As we are wrapping up January and turn towards the month of Love, things begin to look up… The mad pressure to hit the ground running in January and kicking off the year with a bang, is now behind us.
We can now truly embrace more self-compassion and set the right tone for the upcoming year… As we’ve been trying to be gentler with ourselves despite the New Year pressure, today’s Self-Love aspect drives this point home- let’s Embrace Self-Connection and Radiance.
Self-Connection is one of the 4 Aspects of Self-Love we are working on to help us start the New Year right…
Self-Connection is about having a strong relationship with ourselves- with fully knowing and accepting all our parts, with having our own back, with being more present, with keeping our own company, with nurturing ourselves.
When we are connected with our Self, we are never alone… When we are connected with our Self, we are knowing… When we are connected with our Self, we are purposeful… When we are connected with our Self, we are inspired… When we are connected with our Self, we are radiant…
When we are connected with our Self, we are steady, powerful, unstoppable, brilliant…
This is the state we want to cultivate, as this is the Sparkle in our life. This is how our Journey is more than a grind…
Self-Connection and Radiance
Being in Connection with our Highest Self is our Soul’s directive if you may… When we are not in connection with our Self, we are banging around grinding through our life in our meat suit, aimlessly and exhaustingly, till we are six feet under. This is not the way to live!
When we are in Connection with our Highest Self, we embody our full Being, pursue our calling, embrace a full Human Experience that includes intentionally evolving… This is how we Radiate our Brilliance…
This is what makes us unique, special, magnificent, extraordinary, and exceptional. This is who we really are… Let’s embrace ourselves once and for all, shall we?
I. Fully knowing and accepting all our parts
We are complex human beings that have many parts that make up who we are. Not only do we have different aspects to our conscious self that make up our personality, but we have all sorts of parts that are subconscious that we are not aware of. These parts make up the bulk of who we are, and are the puppeteers behind the scenes… It behooves us to learn ourselves better in all regards to become more whole and who we truly are…
II. Having our own back
Nobody cares more about ourselves than ourselves… When we don’t love ourselves well enough, or take care of ourselves, that’s what we put out and that’s the kind of relationship/s and life we create… When we are not in touch with our Self and our needs, we don’t have our own back and therefore we feel alone and ravished…
It behooves us to own our needs and take care of them to ensure we are OK and have the opportunity to play full out…
III. Being more present
We are so used to all the noise in our lives that the mere thought of silence freaks us out. And, this is for the external world. The same goes for our internal world. We are SO noisy inside our heads.
We are even noisy in our bodies… How we set up our experience and environments, the information we consume, the thoughts we choose to have, and even the food and other substances we choose to consume all generate different levels of noise… This distracts us from our Self…
It behooves us to quiet down and become more present to authentically show up and be available for our life…
IV. Keeping our own company
Most people can’t stand it to be alone or to do things alone. And, if we are alone, we are super engaged with busyness and the noise we create in our lives… We don’t know how to keep our own company and savor being with ourselves. We miss out on the opportunity of enjoying our own company and experiencing our Beingness. We squander the opportunity for connecting more deeply with ourselves and truly knowing ourselves…
It behooves us to have experiences by ourselves to fully take them in, savor them and enrich more who we are…
V. Nurturing ourselves
Nurturing ourselves is how we show ourselves we know we are special. It’s a form of personal validation. When we neglect, or even mistreat ourselves, we sabotage our Human Experience and create a much more challenging life than is necessary…
If we don’t resource ourselves, but are constantly depleting ourselves instead, how are we to have a life full of energy, vitality, health, wellness, and longevity? Most don’t take care of the basic needs, never mind going the extra mile to make the Journey more exquisite…
It behooves us to sprinkle in the luxuries and the treats for a fuller Human Experience…
Self-Connection is the most neglected aspect of our Self-Love Practice and such a detriment to our wellbeing, our ability to create our Best Life and have our Best Human Experience…
Watch the video for more on these 5 Tactics to help you more easily embrace Self-Connection… Enjoy!
APPLICATION: If Self-Love was a cake, it’d be made of the first 3 Aspects (Self-Honoring, Self-Management, and Self-Care), and it would have Self-Connection as the icing. This is what makes the whole thing. 😋
We all need to have our cake to live a delicious life, a life well lived!
Review which Tactic in this Aspect resonates the most for you and complete the related process below…
I. Fully knowing and accepting all our parts – In your Journal, on a clean page, draw a circle. Divide the circle into 8 equal slices using horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines, for a pizza effect.
In each slice capture different Parts of yourself, not roles you have but personality-like parts. Try to capture as many sides of yourself as possible, negative and positive, that you can see. Group characteristics as you see fit.
Then, identify what Parts you would like to have that you don’t already have or don’t recognize in yourself and add them to any available slices.
Finally, create two new Habits: One to counter a negative characteristic you’d like to eliminate, and another to cultivate a positive characteristic you’d like to embrace… This is how we own and evolve ourselves…
II. Having our own back – In your Journal, capture a stream of consciousness about your state- how you are feeling, what’s working, what’s not working, what pleases you, what annoys you and the like… Write for a couple of pages until you feel you have captured your current state (+/- a couple of days…). Go back to what you wrote and identify any themes.
Now, select the theme that is torturing you the most and address it with a conversation, new habit, environment tweak, additional support, etc. Make sure you address whatever need is screaming for attention.
III. Being more present – In your Journal, capture a day in the life (your life obviously). Then review it for your level of presence throughout the day…
-Do you have any mindfulness practices -Do you take intentional breaks? -Do you protect your focus from distractions? -Do you make time to connect and attune with loved ones? -Do you check-in with yourself about how you are doing and what you might need? -Do you consume inspiring and positive content? -Do you consume clean and nutritious food? -Do you minimize the noise in your life?
Rate yourself from 1-10 for how present you are daily, with 10 being super present (quite…).
Commit to increasing your score by a certain amount by a certain time, and identify a change you’ll make to achieve it: Routine tweak, new habit, better boundaries, more support, etc.
IV. Keeping our own company – Unless you are a complete introvert, you most likely have a hard time being alone… And this is true if you are an introvert as well where even if you are alone you are otherwise engaged… You are not keeping your own company…
When we are in constant interaction, with others and otherwise engaged, we don’t get to know, see and honor our Self… We don’t get to Connect with our Self…
Take stock of how often you keep your own company… Where you are engaging with your Self… I bet it’s almost never…
Let’s change that!
-Select a time in your weekly routine where you have Me Time… -Block off this time, create a recurring event for it, and protect it going forward… -Make a list of activities, you’d like to do by yourself keeping your own company… -Ahead of time, pull from this list to do during your Me Time. Complete any planning if your activities requires any scheduling, setting up, etc. This can be part of your Reset for the upcoming week.
Make sure nothing gets in the way of having an amazing time with You!
V. Nurturing ourselves – And this is the Sparklers on our cake! From the first Tactic in the first Aspect to this point, the focus has primarily been on making sure we honor and take care of ourselves well and to the fullest extent to ensure we can do famously in our Journey…
This Tactic is about adding more joy, fun, experiences and indulgences to make the journey more worthwhile!
-Make a list of the little things that give you joy.
Here are a few of mine that I grabbed from just my morning routine…
-Then, make a list of experiences you want to have, Bucket List like.
-Finally, make a list of indulgences, little and big luxuries, you want to add to your life.
Depending on your lifestyle and Practice, choose a good place to start for you:
-Adding little touches to your daily routine and life -Scheduling monthly experiences during your monthly resets -Planning the integration of more little and big luxuries into your life
Use these Tactics to keep things fresh and recharged in your life!
Voila! This brings us to the conclusion of our Self-Love Practice. We have covered a lot of ground in the past few weeks. You now have 20 Targeted Tactics to help you embrace a Self-Love Practice and help you upgrade your life!
A Self-Love Practice allows us to have better relationships with others…. More about creating amazing relationships next month!
Wishing you much joy, connection and love today and always…
With Much Love & Light!
PS: WEBINAR MASTERCLASS!
A Self-Love Strategy for Creating Your Best Life-
Stop Self-Sabotage, Increase Resilience, and Generate More Joy
Includes Recording and gorgeous Workbook of transformational processes!
Copyright (c) 2022 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include: Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com
This is about the toughest week of the year… This is when we have Blue Monday, supposedly the saddest day of the year. Bills come in from the holidays, attempts at new habits start falling to the wayside, hibernation is knocking on our door, and things just feel heavy. It’s rough to get going on creating our Best Year Yet… What’s needed is an influx of energy to set us on the right path. The best way to do that is by Embracing Self-Care and Resilience…
Self-Care is one of the 4 Aspects of Self-Love we are working on to help us start the New Year right…
Self-Care is about taking good care of ourselves- with having a wholistic self-care practice that generates vitality, health and wellbeing.
There are a lot of definitions and information out there about how to do a Self-Care Practice. My Self-Care Practice is on steroids and became the Self-Love Practice we’ve been working on… LOL
I like to look at Self-Care as solely the activities that nourish and take care of our body and wellbeing: Sleep, exercise, nutrition/supplementation/hydration, grooming/hygiene and relaxation/mindfulness.
When we give these activities the proper attention, we are taking care of our “meat suit”, our human vehicle, so that it allows us to have a beautiful, full and long human experience…
When we take proper care of ourselves, we slowdown the aging process, we increase our health, vitality, longevity and ability to truly enjoy our life. Who wants to get to an advanced age and be decrepit? Or, worse be decrepit now or have a short-lived life?
Having a rich Self-Care Practice allows us to have boundless energy and larger bandwidth, be healthy and fit, look and feel amazing, have more focus and stamina, and the ability for higher performance in all areas of our life.
A rich Self-Care Practice gives us the ability to feel happy and joyous more consistently, to better self-regulate and to be less triggerable… It helps with our wellbeing and resilience…
Watch the video for Tactics to uplevel the 5 Pillars of your Self-Care Practice… Enjoy!
APPLICATION: Some see self-care as a mysterious concept and have the mindset that only privileged or lazy people can afford it. They might consider it a luxury or a waste of time to do things to take care of themselves… Or, they truly believe they don’t have the resources for it… If this is you, I challenge you to consider that you can’t afford not to invest in taking care of yourself…
You don’t have to invest a tremendous amount of resources doing self-care tactics, you just need to make targeted investments to get the results you want.
STEP 1 – Decide what is it you want in terms of your fitness, health, and wellness. How are you doing in these areas and how would you like them to be, how would you like to feel?
Take stock of your energy level, mood, health, fitness, and appearance. What can use some upleveling?
STEP 2 – Review the Pillars below and choose one to focus on that will address the area you want to target and that will give you the most immediate results.
Depending on your current state and lifestyle, you might need to start with the basics, or you might want more advanced and nuanced strategies.
I provide a range of ideas here to get you going, feel free to do additional research to take charge of the Pillar you identify as your current focus.
Pillar 1 – Sleep: Research shows that most people are sleep deprived. When sleep is the thing that detoxes and cleans, repairs and heals, and recharges us. We tend to short-change ourselves when it comes to sleep.
At the end of the day, it’s not really about the amount of sleep but the quality of sleep you get that allows you to go through all the sleep cycles several times a night to get the most benefit from your sleep.
The key is to have good Sleep Hygiene:
💤 Reverse engineer what time you want to get up in the morning, and back up to what time you’d need to go to bed to get up at that time while giving you an average of 7 hours of sleep.
💤 Start shifting gears for sleep two hours before your bedtime – no food, drinks, blue light
💤 Start your night routine at least 30 min before you want to be asleep – account for all the things you want to do before you fall asleep…
Like: Prepping for the next day, doing your skin care routine, activating your soothing bedroom environment, gratitude journaling, connecting with your partner, reading
💤 Commit to lights out and shutting down by your sleep time
💤 Set your alarm to wake you up at the time your chose and turn off snooze, get up when your alarm goes off
Pillar 2 – Exercise: You might be doing everything right, but if you are not exercising you won’t achieve your fitness, health and wellness goals… Which are needed to support the rest of the goals in our life and to truly live a well-lived life…
There are tons of myths about exercise, and exercising as we used to understand exercising is more harmful than good. For example, spending hours doing cardio to lose weight has proven to be an ineffective tactic (you lose muscle mass which slows down your metabolism)…
What seems to be better supported is a combination of:
🏃♀️ High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) 🏋️♀️ Resistance Training 🧘♀️ Flexibility Training
You can create a basic workout routine that incorporates all 3 per workout session or on rotation that makes sense for your life and that is enjoyable for you.
And you can choose what types of activities to do for each. You can put in as much or a little into this as you wish as long as you cover your basics.
*Consult your doctor if you have any medical conditions.
Pillar 3 – Nutrition, Supplementation and Hydration: The key here is to understand your goal and to feed yourself accordingly in a nutritious and healthy manner… There are so many ways of eating and so many different diet protocols and they all contradict each other- your head can explode trying to figure out how to eat…
My suggestion is that if you are just now beginning to take charge of your consumption that you start small and with the basics:
🤩Reduce your caloric intake- consume calories in relation to how you spend calories, reduce to a reasonable intake that still provides you with enough energy and nutrition (for women an average of 1500 cal/day does the trick but do your own research to match your situation)
🥙Eat cleaner- just stop eating all the processed foods and junk, and greatly reduce your alcohol consumption!
🥗Step it up to even cleaner eating- reduce any inflammatory foods you recognize your body doesn’t like (bloat, pimples, constipation, foggy brain, etc.)- like gluten, dairy, soy, eggs, peanuts/other nuts, corn, cruciferous vegetables, beans, nightshade vegetables, sweeteners, onion/garlic, caffeine (increases cortisol levels!).
📞Consult a nutritionist or functional doctor– get specific guidance if you are lost, confused or need additional support for creating a plan that works for you and your body… And for proper supplementation.
💧Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate- Shoot for 32 to 64 onz (1 to 2 liters) of water per day and you can step it up as you desire… I’ve been using this bottle to give me a visual of how I’m doing…
*Consult your doctor if you have any medical conditions.
Pillar 4 – Grooming and Hygiene: This is totally a personal choice of course. But I have it here as part of taking care of our body. A groomed body looks better, is more youthful and lasts longer…
👁Taking care of our skin, hair, teeth, eyes (hydrating with eyedrops helps maintain good vision!), etc. goes a long way.
💄Minding our products is super important as we try to become radiant from the inside out and minimize the toxins we put in our bodies…
🧹Adding a detoxing routine is a great practice – like body rolling, face rolling and skin brushing.
Pillar 5 – Relaxation and Mindfulness: Can you believe that we forget to breathe? LOL
We might shallow-breath to get air in for survival, but in general we don’t breathe well. We don’t get enough clean air circulating through our body.
Additionally, we don’t stop to smell the roses. We are always on go mode or mindlessly taking a break or so called relaxing.
We don’t properly restore, recharge and rejuvenate.
Our daily routine needs to include practices for being present and grounded, intentional breaks, and restorative activities like:
• Meditation • Visualization • Breath Work • Taking a break from our computer and other devices • Stretching • Connection calls • Pursuing an interest or hobby
Regardless of where you are with your Self-Care Practice, it’s always nice to shake things up, spruce them up and uplevel them. Focus on the Pillar that makes the most sense for you to address first, then tackle the rest as you make progress.
Don’t take all this on at once. It can be very overwhelming to make so many changes at once, and you won’t be able to fully integrate them into your life if you start slipping up (which you will if you do too much at once).
Once you selected your Pillar, do the research, set up the routines, set up the supportive environments, put all the things in place to help you work your Pillar.
Have fun with this. This is a lifelong pursuit. Enjoy the process!
Wishing you much joy, connection and love today and always…
With Much Love & Light!
Copyright (c) 2022 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include: Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com
Are you feeling like you are moving slow getting the New Year and your Best Year Yet started? The first couple of weeks of the year are always rough. Either we overcommit to new stuff to create our new life, or we just can’t seem to get it together to get moving… Either way we are not properly approaching the changes we want to make to get the results we want… But there is a better way and that’s Embracing Self-Management and Flow…
Self-Management is one of the 4 Aspects of Self-Love: Self-Honoring and Being Self-Management and Flow Self-Care and Resilience Self-Connection and Radiance
Self-Management has to do with taking full responsibility for ourselves- with learning how to properly manage ourselves and strive for excellence and high performance. It is about flowing through our days creating our Best Life…
Embracing Self-Management in our Self-Love Practice allows us to truly have our own back and support ourselves in our Journey…
Self-Management is a multifaceted endeavor, it includes managing our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, energy, time, space, and everything else…
For the purpose of our Self-Love Practice, I’m honing-in on how we set up and go about our days to effortlessly achieve our goals, experience joy and fully live our life.
Watch the video for 5 Tactics for managing yourself… Enjoy!
APPLICATION: Self-Management is a super skill. When we manage ourselves well, we are unstoppable! Here are tactics to help you easily start better managing yourself for more high-performance, productivity, and flow… Let your Core Values guide you as you work through this exercise.
Set some time aside to Design the Life You Want to Live…
🌟Time Mapping – Decide how you want your weeks to flow… Design your Ideal Week. Designate days with themes and part of the days for different Life Areas. For example:
–You can have writing or content creation days, client days, meeting days, admin days and such.
–You can have Self-Love/Me Time, Couple Time, Family Time, Chores Time, you get my drift.
This guides where you add your commitments in your calendar, where you focus your attention and what you work on, and helps you manage how you use your time, energy, and bandwidth… This is a one-time exercise that you tweak as you see fit.
🌟Time Blocking – Now, within your Time Map, you get to drill-in how you use any given time. You designate time chunks for tasks and commitments. This is a weekly task where you plop in what you want to work on and accomplish into specific times of your week.
Be sure to judiciously block time including buffer time and transition time. We want to allow for context shifting and build in grace for when things don’t work out as planned. This ensures more flow and ease in your days…
–This is a great activity to do on Friday before the closedown for the day, so you are ready for the next week and avoid the Sunday Scaries (AKA Sundaynitis in my home). Or, a Saturday Morning Reset activity, or a Sunday Afternoon Reset activity. Whatever makes sense for your life.
Decide when you’ll do your weekly Reset with Time Blocking. Add it to your calendar as a recurring event…
🌟Routines – This is my favorite. When we create rich routines, we can make any change we desire in our life. We don’t change in a vacuum. Creating change is very challenging and routines provide the context where the change can happen. It reduces friction, creates support and motivation. The things you are trying to do happen automatically without you having to white-knuckle your way.
–Choose a time of day where you and your family experience the most stress, where most conflict happens, where everyone ends up crying, yelling or both, or where you’d like to add more richness for a better life… This usually includes mornings, evenings, and bedtime, and other transition times like Friday evening, Sunday evening, before and after vacations or trips, and such.
–And, in terms of adding richness: Self-Care/Love Routine, Bedtime Routine, Skin Care Routine, Food Prep, Family Night, Couple Time, Date Your Partner, etc.
–Select your time by activity to improve, richness to integrate, most stressful to eliminate, by whatever you’d like to tackle first that will have the most immediate impact in your life…
Then design a routine that will address the friction and issues you encounter. For example, choose a time to start transitioning to the evening routine and what does that entail- daily review, organize for next day, closedown technology/work, connect with family members, discuss timing of next activity, start meal prep, etc.
Once you design the look and feel, tweak your schedule/calendar and your environments (declutter, layout stuff, set reminders, send notices, and such) to support your design…
🌟Habits – These are the ingredients of your routines!
Depending on what segment of the day or routine you are targeting to create more ease in your life, you can implement new habits to make that routine or time of day work better.
AND, to achieve your goals, you must have repeating targeted behaviors, tactics or habits to go along with them. Goals are achieved through taking consistent action…
—Health/Wellness Habits do very well as part of a morning self-care routine and part of weekend reset routine (meal planning, food shopping, food prep).
—Connections Habits do well as part of transitions, evening routines, and weekend routines.
—Success Habits do well as part of targeted work time blocks…
🌟Special Days – These are the exceptions to your routines and the sparkle sprinkles! Think of different ways of playing hooky if you may. LOL These are theme days to take care of things and enjoy things outside your regular routines.
–Specials days can be used as: Fun Day, Me Day, Mommy-Daughter Day (or other family combos), Adventure Day, Admin Day, Reset Day, Shoot Day, Lazy Day, and so on.
Make a list of all the Special Days that would make sense and that you would enjoy in your life. Then add them to your calendar as recurring events or keep as things to be scheduled during reset or planning days.
And that is the powerful way of taking charge of your days and creating the flavor of your life.
Wishing you much joy, connection and love today and always…
With Much Love & Light!
Copyright (c) 2022 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include: Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com
As we start a New Year, we are looking forward to a new chapter, and possibly a new book, in our life. The thing is that the person that got us here, our current self, is not the person that can get us there… The person that got us here and only do more of the same…
For us to create something new, we have to be able to Be in a new way… The new self can create our new chapter, our Best Year Yet. A way to the new self is through Embracing Self-Love and Being.
Part of our Human Experience is to continue to grow more into who we really are… To continue to evolve. Shedding the slumber, the character defenses, the defense mechanisms, and other unconscious patterns to become our Best Self. This is the pursuit of Self-Growth…
I’m looking at the pursuit of Self-Growth as having two key components:
🌟Self-Love Practice for our Being
🌟Personal Development Practice for our Becoming
This month’s series will focus on our Self-Love Practice with today defining Self-Love and setting us up for a deep dive into developing a rich practice that really honors who we are and takes care of us.
Self-Love has to do with:
💖 Self-Honoring – Respecting and honoring ourselves- our values, our needs, our body, our feelings, our intuition, our perspectives, our space, our time, our preferences, our wishes, our dreams and so on.
💖 Self-Management – Taking full responsibility for ourselves- with learning how to properly manage ourselves and strive for excellence and high performance.
💖 Self-Care – Taking care of ourselves- with having a wholistic self-care practice that generates vitality, health and wellbeing.
💖 Self-Connection – Having a strong relationship with ourselves- with fully knowing and accepting all parts of ourselves, with keeping our own company, with having our own back, with being more present, with nurturing ourselves.
Each of these can be a whole newsletter or blog in and of themselves. LOL Nonetheless, we’ll be covering some aspect of each in the coming weeks, starting today with respecting and honoring ourselves.
Watch the video for 5 Tactics for honoring yourself… Enjoy!
APPLICATION: You’d think it’d be easy to be us. To be who we are. To be ourselves… As you might be aware, this is actually not the case and our Journey is about learning and evolving ourselves… Therefore, it’s imperative that we integrate tackling this intentionally in our lives…
Set some time aside to give yourself some Self-Love…
💗Values – We have to know our Core Values to help us filter our decisions and pursuits in our lives… Complete the Identifying Core Values exercise, and let your discovery inform other practices and tactics for more cohesiveness… Get the guide HERE.
💗Essence – We have to choose what flavor human being we want to be. LOL In your journal, list qualities of people you admire and who you consider role models.
1️⃣Underline the qualities you have in common with them. 2️⃣Circle the qualities they have that you’d like to embrace more in yourself… 3️⃣Summon the essence of that quality and strive for integrating it into yourself… Do this when you need a little pick me up, inspiration or motivation.
💗Feelings – Thoughts lead to feelings… Therefore, we can generate whatever feelings we like!
1️⃣Decide what kinds of feelings you want to experience more in your life…
2️⃣What kinds of thoughts would you have to have to generate those feelings? 3️⃣In your Journal, capture the thoughts so you can reference them as needed if you are having a hard time generating them, and their related feelings, on any giving day… 4️⃣Make it a habit of choosing the feelings you desire for the day first thing in the morning and go about generating them…
💗Intentions – We can be pretty chaotic in how we show up to our life and the days in our life if we are not intentional about it… Intentions are a powerful thing… You can choose how you want to show up everyday, and self correct at any giving moment…
1️⃣In your Journal, make a list of intentions about different ways you’d like to show up in your life.
2️⃣Keep this handy to draw from as needed to bring more intentionality and personal engagement in your life… 3️⃣You can use these as daily intentions, weekly themes, sprinkles for kicks and to keep things fresh
💗Roles – This one is super important. I often discuss this in our work with clients in terms of what kind of people they want to be regardless of how the people in their lives are being…
1️⃣Ponder on what kind of human you want to be, what kind of man, woman, or other gender, what kind of partner, what kind of parent, what kind of “child”, what kind of sibling, what kind of in-law, what kind of friend, neighbor, boss, and so on… 2️⃣In your Journal, capture your musings. 3️⃣Identify where you’d like to tweak how you are being in any relationship and get to making the corrections or upgrades…
Isn’t this work just so delicious!? This is a quick way to embrace you and Be more of who you want to be, who you really are… You’ll just be intentional about really Being you…
Wishing you much joy, connection and love today and always…
With Much Love & Light!
Copyright (c) 2022 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include: Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com
We are knee deep in setting ourselves up for an amazing New Year! Do you usually give this much thought? Do you do personal End of Year and New Year Planning? Do you take the time to be with yourself and get inspired to design the life you want and map out how to make it happen? I do, and I know that those who do also create Masterful Lives…
Therefore, I’ve added the Sparkling Step to my planning process to help you do it as well. Today, we are covering The Masterful Part of this step (2of3).
But, first a quick recap – End-Of-Year & New-Year Planning (E.N.P.):
The Inspirational Part covered how to get in touch with your Essence and bring it forth more…
Today’s Masterful Part covers how to capture and integrate better habits and activities for more efficiency, productivity, ownership, empowerment, focus, presence, harmony, joy and enjoyment in your life…
The Masterful Part
To have a Brilliant Human Experience™ we have to Live our life… This might mean different things to different people. To some it might mean achieving great success professionally and making an impact.
To other it might mean mastering themselves, physically, emotionally, etc. To others it might mean partying it up every weekend. To others it might mean going on great adventures a few times a year. And, yet to others it might mean a combination of these and other essential experiences and masteries.
It is up to us to create our Best Life, a life we love. And a life well lived at the end of the day that truly represented our essence and how we wanted to have lived it…
From the work we’ve done so far, we already know what we are working towards. Now we’ll add how we want to go about making it happen. How we want to do the Journey…
Watch the video for 5 Tactics to help you Masterfully enjoy your Journey…
APPLICATION: This process just gets more and more fun from here. Woot!
A note of caution first, you really need to doSteps 1-3 of theEnd-Of-Year & New-Year Planning (E.N.P.) process if you haven’t yet… This is you guiding North Star… You can sprinkle all the sparkle you want into your life and still not create your Best Life if you don’t know what you are creating at the end of the day…
Again, set time aside to play with this process, work through the steps in order, though 1 and 2 can be swapped depending on your situation.
And, now on to the Tactics of The Masterful Part…
VERY IMPORTANT: Don’t create the lists below in a vacuum. They need to flow from your vision, goals, and tactics to support your overall approach and desires for the New Year… They are additional ways to help you create your vision and achieve your goals. They are the icing on your cake. They are not meant to be miscellaneous extra things to overload you…
🌟Stop/Start List – Create a list all the minutia, redundancies, and painful tasks you do. Add to this list the negative habits, commitments, and anything else that just suck your life energy out of you. This is the Stop part of your list. Now make a list of skills, healthy habits, and activities you want to add to your life to recharge you, enrich your experience and create more efficiency and joy. This is the Start part of your list.
Select a couple from each to tackle Q1 of next year. Weave the Start items into your flow, time map, routine, calendar, schedule, to ensure you fully execute this; remove the Stop ones as you go (scrap, automate, delegate, outsource) …
🌟Life Rules – Create a list of rules to live by. This is about setting more effective boundaries in your life… This has to do with you fully owning yourself and taking charge of your life… Of not being a push over, people pleaser, codependent, and generally being at the bottom of your own list… What will you no longer tolerate, put up with or get sucked into in your life?
Select a handful to master in Q1… Diligently set out to have the necessary conversations or take the action steps to establish your boundaries.
🌟Spend for Happiness – Create a list of things you’d like to purchase that you believe will bring you more joy and happiness… Create a Spending Plan to map out your purchases for the year.
Pick out the ones for Q1 and implement your savings tactics to enable your purchases. This will keep you focused on your saving strategy and make your spending more intentional… This tames the consumerism bug, supports minimalism and essentialism philosophies and supports a more meaningful lifestyle.
🌟Special Days – Create a list of the types of Special or Theme Days you’d like to have, like: Declutter or deep clean day, life admin day, shoot day, content planning day, reset day, inspiration day, me day, celebration day, feel good day, hooky day, and such.
Next, schedule those into your calendar for Q1. Woot!
🌟Challenges – Make a list of 30-Day Challenges you’d like to do to stretch yourself, develop character strengths or personality traits, install better habits, improve some aspect of your life, stay intentional and engaged in your life daily, or just for kicks and conversational content. Here is a cool collection to inspire you.
Select the 1-3 you’ll tackle in Q1 (1 per month at most…) and schedule prep-ahead-time for each to launch into them seamlessly.
🔔Once you finish integrating these into your lifestyle, set up a reminder in whatever app makes sense in your life to grab another set of these to tackle in Q2, and so on.
The beauty of this Part is that the tactics support our achieving our goals and make the process more tangible and fun. They help us uplevel our life experience on their own right.
Wishing you much joy, connection and love today and always…
With Much Love & Light!
PS –Check out past Holiday posts to help you Thrive this Holiday Season and start the New Year right!
Copyright (c) 2021 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
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Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT has been in the mental health profession in varying capacities for the past 20+ years. She is the Founder and Director of metrorelationship.com a psychotherapy and coaching practice specializing in working with busy professional and entrepreneurial couples who are struggling getting on the same page and feeling connected. The work helps couples create a radiant and successful relationship and meaningful life by becoming a strong partnership and increasing their connection, intimacy, and fun. Emma is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Relationship Strategy™.
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