Via Forte

 Think about a situation, maybe it’s a job, a purchase, or even a social media post. Or maybe it’s about starting a new hobby, or routine. Now think about who is seeing your choices. Who is seeing what’s in front of you. Is it you? Is it really you? Or is it all the people that may have an opinion on “how it looks” or other people that have opinions on “what you should do”. We borrow other people’s eyes to see what’s in front of us. Now, stop and think about what you really want. Turn all the other perspectives off. Quiet all of that. Ask yourself what you really want. That resistance you feel? That twinge you get when you give yourself permission to think about it ONLY as what YOU want? That’s just the layers of conditioning you are pushing against, it’s the resistance of all the other peoples’ voices telling you to listen to them instead of trusting yourself, instead of trusting your own voice. We’ve been trained to listen to everything outside of us. We’ve been trained to borr...

  Begin Again Begin again. This phrase was first introduced to me in the context of mindfulness and meditation. It was incredibly helpful and helped me make that part of my regular routine. I went from thinking I couldn’t do something, to feeling like I was already doing it. What’s even better, is that mindset has crossed over to other areas of my life. It applies to everything. Begin again. Let’s start from the beginning: I was trying to make meditation part of my routine. I felt like my mind was racing, felt stressed, and really needed something to slow things down and be a centering or grounding activity. Everything was going 100 miles per hour and I needed something to change. This felt like something helpful. While the concept of meditation sounded helpful, the practice was really difficult. I was having a hard time quieting the mind. I couldn’t concentrate. I thought I was incapable of doing it. I had tried many times, but never felt like I was doing it “right”. That’...

  What I do as a Health Coach When I am coaching, I am listening, I am educating, I’m offering tips, I’m holding you accountable. But all of this is in the name of support. What am I supporting? I’m supporting you, yes. But more specifically, I’m supporting your habits. Wherever you are right now, your habits got you here. Your current habits are bringing your current results. If you want to change those results, you need to change your habits. If you want to keep these results coming, you have to keep these habits going. As a Health Coach, I’m focused on supporting your habits. I help you identify old habits, quantify the results those habits are bringing you (for better or for worse) and help you see what things will look like with progress. Through that process, I help you build new habits. I help you start new habits. And I help you stick with those new habits, so you can take new habits and make them current habits, and eventually they become long-term habits. Our wo...

  When you feel better you do better. And when you do better you feel better. But what is better? What is it that you want to be doing? How is it that you want to be feeling? The hard part is that sometimes we don’t know until we do something that brings us there. When we go for a walk in the middle of the day and realize that break did a lot for our mental health. When we get a good night’s sleep and realize how much better the next day is when we are rested. When we drink more water throughout the day and feel the difference in our body, our mind. Even the accomplishment will bring a good feeling. If you set out to do something and you accomplish that goal, that feels good. It gives us that sense of accomplishment. And when we are feeling good about an accomplishment, we have the confidence that we will continue to reach this goal. Maybe even set the next goal. In other words, it gives us energy to go on to the next thing. I realize this is kind of a chicken and egg s...

When it comes to purpose, I have a unique perspective as I have been to many places as an avid traveler, and worked in many industries as a life-long learner and jack of all trades…master of none? Actually, I am a master of ONE trade. This one. Coach and confidant. I didn’t always know that. And that’s part of my perspective. I wasn’t sure about my purpose. I had it wrong in some ways, and other ways, I was simply afraid to claim it. I had to learn to lean into my purpose. Even while I was in a role that was perfect for me. My title was Health Coach, but I had to move into another phase of starting a business. My company was about health and wellness, but it had to fit into corporate settings and it had to be growing. So, while my days were spent helping people with their goals and being the very thing that I felt destined to be, even then, I wasn’t really doing that. I was just trying to fit into a box that I thought I wanted to be in. But, I didn’t realize that. At the time, the box...

  Sometimes we can get stuck because we aren’t already doing something. It is hard to start things. If something is new, it is difficult to start it and even more difficult to be doing it regularly right away. I’ve talked about not being afraid to start something. I’ve talked about not being afraid to be bad at something. Anything you do for the first time, you will not be an expert. Period. That’s just how it works. But something else that can keep us from taking that first step, or trying to take another step after we’ve been off for a while. It’s momentum. We’ve heard the law of physics: an object in motion stays in motion. That is literally true. It can also help us get going. More importantly, it can help us not beat ourselves up about it. You can tell yourself that you want to be doing something. It can be any habit. More water, less screen time, more movement. Whatever it is, there is our desired place and there is where we are now. Even if that gap is small, it ca...