BROADCASTS.com

Change always begins with compassion.

All-or-nothing mentality causes us to live in fight-or-flight response, because everything is either good or bad, right or wrong, success or failure. 

If we are thinking in all-or-nothing terms, then we end up day-after-day experiencing habituated emotions. 

Those habituated emotions drive our life, and we feel less and less in control.

When we feel out of control, we experience the feeling of being a victim, and we feel stuck.

When we feel stuck, we stay right where we are, without progress or change of any kind. (I believe we are hard-wired for progress and change). If we feel like progress or change isn\u2019t an option, that feels pretty terrible and scary and hopeless. It\u2019s like our agency is gone or at least limited. And that\u2019s scary!

A friend of mine once pointed out that the kinds of situations that are most traumatic in our lives, are those when our agency is taken away.

It\u2019s traumatic to not have agency!

And I believe this is how many of our negative emotions like anxiety and depression can feel like-- a loss of agency.

Thinking thoughts like "I'm terrible" or "she's a saint" contributes to all-or-nothing mentality; the truth is that we are both-- at times we might be terrible and at times we might be saints.

Here's what to do:

Remember that change always begins with compassion.

Practice allowing for setbacks; know it happens, and that\u2019s okay.

Use the word \u201cand\u201d (I\u2019m good and bad; I make good decisions and sometimes not so good decisions. I\u2019m spiritual, and I also have questions. It was a hard day, and parts of it weren\u2019t so bad).

Separate your value from your performance (Example of learning to sing alto; I was terrible at it! And I could laugh, because I wasn't attaching my value to how well I could sing alto.)

Add the word \u201cyet\u201d to your vocabulary (ex. I haven\u2019t achieved it yet,  or I haven't figured it out yet.)

More Calmness = Less Depression We don't necessarily need more happiness to solve our lows; we need more calmness.

Want to know my group fitness schedule? 

Email: mstevenett@gmail.com

subject line: MIND.BODY.BOSS Group Fitness