Category: Self worth

What is self- worth?
The dictionary defines self-worth as “the sense of one’s own value or worth as a person.”

Self-worth is the most critical component of our ability to truly believe in ourselves and live our life aligned with our best qualities. Without a healthy sense of self- worth, doubts and fears can overwhelm our true potential, greatly impacting the quality of our life experience, as well as sabotaging our life’s dreams, vision and purpose.

Although some of us may not be consciously aware that what is keeping us up at night is a sense of self-worth that needs improvement, I am here to tell you that if you and I can focus on one issue with the highest return on your investment, it is self-worth.

The story of how we develop or do not develop self- worth can be a long and painful one.

Join me as I make every effort to organize where your story of self-worth begins, and how we can make the ending the happiest one possible!

Why Using Our Fight or Flight Response Less Should Be Our #1 New Year’s Resolution

We seem to constantly be ready to fight, flee, or freeze.

This can happen whenever someone cuts us off on the freeway; our boss gives us “constructive” feedback; a client wants to cancel his or her contract with us; or a significant other has a different opinion from us about something.

The unfortunate aspect of how quickly we choose the path of fighting, fleeing, or freezing is that it does not lead us to optimal outcomes in any area of our life, (unless we are being chased by a wild animal in a forest) and it negatively impacts our health as well.

I vote for minimizing the unnecessary engagement of our fight or flight response as a high priority for a New Year’s resolution.

Here is why:

  1. Would you prefer an executive CEO or a child with no experience to run your nervous system? The two major parts of our brain that engage our fight or flight response are our amygdala and our cortex. The amygdala, which perceives sensory input in eight milliseconds and holds unconscious memories (implicit memories), is like a kid that we cannot reason with. Our cortex is the executive CEO of our brain that holds great data that we are conscious of (explicit memories) from which we can make logical decisions and assessments. It takes forty milliseconds for sensory input to reach our cortex. When our fight or flight response is activated, our cortex shuts down. We no longer have access to all the precious reasoning and problem-solving resources we have collected throughout our life. We are temporarily impaired!

 

  1. Would you prefer to be a prisoner of the past or a master of the present? When we elicit our fight or flight response (except when we are facing a true threat, like a mountain lion chasing us), what happens is that a current situation, as perceived by our five senses, triggers a negative memory from the past. The trigger can be the tone of someone’s voice, the smell of another’s perfume, or a specific word that touches a “raw spot” of a negative memory of a situation that we fight with all our might to not experience again. Sue Johnson, in her best-selling book Hold Me Tight, tells us how different emotions lead us to take different actions to avoid negative feelings. “Anger tells us to approach and fight; shame tells us to withdraw and flee; fear tells us to flee or freeze; sadness primes us to grieve and let go.” If something that hurt us is in the past, why are we still carrying it along with us?

 

  1. Stress can really kill us. Being in the reactive mode of our fight or flight response means we are temporarily off-kilter. In the moment, this imbalance means that our heart is beating a lot faster than what is normal, our blood pressure is way higher than what it should be, and many essential functions are not happening, as they should. This is why we usually get sick during times of high stress in our lives. Our energy is not being used to fuel the optimal performance of our immune system. It has been hi-jacked to fight the client that no longer wants to do business with us! Long-term, the larger the sum of the things our body has to do to reinstate internal balance (our allostatic load), the higher the risk of organ and functional damage. We have learned so much over the span of several decades about the devastating impact of long-term exposure to chronic stress. For example, we know that our pre-frontal cortex and our hippocampus shrink under prolonged stress. These two critical structures are involved with mediation of rewards, motivation, problem-solving, learning, and many other executive functions. Can you imagine trying to run a profitable business without the executive CEO? Stress has been described as the epidemic of the century by WHO (World Health Organization). Stress is the true threat to our health, productivity, happiness, and performance. The good news is that changing our relationship with stress to mitigate negative events is completely within our control!

The Solution

Put yourself in control!

When you feel any signs of your stress response being activated, like an uncomfortable sense of your heart rate increasing, work with your prefrontal cortex to change your interpretation of what is happening.

Science has confirmed our brain’s ability to change based on experience. This is known as (Neuroplasticity).

The more we practice altering our brain’s interpretation of reality and the more stress-resistant thoughts we choose, the stronger these mental activities become and we grow the parts of our brain that make us more resistant to stress!

Every new year, we make a new commitment to take better care of ourselves, improve our health, and be happier at work and at home.

I suggest that we learn to care about ourselves enough to protect us from the corrosion of anger and to monitor the quality of the energy we hold in our heart toward people and situations in our life. Instead of fighting, I propose handling life’s endless stressful situations with love and compassion from an internal state of calmness.

Choosing not to fight or flee and approaching life from a calm inner state and a balanced nervous system is the one new year’s resolution that can not only create a palpable difference in our individual experience, but also create a better world for all of us to reside in. And we can do this one perception, one breath, and one person at a time.

If you could use a personal helping hand to teach your brain new tricks for a healthier, happier reality, I am here for you. http://bit.ly/contacttzeli

If you prefer to be your own scientist, you can join my online community and receive a free, one-page resource that you can use to practice working with your thinking brain toward improvements in your health, relationships, and work performance. http://bit.ly/JoinMyndZen

Three Things I Am Letting Go of as I Say Good-bye to This Year.

Life is such a delicate balance between holding on and letting go, as Rumi once said.

Do you struggle with knowing what to hold onto and what to let go of?

More often than not, we tend to hold onto people, possessions, and habits that are draining away our energy.

The delightful Ms. Carolyn Myss, world-renowned medical intuitive and best-selling author of a number of books including, Anatomy of the Spirit, said it best: “We only have a specific amount of energy per day. If we have $100 worth of energy and we expend it all on things that do not return on our investment then we end up with an energetic debt. If we keep making this debt larger, eventually our own body tissues will have to cover the difference. This is how we end up getting sick.”

I have done a pretty good job throughout my life with balancing my bank account between deposits and withdrawals. But I have not been as good with energy deposits and withdrawals, so I did get sick.

As I have been building the bridge back to my healthy self, which was the genesis of Myndzen, I discovered that choosing to let go of some beliefs and attitudes that I held did wonders for my physical and emotional health. Over the course of my journey, I have experienced such beautiful warmth and joy from letting go of perfectionism, taking things personally, comparisons, the need for others’ approval, and other beliefs and actions that were eating away at my happiness and well-being.

However, there were three behaviors that have been very difficult for me to let go of because they camouflaged themselves in altruistic costumes. Not until this year did I realize their truly toxic nature.

As we are preparing to say good-bye to yet another year, I invite you to join me in letting go of the following:

  1. Putting up with people you cannot depend on

Nobody is perfect, by any means, and we should always be willing to give the ones we love the benefit of the doubt. However, there is a lot of negative energy connected to people in our lives who are chronically unreliable and never take responsibility for it. I used to think of myself as a kinder person for letting dear ones off the hook who forgot a commitment they had made to me, changed our plans at the last minute, or showed up a day late and a dollar short the one time I needed their support.

But the ultimate act of kindness is to be true and respectful to ourselves first in order to be able to extend the same courtesy to others. Ultimately, if I cannot rely on you, that means that I cannot trust you and that is not conducive to creating safety between us. And a lack of safety in relationships is a significant risk factor for our health.

So, if you are holding on to any relationships in your life with people you cannot depend on, I invite you to love them, hug them, kiss them good-bye, and let them go!

  1. Being the Mother Teresa of wounded souls

Somewhere in between my being “anxiously attached” in childhood and being enamored with the “high” of external approval, I found myself making an energetically draining choice over and over again in my life: I embraced and extended refuge and love to fellow humans who as adults still carried unresolved wounds from their past.

It is truly heartbreaking to imagine that any child suffers traumas inflicted by people they depend on.

I have chosen to work as a Court-Appointed Child Advocate to serve as a voice for abused children. But there is a vast difference between volunteering to protect the rights of innocent child victims of abuse and putting up with absolutely unacceptable behavior from adults because they still carry wounds from their past, which they are not willing to own up to and let go.

Empathy and compassion are wonderful virtues, but there is a fine line between empathizing about someone’s unfortunate past and letting them get away with entitlement, exploitation, empathy impairment, or projecting their pain on you. (These are the hallmarks of Narcisistic personality disorder-the ultimate manifestation of unresolved wounds!)

The bottom line is this—hurt people hurt other people. So, if you still have people in your life that often behave in unkind ways and are not accountable for their behavior because of how they were treated in their past—do yourself a massive favor and let them go.

  1. Living with illusions and lies

Human nature is such that, at times, we like to believe in fairy tales, mostly to protect ourselves from facing realities that we do not really want to face.

We create a story that nurtures and justifies an illusion, living in denial about how we actually play a big part in betraying ourselves.

But deep down we know when we are telling ourselves a lie—like sticking to a relationship that is not honoring our spirit, or working at a company or in an industry that is not aligned with our values.

Why is it hard to identify illusions? Because we are scared!

If we did not grow up in an environment conducive to developing a healthy sense of self-worth, we keep one eye closed so we can get what we think we need, settling for crumbs and endeavors that are offensive to our soul.

Many statistics reflect our challenge with identifying illusions: The percent of infidelity in relationships and the incidence of alcoholism and other escape tactics are just a few.

Trust me, I know how hard it is to let go of the lies we tell ourselves and how uncomfortable it feels to be in free fall, detached from the stories that were part of us for so long.

But here are a couple of reminders to aid you in this magical act of letting go out of kindness for yourself.

  • Fear is also an illusion—95% of the things we worry about never actually happen.
  • We can increase our self-worth by the choices we make. When we start treating ourselves like we are worthy of all things great in life and no longer settle for fairy tales that drain our soul, we increase our self-worth, one nerve connection at a time.

If a person, a job, a friend, or a situation does not contribute to your values and your mission in life, and you realize that you are keeping them in your life because of a fairy tale you have been telling yourself, offer them a beautiful bunch of flowers and let them go.

We are about to enter a new beginning, a brand new year.

This new year can be amazing for you.

This could be the year that you make your dreams come true!

Or this new year could be disappointing.

The one certainty is that it is you who will determine how the year goes. You are worthy of love and belonging and goodwill and acts of kindness and all great experiences that allow your nervous system to remain in optimal balance supporting your health and well-being.

But choosing carefully and following through with whom and what you need to let go of is critical for the trajectory of your happiness in this new year and beyond.

Happy New Year!

Tzeli

Part two: Improving your relationship with stress-How to establish safety and trust

Last week, I introduced you to my simple, yet effective, approach that I used to become a BFF (Best Friend Forever) with stress so it would no longer be such a barrier to my health and well-being. Following the cumbersome health complications that I experienced when I chose to ignore the effects of stress on my body, befriending stress has become the most effective health improvement intervention for me so far.

Although the idea of “befriending stress” may sound like an abstract concept, it is not very different from the process we use to befriend someone we meet that we like:

  1. We get to know them better.
  2. We create safety and trust between us.

In this section, Stress: Part Two, I will share with you the most profound and unusual pearls of wisdom that I have gathered in regard to how we can create safety and trust in our relationship with stress so we can enjoy a happier, healthier, and more productive life.

  1. Question your perceptions! We are built for fight or flight in response to demands from the environment. It’s nothing personal, just a matter of survival. One of our most primal needs is to connect with others, yet our brain and nervous system are built for war and not for love. This presents us with a great paradox that we have to somehow reconcile to reinstate a sense of safety within and without. Our brain has evolved to give us the greatest survival advantage and that translates into us looking at things from a threatened perspective. We can intercept this scientific truth by literally questioning our assumptions and that which challenges us. For example, if you did not get an “Exceeds” in your performance evaluation, does it really mean that you should have concerns about your job security?
  2. Make a regular practice of choosing the words to your own life story. We are what our experiences have shaped us to be. Most of our memories are stored in our brain without conscious intervention on our part. A memory of a negative experience will get triggered and elicit a response when a situation occurs that mimics sensations of that negative experience. As brilliant as we may be intellectually, most of our actions happen without our permission. For example, if we had a negative parent figure in our childhood, the moment we get close to someone as an adult, implicit memories will resurface of what it was like to depend on someone who was not dependable. Then the relational part of our brain will shut down to disrupt the perceived negative consequences of depending on someone again. We can start re-writing this story by assessing how much of our assumption that the present moment resembles our past is a truth or a story. We can also become a regular participant in deciding if bringing the past into our present is leading us to our desired outcomes.
  3. Embrace the power of your emotions—one emotion at a time. We have been conditioned to be afraid of our own emotions, because well, they have a life of their own! We need to embrace that it is biologically impossible to not make an emotional decision. Prominent neuroscientist, Joseph Le Doux, has shown us that when a threat is perceived by our thalamus, which relays motor and sensory signals, it only takes eight milliseconds for the message to reach our amygdala, which is responsible for detecting fear, but forty milliseconds to reach our prefrontal cortex, which is the thinking part of our brain. Instead of running away from our feelings, what if we fully embrace and trust them by giving them a name and choosing how we allow them to shape our behavior? Making intelligent use of our emotions (otherwise known as emotional intelligence) has been found to be more important than IQ in how well we do in life. You can access a free resource to help you with this endeavor by clicking on this link: http://bit.ly/JoinMyndZen
  4. Reconcile differences between expectations and actuality. Our brain perceives difference, or change, as “errors.” When we are promised a sweet-tasting treat and we get something sour instead, two structures in our brain get activated that emit very strong error signals. The two structures are the orbital frontal cortex and the amygdala. The activation of these structures draws our metabolic energy away from the part of our brain that supports higher intellectual functioning and results in us acting impulsively and often putting our foot in our mouth. To change this, make it a high priority to identify any parts of your life that present your brain with the taxing job of reconciling differences and, one by one, eliminate them. Do you support healthy living, but find that your health improvement initiatives end the moment you sit in front of the TV at the end of a stressful day with a bag of unhealthy snacks? Do you have a significant person in your life who says they love you but often minimizes you? Recognize all situations that aggravate your brain by showing up as errors, call them by name, and let them go. Your brain will love you for it!
  5. Treat your brain as the best part of yourself. Our brain is our best friend and the CEO of the amazing operation of our incredible body. Improving our relationship with stress involves improving our relationship with ourselves. Although we haven’t been taught how to do that, there are several practices we can learn that are simple, backed up by science, and take only a smidgen of our time. Mindfulness meditation is one of the most effective and well-documented methods to quiet down the alarming narrative of any story and allow us to infuse our present moment with safety and trust. We can chose any focal point that makes us feel safe and protected as an effective way to build an internal sense of safety and trust. We can simply focus on our breath and recollect all the amazing things the power of our breath accomplishes, like oxygenating our one hundred trillion cells, or activating the parasympathetic branch of our nervous system, which governs rest and digestion. If you are one of the many of us that needs some guidance meditating, I invite you to use some of my favorite guided meditations that you can find here: http://bit.ly/myndzenguidedmeditations.

We modern humans are having such a hard time keeping our nervous system calm and available to serve our higher purpose and objectives in life. Part of the problem is that we have had to turn our brain into a warrior in order to survive throughout the ages.

Ultimately, we all strive to accomplish one, and only one, universal state—to be happy! However, there is not just one type of happiness.

We feel a primal type of happiness when we are in love and we make love to the object of our affection. But there is a different type of happiness that has been a secret until neuroscience uncovered it for us. This other type of happiness does not leave us, like the afterglow of being with the one we love. Instead, we carry this other type of happiness with us, and it shapes our perceptions of the world and how we expect the world to show up for us.

The foundation of this amazing, effervescent happiness hinges upon a baseline feeling of safety.

No matter how well we do in life, happiness will continue to be a fleeting target for us until we are ready to improve our internal sense of safety and trust. Changing the perceptual lens through which we view the world is a powerful way to improve our relationship with stress and increase our health and happiness.