A journal entry…

I hate the fact that I have not had the time to write since starting university this year. I think about it all the time but I always seem to have something that needs to be done. Nevertheless, I am here now writing this post. Better late than never.

A lot has happened since I last wrote and I have reached extremely positive states and dropped back down to low ones. I am feeling very low tonight, which is why I cannot sleep. I have started my counselling and worked on great tips to help with my anxiety. If you have not done a worry tree before, try it! I hope to share more tips with you very soon. What I have not addressed yet is depression. I thought it may be good for me to read a journal that I wrote back in July when my depression was at its worst to make me reflect on how far I have come and I wanted to share an entry with you.

‘ I don’t know what else I can say . I cant even think straight let alone talk. Its all one big jumbled up mess again in my head. Like a pair of headphones or a necklace that ends up in that awful tangle that can take hours to undo. The last week has been hell and I haven’t even had time to write, or maybe I just didn’t find time. I’ve gone back to wanting to sleep every moment that I don’t have anything important to do. Even then I cant sleep without having nightmares. I thought Angel would be with me everyday to help guide me but maybe they have a limit on how many times they can interfere. I have gone back to square one all over again. I cant understand how my feelings are such a rollercoaster and neither can he. One moment I sit and day dream, about the future, about buying houses, having children. I see a time where I am completely content and no longer feel pain, no longer fear. There are times where I sit or lay in his arms and cant stop smiling. I say I love you so often and kiss him so much that he actually finds it annoying and asks me to chill out. In those moments I have found my passion again. I don’t feel lost, I feel like a happy healthy girl, vibrant with goals, and so set and driven to reach them. But just moments later I can feel the complete opposite. I am lost with no direction, no idea what path I should take, no idea what choices to make , and here I often find myself making the wrong ones. How can this be? How can my thoughts and feelings change in what seems like the flip of a coin by a person playing a game with my life. Sometimes if I am lucky I may land on heads every time he flips it in that one day. More often than not I get my fair share of tails. Even writing this, the choice of words I have used I am beginning to see that I have little belief in having control over my own life. I think I’ve struggled since a little girl to believe that I can decide what happens and whether I can be happy. Why would I choose to be abused? I cant have wanted that, I cant have consciously taken steps to cause that to happen, could I? Maybe now as an adult I need to start realising that I do now have power over my life. Now I do have control over the situations I put myself in. Deep down I know its down to me to find a way to get passed these feelings so that I can live a life. But in moments like this I am not living at all , and all I think about is going to sleep and never waking up.’

I wanted to share this entry because it relates to my counselling session this week. Reading back over this its clear that at the time I was trying to say that my past experiences were controlling my life, and in particular the abuse. My Counsellor told me that I must work on comforting the little girl from my past who lives inside me. I must tell her she is safe now and that she cannot be hurt anymore. I must do what was not done all those years ago so that she can be at peace and let the current me have control back.

Many of my other blog posts focus on gaining control of your own mind. I really do believe that is the key to happiness and success.

Until next time.

Emotional Intelligence – The power of the mind, yet again!

So this week I had a uni task and it has really inspired me to write this post. The task was to prepare a three minute speech on why we should receive a graduate trainee manager position. That was it, no elaboration on the job description whatsoever.

I decided that I’d focus on my interpersonal skills and how they would enable me to be good at management. I thought about what I think makes a good manager, and what I like about managers that I have had in the past and I ended up going into great detail about emotional intelligence. I had some training on this a few years ago in one of my previous jobs. They believed that It would be really beneficial to all staff members, at the time I didn’t understand how it was relevant to the job. After the emotional crisis that I have just been through, and the better understanding of life, I finally get it!

What is emotional intelligence? well.. for those of you who may not know let me give you a brief explanation.

Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand our own emotions as well as the emotions of others, and furthermore to use that understanding in order to guide ourselves or another.

I cannot believe how well this links in to combatting depression and anxiety. Being able to recognise when we feel a certain way, understanding why, and then adapting our behaviour in response to that emotion. That is exactly what we need to be doing in order to achieve our desired outcome.

It would benefit everybody to be able to manage themselves, whether they struggle with mental health or not, but what really inspires me the most about this concept is the consideration of others emotions. I have been focusing on the benefits of this in terms of employability. How you could be a better manager if you were able to understand the feelings of your employees and adapt your methods as a result of this. As a really basic example, it is your responsibility as manager to increase sales. You are able to recognise that employee A feels disappointed and disheartened when they complete a sale but receive no recognition for it. You come to learn that employee A loves to feel like their efforts are acknowledged and appreciated immediately after a sale. Therefore, you simply congratulate them and reward them with some sort of recognition incentive. This causes employee A to feel positive emotions, and so causes them to enter the next negotiation with a really positive mindset. As a manger, its a double whammy. You have made your employee feel important, made them happy and you are also growing business!

This does not just apply to your careers either. Imagine how much better your relationships with friends and family could be if you were more intelligent in their emotions? This is not be confused with the concept of allowing people to make excuses, and perhaps even abolishes the idea. The more emotionally intelligent you become the more that you understand and appreciate that whether they seem reasonable or not to yourself, everyone is affected by emotions in different ways. Recognising when your friend is experiencing an emotion, and knowing what you can do to guide them away from that emotion into a more positive one is a truly invaluable trait to have.

If you have never heard of it before, I urge you to spend 10-15 minutes to just research it. It will be really beneficial to your life and your career no matter what it is that you do!

Remember, we are all here on this planet together. Selfishness will not achieve you success, you will reach far greater in life If you allow yourself to be helped by others and help others yourself.

Until next time.

The greatest strength lies inside your mind.

If your reading this blog it is probably because your mind currently, or at some point during your life, seems to have taken control of itself and your life, and you feel like you can’t stop yourself from feeling a certain way or doing certain things.

I know when I was feeling my lowest that I thought there was no way out. I thought that the only way I could escape my mind, which had run free and messed up so many things in my life, was to take my life. It seemed impossible at the time, that the very tool which was destroying my life was also the only tool that could build up the life that I want to live. The mind is key to success. Whether that be setting up a business, pulling yourself out of depression or climbing mount Everest. You can’t do any of those things without your mind, a positive mind-set is a catalyst for success.

There are so many things that I do or don’t do in my life, that I want to do or to not do. Let me give you some examples. I have got much better at managing my money, ensuring that I am not left with absolutely nothing for any period of time but I’d really like to save and I’m not hitting my savings goals at this moment in time. There is only one reason why. I haven’t got the right mindset yet. I know what I want to save for, but I do not have the determination to fully commit. I have stopped myself from buying expensive things that I don’t need, but I still end up spending unnecessarily, usually on food. If I want to save money, I need to have the willpower or it will never happen and willpower comes from the mind.

Let me tell you where I have practiced this successfully. In some of my other posts I mention the break up that happened almost 2 months ago with my ex boyfriend. I kept saying, and kept thinking that I wouldn’t ever be able to love again. And, if I am to be completely honest I am still not sure that I will. However, what I have done is changed my mind-set, and I am using my emotions and heartbreak to my advantage. Let me tell you how. I am very afraid, to let anyone else in after all of the past experiences that I have had, but, it is my dream to have a loving relationship, to settle down and it always has been. I am a really family orientated girl, very maternal, and my idea of happiness sits comfortably in the family life regime. So why should I remain a single parent, with only one child, when my dream is to have more than one child and to marry? I shouldn’t. Just because I have had my heart broken, I shouldn’t run away from my dreams because if I don’t then at least I have a chance of reaching them right? Okay so this is what I have been doing…

In the 2 months that I have been single I have only felt well enough to talk to another male in the last two weeks. I discussed it with my councillor and she and I developed a few things that we should do in order to help me get back into the world of dating, but protect myself from making the wrong choices. One thing that I mentioned to her was doing things too soon, from getting intimate, to becoming in a relationship and introducing my child. So I have created a list of 5 questions that I must ask any man that I am seeking that kind of relationship with. It is not an interview so they will not be word for word, and I will be slipping them into natural conversations where they are applicable. This is to help me to identify at an early stage whether the person has the traits and personality that I am looking for, before things start to get to complicated.

Now I feel myself drifting away from my actual intended point here, the power of the mind, but methodology is important too. So basically what I am doing is taking things very slowly, and ensuring that I am finding out the important things sooner rather than later. If you have read my earlier blogs you may know that I am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. I want to explain a little bit about how that has affected my relationships, and particularly my sex life so that you can understand why I feel I have made great progress over the last 2 weeks. My experiences as a child made me grow up feeling like no more than a sex doll, sad, but its true. Now some survivors go the opposite way, they have a fear of people going anywhere near them or touching them physically and so become afraid of sex following the trauma. For me, the experience was very different. Due to re-victimisation very shortly after the first spate of abuse I entered my teenage to adult years feeling as though I was worth nothing more than sex. Like that was the only thing I was good at, the only purpose that I had. My brain had also programmed itself into believing that my opinions, my desires, what I wanted, had no significance. Therefore, if a male wanted me, I would often consent even if I didn’t truly want to. Many will say that this makes me a slut, but I am not offended by their thoughts or comments because they don’t understand what I went through and what it did to my head. I no longer have to be ashamed because I have discovered the issue, and I have addressed it and now I have put my plans into action using nothing but my mind. On every occasion that I have seen this one guy over the last two weeks I have gone no further than to kiss him. I regret to say that this an achievement for me. No matter that I had alcohol in my system, no matter that he was trying to persuade me to change my mind. I went into his company telling myself that I was not going to give any sexual contact and I stuck to my guns every single time. Part of this is to see if he respects my wishes, or whether sex is all he wants. Part of it is to make him chase and see him put in the effort. But do you know what the most important part of it has been? Showing myself that I CAN do anything that I set my mind to. I don’t have to be a slave to sex as the males of the past made my mind believe. I can be whoever I want to be. I deserve more than giving myself up straight away, I deserve to grafted for, but I have to make that happen.

The above example may be un-relatable to many of you reading it, but the point that I want to get across is that you can change lifetime habits, you can change habitual thinking patterns, cognitive distortions that have been instilled in you since a very young age. The key is the mind. You must use your mind, you must adapt your mind-set. The behaviours and everything else required for your success will follow once your mind has found the right path.

Believe in yourself, challenge yourself. You are your best supporter and your worst enemy. Once you unlock the full potential of your mind, you can be unstoppable.

I hope this post inspires you to test the powers of your own mind, success is like dominoes! Once you achieve one goal, you believe, and once you believe, you can begin to smash all of your goals one after the other in succession.

Good luck.

Until next time.