Sara Jane Lowry

Coaching and Consultation

Power of Thought – Manifest a Better Reality

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looking at sky up through the middle of 4 walls of a building indicating the power of thought to change your realityPower of Thought – Manifest a Better Reality

Power of Thought – Manifest a Better Reality is the name of a new series I am offering starting in January. Thoughts are incredibly powerful, affecting us whether they are conscious or not. They can help or hinder how we live our lives in a way that makes us happy. Sometimes we attach negative thoughts and reactions to our current reality that make us anxious and depressed. And our inner critic uses them against us.

Where you are in your life is never who you are.  It’s more a reflection of your thoughts and beliefs, priorities that you haven’t acknowledged, or unmade choices.

So, stop explaining and justifying where you are and how you got here. That’s focusing on the past. All you need to know at this point is where you’re starting from at this moment:

  • Is the life you are living something you’re not wild about?
  • Do you feel like you’re going around in circles with nothing you’re doing gaining any traction?
  • Do you find yourself constantly looking for something better than what you have right now?

Your thoughts create your feelings.picture of rain and a leaf on the road showing the power of thought when we get anxious or depressed

There are thoughts and perceptions you have of your life that are negative or self-critical.  Thoughts like these are quietly snaking across your mind automatically, with no effort on your part. And, they have a huge impact on how you are feeling. You think these thoughts are real, and therefore, the feelings that accompany them are real. But they are often just habitual ways of thought that set up an emotional reaction that’s negative.

Yes, bad things do happen and life can really hammer us at times. Yes, people can be cruel and thoughtless too. We can’t change those things, but we can change how we think about them. We can change our hidden beliefs and self-values too.  And when you change your thinking, you change your happiness, your outlook on life, and your journey.

Start right now with a new attitude

The power of thought is in learning to recognize the negative ones and change them.  Your journey to manifesting a better reality starts with living and doing your best where you are right now. And that starts with your attitude. Your attitude of gratitude for what you currently have, seeing it as a stepping stone on your journey, and making the best of your current situation.  It means giving it your full attention. This is when new opportunities start to present themselves. Most of my readers know I’m a huge advocate of daily meditation which can also improve your moods and mental states.

What you think, say, and do are the pivot points that can change your life and help you manifest a better reality. Those old ways of thinking, or talking about yourself or to yourself, or acting in self-destructive ways misaligned with the person you value, don’t serve you now.

Automatic thinkingdistorted figure through glass showing the power of thought when it is distorted thinking

Cognitive distortions (the basis of cognitive behavioral therapy) affect most of us. If you struggle with black and white thinking, jumping to negative conclusions, catastrophizing, perfectionism, labeling yourself negatively, and rejecting positive experiences, you can learn to become aware of those automatic and powerful patterns and change them as they happen.

One secret to happiness to set modest goals and accomplish them.

  • If you are a perfectionist (which is really fear-based) on how your goals are accomplished, or you procrastinate in going after them, you will increase your misery quotient.
  • It requires a mental strength to not give in to your habitual patterns. So, changing that pattern begins with self-respect.
  • The power of thought gets flipped when you start analyzing what you gain or lose by having a habitual thought. When you give up perfectionism and procrastination, or not acting on something where you don’t know the outcome in advance, you gain a chance to manifest a new reality.
  • If you want to change your inner critic, begin writing down what it says and when, and write a different thought. Practice telling that inner voice no or stop!

How does the power of thought work?red sign saying No indicating the power of thought when you can't say no

I work with a lot of women who find themselves doing more and more because they have difficulty saying “no” even when they’re asked to do something that isn’t in their best interest. Your hidden belief might be “I must always do what people ask me to do” because (1) it makes me feel needed, or (2) they won’t like me if I say “no”; or (3) I don’t have to worry about someone being upset with me; or (4) doing what people expect of me makes me feel in control.

But you don’t look at what you lose by doing that: (1) that you compromise your time to do something you really don’t want to do; (2) you never know if someone really just likes you for who you are; (3) you give others power over you in avoiding the threat of disappointment; and (4) you never have to figure out what you really want because you are always working to please others.

Changing this personal belief system requires that you write a new belief such as: “I enjoy when someone approves of me but I don’t need it to make choices that fit my own goals and enhance my self-respect.”

Join me on a journey of powerful thought recognition and creating a new reality

If you want to live 2018 differently, you need to start with changing your thoughts. Join me on a month-long daily thought-journey to help you identify what types of negative thoughts you are caught in, and begin a new path to manifesting a new reality for yourself. Sign up today!

 

Negative self-talk is a habit you can break

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Stop sign to end negative self-talk

Negative self-talk – stop the habit.

All of us are subject to negative self-talk in the form of an inner critic. And that inner critic can talk faster than we can externally: 1300 words to our 200 words. Some of our self-talk is about things outside us. For example, when we find our lost keys, we might say to ourselves, “There they are.” But another part of our inner dialogue is about ourselves. For example, when we can’t find the keys, we might say something like, “You idiot; you’re always losing things.”

Self-talk is a habitual way of responding to our experience and unfortunately, it often takes the form of an inner critic who is very negative and pessimistic. For example, if you feel like you’re not getting the contract, the promotion, or the new job, your inner voice might say something like, “You’ll never get anywhere. You don’t know what you’re doing. Every time you try something, you fail.”  Or, you assume someone else’s behavior or actions are about you and have a negative meaning. For example, if someone you know doesn’t greet you at the store, your inner voice asks, “Why did I do? They are rude.” Or, “they don’t like me. I just can’t win.”

Negative thoughts make you feel anxious, sad or hopeless. These feelings, in turn, make it difficult to act constructively. And preoccupation with your negative emotions may even intensify them and trigger more negative thinking.

How our negative self-talk triggers our behavior

There are three ways our negative self-talk manifest in behavior:

  1. Overgeneralization or Catastrophizing
    Drawing a broad conclusion based on a single incident or insufficient evidence.
  2. Jumping to Conclusions (Mind Reading)
    Assuming we know what others are thinking and feeling.
  3. Shoulds
    Using inflexible rules about how we or others should act. We feel guilty when we violate these rules.

Confronting negative self-talk patternsStepping stones through reeds over water

In order to confront our negative self-talk, we need to take some steps.

Creating Distance

We can start by creating a bit of distance from them in order to recognize when and where we are having them. This means some self-reflection is necessary, and it can be done through journaling about your day and noticing your most extreme moments that you notice. Pay special attention to when you are exhausted or feeling depressed about your day because the self-talk at those points is a clue to your habitual thoughts. In creating distance, you can ask yourself whether you’re seeing things in a balanced way of both positive and negative experiences in our lives.

Testing reality of the self-talk

The next step is to begin to test the reality of the thoughts. In order to test whether your automatic thoughts are valid, ask yourself what is the evidence for and against your thoughts. Try writing down the evidence, both pro and con, to help you gain some distance from your thoughts as you become curious about whether things are as bleak as you think. For example, if your thought is “Things are always a mess in my life” you might list on the pro side the times when things were going smoothly and successfully.

Seeing alternative options, or “coming back to reality”

If you worked through the first 2 steps, you will arrive at an alternative interpretation of your experience (if you refuted the thought) or a more balanced thought that summarizes the valid points for and against (if the evidence was mixed).

By being curious about our self-talk, rather than refuting or indulging it, we can learn to see our situation in an accurate, yet hopeful, manner, and move our habits of thought toward more realistic reality. From there we can begin to practice positive self-talk.

You have the power to change negative self-talk. Take a month-long journey to reprogramming your mind with tips delivered to you daily, and change your self-talk from negative to positive. Please sign up today and take back your mind.

Fresh start: It’s time to awaken to our potential to live authentically

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circular stairs highest potentialWe need a fresh start and conscious awakening. If you’re like me, your lives are flooded with information from every direction.  And we have become very good at selecting the information we choose to let in, to affect us, to learn from, to judge others and ourselves by, and to believe. We filter that information by choice on how it fits our beliefs, our experiences, our worldview, and our desires. Inevitably, we reject the information that doesn’t seem to directly fit. Thus, if we find ourselves reacting to the content of information and it makes us feel uncomfortable, or afraid, or helpless, we reject it, or get angry, or pretend we didn’t see it.

Dead or alive?dead or alive

As we are all connected on a deeper human level, we can’t pretend we didn’t consume it. Unfortunately, that information remains inside of us and shows up as an unconscious worry, doubt, anxiety and depression. Or, we experience feelings that bubble up related to that information, but don’t know why.  Most of all, we just want to stop feeling that way. We feel brittle, ghost-like. So, we try to ignore the feelings: we eat, drink, anaesthetize ourselves with medication, with shopping or trips, with mindless entertainment. Or it shows up as anger, lack of compassion, lack of focus. In ways that matter, we begin to deaden ourselves. It’s as if we will ourselves into stressful, reactionary, unhappy and frantic lives. As Sigmund Freud said, “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways.”  And as we suffer, so do our families, our colleagues, and our communities. When that happens, we become less than our true selves. We no longer are living our highest potential.

It’s time for a fresh start – to awaken

When you go through a conscious awakening, you undergo a period of intense change and revelation in your fresh start awakeninglife.

If every day is an awakening, you will never grow old. You will just keep growing. – Gail Sheehy

Conscious awakening doesn’t mean that you shut out the information, the news, the situations we face. So, it requires that we take a step back for a moment and find a breath of distance.  A breath of distance is when we stop and breathe and focus fully on what we are seeing, hearing, reading. Perhaps, we listen fully to the person who is speaking. Since the breath allows us to find clarity, we can make a choice on how we want to respond.  When we choose a breath of distance, we move past the urge to complain – complaining is a negative release of energy that disempowers us. Or it releases stress, anxiety, and anger.

Consciousness leads t0 intuitively and creatively taking action

Christof Koch, Chief Scientific Officer at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, tells us: “Consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe. Wherever there is integrated information, there is experience.” The more we move to being conscious, the more we understand ourselves and the world. A conscious awakening begins with a quiet moment as we go inside to question our beliefs and reactions. Here you find answers to your suffering and can make peace within moments of silence. Most importantly, this is where you will recognize your spirit, your purpose, and your ability to choose. What reflects your highest potential? As we begin to figure out whether we can change something and how, we can take conscious action. Or, sometimes we choose to surrender to the situation within ourselves. A fresh start might mean walking away in order to go within, or working with a coach on mindfulness.

All humans connect through consciousness. So, how we think, act, react, and believe ripples out from us into the world and affects others. Consequently, we have a responsibility to one another to respond to the world from a place of consciousness.

Today is a new day. Fresh start, begins now.awaken fresh start

Mindfulness benefits my business? I thought it was just for yoga.

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Pause for mindfulness benefits

How does mindfulness benefit my business?

Mindfulness benefits business but only if you use it. If you’re a start-up company, a freelancer, a small business, or a nonprofit, you are stressed – about money. Stressed thinking does not lead to good decisions, more sales, or improved relationships. It damages our health.  In our agitation, we often focus on small things we can control, rather than bold moves. We try to manage the details of what we are already doing rather than calmly analyzing what’s going well and what’s failing.  We are unable to come up with creative solutions.

And what is failure anyway? Failure is part of critical growth. Did you see a child give up walking after falling down?  Of course not. You see them learn to hold onto things, to take shorter walks, and to fall down but get up again. There are dozens of studies on how mindfulness practices can improve our stress levels, and our sleep. Stress can also have a huge impact on our creativity and decision-making.

Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.

– Winston Churchill

Creative paralysis is fear of failure

We procrastinate in making hard decisions, and holding the hard conversations we dread. It’s as if avoiding things will make it get better. Mindfulness benefits include converting our fear of failure to action. One of the most frequent sources of creative paralysis is fear of failure. It’s nonaction that keeps us stuck doing the same thing over and over with no improvement rather than risk ‘failure.’

So, back to mindfulness and what benefits it brings to my business.  Mindfulness does 4 important things for business leaders: it brings focus, clarity, creativity, and compassion (for yourself, and others) back into your field of awareness. I recently was working with a nonprofit executive. She was simply unable to see how her reluctance to create an earned revenue program was keeping her tied to fickle foundation funding. When we began to explore her beliefs around money using mindfulness, she began to let herself explore new opportunities. Mindfulness benefits for her were connecting again with skills in leadership that she could use in this new endeavor. And, happily she was able to gain foundation dollars to support the launch.

Mindfulness benefits: is it really as simple as breathing?

Breathing is where you begin to focus your attention. And the breathing that is part of mindfulness work is where you start to get some distance from the pressure of current issues. It’s where you start to tune into what your body is feeling, and the emotional surges that upset your day. Mindfulness is a practice which means you might try to do it every day, or even several times a day.  You do it because the practice bears fruit within days of keeping at it. You can read more about the steps to mindfulness here. Or find a more in-depth blog post by John Parrot called The Art of Mindfulness: Why it Matters to get a full look at the benefits of mindfulness.

beach mindfulness benefits

When you go to the beach, you breathe in the salt air, you feel the warm sun on your lips, and the wind across your shoulders. You notice the ocean, the sky, the sand as you gaze at the ocean waves coming in and out.  You often find you’re not thinking about much of anything. And, you can probably see mindfulness benefits easily in this scenario.

Now imagine having a moment like that in your day where instead of waves, you see those things you believe to be failures, or irritating people, or worrisome sales numbers also floating in and out with the breath.  Can you be a witness and observer and look at it on all sides? In a place of detachment, can you step back and let it just be without assigning pejoratives, and see what isn’t working?

Shifting beliefs

Mindful benefits your ability to face what scares you.  It is possible to see how your beliefs and thoughts can be transformed to ones of confidence, to courage, to a creative solution as we see how to shift our usual patterns by becoming more aware of them. And, your mind can become a bridge from the problem to the answer.

 

 

What does mindfulness have to do with success?

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multitasking is not mindful

Mindfulness is key to success – busyness is not

Today I talked with a small group of women entrepreneurs about the importance of mindfulness in their day. One of the women described her day. It includes running from phone call to a meeting to picking up kids. Followed by making dinner, answering emails to creating a presentation. Her day consists of checking off tasks and activities as she went as she juggles a burgeoning business and a young family. She shared that emotionally she feels drained and overwhelmed. And yet, every day she thinks she was being successful: “I am accomplishing a great deal and something useful seems to be getting done, and I am getting lots of positive press for my business.”

Is this how you measure success?

We spent some time in practicing some mindfulness pauses. She revealed that she was equating a busy schedule and positive reviews with a happy life. She began to notice that she was never fully present in any momenmindfulness begins the dayt or activity, already skipping ahead mentally to the next thing. “I’m simply going from meeting to activity on my daily schedule,” she said, “but I’m not really there.”  I’m driving my kids while thinking about my last meeting, and looking at a paper for my next conversation. I never have enough time to focus on the next innovation needed in my business. Then it’s time to put the kids to bed, and stay up till midnight responding to emails and preparing my presentation that’s in two days. I fall into bed at night just to wake up the next morning and start all over. I’m exhausted.”

By recognizing how much time we spend in a mental state known as continuous partial attention, we deprive ourselves of fully living. We feel anxious about more complex situations as we don’t take the time to give it our full attention. We seem to expect ourselves to multitask, efficiently answering emails while on a conference call. Sound familiar?

Ghosting, the opposite of mindfulness

I call this ‘ghosting,’ where one’s form appears to be solidly present but the life force inside is vapory and permeable, hovering around the edges of your life. And when you’re in this state of being, you lose touch. You no longer know what motivated you in the first place.  You don’t recognize the person you envisioned yourself to be as the lead in your own life. But now, there are others who depend on you.

So how can you choose differently?

This requires a change in your beliefs about success norms. As a culture, everyone tries to copy and reengineer what we observe as success with others we admire.  But that is often a focus on the past which had its own circumstances, rules, norms, and relationships. Comparing our lives, choices, relationships, successes to another can be a learning experience. But it can also be a slippery slope to devaluing the uniqueness of your own market, relationships, expertise and intuition.  In being focused, you allow your own creativity and relationships develop new choices that enrich your life and fit your goals.two paths - mindfulness or multitasking

So where does mindfulness fit in this?

When you bring your full attention into the present moment, you become alert. You hold an inner focus – a fuller consciousness of what responses you can choose to challenges that are being presented in this moment. Or, you may begin to hear the sounds around you, take note of the day and weather, or the aches in your body. As you pay attention to your breath, bringing your awareness more into your body, you release a bit of what has been so important just the moment before.  In that moment, a more fully conscious recognition of what is real and what is “drama” becomes possible. You begin to register what your arguments for and against the situation are as your values and beliefs arise. It may include an arising of your instincts or intuition, your “knowing” of what should happen next. You are able to listen more fully to your business partner. Or you find yourself enjoying your child’s recitation about the field trip experience today. In that moment, you can respond fully rather than react or push away these moments as distractions not on your checklist.

Mindfulness is a moment by moment practice

Creating a better future is dependent on the seeds you plant in the present moment. Planting seeds requires a full and complete acceptance of the present moment, one without judgement. Being present in this way helps you to have clarity about where to focus. And being nonjudgmental allows you to have compassion for yourself, and be more fully you in any moment. No more ghost, but rather a full present human. So here you are. Can you pause in your hurried, complicated, and entangled life to be present in this moment? You can begin by stopping and focusing on your breath. Where do you feel it in your body? In your nostrils? Can you just focus there for this moment now?

Mindfulness is the key to an enriching life and successful leadership.

If you need help learning how to use mindfulness to be more fully you, you can visit:  http://www.freemindfulness.org/download for free audio recordings.  Sometimes it’s helpful to work with a mindfulness coach – if that’s you, please reach out for a session at https://sarajanelowry.com/contact.html.  I work with individuals and leaders to bring mindfulness into their lives and work.

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