believing in yourself Archives

Self-awareness — how well do you know yourself?

January 22, 2018 by Sara Jane Lowry

Brown box with lid open stuffed with black and white photographs of relatives and a baby. Self-awareness begins with knowing your lifelong patterns Self-awareness is critical to success. How well do you know yourself?

Stay with me here.

We are talking about something much greater and of higher consequence. I am asking about who you are at your core, what most matters to you, what makes you come alive, what feeds your soul and what drains your spirit, and how to know the difference so you choose well as you give your best energy, and commitment to something.

If you are lacking a lot of self-awareness, you may still live a life somewhat in alignment with who you are but only by accident or sheer stroke of luck. And you may be living a life that doesn’t fit. What if you could be certain that you live in alignment with who you are not by accident or luck, but rather on purpose, by intention, by design.

How? By getting improving your self-awareness and getting to know yourself really well. One way to do that is to learn your values, passions, and goals. Another is to ask the right questions. (More about that later.)

In my coaching practice, I’ve been working with people how to create better lives for themselves which in turn changes their work, their relationships, and their happiness. They have grown their “self-awareness” quotient and:

gotten clarity on their life’s purpose

determined where they want to go in their career or business

boosted their incomes

deepened their relationships

connected with their gifts

Self-awareness and Mindset

I am so passionate about how we can create the right life for ourselves by first knowing who we are, and then creating the right mindset. So, your mind believes anything you tell it. Is it true? Let’s see.

What is it that you tell yourself all day long? You might be exceptional but most of us walk around saying relatively negative criticisms to ourselves or about ourselves.

Let’s say someone asks you whether you can run a marathon or you can give up dessert for a week. Usually, we hedge unless we’ve already done it. Sometimes the response is immediately I can’t. I can’t learn that or do that. Or you hear yourself saying “I can’t take this anymore” but don’t take action. That phrase “I can’t” is part of our everyday dialogue and that is your message to your mind.

So, how well do you know yourself?

Your mind says “ I can’t do that well, so we’re not going to even bother because I know I can’t do that”. You’ve already woven a story that your mind believes. As you repeat this over time it becomes a fact to you. It becomes the truth whereas it’s really just something you’ve been telling yourself.

Some of you know that I used to be an opera singer in my early career life. At that time, I had a personal transformation in my singing journey that I still to this day cannot believe I am able to do because the story I had been telling myself was so powerful.

Singing the role of the Noemie, Stepsister of Cinderella in Massenet's Cendrillon, with my foot on the stool holding the glass sliipper — Singing Noemie in Massenet’s Cendrillon

I remember a voice teacher telling me that I would have to be able to sing notes higher than a high “C” (think Pavarotti’s high notes) if I wanted it to be a good one in performance. Of course, when my voice was younger, that wasn’t too much of a problem. But as my voice and body matured, my voice was no longer light but instead had a richer, darker middle and lower note capacity which added “weight” to the sound. And it’s hard to take that weight up high.

Now, of course, I know that my body can do this but the first time it happened I had to convince my mind that I was capable of doing this. In reality, my body was already there. My teacher said your body has no limitations on doing this at this point in your singing journey but my mind had been keeping me from doing so because I have been telling myself the same story of “I can’t.” I was trying to sing it but my mind didn’t think I could do it. My mind wasn’t ready to change the outcome.

Knowing yourself and what the mind believes

So what is it that you’re telling yourself all day long that you cannot do, that you don’t know how to do, or what to do, or whatever other negative phrases that you’re using? How well do you know yourself?

Remember: your mind listens and believes you and then uses that as a fact to run your life in a misguided effort to protect you.

You can send it a different message.

You can choose to believe in a different story: a story of being a confident person who CAN make changes and choose differently, and seeing that there is a deeper truth than you’re believing about yourself.

Change your mind on how you see yourself and see how that will integrate into so many better results in your life. Start to question those beliefs. Get to really know yourself.

The opportunity has never been greater to… Neon sign saying Do Something Great which is possible when you have self-awareness

Show up as the people we have grown into becoming

Sustain thriving relationships

Discover and follow our highest calling

Create prosperous careers aligned with our values

Experience radiant health and vitality

Live in ways that are spiritually connected

Ignite and empower others to step forward into their greatness

Be catalysts and change agents shaping the future of our world

Happiness is when we have clarity of purpose, our work and relationships are meaningful, we have health and vitality, we feel connected to the Universe – in other words, we are in alignment.

If you take this journey, you will realize that: you are a unique human of this world. Are you brilliant, wise, and generous? Perhaps you are perceptive and fascinating. Know this: you are gifted and talented beyond your knowing. You are beyond capable to do what you dream. It starts with getting to know yourself and changing your mind.

Negative self-talk is a habit you can break

November 2, 2017 by Sara Jane Lowry

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:

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

Confronting negative self-talk patterns

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.

Coaching can promote your career to the next level

May 8, 2017 by Sara Jane Lowry

Getting to the next level through coaching

Think coaching is only for senior leadership? You appear to have missed one of the biggest ways leaders improve their skills and performance. Working with a coach may help push you up the ranks too.

When you move up the ranks, you will be having a different level of conversation from what you’re having now. You will be expected to think and make decisions about subjects not in your own expertise or skill sets, and you will be expected to lead people whose job you couldn’t necessarily do yourself. You’re now in a team or group of leaders that help transform the company or nonprofit and are no longer just fullfilling your own function area. Sometimes you will need to deliver difficult messages, and navigating the politics at this level requires new skills.

Working with a coach focused on you

Working with a coach provides a safe and confidential place to share your challenges with someone who is qualified to help you. A good coach helps you to find your own path as well as decide on your management style, all in a Coaching focused on you supportive environment without judgement. Coaching is non-judgmental listening – helping people to think through the decisions they are in. People often have artificial obstacles in their mind. Coaching can help people reframe issues, so they can resolve those problems.

Recently I worked with an executive director who came in as president of a large nonprofit. She was struggling to work out how to work with flat organizational chart, especially given that funding was in peril for an important division. So, instead of working with the chart as it currently stood, we instead wrote the chart as would be serve the highest potential of the organization. We went from 12 direct reports to 4, one of which was a position that did not exist previously. She then began to rewrite titles and responsibilities, and determine who best fit those roles. The obstacle was thinking she needed to work with the current situation, rather than transforming it.

Building your interpersonal style through coaching

Most leaders must rely on their influencing skills to win people over in getting them passionate about the next strategy, or to discuss new ideas, and coaching to perfect your interpersonal style can be very useful. It’s particularly important for developing relationships with investors, donors, and partners. It allows you to think about how you are going to take others with with you when they don’t always trust the message or strategy.

Like seeing a therapist, the relationship between coach and client is confidential. The coach helps the client outline the goals they set to become a leader, and discussing the ROI they want to deliver in terms of impact.

Are you the next leader?

With increasing focus on having a more diverse leadership team and companies are looking into talent pools that they may have previously dismissed. Nonprofit executives are retiring, and boards often think they need to go outside the organization for the next leader. Instead, companies and nonprofit benefit when get people ready for leadership roles. And coaching can help develop people who may have all the firepower, but not all the leadership skills or experience.

Coaching helps leaders to self-reflect. To be really effective, they have to know who they are and what their motivation is. This is a skill that any person can use in lifting their career path. When we’re connected to our strengths, we find the fire we need to lead.

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

May 8, 2017 by Sara Jane Lowry

circular stairs highest potential We 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?

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 awakening life.

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

What does mindfulness have to do with success?

April 30, 2017 by Sara Jane Lowry

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 momen mindfulness begins the day t 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.