Carol The Coach Blog

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I am the believer of miracles….In may of 02 I sat with a colleague drinking a margarita and told her that I believed we could change the lives of millions of women if we could……just get ourselves on Oprah!

So we spent hours putting a women’s manual together of the more than 2000 groups that we had facilitated and all the exercises that had helped them. I sent the manual weekly for over a year only to find out that Harpo did not accept packages! What happenned to the 50 + manuals that we sent?

I had two people hand deliver the manual to producers of the show with no call back.

I made numerous calls with no real response.

And then last week, I emailed Deborah Way, one of the editors of The O Magazine and her assistant called back to say I could submit my articles for consideration.

So what is the meaning behind this BLOG? You must never give up because life continues to open doors but it seemingly is never on “our time.”

What goals are you working on and what steps are you taking to make them happen?

Each week I invite you to join me in taking your life to the next level and put out the energy to make it happen. As you know there is no guarantee that Ms. Way will like my submissions but “what I know to be true” is that when I put it out there…..it goes somewhere….and when it is intended to help others….it will always come back!

All the best!

Carol the Coach

Life has its ups and downs and I recently found out that my “Sex, Love and Relationship Show” got cancelled after almost 2 years. The bad news is that I loved that show! The good news is that I am viewing it as an opportunity to go bigger and better and take the idea to a larger audience.

I am not sure whether I will look for syndication, or will do some TV or do an internet gig but whatever I decide….one thing for sure…I know that a setback is really an opportunity for bigger and better things and that is why I think this next article will help you to see it from my perspective.

After you read the article, I would love to hear how adversity turned into opportunity in your world.

Resiliency:Adversity or Opportunity

You Decide

 

 Most people who come to therapy have been traumatized by rejection, abandonment and other adversities.  When they make their first appointment, they share their story which brings them validation and acknowledgment.  I encourage them to feel the feelings, and then I help them to decide how they want their life to be different.  Most often, they tell me they want their pain to end.  “Ending the pain” requires that they acquire a set of coping skills to strengthen their ability to move on and better their life. 

 

Some people seem to be born with a resiliency that allows them to deal with life while others have to learn this skill.   I ask myself why do some people succeed while others, who are equally as passionate, falter?   Why do some people grow stronger from their adversities while others allow their crises to beat them down? 

 

Each person is different, but there are clearly mindsets and strategies that separate the winners from the losers and the successful from the disparaged.    When people possess the strength of resiliency they are able to move past their situation and grow stronger.  Resiliency is a mindset.  You aren’t necessarily born with it, but you can learn it by modeling others or cognitively changing your thinking so that you shift from the negative toward the positive.

 

Healthy individuals can weather all sorts of trauma, loss and disappointments if they can rationalize it as a “part of life”. People with little resiliency seem to take disappointment very personally and have difficulty letting go. .Part of resolving life’s issues is feeling the feelings, letting them go and then moving on and trying again to find success in life, love or business.

 

Assess your resiliency by and decide what areas you need to strengthen:

·         Do you fight change, or embrace it?  Do you ask yourself if you can benefit from an experience? This allows you to gracefully accept a change instead of fighting it.  Use it to your advantage!

·         Do you ask yourself what you can learn from a situation so that you will grow stronger and not necessarily repeat the same mistakes?

·         Do you balance your needs with the needs of others?  There will be many opportunities for you to pick the choice that benefits you.  How do your decisions affect your environment?  We have spent the last two decades focusing on “self”.  Making healthy decisions means balancing what is best for you with the needs of others.   Ask yourself honestly, “Can I achieve this goal without compromising the needs of my loved ones or coworkers?”

·         Do you know your strengths, gifts, and talents?  Do you use them with confidence?  As Marianne Williamson says, “Playing small doesn’t serve the world.”  Identify your positive qualities and then use them to define who you are. 

·         Do you accept your imperfections?  This often requires that you learn how to work with them.  Many people spend their lives hiding from the truth.  Acknowledge your weaknesses and develop a strategy to cope with deficits. If you lack follow-through with goals, create structure that includes one daily task, and a time to tackle it.  Working with weaknesses means that you know what areas to work on and you take it to the next level to create a strategy of dealing with it.

·         Do you build relationships? This requires a mutual give-and-take of energy. Do you regularly spend time fortifying relationships with others?  Are you able to ask others for their time and energy? Assess whether you’re a giver or a taker, and practice the opposite interaction.  If you’re a social isolationist you will need to practice the skill of interaction.  Call someone to connect, ask someone to lunch or e-mail a colleague to check in.  Do this with regularity.  

 

If resiliency doesn’t come natural, develop the coping skills to maneuver through life. You get to chose whether you give in to the pain or learn from it and let it go.  If you are the type of person who is still licking your wounds after several years, then you will need to make the effort to view what happened to you in a different way!

 

Carol the Coach

I am really excited to ask you to participate in an experiment with me. I believe that we can achieve anything  if you think positively, feel the feeling of “already accomplishing it” and then living in the gratitude of what already is.

Sounds simple doesn’t it and yet feeling the feeling can be difficult if you have limiting beliefs that stop you from believing in you and believing that you can do anything.

Now here is the challenge….I am absolutely convinced that I should have another radio show and yet there seems to be many daunting tasks to  getting the job done.

I must confess that I have said to my self that this town may not have any more opportunities for me in radio……Now that sure is playing small and so I am going to document from this day forward all the things that I am going to do to prove to you (and myself) that I will have another gig in the near future.

Now what I would like for you to do is follow my progress and join my team…and challenge yourself to take your life to the next level by opting for something in your life that is “extra”ordinary.  What goals would you like to accomplish and what do you need to do to make it happen. Follow my blog and my video blogs on the web site and through You Tube to make it happen.

Keep the faith and watch the magic unfold as we take our life to the next level!

“Faith”fully yours,

Carol the Coach