Tag: self-sabotaging behaviour

Self-Forgiveness and Self-Care for Health and Happiness

There is a growing consensus around what we need for self-healing and this convergence is supported by neuroscience and scientific research into the process of aging.  In a recent HEAL Summit, international holistic health expert Danette May presented her insights gained through her traumatic life experiences and her journey to international success – a journey she has mapped through her book, The Rise: An Unforgettable Journey of Self-Love, Forgiveness and Transformation.

The HEAL Summit is produced by Hay House and the free presentations and resources are offered over one week by more than 30 experts in holistic health.  The presentation by Danette May covered the topic, Self-Love Rituals to be Happier and Healthier Now.  Her recipe for success in life involves healing foods, healing movements and a healing mindset.  Fundamentally, it entails self-love expressed through self-caring activities undertaken regularly to achieve wellness.

The rise from depression

Danette suffered severe depression and grief following her failed marriage and the death of her infant son.  Her story is one of achieving transformation in mind, body, and heart.  She became a best-selling author, leading expert in developing a healthy lifestyle, creator of a highly successful international business and a significant influencer through her social media presence and speaker engagements.  She was featured in the life-affirming documentary, WeRiseUP, which exhorts people to connect and take action to make a difference in their sphere of influence, whether in education, work, or the community.  Danette’s suggested approach represents an integrated, holistic way to achieve self-healing.

Healing foods

One of the world’s leading experts on aging and healthy living, David Sinclair, who is author of Lifespan, confirms through his research and that of his colleagues that what we eat, as well as how much we eat, has a major influence on our quality of life and longevity.  Danette contends that if we remove certain foods from our diet and include other more beneficial foods, the “wiring in our brain will change”.

Danette’s recommendations re healing foods include the following things to avoid:

  1. White sugar – because of its toxicity for mind and body.
  2. Gluten – causes inflammation in the whole-body system, including the brain (individuals may have more visible symptoms than others from these inflammatory effects, e.g., skin problems, headaches and/or digestive issues).
  3. Oils such as canola or vegetable oils (olive oil is widely recommended as a substitute).

Her recommendations re what to eat include:

  1. Avocados – identified by the Mayo Clinic as the superfood of the month.
  2. Blueberries
  3. Leafy green vegetables
  4. Fish
  5. Nuts

It is interesting that these latter foods are among the 10 superfoods identified by the Harvard Medical School as sources of a healthy diet.  Danette elaborates on her healing foods recommendations in her abovementioned book.  She has also published another book focused on recipes that are gluten-free and vegan friendly and provide a welcome resource for those who are trying to move away from mainstream consumption to a more healthy diet. In essence, she encourages us to be more mindful of what we eat and knowledgeable about its effects on our body and mind.

Healing movements

Danette identified inertia as one of the problems associated with depression and grief.  She strongly encourages movement particularly walking and maintains that movement is the quickest way to change your mental state.  Walking releases emotions and assists clarity in your thinking.  Danette especially advocates walking bare feet in nature as this enables you to become grounded. 

Healing mindset

Neuroscience research supports the view that positive thinking leads to better health outcomes, both bodily and mentally.  In line with her philosophy of small movements towards a goal, Danette recommends the use of personally appropriate affirmations for thirty seconds to one minute, at least each day.  Affirmations reinforce what is good in ourselves and helps to supplant “unconscious negative beliefs”.  What we focus on mentally becomes our new reality, our new mindset and perspective on the world.

Daily rituals of self-love and self-care

Danette suggested a wide range of daily practices that if maintained can create a ritual – a regular practice of a particular group of activities .  Here are some of them:

  1. Spend time in nature
  2. Write a gratitude journal   – writing can release self-limiting beliefs/negative self-stories, increase our self-awareness, and build a positive outlook through appreciating what we have.  You can reflect on where you are with your partner, family, career, life purpose or finances and appreciate the positive influences and influencers in your life.
  3. Eat something green and leafy
  4. Practise meditation, however briefly – even, for example, taking a few mindful, deep breaths.
  5. Read inspiring success stories that provide the motivation to realise, and exercise, your own power to make a difference in your arena of influence.
  6. Walk for health and wellness.

Overcoming procrastination

We can be full of good intentions to develop a daily ritual or to undertake something significant.  If we delay through procrastination, we enable our negatively biased brain to think up all the reasons why we should not proceed.  Danette suggests that we have 17 seconds to take action before our self-sabotaging thoughts take over.  Like Seth Godin, she suggests that you start small – begin with some step towards your goal, however small.

Self-forgiveness and forgiving others

Anger and resentment over our sense of personal hurt by another can only consume us and damage us physically, mentally, and emotionally – we can experience physical pain, unhealthy self-absorption, and emotional stunting.  Danette suggests that self-forgiveness and forgiving others is like “cutting the rope” – releasing yourself from negative emotions that hold you back.  She herself had developed a daily ritual of saying, “I forgive you, I love you”, to overcome her resentment towards her former partner – the process took five years!  Louise Hay offers a very pertinent affirmation for forgiveness, “As I forgive myself, it becomes easier to forgive others”.

Professional support

Sometimes our self-sabotaging behaviour becomes entrenched and difficult to shift.  It is times like these that professional help can provide the impetus to move forward.  Danette provides a range of services to assist anyone to make the necessary shift to achieve overall wellness and happiness:

  1. 3-day emotional detox – to work with people where they are currently at.
  2. 30 days challenge
  3. 6 weeks premium coaching to identify self-sabotaging behaviour, develop a positive mindset and take the first steps towards personal recovery and making a difference in the world.

Reflection

There can be a lot of things and experiences holding us back from realising our true potential.  The starting point is awareness – followed by deciding what we want to be different in our lives.  Daily rituals including meditation can help us to move forward and actively engage with what is holding us back.  As we grow in mindfulness through our rituals and daily mindfulness practices, we can develop profound self-awareness, a strong motivation to make a shift and the courage and creativity to realise our life purpose.

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Image by dae jeung kim from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

How to Overcome Self-Protection to Create Personal Behavioural Change

Tami Simon, in a recent interview podcast, spoke to Dr. Lisa Lahey about her co-authored book, Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization.  Lisa is also a member of the faculty for the Inner MBA, jointly conducted by Sounds True in partnership with New York University, Wisdom 2.0 and LinkedIn.  In the interview, Lisa and Tami explore our self-protection mechanisms, the need for courage to overcome them and the importance of supportive challenge to sustain significant personal change.

Our self-protection mechanisms create an immunity to change

Our self-protection mechanisms are designed to protect our sense of self-worth and overall psychic health – they stop us from doing things that would be harmful to our psychic welfare.  Research and experience demonstrate, however, that that many people in organisations find it difficult to make positive behavioural changes that would make them a better staff member or manager.  For example, staff may not change inappropriate behaviour despite regular corrective feedback and a manager may not be able to delegate effectively despite their belief in the need for delegation.

Lisa maintains that the real barrier to these desirable behavioural changes is not a lack of procedural or technical knowledge but the need to change our “inner landscape” – made up of our beliefs, inner rules, feelings, self-stories and assumptions about our self, others, and our world.  Many behavioural changes in an organisational setting require these “adaptive changes” – becoming aware of the specific, inner landscape barriers to a focal behavioural change and working consciously to remove them.  This perspective advanced by Lisa lines up with our earlier discussion of “absolutes” and their impact on our thoughts, feelings and behaviours.

Lisa likens our inner landscape to our immune system which is a self-protection mechanism designed to protect us against infection.  Our immune system, however, can also work against our physical welfare.  This can happen when it becomes hypersensitive to foods that would otherwise be good for us and creates inflammation in the form of rashes, hives, and other manifestations of food intolerance and allergies.  Another example is when the immune system rejects a liver or heart after a transplant.   Our inner landscape, just like the self-protective mechanism of our immune system, can work against making and sustaining desirable, personal behavioural change (whether within an organisational setting or in daily life with our family).

Making adaptive change through the “immunity change process”

In her Book, Immunity to Change, Lisa provides a detailed four-step process for making adaptive change which she calls “the immunity change process”.  In the podcast interview, she offered a brief description of each step and these are illustrated below:

  1. Have a clear goal in mind – Clarity around your behavioural change goal is critical because it enables a focused exploration of your “inner landscape”.  Lisa gave the example of her gaol to overcome the fear of public speaking.  Here I will focus on the goal of improving delegation as a manager, drawing on my experience working with managers over many years.
  2. Honest exploration of your self-sabotaging behaviours: As a manager, you might work against the achievement of your delegation goal by constant interference/ checking in with the person to whom you have delegated work (the delegatee), expressing a lack of trust in the delegatee’s ability to complete the work successfully, showing increasing signs of nervousness, and/or being unclear in your instructions/requirements when establishing the delegated task.  These behaviours can feed your anxiety cycle and thwart effective delegation to the delegatee and, at the same time, undermine their confidence so that they do not do the delegated job very well (an outcome that reinforces your belief system about the threats to your self-worth involved in delegating).
  3. Honest exploration of your inner self-protective goals:  These inner goals lie beneath your self-sabotaging behaviour and provide the unconscious rationale for behaving in a way that works against the achievement of your goal.  These self-protective goals could include trying to avoid the embarrassment of staff making mistakes, ensuring the security of your own job, maintaining a sense of superior knowledge and skills (“better than”) or avoiding being seen as lazy. 
  4. Identifying and challenging the underlying assumptions that give rise to the self-protective goals: These could include the assumption that if the delegatee becomes really good at their work your job will be at risk, they will see any poor work that you have done in relation to the delegated task,  they might do it the wrong way if you don’t constantly check on them, you will be seen as incompetent if they do the delegated task poorly or you will lose control of the task and the delegatee and reduce your influence.  These assumptions are interrelated and self-reinforcing, reducing your capacity to see possibilities and explore creative options.  Once these underlying assumptions have been surfaced, you can challenge them by exploring alternative assumptions.  Lisa suggests, for example, in relation to delegation, that the process could be seen as adding real value to the organisation and the delegatee by enabling them to be the best they can be.  This not only contributes more fully to the achievement of organisational goals but also builds staff motivation and mental health through providing a sense of agency.  Also, as neuroscientist Tali Sharot explains, you grow your influence by letting go.

Reflection

Our inner landscape acts as both a self-protective mechanism building our self-esteem and a self-sabotaging system that comes into play when we perceive that our self-worth is under threat.  As we grow in mindfulness through reflective processes such as the “immunity change process”, we can become more aware of our self-sabotaging behaviour, our unconscious self-protective goals and the underlying assumptions that hold them in place.  As we challenge our assumptions and associated expectations, we can break free of their hold over us and be open to creative options that we can pursue with courage and persistence.

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Image by Peter Perhac from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield – Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives)

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.