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

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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Transcript

Living a Life Beyond Your Limits

Speaker 1 0:03

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 1:43

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 2:48

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 4:24

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 5:49

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 7:01

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 7:37

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 9:07

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 11:18

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 12:35

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 13:44

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 15:42

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 .

Supportive Conversation on Self-Improvement

Speaker 1 16:22

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 .