Category Archives: self help

Better By Monday: Imagine A Rescue

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Better By MondayHave you ever wondered if you would save the life of a stranger? I have made myself contemplate being able to save someone from drowning? I have questioned myself about if I would jump into a cold and deep river to try to pull someone to safety. If a person was drowning, even if I might also perish, I would help save a stranger’s life.

There is no question in my mind that I value a person’s right to survive and to live, and I would hold nothing back to help them as a fellow human being, deserving of all the same things I hoped for in my own life.

This exercise of imagining the human need to survive and my desire to help that need reconnected me with my humanity. I identified with a way to love a fellow human being trying to survive, like all of us, through the unlimited potential drowning we all face as we try to move safely through our daily lives, to survive, and also succeed and thrive. I found my path to empathy through imagining.

No one gets through life without pain. What causes one person pain looks different than what causes pain for others. Because we can’t ever truly see or know what causes pain for the other people we encounter – we are walking into dangerous unmarked territory. We can’t get to know everyone we encounter on a deeply personal level because we don’t have the time to listen to every survival story happening around us.

Awareness that others DO have a story, and that it’s as compelling and fraught with pain and travail as our own, works to create a sense of being on a common path. We find we can actually trust each other’s intentions, despite behavior that can sometimes trigger our own pain, and this leads us to pure and unassailable empathy. Nothing could do your life (and your blood pressure) better than to find yourself in the land of inner empathy and to stay there as long as possible.

Empathy isn’t only about walking a mile someone else’s shoes. It’s also a knowing and believing that life is painful for everyone in some way – your pain is not more important than your neighbors. Empathy promotes a sense of compassion that bridges your humanity and mine and with this we can feel more safe and hopeful every day.

Dawna Daigneault, Eds, LPC

Dawna Daigneault, Eds, LPC

Dawna Daigneault, Ed.S., LPC.

Better By Monday is a blog about one thing you can do, over the weekend, to feel a little bit better by Monday.

Zest of Life, LLC. Professional Counseling

Better By Monday: A Thousand Thoughts

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Better By Monday“Habit is either the best of servants or the worst of masters.” -Nathaniel Emmons

The average human mind can think around  fifty thousand thoughts per day, give or take a thousand. Even though this mental phenomenon has been calculated, we still don’t know exactly how many thoughts a person has the capacity to think – it could be as high as one hundred thousand daily.

The question I find myself asking is, “How many times must a thought occur for us to act on it?” Nobody knows how often a thought must be thought before a thought becomes an action. We also don’t know how many times we must engage in an action before it becomes a habit. Some experts believe that a new habit can be made in about month.

I remember watching my children seriously contemplating taking that tricky first step. I remember the look on their pre-walking faces and I believed I saw definite mental processing occurring beneath the surface of each quizzical baby expression. Were they thinking about taking a step?

It would be interesting to know how many times a baby thinks about taking a step before acting on the thought. I wonder if it’s in the thousands by the time thirty days pass. I believe taking a step is a thought we all still have thousands of times, as adults, but we have all developed the habit of walking so we don’t have to think hard about the steps we take.

We do have to think harder and more often about any new habit we want to develop. I’m a skilled and talented walker, I can even weave a grapevine, but if I want to be a skilled runner – that would take more and different steps for me to learn.
We can use our thoughts productively to create the habits we want. We can step into a new way of behaving by starting with a new goal. One simple way to get moving towards a new goal is to make a Habit Box.

Make a Habit Box:
Type up or write down or cut out positive words or phrases which will help you think about the habit you plan to create. Separate the positive phrases and fold each one in half. Make thirty. Find a box and make it your own. Put your folded phrases into the habit box and take one out daily for positive reinforcement. This process will help you move a thought into an action.

“You cannot run away from a weakness. You must sometime fight it out or perish. And if that be so, why not now and where you stand?” -Robert Louis Stevenson.

Dawna Daigneault, Eds, LPC

Dawna Daigneault, Eds, LPC

Dawna Daigneault, Ed.S., LPC.

Better By Monday is a blog about one thing you can do, over the weekend, to feel a little bit better by Monday.

Zest of Life, LLC. Professional Counseling.

Better By Monday: Write Out Your Worst

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Better By MondayYes, write a list of your worries and/or fears down on a piece of paper and look at them. Keep the list focused on your biggies, probably not one, but not more than ten. Once you’ve done this put them away in a container or box.

Many religious, spiritual, and secular traditions around the world use worry mandalas, images, icons and figurines to allow people to mentally deposit their worries and fears and then move on with their day and their life. It’s a way of acknowledging their existence, treating them with the respect they deserve (meaning, they are of real concern to you) but also allowing you to LEAVE them be, for a time, and free yourself to get on with regular living.

For you it might be as simple as a daily or weekly list, folded and stored in an old shoe box or plastic container. You can replace the old one each time by throwing it away and depositing the new list. However, you may want to date them and keep them all. Any practice that works for you is what will work!

Try it! Just doing this simple activity can actually help you do better work, and enjoy relationships more because as you no longer carry the fears inside you the odds of them leaking (or screaming) out at random times is lowered. Leaking your fears onto others can inflict pain or confusion on those you love.

This isn’t denial. You are accounting for all of them by placing them on a list in a container – you are also creating a situation where they don’t upstage what you need to do (perform your best) for the present moment. You are taking back control of your choices and thoughts and giving space for the thinking you need most in the moments of your life you really want them to be pure and undiluted.

This is a practice, maybe too simplistic for some, to regain personal peace. But the very essence of freeing yourself from excessive fears and worries is an act of courage over something most within your control – your thoughts, how you animate them (with fears, emotion, wisdom, anger, etc. etc. etc.) and your choices around how to respond to, manage or simply influence them to regain a moment of peace.

Dawna Daigneault, Eds, LPC

Dawna Daigneault, Eds, LPC

Dawna Daigneault, Ed.S., L.P.C.

Better By Monday is a blog about one thing you can try, over the weekend, to feel a little bit better by Monday.

Zest of Life, LLC.

Better By Monday: Off Balance

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Better By MondayPlan to be unbalanced. That’s right, spot a time in your day or weekend where you KNOW you’ll be a bit of a wreck, overly emotional, or even angry. I know this is a bit of an anti-positive attitude here, but hang with me. After you select your anticipated event or time when you expect to be challenged, think right then of how quickly you can recover or get back to a positive/neutral feeling about it.

Plan in your mind whether it will take a day, a few hours, 30 minutes…..maybe a minute? Point is – there is NO such thing as achieving some ongoing steady state of personal or emotional balance in life. People keep themselves anxious and self-critical every time they fall out of a comfortable life position. Instead you can now see this as a normal nuisance and expected thing, and the ONLY plan and forethought worth having is about how you expect to get back into balance, for a time – until the next thing happens.

That’s it! Balance can be found but never kept. It’s found, lost , found again and lost again. Over and over it goes. Over time you don’t need to anticipate any specific bad situation, just know they will always show up, along with the good ones, and in each case you will have an opportunity to see how much better you are at responding, recovering, and moving on with peace inside (think of peace as a hybrid positive and neutral).

So at a minimum you can stop fearing this loss of balance and welcome it, and plan your recovery. THAT’s the way to get though life with overall balance, over time… as nothing – and no one – will be able to incite fear in you again as you have the ability to respond to anything… and trust yourself.

Dawna Daigneault

Dawna Daigneault, EdS, LPC

Dawna Daigneault, Ed.S., L.P.C.

Better By Monday is a blog about one thing you can do, try or practice over the weekend to feel a little bit better by Monday

Zest of Life, LLC.

Better By Monday: Songs I don’t want to sing.

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Better By MondayI really appreciate Hal and Sidra Stone’s book, Embracing Your Inner Critic, where they explore the internal critical voice. They explain that we all have a radio station in our mind call K –RAZY. It’s the station that we tune into when the other stations aren’t working.

The songs played at K-RAZY are all familiar but we don’t love any of them. We can expand the metaphor a little and say that listening to K-RAZY makes us feel crazy because we remember all the words to the songs that make us feel bad about ourselves.

One of the exercises in the book invites us to start paying attention to the lyrics of the songs played on your personal K-RAZY station. You can even ask yourself a few questions to get started changing your tune.

The following questions are a combination of my own self-awareness techniques and an excerpt from the book in the section called, Where Did Your Inner Critic Come From?

  • What negative thinking might have started in Elementary school?
  • What did a teacher say to you that hurt or embarrassed you?
  • What is the worst thing a friend/classmate said to you?
  • What are the “worst characteristics that a person could have, according to your grade school classmates?”

I remember one of my grade school teachers mocking me after I had asked her for help with a math problem. I stood at her desk next to her as she worked the problems while I watched. I had difficulty understanding how she was able to start and end the equation with the right answer but when I followed the process I never got the right answer? My confidence was shattered. As I walked away from her desk, still confused, she sang out loud for everyone to hear, “Off to the funny farm we go, Ha-Ha, He-He, Ho-Ho…”

It really hurt my feelings after I got home and asked about what a funny farm was – I had assumed it was a cartoon.  I felt stupid when I couldn’t understand math. Then that song replayed in my head! A song about where “crazy” people are taken which had been sung about me and my math skills.

That’s when my K-RAZY station started playing the song – “Math isn’t good for me because it makes me crazy.”

This silly but sad story is an example of how easily a child creates a negative/critical script that can last a lifetime. You may have scripts like this running in your life too. Take some time to remember them by using the questions listed in this article. You can’t change the lyrics into something you love hearing if you don’t make yourself more aware of what you’ve been singing along with since childhood. There are songs with better lyrics waiting to be written.

Dawna Daigneault

Dawna Daigneault, EdS, LPC

Dawna Daigneault, Ed.S., L.P.C.

Better By Monday is a blog about one thing you can do, try or practice over the weekend to feel a little bit better by Monday

www.zestoflife.com

Better By Monday: Feeling Better

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Better By MondayEvery client I work with wants to feel better. Better is usually at least one step of improvement and rarely the sense of being “all better” or perfect. It is amazing how just one step in the right direction can make a counseling client feel better. This feeling is desirable, it can also be motivational. One step into feeling better creates the promise of more promising steps.

Counseling is intended to make things better but not every session provides that result. Such as the case of a client of mine experiencing depression several years ago. The young woman was mentally and emotionally “Stuck,” in her words. She couldn’t move through her daily routine with any motivation.

After a few sessions I asked her, “Is this depression fact based or fear based?” She pondered the question and responded that she had thought she would say it was fact based but that on further quiet investigation she said, “…it’s really fear based.”

We were then able to push through the fear holding her hostage in her own home using just one step out of the prison her depression had become. I had her consider which chore in her home is easiest for her. The one task she decided on was to unload the dishwasher and only unload it with no additional cleaning. We agreed that this is one step she could take and that no other steps were required right now.

On her next session she reported having done the dishes (both unloading and loading) and then she paused. “I had forgotten what it felt like to just get something done.” She said with a calm and resolute tone of voice. A psychiatrist shared this equation with me: Suffering = Pain X Fear. “All resistance is fear.” He said.

We can control our fear but we can’t always control the pain we have. We can take one step away from what we are afraid of and feel the distance that gives us from our suffering.

Dawna Daigneault, Eds, LPC

Dawna Daigneault, Eds, LPC

Dawna Daigneault, Ed.S., L.P.C.

Better By Monday is a blog about one thing you can do, try or practice over the weekend to feel a little bit better by Monday

www.zestoflife.com