Beyond Your Limits with Dr. Christine Jehu

131. COACH'S CORNER: From surviving to thriving - Digging deeper journal prompts

• Dr. Christine Jehu

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When life threw me the curveball of losing my father, I found myself clinging to my career for a sense of normalcy. Yet, this survival strategy soon morphed into a crutch, stifling the vibrant life I had worked so hard for.

Today's episode is a digging deeper into the journal prompts from episode 129.

I can't wait to hear what you are learning about yourself through this deeper journaling process. Be sure to connect with me on Instagram.

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Speaker 1:

What does it look like to live a life beyond your limits? Hi, I'm Dr CJ, a copy obsessed psychologist coach and your personal virtual mentor. Too many of us are holding ourselves back, placing limits on what's possible and believing the false stories in our head that say we can't accomplish a goal or a dream. Together, we will rewrite the stories holding us back, tackle barriers and limits and build an incredible foundation for going after our goals and dreams. I'm here to support you, to challenge you and to coach you through and beyond your limits. And a quick caveat while I am a psychologist, this show is not therapy or a substitute for mental health treatment. Please connect with a licensed mental health provider for those needs. Alright, are you ready to live a life beyond your limits? Let's get after it. Hey, hey, everyone, welcome back to another episode of Beyond your Limits. This is your host, dr CJ, and we're continuing on this coaches corner Dig deeper in the journaling prompts. So hopefully you have listened to episode 129. That was the first episode of the year and I gave some journaling prompts in there and, as I do, you know, I like to go a little bit deeper and explore each of these areas a bit more with you. So that's what we're doing in today's episode. It's the second of the three journal prompts offered at the end of episode 129. And this one is all about moving from surviving to thriving. So make sure you've grabbed your journal, and if you haven't grabbed a journal for the year, what are you doing? Let's get on that.

Speaker 1:

This year I actually ordered a bullet journal, not to do the like bullet journaling that you see all over Pinterest and everything. I just really appreciate writing in the dot pages. I don't don't ask me why, it just is what I like to do, and I had never even seen a bullet journal before and I was really surprised when this one came. It is super, super high quality and one of the things that I really like about it is all of the pages are numbered, which for me, if you've been here a while, you know my journaling practice includes writing down some gratitude and some quotes for every month, and so it's going to be really cool to be able to keep a index and be able to say these are the pages and just flip to them like you would chapters in a book. So found that really, really interesting and have been enjoying, you know, diving in and using that journal. But if you need other recommendations for journals, let me know.

Speaker 1:

I've used a handful and, honestly, when I got started journaling, I really just went to Target and found a notebook. That inspired me quite honestly and I've shared the story before where I had to trick myself into having the journaling practice or the writing practice not be not feel so academic, because I have been trained to write academically my entire life, and so I found journals that maybe were a little bit more childlike and I would write in marker. I got the skinny markers and I would journal in marker in all the colors except black and blue, because those still felt like ink colors to me. And now, after gosh, probably 10 years later, I am consistently journaling. I still use colors, but I'm in pens and can use more of it. I was going to say standard notebook, but that's not really it, maybe something that feels a little bit more academic, and I've been journaling for about 10 years now, so I've been able to break some of those blocks that I was experiencing. So, remember, environment matters, our tools matter, and so play around with it and find ones that work for you. So, anyhow, I'm going to stop blabbing here and we're going to dive into a little bit more about the journaling prompts from surviving to thriving, but wait to hear what you're thinking of these deeper dives into the journaling prompts. Drop me a message on Instagram and let me know what you're thinking and we will talk soon, my friend.

Speaker 1:

Okay, today we are digging into the second journal prompt from episode 129, where we were welcoming into the new year and moving forward, stepping into 2024 with some of this discovery and what I've shared about. What I've been going through in my life is moving from a near decade of living in survival mode, spending 2023, starting to move into living. And as we're moving into 2024, I'm really intentionally working to identify the areas in my life where I am still in survival mode honoring that, being graceful, having grace with myself in that and move towards the living. And in those spaces where I feel like I'm truly living, I want to start shifting into thriving. And so the questions that I prompted you with in episode 129 is how are you surviving in your life, what areas are you in survival mode and what does it look like? The impact, right? What's the impact of being in survival mode in your life in those ways? So let's dig into that a little bit. I've shared that.

Speaker 1:

For me, I was surviving in my personal life, surviving in terms of navigating grief from the loss of my father In 2014,. I was surviving career-wise, and I paused with that because I was using my career as my anchor point for staying grounded and connected to my life, and so it was a tool of survival and it allowed me to thrive. I did really well in my career. I have done really well in my career. I've gotten a number of promotions, I was able to move jobs and, within this job, in less than three years, I was promoted into a leadership position, and a year after that, even into an even higher leadership position, and so I'm truly thriving. However, I recognize some of the ways that I was showing up in my career. I started to get disconnected, and so I think I moved more into survival mode because other areas of my life were shifting.

Speaker 1:

And so, as I'm talking this out right, I'm thinking you may have some areas where you're truly thriving, some areas where you're living, some areas where you're surviving. It doesn't have to be all or nothing across those domains of your life, and so, yeah, break that out. What are some of the areas where, right now you are in survival mode. It could be relationally. For a long time, relationally, I was in survival mode. Is it with your health? Is it with your spiritual life? Financially right, where are we in survival mode?

Speaker 1:

And then let's take some time to recognize how is being in survival mode in one or more areas? How is that impacting other areas of your life? So, for instance, if I'm, you know, for me I was in survival mode relationally and in my personal life, and at a point that started impacting my work life and so I went from thriving back to living in work because the imbalance started to shift and pieces in my personal life were bleeding into work. I was at my limits with that and I knew a change needed to happen. In you know, as I'm reflecting back on last year, my health my physical health and my mental health started to shift and I would say I would put myself in this realm of survival mode, right, because I didn't know what was happening and I was trying to go through the motions and things weren't changing. I was continuing to get frustrated and so I made the shift to reach out to some doctors and get some different support, start some medications, those types of things, and right now I feel like I'm in the living phase, which is interesting because it's living and healing.

Speaker 1:

I'm living differently, while I'm allowing myself to heal, so I'm not I'm not, I would say, like forcing actions out of survival. I'm pulling back on actions so that I can live and heal. And so, as I'm talking this out, it's helping me recognize and put words to something that I think has been in my head, that this, that the living doesn't always have to be necessarily with what we'd imagine as forward momentum or making active shifts. Some of living could be stillness, it could be grounding and presence and slowing down, because I feel like sometimes, with survival, there's a lot of chaotic energy and we're doing, doing, doing, doing, doing, sometimes in efforts to avoid or to figure out or to survive, and sometimes the absence of the doing and again going back to that grounding being present, re-centering within ourself, is that living, peace and healing. So, as I'm thinking about my physical and mental health process, this living piece for me is slowing down, being still not working out as much, because I'm trying to reset some things in my body, moving into some different ways of movement, trying to embrace some of the more grounded yoga's, walking, stretching, those types of things, so that once that healing comes, I can start to shift into then that next phase of living. What does it look like to bring in some more intense exercise? What does it look like to bring in more weight lifting and things like that? And then how do I continue to incorporate those elements that helped me heal into my everyday life?

Speaker 1:

Right, so, when we think about the last episode, when we were talking about the what lights you up and looking at those rhythms in our life, what are some of these rhythms from surviving that we have an opportunity to release, maybe say goodbye, to adapt? What do they then look like in the living phase? And then how do we build upon them as we move into thriving? But first we have to understand where we are in the different areas and domains of our life. And so maybe, rather than just looking at how are you surviving, what if you write down the domains of your life that you have, right, family, children, work, maybe you're in school, maybe you have work and school, your financial life, your spiritual life, physical health, mental health? Put all of those areas and put where you are Are you surviving, are you living, are you thriving and in that living, is it healing as well? Are we working to do some healing?

Speaker 1:

And so then, when we look at those areas, if we take the pieces where we're surviving and imagine, okay, what does it look like to live in that area? So if we started making shifts, or the places where you're living, what would it look like if we started to shift into thriving? And think about, in three months, what would that look like, in six months, what would that look like in nine months? And then, by the time we're at 12 months, the end of the year, what would that look like for you? And I'm recognizing, as I'm advancing this journal prompt and we're looking at all domains of our life. It can be really freaking, overwhelming, to look at all of those domains at once and, quite frankly, it's not realistic to approach all of them at once. So I would challenge you to let's look at one area where you feel like you're surviving and one area where you feel like you're living right, and let's focus in on those right now and go through that process of three, six, nine, 12 months.

Speaker 1:

If we start to make shifts, tort from survival to living and living to thriving and maybe you have, you're in that living slash, healing, and so then maybe the next phase is full living as we're healed, because it's kind of phases there, right, if we have some of this healing that happens in the living, we need to live healed and then move into thriving. And so the beautiful thing in this is, let's say, you focus on those two areas for the next three months and then in what? January, february, march, in April, when you come back and look at this, do an evaluation and I can almost guarantee you the other areas of your life that you weren't necessarily intentionally focusing on will be impacted as well. Because as we work on one area of our life, we see a shift in the positive right, just as we, when we start to experience negative or more detrimental shifts in one area of our life, we start to see it bleed into the others. So let's work on this in in the other direction, right In that survival to thriving direction. And so each three month increment, we can start to reevaluate all areas of our life and if you feel like those two areas that you started working on, you're like, okay, I've got some rhythm, I've got some movement, then maybe we pick one or two more areas to bring into that intentional focus and we build, and we build, and we build until we start working on all of them in tandem and you know, we're starting to get more movement to where most of our areas of life were truly in that full living, and we can start to work towards thriving. And then, you know, I want to give a bit of a caveat too, is I don't necessarily think that we have to be in full on thriving in all areas of our life all the time. There's going to be that give and take.

Speaker 1:

In order to thrive, say in your career, we might have to make adjustments. And what's that word? I'm looking for compromises. All I could think of was sacrifice, but that wasn't what I was looking for compromises in other areas. So let's take, say, pregnancy, for example, a woman who is in the process of growing and having a baby. That's going to shift. You can still be really strong in your career. And then when you go on maternity leave, right, we're stepping away from that, and so that's it's not a bad thing, it's just the way that the elements of our life have some of that give and take.

Speaker 1:

So yeah, that's the journal prompt and the last part of the prompt from episode 129 was what tweaks and adjustments can you make to bring the shift? And we've talked about about those areas already, so I'd love to hear about your area analysis. Please feel free to send it over to me if you're looking at it and you're like shit, I just don't know where to start. Let's talk about it. Let's have a conversation. I don't want you to feel like you're in this alone. I'm here to walk with you, walk beside you, and as I'm unpacking these things for myself, I want to be there to support you. Okay, we've got one more episode to come on these journal prompts that we posed in episode 129. So we will talk soon. I love you. I'll catch you on the next one.