How to See the Opportunity Around You (Even When You Feel Defeated)
Don't let one moment define you or your future.
Photo: Color Joy Stock Photography
Life is about seeing the opportunity around you, stepping into the vision you have for yourself, and embracing the work it will take to get there.
For me, stepping into the vision I have for myself hasn’t always been easy and there has been a ton of imposter syndrome along the way, but leading is about doing scary things and having faith in knowing you were created to do something amazing.
One thing I know for sure is one bump in the road doesn’t define who you are, or the impact you are meant to have in the world. In fact, if you let it, one bump, or many bumps can inspire you to take the leap to do more with your life. I know this was the case for me.
One of my major bumps in the road was when I filed for bankruptcy. I was a single mom and not in a financial place to handle everything that was coming my way. I remember leaving the courtroom after my bankruptcy hearing feeling ashamed and embarrassed, but I knew in my heart there was something more out there for me, I only needed to have the courage to go after it.
It was then I decided to take a leap, bet on myself and move from Ohio to North Carolina with me, my son, our luggage, my last paycheck, and a rental car. I didn’t have a job, but I was willing to bet on myself and had faith the move would create a better life for us. I was right.
When you feel defeated, it is critical to see the opportunity and not let the moment define you, or your future.
1. First, it’s okay to feel the emotions that come with feeling defeated.
It’s normal during tough situations to feel sad, angry, disappointed, embarrassed, frustrated. It’s important to take the time to acknowledge the emotion, so it can be dealt with accordingly.
When I filed for bankruptcy, I felt ashamed, embarrassed, and irresponsible. I let myself feel all my emotions, I cried and talked it out. As I worked through my emotions, I began to forgive myself, which allowed me to move forward.
2. Ask yourself, “What is the lesson I can learn from this?”
As you face your situation, think about the lessons you can or have learned and how your situation can shape your life for the better.
Thinking about the lessons I learned was a pivotal moment for me because I realized I needed to make more money and be wiser with my financial decisions around money. I needed to think bigger and rethink my career game plan. This big thinking ultimately is what changed my trajectory and situation creating a better life for me and my son.
Which brings me to...
3. Think about the opportunity around you to change your circumstance.
There are opportunities all around us. When you are open to seeing them, you create a whole new set of possibilities for yourself. You have to be able to look outside of yourself, your comfort zone, and be ready to be all in to do what it takes to change your situation.
When I moved from Ohio to North Carolina with no real guarantee anything would work out, this motivated me to apply for jobs outside of my original career field and utilize my full experience. I enhanced my education to help me move up the career ladder faster, I moved into upper management and was part of senior management teams in the C-suite.
Within a few years, my skill set surpassed several of my colleagues and I became the go-to for troubled businesses that needed help with restructuring and streamlining. This experience ultimately is helping me to build my own seven-figure business and helping other entrepreneurs to do the same.
4. Create an “I never want to be in this situation again” action plan and follow it.
When life throws us challenges, it’s important to ask how you can not be in the situation again. Use the lessons you learned from Step 2. Think about the steps you need to take, break down those steps into micro-steps, and take real action to achieve your goals. Don’t delay.
In my situation, after going through what I went through, my action plan was, and is, now to help me never struggle financially again and to make smart financial decisions for my and my family’s future.
This has helped me to do brave things like start my business, continuously invest in my growth and development, travel the world, buy my home, become the breadwinner for my now blended family of four, and continue to keep doing big and scary things.
Remember, life is meant to be lived, so it is never too late to step into the life you want to create and to go after more.
“When you feel defeated, it is critical to see the opportunity and not let the moment define you, or your future.”
—Brandy Mabra, CEO of Savvy Clover Coaching & Consulting
About the Author: Brandy Mabra is the CEO of Savvy Clover Coaching & Consulting and a business and leadership coach. Brandy has 15 years of business management and leadership experience. She has worked in diverse business climates and has turned hot mess businesses into well oiled and profitable machines with engaged teams. Brandy has spent her career building million-dollar empires and now uses her million-dollar skill set to help herself and other women entrepreneurs to do the same.
Brandy is the founder of Savvy Foundations, a CEO mastermind helping other women show up unapologetically savvy in their CEO role and build a healthy and sustainable business generating multiple-six and seven-figures. Because The CEO Skill Set is the Million Dollar Skill Set. Brandy loves to travel and spend time with her family, she believes you cannot build a business on fumes and CEO breaks are required. You can follow her on Instagram at @savvyclovercoaching.
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How to Set Your New Year's Intentions (Because Resolutions Are So 2020)
A more flexible approach to goal-setting.
Photo: Color Joy Stock
2020. What. A. Year. I’m guessing that you, like me, are ready to leave 2020 behind and head into the new year ready for some much-needed change. Traditionally, the start of a new year calls us to make a resolution and spend the beginning part of our year making it happen. It’s a time for improvement and renewal buoyed by hope and inspiration. However, if you’re looking to make a deeper, lasting change and achieve greater success in both your personal and professional lives, I’d encourage you to forgo the resolutions this year and instead set an intention.
What’s the difference? A resolution is a specific goal to achieve your desired result typically brought on by a perception of weakness and a need for improvement in an explicit part of your life. For example, common resolutions include exercising for weight loss, healthy eating to reduce cholesterol, signing up for a class to develop new professional skills.
An intention, however, is an overarching idea of how you want to live a life that aligns with your values and, in turn, drives your actions and decisions. I liken it to the top of an organizational chart. At the very top is your intention, and beneath it lies the different parts of your life (professional, relationships, etc.). Stemming from each subdivision are the many ways that you can incorporate your intention in order to achieve improvements and success within the scope of that part of your life. In this approach, you provide yourself with an overall roadmap for how to live your life in accordance with this value that trickles out to all the parts of your life.
If you’re ready to make a profound impact on your life, here are the actionable steps you can take to successfully set an intention and implement it into your life.
Step 1: Reflect on 2020
Take a moment to look back at your year in order to understand what aspects of life are important to you and where you can create and cultivate inspired action to achieve more balance and purpose. Reflect on both the wins and the challenges. Trying to assess your overall approach to life.
Step 2: Create Your Vision for 2021
Based upon this reflection, ask yourself, “How do I want to move forward in 2021?” What vision do you have for yourself in this upcoming year within the various parts of your life? It is this vision of yourself that will help you pinpoint the attributes that you need to embody in order to achieve this evolution.
Step 3: Set Your Intention
Once you’ve imagined how you will personally define a successful year, you can begin to brainstorm power words or phrases that sum up your overall vision. Go through your list and pick the top two or three that resonate the most with you. Visualize what it would look like to have each intention guiding you throughout your daily life, and based on this projection, you’ll know which direction to head towards for your intention.
For example, if I reflected on a year that felt constrained because of a lack of work opportunities and a quarantined social life, an intention that might resonate with me is “to be limitless.” This intention would then translate into seeking out or creating opportunities for myself in my professional life and finding ways to expand my outlook and create abundance in my personal life.
If you would like some extra help with finding an intention, I invite you to try out my guided meditation on intention setting on my podcast, “Responding to Life: Talking Health, Fertility, & Parenthood.”
Step 4: Infuse Your Intention Into Your Daily Life
Resolutions can be tough to maintain because they are so specific and rigid. The benefit of an intention is that it can be flexible and flow with how your life unfolds. Because your intention is an overarching concept, you can play around with your interpretations of it on a daily or weekly basis.
The key to staying accountable with your new year’s intention, however, is to call it to mind every morning. Whether you are able to sit in a three-minute meditation or just reflect on your intention during your morning routine, by calling to mind your intention, you can set a road map for your day making sure to infuse and manifest this value into your plans each day.
“As you head into this new year of much-needed renewal and hope, I encourage you to cultivate this vision of yourself each day with inspired action to create lasting success in all aspects of your life.”
—Josephine Atluri, Host of the Podcast "Responding to Life"
About the author: Josephine Atluri is an expert in fertility and motherhood mindfulness and meditation and in helping others overcome adversity to find joy. Through her unique journey on her path to becoming a mom of five, Josephine weathered many ups and downs with miscarriages, IVF, international adoption, and surrogacy. Channeling her experience to find calm and courage and to focus on perseverance, she now helps others navigate life’s curveballs through online meditation training, fertility mindfulness workshops, and her podcast, “Responding to Life.”
Josephine is a regular content contributor for Motherly and Red Tricycle and she is also a preferred mental wellness provider for The Fertility Tribe, The IVF Warrior, Robyn, and the Fertility Circle. Josephine’s expertise has been featured in Woman’s Day, Prevention Magazine, Mind Body Green, Well + Good, The Bump, Peanut, and the L.A. Times. During this time of extreme isolation and anxiety, Josephine shares practical stress management tips including tools to help ground yourself via the free meditation videos on her site www.jatluri.com. For a free monthly video meditation and wellness tips, be sure to sign up to receive her monthly newsletter on her site. For daily inspiration, be sure to follow her on Instagram @josephineratluri.
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On This Day: 4 Ways Your #TBTs Can Motivate Present-You
Now your #TBTs can matter more than ever.
photo by Allison Norton
This post originally appeared on Shine.
Written by: Felicia Fitzpatrick
It’s 7:45 A.M., and I am squinting at my phone as I turn off my alarm. I instinctively open up Facebook’s push notification in a half-asleep daze to look back on the memories that I’ve apparently shared with 26 different people “On This Day.” Halfway through the scrolling, I cringe.
“On This Day in 2010…”
“On This Day in 2010 my friend and I took an completely awkward photo with a stranger who started talking to us on the bus so I could prove that I was having fun as a freshman in college.”
It terrifies me that on any given day I can stumble upon the Ghosts of Felicia’s Past.
It’s like the virtual version of running into former high school classmates at Target while home for the holidays. These digital time-turning apps have made me run into my first love that broke my heart, friends I don’t talk to anymore, and a version of Felicia that didn’t fully understand herself.
While there’s always something sentimental about naivete, the overwhelming sense of insecurity I felt back then also creeps up. It’s a lot to feel, especially at 7:48 A.M.
In some instances, I get jealous of my past self. “Damn, 2010, 2012, AND 2014 Felicia was seizing the hell out of this day! Oh, but 2017 Felicia had a bad day at work. I’ll never amount to anything.”
How have these apps made me competitive with myself?! And is that a positive or destructive behavior?
Studies have shown that “feelings of envy can then lead to Facebook users experiencing symptoms of depression,” so how do we make these morning reflections of social media nostalgia pleasant and motivational?
Here are four tips on how to use the days of yore to push towards a happy, successful, and fulfilling future:
1. Write Out How It Makes You Feel
If these virtual look-backs have you feeling some type of way, it’s time to break out a journal, scratch paper, or even your phone’s notepad, and get ready to ask yourself (and answer) some questions.
What is your gut reaction to these memories?
Embarrassed? Vulnerable? Angry? Jealous? Sad? Identifying feelings can be tough because it may bring up emotions you’ve been trying to avoid, but writing down a list of the different emotions can help you break through barriers.
How does that make you feel?
Are you embarrassed because you accidentally sent a ‘reply all’ email at work? Are you vulnerable because you opened up in a relationship? Are you angry, jealous, and/or sad because your friends have been hitting their life goals and you feel like you’re still just treading the proverbial achievement-waters?
Write down your current emotions and compare to the list of memory-driven emotions. Note the similarities between the lists, because there may be patterns and habits you have developed.
What do you want?
Making a list of goals can feel lofty and overwhelming, so decide on your framing. Maybe you want to think big picture: what is the one BIG goal you’d like to achieve eventually, and work your way down to one goal you can achieve in the next year that will help you get to the BIG goal, one goal you can achieve this month, and one goal you can achieve this week.
Alternatively, you can start small -- creating basic habits that you can do each day and next thing you know, you’ve created a lifestyle change. Regardless of how you frame it for yourself, determine what you want.
What lessons from the past can use you in the present?
Nostalgia can sometimes help us identify what we crave in our current lives. Do you miss the community feel you used to have with your soccer team? Do you miss the English teacher that pushed you to create your best work?
"All of the experiences you’re having now will help you get to where you want to go".
Tweet this.
All of the experiences you’re having now will help you get to where you want to go.
Think about how you can apply that in your current life. Maybe you become the social chair of your office and plan happy hours for you and your colleagues. Maybe you ask your manager for more consistent feedback, or seek out a mentor. Looking to the past can help you build upon your foundation to achieve what makes you happy.
2. Embrace Nostalgia and Reach Out to Old Friends
It’s okay to think back fondly on memories of your life -- recalling the pure excitement as you embrace future adventures, the pure fear as you stepped into the unknown.
I often see my younger self taking full advantage of days of carefree bliss, before phrases like “student loans” and “apartment security deposit” were in my vocabulary. Moments like this can often leave you sentimental and longing for the past. Instead of a solo wallow sesh, reach out to the people that were surrounding and supporting you at that time.
Acknowledge the people that have seen you through everything: braces and pimples, your Lizzie McGuire phase, your bumper sticker decal obsession. They were most likely the ones that were there when you were building your dreams, and it wouldn’t be surprising if they were looking for support from their longtime friends too.
Who knows, you might create even more memories.
3. Take Note of Your Progress
Sifting through these memories, you may find yourself laughing at inside jokes in the making, smiling at dreams being formed, and head-shaking in that annoyingly all-knowing way at significant goals being achieved.
You have a new perspective. Appreciate your growth by making a list of your accomplishments, because even if you feel like you’re stuck now, a visual list can remind you how far you’ve actually come and how many possibilities are in your future. Hope you still have that pen and paper out.
What goals have you achieved?
If you’ve set goals for yourself in the past, this list will be fairly simple to produce. Did you achieve what you wanted to achieve? Finally got verified on Twitter? Became a council member for your town? Great! If you haven’t been an active goal-setter, think big picture about the life and habits you’ve imagined for yourself.
Were you a small town gal with big city dreams, and now you’re thriving in the Big Apple? Did you hope that one day you would be able to spend weekends hiking with a backpack full of trail mix? Those count, too.
What fears have you overcome?
"Appreciate how far you’ve come and how many possibilities are in your future."
Tweet this.
Appreciate how far you’ve come and how many possibilities are in your future.
This does NOT mean you need to submerge yourself in a vat of cockroaches and reenact an episode of Fear Factor. Can you now give speeches when you used to feel like Anne Hathaway in The Princess Diaries? Have you publicly shared some of your creative work when the thought used to give you hives? You may not have developed specific goals around these fears, but it’s worth noting that you’ve spent time conquering ideas and notions that used to scare you.
What could you not have done a year ago that you are capable of now?
While this list could look similar to the lists above, ask yourself, what would I not have been able to do a year ago? This list may be filled with more unexpected and spontaneous achievements -- maybe it’s bench-pressing a certain amount of weight, or maybe belting a high C. What skills have you developed in the past year?
4. Authentically Live in the Present
My friend Tyree Boyd-Pates has a signature phrase, “trust the process.” You can have an end goal or destination -- but don’t think that there is only one path to get there.
Your journey may be winding as hell, have multiple forks with no munchkins guiding you, but everything you encounter along the way will only strengthen you. Don’t focus so much on the future that you can’t take in life lessons in the moment.
All of the experiences you’re having now will help you get to where you want to go, and perhaps more importantly, where you need to be. And that’s exciting, because I can only imagine what achievements will deserve an annoyingly all-knowing head shake in the years to come.
Felicia Fitzpatrick is the Social Media Manager for Playbill. When she’s not teaching Broadway performers how to use Snapchat, you can find her eating spaghetti, listening to Christmas music and rewatching Gilmore Girls seasons 1-4.
Why 80% of New Year's Resolutions Fail by Mid-February
And what you can do about it.
photo credit: Elle Magazine
Written by: Marah Lidey, co-founder Shine
In the day or two after New Year’s Eve, you likely process a mix of feelings: euphoria and hope for a new year, resolve to change those ‘bad habits’ that held you back last year -- and often, a fresh perspective on who you are and where you see yourself going.
You probably set some goals. But not your friendly neighborhood diner type of goals. No, you set Michelin-star, creme-brulee-boasting, so-fancy-they-serve-the-salad-with-the-baby-fork restaurant type of goals.
You want to work on that six pack every day of the week, write a bestselling novel, give up being the ‘always late’ coworker, save 80% of the money you're making and call that long-distance friend everyday to check in.
We all set lofty goal for ourselves with each new year. Our ambition is one of the many things that makes us so amazing as humans.
There’s just one part of the whole New Year’s resolutions formula that tends to go awry. Our goals often aren’t sustainable.
Change is hard overnight, and when we set unrealistic, binary milestones for ourselves and subsequently struggle to reach them in a short timeframe, we crash and burn.
In fact, USA Today reported that by mid-February, eighty percent of resolutions fail.
The good news? There’s an antidote that is 100% within our control: setting goals with self-compassion.
In it’s simplest terms, self-compassion means being kind to ourselves when we feel inadequate or slip up. It's been proven to lead to greater emotional wellbeing and is linked to less depression, anxiety and stress.
Psychologist and researcher, Dr. Kristen Neff, defines self-compassion in three abilities: self-kindness, common humanity and mindfulness.
Self-kindness
...is about flipping the script and reserving judgement on ourselves (studies have shown that we are 3 times more likely to feel compassion for a total stranger).
If we are struggling to meet a goal, there are probably valid reasons. Recognize that you’re going to do the best you can, and when you have off days - empathize with where you’re coming from.
Common humanity
...is about realizing that we all are imperfect beings.
Recognizing that you’re not alone and that you will doubtlessly hit roadblocks along the way, can empower you to rely on community and support for others in moments of self-criticism. There is a 100% chance that someone else has felt exactly the way you do, whether you’re crushing it or struggling.
“Self compassion helps bridge the gap between who we feel we are and who we really are.”
Mindfulness
...is about cultivating an awareness. We can’t be kind to ourselves or rely on the power in shared humanity if we don’t recognize when we’re being particularly hard ourselves.
As Dr. Anna Rowley, Psychologist and millenniall wellbeing expert says, “we can separate ourselves from our negative thinking or feelings of inadequacy. Your boss chews you out for a report she doesn’t like. You have a choice - dwell on what a failure you are or practice mindfulness and acknowledge the feedback and do better next time. By separating ourselves from the emotion - anger, frustration, or self pity - we are available to problem solve.”
Did you know? We are 3 times more likely to feel compassion for a total stranger than for ourselves.
Unfortunately there is a common misconception, that being compassionate with ourselves means that we’re going to take it easy, give ourselves a pass to never improve or become set in our ways.
But the reality is, that when we focus on empathizing with ourselves and meeting ourselves where we are - we can set goals that build on our strengths and realistically help us improve.
“Self compassion helps bridge the gap between who we feel we are and who we really are,” says Dr. Rowley.
She continues:
“Resolutions are hard to change because we are trying to alter aspects of ourself we aren’t happy with or behaviors we may have ‘lived’ for a long, long time. Many of us set unrealistic or unreasonable goals.
For example, "I will go to the gym 4 times this week”might be a tough resolution to keep if you have never been to a gym before or you are embarrassed walking into a room full of strangers grunting and heaving. Self compassion is about reducing the risk of feeling like a failure if you don’t nail your immediate goal.
It also helps us set more realistic compassionate goals. Rather than join a gym I’ll go for a walk or next time I shop I’ll look for a more healthy choice of foods. Self-compassion can help us make smarter choices and offer a helping hand when we mess up - and we will mess up.”
So, this year as you continue to grow, evolve and work on yourself - remember to set goals that allow you to be kind to yourself.
Sign up for Shine to set an intention and track your goals for the year.
The original version of this article appeared on Shine.