How to breakup with your old self after a major life transition

Significant life transitions, such as moving to a new city or a new country, becoming a parent or retiring, can be exciting, exhilarating and giving you a chance to grow.  Yet transitions, even positive ones, can also be stressful and bring up mixed feelings.

Breaking up with yourself is hard, yet necessary: In transitions, you’re breaking up with who you were during that time of your life. You’re not only leaving a place and a season in life behind, but you’re also leaving a version of you.

In life transitions, feeling strangely abnormal becomes the new normal.

So right now, if it feels like you’re going through an identity crisis it’s probably because you most definitely are.

The only way to truly own your life is to take responsibility for it. Sometimes things happen and there is no logical explanation, and it doesn’t need to be anyone’s fault. Finger-pointing and blaming doesn’t take away from what happened or change the facts. In fact, it keeps you living in the past by dwelling

Control, perfectionism, micro-managing. If it serves you, that’s great. Truth is I’ve yet to meet a woman that doesn’t drive herself crazy over it.

I refer to control as a ‘losing game’. It’s perfectly natural to desire that certain things happen in a certain way, but when we create requirements that everything happens according to plan (requirements to be happy, to feel successful, to feel good about ourselves), that’s when it backfires. And it’s only because we will never truly be able to control everything and everyone in our lives. It’s an impossibility. But we do have the power to influence ourselves and our lives to our greatest abilities.

Happiness stems from freedom, not control. But we can only feel truly free when we have the ability to choose. Restrictions and control are the polar opposite of freedom.

Breaking up with OLD_YOU starts with self-awareness.

Your inner self-talk determines what you say, what you do, and how you feel every single day. Influencing it is one of the most powerful things you can do to influence your life.

If you can identify when you are talking to yourself about yourself through the eyes of guilt, shame, blame, control, or comparison, and start talking to yourself like you would your own best friend (with acceptance, compassion, and understanding), your life is going to completely change.

Transitions never occurs in a vacuum. It Involves people at every turn.

Part of transitioning well means being mindful of the process involved in saying good-bye. If we give ourselves the time and space to say good-bye well we are freer at our destination to say hello with our whole hearts. Same principle applies when you have to say goodbye to your old self.

5 Ways Your Brain Is Tricking You into Being Miserable

Everyone wants to be happy, but the biggest obstacle to that is the mushy thing inside your skull that you think with.

Source: www.cracked.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The brain is designed to put more weight on negative thoughts than on positive ones. This imbalance takes us away from experiencing positive emotions such as joy, gratitude or hope.

Having positive emotions helps us become relaxed, playful and learn new skills more easily.

However, it is important to have a certain amount of negative emotions to be able to be creative and resilient.

 

Related references:

Perception and Behavior: How To Stimulate Creativity

 Updated Thinking on Positivity Ratios Barbara L. Fredrickson

 

 

 

 

 

See on Scoop.it – Global Leaders

7 psychological reasons for diet failure

healthHealth

Do you keep failing to lose weight? Your mindset might be preventing successful weight loss. Find out how to change this.

Source: low-carb-support.com

This apply to any kind of change, not only for loosing weight :

We all don’t like discomfort and change is about making you uncomfortable, so embrace it rather than trying to avoid the pain.

No pain no gain: yes if you want changes that last you will have to give up some things you really enjoy but the key is to replace habits that don’t serve your goals by new habits you equally enjoy

Focus on the process rather than on the end results, nothing is happening overnight.

Check if you are mentally and physically equipped to make the changes you need. It is better to postpone starting a change project if it is not the right timing rather than trying for a couple of days or week, failing and blaming yourself for lack of will power. It will sure make your self-esteem goes down

Have Your Made New Year Resolutions ?

Visit Our Page What Is Coaching ?

Contact Me If you Think Coaching is What You Need To Succeed !

See on Scoop.it – Great Life Coaching

Beware the Very Real Effect of Negative Social Connections

See on Scoop.it – Education For The Future

There’s a growing body of evidence supporting the idea that your friends’ friends wield tremendous power over you without you even knowing it.

Social networks are the groups of real friends that we all share and interact with.

Anne Egros‘s insight:

“Birds of a feather really DO flock together”

In the article, the negative effect of social networks is shown with obese people who tend to connect with other fat people on many levels of connection.

Emotions are the tools people use to connect with social network friends usually faster than in the real world where people tend to be more inhibited to expose themselves in person.

The phone works two ways though and the positive effects of your online friends may outweigh the negative impacts.

For example you can join people who have common goals and interests such as losing weight, staying fit and healthy, aging, raising kids or living abroad etc. Social networks can sometimes help you get extra motivated and less isolated.

What do you think ?

See on networkedblogs.com

Neuromyths Busting and Education

English: PET scan of a normal human brain (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The OECD’s Brain and Learning project (2002) emphasized that many misconceptions about the brain exist among professionals in the field of education. Though these so-called “neuromyths” are loosely based on scientific facts, they may have adverse effects on educational practice. 

Here the list of some of the biggest neuromyths, or misguided beliefs about brain functions and their impact on learning and education design:

1-We use only 10 percent of our brains.

Wikipedia collected the refutations of the myth in its  “Ten Percent Of The Brain Myth” page Neuroscientist Barry Beyerstein sets out several kinds of evidence refuting the ten percent myth, here the top three most evident for me:

• Studies of brain damage: If 90% of the brain is normally unused, then damage to these areas should not impair performance. Instead, there is almost no area of the brain that can be damaged without loss of abilities. Even slight damage to small areas of the brain can have profound effects.

• Brain scans have shown that no matter what we’re doing, our brains are always active up to 45%. Some areas are more active at any one time than others, but unless we have brain damage, there is no one part of the brain that is absolutely not functioning.

• Brain imaging: Technologies such as positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allow the activity of the living brain to be monitored. They reveal that even during sleep, all parts of the brain show some level of activity. Only in the case of serious damage does a brain have “silent” areas.

2-The brain is static, unchanging, and set before you start school. The most widely accepted conclusion of current research in neuroscience is  neuroplasticity: Our brains grow, change, and adapt at all times in our lives depending on stimulus received from our environment. Therefore the more we use our brain at any age, the more we can develop connections and learn new skills even new languages. Experts routinely take the time to learn, unlearn and relearn relevant information related to their fields of expertise. There is a lot of new research going on in the field of cultural neurosciences, looking at the relations existing between cultural dimensions and the brain’s plasticity. Although most people think that good memory means good retrieval, good memory is actually good learning–forming a strong association when acquiring new information.

3-Some people are left-brained and some are right-brained. Like many other myths, this one has emerged from a misunderstanding of experiments made by 1981 Nobel Prize winner Roger Sperry, who noticed differences in the brain when he studied people whose left and right brains had been surgically disconnected. Today, neuroscientists know that the two sides of the brain work together to perform a wide variety of tasks and that the two hemispheres communicate through the corpus callosum.

4-Male and female brains are radically different. Though there may be subtle differences between male and female brains, there is absolutely no significant evidence to suggest that the genders learn or should be taught differently. 

5-The ages 0-3 are more important than any other age for learning. Even though the connections between neurons, called synapses, are greatest in number during this period there are few studies that have to do with teaching during these “critical” time periods.

Still, there are some powerful insights emerging from brain science that speak directly to how we teach in the classroom: learning experiences do help the brain grow, emotional safety does influence learning, and making lessons relevant can help information stick. The trick is separating the meat from the marketing.

 Related resources:

• Neuromyths are a Barrier to Changing Education
• Does Raising Bilingual Children Make Them Smarter ?
• Baby’s Brain Begins Now: Conception to Age 3
• What is Brain-Based Learning?
• Psychology professor Christopher Chabris discusses “neuromyths” with WSJ’s Gary Rosen. Video
• Sometimes I just want to start throwing things: myths in education
• Do men and women have different brains?
• Neuroscience Electronic Textbook

How Intercultural Competence Drives Success in Global Virtual Teams

See on Scoop.it – Global Leaders

A study that shows intercultural competence as a factor in effectiveness of global virtual teams, and that building relationships, establishing structure, and having discipline are critical for success.

Anne Egros‘s insight:

To build a global team, first determine what needs to be done and then identify who are the best individuals for achieving the goals based on individual coaching and through intercultural training programs

See on gbr.pepperdine.edu

Related articles

• Research Findings: The Value of Intercultural Skills in the Workplace
• Ideal Traits of Global, Cross-Cultural Virtual Team Members
• Avoiding Cross-Cultural Faux Pas

I Failed: Leo Babauta

“Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” ― Winston Churchill

 

 

Anne Egros‘s insight:

Yes failure can hurt, we have to acknowledge this feeling but what can we do about it ?

Is taking action the answer ?

You can find good suggestions in Babauta’s article.

Here what I do and questions I ask myself:

1. Writing down facts : Are they true ? Do I have evidences or is it my interpretation ?
2. Writing down emotions: Is it my ego that got hurt ? How do I feel? Why do I feel pain ?
3. What choices do I have : learn from failure and move on ?, Try a new approach ?

How About You ? What can you do when you have the heavy feeling of failure in your heart ?

 

Related articles

• Whats the secret of success? Failure (hiscox.co.uk)
• Fail your way to the top (10000waysthatmightwork.wordpress.com)

See on zenhabits.net