Written by: Angela Ward BA(Hons), MSc, MGHT, MGLT, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
There comes a time when you are going to find yourself stuck. When you are at this point, it feels like you have run out of answers and run out of ideas.
Then the voice of pragmatism kicks in. You know that one that has a hundred reasons why you shouldn’t or couldn’t do something that would take you out of the stuckness and help to move you forward?
Generally, that voice of pragmatism is underpinned by doubt and fear and will be the loudest voice you hear. As you hear it, it seems reasonable, to listen and take note. The problem arises when this voice of pragmatism becomes the overriding factor between staying put and stepping forward. It becomes the overriding factor between being happy and just being.
The following points will help you remove your blocks. But before you read on though, you must accept that it’s YOUR responsibility to make YOU happy – no-one is coming to save you. You are your own hero.
1. What does your life look like right now?
If you take away all the things that you cannot control, what are you left with?
Your physical health
Your mental health
Your financial security, and
Your environment.
These 4 things are the only aspect that you can truly have control over.
So, it's time to really cut through your own BS and face the truth. It’s also time to let go of controlling everything because you can't. It is an impossible task, and it will have you going around in never ending circles, making your thoughts, and planning scattered. Your emotions will create your reality, if you let them govern your thoughts.
When you take this approach with an honest lens, you will be able to start seeing things more logically.
You need to draw a line in the sand. You need an anchor, a stake.
This is your starting point. The here and now.
What does it look like for you? Make a note of what’s working, and what’s not working. Right down how you feel about it all and what you perceive to be the problem?
When you look at your life what do you really see?
Are you living your life to please other people?
Are you looking for perfection to the extent that you never just relax and be happy?
Most of what we do and most of our behaviours are learned.
We are conditioned to think, to feel, to look and to behave in a particular way. It's how we learn and grow initially. But for a lot of people, we never develop a true sense of self.
Our hopes and fears are also predetermined by the learned behaviours which can also have a knack of limiting us from achieving our dreams and aspirations.
Society's rules tend to dictate whether you are successful or not, whether you are accepted or not. As human beings, we have this innate need to belong and we find ourselves searching for a place in the world, even if it’s to the detriment to our health. Chasing outside validation becomes part of the everyday.
What we forget to remember is that our life is ours. We have the controls in the driving seat. Yet so many of us give that control away.
If there’s one thing you take from this process, remember this: We are not given a good life or a bad life. We are given a life. It’s up to us to make it good or bad.
2. Where do you want to be?
You now know where you are right now. The next step is where do you want to be? Whenever I am using these processes, I’m always looking for balance, the equilibrium that maintains a happy state for me.
Happiness is not something you can search for. Happiness is something that you choose to be.
It doesn’t matter how many riches you have, properties you own, cars you have, they are all things that bring pleasure. Pleasure and happiness are 2 different things.
Pleasure, according to the oxford dictionary is a feeling of happy satisfaction and enjoyment. This is a temporary feeling. Once you’ve bought the shoes, the car, the new designer label, or drank the expensive champagne, you return to your reality. The pleasure is short lived.
Happiness is a state of well-being and contentment, whether you have those things or not.
Happiness then is about how to feel when you are in alignment and with happiness comes balance.
Balance is something you hear people band about in conversation. But getting a balance in your life is truly a skill.
Achieving balance comes from being connected to who you are, setting boundaries, having enough of the things you need in your life that bring you into that state of happiness. It also means that you must trust in your own conscious awareness and ability to bring you back on track quickly when you go off piste.
We all need a compass to calibrate to. Your balance will be solely dependent on how you want to live your life.
Ok, so you’ve drawn a line in the sand by accepting your life right now. That was step 1. This line isn’t your compass, because you are stuck there, you are unhappy there.
You need to find your compass, and that’s what this step does.
Step 1 allowed you to assess and let go of what you cannot control. Now you get to take ownership for the rest. This is the exciting bit.
Now review what you wrote about your current life in step 1. Next to it, write down where you want to be.
Be as creative as you like at this stage.
Your physical health
Your mental health
Your financial security, and
Your environment.
Everything you need is right here, right now. So don’t hold back. How do you really want to live your life?
You always have a choice. Always.
‘One day your heart will stop beating and none of your fears will matter. What will matter is how you lived’. - Henri Juntilla
3. What is blocking you?
Every single one of us at one point in our life will have our heart broken, will lose a friend, a family member, be disappointed, feel betrayed and hurt by someone else’s actions. For some reason we hold onto the resentment we feel, and we store that in our bodies, like a trophy that somehow, we are proud of.
We drop accountability as we blame other people, we become judgemental, we start to not feel good enough, not feel pretty enough, not skinny enough, not loved enough, not clever enough.
Our emotions take over our reality. The more we hold onto all of this, the more it clouds our judgement and logical thinking.
The good news is you can change that. You can choose to behave differently, think differently, act differently.
You can change your reality.
Look at your answers to step 2. Ask yourself, WHAT is stopping you from having the life that you want to live?
This question isn’t about WHO is stopping you because the truth is, that will always be YOU. You have the control. We have already established that.
Self-expression is like your business card.
How well do you articulate your own brand? Are you showing up in the world as a person who is full of pain, regret, resentment, and judgement or are you showing up in the world as the identity of the person you want to be.?
Make a note of everything that comes up. These will highlight your sabotaging patterns. These are your blocks.
4. What you must do to create what you desire.
I was asked this question the other day.
What are the problems that people must overcome on their spiritual path?
A brilliant question and one that could take you down the rabbit hole.
On careful thought and analysis of the clients I have worked with over the years, I came up with what I believe to be the 2 most fundamental ones.
Acceptance and forgiveness.
Acceptance.
When I talk about acceptance it covers many aspects. Acceptance of where you are now, acceptance of what has happened, acceptance of the part YOU played in the outcome/experience and acceptance that other people may not see things the way you do.
Until you have acceptance, you cannot move on.
Acceptance brings awareness of the truth. Your truth. Once you have awareness, you can take the necessary steps.
Forgiveness
Forgiveness is a very powerful emotional tool, but forgiving others isn't enough. It also isn’t easy.
To be brutally honest, other people don’t really care if you forgive them or not. They are too busy getting on with life. They more than likely don’t even think that they’ve done anything wrong, that there is an issue, because it’s you that has the problem.
You are the one that’s hurting, even if it’s them that caused you to feel pain.
When you’ve forgiven others for their actions, don’t expect a parade of celebration from the people that you’ve forgiven. They don’t care AND they don’t even need to know. The only one that needs to know is you.
It’s your progress, it’s your release.
Have a self-celebration. Enjoy the feeling the release gives you.
Your next step is to reserve your energy, put your boundaries in place and work on forgiving yourself. This will also include keeping a distance from the people that you’ve forgiven, because 9 times out of 10, they will repeat the very behaviour or action again, sending you into a wounding cycle.
This might sound a bit absurd, but all of those many NOT GOOD ENOUGHs you’ve told yourself have had a very detrimental effect on your physical and mental wellbeing. It’s limited you from being who you truly are because you have harshly judged yourself.
I should have seen it coming!
Why didn't I see the signs?
Am I that unworthy?
Poor me!
Why did I go back?
I should’ve left
I’m such an idiot!
To forgive yourself means that you can start to practice love and appreciation for yourself.
Gratitude must become your attitude.
This enables you to step into BEING aligned to the life that you want to live. If you recall at the beginning of this article, I explained how your emotions create your reality. If you keep telling yourself you are not good enough, or your life is bad, that’s the reality you will create.
The more we have gratitude and appreciation for ourselves and what we have now, how far we’ve come, what we have already accomplished, we start to get excited about opportunities rather than disheartened by negative outlooks.
Our reality changes as we change the emotions we are tapping into.
We MUST shed our feelings of embarrassment, shame, guilt and hurt about the past. It has no place in our future.
However, when you practice gratitude and forgiveness, all those things that you felt bad about become your superpower.
As you overcome these feelings from past experiences, accept what is, it has no hold on you. You set yourself free from the limitations it sets.
There is a host of research on the benefits of gratitude. The findings from the research include things such as:
Better sleep
Better immunity
Higher self-esteem
Decreased stress
Lower blood pressure
Less anxiety and depression
Stronger relationships
Higher levels of optimism
In essence then, we cannot just forgive others (letting go of the anger and resentment) without also forgiving ourselves. (Letting go of fear, doubts, not good enough, blame and judgement).
The hardest part is accepting that we punish ourselves because of what someone else did or said. And that is the truth of it.
Focus on your intention – Goal setting
You must focus on your intention not your pain, not the emotions. The role emotions play is to alert you that something doesn’t feel right. They alert you so you do something about it.
The decision you make will have a different outcome if you make it whilst you are in the height of the emotion. If you accept the emotion, accept it is letting you know that something isn’t right, you can then detach it and make a decision/choice from a place of logic.
Your intention must not be dependent on anything else. It must be because you want it.
To find your true intention listen to what your heart is telling you.
When you think about an intention what comes up?
Are you feeling happy that someone else will be pleased if you achieve this?
If that comes up, then this is not your true intention.
This is the time when you must be honest with yourself.
This is about your intention, not your wounding. If doubts arise, these will be your sabotaging patterns and the healing work that you will also need to undertake as part of this process. And that’s exactly what it is, a process. And you can do both, bring the awareness, heal the wounds and make the intentions.
When you focus on the intention and not the pain of the disappointment you will see things differently.
You might discover that what you really need is to embark on a new enterprise or project or a new career direction. You may have to learn a new skill to help you or get the support you need to help you see with a wider lens.
Whatever lifestyle you choose to live, you will need to be able to fund that.
This is your opportunity to get very clear on everything. You are creating a lifestyle. This isn’t about the acquisition of THINGS that bring short lived pleasure.
What’s great about this process is that it can help you any time you get stuck. As we grow, our needs change, our fulfilment requirements change, our goals change, and our happiness barometer changes, life also changes us.
Putting your desires into plans is a basic tool to help you realise your ambitions.
Be prepared to review your intentions every so often. When something isn’t working review the plan of action, change the plan so that it moves you closer to where you want to be.
Take the time to listen, observe, and record your findings.
Actions speak louder than words
You’ve heard the saying right? There are many ways to act, some will get you closer to a life you want to live, some will take you away from it and keep you stuck in the present.
Making excuses is action.
This type of action will just keep you stuck. It gives you a hypothetical ‘get out of jail card’ a way out of showing up in the world as the person you want to be because you fear success and or failure.
Not taking time because you are too busy, is also action. You will need to review what you are doing that is making you so busy. Is this busyness taking you away from your goals? What can you stop doing to free up some time?
A necessary action is to have clear plans in place, clear objectives, and a clear vision of what lifestyle you want to live. These will be the indicators you need to measure your success.
How you get there will be dependent on the principles you hold.
A couple of things to note that
There is nothing wrong with ambition. It's healthy to want to improve the way you live and how you live. It is not selfish to want a better quality of life or to improve your standards of living. It is not selfish to put you first either.
In the scheme of things, we are on this planet for short time. Living your life starts right now with every breath you take. There is only one destination for all of us. Let’s enjoy the journey and manifest a life you love, by taking the right type of aligned action and remembering that balance is key.
Imperfect action is better that procrastination because procrastination is the thief of dreams.
My name is Angela Ward, and I am the Authentic Happiness Coach, and Founder of the 5 Elements of Authentic Happiness programme. If you are seeking support and that safe space to help you reset and focus, drop me an email, it would be my absolute pleasure to help you find your authentic happiness.
Angela Ward BA(Hons), MSc, MGHT, MGLT, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Angela Ward, is a leader in spiritual coaching, spiritual development, and personal growth. Her own spiritual journey started back in 2005, after the death of her mother when the message became loud and clear. 'Being true to yourself is the only priority – the rest will follow. In 2012 she set up a consultancy company; a hybrid of management consultancy and spiritual coaching. The aim: is to help people connect with their spiritual self, to find balance, harmony, and resilience, so they too can have authentic happiness. She runs retreats, coaching programmes, and workshops. She is the founder and CEO of the Holistic Therapy, Wellness, and Training Centre. Her mission is to light up the world, one person at a time.
