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People often avoid negative emotions because they can be uncomfortable and challenging to confront. Negative emotions, such as sadness, anger, or fear, can be overwhelming and disrupt our sense of well-being. Additionally, societal, and cultural norms often emphasize the importance of positivity and happiness, leading individuals to suppress or ignore negative emotions.

Avoiding negative emotions can not only hinder progress in your life, but can also cause physical, emotional, or psychological harm. Your emotions are a gift; they need to be acknowledged, felt, and they also carry valuable insights and lessons. By acknowledging and exploring these emotions, individuals can gain a deeper understanding of themselves, develop resilience, and ultimately use these emotions as catalysts for personal growth and transformation.

Embracing negative emotions and life’s struggles can be a powerful catalyst for personal growth. Instead of avoiding or suppressing these emotions, it’s important to acknowledge and accept them as a natural part of the human experience. By doing so, you can cultivate a sense of empowerment and confidence to intentionally grow and navigate life’s challenges.

One way to embrace negative emotions is to approach them with curiosity. Instead of being overwhelmed or defeated by them, ask yourself why you are feeling a certain way and what lessons can be learned from the experience. This mindset shift allows you to view challenges as opportunities for growth and self-discovery.

Being purposeful in your personal growth journey is also crucial. Set clear goals and intentions for yourself, and actively seek out experiences that push you outside of your comfort zone. By intentionally exposing yourself to new challenges, you can develop resilience, adaptability, and a greater sense of self-awareness.

Remember, personal growth is not a linear process. There will be ups and downs, setbacks, and breakthroughs. Embracing the negative emotions that come with life’s struggles allows you to fully experience and learn from these moments, ultimately leading to a more empowered and confident version of yourself.

Embracing negative emotions can lead to personal growth in several ways:

• BUILDING RESILIENCE: When you embrace negative emotions, you develop resilience by learning to bounce back from setbacks and challenges. By facing difficult emotions head-on, you become better equipped to handle future obstacles with strength and determination.

• GAINING SELF-AWARENESS: Negative emotions often carry valuable insights about ourselves and our needs. By embracing these emotions, you can gain a deeper understanding of your triggers, patterns, and areas for personal development. This self-awareness allows you to make more informed choices and take intentional actions towards personal growth.

• CULTIVATING EMPATHY AND COMPASSION: Embracing negative emotions can foster empathy and compassion towards yourself and others. When you acknowledge your own struggles, you become more understanding and supportive of others who may be going through similar experiences. This empathy strengthens your relationships and contributes to personal growth on an emotional and social level.

• LEARNING AND ADAPTING: Negative emotions can be powerful teachers. By embracing them, you can learn valuable lessons about your strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement. These lessons enable you to adapt your mindset, behaviors, and strategies, ultimately leading to personal growth and development.

You will always have negative emotions in your life. Understand that, embracing negative emotions doesn’t mean dwelling on them or allowing them to weigh you down or consume you. It’s about acknowledging, accepting, and learning from them thereby, enabling you to continually grow and thrive throughout your life’s journey.

In your life quest to go from good to great, you must learn to handle adversity more effectively.

What is Adversity? Adversity can be any type of hardship, difficulty, tough luck, or catastrophe. Your experience in every situation is different, based on your own experience, philosophy, and feelings around it.

You all face adversity in your life. There is no escaping it. In today’s world, there is a lot of sudden change, which causes unforeseen circumstances that can lead to more uncertainty. You may experience increased anxiety over your health, a job loss, financial concerns, and, consequently, increased chaos in personal relationships. One thing to note when dealing with adversity is that it’s always an inside job.

ost of my coaching clients are dealing with what I call “adversity perception”, which feels horrible, as though something has really gone wrong, but it isn’t a fact. Examples of adversity perception are:

• Adversity haunting you from your past – Rather than facing former adversity, you keep resisting and running from it, so it still affects you. Your past can’t be changed. You need to know what is currently going on in your mind, which is making the situation from the past feel adverse in the present.
• Current made-up adversity that is from your imagination – You all imagine this; adversity can look like fear, doubt, insecurity, self-sabotage, procrastination, or anxiety from your thoughts about your own capability or capacity (or a vast amount of similar negativity).
• Future projection adversity – This can be something that hasn’t even happened yet. You borrow trouble from the future. You are afraid that something could happen and you’re anticipating or creating it in your mind.

These adversity perceptions aren’t real present dangers; they are easily solved with compassion, self-awareness, and coaching.

What about actual situations? Losing a job or a loved one or dealing with an illness or an accident are adversities that we cannot control, and they can seem daunting.

We can decide how we are going to react in any situation by managing our thoughts and emotions, as follows:

• Don’t resist it, embrace it.
• Don’t add to the pain of adversity by judging yourself, allow yourself to feel it.
• Stop trying to make your life easier. It’s going through the things we think we can’t handle that make us stronger.
• Stop negative self-talk.
• Take responsibility for your life.
• Ask for help and draw courage from others.
• Refuse to give up.
• Find the silver lining – choose a positive mindset.
• Decide who you want to be in every situation.
• Accept that things happen that are out of our control.
• Don’t compare yourself with others, it’s your journey.

You can leverage adversity in your life if you are willing to face it, and you don’t need to face it alone. This potential growth enables you to be more resilient and empowered. What do you want your adversity quotient to be? I can help!

People usually come to me because they want something different for their lives. They may want to lose weight, change a habit, reach a goal, or even foster a better relationship with a family member or colleague. Sometimes they don’t know what they want, they just feel like life is uninspiring.

Your feelings matter. Your life doesn’t have to be terrible to want a change. It’s in our DNA to want to grow and expand, but many of us won’t make the effort. We consider it selfish, we may be unsure about the process, we doubt our abilities, or we fear losing the life we know. And if life is good, why bother?

If you are feeling an urge to try something new, change a personal habit, or improve an area of your life, listen to your feelings. This is the future version of you saying, “hey…let’s grow and become this, or achieve that.” Those whispers are uniquely yours.

What would happen if you ignored the engine light on your car? It could cause a serious problem. There can also be consequences for not paying attention to your own thoughts and emotions. For example, if you are in a habit of ignoring those nudges, you could experience increased sadness, unfulfillment, resentment, regret, strained relationships, and more.

Here are some reasons for tuning in and stepping out of your comfort zone to pursue the change that you truly desire.

You get to experience new things Your experiences add up to your life. If your life is stagnant or a bit boring, you can decide to implement change and be open to new opportunities and experiences.  

Be proactive. You can avoid greater problems in the future by paying attention to your wants, needs and desires now.

Increased confidence You intentionally make choices that improve your life rather than feeling helpless like life is happening to you.

Evolving yourself You don’t grow when you stay in your comfort zone. If you want something better, you need to change. This will bring more self-awareness and growth.

Fulfillment When you actively pursue your dreams and desires you feel more alive and purposeful. You receive the reward of your efforts. That positive energy will transfer to other areas of your life, including your relationships with family and friends. You won’t be looking to others for your own fulfillment.

Living authentically You aren’t meant to be a copycat. You have a unique path with desires that mean something to you specifically. When you are free to be yourself, you also give others permission to do the same.

Life coaching doesn’t take away all your problems, but it helps you see what could be holding you back from just being good to being great. It helps you see how you can use our own mind to improve your life. There are more exciting possibilities instore for you. Are you excited to find out what they are and start living a more fulfilled life?

So many of us have amazing dreams and goals, but we aren’t doing what needs to be done to achieve them. Are we not motivated? Inspired? Do we not believe we can get there? Are we afraid of how much our life will change if we do? I don’t know the answer for you. But you do.

We humans want what we want because of a feeling it will give us. We think that if we weigh a certain weight, have that amazing partner, get a raise, or open that business that you will feel something, and it will create our happiness.
What I want to offer you is that it happens the other way around. The emotions you experience drive all your actions. The things you don’t do, and the things you do, are because of an emotion or a feeling. How you conduct yourself is a direct result of how you feel, but where do your feelings come from? People are always blaming other people or situations for their feelings. I’m sorry, you don’t get off the hook that easy. You cannot change other people or circumstances, but you can change your perceptions.

Our feelings come from our thoughts. Truth is most of us aren’t very in-tune with ourselves and aware of our own thinking. Our brain has helped us with this because it loves to be efficient, but we get caught in certain habit or thought loops that were created over time to help us learn and do things quicker and to protect ourselves. We live habitually about 90% of our time. For example, we don’t need to think about how to dress, brush our teeth, drive, and other daily tasks, which in some ways is helpful. But if you want to change a result in your life, you need to think, feel, and act differently if you want a different outcome. If you only change the action, and not the thinking and emotion that fueled that action, you are fighting a losing battle, the change won’t be permanent.

Your perception of yourself, your worth, abilities and beliefs matter. What you think about is important. The world is full of loud negative voices saying you can’t or it’s too hard. The loudest is usually found in your own head because you have stored things up through the years and have made some of them mean things about yourself.

There are many distractions that offer temporary quick feel-better feelings, which unfortunately usually offer the opposite outcome you truly desire, and that is why being aware and intentional with your thinking with the goal in mind will benefit you greatly.

If you are holding back and not moving towards your dreams and goals, it is only because of a thought error that is creating an emotion that is causing you to procrastinate, get off course, or stop. This can be changed. Instead of justifying this, compassionately ask yourself, “what am I thinking that is causing me to feel like giving up?” or “Is this thought creating the energy I need to keep on course?” If it isn’t, you have the right, the ability and power to change the thought if you want to. I highly suggest taking time to find out why the thought came into play first.

Nothing outside of you can take credit for your success or your failure. It’s how we look and perceive those things that make all the difference. The answer is in you. As a life coach, I am trained to help you see those thought errors and support you through the transformation process. If you are curious about the process I use and see if we might be a good fit, you can book a free virtual coffee with me.

Our brain was created to form habits and be more efficient in this world. According to dictionary.com, a habit is an acquired behavior pattern regularly followed until it becomes almost involuntary. Consider how easy it makes our life. We aren’t required to be constantly on alert to remember to brush our teeth, which leg to put in the pant first, how to cook or drive, or to look both ways before crossing the street all because of the blessing of habit.

These habits become part of who we are. Thinking patterns and learned emotional responses become part of our makeup. Some of our habits are necessary for our survival and day to day living and others may seem like quirks or obsessions. Some of these behaviour patterns seem merely physical while others encompass mental and emotional patterns as well, which can create dependency on other people’s opinions, narcotics, alcohol, food, etc. to create a false sense of well-being, a temporary fix which is usually an attempt to feel better about a situation they don’t even like.

Have you heard yourself fighting to keep a habit you don’t want? Have you said, “It is just who I am”?
Have you declared, “I am a smoker, I’ve been smoking since I was 10 years old”, or “I am overweight because it’s in my genes, my whole family is heavy”? Or “I am this way because I was victimized, and I can’t help behaving like this.” I strongly believe that kind of thinking is a smokescreen to protect yourself. I have done this most of my life. I have suffered a lot of unnecessary pain because of it. All you are doing is trying to avoid being uncomfortable and facing the truth of your situation. It’s not your fault. It is how our subconscious brain works, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. It is possible to change your belief and thought patterns and even your emotional responses and create a new way of being and get new results, but you must be intentional about it, it won’t happen automatically.

When you decide you want to follow another path, change a habit or uplevel your life in some way, understand that approximately 95% of our behaviour is habit, so you will feel some resistance in you, and it will take some work. Don’t misinterpret those strong negative feelings as a sign you can’t do it or give up. Your brain is just checking in with you and wanting to make sure you know what you are doing. It initially had created those habits to protect you and it feels scary to change and go into the unknown. Rest assured, there is nothing like the feeling of pushing through and changing our lives to create our own experiences. It is so empowering and worth the effort. In time your new thought patterns and choices will become your new habit and your new way of being. 

What do you want for your life? Seriously. Think about it. What do you want to experience today, next month, or two years from now? What is stopping you? Honestly nothing is stopping you except the habit patterns in your brain. If you desire something different, you will need to think, feel, and act differently. It is a choice you get to make every day. I can help you with this.

This is what I am trained to do. This is what I love to do. I ask you the right questions, hold space for you with zero judgement, and together we find solutions that work for you. If you are ready to dive in and begin creating new possibilities, click the sign-up button below to book your 1:1 session or your six-week package of 1:1. If you are struggling to figure this out, please click the link below to book a free virtual coffee with me. I’ll answer all your questions, we can see if we are a good fit, and if coaching is something you want. Perhaps that one conversation is all you need. I truly love my work and desire more than anything for you to feel empowered and intentionally create what you want.