A lot of life happens unintentionally. You just go through the motions and you can become unaware of why you are doing what you are doing. You start thinking I should…… a lot. That feels awful, but you don’t really know how to change it. Well, I give you some practical ways to shift your thinking and go from obligation and judgment to hope and opportunity. Check it out!
It is so important for you to decide how you want to think about your singleness. If you don’t decide for yourself, it is very easy to let what other people think sway what you think. So, I encourage you to look at your singleness from God’s viewpoint. He is at work in your life. He is working it all out for your good. You might have a hard time believing that. Let’s look at some scripture and see how we can apply it to your circumstances today.
Get good at allowing yourself to feel lonely.
Drop the belief that you shouldn’t have to be alone.
Don’t make being alone mean anything else about you.
Decide who you want to be when you are alone.
You are alone right now, and that this doesn’t mean it will be forever.
Check out the blog for more details.
The Holidays can be hard for single women.
It is a time of reflecting and celebrating, and both of those can be challenging for single women.
You might struggle to reflect because you can only see where things in your life haven’t changed.
You might struggle to celebrate because you are continually thinking that it would be so much more fun celebrating with someone.
I want to encourage you to allow for the 50/50 of this Holiday season and share some tips on how to reflect and celebrate even as a single woman.
Often times my clients come to me and as we peel back the layers they realize that they don’t love themselves, or maybe even really like themselves. One of the subtle consequences of that, is that they don’t take good care of themself.
They hope that a husband will come along and do the job of taking care of them, and so until then….
I want to share with you how to stop this cycle and pose some questions for what it would take to really take care of yourself. Hint: It might start with changing the way you think about you!
Making decisions in the moment are a sure fire way to put your lower brain and your prefrontal cortex in a battle. Who will win? Well, it all depends on who you have let win. So deciding in advance is the best way to get the results you really want with your life. Then you just have to go to work honoring those decisions and doing what you said you would do, even when you don’t want to.
Everything we want in life is for how we think it will make us feel. You want to lose weight to feel comfortable. You want to be married because you will feel wanted, or chosen. You might want a different living situation because you might feel independent. I want a clean house because it makes me feel less frazzled.
We do everything because we want that feeling.
So at the beginning of the year a lot of us set goals and plan out things because we think that in the achieving of them we will feel something. Now it’s almost March and maybe you aren’t tackling those anymore or maybe you, are but regardless, understanding why you are doing something is really powerful.
Let’s say you want to run a marathon. Your brain will get super excited about the possibilities and what it will feel like finishing it. It will dream about what it will feel like to have that done and how proud you will feel for doing all the work. You will find fun training plans and envision checking off the boxes of each work out. You will feel excitement and a sense of purpose with all of this. And then you start putting in the work. It will be hard. You won’t want to do it. Your brain will offer you excuses because it wants immediate gratification and what you are working towards is not immediate. Obstacles will come up. You will want to quit. And a little bit of you will think, “Wow this was a bad idea, why did I ever think I could do this.”
You feel disappointed that you can’t really try for the things you want in life and often this creates a slippery slope to just being complacent where you are instead of working through all that comes up to make it to the other side.
Often when I work with clients they are in the “river of misery”. The river of misery is the place between where they used to be before working with me and where they really want to be. They want to be on the other side, having tackled their goal and standing tall and proud and seeing that they created the follow through. They set their mind to something and made it happen.
Losing weight
Buying your own place
Saving money
Dating
Switching jobs
Moving
Waking up early
Running a marathon
In the river of misery we become someone different than before. We do things we never have before. We continually bump up against old beliefs and have to deal with them. This work is not easy; it is not supposed to be. But the one thing that continually rings true is understanding why you are doing it at all.
Taking the time to ask yourself, “Why do I want to do this?” is going to be very important because when things get hard, and they will, you need to have a whole slew of reasons you are fighting for this.
Because the desire for quitting, and to give into whatever the immediate gratification is, will be strong, you need a lot of really good reasons why you are trying to run a marathon, or lose the weight, or meet the guy, or save the money.
Why do you want to lose weight? I want to feel comfortable. Why do you want to feel comfortable? So I can buy clothes that fit, and I feel good in. Why is that important to you? Because I have been hiding for a long time and I want to stop hiding. Why do you want to stop hiding? Because I have to stop hiding in order to meet guys and get married.
Now you have more understanding of your why.
But let me walk you through this process. Let’s say you want to lose weight but your desire for eating ice cream is much higher than your desire to actually go out and meet guys. And a small bit of you believes that this is all impossible anyways. The losing weight and the meeting guys. So you have two competing desires; ice cream and marriage. The one right in front of you is immediate, quick, fast dopamine hit. You want it, you can have it. Not a lot of work, not a lot of changing your thinking. Just yes, and yes. But what happens is in that moment your why for ice cream (I have had a hard week, I have been so good, I deserve it) is much stronger than (I want to eat healthy and fit into clothes and feel comfortable so I can meet guys) is less strong.
In that moment your why for the hit is way more powerful than your why for the delayed gratification and the long term dopamine.
Understanding this is key. It is in the little moments when ice cream is presented that our brains do a whole slew of thinking. Should I eat this, should I not. I want this, but I also want _________ fill in the blank.
Knowing your very long list of whys and how this goal is important to you, because this is who you are becoming, helps you have a lot more behind why you wouldn’t want to eat the ice cream.
So the next time you are presented with ice cream you are fully aware that the immediate reasons why will be there, but the 100 reasons you don’t want to eat the ice cream will be there too. And over time you will stay committed to those whys more than you are committed to the immediate gratification.
Focusing your brain on your why is going to be something you will have to practice doing. It is not something you have trained yourself in before. Seeing the competing desires of short term and long term gratification at war will help you understand why your why is so important. If it doesn’t have something worth fighting for, it won’t. So a list of a bunch of reasons why you want your goal is going to be key. Focusing on those is important.
So get in the habit of asking yourself, “Why do I want this?” and keeping asking why so you can have a ton of reasons behind what you are fighting for.
Then with that list begin to tackle all of the obstacles and fight for who you are becoming, not who you used to be.
And if you need any help, that is what I am here for.
Angie
When you think about how it should be you always are disappointed in the way it is. And if you keep thinking, I should be married by now, you miss out on what is right in front of you. Being single on Valentine’s Day doesn’t have to be bad. Yes there are parts to it that may be negative, but we don’t have to stop there.
Let’s make this Valentine’s Day amazing. Decide right now how you want it to be. Picture your Sunday February 14th 2021, and create it. Don’t think about what others are doing. Don’t sit in the place of I hate being single on a day all about LOVE, and just reminded of what you don’t have.
If you want to grab other single ladies and plan something fun, do it.
If you want to grab other single guys and gals and plan a fun party, do it.
If you want to make fun treats for other single people and deliver them, make it happen.
If you have a friend that is married with kiddos and you want to babysit, offer.
But do it because you want to. Show up for yourself this Valentine’s Day and create what you most want to happen. Allow sadness, disappointment, and other negative emotions to be there, but don’t act from those. That is why deciding ahead of time is the best way to not act from those. Because when you actually ask yourself, what do I really want? You might actually listen. You might take action and create.
Having something to look forward to and get excited about helps alleviate the negative that your brain wants to offer you.
But if you want to sit at home with a bottle of wine or chocolates and drown in your sorrows of all that is not, go ahead, but know that you are choosing that, and you don’t have to. That is the unnecessary suffering that I thought I had to have. I thought I had to feel the pain of my singleness and that is where I let it define me.
You don’t have to. Singleness is just a circumstance and Valentine’s Day is just a day on the calendar that you get to think about however you want.
But don’t let your lower brain by default use it against you my friend.
There is no book out there that says, “All single women need to sit at home and suffer through this day.”
Seriously, as a married woman with kids I spend most of Valentine’s Day showing others how much I love them. It is less about romance and more about having fun with love. I think it’s an excuse to throw a party and tell everyone you love them.
You might be “talking” to a guy. You might have gone on a few dates but don’t really know where you stand with him. You might think a guy likes you but hasn’t made the first move towards a relationship. Any scenario that could allow you to think I don’t know what is happening here will make you feel confused.
And when you feel confused about the relationship you tend to sit back and let things happen. Typically our confusion keeps us from taking action, but it leaves us in over thinking mode.
When confused, our brain typically asks questions like: What’s going on here? Are we something? Does he like me? Why is this so difficult? Why can’t he….?
All of those questions just keep your brain searching for answers that are typically hard for it to solve. So it tends to either look to your past to solve this, or look around to others, which leads to comparison.
My biggest tip for you is to answer those questions. Don’t let those sit there in your brain to over think and compare and look to your past to remind you of how it didn’t work out. Answer them. What is going on here…. And give the facts. Are we something? Answer that with clarity. Does he like me? Have you asked him? With any of the questions that your brain is offering you answer them and then redirect your brain to work and solve for you. Ask yourself questions. What do I want here? Do I like him? What do I do that makes things difficult? What am I expecting him to do and why? What do I want to have happen in this situation? Regardless of how he acts how do I want to show up right now?
Gain clarity and understanding of yourself so you know what you want and why. Then from that place decide how you want to show up for Valentine’s Day. You still may not do anything towards him at all, but your mental game will have drastically elevated from this situation.
Let this Valentine’s Day be a reminder of who you are and who God made you to be and rejoice in all that He is doing in and through you no matter what season it is.
I give you permission to create the day that you most want.
Angie
