Overcoming the Impossible! Here’s a few steps to make it happen!

This article is best viewed on Tamara's website, click to follow the link.

What has your year been like? Are you preparing yourself to look at what resolutions you wish to put into place for the New Year?

What if I were to say that I don’t do resolutions anymore? Why not?

Well, by creating a list of resolutions we’re focusing our energies on what’s negative or not working in our lives. When those resolutions don’t pan out we then bathe ourselves in negative self-talk; do this year after year and our self-confidence slowly evaporates. I know that only too well. I kept putting myself through that process because I desperately wanted to heal, to grow, to change.

The toll it took on my self confidence became overwhelming, and rather than being able to move forward to where I wanted to be, I became stuck. So stuck that I felt I wouldn’t ever be able to move forward, because there was probably something so wrong with me that no matter how hard I tried, it would never happen.

So how is a person going to change, grow and move forward in life if this approach doesn’t work so well?

Well, a few years ago I heard of a brand new approach, which spoke to my yearning soul. This new way seemed focused on positivity, and echoed the new lessons in positivity I was learning from other sources.

What is that approach and how has it made a difference in my life?

I learned about a very helpful exercise where I write my list of accomplishments from the closing year, and from those I make a list of goals for the upcoming year! From those goals I can start to create a plan by looking at the steps I need to go through to achieve those goals!

The difference I discovered in my life was profound, in that the shift was deep, changing my inner thoughts from negative to positive! The more I changed, the more I discovered I wished to change, and the more strength I developed to change!

Here’s a few articles which explain this in more detail:

A Neat Trick for Setting Goals

There’s a nuance of difference between making Resolutions and Setting Goals for your life! (Useful for any time of the year!)

The very phrase “Making Resolutions” or “New Year’s Resolutions” seem to be loaded with GUILT for most of us who try (and then fail) to do what we set out to do. I believe it’s time to drop this expression from our vocabulary! …Oh and by all means don’t tell people what “resolutions” you’re planning for yourself, because apparently it works against us psychologically!

A new you! Is this possible?

I’ve found personally that when I’m unhappy with myself/my life, that I need to step out of my depressed and negative mindset for a few moments, to be able to determine what I’m unhappy about (and saying “everything” won’t cut it!) to be able to figure out what my plan of action needs to be.

I’ve observed that in a multi-step plan, there are usually many smaller steps that I need to do in order to get to where I want to go, and that I need to be realistic in how long it will take me to get it done!

Luck is What Happens When Opportunity Meets Preparedness!

“Luck is what happens when Opportunity meets Preparedness”! This is so true!

Sometimes we don’t even know what to prepare for, yet if we’re OPEN then we tend to see more opportunities.

Opportunities are all around us, every moment, every day, yet when our spirits have become ground down we plod along just trying to survive.

Kudos not Kicks each year!

I love all the positive steps Etta outlines in her blog post “Be Calm, Create Your Action Plan”!

I stopped making resolutions a few years ago since they’re just self defeating! Inevitably we break them and then the cycle of guilt and negative self talk just reinforces the negative tapes that are already playing!

Making a change… “How do I take that first step?”

So, you wish to start thinking about making some changes in your life! …but how?

Whether it’s a New Year’s resolution or a decision at any time of the year, to making something change in one’s life is kind useless without a plan or a road-map! It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all that needs to be done, and then to throw up our hands in the air in disgust, and tell our selves it’s no use!

Please don’t do that! We all have issues, and we all have things we’re working on, even the people who seem practically perfect on the outside!

This past year saw me experiencing life in greater fullness because I had set that as a goal for my year! I will share some of the lessons I learned through this process… I wrote a few articles but didn’t share them here (for various reasons) and so my goal for the next year is to share more articles with deeper lessons I’ve learned!

What are your current struggles like?

Have you been struggling to overcome old habits or to achieve your dreams? Is what you’ve been working on been years in the making? How are you doing with this? Is it feeling like your efforts have been futile, no matter how much thought energy, time and efforts you’ve put in?

Here’s a few articles to help you get refocused:

10 Steps to Owning Our Happiness

We’ve all known people who defer their happiness in the name of completing their goal, yet goals can shift imperceptibly, getting more elusive as time passes, leaving people stuck in a life habit of not enjoying their lives in the present time!

So, what are the steps we can follow to get to own our “Happiness”?

Bringing Peace Of Mind into our lives…

Peace of mind… so essential for good emotional, spiritual and physical health! We cultivate it by choosing positive thoughts!

Don’t try to “chase away” negative thoughts, rather choose positive messages and keep repeating those! Trust is those thoughts, feel good about them, and keep selecting them when things don’t appear to go well in life!

I used to be a worrier, trying to anticipate everything before it happened and trying to prepare myself for everything! I didn’t have peace of mind! My mind was trying too hard to control every outcome by thinking of every possible outcome.

Do you need permission to start your dream activity?

I’d never thought of it before so deeply, how we all seek approval from others before we will start an activity or something new in our lives, yet how many of us feel we CAN’T do something, and so WON’T?

When we say we can’t do something, we do know on a conscious level that unless we take classes or find some way to learn, then we won’t have the necessary skills to do it. We can’t possibly know in advance if we truly have talent or not, without ever having tried it. It’s much like deciding we don’t like the taste of a new food before having eaten it.

Gratitude, Joy and Synchronicity

When our hearts are burdened we struggle to feel positive about anything. So starting with small things is then crucial to becoming able to get strong enough to turn the light switch on in our minds and hearts and to send the shadows fleeing.

Joy. It can be tiny moments, but add them together they can become a bucketful, a lake full and even feel as expansive as an ocean! Finding moments of joy and holding onto them is very important!

Must You Choose Only One or Two Activities for Life and Retirement?

Years ago when I was interested in quite a few new activities, I had some people trying to helpfully tell me I needed to choose one, maybe two of the activities which interested me the most, and focus only on those.

Their reasoning was that I couldn’t possibly do more things well, and that I’d be dispersing my energies too thin.

We need a Compass… Or more specifically, a Moral Compass!

A Moral Compass is more than doing the right thing because we’re afraid of getting caught if we break a rule or a law… It’s something that happens on a much deeper, soul level.

When we feel compelled to do the right thing, it’s because we feel it’s what needs to be done, even when people aren’t watching us to make sure if we do or don’t do something!

When the elephants poop in the ring… and other unexpected things!

We all want things to go as planned. It seems a like a huge disaster when something happens to throw us off track… if people are watching, we can feel humiliated, it’s as though we failed to deliver on the experience we had built up for ourselves (or perhaps for others) to expect.

In all our planning, and expecting certain results, we can become really thrown off by the unexpected, yet when we allow ourselves to spontaneously follow the flow, we may find ourselves surprised or even delighted!

XXX’ed Out! Mistakes and blame.

MISTAKES…

We all make them. Some are tiny and insignificant while others are life-affecting.

BLAME…

It’s sometimes very tempting to find someone to blame it on, rather than accepting responsibility and the CONSEQUENCES ourselves.

…Responsibility…

I witnessed a profound lesson in Faith and Patience!           

This year I experienced a profound lesson in hope, faith and believing in the impossible. It came through a family my office adopted for Christmas. This family was facing extreme difficulties which any of us would crack under, and they desperately needed help. Their electricity was shut off just before the cold of winter hit and they desperately needed our help.

However, the social worker we were working through as an intermediary didn’t tell the single mom that we were looking to get approval from the top brass to make a financial donation to pay their utility bills, just in case the answer might be no. Nothing would be more crushing than to get their hopes up that we might be able to help, and then have that taken away.

So, while we waited to hear the answer, we knew the mom had to go on hope and faith alone, without any assurances that her life was about to be helped in a profound way, that good was being worked out on her behalf, without her knowledge and behind the scenes.

Through this I realized that this exemplifies how the universe works in our lives too (though not with the same results) where it may feel like we’ve been abandoned or forgotten by God or the Universe, while far greater things are being worked out on our behalf, behind the scenes.

This rarely means that life will unfold exactly how we’ve envisioned it, rather that there’s elements which are included which are there to provide opportunities for growth, change and learning if we choose to see them and embrace them.

As crazy as this sounds, even our most difficult situations can bring about incredible inner changes. How? We can discover inner strength we never knew we had; we can see areas we need to change; we can learn new skills and we can open our minds to new opportunities.

Here’s some articles which speak about those things:

How do you know if you’re in the right place?

Making a big move or even any transition in life can feel daunting!

You’ve known that this change was coming. You’ve researched it. You’ve asked people for advice. You may even have tested it out a little!

Yet, once you jump in with both feet and land in that new place, whatever it may be for you, once there you may feel some little nagging feelings of uncertainty!

Impatience… “When will the Universe give me what I want?”

I’m seeing the desires of people around me, whether physically in my life, or virtually, through the Internet, the desires to change, to have their lives move forward, to be different.

There’s hesitation, almost trepidation of making the right choices, in choosing where they want their lives to go.

Loving and Respecting ourselves!

A huge challenge we all face is learning to love and respect ourselves. Putting this into practice is very difficult, yet a very crucial part to of our self-growth.

Here’s a few articles to help you with this:

Accepting and Embracing the Depressed Side of Ourselves

It takes great courage to accept and even embrace the depressed part of ourselves!

Understandably Depression can rear its head when we go through tough times, but when it occurs during periods of time when “everything is going well” that makes it seem BAFFLING and so we REJECT it!

Please note: If you’ve been diagnosed with a mental illness, don’t take my words here as permission to remove yourself from your medication! This article isn’t speaking to clinical or chemical depression, but is talking about situational depression.

All about “The Power of Your Identity”!

I love writing about personal development and positivity, so can you imagine how cool it was for me to find out about “The Power of Your Identity” by Rock Thomas, and to know I went to high school with him? Yes, really!

What are the chances that two people from the same graduating class would be inspired to write personal development books? Pretty farfetched?

Are you consciously opting out of the “Loser” myth?

The “Loser”Myth: Where did it come from?

By the time we’ve become adults, the myth of the “Loser” has become so embedded in or minds and our spirits that we no longer question if it’s true or not! We accept the myth as if it were a fact!

Opting out of the “Loser” myth…

Fear… What Can Hold Us Back?

Our fears can take many forms. This article talks about what can hold us back from pursuing our dreams and going all the way with them!

Even the strongest, most powerful people have or have had their fears. How we deal with them is key to not being held back by them!

Forgiveness… the mother of a mass shooter learns a profound lesson from the parents of the children who died.

“Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other to die!” – Buddha

When holding onto anger can destroy us…

So why forgive?

Freeing the Prisoner in our Mind

I read a very thought provoking article on Flavorwire.com, which reviews the film based on the Stanford Prison Experiment, where a psychology professor set up a prison environment in the basement of the Psychology Department and where students were randomly assigned the roles of “prisoner” or “guard”.

The author of the article, Moze Halpern, chose to make comparisons between the film and what happens in society where we have roles either assigned to us or where we chose them.

How to stop being Manipulated!

Tired of being manipulated? Tired of being toyed with for selfish purposes?

How do our “masters”, that is the narcissists keep us on a “leash” and push our buttons to keep us coming back?

One word. Fear.

Fear of losing their love. Fear of not getting their approval. Fear of their anger. Fear of their retribution… that’s revenge, or as they put it, punishment.

Is Love Enough to Help Someone Kick a Drug Habit?

Love and caring are necessary components in helping someone to kick a drug habit, but unfortunately, they aren’t all what’s needed!

Loving Ourselves… means we don’t always put ourselves LAST!

Learning to Love Ourselves…

This has got to be THE most difficult relationship of all! We’ve all heard of loving ourselves but when we turn the magnifying glass inwards, don’t we just cringe at the thought of saying “I love you” to ourselves?

On Comparing Ourselves to others…

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

How easy is it to feel badly when we compare ourselves to others following a similar path?

Is it HEALTHY when we find our mind doing this, and how can we harness it?

Red Ocean or Blue Ocean? How do you think?

Are you a Red ocean thinker or a Blue ocean thinker?

Hmmm… a new thought! What does this mean?

Time to Change the Negative Tapes!

As part of the Infinite Possibilities workshop (I believe it’s now the Love Your Life 30 Days Project) I did through https://www.TUT.com, Mike Dooley talked about changing the negative tapes in our minds which play back old unwanted and negative messages to us. Here’s what he said...

The Power of Positive Words!

You’ve heard that positive thinking affects more than your relationships, ability to achieve your goals, helps your work environment, among other benefits?

It’s becoming more and more obvious to health professionals that when we THINK positively and LIVE our lives in a positive way that our immune systems are strengthened and they say even cancer can be held at bay or eliminated!

“What if it really were up to me? Could I do it?”

“Is it really up to me?” This is a question I avoided looking at for many years.

I craved for people to help me out of the situations I desperately wanted out of; I struggled and struggled to find my way out.

I felt powerless to change anything and felt all the different things I was trying weren’t working because I was somehow cursed, or that I was a terrible loser that the universe couldn’t or wouldn’t help me by giving me a life free of troubles…

What is the purpose of an Anger Journal, and why you need one!

When I created the Anger Journal I knew I was creating a tool which would be much more than a notebook to dump thoughts!

After all, why would a person buy an anger journal if a simple notebook could suffice?

As with all my books, I’m creating tools. Tools to help a person deal with the immediate moment, and also as a way of gaining valuable insights for growth!

By asking guided questions, it becomes more than a dumping ground!

“What kind of love do I allow in my life?”

Here’s a question many men and women have at various times: Will I meet someone special? Will I have love in my life? Will someone love me?

You may probably be thinking of these things, yet dread repeating past mistakes…

When is it UNREASONABLE to expect forgiveness?

I’ve been sitting on this article idea for a little while since reading Alexi Rose’s very heartfelt article regarding Forgiveness and why she has deep misgivings with the word. I too had similar misgivings when I was struggling through my own healing, and so I’d like to share some of her thoughts, as well as what I’ve learned going through my own process.

“You’re wrong about that!”

How many times has it happened that you’ve been taught to do something a certain way and someone then does it differently and you blurt out “You’re doing it wrong!”

How many times have you been sure of your facts and someone says something you’re sure is wrong and you’ve said “You’re wrong about that!” …only to be proven wrong later?

Just how DOES a person deal with this?

Moving forward to new spiritual awareness...

Choosing Our Thoughts: From Adventures of the Soul!

It’s been a while since I’ve delved into the wonderful book by James Van Praagh: “Adventures of the Soul”!

Please see Dr. Amit Goswami’s groundbreaking documentary “The Quantum Activist” available for viewing on YouTube and his website. He brings Quantum Physics into our everyday lives in a simplified way!

Fulfilling the Human Condition from “Adventures of the Soul”

A little further into the book and James Praagh is speaking about Energy, more specifically Quantum Energy. What’s that? That was my question too!

Manifesting our Thoughts: More from “Adventures of the Soul”… The missing ingredient!

Do all thoughts have the same power to create our futures?

If we have random weird thoughts, will those have the same strength as deep wishes?

Are we victims of our untamed thoughts or do we have power to change them?

I read with interest how emotions give energy to our thoughts and what’s the missing ingredient!

Raising Our Level of Consciousness from “Adventures of the Soul”

We’re at the beginning of the book still, where the author is discussing what consciousness is, and how to raise our levels each day.

All of these articles contain the lessons I’ve learned along my journey. Many times along the way I thought I’d be crushed but the Universe an God provided me with opportunities for growth and I’ve grown beyond what I ever thought I’d be capable of doing. These changes took time and effort, sometimes very incrementally.

I’m gratefully sharing what I’ve learned, knowing that we all have the inner power to achieve these changes, even if it doesn’t feel that way right now!

So my message is this: learning to love ourselves in a deep way which changes our inner fiber is very do-able even if it is challenging!

Change is part of life itself, let’s choose strength, positivity and Love!

Tamara

“When I know better, I do better!” – Maya Angelou

See more helpful articles: https://tamarakulish.com/resource-articles

My library of books is available on Amazon!

LARGE PRINT EDITION: How to Heal Your Life on a Deep Heart Level

LARGE PRINT EDITION: Art Journal Workbook

#learning, #growth, #universe, #love, #loving, #time, #healing, possibilities, #open, #Amazon, sharing, #family, #blog, #author, #publishing, #self development, #self improvement, #inspirations, #books, #health, #art, #photography, #mental health, #fear, #happiness, #recovery