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5 Effective Ways to Battle Anxiety

Anxiety is one of the major reasons people go to the doctor. A full blown panic attack can feel like you are having a heart attack. The good news is that you don’t have to live with anxiety and fear. Here are 5 ways to battle anxiety.

1. Recognize that there is nothing wrong with you nor how you are feeling. Anxiety is a a very common emotion.

2. Be grateful. Science as proven that being grateful can change your state of mind from fear and anxiety to calm. Look around and find one thing you can feel grateful for. What’s another?

3. Talk it out! find someone you trust to talk about your feelings.

4. Get some good nutrition in you. When we don’t eat our blood sugar drops and the body creates a hormone called cortisol. Cortisol can be helpful at times. But, if are prone to anxiety, it can make yoU feel worse

5. Live in the moment. Anxiety is often caused by uncertainty of the future. Live in the here and now. Take time to smell the roses as my grandmother use to say.

If your anxiety is out of control seek advice from a trained medical professional. You may also consider alternative forms of help by working with a Alternative Health Practitioner.

The good new is that anxiety can be treated.

5 Steps to Effective Journaling

I remember when I was first introduced to the concept of gratitude journaling, I had no idea how to start or what to write. At first, I’d come up with something and instantly dismiss it as stupid. I was simply thinking too hard and judging. Once I got out of my head, things begin to change for me. Before I knew it, I realized that all things great and small are worth being grateful for.

A gratitude journal is simply a notebook where you write down everything in life you’re thankful for. It doesn’t have to take more than 5 minutes in the early morning or before bed each night. The idea is to clear your mind, reflect on the day, and see the goodness in life.

Here are some tips to help you get started:

  1. Buy or make yourself a nice, attractive journal so you’ll take care of it and will look forward to journaling every day.
  2. Reflect on anything new that came your way: new friends, clients, or opportunities.
  3. Don’t be shy about repeating things from previous days; praising your good      health and loving family never tires.
  4. Did a friend do something nice for you today? Did you find a lost item? Did you handle a difficult situation well?   Gratitude is not reserved for  really big things; you can be grateful for the small things, too.
  5. Periodically, go back over your journal and read all that you’re grateful for. It’ll be a great pick-me-up on especially difficult days.

The more you add to your journal, the more you will teach your mind a new way of thinking.

Your outlook on life will become more positive and you will feel a deeper sense of connection with those around you.

And you’ll discover the sheer beauty that already exists in your life.

Written by Victoria Finch MHt, Life and Business Coach. For more on Victoria’s 7 steps to overcome fear and anxiety to live an exceptional life schedule your no cost discovery call https://calendly.com/victoriafinch/discovery-call-with-victoria-finch

Top 5 Excuses for Not Going After Your Dreams

What are you waiting for? You have plans and aspirations that you’ve been putting off for years. We’re great at putting things off and convincing ourselves that we’ll get them done someday soon. Eventually, we all run out of some days and our options become more limited. If you’re not enthusiastically pursuing your goals, there’s a reason. And it might not be the reason you think.

Most excuses are actually a form of fear camouflaged as another challenge.

Identify your excuses and take action today:

1. A perceived lack of resources. Perhaps you need additional knowledge, education, money, or time. This is the most common excuse for not taking action. These excuses might be accurate. You might not have enough time. However, it’s up to you to make the time. It’s up to you to find the money you need.

A lack of resources can’t stop you if you’re determined. Using the lack of resources as an excuse suggests another underlying issue.

Find a way around your lack of resources. There’s a solution available to you right now if you want to find it.

2. Your belief that you’ll fail. Maybe you’re not afraid of failing, but you anticipate failure. No one would waste their time taking action if they expected a negative outcome. Use every tool at your disposal to change your belief. Try using logic or convince yourself that you’ll give it a try anyway. Meditation, self-hypnosis, and visualization are other possible options.

Get expert advice or consider changing your objective to one that’s more believable.

3. Fear. The is the most accurate answer most of the time. Doing something significant involves change, both the change that results from success and the chance necessary to create success.

The most effective way to combat fear is to jump in with both feet. The apprehension that results from thinking about taking the first step is more severe than the apprehension that accompanies real action. Once you get started, the fear subsides considerably.

Fear has been around since the beginning of man. It’s not going away, so it’s important to build your ability to manage it.

4. A lack of motivation. Why aren’t you motivated? Is it due to fear or something else? A little success can create motivation. Starting a diet can be challenging, but your motivation grows after you’ve successfully lost 10 pounds.

The solution to a lack of motivation is the same as the solution to fear: take the leap. Get started and hang in there until you’ve experienced some success. At that point, you’ll find that your lack of motivation is no longer an issue.

5. The need for perfection. This could be the need to have ideal conditions before getting started or the need to accomplish your goal without experiencing any failure along the way. Perfectionism is just another manifestation of fear masquerading as a socially acceptable excuse.

There is no failure, provided you don’t give up. Expect that things won’t work out 100% according to plan. Accept this fact and move ahead.
Take action. Taking action is the best way to reduce your fear. You don’t need to be perfect. You only need to be “good enough.”

If you’ve been finding reasons to put off your plans to some unidentified point in the future, it’s time to examine the reasons. Fear is the biggest reason for chronic procrastination. It’s your responsibility to determine why you’ve been waiting. By finding an explanation, you can begin to take motivated action and see your dreams come true.

3 Ways to Make Lifestyle Changes Easier

At least 90 out of 100 people would tell you that they do not enjoy change. Change is not easy because humans are creatures of habit. You want to continue living in a certain routine once you have conditioned your body and mind to function in that way. This makes you feel comfortable with your surroundings and decisions.

Even if you don’t like change, there are ways to make healthy lifestyle changes easier. There are also tools you can use to welcome change into your life, even when you’re entering new uncharted territory.

Here are 3 ways to make lifestyle changes easier for you:

1. Determine Pros and Cons. If you know you need to make changes in your life and you aren’t looking forward to doing so, you can do a simple exercise that will make the change easier to handle.

Take a sheet of paper, and on one side write “Pros,” and on the other write, “Cons.” On the corresponding side you will write the pros and the cons of the change so you can see what the benefits and drawbacks might be.

You may realize as you complete this exercise that the very thing holding you back is the fear of change itself.

Seeing the pros and cons will help you realize how it will benefit you to make the change. This allows you to warm up to the thought that change actually might actually be a good idea!

2. Incorporate the Change Gradually. Another way to make lifestyle changes easier is to work up to them.

For instance, if the healthy lifestyle changes that you need to make center around ceasing your habit of smoking and drinking you may not want to quit cold turkey; instead you can work up to it. Stop drinking every night with dinner, and then stop drinking for a few days at a time. You can do the same thing with smoking so that you aren’t fighting the lifestyle change.

Preparing yourself both physically and mentally helps you to ease the change into your daily routine.

3. Use Affirmations. Another way to help make lifestyle changes easier is to use positive affirmations. Positive affirmations are statements that encapsulate the way you would ideally think or behave.

You can either create your own affirmations or look for statements that others have created. The key is that you find an affirmation that speaks to you.

Words are powerful and, when you repeat the same words over time, they continue to resonate through your mind. When the words are positive you’ll find that you can tap into the positive thought anytime or anywhere.

If you’re worried about making a healthy lifestyle change, you don’t have to be. Instead, you can remind yourself why you want to change by saying something like, “Change is healthy. I do not get stuck in the same routines.” When you repeat this often enough, it becomes your response to the anxiety you feel. This makes changes easier for you to handle.

Some lifestyle changes are harder than others to become accustomed to even when we desire to make the changes. Many times, just one of these tips will help you to implement the change, while other times you may need to use a variety of methods to feel at ease about the change.

Use the “pro and con” method to see the benefits. Then bring the change in gradually while you accept it through your affirmations. These techniques will help you feel confident so you can enjoy the benefits of your new lifestyle.

Spiritual Wellness Creates Balance in Your Life

Are you searching for deeper spiritual meaning in your life? You’re not alone; the hectic demands of life in the 21st-century have made many people feel disconnected. Perhaps what you need is a spiritual re-connection to bring about a sense of balance and completion in your life.

Many people confuse spirituality with religion and believe that spiritual wellness can only come from religious beliefs. However, spiritual balance comes from more than subscribing to a religion. Some people do seek religion for their spirituality, but spirituality can also be achieved without belonging to a specific religion.

How to Develop Spiritual Wellness

Essentially, developing spiritual wellness means working toward identifying what you believe in and how well those beliefs can give you inner strength through even the roughest patches in life.

When you’ve developed spiritual wellness, you can:

  • Respond to others honestly, regardless of the situation.
  • Express the values that you uphold and stand behind them at all times.
  • Understand the meaning of life and become in tune with the meaning of your existence.
  • Lead a fulfilling life.

How do we achieve spiritual wellness? Each of us has to develop our spirituality in own way. Your chosen path may take you on a different journey than another’s or than what you thought it might. 

When you’re ready to begin your journey toward spiritual wellness, consider the following suggestions:

1. Question the purpose of your existence. Ask yourself a few key questions as you go on a quest to achieve balance through spiritual wellness. Self-exploration is the key to developing your spiritual balance.

Ask yourself:

  • What defines me?
  • What is the purpose of my existence on the planet?
  • What things, people, and ideologies should I be committed to?
  • What do I want out of life?

2. Connect to what’s meaningful. After you’ve answered those questions, your next mission is to connect to and identify with the things in life that you want to represent you. Do you believe in helping others? Is it your interest to sacrifice the physical aspects of life to gain spiritual strength? Put the answers to the questions to work.

  • Contribute to a charity if you’re inclined to help others.
  • Go on a fasting mission to gain endurance and clarity of mind.

3. Test your limits. When you take on challenges, you expand your understanding of a whole new myriad of possibilities for you. Testing your limits could involve many things. Here are some examples:

  • Take on a physical challenge that ordinarily you wouldn’t take on due to fear of failure, disappointment, or the challenge itself.
  • Make a decision based on your beliefs even though you know it may not be popular.
  • Have the strength to stand by those convictions even if others reject them.

Becoming spiritually strong involves believing in something. It involves identifying your purpose and working towards achieving that purpose. Most importantly, it involves becoming truly happy with your life.

Ultimately, the balance you seek will come when you satisfy your spiritual needs. By taking the steps outlined here, you can put yourself on the right path to spiritual fulfillment.

Achieving spiritual wellness is not an overnight process. With persistence and dedication, you’ll find yourself connecting with another aspect of your existence that you never realized. More and more things will become clearer to you and you will start to experience true inner peace, no matter what challenges you’re faced with!

About the Author: Victoria Finch, The Heart Healer is an International Speaker, Author, and Strategic Life & Business Coach. Victoria helps faith centered professionals remove self doubt so they become more confident, connected, and make more money.    

To schedule your personal break through call with Victoria Finch visit https://calendly.com/victoriafinch/discovery-call-with-victoria-finch

How to Take Risks and Abandon Your Fears

It’s quite comfortable to sit back and keep the status quo. After all, if you don’t rock the boat, you can’t fall into the sea. But without risk, there are few rewards.

Abandon Your Fears

You already know that taking risks is risky. To build up the courage, you need to master your fears. However, it’s not as easy as it sounds. If you’ve spent the better part of your life with fear, it could be deeply ingrained in your subconscious, but it’s not impossible to change.

All you need now is the willingness to overcome your fears. If you really want to abandon your fears, there’s nothing that can stop you!

Here are some tips to keep fear at bay:

1. Recognize Your Fears. Recognize your fears for what they really are. You’ll soon discover how your fears are limiting you by your reactions to them.

  • Let’s say you’re afraid of driving, if you’re ever in the driver’s seat your response might be a quick “Oh no! Get me out of here!” If you continue this pattern of thinking, you’ll always be afraid. Accept that the fear is real, but challenge yourself to approach the situation with courage and inner strength.

2. Overcome Your Fears. Many times, we’re afraid of something because it remains in the unknown. We might label something as risky because we don’t yet know or understand what’s going on.

  • An example would be avoiding college because you are afraid of meeting new people, the workload, and so on. To overcome this fear, you can get familiar with the college, the courses, and the people so you can feel more comfortable and confident. Doing so will ease the fear of the unknown and give you a sense of relief.

3. Change Your Thinking. If you can alter the way you think about a certain situation, you’ll then act differently. Your fears may overwhelm your thoughts at times, but your job is to put a stop to this.

  • For example, if you think you’ll never be able to achieve your goals, you won’t. But if you believe in yourself, you’re far more likely to succeed!

How to Take Risks

Once you overcome your fears mentally, it’s time to take risks. Whether you realize it or not, you take risks everyday. Most risks are quite minor, but risk accompanies nearly every decision you make.

Follow these pointers to help you get into a risk taking mindset: 

  • A “risk” may sound negative; instead, think of it as more of an “adventure” or “journey.”
  • Visualize a positive outcome.
  • Consider the reasons why you’re hesitant to take a risk.
  • When you have a set plan in place, taking a risk is a whole lot less threatening.
  • When you’ve taken the leap, evaluate your experience so you can improve in the      future.
  • Self-confidence is the most important ingredient to success.

Putting it all Together

If you’re feeling tentative about the whole thing, get your feet wet with small steps. You can’t expect yourself to change drastically overnight, but at the same time you have to believe in yourself and believe that change is possible. 

Overcoming fears and taking risks go hand in hand. Start small and dream big. You only have one journey on this earth, so you might as well make the most of it!

About the Author: Victoria Finch, The Heart Healer is an International Speaker, Author, and Strategic Life & Business Coach. Victoria helps faith centered professionals remove self doubt so they become more confident, connected, and make more money.    

To schedule your personal break through call with Victoria Finch visit https://calendly.com/victoriafinch/discovery-call-with-victoria-finch

5 Tips to Deal With Disappointment

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. Romans 8:28

Everyone faces disappointments in life, both big and small. Unfortunately, many of us choose to complain and whine about our problems to the immense irritation of others.

It’s important to acknowledge our disappointments and not just ignore them, but how do we do it effectively without being a nag to others? The answer lies in learning constructive ways to acknowledge disappointments.

Disappointment can build character and patience if you allow it to. Learning to deal with your disappointments constructively can make you a stronger person in the end.

Coping with Disappointment

The first thing you need to do in learning to deal with disappointment is recognized your old coping strategies. Everybody has them. Do you reach for the pint of ice cream or withdraw into a room all alone? Do you get drunk and try to forget?

Once you recognize that your old strategy isn’t working, it’s time to create a new one.

Here are 5 tips for effectively dealing with your disappointments:

1. Acknowledge what you’re feeling. You can honestly express the emotions you’re feeling without blaming or punishing others. This is about how you feel about the situation, not others. Articulate your feelings without attacking others. Always be respectful, but don’t be afraid to let them know how you feel.

There isn’t a right or wrong way to feel. Your feelings are valid and if you don’t voice your opinion then you’ll harbor resentment and stress yourself out. Be honest with yourself about how you really feel about the situation.

2. Put things in perspective. Even small disappointments can seem monumental at first. But once you’ve expressed your hurt, frustration, or anger, take a step back and look at the bigger picture. How much of an effect is this disappointment going to have on you tomorrow, next week, or next year?

Take a deep breath and go for a walk to put your disappointment into perspective. Taking time to reflect and step away from the situation will help calm your nerves so you’ll be better able to handle the disappointment.

3. Refuse to doubt yourself. Sometimes disappointment can make you feel like a failure. You may wonder why these things happen to you or you may think you were stupid to get your hopes up in the first place. But none of that is the truth. Don’t allow yourself to give in to these negative thoughts!

Disappointment is not unique to you. Everyone has been disappointed at some time in their life. Instead of getting down on yourself, think about what could have been done differently and learn from the experience.

4. Look for a solution or compromise. You can’t have your way all the time but sometimes there may be a second option that’s agreeable to each party.

Take a few deep breaths, relax, and look for the “silver lining.” It’s possible to find something positive in almost every situation.

5. Reevaluate and make changes if necessary. Sometimes when we experience disappointment, it may be a sign that we need to re-examine our priorities. Depending on the degree of disappointment you’re facing, you may need to make minor or major changes to your life.

Learn to be flexible. Refocusing your attention on your new goals will help you forget about your disappointment.

Don’t Give Up

Any person who has had even a small degree of success in life has faced disappointments.

Winners simply don’t quit. They learn from their failures and disappointments and go on to achieve their goals.

You can become your own biggest motivator! Don’t underestimate the power of encouraging yourself by saying, “I can do this. I can make it. I will get through this and become a better person!”

You don’t need to allow disappointment to lower your self-confidence. That’s not to say that you need to gloss over your feeling, but you can simply learn how to deal with your disappointments effectively, then move on to bigger and better things.

About the Author: Victoria Finch, The Heart Healer is an International Speaker, Author, and Transformational Life Coach. Victoria helps faith-centered professionals remove self-doubt so they become more confident, connected, and make more money.    

To schedule your personal breakthrough call with Victoria Finch visit https://calendly.com/victoriafinch/discovery-call-with-victoria-finch

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