Choosing your Feelings

I didn’t even know that choosing your feelings was possible. I thought emotions happened and I had to feel that way. I had to react that way. I had to suffer from whatever feelings were present. I often felt annoyed with my feelings but didn’t know what to do to change that.

When I first heard this, I thought, “Your telling me I can decide which feelings I want to have?” Yes.

You can consciously choose which feelings to have about any circumstance. And your brain may offer you certain feelings that don’t really help you at all. And this is super important to understand, you don’t always have to believe your brain!

When a situation arises you have thoughts. It could be something that happened in the world, or to you, or that you did. But whatever the case, when something happens, we feel. We think we feel because of the situation, but we don’t. We feel from our thoughts. Our thoughts create our feelings. Our feelings are just vibrations in our body.

Think about the last time you were nervous. You might have been in a situation that you believed was making you nervous. It was really what you were thinking about the situation that made you feel nervous. And the feeling of nervousness is vibrations inside your body. For me these vibrations create extra sweat in my armpits, a raised heart rate, and heightened senses. But that is all happening in my body because of my thoughts. I could choose different thoughts and I would have different feelings. But unintentionally you might feel nervous and not know why. You might blame your circumstances for why you feel how you do. That is where I lived. I am mad because of what he did. I am hurt because of what she said. I am frustrated because they choose to do it that way. Name the emotion and their was a reason I was feeling it.

But once I realized that I wasn’t hurt, frustrated, or mad because of them, but because of my thoughts, a light bulb went off. Wait a minute. I am causing this pain? I am causing these emotions?

That is actually good news. Because if I am creating my feelings, I can choose to not create them, or create different ones. I can figure out what thought is making me feel that feeling and then choose whether I want to think it or not. Now sometimes that thought keeps being offered to me, but that’s okay. I can just keep saying, no I’m good, I don’t want that thought anymore. Or thanks brain for letting me know that, but thinking about it that way only creates me feeling like this and I don’t really want to feel that way.

The first step in how to choose your feelings is to become aware of what you are feeling.

Most people don’t like feelings and so they don’t really like to be aware of them or name them, because if they do, they might have to deal with them. So when feelings do happen, they try and push them away or resist them. That feels tense inside of your body because you are fighting against what is. So I want you to begin to acknowledge the feelings and allow them to be there. Notice what is happening. What feeling is there. Embrace the feeling. Don’t do something to ignore or avoid the feeling that is present. You don’t need to escape this feeling. Just move towards it. The feeling is absolutely harmless. It is just vibrations. Those vibrations don’t have to result in outward action, they can just be felt internally.

Second step is to see what thought is creating the feeling.

Sometimes it can be hard to wade through the many thoughts that are there to find which thought is making you feel a certain feeling. There may be many thoughts creating many feelings. Practicing trying on thoughts to see how they make you feel, so you can start to see trends. Whenever I think this is too much, I feel overwhelmed. Whenever I think I don’t know what is going to happen, I feel anxious. These thoughts like to present themselves to me often. But knowing the thought that creates the feeling gives me the power to then choose.

Third step is to decide if you want to think that thought and feel that feeling or not.

Once you identified the feeling, and figured out the thought that is creating it, you can decide if you want to think that way or not. You might decide yes, I do want to think this way and feel this way. Great. You have chosen your feelings. They aren’t just happening to you, but you are allowing them to be there. Even knowing you are creating the feeling helps you gain some clarity and keeps you from giving your power to the person, or situation. If you don’t want to think that thought then practice letting the thought go, changing the thought a little bit, or replacing the thought with something new. Sometimes I can easily let a thought go. I might think I am done thinking that way, or I have thought that way enough, and no more. Other times the thought just keeps coming back in and I need to tweak it a little bit. I often add that’s okay to the sentence in my brain or I change one word. So thinking the trash didn’t get picked up and that’s okay feels different to me than the trash didn’t get picked up! Or she always says that feels different than she chose to say that. Working with your thoughts and not against them can be helpful. You want to see what works for your brain and if it doesn’t feel right, you might try different words or phrases. You might even change the thought completely from this isn’t working to I can find evidence that this is working or it isn’t working. Understand that taking each thought captive is a Bible verse that is so practical. You can take your thoughts and play around with them and choose which ones help you to be more like Christ or which ones keep you acting the same way you always do.

Step four is to just keep practicing this.

All of my clients know that this new way of thinking and feeling takes time. You can rewire your brain and think differently which in turn allows you to feel differently. But it takes practice. It takes resisting a feeling and then realizing you are doing it. It takes trying a new thought that doesn’t really stick. I get coached often because sometimes I can’t find the thought that is creating the feeling that I don’t want. I just know the feeling is there but I am struggling to see it myself. You can get better at choosing your feelings. Things can happen and you can decide how you want to feel about something. I am getting better at this and love it when I show up and choose to feel a certain way. When my clients actually do this, they feel like they have a super power. I did that. I chose a thought. I chose this feeling. I can stop feeling the feelings I don’t want to. It is amazing. Give it a try!

Choosing my feelings right along with ya,

Angie

Success as a Single Woman

Success according to Merriam Webster dictionary is achieving a favorable or desired outcome.

As a single woman it can be easy to think that in the world’s eyes you aren’t successful because you aren’t married. After all isn’t success, marriage, kids, a home, and $. Now I am being silly, but I believe that we often define success from the world’s standards.

I will talk to a single woman and she might mention her successful career, or her ability to be successful in having a home, a great job, a great life, but she is unable to find success in dating.

And that last one is frustrating her. Therefore she feels overall unsuccessful or like a failure.

See the opposite of success is failure. We view success as winning, or achieving, for things to work out or go well. We view failure as losing, not gaining, for things to die or go wrong. But for as many things as you are “trying for” you often don’t create the desired outcome and so it can seem like you are doing a lot of failing. Losing weight; failing, dating; failing, relationship with friends; failing, getting to bed on time; failing, the list goes on and on.

Failure is success in progress. Albert Einstein

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. Winston Churchill

But the only way to not lose enthusiasm is to decide why you are continuing to put yourself out there and what success really looks like regardless of the outcome.

Women typically fear dating because they fear what failure would look like. They don’t want to imagine putting time and effort into a person for them to only be rejected in the end. They are so good at finding evidence that it doesn’t work out, that they think it will never work out and so they stop putting themselves out there. Their only option for success is if it works out. But you would have to open to failing time and again until you get the result you most want. It would help your brain if you knew that you could be successful regardless of the results.

This can also happen at work. You might be throwing yourself into work and don’t even know what the desired outcome is. Do you succeed if you get a pay raise, or promotion? You haven’t decided what success looks like and so you are chasing something illusive to try and feel successful. But what if it didn’t have to be like that?

No, you get to decide what results you are wanting and then create that success. But that would take you deciding ahead of time what success really looks like. And I encourage you to decide that success isn’t only if it works out.

I have determined that when I try something and it fails, it actually is successful if I learn and grow from it.

My son played basketball a couple weeks ago and they lost. He wanted to hang his head and feel defeated. I mean come on 8 year old basketball is pretty intense! But we had a great talk about how we don’t have to win for something to be successful. He can decide how he wants to show up in a game and then determine success off of those parameters.

So for basketball he can deem it successful if he:

is present and fully focused when out on the court (hands not in pockets, not off in a daze in la-la-land)

is encouraging to his teammates

is giving 100% effort

is not complaining about other team or refs

is working to improve his basketball skills

is creating fun regardless of the circumstances

Look at this list. Success is not did I win, it’s did I show up like this?

Creating this list (that is completely within your control) will help you create more success in your life. You get to feel successful even when you don’t win. This will totally trick your brain. This will throw you for a loop. This will get you evolving and changing and growing to become more of who you want to be.

Because think about my son. He walks away from the game regardless of the score or if they won or lost as successful because he is completely in control of his own success by those terms he created. You want to start doing this. You will want to think about what success looks like in dating, at work, with your family, with your ex, in regards to money, and time, and as many things as you can determine. Because when we set ourselves up for success the failures don’t sting as bad.

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. Thomas Alva Edison

See often success is at the top of a mountain of failure. But if with each failure we still feel successful we are more willing to try again. That is what you want to do in many areas of your life.

I want you to decide what success during this season of life looks like. Define it in terms of what you can control regardless of the outcome. Decide who you want to be. Decide how you want to act. Think through your whys in as many areas as you can. And from that place celebrate success, celebrate failures, celebrate growth, celebrate who you are becoming and celebrate each and every season you experience.

Here is to creating success,

Angie

Ways we Add to the Heartbreak

No matter how you cut it getting your heart broken by someone not wanting to be in a relationship with you is tough stuff.

You have put yourself out there and chosen to show up and express your feelings for someone and they don’t want to make the relationship work. You have the emotions of sadness, hurt, and even some anger towards the other person. You are tired of getting rejected and fear you always will. You have a ton of evidence that they liked you when the relationship started so what happened to make it so they all of the sudden don’t want to anymore? You are filled with confusion, doubt, and fear of ever having to go through this all again. Having your heart broken may keep you from putting yourself out there and trying again. You can replay how much time, energy and effort you put into this relationship and you can be filled with regret for time wasted. Do you see all of this negative that you are dealing with. And if that isn’t enough we add onto the heartbreak in ways we don’t even know.

That is what I want to share with you today, and give you some practical ways of not adding onto the heartbreak but creating a softer landing if heartbreak should happen again in the future, or if you are still recovering right now.

Here are 5 ways we add to the heartbreak.

1. You struggle with your relationship with yourself.

   So this person just rejected you and said, there are some things about you that make it hard to like or love you. The problem is that when they do this you already have some thoughts about parts of you that you have a hard time loving or even liking about yourself too. When they share their disgust with those parts you too feel that same disgust. So not only do they reject you, but you join in and reject yourself too. This is super hard for you because your negative self talk compounds the thoughts that you have about their negative thoughts about you. Wow, that is a lot of negative thinking and it is all about you. Which feels pretty awful.

2. You don’t feel safe with you

   You know that they don’t have your back, they are abandoning you, and you feel like you are abandoning you as well which does not feel safe to you. You’re filled with a ton of negative thoughts about them, you, and the whole dating experience, that just happened. That is all surrounding you and you aren’t tapping into thoughts that make you feel safe and secure but rather at risk and susceptible to more danger. You don’t trust yourself in making good decisions because clearly this is where it gets you…. to a ton of pain.

3. You don’t know how to feel the emotions of rejection, hurt, heartbreak, not being wanted, desire unfulfilled, or sadness

   So you do whatever it takes to avoid this negative pain by buffering , which is doing something externally to change an internal feeling. But that makes you turn to things like overeating, over drinking, overspending, binge watching TV to numb out, or moving onto another relationship to avoid the pain of this one. All of that buffering doesn’t solve for the negative emotions and after you do those things you have even more negative emotion about what you just did. Further giving yourself more evidence that you don’t make good decisions, you are messed up, and there is no way to escape all the horrible in your life.

4. You struggle because you rethink everything about the relationship and how you should have done things differently or been different

   This one is just the default of your lower brain. It’s job is to scan your environment and look for danger, when it can’t find any in your apartment or surroundings it goes to work in your past looking for danger or red flags to make you aware of. As one client recently said so while I am shopping and going down the produce aisle I have these ridiculous thoughts about the outfit I wore in 4th grade and how people made fun of it. What is going on there? Just your lower brain doing it’s job. But since you have a ton of thoughts about your relationship that didn’t work out, you just replay them over and over. Each conversation, and action you did or didn’t do being sifted through and the negatives highlighted. Your brain believes this is helpful to you so that you can learn from them and NEVER do that again. But really that is just creating all of the negative emotions coming to the surface again. Add onto it you think maybe you are wrong; overweight, not pretty enough, not trendy enough, not athletic enough, the list goes on and on. Just bring out even more negatives all around.

5. You don’t know how to let the other person go

   You have thoughts that still make you desire him. You still care and you still want to know what he is doing, how he is doing, and you still might want clarity as to why he doesn’t want to choose you. This keeps your brain wanting to collect information about him. You keep scrolling his social media, you drive by places where he might be, you try and bump into him or hear about him whenever you can. These actions are fueled by desire and curiosity. But both of those feelings are getting you into more trouble now because it just keeps you connected which adds even more pain to this wound.

Here are 5 ways to lessen the pain of heartbreak.

1. Know your way back to you

   You have to know who you are before you are ever in a relationship. Understanding that your thoughts about you are going to be how you feel about you. There are parts of you that you don’t have to love but you choose to love regardless because that is how you want to show up to you and even others. When others choose to not choose you that is okay, they don’t have to because you always will. Add onto it the thoughts that God always chooses you, so that makes two against one. By the way, you didn’t make you, you are just choosing to love who God made you to be. See that feels a lot better.

2. Secure with self

   Remind yourself that you will always have your own back. If and when others don’t have your back, that is okay, because you always will. You know that you can think about you and others in a way that makes you feel safe and secure. You can remind yourself that every decision you make is not good or bad, but what you make of it. When I make mistakes or fail or do something that I don’t love I always greet myself with love and curiosity. I greet myself the way I would my 5 year old. I am so sorry that happened, that stinks, tell me all about it. Now that is a safe landing and a place that my 5 year old loves to be when hard things happen. I want you to create that same safe place for yourself.

3. Learn to feel your emotions and open up to all of them

   This is exactly what I teach all of my clients to do. They learn how to feel those feelings, the positive and the negative ones. When you decide that you are willing and open to all of the feelings then your whole human experience opens up to an even bigger experience. You are not afraid of what might happen because you know that you can handle any of it. You don’t have to get away from the negative emotions by buffering and then creating even more negative emotions, but you can just feel the negative ones in the first place. So you can stop the overeating, over drinking, overspending, and the binge watching and start replacing it with intentional actions creating the life you most want. I know so many women who are creating the life they most want just by doing this right here.

4. Re-write the story and tell only that version

   When your brain goes back into your past and starts digging up the dirt, you just allow it and understand that your brain thinks it is being helpful. Nothing has gone wrong, nothing went wrong, and you my friend are not wrong or messed up. It all happened. It happened for you. You can look at it however you want. Let’s start rewriting the story so it serves you into your future because that is where you are headed. You are not going back and redoing the past, you are creating a new future and new relationships. Let’s learn from this one and grow and become who we most want to be. Stop telling the old version that keeps you spiraling and feeling all horrible. Start telling this new story about growth, and gratitude, and who you are becoming because of that experience.

5. Let them go

   Knowing that your brain wants to keep you connected is helpful because you can know and believe that keeping you connected may only add onto the pain and keep you stuck. When you let them go, you also let yourself go into the future. It is like you stop adding fuel to the fire and you can just let it smolder out. I know that seems hard to your brain but let’s just rip the band-aid and let it start healing. When you stop giving yourself more information to process then your brain doesn’t have to process him, the relationship, what did and didn’t happen. Any questions your brain thinks it can answer by getting more information just answer without any more information. Thoughts like is he dating someone? Is she prettier than me? Is he happy? Just decide for yourself and move on.

Heartbreak may be a part of your journey to getting married, but we don’t have to make it miserable. You want to show yourself that regardless of the outcome when you are getting to know someone or dating, if they don’t choose you, you will and you know how to create a safe landing space and learn and grow from all that happened while you were showing up in this relationship.

Relationships are such a great opportunity to learn about yourself, about the type of guy you are wanting to partner with, and about relationships in general. When you decide that you can handle heartbreak, nothing can stop you from showing up and learning a ton and becoming even more of who God intends you to be.

So, here’s to heartbreak, or at least being open to it,

Angie

Habits good & bad

One of your earliest habits formed might be brushing your teeth. It became so ingrained into your brain that it just became autopilot for you. Now I can’t get into bed at night without brushing my teeth. If I do my brain sends nagging signals of you are forgetting something, you have to do this, etc. Our brain likes it when something becomes so regular and consistent it can count on it. It becomes wired in as a pattern.

Merriam Webster defines a habit as a usual manner of behavior. It also defines it as an acquired mode of behavior that has become nearly or completely involuntary; or an addiction.

So when you think about it in those ways our habits can be broken into good or bad habits and/or addictions. I never have really looked at brushing teeth as a good addiction but I guess it is. Habits are either our usual behavior or behavior that has been acquired to become a habit.

So that get’s me thinking about the things in my life that have become habits. I have a habit of biting my nails. I have a habit of writing this blog. I have a habit of after dropping my kids off at school listening to a podcast for my drive back home. I have the habit of drinking water all day. I have this habit of looking at all forms of social media and my email, just to check and see if anyone needs me.

There are some habits that I don’t like and are trying to change.

There are some habits that I am wanting and are trying to form.

So understanding how habits form both good and bad may be helpful to you.

Let’s break it down.

There is typically a cue-then an urge- where you take action- and then you get a reward

So think about it from a habit I like. Monday morning 9am my schedule says write blog which is my cue. I then have an urge to get writing. From there I turn off all notifications and get totally focused on writing and take the action of writing for almost an hour. Then when the blog is done I am not only rewarded with some dopamine but my brain is cued into “Do that again, we like this feeling.” A pattern is started. Once I do that week after week after week, it becomes involuntary and if I am not sitting down to write the blog on Monday mornings, my brain thinks something is wrong.

Now when we are first starting out trying to create habits there are quite a few obstacles in the way. I knew I wanted this to be a habit but for a few weeks I would jump around which day and time I was writing and I had a lot of push back from distractions and other things coming up that it was hard to create this pattern in my brain. I wasn’t allowing for the cue, urge, action, and reward. I knew I wanted the reward of my brain wanting to do this, but at first I didn’t know how to create that. But this process can create what you are wanting. Focus on a cue-urge-action-reward. Believe that you can create this habit and then run this pattern over and over.

You can do this with any habit you are wanting to form.

• Cue: Alarm clock goes off

• Urge: the thought, “I want to get up and spend time with the Lord”

• Action: Get out of bed and find a spot that you go to repetitively and spend time with God

• Reward: Dopamine hit and the thought, “I want that again.”

Make this a pattern by doing it over and over… and make sure to really enjoy the dopamine hit!

But looking at bad habits from this angle can be very insightful as well.

A bad habit I created was eating a sweet treat every night.

• Cue: Kids in bed

• Urge: thoughts, “I need a treat, I deserve a treat, I have to have a treat”

• Action: Ice cream, or cookie, or some sweet treat

• Reward: Dopamine hit and the thought, “I want that again.”

And then I did it again and again reinforcing it until it became an involuntary habit.

Little did I know that the same thought patterns were going on and the more I reinforced the urge by giving into the action I was reinforcing the pattern. So each and every time the kids would go to bed, the urge would come up which was every night! My habit was going strong. So to try and break the habit I had to break this pattern. I had to have the cue happen, the urge come up and then not give into the action. Just feel the feelings of the urge. This my friend is how to stop the pattern.

So what do you do with this knowledge.

Look at your life. Ask yourself what habits have you formed, good and bad? Don’t beat yourself up. Don’t think you can’t change. Decide if you want to do what you are doing. Do you like the habits and want them in your life? Do you want to add some habits into your life? And from there decide that the habits you don’t want you can quit. The habits you do want you can form. You now take this cue-urge-action-and reward and walk it out. Either implementing it, or breaking it down.

I was just talking to a client the other night about how I never eat treats or anything after dinner now. I eat dinner and then that is it. I don’t even think about it. I have no cues that trigger any urges. And if I can do that, believe me, you can!

Here’s to making and breaking habits!

Angie

Loneliness and disconnection

I listened to Curt Thompson share at the IF: Gathering this past weekend all about this topic and I know so many of you are dealing with this very issue. So I wanted to take what I know from before, what he shared in his talk and what coaching has taught me and put together some important things to think about.

Loneliness may start from a thought but can spiral quickly to other thoughts and emotions and become a state of mind.

When we begin to feel lonely it is typically situational. You might be sitting at home on a Friday night feeling those same emotions start to rise up. The same thoughts you have thought many times come back into play. And it doesn’t normally stop there. You then can easily add on layers of thoughts that lead to feeling isolated, separated, alienated, cut-off and even exiled. God never intended for us to be alone. He even says it is not good for man to be alone. (Genesis 2:18) But there are times when we will be alone or by ourself for an extended period of time and we get to think about that however we want. As single women this is a part of your day to day life, being alone. Your default in the lower brain will be to interpret that as danger and spiral from there.

Once we begin spiraling our brain looks for evidence that these thoughts are true.

You have these thoughts, that spiral to others, and then before you know it you are knee deep in a pit and can’t see any way out. You’re looking to confirm the thoughts as truth and your brain will find evidence that it is true. So if you think no one cares about you, you somehow find yourself scrolling IG and finding friends together without you, once again confirming that it is true that your friends don’t care about you. Because if they did care about you they would….. And once you decide it is true, it is really hard to understand that it is just a thought, and that you can change that thought. When your brain offers it to you as truth you think you have to believe it and you have to deal with the truth and that can seem even harder to get out of.

You try and solve for the pain.

When you are in that pit and feeling overwhelmed, in despair, not cared for, hurt, and remember alone, you don’t know where to go. You can’t go outside to the people that you want to connect with because they are the people that are “hurting” you. You don’t really know where to turn and your thoughts are pretty grim. You want to numb out, or try and avoid the pain of it all and then you tend to do just that, check out. You binge a show, get lost in a youtube spiral, aimlessly scroll, eat, or take whatever actions you think will make you feel better, but really they make you feel worse. You are longing for connection and actually you are just getting more disconnected from yourself.

Let me paint a recent story of loneliness and disconnection.

This happened to me right around election time. I had been at home working alone a lot and let me tell you I love my clients, I love the people I interact with but something inside of me was feeling disconnected from the world around me. No church, no in person small group, no hugging my people, no random conversations with people at the park or grocery store, and my world was caving in. I wasn’t listening to the news but knew that there was something going on and I didn’t understand it all. I felt the pressure of voting, of making a difference, of doing the Lord’s will in it all. I felt disconnected from people, from friends, from those around me, and God.

The thought that makes me feel connected to someone is that they know what is going on with me. The thought that makes me feel connected to someone else is that I know what is going on with them. So I felt connected to God because I knew He knew all about me, but I didn’t feel connected to Him because I didn’t know what He was up to. And for some reason I had a ton of evidence that I wasn’t connected to others very well. No one was calling me to check in with me. No one had invited me to hang out. I didn’t know what was going on with a lot of my people. See all the evidence. I knew it was true. I felt justified to believe what I was thinking and even though it was causing me pain, I didn’t know how else to think about everything. My mind was spiraling, finding evidence for it to believe it is true, rinse and repeat. Lots of jumbled mess.

There were a few hours one day where I felt stuck. I didn’t know what to do. I froze. I cried. I didn’t know if I should share what was going on with me or pretend it wasn’t really happening. Shrug it off and think, I’m just having one of those days. My brain offered me to just get back in bed. To pull the covers over my head, but of course I felt worse. I tried to lay down and watch some shows but again pain. My body was physically tense. I was filled with lots of emotions. I wanted to get out of that feeling. But I knew I was looking for something external to change my internal. It just doesn’t work that way. So I was trying to feel better, and nothing was working.

But the training I had received as a coach helped me to know that I was creating this. So I started to investigate why I was feeling all of this. What was going on with me? I began to get curious. I sat with my thoughts. I mean really sat with them. I took out a pen and paper and just started word vomiting. Things I didn’t even know came out. Lots of thoughts about losing friendships, relationships, people, normalcy, fear of the unknown, fear of the future, tons of questions. Wow. once I saw what I was dealing with no wonder I felt overwhelmed and panicked. It was good to connect with myself. Oh… I see what is going on with you, connection! The pain started subsiding.

Now to connect me to God. I knew the struggle was I didn’t know what He was up to. So I went to some of my favorite key verses in Daniel that remind me who is on the throne. I looked at the outside circumstances and put what I knew was true about Him to all that was around me. I went to Psalms and was reminded of how He never changes. How great and mighty He is. I stood in awe of Him and all that He is. Oh… you know what is going on with me, I know who and what you are, connection! The pain still subsiding.

I prayed and laid all of what I just learned about me on paper to the One who hears it all and I cried out in sadness over all the things. He knows there will be pain, sadness, negative emotion and He wants me to bring it to Him. He can bear it, He can handle it. He wants to be in it with me. The pain is now lighter.

Then I went for a walk. Getting outside, breathing in the air, seeing the birds, the clouds and sun immediately made me feel even better. Walking and moving allowed me to feel alive. My heart was pounding, my blood flowing. My brain was surrounded with so many beautiful things. I was connected back to the world.

I called a friend. I shared what was going on. I openly said I was struggling. I was having a hard time with the election. I was feeling sad about the world. I was hurting but didn’t know where it was all coming from. I was tired of not seeing my people. Things were taking a toll on me, and that is okay. I have people, I have a small group, I have a church body, I have friends, I have family, I have a God who loves me and is in control. I have a purpose here on this Earth. Connection.

Steps to connection

1. Connect with self.

   Get out a piece of paper and write it all out. See it and understand yourself even more. Have an awareness about yourself because you paid attention.

2. Connect with God.

   Soak up scriptures. Listen to worship music. Flood your thoughts with TRUTH about Him.

3. Give your pain to Him

   Lament, cry out, weep and wail. He knows, and He wants it. He will be in it with you. Allow Him to be.

4. Go for a walk outside

   Feel your heart beat, come alive. See creation, and connect with the world.

5. Connect with someone

   Make the phone call. Share. Ask them questions, and listen. Know what is going on with them. Tell them what is going on with you and connect.

Practice this the next time you are feeling those same lonely thoughts start. Get in a habit of having this in your back pocket and don’t give the loneliness spiral an opportunity to take you out. Loneliness can be the beginning of a sin cycle for some people. God wants freedom. Satan wants defeat. He will use anything and this might be an easy tactic with you.

I want to equip you to steward your story and singleness and lonely is one part of that. You can be single and connected which feels a whole lot better. And creates better results for you!

Walking through it too,

Angie