or that I took away, is that all people have a primitive nature and we are taught how to be socially engaged and kind.  As in all areas, some people have predispositions to kindness or to cruelty.  Plus, parents and caregivers to have a huge impact on the direction of our social engagement preferences.

Which leads me to the idea that not everyone has the same values.  At school, my now second grade daughter is taught how to share and focus on the work before her.  She is encouraged to play well with others and be kind.  Sadly, these lessons do not always serve people.  In a large family, if a person would wait to take food, dinner might be gone.  Survival of the fittest becomes the lesson of the day.  Nevertheless, there is a time and place for everything, including kindness.

Sometimes, doing the right thing is hard.  Sometimes being kind and generous takes more energy than we wish to spend.  Sometimes people treat us badly and we are not full of what Ghandi called satyigraha, or resisting peacefully.  Right now I have many areas of my life that cause me anxiety; I'm not alone in this.

I often look to world leaders to inspire me and how I interact in the world.  Past leaders are who I'm turning to these days.  The phrase that comes to mind lately again and again is the one inspired by Ghandi, "Be the change you wish to see in the world."   I shall endeavor!

Dr. Heather Corwin, Copyright  © 2018

Listen to Your Body

There are days, few thankfully, that I feel simply tired or bad.  On these days, I'm often reminded of

the stressors that are filling my life at an UN-ignorable decibel level.  When I feel bad, this is my body's way of saying, "hey, calm down.  You need to rest today and take care of yourself."  When I was younger, I just plowed through these signs and then got sick.  Now that I'm older, half the time I jump straight into unwell.

These times are not unique in my body being clear about sending me signs that are terrific warnings for me.  When my hair stands up on end, I know something is going on that requires more attention int the moment.  When I get a sensation in the pit of my stomach, I stop everything and listen.  When I want to be alone more than anything, I find a way to do that, even if in short spurts.  My body is loud when it signals to me.  I'm thankful, even when I don't want to listen. 

Today I have a burning in my throat and an ear infection.  I didn't listen soon enough and now I'm paying the price in pain.  Pain is the body's last resort to signal something needs to change in behavior.  Got it.

May your Spring be filled with signals you hear, your health be vigorous, and your laughter heal your heart.

Copyright 2018 Heather L. Corwin, Ph.D.