Do you ever go into the “what if” place? You know, “what if this happens or doesn’t happen?” What if blah de blah de blah happens? It a place where your mind can spin out of control and push you over the edge. Umm, not helpful!

The fastest and easiest method I’ve ever come across to stop your mind from spinning out of control is called Grounding. If you’ve heard of grounding, great! Keep reading because I bet you haven’t heard of this method.

What is grounding and when do you need to do it? Grounding is just what it sounds like. Being focused in the present, the here and now and feeling solid like you are connected to the Earth and have your wits about you. There are many reasons and situations to want to feel grounded. If you are someone who suffers from anxiety, grounding is important to you. If you are feeling panicked about something you cannot make sound decisions and choices, grounding is essential. If you are like me and perform work in other realms you need to come back to the present when done, so grounding is necessary to interact in the human world. If you find yourself thinking “what if this” or “what if that” then grounding is critical for you to stop your mind from spinning of control. Remember that “what if” generally never happens, it’s just your fear of it happening and that fear can keep you from living a life of value and meaning.

When I first become a life coach back in 2001, one of my favorite books was Taming Your Gremlin by Rick Carson. For such a seemingly small book it was surprisingly challenging to work through. I don’t remember much else from his book since it was so long ago that I worked in it and I may just decide to revisit it again sometime soon. What I do remember is this powerful way to silently, quickly, and non-emotionally bring yourself back down to Earth, focus your energy and stop your mind from spinning.

It is so surprisingly easy that you could do this in as little as 10 seconds in any public place and not one person would have any idea that you were doing it.

Here’s how I remember it and do. You want to bring in your 5 senses. You are not describing what is happening, simply making an observation and statement. There is no judgment or value placed it on, simply a statement. Here’s what it might sound like in your head:

“I am sitting at my desk typing this. I feel my hands on the computer. I hear the keys clicking; I see the letters and words appear on the page. I hear the music playing in the background. I see my cat lying on the floor next to me. I taste the lingering mint in my mouth from my discarded piece of gum. I feel the cold air on my feet from the air conditioner.” 

If you could smell something you would bring that in as well. When you observe and bring in your senses you are solely in the present. You are feeling, sensing, hearing, seeing, touching, tasting and even smelling. You simply want to state to yourself what those things are. Doing this brings you into a place of neutrality and focus and stops the spin.

Practice often!

Julie Hawkins is the Biz Psychic and Women’s Empowerment Coach. www.juliehawkins.com

I recently gave several readings where everyone I spoke to felt like whatever was going wrong in their life was their fault. Conversely, maybe you know people who think everything that goes wrong is because of something or someone else. You often end up at one of the two ends of the spectrum – self-flagellation or complete lack of responsibility. So why do we do it and how do we stop? After all, it has to be someone’s fault…right?

Humans are programmed to want to find reasons why things happen in order to find solutions to problems. You play detective: where did this problem originate? Who started it? This is your default thought process. You think it helps you to make sense of a problem and sometimes it can. But making things “black or white; right or wrong; yes or no” can often be a deep source of frustration, hopelessness, guilt and anxiety and cause undue stress, overwhelm, resentment and a myriad of other negative feelings. It’s also hugely limiting because if it isn’t one thing or the other, what is it?

What happens with blame?

1.  When you place blame, you may feel better initially, but the truth is you give away your own empowerment and ability to make impactful change in your own life when you resort to blame, be it on someone else or yourself.  Blame is unresourceful. It doesn’t solve any problem. You can feel self-righteous about it, but it still does not solve the problem. It gives you NO choices.
2. Blame is a spiral. It is a never-ending cycle of negative feelings. Also, sometimes there is NO apparent good reason as to why something happened. Sometimes there is a cosmic occurrence. Whether you believe in astrology or not, the fact is our solar system and the Universes beyond are all driven by powerful energetic forces. So while I will always default to one’s own responsibility to make choices and problem solve, you also have to remember that it’s not just you in this world; sometimes the correct response is to step back and be introspective rather than action driven. It’s another great ability to cultivate in response to things outside our own control.
3. I like “response-ability.” Blame is completely disempowering, plain and simple! Response-ability on the other hand is empowering and choice driven. I think of it this way: “Response-ability.” It is your opportunity to develop new abilities to respond to certain situations. Blame keeps you stuck, resentful, angry and feeling down. Response-ability or choice is uplifting and full of action and momentum.

Blame is not useful. Response-ability is useful AND empowering. So ask yourself these questions when you want to place blame:

1. How does it help me to blame ____________________?
2. What do I get out of blaming _____________________?
3. What would I rather have instead?
4. What are my choices and how do I enact them to be more empowered?

Julie Hawkins is the Biz Psychic and Women’s Empowerment Coach. www.juliehawkins.com

Everyone has intuition; whether you are aware of it and connect with it, may be a different story.

Intuition is defined as follows:

Quick and ready insight.
a) Immediate apprehension or cognition b); knowledge or conviction gained by intuition; c) the power or faculty of attaining to direct knowledge or cognition without evident rational thought and inference.

I think of intuition as your own internal GPS. It locates your feelings and emotions so you can pay attention to them and use them wisely.

Intuition doesn’t have to be profound, yet it certainly can be. It can also be a simple experience with undeniably important results. Paying attention to your intuition can be as easy as “knowing” or trusting that you should have turned left instead of right. Or that you knew you were going to get a job because you just had a feeling. Maybe you knew “this is the person I’m going to marry.” Or you had a little niggling feeling to call someone and it turned out they really needed to talk with you. This is intuition; whether it is mundane or profound.

I remember when I was young just how often I would get ‘those feelings’ and how often I didn’t follow them only to berate myself later for not listening and trusting my original feeling. Intuition is hard wired into us as humans to enable our survival. Our ancestors knew this and used it and so can you. I’ve had several clients ask me “how do I identify my intuition?” so here are my 3 quick steps.

It can take practice to notice the niggling impressions or feelings we come to recognize as intuition.

1. Pay attention and practice listening to the little voice or feeling inside.
2. Notice what your gut “says” and learn to trust it.
3. If doubt creeps in notice if it’s coming from your head; if you are hearing a cynical or critical voice it’s your ego, not your intuition.

Remember, your intuition is a survival skill. You are supposed to have it and use it! It will not lie to you; it’s here to protect you. Once you figure out your own patterns and know when to trust the information that’s truly coming from your intuitive GPS as opposed to your inner critic, the more you will build the confidence to trust your own skills and the happier you will be.

Julie Hawkins is a trainer, author and women’s empowerment coach. She is also known as the Biz Psychic and teaches individuals how to access their own wisdom. www.juliehawkins.com

Sometimes the holidays feel like good news/bad news. It’s actually fairly common because the expectations during this time of year may stretch common sense and cause you to feel torn in several different directions causing inner conflict. It may feel our sound like this in your head: “Part of my feels ___________ and the other part of me feels the opposite.” Or it may come out as the good news is…and the bad news is language. Sometimes this internal unrest is just a commentary and doesn’t really present a problem. Other times it can be a BIG problem. When this kind of problem creates stagnation, frustration and indecision, it’s unlikely to go away without taking some kind of action.

There’s a wonderful NLP (neuro linguistic programming) technique to resolve this problem called a Parts Integration. A Parts Integration is neither easy nor quick and most often requires an in person visit, however it can yield profound and lasting results because it resolves the inner conflict at a very deep and unconscious level.

If you don’t need or can’t do a Parts Integration, you can still work on this yourself. Here are my tips:

1. Identify the inner conflict by stating the “good news/bad news” or what you feel conflicted about. It can also be expressed as “part of me wants to __________ because…and the other part of my wants to do something else because….”
2. Once you have identified the two conflicting aspects you can begin to weigh them. Write the cons first and then the pros. Don’t get stuck in the story of the pros and cons, simply acknowledge them (this may be a challenge so keep at it).
3. Notice and write down the feelings for the pros and the cons that arise.
4. Notice if there are any similar positive feelings on each side. This is where you’ll want to focus since this is in agreement. Stay with the good feelings because they are your motivation.

I’ll give you my own example as to how it might sound in your head.

Step 1

“Part of me can’t wait to finish my teacher’s certification in Chicago. I’ve been looking forward to completing this work so I can teach it to others because it’s so amazing. The other part of me doesn’t like the thought of traveling to Chicago where it will probably be freezing and I’ll miss my cats and my nice comfortable bed. It’s such a pain to travel.”

Step 2

Cons

I hate hotel beds.
I’ll have to eat all my meals out and that’s a challenge.
It’s a long day of traveling.
I’ll miss my home.
I don’t know what to expect.

Feelings (Step 3)

Dread, annoyance, excitement, fear of the unknown

Pros

The time will pass quickly.
I’ll be learning amazing new skills and information.
I’ll meet wonderful people.
Traveling is only a short part of the process.
I’ll be home before I know it.
It’s sort of a mini vacation.

Feelings (Step 3)

Excitement, anticipation, relief, joy, satisfaction, confidence

Step 3

Do you notice any similarities between the pros and cons? In this instance, excitement was in both “pros and cons.” When you focus on the commonalities and the positive feelings, it automatically reduces internal conflict.

If you don’t get any similarities initially, keep pondering the situation and repeat the steps. Eventually you will find some common ground. For deeper-rooted issues more advanced work may be necessary.

This is a quick exercise. It may take all of a couple of minutes to do in your head and maybe 5 minutes on paper. Isn’t it worth your time to reduce the inner conflict? The important point to remember is that you end this, or any exercise, on a positive note. The mind remembers the last sentence, thought or action that happened.

Asking if you have trust issues is probably a “duh” question, however, that doesn’t make having them easy or acceptable. Mistrust of others breeds anger, resentment, hurt, shame, disappointment and more. It can also intensify self-esteem problems, self-doubt and indecisiveness. It is hard to live a happy life when you feel this way.

You didn’t start out this way in life. As a baby, you innately possessed trust because your very survival depended on it. As you grew, life experiences taught you that people did not always live by their words. You probably experienced many breaches of trust, some more profoundly impacting than others causing you to feel fear, anxiety, depression, disappointment, resentment and other negative emotions.

Living life this way is neither productive nor satisfying. So what can you do about it? Trust starts with you. When you learn to intuit and understand your own triggers, and emotions then you recognize and understand the signals going off inside. The more you do this the more you trust yourself to make sound judgment calls and good choices.

You are equipped with in internal guidance system and a set of survival instincts that are hard wired into your human system. Fight or flight is your most basic survival instinct. Back in cave dweller days if your source of food, shelter or community was threatened, you often had a split second to determine whether to run for you life or stay and fight. That instinct cannot be easily altered or removed. At your most basic you have the instinct to survive so even if you are not acutely aware of the signals going off I promise you they are still there.

Your internal guidance system commonly communicates with you through emotions and feelings or sensations. Sometimes you may feel a pit or knot in your stomach (when your heightened sense is to flee) and butterflies in your stomach when your heightened sense is for something more positive and exciting. There is also a part of your guidance system that is intuitive. You may call it your sixth sense, goose bumps, hair standing up on the back of your neck or a sense of knowing. Your internal guidance may niggle you to back away from a situation or prompt you to move forward even though you have no logical reason to do so.

When you were a child you were much more in touch with this system and as you matured you began to rely more heavily on your logic and reason. But I’ll tell you this much. Ask most highly successful people what convinced them to do something or avoid it and aside from the obvious logical reasons, they’ll tell you it was their gut feeling because they learned to trust it.

Building trust comes from within. When you remember how to listen to your instincts, eventually you come to trust them more even though logic or reason may sound better initially. Logic is helpful and I usually suggest you consult it and then check in with your gut and/or your heart. What are they telling you? Listen closely. Observe the feelings, emotions and sensations.

Trust is built slowly. When I introduced my new cat Felix to his sisters, I did it slowly. They didn’t much care for him at first and being the kitten, he didn’t care about their feelings. Over several weeks they have slowly and steadily come to know each other and I feel the bond growing. The older girls are more accepting because I’ve gone out of my way to make sure I express to them how much I love them. They trust me and will soon trust and accept Felix.

There will also come a time when you learn or remember how to bring in the wisdom of your higher self as well as the drive and logic of your ego (conscious mind) and blend it with your gut instincts. Then it becomes your own high council of trusted information.

Take it slowly. Remember, not trusting others is often about not trusting yourself so start with you first.

• Observe yourself (no judgment, simply observe what happens).
• Notice what situations trigger your negative feelings.
• Notice how you respond in these situations.
• When you play it back in your head, slow it down like a movie.
• Was there a signal that you initially missed? Did your gut tighten or did you feel anxiety? What did you feel?

After you make these observations, then think about how you’d like to respond differently the next time the situation occurs. Listening to and acting upon y

Repeat the steps above as often as possible. The more you do this the more trust you have in your own magnificent abilities.