Today is a Good Day
Yes, this one is bordering on obnoxiously positive, I know.. but some days it IS just as simple as deciding on which thought, perspective, idea or story we want to set up camp in. #outofourheads #andintoourlives
What is Emotional Abuse? | The Top Emotional Abuse Warning Signs
How to know if you are being emotionally abused? Abuse - no matter what kind, is always about power and control. But it's not always obvious this is what's happening - especially when it comes to emotional abuse - which is why we are talking about it here in this important video. Emotional abuse is a lot more common and serious than many of us might think because it's not as obvious as other kinds of abuse, and you may not even realize you are being emotionally abused by someone in your life. Here we [...]
A Happiness Exercise that WORKS! (and Lasts)
This is one of the simplest, most powerful and research backed happiness building exercises that anyone can do. No, it’s not about just being more grateful (although that is a good one). It’s something that can be even more powerful than gratitude... This exercise not only helps to give a serious boost to your happiness and well-being, research shows it also has one of the longest term effects of any happiness boosting exercise or activity that we can do. There are three simple steps to this exercise, and I’m going to walk you through them [...]
7 COGNITIVE DISTORTIONS FOR THE CALM YOUR STRESSED & ANXIOUS MIND CHALLENGE
Download the PDF HERE: 7 Cognitive Distortions 7 COMMON COGNITIVE DISTORTIONS 1. All or Nothing Thinking: You look at things in absolutes, and extremes. ex: one bad thing happens and suddenly all is doomed. My Example: 2. Mental Filter: You focus only on the negatives and ignore the positives. My Example: 3. Mind Reading: You assume that people are reacting to or thinking about you negatively when there’s no actual proof. My Example: 4. Fortune Telling: You just assume and predict things are going to turn out badly - with no actual proof. My Example: 5. [...]
A Powerful Little Deep Breathing Technique for Stress & Anxiety
If you are feeling anxious, overwhelmed, stressed out or ready to lose it for any reason at all, this exercise is for you (it's my favourite one and I use it all the time).It's a quick and easy breathing exercise that is easy to do, simple to remember and is a powerful one for anxiety management, to calm us down, and help us feel more grounded and in control when we are feeling worked up, emotional, or like our head is spinning or our thoughts are swirling.But why do this breathing exercise as opposed [...]
3 Mindless Social Media Habits that are Causing You Harm.
This social media thing almost seemed to come out of nowhere. Well, not really, I guess it all kind of started years ago with MySpace. Myspace, do you remember that one? What ever happened to MySpace? I guess they became the Nokia of the social media world...I can’t help but feel sad, for both. But this social media thing, that’s not really a thing, but has pretty much become a way of life. Within a few short years, we've morphed in to a culture of pictures, posts, likes and shares, but none of it came with a rule book [...]
How to Reduce Your Stress, Deal with Anxiety and Keep Yourself From Losing Your Sh*t!
This is a big reason why we get overwhelmed, stressed out, anxious and I talk about how we can start dealing with stress, and how to relieve stress and deal with anxiety by setting boundaries. Did you know many of the biggest signs and causes of stress, and many symptoms of anxiety come from a lack of healthy boundaries in our lives and in our relationships? And we definitely experience some of the biggest effects of that stress and anxiety when we're not protecting our buffer zone. We go a whole lot deeper [...]
The Danger Of Taking On Other People’s Problems.
Have you ever found yourself ready to pull out your hair because “that person just won’t listen to my advice,” or because “don’t they see how much they are hurting themselves by doing that,” or because “I can’t fathom how someone could be so irresponsible – it’s just too much!” But getting all akimbo and kerfuffled like this is almost totally unnecessary. And we do it because we feel responsible for other peoples' problems. We feel like we have to solve their problem or their life for them. We feel like we can’t possibly let [...]
A Simple Exercise For Managing Anxiety
In this video I talk about what anxiety is, and what one of the most important things we can build within ourselves is to help us overcome excess or unhelpful anxiety. I then teach you a simple mindset strategy you can use anytime you're having thoughts that are making you feel anxious or overwhelmed. Also, make sure you grab my stress management tip sheet below.
3 Unintentional Habits that Are Killing Your Confidence.
Bad habits. Sometimes they are things we don’t even know we’re doing, but are having a negative effect on our self-confidence nonetheless. Now we could go on to hypothesize as where and why and where we picked up these bad habits in the first place, but we’ll save that for another day. For today, let’s just draw our attention to them, and make a concerted effort to get rid of them. Saying sorry all the time. Of course I’m not talking about apologizing if we’ve hurt, offended, inconvenienced, or upset someone (whether intentionally or not), but those [...]
A Big Mistake You are Making that is Keeping You Stuck.
Have you ever convinced yourself not to do that thing that you really need to do, that is good for you, that will help you get closer to your bigger goals, that will give you a deep sense of satisfaction in the end because…. you don’t feel like it right now? And if so, if you do tend to listen to and abide by your feelings in this way, you are making a big mistake. Of course, you are absolutely permitted to feel exactly what it is you are feeling at any given moment on any [...]
The Easy Way to Find Your Passion & Purpose.
It’s a question I get quite often from my clients “How do I figure out what my passion is? How do I get there? And besides that, how do I even figure out where there is?” Many of us are standing on the edge with our eyes in a strained squint expecting that some purpose filled destination will reveal itself off on the horizon, and all we have to do is look down to see the perfectly laid path before us, step on to it and start on our easy breezy saunter right in to our passion [...]
Foods That Help with Depression, Anxiety, Stress & Sleep
Foods That Help with Depression, Anxiety, Stress & Sleep *I always suggest we get as many of our core nutrients from the food sources themselves. If you do supplement, please make sure you consult with a health professional (doctor, registered dietitian, naturopath etc.) before starting on a supplement regimen. Just because it’s natural, does NOT mean it’s safe. B VITAMINS - A deficiency in B vitamins can trigger depression. Foods rich in B vitamins include: Beef (I recommend the leanest cuts) Avocado Asparagus Almonds C VITAMINS - This vitamin protects our cells and increases immunity [...]
A Funny thing that Will Reduce Your Stress & Increase Your Confidence.
Who needs more fun in their lives? I, for one, definitely do. With businesses and babies and responsibilities, and with all of the other stuff that comes from being a grown up, sometimes I get so busy that I forget to take a moment or two for a little fun. I was hit smack between the eyes with this one a short while ago while working with someone who is going through some really difficult stuff. She and her husband have been trying to get pregnant for the past 3 years and after investing thousands of dollars in trying [...]
Why Getting Unsolicited Advice Often Feels Icky.
Have you ever wondered why it is that most of us think other people want, no NEED our advice and should absolutely do what we say and make the choices we can clearly see are best from them - but then when the tables are turned and they come to us and tell us what to do, or how we should live our lives or what choices WE must make, we get irritated, resistant, frustrated and feel like they "really don't know what they are talking about"? So we all want to give our golden, must-be-revered [...]
The Thing that Pisses Me Off Most About My Job
I’ve been a therapist for 6 years now. Whoa, 6 years? How did that happen?? And I have to tell you that in the 6 years of doing this work and from the hundreds of men and women I have worked with I have come across 3 people whom I did not enjoy working with. One was a sociopath and was unable to connect with his emotions making it very difficult to make any progress in our work (needless to say, that counselling relationship did not last long). One was a women who [...]
Why So Much of the Self-Help Advice Doesn’t Work.
There is A LOT of mental health and self development advice out there and it seems like everyone is a personal growth expert these days. But the thing is, a lot of what people are telling us to do to feel happy, fulfilled and content in life is kind of useless. But not because of WHAT they are saying, but because of HOW they are saying it. And if you don’t know well enough how the human psyche typically works, you would have no idea that your advice, although true, probably won't make any kind of real difference. Here’s [...]
6 Annoying Habits that Make People SO Hard to Be Around!
The truth is, we all behave in ways that are less than becoming from time to time. But there are a few notable behaviours that some people exceed their quota on far too often making them not at all nice to be around. But since we really can't change the behaviours of anybody but ourselves, let's just go through the list to remind US to not be one of those people. Constantly Criticizing Picking people apart, judging, putting people down (even in subtle ways), or having something to say about people you know that’s not uplifting or flattering [...]
Why Some People Irritate Us SO Much.
Why do some people irk, irritate, or get under our skin while others don’t? And furthermore, why do we find certain people so totally annoying while someone else may think that same person is perfectly fine? Well, I’m going to tell you, but you may not like it. It’s because Carl Jung (one of the grandfathers of modern psychology) found, through his lifetime of work and research, that the reason some people irritate us so much is because they embody something of ours called the Shadow Side. The Shadow Side is the parts of ourselves we don’t like. The [...]
How to Deal with Social Anxiety.
Have you ever gone to a party, event, or social gathering where you didn’t really know many people and as soon as you walked through the doors felt extremely uncomfortable? I mean so uncomfortable that the only thing you could think about in that moment was what kind of excuse you'd be able to come up that would justify your intense desire to turn right around and high tail it out of there? And did that feeling stay with you to the extent that next time you were offered an invitation to an event, you were [...]
How to Get Through Rejection.
Can we just cut right to the chase and say that rejection is probably one of the worst feelings a person can feel? I mean, really? Is there any worse feeling? Rejection. Feels. Terrible. And it feels so terrible because we often take rejection personally – we believe that when we are being rejected it means there’s something fundamentally wrong with us, and because our deepest desire as human beings is to feel like we are actually good enough, rejection doesn’t really help us in that cause. But, the truth is, we’ve all been rejected, and we’re [...]
Don’t Bother With Your Daily Gratitude Practice – It’s A Waste of Your Time.
You’ve heard it, I’ve heard it, we’ve all heard it: One of the biggest and most significant contributors to genuine happiness and fulfillment in life comes from being intentionally grateful. Have an attitude of gratitude (if you will). And once word got out around the power of gratitude, the whole thing became all the rage. Everyone started following the trend of taking on a daily gratitude practice that typically goes a little something like this: “Start or end your day with 3 things you are grateful for and it will change your life.” Well, yes and no. But mostly [...]
Why You Get Super Stressed Out & Sometimes Lose Your Sh*t.
Have you ever witnessed that classless human being at Starbucks who yells or snarks at the barista for putting whole milk in their 1% latté? Or the crazed maniac who gets cut off in traffic and then lays on their horn, rolls down their window and screams totally appalling words at the hurried perpetrator? Or the sub-par parent who yells and their child in the grocery store line up for whining about not getting to eat every single chocolate bar on the stand in front of them? Okay, truth time. Have you ever been [...]
To Get Anywhere in Life, Here’s What You Need to Know.
It’s easy to feel good when our businesses are booming, our health is in tip top shape, our friendships are feeling rewarding and connected, and our emotional well-being is intact. Anyone can believe in themselves and feel confident and happy under those circumstances. The real test, the real challenge, the real measure of centeredness and success comes when we experience failure. When things don’t work out. When stuff doesn’t go according to plan. When we get knocked down. And many of us often believe that the people who are out there and killing it in [...]
An Important Reason You May Be Procrastinating (You’ve Never Heard this One Before).
Procrastination is a thing. It’s a big thing. For a lot of people. Not just for lazy, unmotivated, irresponsible people. In fact, in my experience as a therapist and working with hundreds of smart, successful, accomplished men and women, procrastination does not discriminate. And for those of you who have ever researched why people typically procrastinate, you know already that it’s often a by-product of perfectionism (that too is a thing. A big thing. For a lot of people). If you’ve not heard this before, I’ll explain briefly before I continue. Perfectionism and procrastination. Perfectionists [...]
Why We Get Overwhelmed and Frustrated in Our Closest Relationships.
For those of you who have ever felt any resentment toward anyone (aka all of us), have you ever wondered why you've felt that way? I mean really thought about why you were feeling resentful toward that person? Often, we think the reason we feel resentment is because other people ask too much of us, or cross our boundaries, or make us feel guilty, or don't do what we want them to do or think they should do. But we get resentful for another reason. And we’ll get to the that, but first, let’s talk [...]
Why You Procrastinate & Are Unproductive.
Procrastination is a big one. I hear it a lot in my practice and in my personal life because a lot of people struggle with it. And often, when we don’t get things done, when we put stuff off, when we chose to binge watch Netflix or scroll through Facebook for hours on end creeping in on people’s personal lives, by the end of the day we realize we’ve accomplished a big fat nothing, and you and I both know that does not fill us with a whole lot of joy and satisfaction. To go [...]
Stop Trying To Be So Nice. It’s Making You Miserable.
By nice, I mean trying so hard to always be pleasant, pleasing, lovely, happy, positive, only doing what other people want you to do, never speaking up for fear of ruffling any feathers, keeping yourself hidden and small behind what you think other people want or expect you of you… nice. Don’t get me wrong, I am a big advocate for treating others with kindness, care, and respect. Be considerate and thoughtful, yes. Only doing or saying or acting in ways we think other people want us to because we want, no we NEED them [...]
A Hard Truth You Need to Hear.
And it’s going to be hard for different people for different reasons. This might be a little harsh, and if it makes you uncomfortable, it’s probably a good thing – it means you need to hear it. We’re just going to jump right in, so here it goes: No one is better than you and you are not better than anyone else. For some of you, that may be relieving, for others uncomfortable. So let me explain: We all have our strengths, gifts, talents and abilities that we bring to the table in any of [...]
Boundary Setting & Effective Communication Skills Bootcamp **CONTEST**
In case you missed it on Periscope*, Julia Kristina Counselling is holding a contest for 1 exclusive seat in her Boundary Setting and Effective Communication Skills Bootcamp 6-week LIVE virtual coaching group. Contest closes at 2:00 pm PST on Saturday January 16th, 2016. Here are all the ways to get your name in the draw: You get 1 entry for: Visit Julia Kristina's Twitter page found here and RETWEET the official Bootcamp posters on her twitter feed Go to Julia Kristina Counselling’s Facebook Page found HERE and SHARE the Bootcamp posters. There are several posters on both Twitter and [...]