Intentional Living With Tanya Hale

#2 in our list of things we need to have good mental health is emotional balance.  Here we are talking about the 50/50 balance of positive and negative emotions, and specifically about our ability or inability to feel and work through the negative ones.  They can be challenging for sure, but only in choosing to feel them can we find the balance that we seek that brings mental health.

Future plans, #1 on the list of what we need to have better mental health.  Consistently moving toward growth by tapping into our potential and our dreams is an amazing place that helps us find greater fulfillment and satisfaction in life.  If you feel as though you are just living on auto-pilot most of the time, not growing into a greater version of yourself and not experiencing the joys you feel you are meant to experience, this is a great place to start!

It's fascinating that our culture often defines mental health by stating that it is not having a mental illness.  But mental health is so much more than that!  It is more accurately defined by our ability to be resilient and work through tough emotional and mental situation in a healthy way.  Today we are going to take a closer look at mental health and what it is, and then prep for the next 10 episodes when we explore an aspect of how to be more mentally healthy in each one.

Rejection and approval.  One we seek desperately to avoid and the other we seek desperately to obtain.  And yet they are not always what they seem.  Learning to move into rejection can be one of the greatest ways to ensure our own approval.  Join me today as we discuss how learning to accept ourselves rather than how to avoid rejection can be one of our greatest tools for truly discovering our deepest potential.

I don't know too many of us who enjoy being uncomfortable, and given the times and culture we live in we rarely have to endure being physically uncomfortable.  However, mental and emotional discomfort is a key element in our growth and progression.  When we can learn to lean into discomfort, we can begin moving into our potential and find greater satisfaction and happiness in life.  But to begin the whole process we have to start learning to become comfortable with being uncomfortable.  

Remember last episode when we talked about that huge list of mental and emotional behaviors?  Well today we're going to talk about the antidote for intentionally or unintentionally wanting to engage in them:  Charity.  This amazing piece of Christ-like love will rid us of all of those relationship killers and instead deepen and strengthen our relationships.  Charity will help us engage in healthy behaviors that will create healthy relationships.

Today we are covering a huge list of mental and emotional abusive behaviors.  When we know better, we do better, right?  This is to give us an opportunity to see behaviors that we may be engaging in that are harming our relationships and preventing us from having the connections that we ultimately desire.  This is not meant to cause us shame or guilt, but rather to bring awareness to our actions so we can explore the feelings and thought behind them.

Life can deal all of us a bad hand sometimes.  But actually, it's not the hand that's bad, it's how we choose to think about that hand.  Today I'm going to share with you the experience of my Client Charity, who seemed to have been dealt some pretty rough childhood experiences. I'll show you how coaching has helped her to move from being a victim of those circumstances and blaming others to taking responsibility for her current actions and starting to create the life she really wants to live.

Today we are taking a look at the difference between the brain and the mind.  Both do amazing things for us, but where the brain is part of the physical body, the mind is part of our spiritual body.  When we tie this into the understanding that part of our purpose here on earth is for our spirit to learn to manage the physical body, this takes on a whole new understanding.  We can start to understand how our brain works to keep our physical body alive, and how our mind works to move us forward to find and fulfill our potential.

Have you ever thought about the fact that every action we engage in has a ripple effect?  When we do something, it will affect the people around us, then they will take that action, turn it into thoughts, feelings, and actions, and their actions will in turn affect the people around them, and on and on.  So what about our actions?  Are they creating the kind of ripple effect that we want to send out into the world?  Let's take a look at this today.

Respect is one of the most basic and fundamental elements in any healthy relationship.  Today we're going to discuss some of the indicators of a lack of respect so you can recognize your own unhealthy behaviors in this area, and also so you can recognize when respect is not being shown to you.  We'll also touch on the importance of consequences and boundaries in regards to respect.  If you don't have respect, you don't really have a relationship.

The word "should" is one that we really should take out of our vocabulary!  All it does is work to create controlling expectations of others and bring guilt and shame to ourselves.  When living from a place of should rather than a place of love, we break down the relationship with ourselves and with others.  Learning to do or do not, rather than shoulding ourselves is a place of self-care and compassion.

I love this one!  Today we are learning about how we can use our future to create our future.  Generally we tend to look to our past for patterns and examples of how to live our lives and create our future, but our past is limited by what we already know.  Our future is full of potential and ideas that we currently just dream of, so learning to tap into our future to help us create our future is an amazing way to move forward.  

Sometimes it seems as though we can't escape the difficulties of our past.  They just keep coming up and coming up and making our current lives so much more difficult.  But if we can really learn to embrace our past for the amazing lessons it has to teach, and to think in more positive ways about the challenges we have encountered in our lives, we will find the peace with our past that will allow us to have faith in our future.

Healing after a really difficult experience can be so challenging.  But healing can happen when we start to see the meaning behind the experience.  Learning to ask ourselves, "What can I learn from this?" rather than "Why did this have to happen to me?" is a process of learning to cue into our thoughts and start creating healing thoughts rather than thoughts that keep us stuck in pain.  Today we'll talk about how to do this.

Emotional abuse is such an inside killer of so many relationships, and most of us don't even know we're engaging in it.  Giving someone the silent treatment is one of the most insidious forms of emotional abuse because so often we think we're taking the higher road by not yelling and screaming.  So today we're discussing what the silent treatment is, how we engage in it, and what we need to do whether we are the perpetrator or the victim.  Good stuff!

The River of Misery is the place of discomfort where all good things happen in our lives.  Growing from one form of ourselves to the upgraded version of ourselves is almost always a painful, difficult process, but it's the only way to move forward.  And growing is the only way to be happy.  And the River of Misery is the only way to grow.  So it's time to be willing to embrace the discomfort if we're going become the even more amazing person that we are.

Do you ever think of yourself as a fixer-upper?  Sometimes it seems there is just so much we need to fix to get us to a healthy and happy place.  But what if we were to embrace the idea that there isn't actually anything about ourselves that we need to fix?  What if we were to accept the fact that we are perfect just the way we are?  What if we could start believing that we are completely whole and that it's just our behaviors that need tweaking?  Let's chat about it.

So today I get a little bit personal when I tell you about a recent experience I had hurting someone's feelings and what I learned from it.  Basically, that it's all about love.  If I can get my heart to a place of love, everything in my life is better.  Love really is the answer if we want greater happiness and peace in our lives.

This podcast is prompted by three situations this week where people have felt that they don't need to worry about the consequences of their behavior because it's the other person's responsibility to control their thoughts using the thought model.  And yes, it is their responsibility, but it is also your responsibility to control your own actions and take responsibility for them.  We're talking today about how consequences and boundaries fit in with The Thought Model.