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I cannot tell you where this idea came from, but one day in my morning time with the Lord I picked up a thin marker (in the green color), and I made little dots on my left hand closest to my thumb. I chose a place on my hand that would be easily seen by me as I went through my day doing my work and daily tasks.

Each dot that I marked on my hand represents a different truth I want to believe for myself, or I want to reinforce in my thought patterns. Our brains are like sponges! And I have decided to help my brain out by telling it what to believe.

Can I say that from day one of doing this I have noticed real change in my thinking and my emotions. I am actually believing these truth statements more and more each time I look down at the dots on my hand and repeat aloud what they represent for me.

Every morning I repeat this routine. I grab my green thin marker, place new dots on my hand for the new day and all while at the same time repeating the truth statements I need.

These are my current “truth” statements I need right now:

First Dot:  “I am worthy of love. I am loved. I am lovable. God loves me. Jesus loves me. Holy Spirit loves me. I love me.”

Second Dot:  “I am worthy of joy in my life. I am worthy of peace in my life. I am worthy of an abundant life.”

Third Dot:  “I am worthy of good health. I am worthy of good brain health. I am worthy of a healthy nervous system. I am worthy of having balanced hormones. I am worthy of being strong, fit and healthy.”

Fourth Dot:  “I am worthy of success. I am worthy of having a profitable business. I am worthy of being used by God to impact and love others.”

Fifth Dot:  “I am worthy of being safe. I am content and happy where I am in my journey and life right now.”

There is definitely power in choosing to believe truth over lies. As we do this we are literally rewiring our brains and forming thought habits that will lead us to make healthier and better choices for ourselves and a life that we should be living.

When I struggled with burnout and then was diagnosed with severe depression following that, I began to do research on the brain and how it works. And in my research I found evidence and good teachings that support the importance of this particular simple practice. 

I reveal this simple activity I do daily, twice a day or more, to get you thinking about how and if you need to change your bad thought habits, and choose to create healthier ones instead. 

If you want to change your life, you must change some things within yourself and a good start is with your thinking. I challenge you to find a way to do this activity that helps you. For me it is simply putting green dots from a thin green marker on my hand every morning to keep myself reminded of having good thoughts and beliefs throughout my day. The simpler the better in order to adapt it to your busy life.

I love the simplicity of this, I love the action of it and the habit of verbalizing my new truths I am choosing to believe. I will be doing this as long as I have air in my lungs, meaning for a very long time. 

Here is a lady I have learned a lot from about the brain that encouraged me to believe that I could bring my brain into better health:  Caroline Leaf drleaf.com

And here is another individual that gave me hope for a healthier brain after my severe depression diagnosis:  Daniel Amen  

Both are worth the time to look up! 

The New Year had just begun, I was working on my usual weekly to-do list task while pondering what this year of 2020 was possibly going to bring my way. (And it is not unusual for me to have wondering thoughts in the middle of doing a mundane task.)

That’s when I heard the Lord drop the word, “Worth”, into my heart. I had never chosen a specific word to use as my motivation for growth and reaching a fuller potential for a year before, but here I was rolling around in my head my word for the year.

I will be honest, I at first did not fully understand why this word was the word I needed. I mean, I knew that I struggled with having self-worth, but I did not know what the Lord was up to with this.

We are now deep into the month of February and now I get it, I get why this is my word for the year. And understanding why has motivated me to embrace this word and allow change in my mind and heart to take place.

I have been through some tough stuff in my life, and after a collection of trying and exhausting experiences piled one on top of the other, I have been left with some heart wrenching effects. Losing my self-worth, my identity, my ability to find value in just being who I am was the most life impacting result.

We have different negative markers in our lives that we can look back on and pinpoint the time or times we had changed and lost pieces of ourselves. And all because of what happened that was so frightening and devastating for us.

For me, it was the summer of 2014. Something happened to me that caught me off guard, as these things always do, but left me traumatized and full of fear and distrust with myself. I can still look back on that evening it happened and point to it and state, “That’s when it happened. That’s when I would never be the same again.”

I lost a lot in that one evening, and it would take me years to realize all that I had lost.

The most important thing that I lost was my self-worth, which led me down a horrible road of depression, anger, and despair. I could not forgive myself for having allowed myself to be pushed to burnout. I could not forgive myself for the HUGE transition my husband and I had to make to return back to the States because of my newfound issues with mental health.

I am here today to share that I have recovered a lot from that event. And now it is time for me to go deeper with my healing and to really work on improving my own self value and worth, beginning with really forgiving myself and letting go of what happened.

I have been really diving into how to get not only our self-worth back, but even our confidence. I am learning a lot of things in this growth process and I am thrilled to be sharing with you the things I am learning and applying to my life.

I will be sharing more with you on this focus word of mine, but in closing out this blog post I want to encourage you to search out a possible “word” you want to hold onto for this year of 2020 that will bring you what you need to move towards your growth, healing, and transformation. Let me know in the comments below your “word” of choice for this year!

What I am about to share with the reader is something that has just recently been my own experience, very recent in fact. I am working my way back to what I deem as normal for myself, and this has definitely not been my first setback. I have had many.

First, I want to define what I mean when I talk about being held back. I am referencing those times when something interrupts our lives and interrupts our natural flow of things; when something happens that invades the race you are running and trips you up in it’s wake.

This can be a lot of things, like an interrupting health issue, an unplanned move, a horrible heartbreak, an unneeded job loss, and I can go on and on.

Most often these are “out of our control” events that take place in our lives.They can take us by surprise and leave us wounded, shocked, and even not ourselves, or confused with who we thought we were.

Events such as these can definitely contribute to us finding ourselves stuck in our lives. I know you are aware of these types of events, but I want to move forward with sharing some things to keep in mind when it is time to pick yourself back up and truly live again.

How we get back up again, when life knocks us on our back, depends a whole lot on what actually happened to us and how deeply it affected us. It also depends on other factors too, such as our resilience, if this has been the first or tenth time this has happened to us and if we had trauma in our past and so on.

Some of us will need more help than others to get back up, such as external tools provided by a counselor for example, but that never translates that we are less than because we need a different type of help. I want to take all shame out of the decision to get more help for yourself, in fact, it is actually a brave move and speaks of your strong character for reaching out in the first place.

With that being said, let us move forward with what you can do in the meantime to pick yourself back up.

I am naturally an over achiever and when I get knocked down while running my race, I have to work hard to give myself the time and space I need to find my footing again. I make a choice to show myself compassion and grace as I recover, and take off a whole ton of pressure to be my normal over achiever self.

It takes energy to work through difficult things in our lives, energy that we would normally be able to exert in daily tasks, working on relationships, and any work projects or personal hobbies we are used to doing. Now that we are trying to gather ourselves, we need to recognize that our energy level will drop for a time, and that we should be okay with that.

When I am in the healing process, I lesson my load where I am able to and can afford to. And since being an over achiever is my normal mode, I definitely have to back away from that tons.

Setbacks can happen for a reason and they can happen for no real reason at all. A lot of times we quickly question ourselves of what we did wrong to experience this horrible event. However, if we are reaping the consequences of our own wrong choices, then we will more than likely immediately or soon discover that.

 

 

Other times it gets gray and fuzzy in our minds as we try and understand why such and such happened to us. This alone can drive any of us crazy and create a lot of confusion for ourselves. I take this time to get out of my head and have conversations with trustworthy people in my life to help me gain the right perspective.

And if we cannot understand the why, we should be allowed to be okay with not understanding for a time or ever. Life is not always kind and fair. There are people in this world who hurt and attempt to destroy others, and trying to understand them may not be an option for us. More than likely they are hurting inside and have been for a really long time. Or an event took place in our lives that had nothing to do with another person’s choices, but instead was an uninvited illness or accident, or even a natural disaster. These instances can also leave us reeling with questions.

We cannot control what did happen to us, but we can control how we respond. We can choose to move towards healing, we can choose to let go and move on, and we can choose to try and learn something in this process of getting back on our feet moving forward (even if it is learning something awfully true about another person or something surprising about ourselves).

We can choose to allow this experience to deepen our faith, to strengthen our resilience, and to believe that things will get better, thus having hope.

Everyone of us will have setbacks in our lives, and everyone of us has had them already producing different intensities of grief within us. Some people do actually stand back up on their feet again, but sadly, there are those that have remained stuck in their pain and have not moved at all.

I have great compassion on those that are stuck, because a lot of times they are because no one gave them the encouragement, love, and support they needed to stand back up. We cannot save everyone, however, for there are those who refuse to get better, but we can become the comfort we hopefully received and the love we also desperately needed.

For some of us, the grief as a result of what happened is so intense, so paralyzing, that one baby step forward is a huge accomplishment and we need to applaud one another when these moments take place. We should never judge anyone for the time it takes for them to grieve something that has happened to them. If it takes them a matter of years to get themselves together and stand back up again, then we applaud them for doing so and rejoice with them that they made it back up.

My last word of encouragement with this is to show yourself the grace, compassion, and understanding you would show your best friend if it were them going through such a setback. Watch your thoughts and ask yourself if you would say the same things to your friends, or even your younger self. It is crucial when we are in the season of getting back up, that we are kind to ourselves and show ourselves love. This alone helps in our healing process and strengthens our hearts to continue on. Don’t give up, keep moving!

Fear. 

It can be a beast when you have something new and great in your heart to do. For myself personally, I have allowed fear to hold me back way too many times in my life. I can even share that my fear to do something brilliant, but perhaps out of the norm, has been a HUGE reason of why I’ve been stuck in my life at various times. 

Now, underneath the fear could be a whole set of insecurities, doubts, and what if’s. However our emotions are described, if fear is involved then we can name fear as the main instigator. Our brains work real hard to keep us safe and comfortable, and anything we want to do that is different or has risk to it, we quickly hear our brains giving us a plethora of reasons why we should not do it. 

But we have something stronger within us then just our brains at work, we have a will. Our will can and has surpassed our brains alerting us to danger. I mean, just think of a time when you were young, where you knew the danger of doing such and such, and yet, you still did it anyways. 

We maybe can sum that up as us just being immature, but you have to admit we had more courage back then. We saw the world as ours to conquer, until the world brought us hurt and pain. Now, to convince ourselves to do anything out of the box takes more guts and courage than we ever needed in our lives. 

When I was grappling with starting this business, I spent a lot of time going back and forth in my head of why I should and why I should not start it. The truth was that I was afraid to step into who I knew I was meant to be. I had enough experience, enough skills, but for two years I refused to budge. 

Why was this? Well, fear, insecurities, and not believing what I knew to be true about myself. I saw myself through skewed lenses, and admit openly, that I still put up a fight with seeing myself this way. 

The truth is I know myself. I know my weaknesses and my strengths. I know my insecurities and self-doubts. And I know that I struggle immensely with “not being good enough”, and measuring myself up against others and thinking for some strange reason that they are better.

But the greater truth is that everyone is exactly like this. All of us have an understanding of our weaknesses and strengths, our own feelings that we don’t measure up, and our issues with comparing ourselves way too much with others. In short, we are all humans who grapple with fear on the daily. 

Moving past that daily dose of fear, ignoring it as we should, and stepping into a life that we desperately want for ourselves can be possible. 

How is it possible, you ask? Well, for starters recognizing that you are not alone in your fear of moving out of being stuck. There are plenty of people that find themselves in the same boat. What can differentiate us from them, is making a choice by our will, to move past the fear into action.

Fear will not entirely go away, and when we come to that understanding in our lives, then we can move towards working around it instead of against it. And to do this we have to begin to believe truths about ourselves that scream louder than our fears.

Before the New Year decided to poke it’s head over the horizon, promising us all a new decade, more resolutions, and emotions of disbelief that another year is upon us, I was deep in thought over why I felt stuck with something.

I had made some decisions earlier in the month that I wanted to start specific new projects and continue working on existing ones, but something inside of me was stirring. This stirring was real and raw and yet, I couldn’t get it to surface.

I had a few ideas of what was trying to peak it’s way through in my heart, but each time I thought I knew what it was, the stirring continued communicating to me that I was not getting it. I was stuck and that produced some great anxiety within me. When you are about turn 40 and you know you are supposed to be doing something, but you have not figured it out yet, you feel time is no longer friendly and you need to hurry up and piece it all together.

A lot of this anxiety and fear comes from comparing ourselves to others that are doing or making the impact we want to make and yet, they are light years ahead of us (or so it feels), and some even younger than ourselves. It strikes a chord deep inside that we need to hurry and run after the dreams we once had, but because of life, we got sidetracked.

This was me a few months ago. I was stuck and super anxious that I was not a young twenty year old who had plenty of time to make decisions and be okay with making mistakes and changing one’s mind. We had plenty of time back then.

But then I learned and realized, just because I am turning 40 this new year, does not mean that I am running out of time to achieve the things my heart wants to achieve. I DO have time. If I would just stop comparing my journey with someone else’s and be content with where I am at in my life, then the anxiety and fear will melt away.

Sometimes when we believe certain lies about ourselves or our circumstances, that too can be the reason we feel stuck. In order for us to become unstuck we need to first explore what caused us to be stuck in the first place and then work from there.

For me, I was stuck because I was not choosing to pursue what I knew deep inside of me I really wanted to pursue. I wanted to do something safe, comfortable, and risk free. Having that mindset, however, kept me stuck. It was holding me back from what I knew I wanted to be and do.

And when I finally allowed myself to pursue “the thing” that I was afraid to admit that I wanted to pursue, all of a sudden I was no longer stuck.

So what does this mean for you? If you feel stuck I encourage you to explore why and to be super honest with yourself about that why. Do not compare yourself with others and set yourself free from the limitations we put on ourselves as a culture and pursue what you really want to do. I give you the permission you need to do so!