Archive for the ‘Authentic self’ Category

Many people are struggling with their self-worth for all kinds of various reasons. Each and every person can benefit from paying more attention to how they actually feel about themselves. Are you hard on yourself? Are you judging yourself? Do you find yourself being very self-critical? Are you easily hurt by what others say or what you think they may think of you? Do you know who you are? Are you able to validate yourself internally or do you feel that you need external validation to matter. Please know that you really do  matter just as you are, for who you are. Our self-worth was never meant to be tied to us for what we do, but for who we are. In order to have a healthy self-worth you really need to not only know who you authentically are but you need to be living authentically from who  you really are and in an honest, ethical, way with integrity.

Life Coach, BPD/Mental Health and Self Improvement Coach, A.J. Mahari, works with clients in many niche areas of coaching. She can help you identify your struggles and help you resolve them. She can also help you if you are lacking self-worth, feeling shame, have mental health issues, or negative ways of thinking about yourself and/or negative self-talk. You so deserve to have healthy self-worth and to feel good about yourself.

Does life seem to be a struggle for you? Do you feel overwhelmed and frustrated much of the time? Do you wish you could experience something better? Fortunately, you can enjoy the exciting life you deserve. Success is available to you despite challenging circumstances. It’s important to remember, also, that your self-worth is not defined by your circumstances. What holds you back? Take some time today to question the beliefs you hold that limit your potential. If you look at a challenging circumstance as a wall that’s impossible to climb, you need a fresh perspective. Within you is everything you need to thrive and excel.

The more you question the validity of your limiting beliefs, the more success you’ll experience in your life. Think of a circumstance in your life that you believe is preventing you from something you want. Write it down, then get ready to challenge that limiting belief. If you do, you’ll begin to move toward the success you deserve.

Use these strategies to maintain a positive self-worth, regardless of your circumstances:

1. Find the cause. What is the cause of the circumstance in your life? Sometimes, limiting beliefs can serve as warning signs that help you avoid danger. What can you learn from this so you avoid triggering a similar situation in the future?
   • If the cause of your situation is unclear, ask friends and family for their input. Others see your life from a different perspective, and their input can be valuable in determining the root of your difficulty.
2. Get past the blame game. You can often be your own worst critic. Fortunately, negative self-talk often has very little basis in reality. Choose to replace the doubts of your inner critic with more productive thinking.
   • Once a negative thought has taught you its intended lesson, it has served its purpose. If you choose to hold onto those negative thoughts, they will begin to form a negative self-image in your mind. This unbalanced view of your talents and strengths holds you back.
   • Instead of dwelling on negative thoughts about your circumstances, learn the lesson and resolve to move on. Find out what you can do differently to avoid a repeat of your present situation. Then, when negative thoughts enter your mind, choose to replace your self-talk with productive thoughts instead.
3. Cut yourself some slack. Recognize that you’re human. Everyone makes mistakes, but your attitude determines your altitude in life. You are valuable regardless of your present predicament. You are worthwhile even when you slip up or falter. Your circumstances simply provide feedback and an opportunity to learn and grow.
4. Make the most of it. When you recognize that you’re valuable despite your circumstances, you’ll begin to make the most of every opportunity. Stumbling blocks
   you face can become stepping stones to the success you deserve, simply by changing what you focus on.
   • Instead of feeling helpless, ask yourself: “What’s great about this?” Every situation provides something of value if you look for it.
5. Ask for help. Loved ones and friends often see strengths in you that go without notice. Ask them what they believe your strengths are. This is where your self-worth is found. Everyone has something of value to contribute.
   • Once you recognize your unique talents, gifts, and abilities, you’ll see life in a whole new way. You’ll seek opportunities to use your talents to bless others. You’ll
   gain confidence that comes from conquering challenges that once made you cringe.
   • Instead of allowing your circumstances to dictate who you are, you’ll make the rules!
6. Live one day at a time. Despite your best efforts, some days simply provide one frustration after another. When this happens, you have a choice. You can let your circumstances defeat you, or you can choose a more positive perspective.

Make a choice to stop comparing. Take a good look at your negative thoughts, become more aware of them. Challenge them. Resolve today to find your strengths, learn from your difficult circumstances, see mistakes as the growth opportunities that they truly are and experience the joy you were created to experience. Instead of tying your self-worth to your circumstances, or to what you do, or haven’t yet been able to achieve, choose to see things as they really are and radically accept them. Radically accept yourself, wherever you are today. Take it one day at a time. You were created with unique talents and gifts. When you find those gifts within yourself and put them to use, you’ll know how valuable you truly are. In the meantime, know that you are valuable and worthy just because you are.

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How You Relate To Yourself Affects How You Relate To Others

Relationships are complicated. Relationships are often thought of as being vehicles to meet needs, share things with others, and more importantly for so many people, to not be alone. Relationships are often thought of by many as being central to what defines them. What happens if your relationship is defining you, whether you have been aware of that or not, and then your relationships is chaotic or troubled and/or fails or ruptures? The answer to that question will hinge upon how well you know yourself – who  you are really are. It will also hinge upon the degree to which you know how to be there for yourself – to soothe yourself, be kind to yourself, and to nurture yourself.

How can you know and experience healthy love with and from someone else if it isn’t a part of how you relate to yourself first?

Before you can really successfully address relationships difficulties with others you will first benefit from understanding much more about yourself. What is the state of your relationship with and to yourself? This is an essential question to pose that many benefit from exploring in the life coaching process. Seeking to answer this question can help you to identify and clarify your goals. In life coaching, I help people to not only identify and clarify their goals but also to then do the work necessary in how they feel and think about themselves that will help them to not be trying to relate to others as a means of avoiding Self.

Coaching Sessions

1 Session $80.00 2 Sessions $160.00 6 Sessions $450.00 10 Sessions $750.00

The understanding of love so many live with can be more of an illusion than it is reality. This creates toxicity in many relationships. Fighting harder through discord and distress and often even abuse will not make healthy love become reality. Life coaching can help you to understand how to unravel the nature of the patterns of relating you have become involved with that leave you looking for love in all the wrong places.

Relating to others as a means of avoiding who you really are, or as a way of trying to have someone else meet you needs for you, or you meet needs for someone else, is at the heart of so much codependence. Codependence is a not a healthy relationship model. It is not a recipe for happiness or contentment. It is a breeding ground for anger, hurt, frustratation, pain, chaos and turmoil – not to mention distrust, alientation and getting stuck. Unhealthy relating that can become toxic tears away at the fibre or who you really are. People lose themselves more and more to these relational dynamics.

• How To Identify a Toxic Relationship
• Break Free of the BPD Maze – Recovery For Non Borderlines
• Dilemma on The Other Side of BPD – Overcoming Denial about BPD and Love – Loved Ones of BPD
• Inside The Borderline Mind For Loved Ones of BPD
• Loneliness Is a Teacher
• Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life
• Thoughts Determine Your Destiny
• Achieve Your Goals
• Beginner’s Guide To Yoga and Meditation

I life coach many people who, in the process of our work together, find their way out of this maze of trying to be filled up, understood, and/or validated by other people. I also work with many who are the person trying to fill up, validate, or understand the illogical in trying to meet needs for others that they need to meet for themselves.

This relational dynamic - this way of relating does not make room for healthy love. The fact that the struggle and the issues may feel familiar often gives people an illusion of being loved or of loving.

Can you relate to this? If so, do you want to free yourself from this painful way of  relating and having relationships? Do you want to be able to love yourself and meet your own needs? If you can relate to this and you are answering yes to these questions I hope you will purchase life coaching sessions with me so that I can support you in learning more about the lessons that relationships are trying to teach you and the many reasons why you haven’t been able, thus far, to find the relational peace and happiness you really want.

© A.J. Mahari, June 5, 2010 – All rights reserved.

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A.J. Mahari, author, life coach and strategist, takes a look at what it truly means, in every day life to be seeking authenticity. Mahari believes that we are all in some aspect of attempting to actualize (or reclaim a lost) authentic self. Authentic self, is of course, the soul seat and heartbeat of any and all authenticity we can manifest in our lives. It is who each one of us truly is when we can break away from all that is the domain of the image of the ego.

Does it seem like authenticity is the buzz-word of this young century? Is it over-used these days? Has it been applied to too wide of an application in what it means to your life, to your personhood and/or your quest for more awareness of and/or connection to your self?

Have you stopped to think about who you really are? Have you given much thought to actually defining for yourself what it means to be in touch with, connected to, and living through your authentic self?

What is it that makes authenticity such a written and talked about thing? Is it just a new-age fad? Is it being over-exposed to the point where it is too confusing or seemingly meaningless in what is for most people, an otherwise hectic fast paced and stressful life?

Do you ever wonder, how the heck am I supposed to find time to figure out who this authentic self in me really is or what it really means? Do you feel that taking the time to examine this might just be too much of a luxury for you? Or conversely, do you feel it might be a waste of time because it seems so vague to you?

Do you think you know who you are? If so, ask yourself, am I achieving my goals? Am I reasonably happy? Am I satisfied with my self (or sense of self) and my relationships? If perhaps you are not sure who you are or you have goals that you haven’t yet been able to achieve, choices that seem too daunting to make, boundaries that are too stressful to identify, communicate, and/or uphold, relationship drama or chaos that is causing you endless pain, then you will benefit from getting to know just who you are versus who you may want to more fully be.

Life coaching can certainly help with getting to know who you really are. It can also help you to identify, then develop strategy to achieve your goals. I work with clients in my life coaching practice often who need to examine and get more in touch with their own goals, wants, needs, choices, decision-making processes, boundaries and ending negative or toxic relationship patterns and so much more.

What is authenticity?

Authenticity is the expression of an integrated self? a self that is whole and reasonably healthy. The authenticity expressed by this integrated self is consistent and congruent. The expression of authenticity from an integrated self is not contingent upon ego-expression, which is made up more of appearance, of image, and is by its very definition false or inauthentic.

Authenticity is derived from the flowing consistent and congruent expression of one’s integrated and aware truth in conscious and evolved ways that are spiritually based and that are kind, genuine, giving, and loving. Authenticity is not about the gratification of the ego – the image of what is often referred to as a false self.

Authenticity is what flows from any and all expression that is free of pretense. That is free of all that ego encompasses in thought, feeling, and experience. Authenticity is the heart of human connection. It is the vehicle through which honesty, integrity, and positive regard for self and others flows consistently in ways that are not compromised by low self-esteem, lack of self worth, or by needing to take anything, spiritually, emotionally, psychologically – needing any energy or validation – whatsoever from without because the integrated authentic self has its own positive energy spirit source that is free of pretense and that comes from within and rises out of a conscious awareness in each unfolding moment.

Authenticity is a peaceful pleasing fullness that has been cultivated from within one’s heart, soul, and mind. It is an interdependent relational stance from which to engage others. It is not needy. It is not encumbered by the wants or needs of ego.

What is an authentic self?

An authentic self is an integrated self. It is a self that is as whole as a human self can be – not perfect but consistent, congruent, and not bound to the ego-driven illusions that the false self or the unintegrated pretentious self is invested in pursuing. The authentic self has no need to be in pursuit of the ever-illusive pseudo-gratification of itself in ways that separate it out from itself and as a result from others and from feeling connected to others in independent and healthy ways.

An authentic self is a self consciously cultivated in its being sought after. It is an intention in action to bring a deeper meaning to daily life and to the understanding of who one is and how one is inter-connected to humanity generally, and others specifically. Consciously seeking to find, live from, and evolve one’s authentic self requires a conscious intention to continually unstep the ego’s efforts to be the focus of one’s identity.

The measure and meaning of who you are is all-too-often wrapped up in all that you may not be right now or may not yet be. The way that you define who you think you are, or the way that you may experience not really knowing who you are is often wrapped up in defining yourself more from what you do. It can be all-consumed by a need for ego-gratification. An ego-gratification that is a chase for what cannot be satiated and that exalts the fragmented self – the false self – in ways that continually separate one from who he or she really is. This separation from one’s authentic self can be a very painful way to live.

The authentic self is a self that understands its intrinsic value and worth for its beingness. It does not require the ego-gratification of what it does or what it has to make itself whole. The authentic self is positive, hopeful, and unfettered by the comparisons of image-ego-driven others.

Manifesting your authentic self is something that requires you to make a conscious commitment to stop pursuing the ego’s interest in or need to protect what is a false image of who you really are – who you are fully meant to be.

Your authentic self is the self that you were born into this world to evolve into fully being. Your authentic self is a journey ever-unfolding in your personal evolutionary enlightenment. It is not a destination.

How does authenticity manifest from this authentic self?

Authenticity manifests from the authentic self in consistent and congruent ways that are not at all tied to ego. Authenticity manifests from your soul, your faith, the hope that you have in your own ability to seek, quest after, and find more integrated, authentic, and enlightening ways to be more fully conscious in open and honest ways to being the you that you have always been meant to be.

Authenticity only manifests itself from your authentic self when you open your awareness and seek consciously to channel this spiritual energy through yourself in ways that do not need to take any ownership of it. Manifesting authenticity means an unconditional and vulnerable openness that is fully present to the unfolding moment without pretense, without need for image, without ego, without qualifying conditions or the seeking of any external control of anyone or anything.

Authenticity can’t help but be manifested from one’s authentic self. For it is the expression of this authenticity that is the essence of the healthy, well-balanced, integrated self. Authenticity manifests naturally from the authentic self from the very empowering nature of being one with your spirituality and your actuality – an actuality realized in your every day reality.

This unfolding of manifested authenticity from one’s authentic self is a process and journey in and throughout life. It is not a destination.

© A.J. Mahari, January 13, 2009 – All rights reserved.

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