Category

Set Boundaries

Mar 07

Know Your Worth. Then Live Like You Know It.

By Get Your Groove Back, Set Boundaries, Top Home Videos 20 Comments

What do you believe you deserve? That’s a pretty loaded question, isn’t it? In more than 15 years working as a women’s life coach, I’ve asked it thousands of times, and I’ve received countless answers. The majority of the responses have been disheartening, and they’ve revealed a startling truth. Women (even very successful, accomplished women) doubt their deservingness.

Deservingness is not to be confused with entitlement. Entitlement is about believing you have a right to something. Deservingness is about how much you believe you’re worth.

When you doubt your deservingness, what you’re really uncertain about is whether or not you measure up. Are you good enough? (YES.) You’ve made some pretty big mistakes. Do those bad blunders make you a bad person? (NO.) Are you a good enough person to deserve good things? (YES. YOU ARE.)

Many women carry around a secret shame that impacts their feelings of self-worth and deservingness. Our stories are individual, but our core experiences are very much the same. At some point in your life, someone told you there was something wrong with you. (This is inevitable, of course, because there’s something wrong with all of us.)

It gets to dangerous and disempowering territory through repetition. If even one person in your life tells you over and over again that there’s something wrong with you, well, you can start to believe them. Being rejected or criticized hurts, and it has a cumulative effect. Read More

Nov 22

How to set a boundary.

By Get Your Groove Back, Set Boundaries 4 Comments

With the holidays upon us, I thought it would be appropriate to have a discussion about boundaries. Because the truth of the matter is this. Your to-do list is about to birth holiday quadruplets, and your schedule now includes a ton of time with extended family. (And that is not always easy.)

Family is the source of so much love and support. It can also be the source of a great deal of angst and unnecessary drama. We’re all spoon fed this picture of holiday bliss and togetherness (especially now that we live in a social media age), but in my work as a life coach, I’ve found that family stories are a lot more complicated than that.

Everyone has a rulebook they use for life. Your rules tell you what’s okay, and what’s not okay. They guide your behavior, and they dictate what you expect from other people. This would work great if everyone played by the same rules, but (of course) that’s not how it works. People’s rules for life differ as much as people do.

When you think about rules in this way, it makes sense that gathering a large group of people together (even when they love each other) is going to result in some level of dysfunction and conflict, doesn’t it? While there’s little you can do to control the presence of challenging circumstances, you are totally in control of how you respond to them.

I want you to respond on purpose, so today I’m going to teach you how to set boundaries. A boundary is a behavioral fence. It helps you define limits for others, and it helps others define limits for you.

Hear me now. Relationships without boundaries do not work. They create misunderstandings, and breed resentment. (So it’s really important that you deal with setting boundaries, even if it makes you uncomfortable.) Let’s master boundaries in our current episode of GrooveTV. Press PLAY already. You’re in charge of you, remember? Read More

Sep 27

How To Make Guilt Work For You

By Get Your Groove Back, Set Boundaries, Top Home Videos No Comments

How often do you feel guilty?

A recent poll of parents found that both moms and dads feel guilt an average of 23 times per week. (Wow, right?) How about this stat – another survey of women found that moms feel guilt EVERY SINGLE DAY.

What about you? Are you in the guilty-every-single-day club? (It’s not really a club you would have joined on purpose, is it?) While you probably can’t get out of your membership, guilt doesn’t have to make you miserable. In today’s blog, and in our current episode of GrooveTV, I’ll teach you how to make guilt work for you.

Step 1: Understand the science of guilt.

Before we talk about how to manage guilt, let’s talk about why it’s important for you to take control of it. We begin with the obvious. Guilt feels terrible. (But you already knew that, right?)

Unfortunately, it gets much worse than just feeling bad. Guilt produces a stress response in your body, which weakens your immune system, reduces your libido, and MAKES YOU FAT. (I have your attention now, don’t I?)

There is science to how this happens. When your guilt is triggered, your body releases cortisol, which is a stress hormone. Cortisol is designed to help you with the flight part of a fight-or-flight response. But when you don’t really need to run from the saber toothed tiger (because he’s only chasing you in your head) you basically jack-up your biochemistry. (That’s a scientific description.) Read More

Nov 30

Got the disease to please? How to heal it once and for all.

By Get Your Groove Back, Set Boundaries 12 Comments

I’m a bitch.

At least that’s what I was told recently.

It was an uncomfortable encounter, and frankly one that surprised me. I didn’t know this man. We had an encounter in a parking lot that led to a disagreement. I voiced my opinion and stood my ground. He didn’t like it.

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Strong women make weak men mad. #GetYourGrooveBack
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At times, strong women also make other women, who perhaps haven’t found their courage yet, uncomfortable. (If you’re in this camp don’t worry. Your courage will wait for you for as long as you need it to). ☺

When people are mad or uncomfortable, they do something called leveling. In leveling the person you’re interacting with needs to diminish you in order to feel okay about them. A typical way to accomplish this is through name-calling. Read More

May 31

See Ya Self Doubt – How to Start Believing in You

By Get Your Groove Back, Set Boundaries 6 Comments

I know your secret.

You doubt yourself.

All. The. Time.

You think doubt stops you from going for your dreams, and it does. But that’s not all it does. Doubt rides co-pilot with you all day long. It stops you before you speak up in meetings. It muzzles you before you ask for what you want. It shuts you down at the first hint of excitement. It silences you. It makes you anxious. It keeps you small.

Doubt BITES.

Aren’t you over it yet? I am! In fact I’m so over it for you that today I’m going to show you how to stop doubting on yourself once and for all. Read More