It is a new beginning but most of us will identify with resolutions — whether we make them or not. What was 2013 like for you? Can you name 10 or more things you were grateful for in the past year? Write down those 2013 experiences for which you are grateful and then ask yourself, “How can I build upon these experiences in 2014?”

Too often we look at that which we do not like and then say we are going to change! The problem is that we are coming from an “I don’t like this” position. For example, if I don’t like Lima beans am I really going to be able to force my Self to eat them just because I made a resolution to do so? But if I have been eating more vegetables and I find my Self is enjoying new vegetables then I may make a promise to expand my repertoire of vegetables by tasting new ones and old ones that I did not like. Now, what if we look at our body and we dislike it and say we are going to change it? Is that like Lima beans? YES! We will try to avoid that which we do not like. So, we will work out an not see immediate results and fizzle because of disgust or some sort of feeling. If we love the feeling of our healthy, fit body we will work toward that experience in small steps.

Honor your Self this new year. Build upon that which you enjoy and wish to enjoy. I am so grateful for all of you are supporting me by reading my blog posts. I thank you! I wish you all a very happy and fulfilling year ahead!

With warmth,
Kristen

Whether in business or life each person has a brand. The problem is that most people are unconscious of their brand. How do we consciously and with intent create our own personal brand — a Me Brand?

In business, we are familiar with product and corporate brand. As a result, employees may identify with the company or product brand and thereby not see the importance of their own brand within that structure. An owner may identify with the brand and reputation of her or his company but that does not determine her or his self identity and reputation. People will separate the two. For example, “Joe” may be seen as a brilliant business owner but a miserable man. Identifying with the “other” brand, the individual is not conscious of their Me Brand.

A Me Brand is important for many reasons, e.g., sales, corporate culture, and personal success. A sales person can repeatedly sell a product to a customer or develop a relationship with a client who buys for a lifetime. A customer purchases without loyalty and may shop lowest price or convenience. A client develops loyalty and buys from someone with whom they have a relationship. So, if you would like to develop a relationship with potential clients or existing customers you may benefit from developing a Me Brand.

Often, in order to develop a consistent culture, corporations are using “personality” typing with employees and new hires. While this is helpful, it can be enhanced by assisting the employee with the use of that information to develop their Me Brand. They are then consciously creating their unique identity with their strong qualities and adding to the diverse yet unified corporate team as well as to the clients and or bottom line.

In order to develop a successful career personally, development of your brand is important. Your brand can exist because of the perceptions and assumptions others have of you. That is not a brand of which you are necessarily aware nor is it the way in which you want your brand to develop. Do you know how others perceive you? How do you want to be known? It is important for you to be able to answer that question with honest thoughts and goals. It is also important to understand that there are ways you may want to be known but you may be coming across different. Consequently, it is important to understand what is causing the difference so the correction can be made.

Everything in business starts with you! What is the experience you wish to create and to have in each of your business relationships? In order to define and create those experiences you must be aware of your Self. Your attitude, your philosophy, your personality are the first aspects that your colleagues, peers, managers, clients, and others see and experience. The more aware you are of how and who you are in business (or life) the more clear and consistent your brand will be reflected. The more you are branded as a positive, likable person, the more people and clients will want to know you. Consequently, the greater your success!

It’s common conversation to talk about comfort foods. We all get a picture of certain foods when it is mentioned. Very few imagine healthy food from a living source for their comfort foods (unless it is a vegan recipe for macaroni and cheese or coconut macaroons). Still the concept of comfort foods as we have become accustomed in this country, are those foods that, for the most part, are “man made”. Let’s ponder a possible reason.

First let’s address the emotions that need to be comforted. All people have the same emotions. It is a universal language. We can take all of the emotions and divide them into love-based and fear-based emotions. The love-based emotions are love, acceptance, peace, joy, unity, etc. The fear-based emotions are fear, anger, hurt, loneliness, guilt, shame, rejection, attachment, etc. We can agree that most do not seek comfort when feeling love-based emotions. Therefore, most seek comfort when feeling fear-based emotions.

Let’s go one step further in our understanding of emotions in life. The love-based emotions are considered light. In fact, they make most of us feel light, open, and expansive. The fear-based emotions are dense and dark. They, in turn, make most of us feel burdened, closed, and small. It is the fear-based emotions that allow us to feel weighted down and, yet, at times, empty. It is the fear-based emotions that allow us to feel imbalanced, ungrounded, not centered. Consequently, it is the fear-based emotions (now called stress) that lead to illness and injury.

Let’s return to the topic at hand. If we are feeling a fear-based emotion (or 10) and are looking for comfort, you would think we would reach for love. Yet, when we are lonely, we tend to push people away and lock ourselves further into the loneliness. Right? As another example, when we are depressed we want to shrink back and die. We do not want to access help even though we wish for the rescue from the pain. This is how the fear-based emotions stay alive. They feed off of the fear within us. So, it is starting to make sense that our fear-based emotions would guide us to pick up foods that are equally destructive. Foods that would feed the very fear that is thriving inside. Food that is altered by processing. Food that was invented to create an addiction.

Let’s take a sidebar. Addiction. Addiction represents a person’s core fears. People have known for thousands of years that fear creates attachment to the very pain that is creating the fear in the first place. It is circular.

That being said, it is when we are feeling pain, out of sorts, out of balance, and/or not centered that we reach for the comfort foods (the addictive foods) that feed those very emotions. We reach for the very foods that feed the imbalance and any irregular cells in our body that are called cancer. We aren’t feeling good so we don’t want good food. We are feeling bad and want the “food we shouldn’ t eat” — the bad food. It is why we are hearing western medicine now say that stress causes or is a cause of cancer and illness.

In conclusion, when we are experiencing fear-based emotions in this life, we can understand why we reach for those foods that are most harmful to our health — they feed the fear! In the future, when we are feeling fear-based emotions and want to reach for comfort foods, let us stop for a moment and acknowledge the emotion. Let’s agree to ask ourselves, “If I had a child who was hurting right now, would I give them harmful foods or would I hold them and help heal their pain?” Then, maybe, we will pick up an apple or almonds and comfort ourselves with softness from within. That is when the healing of our pain will truly begin.

As a people, we seem to be defining ourselves as entitled. There are many examples. People don’t vote, but they want things to be in their favor. The father is handicapped, so it is ok for the adult child to use the tag for parking. Because someone has money, he or she feels they should get preferential treatment. Because the other has more money, a person feels deserving of that other paying for something. Even though the policy says one thing, a person who feels entitled feels he or she should be given special variance to that policy. There is the entitled thought that if a person yells loud enough and makes enough commotion, he or she will give or get money back or get their way!! A cop has numbers to make, so he or she dishes out a DUI to a person who makes a traffic error because he or she can (no care for the impact on that person). And so the stories go…

Until we stop thinking from this point of reference, we will not take responsibility to make the change needed on this plane. We are not entitled to all of Mother Earth’s resources or each other’s resources. In fact, we are not entitled — period. Many articles talk of entitlement synonymously with narcissism. While there is a cross over, they are each separate and distinct. Entitlement seems to have various characteristics.

Entitlement is a fear-based experience. It comes, at least in part, from the fear of not having or the fear of not being ok or good enough. Somehow a person learns that they do not have to work for what they are receiving. They do not have to earn the experience or object. They do not feel the personal ownership that comes with the earning. They think they deserve things they haven’t earned and may develop contempt for people who work to earn things. That suggests they are lacking in confidence and may feel contempt for themselves if they have to work to earn something. Yet, any time a fear-based experience is in our life, it is an opportunity to heal. Our fear-based emotions and/or experiences are in our lives to show us that which we are not. In other words, they are opportunities to heal and unveil our True, Soulful self.

As long as entitlement is acceptable or fashionable, we will see a vanishing of

As those qualities dissipate, the blame mentality and attitude of indulgence and anti-responsibility are fed. It, therefore, affects the way we treat each other, animals, objects, and Mother Earth and her resources. Concurrently, it holds the individual back from their

So, where do we begin? With our Self and then our children! In life, there is no entitlement, there is no blame, and there is no expectation. There is only you. So, the true antidote is in the personal acceptance of responsibility for the actions, thoughts, and beliefs that you may have bought into. It takes introspection and a sense of being humble to be aware of where you may be feeling entitled. Once you can be honest with your Self and acknowledge those places where you are feeling entitled, you can begin to unravel the snarled web of all you gathered in this life that lead to the entitlement. It is then that you can begin your healing. As you pay attention to the cords that make up that snarled web, you then can begin to heal your children and redirect them to a life that is absent of entitlement.

Most women would love to be known for who they are and loved for who they are. Yet, in our culture, what defines an attractive woman is her appearance and what defines an attractive man is his achievement. In a heterosexual environment, most men will never meet the beautiful woman who resides in a body that men or society deem as “not so perfect”. And yet, a woman will meet a good man who resides in a not-so-perfect body.

Who defines a woman’s body as beautiful? It does not appear to be women. Women work very hard and spend billions of dollars annually to create a body they feel will be good enough for our society’s definition of beautiful. Did women truly agree that a beautiful body is one that requires intense work and surgery to maintain?

Women very often hate their body. They are more often than not in a state of judging their body rather than loving their body. Women learn this. They learn that their body is a public viewing of how they are not good enough — not good enough to be accepted or loved. It appears to be an experience that gets handed down through mother to daughter! That suggests that women have bought into a patriarchal view that is destructive of them. A view that appears to say, “As a woman you will never be good enough to be a man.” It is the men in society that dictate what an attractive body type is. It is women who agree to attempt to create it. Consequently, it is the women who suffer the consequences of failing to meet the male expectation. What would happen if women decided to set their own standard of what their beautiful body is?

In order for that to happen, women would have to feel their own power. Women have learned to hide their power and play the roles dictated by a patriarchal society. Part of the hiding comes from the historic obedience to men’s desires that women have accepted. Obedience, however, only occurs as a survival mechanism. It appears to be a large part of the survival mechanism that has been learned and ingrained in women for more than 2000 years. Women have been teaching girls and other women how to be obedient to society’s expectations for a very long time. For example, in Florida the schools are now doing a brief physical on the children and sending letters to parents to notify them of overweight and obese children based up on the body-mass index. In a middle school a female athlete was sent home with a letter to give to her mother that said she was overweight. Unfortunately, they had her height off by 2 inches!! the mother of this particular student was very supportive and notified the school but what would have been the repercussions had that young, fit, healthy, teenager read the letter and had no support that allowed her see the error at MANY levels!!

It has been shown and discussed that women are not attractive when they are ambitious and intelligent (e.g., Miss Representation, 2012). Society has been trained to view an attractive woman as a sexy, thin woman not necessarily a healthy, conservative woman. This sets a stage for women to shy away from developing a sense of professional self. She tends to feel there is a conflict between professional and woman. Just the other day, I was sitting in a business meeting when one of the men stood to give a testimonial about the women in the group. His testimonial was that the women in the group are beautiful and manage to get up early enough for the early meeting to put on their make-up!! Seventy percent of the women were appalled and angry, while 30% giggled and thought it was funny!! All of the women in the group are high-powered business owners or professional (attorneys, doctors, etc.). Even many women who are successful in a corporate environment either shut down their sexuality and dress androgynously or overstate their sexuality and dress provocatively. Why? Because both extremes develop out of a focus on the image of what they are not. Why have women not developed a style that “suits” them in the business world. Each person can develop their own insignia rather than blending into the masses or the expectations. This is where women can begin to teach one another a new way of expressing their professional self.

It is in women choosing to define their Self that change will begin. Women must be willing to know what they want to experience and be willing to create that very experience. Women will need to help each other develop that confidence and inner knowing of who they are in order to initiate change in the cultural view of what they are. It is then that women will be known and loved for who they are from the inside out.

I am SO VERY UPSET!! We realized, in choosing a picture to represent this article that we could choose a horrific picture of an anorexic women or a media-based picture of a woman. I wanted this beautiful woman:

But the people of our culture have been programmed to KNOW the media’s view of women or be captured by hideous horror. It is the only view that will capture the attention of the public! So, even in my office, we chose a picture that would catch the public’s eye. How awful is this situation?! Please let me know your thoughts!

I write this for the family, friends, and others who suffer as a result of the Oklahoma tornado, the latest tragedy. May you all find a way to heal from the loss, the trauma, and the suffering. May you find life and know that all those who crossed over as a result of this tragedy are in a warm, accepting new beginning. They are not suffering. It is those of you left behind who feel the suffering and the pain of the loss and the tragedy. I feel the agony of the helplessness even from afar.

As I sat at dinner last night seeing my first bit of news, I was emotionally devastated by the suffering and loss of the people of Oklahoma. Another tragedy! I couldn’t believe it. Everyone in the restaurant was talking with one another: strangers, friends, family, all one. None of us could grasp the meaning of all this tragedy. We all hurt for the victims. People were questioning the meaning of life, questioning purpose. Slowly, the conversations shifted from the pain of the victims, and the victims’ family and friends to their own fears. Then people were no longer talking as a whole but had split into their own groups again. Most talking about the fear of the natural disasters being on the increase and wondering how bad hurricane season will be this year.

What could possibly be the silver lining in such a dark series of natural (and not so natural) disasters!? We all unite, at least initially. It is at the core of us all to unite to help. To stand as one when something has gone against us. Maybe we are being asked to stand as one always. To not allow our fear to fragment us yet again.

Donations may be made online at www.unitedwayokc.org or by mail to: United Way of Central Oklahoma, P.O. Box 837, Oklahoma City, OK 73101 with notation for May Tornado Relief.

Anxiety!! What can I do to make it stop and go away! Anxiety feels like a helpless state of suffering but there are things a person can do to heal and transcend the suffering. This article will give a feel for what can be done. It is not meant to be an exhaustive list or suggestive. It is meant to open the possibilities of treatment and healing of the suffering of anxiety. The article will look at western medicine, and then will focus on self help, therapy, and all other medicines.

Welcome to Part 2 of this series on anxiety where we will look at causes of anxiety. Part 1 described anxiety and gave a simple description or feel of anxiety. If you missed the beginning of this series, you can find it by clicking here: PART ONE. This article will address how anxiety may be caused by environmental factors, medical factors, substance abuse, or a combination of these. Although it has been suggested there may be a genetic component in anxiety, this article will talk of environmental factors that may be more influential. Finally, the article will address that while anxiety is a response to outside forces and can be amplified with “negative self-talk” or a belief in the worry, rarely can an immediate trigger to anxiety be identified.

What is anxiety? In this time of economic strain and significant transition , people are having their fears illuminated. At what point do those fears become anxiety? How does someone interrupt/stop the anxiety when it is happening? What causes anxiety to become more of a steady state beyond an emotional reaction? What triggers a feeling of anxiety versus an anxiety attack? Does someone have to live the rest of their life on medication to “manage” anxiety or can you heal from it? All of these questions will be addressed in this article. The series will be divided into three parts: what is anxiety; what causes it; what are the techniques that prevent or interrupt the anxiety and the treatments to heal.

Anxiety is described as the fear of fear. It tends to be vague. As an emotion, we have all experienced it. You are getting ready to go out for the evening and all of a sudden you get this odd, gently disturbing fluttering in your gut or tingling of your skin. You wonder from where the feeling is coming but then keep going and don’t think any more about it as it drifts away and you continue to dress and go to your event. Anxiety can become more consistent for some. That consistency may take the form of a person experiencing anxiety periodically for a limited amount of time or consistently always increasing and decreasing in intensity. There is a significant difference between the experience that everyone has of a brief, intermittent feeling of anxiety or angst and someone who lives with chronic anxiety that can become debilitating.

This post looks at some of the emotions of addiction — in the addict and in those who are in relationship with the addict/alcoholic.  Addiction enters through the person who is using but flows through to everyone in the addict’s or alcoholic’s life.  This is because of the abuse pattern (see previous blog entry). While all people around the world feel the same emotions, we will look at those emotions that are always a part of the addict’s or alcoholic’s life.  We will then look at the emotions of those people who are in the lives of the addict/alcoholic.