by Janelle Legge | Nov 15, 2016 | Wellbeing |
Are you tired of negative people draining you of your energy and enthusiasm for life? Maybe you’ve spent way too long politely and stoically listening to them? Hoping that they will finally ease up on dumping their negative vibes all over you? But they don’t.
If you’re nodding your head in agreement, then it’s time to limit your exposure to negative people, or in some cases disengage from them entirely. Because the impacts of spending too much time around negative people can be insidious and long-lasting:
5 Top Reasons To Stop Spending Time With Negative People
# 1 Increased Self-Doubt
When you’re pioneering your own path in life and feeling a bit vulnerable because you’re venturing into the unknown, it doesn’t take much for a negative person’s remark or disapproving vibe to trigger self doubt in you. It can make you start questioning whether the path you’ve chosen is the right one for you. If you don’t limit your exposure to toxic negative people by setting good boundaries, you can end up losing a lot of precious time second-guessing yourself and your decisions. Robbing you of your optimism and natural exuberance for life.
# 2 Low Self-Esteem
When the negative people in your life are family members, not getting their validation and approval can erode your self-esteem and self-confidence. If this is the case, you need to get some distance from them so you can grow your own psychological roots, and a more robust level of self-esteem. It’s about intentionally disengaging from the negative thinking patterns and beliefs that have been unconsciously passed down from one generation to the next.
#3 Compromised Wellbeing
Negative thinking is bad for your brain. So it’s important to be aware of what you’re thinking and what ideas and views you’re absorbing from other people. Good mental health and overall wellbeing requires positive, optimistic thinking. Repetitive toxic thinking is like a virus. It can deplete you physically and emotionally and compromise your immune system.
#4 Restlessness And Discontent
Regular exposure to negative thinking messes with your desire nature. When this happens it doesn’t matter what opportunities come your way, nothing ever seems quite right for you, or good enough. You struggle to value what you’ve already achieved. You’re always feeling restless and never quite satisfied.
# 5 Abandoning Your Dreams
There’s nothing more demotivating and draining than ending up on the wrong pathway in life because you’ve spent too much time listening to negative people. If this is you, then you need to get back on the right track. Because the longer you leave it, the bigger the task of course-correcting and realigning with your dreams and vision of how you want your life to be.
You are constantly being imprinted and shaped by the 3-5 people you spend the most time with. So if you’re wanting to live a positive, self-directed and successful life, you need to be around like-minded, optimistic people who support and encourage you. Doing this will accelerate your growth like nothing else. You’ll also feel happier, more confident and fulfilled.
by Janelle Legge | Jun 1, 2016 | Case Studies |
Here are the facts, if you don’t get feeling valueless under control and learn how to value yourself, you will fail. Feeling valueless will continue to affect you into the future, as it has in the past. Negatively impacting your personal life, your business, and your career. So it’s really important you get it fixed. Valuing yourself improves every area of your life and the results you get in powerful ways.
Why Not Valuing Herself Set Rachel Up To Fail In Business: Case Study
Rachel had always wanted to run her own business. She had a natural flair for business and helping others succeed. But when opportunities arose to go into business for herself in partnership with people she knew, each time a pattern of failure had emerged. When it came to working through differences of opinion around the direction the business needed to go in order to continue to grow, Rachel repeatedly felt blocked and overridden by her business partner, and couldn’t stand her ground. She froze when it came to negotiating and working through differences of opinion. Instead she eventually just walked away from both business opportunities, feeling angry, resentful and taken advantage of.
Having spent most of her life shaping herself according to other people’s wants and needs, any situation that required negotiation and conflict resolution skills triggered stress and anxiety. After her second business partnership failed, a friend suggested Rachel do a mindfulness program to help her deal better with stress and conflict, and get some new self insights. But attempting mindfulness exercises increased her feelings of anger with herself and brought up feelings of low self worth and failure, triggering implicit memories from her childhood.
People try and work on themselves having to struggle with patterns of behaviour that sit in their implicit memory system. Memories of threat, stored implicitly, often come up first. Implicit memories operate outside of conscious awareness and drive subconscious beliefs and repetitive, default behaviours. Operating outside of conscious awareness, these memories cannot be visualized or reflected upon.
Rachel realised she needed a one-on-one relationship to talk about the issues directly affecting her. When we looked at what was triggering her, it turned out Rachel was still reacting to childhood experiences of being controlled and put down. Something she hadn’t been aware of. Now in her early 40s, Rachel still felt valueless and insubstantial inside. Feelings that stemmed from her childhood.
Common Reasons For Not Valuing Yourself
Early adversity in your home life growing up has huge impacts on your sense of value as a person, and your self esteem. Common examples of early adversity include:
- Parental depression, anxiety or substance abuse.
- Physical or emotional abuse or trauma.
- Prolonged feelings of not being understood.
- Repetitive devaluing experiences such as ridiculing, bullying, shaming or stonewalling.
Rachel had grown up in a family that was judgmental and critical. Her siblings would make fun of her and exclude her because she thought differently to them. Her parents were strict and controlling and openly favoured the youngest child, who could do whatever they liked. Rachel felt alone and alienated in her family growing up. As if she didn’t have a right to just be herself. She had always felt that her family just didn’t get her. This shaped how she viewed other people and her expectations around how they would treat her.
Feeling Valueless Influences How Other People Treat You
Not being listened to, validated or taken seriously growing up leads to subconscious expectations that you’ll encounter the same experiences in the outside world. Particularly when you’ve been repeatedly criticized, bullied or ignored for disagreeing with or questioning your family’s view on things. You end up defaulting to flight or freeze and sometimes fight responses that are security and safety based. This becomes your inner blueprint for how you do relationships and react to conflict.
Not expecting to be listened to and valued plays out in a variety of ways. When you don’t value yourself you can sit in meetings with managers and peers and put forward an idea that is dismissed or ignored. People just talk over you. Minutes later, someone else who’s confident and values themselves says the exact same thing, but in a different way, and everyone thinks it’s a great idea and takes it on board. This was happening to Rachel in her business partnerships, mirroring exactly what had happened to her growing up.
Rachel also found that over time her partner, who she had thought was different to her family, started talking to her in the same dismissive way as her family whenever he got annoyed with her. Each time this happened, all of her feelings of vulnerability and low self worth bubbled up to the surface, which then made things even worse.
3 Ways To Stop Feeling Valueless And Thrive
1. Work With Someone Who Can Help You Become More Self Aware
You can’t change what you don’t even know is there. To change deeply ingrained negative beliefs about yourself you first need to become more self-aware around why you feel valueless. The most powerful and effective way to do this is to find some who’s qualified to help you remember, think, and talk about your life in safety. Powerful constructive conversations with a therapist or coach creates new neural pathways in your brain and brings about the self-understanding required to be able to reflect, rather than react. You’re then able to identify what’s triggering you and why.
Reflection is a conscious process. It’s not something that we do automatically.
2. Commit To Valuing Yourself
When you’ve identified and understood the negative beliefs and scripts that have been making you feel valueless, you’re able to change the way you think about yourself. You’re in a position to commit to the process of valuing yourself. When you love and respect yourself, people pick up on this and treat you the same way. You’re able to express what you really feel and think, regardless of whether someone agrees with you or not.
3. Learn How To Set Boundaries
Personal boundary setting is an excellent way to value and take care of yourself. Boundaries give you effective strategies to handle people and situations where you’re feeling invaded, manipulated, or overwhelmed. Boundaries: When to Say Yes How To Say No To Take Control Of Your Life by Cloud and Townsend is one of the best reads on this.
Valuing yourself is essential to success in your personal life and career. It’s about releasing the negative and critical views about yourself that you’ve absorbed from other people growing up that don’t even belong to you. But just doing positive affirmations or CBT alone won’t shift low self value if your subconscious beliefs and behaviours aren’t first identified and understood. Seeking out positive, transformative relationships and experiences and then backing yourself is the key to no longer feeling valueless.
Our self feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. William James
All names and identifying features in this article have been changed for privacy purposes.
© Copyright Janelle Legge | 2016
by Janelle Legge | Nov 6, 2015 | Relationships and Facebook |
What’s happened to the right to say “No” and set your own personal boundaries in life? Lately there have been some articles in the media on the negative cognitive and emotional responses to being unfriended on Facebook. But sometimes being told “No” is exactly what you need to hear to snap out of an addictive trance, or those toxic relationships or obsessions that just aren’t good for you.
Okay, so people don’t like being unfriended on Facebook by people they know and like. It’s bound to bring up old hurts and wounds around being excluded from the cool group at school, or being dumped by your best friend growing up. It’s not a great feeling being cyber dumped by someone you thought was your ‘friend’. It can trigger all those negative self-defeating thoughts like “I’m not good enough, cool enough, interesting enough, beautiful enough”, you know the ones. Leaving you feeling rejected and snubbed.
It’s astounding the amount of toxic self talk and feelings of low self esteem that can get triggered when someone says “No” to you – when you’re basing your self worth on external sources of validation.
Which is what’s going on if you’re being negatively impacted by someone unfriending you on Facebook. For children and teenagers, being excluded from groups is a bigger deal. Particularly if they’re shy or more reserved in nature and don’t have loads of friends. For younger people being unfriended on Facebook and other social media can really hurt.
There’s a lot of financial gain tied up in Facebook. So we’re all being constantly told how important our Facebook ‘identity’ is, and how integral it is to our personal identity. Of course that’s what the people who are making vast amounts of money from Facebook want everyone to believe. And if you’ve grown up using an iPad since you were 6 years old then your experience of Facebook is clearly going to be different to people who didn’t grow up with social media.
But at the end of the day, switch off your laptop or mobile device and Facebook no longer exists.
If you’re being negatively impacted when someone you know unfriends you on Facebook, here’s what you can do to detox from social media overkill, see things from a different perspective and get on with your life:
Image by Tim Gouw
5 Ways To Get Over Being Unfriended On Facebook
- If you’re upset over being unfriended on Facebook the first thing you need to do is step away from all of your devices and give yourself a 24 hour social media cooling off period. Go and talk about it with a friend – in person – to get some empathy for the parts of you that are feeling rejected and hurt. If you have children or teenagers, you need to give them emotional and constructive support if they’re being cyber bullied or excluded from groups on social media, or unfriended by someone they felt close to.
- Give other people permission to say “No” to you. Giving other people permission to choose who they hang out with on Facebook and in real life gives you the same rights. It makes it an even playing field. You too have the right to unfriend or block anyone, for whatever reason. Unfriending on Facebook often comes down to someone posting content that’s repetitive, inappropriate, or because of something that’s happened outside of Facebook. These days lots of people annually cull the number of friends they have on Facebook to keep their connections personally relevant. Most adults are now over the whole ‘numbers to impress’ game when it comes to their personal Facebook account.
- Take a look at how much time you’re spending on Facebook each day. Are you being sucked down cyber rabbit holes for hours and days on end? If you are, then it’s time to take a break from virtual cyberspace and get back into the real physical world and spend quality face-to-face time with your other friends.
- If someone’s unfriended you because you’ve developed an unhealthy obsession with them, this is a red flag alert. You need to switch off your computer and mobile devices and let go of the fantasy and addictive patterns you’ve developed around this person and Facebook. It’s high time you put your energy and imagination into building healthier relationships that are real and mutual.
- Seek validation from more trustworthy, less fickle sources. Facebook and other forms of social media rely on the fact that most people adopt a herd mentality in groups and unconsciously follow the rest of the pack. There’s a lot of copycat, “me too” group dynamics going on. Yet Hollywood shows us again and again that relying heavily on external, fickle sources for validation to feel worthy as a person and good about yourself can be dangerous and fleeting. Go for substance and credible, trusted sources for validation and honest feedback.
Rejection or “No” gets your attention. It stops you in your tracks and forces you to re-evaluate a whole range of things. Your beliefs, behaviours and expectations around what you want out of life and your friendships. If being told “No” totally devastates you, then there are issues around self esteem that need to be healed. Disappointment and pain are valuable opportunities to learn about yourself and grow.
Don’t get me wrong, Facebook is a fantastic social networking and friendship building tool. But when you lose all perspective and see it as an extension of your self worth and likeability for who you really are, then you’re bound to get disappointed and tripped up by the aspects of Facebook that are just not that credible or real.
When one door closes, other doors open. That’s how life works. Nature abhors a vacuum. Rejection when taken on board with self-awareness is a powerful catalyst for personal growth and positive change.
Being unfriended on Facebook can be a good opportunity to declutter your friend space and create room for friendships of more substance to enter into your life. It can also get you to view Facebook from a more balanced and objective perspective and not let it dominate your life.
Title image by Luis Llerena
by Janelle Legge | Dec 24, 2014 | Relationships
Christmas and the holiday season can be a mixed time of year, when we most need to feel more self empowered and less vulnerable. It’s a time to wind down, step back from our work and express love and gratitude to the people that really matter in our lives. It can also be intense, bringing old wounds and past disappointments to the surface.
3 Self Empowerment Steps To Having More Love in Your Life
Step 1 – If you’re being triggered emotionally by something someone that you care about has said or done, ask yourself “Do I want more love in my life, or do I always want to be right?”.
There are always multiple sides to any situation or disagreement. When we’re stuck in our ego, which is our self-protection default setting, we become rigid and fixed in our thinking and then up go the walls. We’re right and they are wrong! Then nothing gets in, especially love. Studies in molecular biology show that holding grudges actually hurts you on a cellular level. It not only hurts you physically, it also keeps you stuck, feeling disempowered and like a victim. Remember that you get to choose how you respond to things.
Step 2 – Give others permission to be exactly who they are and take responsibility for your own emotional needs and care.
This involves letting go of your expectations for how others should be or how they should respond. Boundaries give you strategies. If you’re clear on your boundaries and values, which is one of the key responsibilities of being an adult, then you’re able to look after yourself in your relationships. Clear boundaries give you a relational roadmap, and the psychological space to not be attached to or caught up in other people’s reactions, behaviours and dramas. When you know how to get your own needs met in a healthy and safe way – and give others permission to be who they are – life becomes less stressful, more loving and abundant.
Step 3 – Say the word “love” regularly, to yourself and to the people you deeply care for and appreciate.
Tell others that you love them. Love is an incredibly powerful word. Have you noticed when you say the word “love” out loud it actually activates your heart centre and softens your feelings? It’s healing, powerful and feels good. It also helps to pull you back into your heart-centre – which is grounding and empowering.
by Janelle Legge | Oct 24, 2014 | Anxiety
Feeling anxious all the time often seems to come out of nowhere. When you’re feeling anxious all the time, it’s impossible to relax, think clearly and realistically about things and just be in the present moment.
If you can relate to this, then it’s time to sort through the muddle, stress and drama so you can reboot your mindset and steer your life back into powerful action.
To help, I’ve created a cheat sheet so you can get the insights and reality-checks you need to be anxiety-free once and for all:
Anxiety Cheat Sheet ©
1. Toxic relationship drama
One of the biggest culprits for anxiety are those toxic emotional-roller-coaster relationships that drain your energy and distort your take on reality. There’s one drama after another and it wears you down. Eventually you’re in such a muddle your common sense and self esteem have gone off on vacation and your self-confidence nose-dives. You lose YOU in the process. It’s no wonder you’re feeling anxious, you should be. If you can relate, then your daily mantra needs to be “I’m better off healthy and happy on my own, than being in a toxic relationship”. Your intuition and gut-feel always knows when you’re in a relationship or situation that’s just not good for you. The un-ease you’re feeling 24/7 is you trying to ignore the writing on the wall, pretending everything’s alright. When it’s not. It’s time to break the spell, rebuild your self esteem and attract better quality relationships.
2. Uber people pleasing
People pleasing never leads to win-win outcomes. It makes you come across as wishy washy. Difference and tension are essential alchemical ingredients for creativity and cultivating healthy interesting relationships that continually evolve. Every time you put someone else’s real or imagined needs before your own a part of you keeps tabs and gets resentful. This builds huge amounts of internal tension – at a cost. You’ll feel loads of anxiety most of the time because you’re constantly scanning other people and your environment for clues, instead of tuning into you. Get back on the self-actualizing-individuation path. Do authentic you from now on.
3. Ignoring your inner guidance
When the incessant noise of your mental chatter keeps drowning out what your heart and intuition are trying to tell you, you’re not going to be feeling too great. You need to turn down the noise and distractions. Tip: your heart holds a wealth of wisdom around what’s right for you. It’s part of your intuitive guidance system. This is where your real power and creative potential resides. Healthy constructive thinking needs to team-up and collaborate with your heart-based wisdom so you can do what’s best for you. You need quiet time alone and self-nourishing rituals to do this.
4. Being out of integrity with yourself
Going against your core values and what you know deep down to be true, is a sure-fire trigger for anxiety that can lead to depression and poor choices. Get clear on your values and internal code of ethics. Live by them. Having a clear take on how you do life gives you a powerful inner-guidance system for navigating the world and your relationships in a grounded and self-confident way. Correct self-alignment leads to wise decision-making and better quality outcomes.
5. Boundaries missing in action
If you don’t have clear personal boundaries you’re on a mission impossible to be treated with respect and get what you want and need in your relationships. You’re going to hit trouble. Everywhere you go. Because it’s a relational-jungle out there. Many people love to test boundaries, either openly or in a sneaky passive-aggressive-kind-of-way. Yet it’s boundaries that make us feel safe and secure. So if you’re not clear on your boundaries and how to put them into action with other people, you’re going to feel anxious. Your unconscious mind will be on red alert or overdrive. Because you don’t have safety strategies in place that come from having clear personal boundaries. So self-centred people on the take see you coming. The sooner you get clear on your personal boundaries and act on them, the sooner you’ll be treated with the respect you deserve and feel far less anxious.
Sorting through the muddle that’s making you feel anxious all of the time is what transmutes anxiety into self-awareness and clarity. That’s when you’re best equipped to make better choices and take more decisive action.
© 2014 | Janelle Legge
