Posts tagged with “resilience”

How I Developed Self-Worth After Being Sexually Harassed and Fired

“Your value doesn’t decrease based on someone’s inability to see your worth.” ~Unknown

In my early twenties, I was a food and beverage manager at a nice hotel in Portland, Maine. About a month after I started working there, they hired our department director, a man twice my age whom I would report to.

At the end of his first week, we went out for a “get to know each other” drink at a loud and busy bar. As we drank and chatted, he was physically very close to me. I told myself it was because of the noise.

His …

The Simple Path to Change When You’re Not Satisfied with Your Life

By Catherine McCourt

“Making a big life change is scary, but you know what’s even scarier? Regret.” ~Zig Ziglar

Fifteen years ago, I made one of the biggest changes in my life. It was something I had wanted to do for so long but had never found the right time, right plan, or courage to do.

You see, ever since I was in my teens, I had always felt I was meant to be somewhere else.

The town where I grew up was pretty perfect for raising young kids, but it just wasn’t for me as I entered adulthood. I always envisioned …

One Question for Anyone Who’s Stuck in a Rut: What Do You Believe?

By Devin Herenda

“You become what you believe, not what you think or what you want.” ~Oprah Winfrey

What do you believe? During the forced stillness of the pandemic environment we’re all living in, this is a question I’ve been faced with more intensely than ever. In particular, I’ve come to question what I believe about myself, and how that impacts every element of my life.

Coming out of years of self-help for social and general anxiety, a long-standing eating disorder, and several dissatisfying personal relationships, I had to come to question what these external realities reflected back to me. For what …

Where Our Strength Comes from and What It Means to Be Strong

By Andi Saitowitz

“Strength doesn’t come from what you can do. It comes from overcoming the things you thought you couldn’t.” ~Rikki Rogers

A friend recently asked me: Andi, where does your strength come from?

It took me a while before I had a good enough answer for her. I sat contemplating the many roads I’ve traveled, through my own transformational journey and the inspirational journeys of all my clients who demonstrate incredible strength for me.

I moved to a different country, alone, at eighteen years old and have changed careers, battled a complex pain diagnosis with my child, and lost loved ones…

Learning to Honor My Grief When the World Has Become Desensitized to Loss

By Claire Austin

“The answer to the pain of grief is not how to get yourself out of it, but how to support yourself inside it.” ~Unknown

Since losing my husband Matt over eight months ago to cancer at the age of just thirty-nine, I have noticed so many changes happening within me, and one of those changes is a fierce sense of protectiveness that I have over my grief.

We are living in a unique time in history. The world has turned upside down due to the coronavirus pandemic, and at the time of writing this the UK had just passed 100,000 …

How I Finally Healed When I Stopped Believing a Diagnosis of Incurable

By Rebecca Tolin

“The quieter you become, the more you are able to hear.” ~Rumi

The quarantine has felt oddly familiar. That’s because I spent thirteen years largely homebound with a mysterious, viral-like illness. It even started with a cold on a flight back from Asia in 2005.

My nose was an open faucet, and my head felt like the cumulus clouds outside my window. When I returned to San Diego, I was so weak and exhausted, I could hardly get out of bed. My brain and body were on fire.

I couldn’t focus or recall names of coworkers. Although I’d previously been …

How to Get Through Your Darkest Days: Lessons from Addiction and Loss

By Melissa Pennel

“You are never stronger…than when you land on the other side of despair.” ~Zadie Smith

In the last years of my twenties, my life completely fell apart.

I’d moved to Hollywood to become an actor, but after a few years in Tinsel Town things weren’t panning out the way I hoped. My crippling anxiety kept me from going on auditions, extreme insecurity led to binge eating nearly every night, and an inability to truly be myself translated to a flock of fair-weather friends.

As the decade wound to a close, I stumbled upon the final deadly ingredient in my toxic …

The Magic of Rewriting Our Most Painful Stories

By Cerise Knight

“When you bring peace to your past, you can move forward to your future.” ~Unknown

It amazes me how things that happen in our childhood can greatly impact our adult lives. I learned the hard way that I was living my life with a deep wound in my heart.

My father was a very strict man with a temper when I was little, starting when I was around seven years old.

He had a way of making me feel like all my efforts were not enough. If I scored an 8 in a math exam, he would say, “Why 8 …

The Cages We Live In and What It Means to Be Free

By Afsheen Shah

“Cages aren’t made or iron, they’re made of thoughts.” ~Unknown

I recently read Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, and like many who have read it, I felt as if it had changed my life—but not because it made me think of all the things I was capable of (as was the case with many of friends who read it), but because it made me realize how capable I had already been.

The book on the whole is beautiful and inspiring, but the part that stuck with me the most was the story about Tabitha, a beautiful cheetah that Glennon and her …

The Unexpected Impact of Growing Up with a Difficult Mother

By Irina Bengtson

“Difficulties in your life do not come to destroy you, but to help you realise your hidden potential and power, let difficulties know that you too are difficult.” ~Abdul Kalam

Do you sometimes daydream that your mom is gone, and all your troubles disappear along with her?

I used to imagine that, too.

When Mom was in intensive care, swaying between life and death, I sat outside, shell-shocked, trembling all over my body, trying to comprehend the doctor’s words: “Her condition is critical, and only time will show if she will make it. I’m sorry.”

For a moment, I …

Beating the Odds: Why I Survived and My Brother Did Not

By Dr. Lise Deguire

My brother, Marc-Emile, sparkled brilliantly. At sixteen years old, he could expound on physics or Plato, calculus, or car mechanics, Stravinsky or Steppenwolf. At seventeen, he began reading the Great Books series, starting with Homer and Aeschylus and moving forward through the Greeks. I don’t know how many of those Great Books he read. He didn’t have that long.

My brother had everything going for him. He was kind, ethical, and handsome. He graduated high school a year early, at the top of his class, with virtually perfect SATs. He started at MIT as a physics major. He ended at …

The Art of Self-Soothing: How to Make Resilience More Sustainable

By Marta Castella

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” ~Micheal Jordan

I believe that self-soothing is the key to accessing all happiness and success. All things being equal, when someone is able to self-soothe, they are more resourceful and more powerful than those who haven’t learned that skill yet. Here’s why.

Great success (whether professional or personal) comes with a great deal of responsibility. That …

How to Avoid Emotional Burnout This Holiday Season

By Joanna Ciolek

Whether you celebrate or not, the holiday season can be stressful for many reasons. From experiencing difficult emotions like grief, anger, or resentment that seem to resurface out or nowhere, to the pressures of making everything perfect for everyone, there’s a lot of opportunity for emotional burnout.

I’m no stranger to painful emotions re-emerging around this time of the year. Christmas used to trigger in me the feelings of loneliness and guilt for years, following my move across the country and away from my family and friends.

Moving was a conscious choice my husband and I made soon after …

8 Things I Learned from Watching My Mum Die

By Karen Schlaegel

“Pain changes your life forever. But so does healing from it.” ~Kayil York

In 2012 my mum got diagnosed with cancer. After an operation, she was cancer-free for some time when in March 2017 it was discovered that the cancer had returned and had spread everywhere, notably to her lungs.

She was adamant that she did not want further treatment, which would have been palliative at best anyway and would have had significant side effects. Nobody was able to make a prognosis regarding how much longer she had left. Being seventy, there was a chance that it would develop slowly.…

How to Rock Your Scars (Because They Mean You’re Strong)

By Raphaela Browne

“Never be ashamed of a scar. It simply means you were stronger than whatever tried to hurt you.” ~Unknown

“It’s such an ugly scar, I really don’t want anyone to see it.” This is what I told my daughter about a scar on my leg from an accident I’d experienced a year earlier.

I can remember the day so clearly when I slipped and fell, while skating, breaking my ankle and tearing a ligament. It was a painful experience with a long recovery. But I also felt embarrassed because I got injured during such a simple and fun activity.

I …