Entrepreneurial: Making the Executive Decision to Choose Joy

Welcome to June 2020 My Charmed Ones!

I sincerely hope you and yours are doing well, staying safe, healthy and productive at home. As you may already know from my May #ICYMI post, the past month was something of a mental struggle for me social distancing for so long in this remarkable time we are living in. This is the thing though, I have gone through so many dark periods in my past that I know how important it is to first honor the way I am feeling in the moment, but also not to let myself succumb to it for too long. So yes, I was struggling this month, but I had to just let those feelings out once and for all and then force myself back into a positive mindset. One thing I know can happen to me when I go through a rough patch is that if I don’t actively fight it, I can stay in that sad mindset for way too long. It’s certainly not easy for me to shift out of that place, but I have an arsenal of mindset shifting tools that I use to help me, and if I don’t execute on them, I know I can get stuck for a longer time than necessary. It all starts for me with making the executive decision that I’m not going to allow myself to stay in that mindset, especially not without a fight!

So, what are those tools? How do I dig myself out of a dark place when I’ve fallen into one? Here are some strategies and tools I use.

Gratitude: I think gratitude is one of the most underrated and glossed over topics when it comes to managing your mindset. It’s easy to take for granted, that’s for sure, but no matter what is going on in your life at any given moment, each of us has dozens, hundreds maybe even thousands of things we can be grateful for if we choose to tap into that energy. It is, of course, a choice to feel grateful, and I think one of the problems around the idea of gratitude is that we hear about it so often or we can rattle off a quick default list of things to be grateful for, but we fail to tap into the feeling of gratitude when we do so. I could make a list of a hundred things I am grateful for right now, but just approaching that task as a catalog won’t shift my mindset. Instead I need to stop and focus on each gratitude item and think about how that item functions in my life and what my life would be without it. It’s certainly true that we often don’t appreciate things until they are gone, and to evoke a true emotional response from myself while making a gratitude list, this is a prompt I often use to help me really feel the energy of gratitude and experience the benefits a gratitude practice has to offer.

Rampage Meditation: There is a subgroup of meditations out there that are known as “rampages.” Go ahead, type Rampage Meditation into the YouTube search bar and you will see what I am talking about. This is a specific style of meditation that has grown in popularity over the past few years, usually, but not always associated with Abraham Hicks and Law of Attraction, but I find that this type of meditation is a really great tool to use to shift my energy. Essentially, this meditation type is a guided meditation where someone is feeding you prompts, affirmations and insight intended to help you shift your dominant emotional energy (aka your vibration) upwards to gratitude, love, happiness, joy, etc! If you think about your emotions as a sliding scale where sadness, depression, anger, etc are at the bottom and happiness, joy, contentment are at the top, the point of these guided meditations is to wind your energy up towards the more positive feelings on the scale. When I am particularly sad, this type of meditation often works the best for me. Because just sitting and meditating on my own is something I can’t do easily or effectively. But these rampage meditations give me the thoughts to think and help encourage me.

Journaling: Whenever I am feeling bad about something in my life or feeling like things aren’t going the way I want them to, journaling helps me so much to identify my limiting beliefs and overcome them logically and reasonably. Journaling is often a tool and strategy I use to self-coach or give myself a mock-therapy session. Now, if you have never done any sort of coaching or therapy, let me walk you through my general process for how I journal out my feelings. First, I always identify what I am feeling and the reasons why I believe I am feeling the way I am feeling. I know that for myself, there is usually some issue in my life that is not going the way I want it to that ends up causing my emotional distress. In the case of how I’ve been feeling recently in lockdown, I know the problem for me is that I start feeling powerless that I cannot just do whatever I want right now. So I start with that situation and feeling and I rant it out to my journal. I complain it all out to my journal until I feel like I’ve exhausted my feelings on the matter and laid them all out. Then, I play the role of coach or therapist for myself and force myself to recognize logical reasons why whatever I am complaining about is not true. For example, even though I can’t go out and do all the things I want to do right now, there are still plenty of things I can do and want to do, and it’s important for me to identify those things and why those are very important for me to do if I want to adjust this feeling. Then the final thing I like to do in this journaling session is make a plan for moving forward. Essentially I ask myself what I am going to do moving forward from this journaling session in a way that combats the negative emotions I was experiencing to begin with. I might list out steps, brainstorm ideas, or make a to do list, but I always like to end these journaling sessions with a plan for self-management to help me avoid the trigger again. Then I have this list or this plan to come back to if and when those feelings creep up at me again, which they do- but having the plan acts as a sort of defense for me. Like “no, we are not going to go down this road again, you already solved this problem, here is the plan, focus on the plan.” And honestly, this helps me a lot to break out of the negative emotional patterns and focus on establishing the positive emotional pattern instead.

So, that is what I do when I get into a low place, like I was in during May, and this is a strategy I am going to continue to focus on as I move into June. Because the trigger itself isn’t going away, I am still in isolation, so I need to stick to that plan to keep myself positive and execute regularly on those strategies that help me stay positive and motivated. This is my executive decision to choose joy and focus on that instead of letting negative patterns take over my mind and ultimately derail my life and happiness. But if it does happen again, and I do go dark again, it’s okay because I have these strategies to help pull me out and each time I get stronger and stronger. It’s progress not perfection we are aiming for here!

I hope this installment of Entrepreneurial has been insightful for you! Here is to another great month ahead. I would love to hear how your May went and what you are up to in June, so please do feel free to leave me a comment and tell me about it!

xoxo,