We can’t be healthy alone

In America, we frame our ability to succeed in terms of our own skills and hard work. We are typically incentivized to win, to become that next big star, to reach that next milestone, or to become famous.

This constant competitiveness creates an us vs. them mentality. It has made us reward and idolize those that have made it, and neglect those that struggle.

And for those who have made it, well, it’s been great for them. But meanwhile more and more of us are living paycheck to paycheck. More and more of us are facing homelessness. More and more of us are becoming depressed, addicted and suicidal.

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We Need Trust to Thrive

My world without trust

I grew up in an environment where I was regularly criticized, berated, or yelled at for minor infractions. I never knew when the tirades would come, and so I tried at all costs to avoid my parents. But it wasn’t easy to thrive in our small home. I didn’t know who I could trust. I felt like I was constantly walking on eggshells, and because I felt I could be blamed for just about anything, the world did not feel like a safe, just, or fair place to be.

It took decades to finally understand the diagnoses that explained my parent’s behaviors. But as a kid, it was much harder to make sense of the anger. I alternated between trying to please them and lashing out. Because I couldn’t make sense of my life at home and lacked healthy parenting, I had to draw my own conclusions about the world. I decided that I had to take care of myself. I couldn’t trust people of authority or God. Love wasn’t something that I could count on. I couldn’t trust that good things or good people could come my way.

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Why is change sometimes so damn hard?

Why is change sometimes so damn hard?

For some of us, there is an area of our life where change seems too damn hard. Maybe it’s getting healthy, maybe it’s changing that pesky habit, maybe it’s getting that promotion. We look to friends or others in social media who are succeeding in those realms, and think, “they have no idea how hard it is!” and “why is it so easy for them?”.

Change is hard because of our expectations.

We tend to think that we should see a linear relationship between our efforts and our results. In other words, more efforts, more results.

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Just One Thing You Need To Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

As the New Year approaches, it is a great time to start thinking about what we can do to improve. But if we don’t have a good track record with New Year’s resolutions, we might find the idea daunting. We might even be wondering if it’s worth doing. Indeed a ¹study that tracked people who made New Year’s resolutions found that only 46% kept their New Year’s resolutions past the six-month mark.

How To Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

But all hope is not lost! If 46% of the subjects were able to keep their New Year’s Resolutions, then what was different about them that made that possible?

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3 Tips to Find the Courage to Change

For most of my life, I ran away from opportunities because I lived in fear.   I had no courage to change. When I was a child, I wanted to be an actress. I remember one of my earliest performance experiences. I was playing a young Chinese little sister who had to bring out a Chinese dust broom to the girl playing my mother.   When my teacher cued me out on stage, I handed the broom to ‘my mother’, and we dropped it. We picked it up again, and in my nervousness, we dropped it again.   By then the audience was laughing, and I couldn’t get off that stage fast enough!

I remember in High school, my school put on really fun musicals that I would have loved to be a part of. By then I was playing the French horn, and I felt safer in the theater orchestra with people I knew. I was afraid to be associated with the acting crowd, and resisted, even though acting and dancing seemed like so much fun!

In college, there were opportunities to live abroad.   I would have loved to travel, and explore other cultures, but I passed those up, because my experience living in Hong Kong as a child was so traumatic for me.

I’ve missed out on so much that would have made my life more fun and more meaningful.   But thank goodness, I now have tools to release my fears!  

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