Good morning SLAYER! You are the author of your own story, don’t like the story, change the narrative.
New blog goes up Friday, until then…SLAY on!
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Don’t Believe Everything You Think
I’ve done enough work on myself to know my thoughts don’t always speak the truth. They lie to me. My thoughts, when left on their own to run wild, always run to the negative side. They always have. And I used to believe them. Thought they told me the truth. But I know today that they don’t. They don’t want me to succeed. They want to keep me isolated. Alone. So they can continue to talk to me without interruption. And my thoughts, without any interruption, are dangerous, and very nearly, cost me my life.
It’s why it’s important to share with others. To let out what you’re thinking. Not only so it loses it’s power over you, but also so you can have a sounding board, and some feedback from someone else who can listen to those thoughts of yours and tell you if they’re telling the truth or not.
Why do your thoughts betray us? Why would we betray ourselves? Why would we not want the best for ourselves and encourage ourselves? You would think we would, but all too often that negative bullshit committee starts up and tries to tear us down, but here’s the secret…we have the power to stop it.
I didn’t know that my own thoughts were my enemy until I made a commitment to get better. I thought my problems were all outside things and once I changed my habits and my lifestyle those negative thoughts would go away. Well, that didn’t happen, in fact, they got louder because I had taken away all of things I used to self-medicate and numb and quiet those voices. So once those were all gone, those voices got louder. So, how did I counter that noise? By making peace with my past. By learning to love myself. By sharing those thoughts and ideas with others, who then shared theirs with me. By replacing all those bad habits with good ones. And by doing all of those things and building self-esteem. When I started to feel good about myself those voices got quieter, they didn’t have as much to say. And when they did pipe up, I had something to counteract those voices as I started making better choices, healthier choices, for myself. Now, that’s not to say that sometimes they don’t pop in from time to time, they do, but they don’t stay long, and, if they do start to chatter, it’s usually a sign that I need to be doing some work on something, or, need to take better care of myself, because when I’m doing good things and making sure I’m getting what I need, I don’t hear those voices.
Our thoughts can be our own worst enemies. They can destroy things for us even before we’ve started. So knowing that, make sure you are armed and ready when your thinking tries to take over and take away an opportunity, or destroy something really great in your life, don’t listen to them. And, as I always say, look at the facts. What do you know to be true? Start there, and you may just find that those voices don’t have the volume they once did. Take action, do things for yourself that you love, that shows yourself love, that shows those around you love. Those acts keep those voices quiet. Love is the counterattack to those voices and keeps them at bay. Don’t believe everything you think because what you’re thinking is probably a lie. One meant to keep you from who and where you are meant to be. SLAY on!
SLAY OF THE DAY: Do you have negative chatter in your head? Do you believe that chatter? What does it tell you? Why do you think it’s the truth? What are the facts to back up your belief? What if you stopped listening to them? What if you did the opposite of what they’re telling you? What if you stopped believing them? What if you did so many loving things for yourself that you no longer heard them? You can SLAYER, you can. Stop listening to those voices in your head, nothing good ever came from that anyway, listen to your heart, ask it what it wants, and go get it, that is a sure-fire way to put a muzzle on those negative thoughts.
S – self L – love A – appreciate Y – you
Slay Say
Good morning SLAYER! Let the feeling of good fuel your fire to keeping working for more good.
New blog goes up Tuesday, until then…SLAY on!
Slay Say
Good morning SLAYER! You didn’t come this far to only come this far. Always keep fighting.
New blog goes up Tuesday, until then…SLAY on!
Slay Say
Good morning SLAYER! What would you attempt to do if you knew you couldn’t fail?
New blog goes up Sunday, until then…SLAY on!
Embracing Is Acing
Before walking this path the only thing I was embracing were the outside things I thought would fill me up. None of them ever did, not in the long-term. Sure I might get a hit of satisfaction or relief, but soon after that emptiness would creep back in. Back then, I couldn’t even fathom embracing something I deemed negative. Which, was pretty much everything in my life, including myself.
When I sought help and started to change my behaviors and embarked on a path of self-love, I had to learn to embrace all of those things I didn’t like. Those imperfections in myself, and in my life. Which was a lot to take on. I was pretty much unhappy about everything. But I started with learning to find acceptance first. And boy, that took some work, but learning to ease off, to let go, to look at each thing and ask if there was something I could do to change it, asking myself, honestly, why I didn’t like it, and using that information to move forward. If there was action I could take I had to take it, otherwise I was not permitted to complain about it. Fair enough. And if I wasn’t ready to take action, I would write down what the action should be, will be, because that was the only action I was ready to take in that moment. Finding acceptance for the things I couldn’t change came next. I felt frustrated, trapped, and discouraged. But if I was going to get better I had to learn to let those things go, they weren’t serving me, they were only bringing me down.
And that’s it really. It’s taking a look at our lives and what is helping us and what is pulling us back, or keeping us staying stuck, and then doing something about those things that aren’t helping us get to where we want to be, or, robbing us of our peace and serenity. There are a lot of things I have no control over, and once I was able to let them go the happier I became. In terms of myself, I was eventually not only able to let go of my hate, judgment, or disappointment for those things n myself I didn’t like, I learned to embrace them. Embracing my flaws made them my assets. And yes, there are some that do hold me back, but the more I practice living in the light and living in my truth, the more those personal flaws start to lessen their grip on me.
As you know, I am a big believer in contrary action. Doing the opposite of what we’ve always done. That is the only way to get different results. And when we practice contrary action not only do the results change, but so do we. Our self-confidence grows, our self-esteem gets bigger, we start to love ourselves for who we are, and we start to see what makes us special. We learn to embrace who we are, all of who we are, and we begin to live a life that supports that love and is more loving to ourselves. When we are embracing we are acing. A reminder that we need to embrace our true selves, it’s only then that we begin to ace life, in whatever that means for you. SLAY on!
SLAY OF THE DAY: Do you struggle with embracing who you are, flaws and all? What holds you back? Why do you think you have trouble? The reasons you’ve cited, are they stories from your past that you’ve continued to hold on to? Let them go, those stories are old, and no longer you, only if you allow them to control your present. Write out who are you, as a person, what makes you you, write out your hopes and dreams, and then write down what holds you back. What can you do to diminish or get rid of those things that hold you back? Maybe even embrace them and make them work in your favor. You can SLAYER, if I can you can, I believe in you. Start looking at those things as something positive, something you can overcome, work around make you stronger to go after those things you want in your life, to be the best version of you. Take charge and focus on what you can do to move forward, and letting go of the rest. Embrace who you are and what you are, and you’ll see many of those obstacles fall way.
S – self L – love A – appreciate Y – you
Back To Reality, Back To The Dark
We all have things we look forward to, maybe things we’ve built up in our heads, anticipated, or worked hard for, and when they happen we feel that high, that rush of excitement, of accomplishment, and we’re lifted up. But what a lot of people don’t talk about, or label, is the crash when we get back home and it’s over. It happens for me after I finish a project, I get that super rush of adrenaline, the endorphins kick in, and all is good, and then, it’s over and that all falls away. Things go back to normal, and things can, in comparison, seem dark, quiet, and the fear kicks in that I will never have it again. I see it, and hear it, in others, whether they’ve come back from a convention, a vacation, or have finished something they had been working on for a long time. They feel down. When this used to happen to me I didn’t know what it was for a long while, that let down, the blues, or the grays, and I wasn’t hearing anyone else talk about it, so I thought it was just me. I realized as I started to talk about it, that it’s not just me, it’s you too.
When you think about it, it’s only natural that coming back home, finishing a project, or just returning to our every day lives, that we would feel down after the excitement and exhilaration of what we had been doing. I wrote about this from a different angle in my blog, Are You Addicted To Excitement? There is a high associated with these types of events in our lives, of having something to look forward to, or being able to participate in something, or seeing a project come to life, so it seems only natural once it’s over we would feel a void. Now, if we’re not careful we can fall into the rabbit hole of depression, not labeling it for what it us, the come down from an event or job we enjoyed, it’s easy to let the negative self-talk kick in and tell us that we’ll never had what we just had again, that we are alone, that no one cares, and this darkness will never end. But it will end, we know it will because it has in the past, and, we can put an end to it. How do we do that?
Well, first we acknowledge it is what it is and not make it anything more than that. Don’t give it anymore power than you coming down from a high. Also, don’t let it tell you that you’re the only one that suffers from this, you’re not, and the more you talk about it for what it is, the more you’ll realize that we all go through this once something is over. So, how do we get ourselves out? Acknowledging it helps, and then we need to take some action. We need to get out and continue to participate in life, find ways, in our daily life to get that little shot of excitement we experience on a bigger scale during one of those events. Find things to do that you enjoy that make you smile, that challenge you, that allow you to give back. Find all the ways in your life that you can fill your heart, so when you come back home and are feeling down, you have a list of things you can take action on to get you moving out of the dark and back into the light. Life is not just a bunch of big events strung together with darkness in between, we need to fill those days up with light each day, and not depend solely on those bigger events in our lives to carry us through. And, also, to prepare for the crash after those events because we know it’s coming.
We can’t remove the come down after a big event in our lives, it still will happen, but we can lessen the impact it has on us by preparing for it in advance, knowing it’s coming, and making sure we are ready for it when it goes. I still feel it after something big, but I now know what to do to kick things back into gear and get life rolling again. Life doesn’t stop after the party, or job, or vacation, in fact, it’s after those things that we need to work harder to keep moving forward and keep from sliding back to something we can’t relive.
SLAY OF THE DAY: After a big event in your life do you tend to slip into a depression, or darkness? Have you realized this about yourself in the past? Or, do you just keep finding yourself there without the understanding of why? Think back in the past few years, to the events that stand out for you, did you find you crashed when you got home and back into your normal life? How did you feel? Why do you think you felt that way? Those feelings are normal SLAYER, we all feel them to some degree. It’s natural to feel down when we’ve felt so high. So, when you know you have something coming up, something you’ve been looking forward to, write down 5 things you can do when you get home to make that transition easier, brighter, and more productive, so when the darkness hits, you can look at that list and get into action. Trust me, that action will bring in just the right light to get you shining bright. SLAY on!
S – self L – love A – appreciate Y – you
Slay Say
Good morning SLAYER! Don’t like the way you feel, how do you want to feel? Think about that feeling until you feel it, then, take action to make that feeling your reality.
New blog goes up Friday, until then…SLAY on!
How Do You Want To Feel?
I was speaking with a friend the other day about not feeling good about a situation and he turned to me and asked, “how do you want to feel.? That got me thinking. How did I want to feel? And as I started to think about it, I started to feel it. For a few moments I felt the way I wanted to feel, and that got me thinking. What action do I have to take so that I feel this way?
We often can get stuck in our feelings, and feelings can be tricky. They can be tied up in some many things and not necessarily with how we feel about our current situation, but can be tied to experiences and trauma from our past. I know for myself that there have been times on this journey where I gotten triggered by something, unbeknownst to me at the time, and I have reacted to how I’m feeling thinking it is a genuine feeling about where I am currently at, but it’s not. Something or someone has hit that trigger and it’s pulled up something that has nothing to do with the person standing in front of me. It used to baffle me. My hair-trigger reaction to things seemed to flare up immediately, and if I didn’t pause to think about why I might be feeling the way I was I would just react and react to whomever was standing in front of me, only to feel badly later on, or, if I was really not present, blame them for something that they were never involved in at all.
With the help of counseling and therapy I now have a better sense of what those triggers mean and what the root of them are, so that when one flares up, I can, when I take a moment, realize what the true source of that feeling is. Feelings tend to have a lot of baggage, and far-reaching tentacles in our lives. But feelings also aren’t’ facts. Feelings can tell us a lot about ourselves and what’s going on for us, but we can also manipulate them, or have a skewed perception, of what the true facts actually are. I used to romanticize a lot of things, or, make them far worse than they really were. It was all about really high highs and really low lows for me, when really, a lot of those things, probably fell more in the middle. But the memory of them, and my feelings of them, where at either a 1 or a 10. and, I would get stuck there. To the point where it seemed like I either didn’t care or I was in a complete rage, with no warning. Sometimes that can still happen, and when it does I know I have more work to do there, it’s a sign that I still need to work on what that trigger is and how to make peace with it.
But back to feeling the way you want to feel. Just by thinking about that, you do feel that feeling. It’s like an instant shot, and it may only stay for a moments, until our brain kicks in and brings you back to reality, but, if it can do it for a few moments we know we can go there, it’s attainable, we can get it, so the next question is, how?
You know I’m always about taking action, it’s what keeps us on a positive path, and makes us warriors. So, what can you do today to feel the way you want to feel? When you ask yourself that, the answers come, and if they don’t, just start by taking some positive action, any positive action, and keep asking yourself that same question. Sometimes, we can’t do it alone, I know I couldn’t at the beginning, and sometimes I still need the help of someone else, so don’t put pressure on yourself to have it all figured out right away, it takes practice, and there’s no prize for doing it alone.
Choose to feel the way you want to feel, and if you don’t, take action to go after that feeling. Even the thought of that makes me feel good. Take action to feel good SLAYER.
SLAY OF THE DAY: Do you tend to get stuck in the way you are feeling and feel like there’s no way out? How would you rather feel than how you’re feeling right now? What can you do to attain that, or, get closer to it? What have you tried in the past? What has worked? What hasn’t worked? What have you still not tried? What would you like to try? Try it SLAYER. Think right now, about how you want to feel, and before your brain kicks in to say you can’t, say yes I can, and go after that feeling. SLAY on!
S – self L – love A – appreciate Y – you
Slay Say
Good morning SLAYER! When you are able to be comfortable in uncertainty, infinite possibilities come into your life.
New blog goes up Tuesday, until then…SLAY on!
