Written by: Heather Madden, 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.
‘It’s a bittersweet symphony, that’s life.’ The opening lyric of a great song by The Verve takes us all the way back to 1997: another era and several lifetimes ago. If like me, you are Generation X, it is likely you were rocking along on a life adventure envisioned through endless choice and opportunity. In my case, this song harks back to arriving in London from Brisbane, enthralled by its incredibleness and abundance of good times.
Equally, Bittersweet Symphony is an instant sonnet for sorrow and simply illustrates the light and dark of existence. When you want to break through the wall of your mindset transformation emotional connection are your next pathway, and the emotion of sorrow is central. Sorrow will guide you to ever-strengthening belief and resilience through the wisdom of hindsight, nuanced lessons, and the ability to actively change as a result.
The poignancy of sorrow is palpable. It is a primary learning emotion from the pain that leads to multiple gains and enables a constant path towards mental elevation. By acknowledging its presence and role in your life, sorrow consistently shows the way to definitive understanding and confident choices: it is ground zero of humility and vision. Acknowledging sorrow is a pat on the back for how far you have come, making way for way for light after setback: a grateful pause in the kaleidoscopic reality of our modern world.
A world in which right and wrong co-exist and challenges us to find a way through our vulnerabilities to turn fear and ‘what’ if?’ into intentional action despite overwhelming. As the homage to sorrow strengthens, your limitless mind transitions from a reliance on linear problem-solving into a confident flow of choice, able to work through the many moving parts of change. Change in all its forms, externally driven and within the pattern of your life bubbles, is the norm and non-negotiable currency of the future.
As the years since the late nineties have passed, change has sped up year after year into its current hurtle. The displacement from the traditional narrative is jarring and challenges the high-performance mindset to set hard boundaries for time, psychological safety, and stress management as part of a total commitment to belief and creating life on your terms. Breaking through the Groundhog Day of mindset transformation necessitates learning from within; taking thoughts and moments from the daily connection into consistent emotional homework, a reset where you recognize the impact of dominant feelings and allow the lesson to be revealed.
Lessons such as values misalignment and action, forgiveness and choice, vivid exploration of emotional narrative, and comfort. These are empowering methods of personal development that ensure a quiet base for leadership and strength. Sorrow, particularly, challenges us to live in the swing of life with an eye on the light we have fought hard for, enabling constant evolution and lifelong learning.
High-performance, limitless mindsets should aim to work with emotions as part of a daily ritual acknowledging their presence and impact on your life. Sorrow is a balancing emotion that makes way for elevation through despair and provides a guiding presence in the way you navigate resets.
These are some of the major mindset benefits:
1. You will recognize positive thinking and joy in living. “But Heather, what about positive emotions?” A good question in the discussion of emotional homework, where there is a tendency to focus on the negative fully understandable given the struggles we are witnessing each day. Many find it challenging to transition from overwhelm and stress into a choice for positive belief. Sorrow provides such a gateway, it pushes us into the bigger picture, accepting that life is not perfect and nor should we expect it to be.
2. Release guilt, anxiety, shame, and the victim mindset of setbacks. Hard times hold crucial lessons about values, truth, and hope. The opportunity is to acknowledge your lesson in the process of letting go, noting clearly that we let go over and over: the reality is that you may need to accept a lesson several times before its impact on your mindset fades.
3. Plan: you will realize what matters and how to shape your next choice. In this era of perpetual change, change is the name of the game how you approach it, how you evolve with unforeseen changes, and how you manage the inherent stress. By focusing on sorrow, you reset at ground zero to hear values talking and can refine choices as a result. Values are the safety of your calm and peaceful mental frame, very often they call for a certain change at a certain time as part of an ongoing, incremental approach to personal transformation. Make time for sorrow to whittle down issues into the one that is most significant in that moment of time.
4. Live in the zone of love, compassion, gratitude, and kindness. What shines through sorrow are the moments of connection and happiness that make us feel seen and heard. Gratitude is about a deep understanding of your unique gifts and talents, and it is by living in direct connection with love and kindness that we realize our sense of belonging and these basic human needs in all elements of life.
5. Rise to grace: the ultimate form of strength and resilience. The ego-less form of leadership and resilience grace is the embodiment of all that is purely limitless. Grace is a vision to see what needs to be seen and to practice a form of internal growth and development that rises above the limitations of life’s setbacks. Do your emotional homework every day and keep learning through patterns of emotional narrative to step into a place of belief that is settling and instant.
The emotional lesson of sorrow and the resilience it provides is acceptance of change, such that change becomes the flow of narrative and connection. By opening our minds to the personal lessons across life’s challenging times, we strip away the fear of judgment or failure and expand our abilities in human connection and emotional engagement, the levers for values-based change. Sorrow allows you to acknowledge what has been and focus on the future with authenticity and belief.
Live Life Limitless
Heather Madden
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Heather Madden, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Heather Madden is a leader in mindset transformation and personal development. By challenging coping modalities and building a lifelong commitment to managing stress, Heather helps others to break through barriers and achieve limitless life transformation, emotional core wellness, and values alignment. Heather founded the Live Life Limitless movement following her self-managed recovery from burnout and breakdown, triggered as a result of stress addiction, over-functioning, and multiple health setbacks including chronic, sight-threatening eye disease and life-changing preventative surgeries following diagnosis of the BRCA1 genetic mutation. She hosts "The Interrupt Series: Stress, Overwhelm and Emotional Wellbeing", Interrupt Stress for Life live events, and regular Limitless Leaders and Live Life Limitless meetups. Her mission: Live Life Limitless: Choose, be positive, make the choice. Mental Health is Number One.
