When I was in my early twenties, I worked in a residential treatment facility for children living with HIV/AIDS. One day during a staff meeting, the clinical director, who oversees the social work done with the children, spoke to us about helping the kids make better choices. She said, “I know you want to help these kids, but you must understand this: You cannot shame or belittle people into changing their behaviors.” She went on to explain that, regardless of our intentions, we can’t force people to make positive changes by putting them down, threatening them with rejection, humiliating them in front of others or belittling them. From the moment the words were spoken, I was absolutely overwhelmed by this idea. For weeks, I thought of little else. Yet, no matter how long and hard I thought about it or how many times I repeated the statement out loud, I couldn’t get my head around it. There were minutes when I thought it was, at best, wishful thinking, and then there were brief seconds when I believed it was the truest thing I had ever heard. But, despite my confusion, I recognized that there was something incredibly important about understanding how to influence people to change. As it turned out, I spent the next decade of my life researching growth, healing and its impact on our lives.
I have since learnt that ,mastering the art of change and healing is about introspection and cultivating a good relationship with yourself. It’s about becoming the person you were meant to be, treating yourself well, and shedding the old beliefs and behaviors that limit your ability to live a healthy, happy, satisfying life.
When we are born, we are whole, integrated human beings filled with tremendous potential. We feel good about ourselves and are able to experience and express the full range of human emotions. As we grow up, we adapt to the peculiarities—and even pathologies—of our own families by adopting patterns of thought and behavior, some of which erode our innate wholeness. We carry these patterns into adulthood, and they shape our lives, our feelings about ourselves, and our relationships with others.
Changing and healing is about reclaiming your innate wholeness by unlearning your unhealthy coping mechanism and limiting beliefs, among other things. It’s a gradual, step-by-step process that involves understanding where your self-defeating patterns come from and how to move beyond them. That means uncovering and retrieving your authentic self—the person you really are beneath the layers of your life conditioning—and living in a conscious and deliberate way so you can achieve the results that you want from life and feel complete and happy.
I first developed the 12-week coaching program to allow people ample time to go through this healing and transformation process while receiving ongoing support. When I discovered that a lot of people found it difficult to take time out of their busy schedules to commit to healing and shadow work on their own, the 90minutes weekly one-on-one sessions in my coaching program became the perfect solution.
This work has become particularly gratifying, because not only am I able to give people the tools they need to begin to make changes in their lives, but as they each go off and use these tools, I can actually witness the dramatic transformations they experience in their own lives from week to week. It’s exciting to watch, and just as exciting to experience.
This blog also gives you the same tools I use in my private coaching practice and wellness journals, all of which are designed to help you change and transform your life.
My interest in the field of personal development began a couple of years ago when I mistakenly thought I was the only one struggling with firstborn daughter syndrome among a plethora of other things. The threat of falling victim to my trauma and childhood conditioning, combined with a growing interest in holistic healing, laid the foundation for my later education in the field. In the years that followed, I underwent training as a life coach. Inspired by the mental health advocates on social media, I created my own website and begun sharing the lessons I was learning on the journey of healing me. I researched on the effects of birth order, recovery from childhood trauma, family dysfunction, completed psychotherapeutic counseling , and mastered mind-body modalities such as emotional regulation, effective communications, shadow work, emotional release, and journal therapy.
The catalyst of this learning and empowerment was my own struggle with anxiety, depression and the firstborn daughter syndrome in the wake of a devastating job market and even worse economy. That, in turn, led me to begin the personal-development work that helped me transform my life. I had to dig deep into my past to understand my family of origin and the roots of my own dysfunction. Through that process, I came to understand the crucial connection between our life conditioning, the self-defeating patterns that diminish the quality of our lives, and the steps we can take to change those limiting patterns.
I have developed what I believe is a unique method for helping others uncover their authentic selves and reclaim their innate wholeness so they can live a fuller, richer lives. My hope, in writing this blog every week, is to give you the road map to achieving that life—a road map that I, like most people, never had.
Now, a few notes before I finish. Healing is a process. As its name suggests, this is not something that happens overnight. You can’t just snap your fingers and make it happen. Here are the three fundamental keys, the must-haves for mastering this art: focus, strategy, and commitment.
First, you need a focus. Healing is about living in alignment with your authentic self— who you were meant to be. That’s your focus. Finding your focus is central to this entire process. In my thoughtfully designed wellness journals, I give you the tools you need to introspect, discover self and clarify the life you want, as well as to identify and understand what areas of your life you need and want to focus on. Ultimately, you’ll be aligning everything you do—your thoughts, your behaviors, and your actions—in a conscious and deliberate manner to create that life.
Second, you need a strategy. Again, in the wellness journals and the 12-week coaching program is your road map. They are thoughtfully designed designed to enable you to develop a specific strategy of your own to get where you want to go, a step-by- step action plan that meets your individual needs. It includes a series of exercises that will help you understand who you are—under all those layers of conditioning—and where you want to go. You will be exploring your own family of origin to identify the specific thought and behavior patterns that are holding you back from achieving your full potential and the specific steps you need to take to change those deeply ingrained patterns. In addition, in the 12-week coaching program, I will provide you with guidance on developing a set of skills that are essential for achieving mastery over your own life and improving your relationship with yourself—and with others.
Finally, this process requires a commitment. It involves creating an ideal relationship with yourself. To be fully committed to this process, you have to feel deserving of it and you have to love yourself. After all, you are not going to feel compelled to invest your time, energy and money in somebody you don’t like very much. That’s a central theme of the wellness journals and wellness program: providing the guidance you need to build a healthy, constructive, and loving relationship with yourself.
As you take the first steps toward healing, recognize that you will slip up. Imagine how a typical smoker quits smoking. She throws away that first pack of cigarettes. Then she might weaken and buy another pack, then just smoke a few cigarettes, then give it up for another few days or weeks, then start up again. And then, one day, she’s just done with it. She’s tried to quit, and finally she just stops. That back-and-forth is part of the process. Like quitting smoking, healing is about changing your habitual patterns of behavior.
As you begin the process, it’s important to be supportive and gentle with yourself. When you slip up, think of it as simply getting more information about what doesn’t work for you. Making a commitment to healing and self-discovery means accepting the fact that you will slip up; treating yourself with love and compassion when you do, and then moving forward. That’s the commitment I hope you will make to yourself in 2024.
Good luck and Godspeed.
Thank you so much for this article. I resonated with it.