Time and space to process change

December 27, 2021December 27, 2021 / Jill Winski / 2 Comments

My partner is away doing some cat-sitting, so it’s just me and our cat, Genevieve, in the living room as I write this today. There’s a delicious silence in here right now as I look around the room at our Christmas decorations, and catch the scent of the “fir and fireside” candle my friend gave me a few days ago.

This was a full year for me, with lots of coaching work, and (as for all of us) the continuation of the pandemic, and at times I felt like I was running on empty. It’s been at those moments when I’ve been reminded, once again, to walk my talk about self-care.

Over the years I have taken many courses with Mark Silver of Heart of Business (I highly recommend both his Heart of Money and The Heart of Your Business courses), and one of the things I appreciate again and again is his reminder of the importance of taking time to process and integrate what we are learning in our businesses, in our lives.

I’ve mentioned many times in my writing here the illness that hit me around the time I turned twenty-five — half a lifetime ago now! That was the year, in retrospect, of The Giant Pause. I was forced to step back and take care of myself. It was kind of a forced reboot, in that it became clear I couldn’t live in the “push forward” way I had been up until that point.

Although I’ve had to “reboot” many times since then, I’ve never quite hit the wall in the way I did at that point, and I think that’s because I have woven time to process and integrate the changes I’ve been through regularly — when I “keep going” too much and too far without pausing to process what I’ve experienced, my body starts giving me warnings: I get headaches, I’m less articulate, my sleep isn’t good, I don’t feel present for my relationships or my clients.

In working with many coaching clients over the past eleven (!) years, I’ve come to see that I was hardly alone in my tendency to push and push without pausing. Why did I do it? Why do they do it? I think it’s because continually pushing forward upholds the illusion that we are in control of our lives if we just keep doing enough.

But it’s a slippery slope, because a) what is enough? Is this a helpful question? Can it actually be answered from our minds? Isn’t “enough” a feeling of satisfaction? Isn’t “enough” experienced in stillness, in noticing what is already here? (That’s often my experience, anyway.)

And b): If the whole of our identity comes through pushing and “getting stuff done,” what happens when we are no longer (either temporarily or permanently) able to push? My long illness way back when showed me the way to a more all-encompassing sense of identity, one that wasn’t based on what I was able to do, but on who I was at that moment in time, and beneath that, simply the being energy that moved through me always, even when I was absolutely still in a hospital bed.

And c): Constantly pushing our way through our lives keeps us out of touch with our emotions (or, at least, with some of our emotions, and we need to feel all of them!) — particularly sadness, which, as I often note to my clients, is the “letting go” emotion. If we don’t allow sadness, we hang on to things.

Sadness isn’t always here because we’ve experienced a big loss or disappointment — it’s also about the bittersweet quality that we sense as life moves on, and feeling it allows us to more smoothly move forward with our lives — by pausing to allow this letting go emotion to come up and out. Seems like a paradox, yes? The more we push to avoid feeling, the more we tend to get stuck.

How do you know it’s time to pause to process and integrate what you’ve been learning in your life, or the change that’s occurred? As I mentioned above, my body gives me signals — they’re subtle at first, but become more pronounced the longer it takes me to listen to them. In addition, clients have reported to me that when they haven’t taken time to slow down and “pause and process,” they notice the following things:

Feeling empty and dissatisfied — things that are supposed to be “fun,” like hanging out with friends, feel more like “going through the motions”
Having a hard time making decisions — everything seems to have equal importance
Feeling exhausted — but rest doesn’t feel replenishing
Having a hard time falling asleep, or staying asleep
Putting in all the “right” actions, but the desired result doesn’t happen, or if it does, it feels less than satisfying
A vague feeling of disconnection from themselves (note that “vague” feelings tend to be covers for deeper, more specific feelings — the experience of something being “vague,” I’ve found, is code for I don’t want to go there)

We’ll each have our unique symptoms and signs that clue us in to it being time to “pause and process,” but the above are some biggies that I hear about a lot.

I’ll admit that I had considered not taking this week off from coaching, not completely! Even after all these years, there is still a strong voice within me, a part of me, which is really afraid of “not doing enough,” of not being of service to others, of being “idle” (as my grandma would have put it). This part of me is unable to embrace nuances — its thinking tends to be of the all-or-nothing variety, and it feels fearful and anxious all the time.

So I need to recognize it and remind myself that the whole of me is much more than this one part of me; this one part doesn’t get to call all the shots. I’m so grateful I didn’t act on its urgings to overwork myself here at the end of the year, because now I am reaping the benefits of taking time for self-connection: a regulated nervous system, connection to insight, and a budding feeling of openness where, previously, something felt closed.

***

What are the signs, for you, that it’s time to pause and process? How might you give yourself permission to do it? What are the benefits of allowing yourself this time and space? I’d love to hear from you.

Wishing you the time and space you need to connect with yourself as we move into a new year.

Want to stay connected? You can sign up for my monthly-ish Artist’s Nest Newsletter, here.

Need support in taking care of your unique and sensitive self while making your creativity a priority? You can learn more about the ways we can work together, here. Wondering if we’re a fit? You can learn more, here.

Above photos by Niels van Dijk on Unsplash and by Jessica Delp on Unsplash

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Choosing your focus

November 3, 2019November 2, 2019 / Jill Winski / 2 Comments

My partner and I recently took our annual pre-Halloween zoo trip, which I always relish.

As we wandered around, mesmerized by the free-roaming guinea fowl (who sound like they’re chanting in unison!), I started venting to him about something that’s been bugging me for a while.

Except — I stopped myself.

It’s great to have good listeners in our lives, those to whom we can safely vent — people who don’t tell us we “shouldn’t feel that way” or who shut us down or who criticize us for having something to vent about. This non-judgmental listening is an essential quality if we want to feel deeply supported.

The kind of venting I’m talking about here is also sometimes called “conscious complaining” — you’re aware you’re complaining, and the other person holds space for you, for a certain amount of time, so you can get out whatever it is. This is different than an unconscious onslaught that saps and drains the other person.

Sometimes, though, as I move into more venting, a still voice inside me is like “Hmm … maybe you’ve focused on this long enough.”

That happened for me that day at the zoo. I kind of stepped outside of myself for a moment, and heard myself launching into this topic, again — and, although my partner was willing to listen (again!), it occurred to me that I didn’t need go there anymore. I could choose to move off of that topic because staying on it was no longer serving me.

It’s important to discern between focusing on things and talking about them because of our genuine need to sort through them and work them out — and focusing on them as a kind of fixation that distracts us from the good in our lives and, maybe, keeps us stirred up because anxiety is familiar to us.

We’ve probably all encountered people who go to one extreme or another here: the co-worker who can’t seem to stop sharing the same complaints with you day in and day out, versus the family member who downplays every emotion to the point you’re not sure they actually have any.

Between these extremes there is a place that feels healthier — unique to each of us — where we’re sharing when we need support and in order to work through things, but we’re not going over the same territory again and again when that path is already well-worn.

When I stopped myself from venting to my partner that day, it was because something in me sensed I would only be deepening the “brain rut” I’d already created with that long-held story.

And I realized it’s time to start detaching from it and letting it go. That means, for me right now, talking about it less — honoring the subtle voice that says, “Let’s be still instead of going there again.”

So I chose, instead, to focus on the colors and textures of leaves, the quiet grace with which a giraffe loped across the grass, the stubby back legs of a polar bear as it swam under water, a squirrel monkey swinging from branch to branch with its tiny baby on its back.

Trees and animals (even those very vocal guinea fowl!) bring me to stillness, which helps me practice discernment.

It’s important to note, in our Western culture which does not encourage the expression of many flavors of emotion, that venting serves a truly important purpose — it helps us to get in touch with the feelings within us so that we can work through them. Often we’re not sure what’s up for us unless we share it with a trusted other.

When we’ve shared something many times, though, and we notice that sharing again may no longer be serving us, that’s when it’s time to choose where we want to put our focus.

Because, yes, we can choose! And it’s this choosing that, ultimately, creates movement, change, and growth in our lives.

(And by the way, the most important sharing we’ll ever do is with ourselves, whether that’s writing what’s true for us on the pages of a journal or in some other form. But, often, we get to that truth through connecting with others at some point in the process.)

What do you notice about this process of discernment for you? I’d love to hear from you. (And a belated Happy Halloween!)

My specially-priced Autumn Transition Coaching Sessions will continue through November 30, 2019. If you’re in an “in-between” place this fall and need support, you might want to check them out! You can do that here.

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What shifts when you stop fighting your feelings?

July 7, 2019July 6, 2019 / Jill Winski

The other day I was on the phone with a friend, explaining how I felt about something that had happened recently in a rather heated way. When I finally paused, my friend said, “It makes total sense that you feel that way.”

After I hung up with her, I went out for a quick walk, and as I passed my neighbor and his two adorable dogs (I’m always instantly happy when I see them!) it occurred to me that something had deeply relaxed in me since I got off the phone with my friend.

It had relaxed because she had validated my feelings. She had pointed out that the way I felt totally made sense. For me. In this situation.

And the reason I’d felt so worked up when I’d begun telling her my tale was because I’d felt I needed to argue my point — a part of me was believing I shouldn’t feel the way I felt about the situation.

When my friend pointed out that how I felt made sense, something clicked.

When I relaxed and allowed and validated my feelings (thanks to my friend “lending” me her validation), I knew exactly what I needed to do to take care of myself in the situation.

When I was wondering if my feelings were “okay,” I was judging myself for having them and then believing I couldn’t take care of myself. Because “maybe I shouldn’t feel this way in the first place? Maybe I’m selfish? Maybe I need too much? Maybe my feelings are just too much?”

One of the coaches who trained me back when I went through life coach training in 2010 said that a lot of times when she asked a client to describe what they were feeling, they ended up describing fighting a feeling, rather than the feeling itself.

For some of us, fighting a feeling is all we actually know. We’ve never gotten beneath the feeling of resisting a feeling to the core feeling.

Does this sound familiar? If you grew up in, or currently work or live in, an environment where authentic emotion was or is not encouraged (and I think this applies to, oh, 99% of humans?!), chances are you know exactly what I’m talking about.

If you could believe that how you feel makes total sense for who you are and the situation you’re in, what might be possible?

Could you relax more? Could you, as I did after talking to my friend, connect more easily and quickly with what you need to do to take care of yourself? Could you view yourself, your life, and the people around you more clearly (because your vision is not clouded by fighting so hard against a feeling, or arguing so hard for your right to it)?

When we’re not fighting our feelings, or our right to our feelings, they come up, move through us, and find resolution. (Karla McLaren writes in depth about this process in her incredibly helpful books and on her website).

And we have far more access to our inner guidance when we’re not fighting or suppressing our feelings. It’s from that more relaxed place of accepting the feelings that we can see what their message for us may be. (It’s also from that place of acceptance, I’ve found, that my clients find themselves shifting out of “creative blocks.”)

Signs you may be fighting a feeling:

• You keep venting about something and it feels unresolved

• You catch yourself channeling Spock, saying things like “It’s not logical to feel, think or do this”

• You insist that the only thing you feel is boredom or apathy

• You’re easily irritated, angered, or feel ready to cry (but you don’t)

• You’re convinced that you “should” or you “have to” do something, but you’re not doing it

If this is the space you’re in, it’s time to create safety for yourself. My friend’s kind and patient presence and her validation of what I felt did that for me. On some days, though, I need to find other ways. I love the audios on self-compassion expert Kristin Neff’s site, particularly the one called “Soften, soothe, allow,” for this purpose.

The key word here is permission. If you had permission to feel just how you feel, if you could give that to yourself (because ultimately, we do have to give it to ourselves), what might you notice? What would be possible? These are (some of) the questions to ask. You can probably come up with new ones!

What do you notice about this process for you? What shifts for you when you allow yourself to feel whatever you feel? I’d love to hear from you.

Want to stay connected? You can sign up for more articles and updates on my coaching offerings (including occasional specials for newsletter subscribers!) here.

If you need support in practicing excellent self-care while making your creative work a priority, I’d love to help! You can find out more about working with me, here.

Above blue jay images by Steve Douglas and Erin Wilson on Unsplash, respectively

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The magic of giving yourself more time

April 7, 2019April 7, 2019 / Jill Winski

Something I’ve noticed again and again while working with clients who want to let go of overwhelm is just how often we expect ourselves to make big life changes very quickly and easily.

When — lo and behold! — making the changes feels like it’s taking a long time and is not all that easy, we conclude that something is wrong.

Where does this mindset come from? For some of us, it’s deeply rooted in childhood, where our feelings might have gotten lost in the shuffle or, in some cases, were flat out not allowed.

For lots of us, too, the culture that surrounds us is focused on “fast and easy,” and we can feel exposed to this message hundreds of times a day. No wonder when things feel slow and difficult, we question ourselves! (This is where self-compassion is especially important.)

When we allow our feelings to surface, we have access to our intuition, and our intuition gives us a solid sense of how fast — or slow — we need to go to best serve ourselves. (Sometimes intuition prompts us to move more slowly and see what emerges, and sometimes it prompts us to take swift action and a lot unfolds seemingly all at once, but when we’re acting from intuition, that unfolding feels right, no matter its pace.)

There are times, for example, when I get an idea about something I might want to do, but when I start taking actions toward it, I can feel a forcing/pushing energy behind it that creates an “ick” for me. (“Ick” is my way of describing something that feels like it’s actually the opposite of where my essential self wants to go.)

If I keep on pushing through the “ick,” I notice I just create more of it. My mind may tell me I need to do this thing (whatever it is), but if I don’t take a giant step back at this point and investigate what’s behind the “ick,” I only end up feeling awful about the thing I thought I wanted to do/create/have.

If we’re in a big hurry, it’s always worth stepping back and questioning what’s going on for us. What are we afraid of? What do we fear will happen if we don’t hurry? How do we want to feel?

***

A while back, a client I was working with felt pretty sure that she wanted to quit her job — the mere thought of quitting caused her essential self to light right up. But when she started getting things in order to actually quit, she felt her version of “the ick”. Flow stopped, fear took over, and she felt frozen. Did this mean, she wondered, that quitting her job was the wrong move?

After we did some calming of her nervous system and she was feeling more safe and peaceful, she was able to see that although she did indeed want to quit her job, she needed to give herself a longer time frame in which to make that big step. Instead of “right now!”, she realized that giving herself six months to plan her exit felt really good and didn’t trigger the “ick”.

When she stepped back in this way, her intuition was more clear to her — she wanted to leave, but she needed more time to do that in a way that felt solid and grounded to her essential self.

Your essential self is the essence of who you truly are (as opposed to your social self, which is much more concerned with how you’re viewed by those around you).

I have learned that the essential self is never in a hurry. Its voice is that of our intuition, which, as I mentioned above, has a “just-right” sense of our unfolding — it’s not about “fast” or “slow”, but about the right pace for where we want to go next, where we (essentially) need to be.

On a smaller, day-to-day scale, giving ourselves more time when things feel hard can help us meet ourselves where we are, too. Whenever I have to figure out some new technology, I get edgy because I am not a techy person. I’ve noticed, though, that if I can block out an hour to learn something new, rather than expecting myself to “just get it” in five minutes, I usually learn it fine and don’t feel like I’m waging a war against myself.

How is giving ourselves more time in this sense different from “procrastination”? It’s the difference between approaching and tending to our feelings, and avoiding them.

What we call “procrastinating” feels so awful because we’re really in avoidance — not necessarily of the thing we’re “supposed” to do — but of ourselves, our feelings, and understanding more deeply what’s going on. (I can’t tell you how many times a client who’s judged herself for “procrastinating” has come to the realization that the “thing” didn’t even need to be done, once she got clear on what was going on.)

When we take a giant step back and ask what’s really going on here, we are generous with ourselves. We’ve taken the pressure off, calmed our nervous systems, and now we can clearly feel into what’s right for us and what isn’t. (If you need support here, you might want to check out my Stellar Self-Care One-on-One Coaching Program.)

When you have that “up against a wall” feeling, what happens when you simply choose to give yourself a little more time? I’d love to hear from you.

My Stellar Self-Care One-on-One Coaching Program is enrolling now. If you want to let go of overwhelm and embrace your creativity, I’d love to support you. Want to learn more? You can do that here.

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Above images by Giv Meraj and Terry Richmond on Unsplash, respectively

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Reducing energetic drains (and clearing space for creativity!)

February 10, 2019February 10, 2019 / Jill Winski

I spent three days inside last week due to dangerously low temperatures here in the Chicago area. Since I rely on walking outside every day to stay grounded (and it’s also the best way for me to connect with my intuition, I’ve found), needless to say, I got more than little bit of cabin fever.

Being forced to stay in, however, made me more aware than usual of my surroundings — I couldn’t get outside to escape them!

Toward the end of this enforced hibernation period, I found myself cleaning out my bedroom closet, which had become a swirl of unused gift wrap, shoes, things I meant to donate and just a general lack of any organizing principle.

This led quite organically into organizing my dresser drawers, and between these two areas, I got some bags of donations ready for Goodwill.

Then I deleted a bunch of stuff I no longer needed from my laptop.

I also brought a beautiful picture out of the closet that I’d framed but not gotten around to putting up.

These actions may seem relatively small, but they’ve had a big effect on my energy this week.

Confronting the tangle of stuff on the floor of the closet had been creating frustration for me on a daily basis, but because it seemed “mundane” I wasn’t dealing with it (a pattern of mine). The same went for the overstuffed dresser drawers.

That unnecessary stuff on my laptop was taking up space. And that wonderful picture buried beneath clothes I’d meant to donate? I wasn’t getting to experience it, and I badly wanted to (that’s why I’d framed it!).

Now it’s out in the living room where I can appreciate it, I’m pleased when I look into my bedroom closet every day, and my dresser drawers close with ease.

None of this seems like “big” stuff, but add up enough of these individual energetic drains and you can wonder why you feel sluggish, unfocused, or frustrated every day.

If you are very sensitive to energy, as I am, these things can really affect you. So just notice if you’re falling into the “I’ll deal with that when it gets really bad” camp when it comes to your immediate environment. You can certainly make that choice (I often do!), but you might want to try out the exercise below and just see how you feel afterward.

This exercise works best if you choose only one area at a time to focus on. Often, we let things pile up and up (both externally AND internally) because we think we have to take it all on at once. That feels overwhelming, so we say, screw it! I’m not doing any of it.

(A solid guideline here: If you feel any amount of dread, the step you’re considering is either too big, or it’s not the right one, right now.)

Doing an energetic home scan

• Go into a room of your home (or an area of a room, if that feels more doable) and stand in the middle of it. Simply let your gaze wander around the room and notice what feels “off” to you.

(It won’t necessarily be “clutter” — it can be anything at all that feels draining. One of my clients felt drained by the lime green chair in a corner of her office — the color was overwhelming to her! Another noticed a humming sound coming from her TV that bothered her. )

• Now, make a list of what you notice. You don’t have to get too detailed (unless you want to).

• When you’re ready, repeat the process with another room, or another area of the same room.

• Once you’ve done this with each room, choose just one thing on the list to deal with this week.

(If it’s a bigger thing, you may want to break it down. The important thing is to begin. I found that when I decided to clear away just a couple of things that kept falling off a box in the closet, I spontaneously did more because it felt so good. When we’re really into the process, we tend to continue it!)

• Really let yourself celebrate and appreciate the space you’ve created. Let how it feels sink in.

***

Taking small steps to clear energetic drains in our immediate surroundings often leads to taking small steps to clear other, less “physical” drains.

After I did this clearing out several days ago, I found myself reevaluating a couple of commitments that have been feeling “off” to me, and I’ve decided to cut back on one, and let the other go completely. Clearing space in my environment seemed to open me up to clearing space within me as well.

(That picture buried in the closet really got me thinking: something I truly value is hidden from view, underneath a tangled mess? Interesting … )

By the way, not giving ourselves the space we need between doing one thing and another can be a huge energetic drain as well. Where can you allow yourself more space — if only just to take a deep breath — as you go about your day?

Where do you notice energetic drains in your home environment? What do they point to for you in other areas of your life? I’d love to hear from you.

Need one-on-one support in recognizing the energetic drains in your home? You might want to try out one of my Living Space Discovery Sessions. You can find out more on my Ways We Can Work Together page, here.

Want to stay connected? You can get info about my ongoing coaching offerings and other good stuff, here.

Bird photo by Clever Visuals on Unsplash; lantern photo by Mira Kemppainen on Unsplash

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Reconnecting with what you want (when you feel a little lost)

December 30, 2018December 30, 2018 / Jill Winski / 4 Comments

With only a couple of days left in 2018, I took a look back at my year and asked myself some key questions. (You can check out some of these questions in my 2017 year-end post.)

I also thought about the clients I’ve worked with, and what had come up for them. And it seems that the most common issue I’ve seen this year is along the lines of this: I feel like I’ve gotten off-track, somehow. I’ve lost the path. Or: I feel so busy and overwhelmed, I’ve forgotten why I’m doing this in the first place.

In the process of creating our lives, we will feel off-track, like we’ve lost sight of the path, and even if we feel “on-path”, we will feel so busy and overwhelmed at times that we’ll wonder whether what we’ve created is actually what we want.

This is not a matter of “if I were doing it right, I wouldn’t feel this way.” I hear this so often. We’re so quick to jump from “this doesn’t feel good” to “I must be doing it wrong!”

Repeat after me: Feeling uncomfortable, off-track, or overwhelmed is not a sign that you are “doing it wrong.”

It’s simply a sign that something is calling out for your attention. Something wants to be looked at more closely.

The more we “push through” and/or ignore this inner nudge to look more closely at what’s going on within us, the more out of control and “off-track” we tend to feel.

(Ironically, we usually bulldoze over our feelings because we’re afraid feeling them will cause us to lose control. It’s true that we do “lose control” in the moment when we allow feelings to emerge. But overall, we gain more control of our lives when we are clear on what our feelings are trying to tell us. I highly recommend Karla McLaren’s books The Language of Emotions and The Art of Empathy on this topic.)

Being able to sit with uncomfortable feelings as they arise is key to connecting (or reconnecting) with what you really want.

Why? Because until we are coming from a “clean” emotional space, we will keep taking the same actions that lead us to results that aren’t really what we want. I have written here before about making decisions from a place of peace, and I have quoted Lao-Tzu, who asked if we can find the patience to allow “muddy water” to become clear. At that point, said Lao-Tzu, the “right action” will arise by itself.

I have found this to be true in my own life time and again. But most of us are really resistant to believing this, because it requires a certain degree of trust to let go enough to allow our “inner muddy water” to become clear.

If we haven’t had a lot of practice in exercising our trust muscles — trust in ourselves to make solid decisions, and trust in the process of life — it can feel downright scary to not rush to action.

But, as I’ve often written here, when we rush to actions that feel “muddied” because we are so afraid of being still, we often make messes that we have to undo, or we perpetuate the same feeling we are trying to get away from by taking rushed action!

I am a prime example of this. As young as age ten or so, I developed a coping mechanism of getting through life by avoiding my emotions, rather than moving toward what I wanted. This coping mechanism became so automatic that by my mid-twenties my body literally broke down. Pushing down emotions only works for so long, my friends.

Our emotions are messengers for us. When we can sit with them, let them move up and out, without taking action on them right away, we clear the way for our intuition to emerge. It is our intuition — the voice of our essential self — that will point us to (or back to) what is deeply true for us.

So when we feel like we’ve “lost our way,” what’s usually going on is that we have been avoiding emotion.

It’s extremely common for me to hear from a client, “I feel like I don’t have time to deal with my emotions!” (This is coming from people who know the value of emotional work — that’s why they’ve signed up for life coaching! Our culture really drills into us the idea that we don’t have time to feel. We must challenge this idea.)

Now, once we have allowed emotion to come up and out, and have cleared the way for the voice of our essential self to make itself known (this voice can be quite subtle, which is why “muddy” emotions can seem to blot it out), we’ll often find that what emerges is one simple step to bring us closer to ourselves.

That’s it. Intuition does not come to us in a series of complicated steps that extend into the distant future — it is usually just one step, one “best” next step.

I was reminded of this while doing my Autumn Transition Coaching Sessions this fall — the whole purpose of these sessions is to connect folks with their “best next step.” It never fails to delight us when, once we’ve let the muddy water clear a bit, that best next step pops right up with intensity. It may be a seemingly “tiny” thing, but it’s always strong and clear.

What’s fascinating is that once we’ve allowed our feelings to emerge, rather than pushing them down, we often find that we’re not as “off-track” as we think, or that our overwhelm is directly connected to the pushing down of our feelings, not to what we’re doing or not doing.

The good news here is that allowing our feelings to come up and out does not have to be some laborious, time-intensive process where we remove ourselves from our “regular lives” for weeks or months. In fact, it’s vital that we weave connection with our feelings into our daily lives.

When we connect this way, just checking in with how we’re feeling on a daily basis, we feel “off-track” far less, because in tending to our feelings and the message they have for us, we are clearing the way for intuition — the voice of the essential self. (You don’t have to actually “sit” with your feelings, by the way. I find walking, moving my body, most helpful for connecting with my emotions.)

How will you connect with what you’re feeling on a daily basis in 2019? What have you noticed about this process for you? I’d love to hear from you. In the meantime, I wish you a beautiful start to the New Year.

(For more related to this topic, you might also find this post from last year helpful, or this one from years ago.)

Want to stay connected? You can get updates on my coaching offerings and other good stuff by subscribing to my monthly-ish newsletter, here.

I’ll be working with new coaching clients starting January 10, 2019. Wondering if I might be able to help? Feel free to check out my Is This You? page.

Above photo of candle by freestocks.org on Unsplash; snow globe by Aaron Burden on Unsplash; lamppost by Hide Obara on Unsplash

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Why accepting where you are is powerful ( + join our community calls!)

January 13, 2018January 13, 2018 / Jill Winski / 2 Comments

(Scroll to the end of this post to find out how to get details on joining our Artist’s Nest community calls.)

One of the most challenging things about being human can be accepting this paradox: we need to truly accept where we are in order to move on from it.

That “moving on” might be actual, physical moving (from a home, job, relationship to a new situation) — or it can be inner, emotional “moving on” — our externals may look the same, but we’re shifting internally. (Often, it’s both!)

In my work as a life coach, I often hear some form of this: But if I accept where I am, doesn’t that mean I’m becoming complacent? Doesn’t it mean I’m settling for less than I want? Doesn’t it mean I’m giving up?

We live in a very action-oriented world. The problem is that we’ve been trained to be so action-focused that sometimes we don’t recognize the difference between action that is rooted in struggle, and action that is rooted in a sense of rightness (as in, “this feels like — from a place of peace or a place of knowing — the best next step to take”).

There is a subtle but powerful difference between true acceptance of where we are in our lives, and resignation. Acceptance is connected to an understanding of what we can control and what we can’t, whereas resignation is more like “I just can’t handle this. I give up.”

Sometimes we do need to be in that place of resignation — for a little while. It’s usually a sign that we’re overwhelmed and need to find ways of prioritizing and getting support.

It’s not, however, the same as acceptance. Acceptance has a different feel to it — it’s more like, “Okay — I’ve done what I can here, and now I’m open to seeing a different way. I’m going to take the risk of standing right where I am — because I can’t truly be anywhere else.”

Can you feel the difference? The great thing about embracing that place of deep acceptance is that we drop the rope. We stop struggling and resisting what is, and that creates a space, an opening, for wisdom to enter.

The wisdom we get is often something along the lines of “Let’s get quiet and take a time-out before we do anything else.”

***

Back in 2014 and the first half of 2015, I was wrestling with living in a house that was up for sale and not knowing when it would sell or where I was going to live. I have a lot of childhood triggers associated with moving, and for about a year, I periodically felt frantic. I would rush to half-baked actions where I’d consider to moving to places I didn’t really want to live, just so I could put a stop to the uncertainty and “be done”.

At the same time, a part of me really didn’t want to leave the house and I would scheme about ways I could stay in it (even though I had come to know that, energetically and financially, staying there was becoming a total struggle). It was a crazy time and I felt really ungrounded and just wanted it to end. (You can read more about this journey here.)

Then at some point — it was spring of 2015, I think — I got it. I realized I needed to accept where I was.

I didn’t know. I didn’t know when the house would sell or how quickly I’d need to get out. I didn’t know how I’d deal with the emotions I’d have about leaving the house. I didn’t know how my elderly cat would handle a move. I didn’t know how a move would affect my relationship. And a part of me still loved the house and didn’t want to go at all.

I remember sitting at the dining room table, looking out the window as winter melted away, and finally accepting the mess.

I didn’t accept ALL of it on that day — it had been a gradual process of accepting the external stuff and my own internal stuff. But on that day, I got clear enough to embrace the not knowing. I accepted where I was.

A decision bubbled up in me (to paraphrase Byron Katie, I didn’t make the decision, it made me). I was going to enjoy living in the house for as long as it felt right. I didn’t even know what that meant.

But it gave me some breathing room. That is what true acceptance does. We get off our own cases. We stop resisting the not knowing.

***

What happened after that? I enjoyed the house for a little longer, and by May, it felt right to look for a new place to live (even though the house hadn’t yet sold). Things seemed to fall into place without a lot of struggle — I was no longer wrestling with myself.

Looking back, it’s clear to me how my need to “know” before it was time to know caused me to try to control the situation and make decisions before they were ripe to be made. I think I needed to give myself the gift of a little more time to simply enjoy my longtime home, before I could truly embrace the idea of a new one.

And guess what? There was time. It was only my frantic mind that told me I needed to hurry up and get things decided. In my urge to move away from discomfort, I created more for myself.

This is another thing true acceptance gives us — time to be with our emotions. When we’re clear, we move on naturally. Things happen, and they don’t feel frantic. Acceptance didn’t cause me to cling to the house — it helped me let go of it.

What might change if you were to give yourself the gift of acceptance today? What do you notice when you allow yourself to accept where you are? What comes up for you? I’d love to hear from you.

And: I’ll be leading monthly Artist’s Nest Community Calls starting January 31. On these calls, we’ll be focusing on the challenges inherent in making yourself AND your creative work a priority. (As I often say, creativity and self-care go hand-in-hand — you can’t truly have one without the other.) The calls are free — to get the details, sign up for my Artist’s Nest newsletter, here. I’d love to have you there!

Above images are “Heart of Ice” © Olga Simakova | Dreamstime Stock Photos, and “House Buried in Snow” © Lane Erickson | Dreamstime Stock Photos, respectively

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Getting clear on what’s true for you

September 26, 2017September 26, 2017 / Jill Winski

Several years ago I was talking to a friend of mine (who also happens to be a very gifted life coach). During our conversation, I kept comparing myself to someone else I admired, saying “I just can’t do what she does.”

My friend pointed out my use of the word “can’t” and asked me: “You can’t — or you don’t want to?”

I stopped and pondered for a moment. Oh, my friend was wise. The truth was, I didn’t want to do what this woman was doing. It was wonderful — for her, but not for me.

This realization brought me to another question: Why was I choosing to believe I wasn’t capable of doing something, when the truth was that I didn’t want to do it at all?

It occurred to me that it was “easier” for me to believe I just couldn’t than to accept and sit with that fact that, as is often true for me, someone else’s path wasn’t my path. Allowing this truth to surface meant that I would need to find another way that did work for me, for who I was (and am).

It is challenging to look inward for guidance when it seems so much easier to look outward. Realizing we don’t want to do it the way “everyone else” is doing it may trigger stuff for us, too. (“Why can’t I do it the way she does it — what’s wrong with me?”)

Guidance that doesn’t fit us, however, is not “easy” at all. Trying to follow it feels like wearing a pair of shoes that are too loose or too tight — it’s hard to get where you’re going that way!

Isn’t it fascinating that our minds will actually believe things that are not deeply true for us, rather than take in truths that may be hard to accept? And yet, this happens all the time. I see it often with my life coaching clients — which is why, sometimes, our work is about simply creating enough safety and comfort for them to be with whatever their truth may be.

Because here’s the thing: if we aren’t standing in our truth, we have no solid foundation to build on. Somebody else’s truth, somebody else’s guidance, won’t do it for us (unless it truly resonates for us).

So how do we get clear on what’s true for us?

• Be sure that you want to know the truth. Sometimes I’ve worked with a client who realizes “I don’t want to get clear right now. I have so much going on that is causing fear and chaos for me, and I’m just not ready yet.” This is totally valid. You know what’s best for you — and in fact, a feeling of safety is key in allowing the truth to surface. Allow yourself to get to that place of safety — that inner feeling of safety — first.

• Don’t force it. You don’t have to grasp or push to know what it true for you — the truth arises when you feel safe enough to be with it and when you are in a place of relative peace. (I often connect with what’s true for me when I take my morning walks, which bring me to a peaceful place of acceptance most days.)

• Notice the language you’re using, as my coach friend helped me do during our conversation. If you hear words like “can’t”, “should”, “never” or “always”, that’s your mind going to an all-or-nothing place — and chances are, those words are not true for you.

• Know that your truth is not deeply buried. When you feel safe to contact it, to express it, you’ll find that it’s right there waiting to be honored. If writing is your thing, a simple and helpful exercise is to go to your journal and write: “What I really want to say is … ” (Thanks to Natalie Goldberg for this idea, which I found years ago in her book Wild Mind.)

• Again, safety. And support. Who is a person you trust, who is good at reflecting to you who you are, as my friend did for me? She knew me well enough to intuit that my “can’t” wasn’t really a “can’t” at all, and she played that hunch.

It is so much easier to move forward — even with the really challenging stuff — when we are doing so from a foundation of what is true for us. That starts with letting yourself know what is true, and going from there.

A quick update: My one-on-one coaching program Light Up Your Creative Self will close after September 30. This program may be for you if you are feeling blocked, stuck or simply like you are flailing in the dark when it comes to a creative project or your creativity in general. I have typically done this program with writers, but it is open to anyone who feels called to it — we are all creative (even when it doesn’t feel like it!). Interested? Find out more on my Ways We Can Work Together page, here. (By the way, it’s $25 off the total price through the 30th.)

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Who do you want to be today?

August 1, 2017September 9, 2017 / Jill Winski / 6 Comments

Saturday is normally a work day for me. I often have coaching clients on Saturday mornings, and if I don’t, I use that time for writing or other business-related things.

But when I got up this past Saturday, I realized I just wasn’t feeling “right”. After a couple of hours of inexplicably aching muscles, my mind went to all the things that could possibly be wrong; I imagined myself in the ER, or with a prolonged hospital stay; it would feel so invasive, it would be so expensive, and how would my elderly cat survive without me if I were in the hospital for a long time?

Meanwhile I kept telling myself I should make use of my day. It was important to keep on schedule! What would happen if I didn’t get it all done?

Saturday passed in a flurry of anxiety, during which I told no less than three people close to me over the phone that I was surely dying and things were crumbling and life always pulled the rug out from under me when I was feeling productive! Life didn’t want me to accomplish anything!

Fast forward to Sunday, when I felt markedly better and realized that I probably just had a mild bug which was causing weird muscle aches. Though I was tempted to play catch-up on Sunday, my body sent me a strong message that it was time to rest, and rest I did (with a little help from Netflix).

Monday morning, though, the tyranny of the un-done loomed heavily as I woke up, grateful to be feeling well but now back in “get-it-done” mode.

(So many years after the chronic illness that changed the way I related to myself back in my twenties, I still tend to make a very quick leap from “Feeling good” to “Now how much can I get done?” It still sometimes takes “feeling physically unwell” for me to truly slow down — and this is something I continue to notice and work with in myself.)

I went out for my morning walk (making it a brief one, since there was now so much to do!). As I headed home, intuition guided me a little bit out of my way to walk past what I think of as “the cat house” — a house whose side windows are situated along a brick-paved street. In these windows, I almost always catch glimpses of cats. At any given time there seem to be about seven or eight cats living in this house.

The cats in the cat house are often asleep on various pieces of window-oriented cat furniture, but on Monday, I encountered two awake ones. In the first window sat a gray tabby, an adolescent, not quite full-cat size. It watched me as though I were the most curious thing it had ever seen.

In the next window, a full-grown, robust gray-and-white cat, sat hen-like. Its eyes followed me as I passed, and I couldn’t help smiling. It was like these cats posed a silent question to me: What’s your hurry, human?

I turned the corner and headed down the adjacent street, my mind quickly crowding out the happy images of the cats with my towering to-do list. But I felt a little shift in myself — a little bit of breathing room.

And then, as I passed the barber shop on the corner, noticing the barber inside chatting with a regular, scissors glinting, it occurred to me: Whether I approach “all I need to do today” from this place of frantic intensity, or borrow the laidback alertness of those little faces in the cat house and move through the day from a place of peace and curiosity, I will probably get about the same amount done.

And I asked myself, Who do you want to be today? The frantic person who tries to do it all because if you don’t, you’ll be really hard on yourself? Or the person who moves from a place of self-acceptance and recognizes that she is choosing to do what she does, and if it doesn’t all get done, she’ll be totally okay?

I chose the second person. And, interestingly, I got a heck of a lot done yesterday from that peaceful, self-accepting place, borrowing some of that laidback-yet-curious cat energy.

But whether I’d accomplished everything I wanted to or not, the experience of doing it, the journey of my day, felt so much more pleasurable (and powerful) than it would have had I chosen to be the frantic person who operates from urgency.

In her beautiful memoir Autobiography of a Face, author Lucy Grealy wrote that we don’t learn something big just once in our lives and then, that’s it; we tend to learn the same truths over and over again. This lesson is not new to me. In fact, this choice of who I want to be is one I make over and over again. Because I often forget that I have this choice.

The key, with so much in our lives, is remembering.

And when I choose self-acceptance and peace over frantic urgency, I do not contribute to the frantic urgency that is so prevalent in our world.

Who do you want to be today? Who do you choose to be? How do you interact with yourself and others, based on this choice? I’d love to hear from you.

P. S. Way back when, I wrote about how our “not enough time” issues are really issues of self-acceptance. You can read that post, here.

P. P. S. My one-on-one coaching program Light Up Your Creative Self goes away at the end of September as I make room for new things I’m creating. Interested in this program? Find out more about it, here — and get $25 off until it goes away.

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On stopping when you’ve had enough

July 15, 2017 / Jill Winski / 2 Comments

bench

One of the things I often say here is that, when it comes down to it, self-care is less about what we do than it is about what we undo.

When I first started my Stellar Self-Care Coaching Program in 2015, I noticed my tendency to “firehose” my clients with lots of information. After all, the more they knew, the better, right?

Then it hit me — whoa! This is a program about self-care. And, particularly if you are highly sensitive (as most of my clients are), you are already picking up on tons of subtleties that can make life feel extra-complicated. You don’t necessarily need more doing, more information. Chances are, you need to subtract, not add.

This “exquisite art of subtraction” is about noticing — really noticing — where we are doing more because of the belief that “if some is good, more is better.” This is such a pervasive belief in Western culture — and, in my experience, it simply is not true.

Let me give you a rather mundane example: I was out for my morning walk a week or so ago, wearing a pair of new sandals that still required a bit of breaking in. I had a wonderful meander over to the nearby park (where I’m sure to see lots of dogs and their humans and I always leave with a smile on my face), and as I made my way home from the park, I started to think, hmm, maybe I will make this walk even longer! Because it’s feeling so good!

Except that the new sandals were rubbing on my toes at this point. Even though my mind was telling me I needed more of a good thing (because more is better, right?), my feet were telling me that they needed some time away from the new sandals.

Well, my mind won out, and I kept on walking, and — interestingly enough — as I rounded block after block, I noticed I was starting to feel quite crappy. In fact, my enjoyment in the walk had decreased significantly. By the time I got home, I was in a bad mood (quite unusual for me after my morning walk) and my toes felt like they were on fire.

What happened? Well, my feet — toes, to be more specific — gave me a signal that my body had had enough. But I didn’t listen to it. (And hurting toes are not even a very subtle signal — they’re pretty blatant. Often, the signals to stop are much more subtle — but our minds are powerful, and in this case, my mind wanted more of a good thing.)

***

Underlying our desire to keep going even when we’ve had enough there is usually a feeling of scarcity, a fear of future deprivation. Deep down, we believe we’d better capitalize on the good stuff while we’ve got it, because surely it will be taken away later.

In the moment I decided to keep walking even though I’d already had a beautiful walk, and my toes were beginning to hurt, there was a thought — outside my conscious awareness at the time — that went something like: You must really make the most of this good energy, because it probably won’t last.

Had I been aware of this thought, I could have countered it with: Yeah, it probably won’t last — today. And so what? Good energy returns. There will very likely be plenty of lovely walks in my future. But for today, I’ve had enough.

Stopping when we’ve had enough — whether that’s enough of something we don’t like or something we do, something that drains us or something that fuels us — is key to self-care, to working with our creative energy, and to avoiding burnout.

In fact, the periods of my life during which I have gotten into burnout can be always be traced to day upon day in which I pushed myself out of fear that if I stopped, if I trusted that I’d done enough for today or that I had enough for now, I would surely be deprived in the future. So it didn’t feel safe to stop.

The irony, my friends, is that getting into burnout forces you to stop. In fact, I believe that sometimes we reach a state of physical, emotional, and/or spiritual burnout precisely because it’s the only way we know how to stop.

Noticing that we’ve had enough comes first. If we don’t notice the often subtle emotions and sensations that are giving us the message that we’re nearing enough, we won’t stop.

So set an intention to notice. Pay attention to your body. Our bodies are the most trusted conduits of the messages we need — far more trustworthy than our minds (notice what my mind did when I was on my walk!).

Once we’ve noticed, that’s when it’s time to actually act on stopping when we’ve had enough. This is not easy! We probably have a bunch of deeply held beliefs about why we need to push ourselves through the stuff that feels bad, or hang on for dear life to the stuff that feels good.

It is so worth it to take a look at these beliefs and go deeper. In fact, doing this type of inner work is what will change our lives because it will change how we relate to ourselves.

When you can’t seem to stop, even though you know you’ve had enough, ask yourself why. Really take a look. What’s so scary about stopping? What are you afraid will happen if you stop when you’ve had enough, if only for today?

When you see the underlying fear, when you “get” it, you have so much more power because you have made what is unconsciously driving you conscious. In your willingness to look deeper, you cultivate trust in yourself. You start to befriend yourself.

Do you have a fear of stopping, even when you know you’ve had enough? Are you able to recognize what “enough” feels like for you? I’d love to hear from you.

Further reading: Martha Beck talks about “just in case” versus “just in time” thinking in this article. I’ve found this to be a truly helpful shift!

Work With Me: This can be tough stuff. If you need support in looking deeper, I’d love to help. Check out the ways we can work together, here.