Archive for the ‘Emotional Mastery’ Category

Author, Life Coach, BPD/Mental Health and Self Improvement Coach, A.J. Mahari now has her Thought Changing Affirmations Handbooks 5 Volume Set available. Through the use of these positive affirmations, one a day, or one a week, you can learn to change your negative painful thoughts into more positive pain-neutral and/or happy contented thoughts. Whatever the mind can conceive it can achieve. If you want and need to stop suffering and to experience more peace, more calm, less to eventually no emotional dysregulation in your life than Mahari’s 5 Volume Set of Changing Your Thought Positive Affirmation Handbooks will be invaluable to you in your recovery process. A natural way to help empower your own recovery. A natural way that you have control over to change your negative thoughts into positive ones. You will feel so much better about yourself. Thoughts define our experience. What you think really controls what you experience, your pain, difficulty in relating to others, in relationships, in knowing who you are and so much more. It is all generated by the rigid thought patterns you’ve built up from a very young age and added to over the years. Affirmations might sound silly, or hardly like a hopeful solution to improve the quality of your life, but take it from Mahari who not only knows this and witnesses incredible change in the clients she coaches but she knows this first hand having recovered from BPD in 1995.

You can use these “Positive Affirmations” – short positive statements targeted at a specific subconscious set of beliefs – to challenge and undermine negative beliefs and to replace them with positive self-nurturing beliefs. How we think creates our experience. If you are thinking largely negatively you will create and perceive your life experience through a negative lens. If you are thinking more positively the exact opposite will manifest in your life – your thoughts, experience, relationships, and your over-all life experience.

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© A.J. Mahari, May 14, 2011 – All rights reserved.

Author, Life Coach, BPD and Mental Health Coach A.J. Mahari stresses the importance of listening. Listening skills are the most important half of communication. Sometimes people aren’t really actively listening to someone speaking because they are focused more on formulating their response. Being present fully to listening to what is being said is a gift of caring and compassion you can give to someone else. It is also most respectful. When two people communicate mutually using both sides of what healthy respectful communication entails the experience will be much more positive, a more strongly connected one, and one that builds your relationship regardless of type of relationship. Healthy communication is mutual and respectful. Toxic communication is often one-sided with one person doing most, if not all the talking. Toxic communication means that someone is not only not actively of effectively listening they are too busy with “what about me” to communicate in healthy and mutually appropriate ways.

How to Improve Your Listening Skills

Listening is the other half – perhaps the better half – of all communication. Unfortunately, most people rarely receive any formal training for how to do it properly. Improving your listening skills can enhance your  personal and/or  your professional and personal life. Follow these practical steps towards becoming a better listener, even and especially in challenging situations where listening actively and effectively is even more  important. I also provide coaching with clients wanting to improve their listening skills or over-all communication skills.

The Importance of Listening Skills

1. Master an important part of communications. Talking is only one side of effective communication. We also need to be able to understand the messages that people are sending us.
2. Build stronger relationships. Listening is a critical part of letting your family and friends know that you value and appreciate them. Many conflicts can be reduced if we work to understand each other’s views.
3. Advance your career. Active listening will help you clarify your employer’s expectations and priorities so you make the best use of your time at work. Expressing a sincere interest in what your colleagues have to say is paramount to good interpersonal work relationships.
4. Improve your emotional health. Many of the techniques involved in active listening are good for your mental and emotional health. By minimizing distractions while listening, you can enhance your own peace of mind. Learning to empathize with others is a powerful antidote against anger.

• A.J. Mahari’s Coaching Guide/Ebook/Workbook – Quest For Self Awareness & Creating Your Story of Success Audio
• Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life
• How To Identify a Toxic Relationship
• The Power of Gratitude
• A.J.’s Ebooks on BPD
• A.J.’s Audio Programs on BPD
• A.J.’s Ebooks For BPD Loved Ones
• A.J.’s Audio Programs for BPD Loved Ones

General Tips for Effective Listening

1. Ignore distractions. Give the speaker your full attention. If you notice your mind wandering, bring it back to the subject at hand.
2. Make eye contact with the speaker. Let the speaker know you’re interested. Having an appreciative audience makes it easier for people to express themselves. It will also help you stay alert.
3. Listen for the main points. It’s usually more effective to focus on understanding the key points that someone is making, rather than trying to etch each word into your memory. Listen as though you were taking notes even if you’re not.
4. Hear people out. Let people present what they have to say without being interrupted. Concentrate on what they’re saying rather than formulating your own response.
5. Pretend you’re doing an interview. Most people think much faster than they can talk. You can use this to your advantage by finding ways to keep your mind engaged if it’s starting to run ahead. Analyze what the speaker is saying and draft questions that would help to clarify or elaborate on the main points.

Tips for Effective Listening In Challenging Situations

1. Encourage people to express themselves. Sometimes people are hesitant to approach a sensitive topic. Use open-ended questions and patient pauses to enable a more complete discussion.
2. Develop empathy. One of the best ways to understand what a person is really saying is to put yourself in their shoes. Try to understand their thinking and feelings.
3. Manage your emotions. When you’re listening to something that evokes strong emotions, you may need to detach yourself temporarily from your feelings. It’s critical to distinguish between what is actually being said and your own
   assumptions and emotions.
4. Prepare in advance. If you know you’re going to be listening to a presentation on a complex or unfamiliar topic, it may be helpful to do some research ahead of time. If you acquaint yourself with the basic facts, you’re more likely to be able to keep up with a discussion of more specialized information.

• A.J. Mahari’s Coaching Guide/Ebook/Workbook – Quest For Self Awareness & Creating Your Story of Success Audio
• Change Your Thoughts, Change Your Life
• How To Identify a Toxic Relationship
• The Power of Gratitude
• A.J.’s Ebooks on BPD
• A.J.’s Audio Programs on BPD
• A.J.’s Ebooks For BPD Loved Ones
• A.J.’s Audio Programs for BPD Loved Ones

Being Giving and Mutual versus “What About Me?” – Healthy vs Toxic

It is important to realize that the more you want to talk it might be an indicator or a way to recognize something you may need more self-awareness about. Why do I say that? Because if you want to talk to the point where it interferes with your ability to listen and to hear what someone is actually saying to you, not only does it create misunderstanding and confusing or misinterpreted communication, but it can also mean the difference between a healthy mutual communication/interaction and one that becomes toxic.

Toxic interactions and breakdowns in communication occur when only one person is trying to listen or when more often than not no one is really listening. When there isn’t a mutual and respectful active listening to really hear and understand the other person what is missing is respect and the mutuality of give-and-take that is central to effective and healthy communication.

Effective, healthy, non-toxic communication requires a mutuality between people communicating and a giving attitude when it come to generously listening. If you are in an interaction/relationship – whatever the basis of your communication is – and you do not get your turn to talk as well, then you might want to think about if the person you are talking to is exhibiting a “what about me” kind of attitude.

A “what about me” kind of attitude indicates that someone is feeling low self-esteem, low self-worth, often a need to be “super” heard because they are in need of validation. This can take efforts to communicate and be heard over the edge because the interaction lacks balance and a it also lacks the common goal of really hearing one another, on the part of one or both parties in the communication.

© A.J. Mahari, February 21, 2011 – All rights reserved.

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Pathway – really pathways – to your happiness often have to be sought out. You may be on a path that is blocking your happiness and not be aware of how or why. You may feel as though you are a victim of circumstances or misunderstandings. You may not realize how many choices you are making every day. Subconscious choices that are often made from fearful and negative core beliefs. Core beliefs that you may not be aware that you even have.

No one else is or can be responsible for your happiness or lack of happiness in your life. It is no longer anyone else’s fault. It is now your responsibility. You really can choose to empower yourself and that’s what so much of  my coaching with people is all about. Helping you to empower yourself and learn to make new choices that will make it possible for you to be on your own pathway to and with a contented happiness in your life.

A major key to finding your happiness begins with realizing that you have the power to choose to do just that. You can become your own brain mechanic adjusting thoughts and beliefs that you become aware of to work for you instead of against you in your quest for happiness and emotional peace.

You can choose to shine, live an inspired life, and make your dreams come true.

I am a Life Coach and I offer coaching sessions that can help you to unblock your own happiness and contentment. Emotional mastery is a process through which people can find their way from emotionally blocked, often unhappy – or even depressed – to the pathway to needed and wanted change that can and will be the road to happiness for you. I do have an introductory Emotional Mastery Audio available now.

Much of what I will be writing about and coach others about, in their own lives, I have lived in my own life. I have been in the pits of despair. I lived the much of my life between the ages of 20 and 33 or so in a negative mindset and from the stance of being and feeling like a victim – and I did this without even knowing or understanding that’s what I was doing and choosing. I was mired in toxic unhealthy patterns of relating. I lacked boundaries. I was often involved in being enmeshed with others and in codependent relationships. I have changed all of this. Living in the ways I have just described I lived did not allow me to experience any happiness.

So, if you feel hopeless right now. If you feel so depressed you doubt that you could really ever be happy I hope you will stay tuned here and come back often. I hope that you will, if nothing, else, decide to continue to read and reach for hope and more understanding of how you really can choose and get on your own pathway to happiness.

© A.J. Mahari, Sept 30, 2010 – All rights reserved.

Life coach and author, A.J. Mahari, talks about the value of observing your feelings. The more aware of how you actually feel, the less you are reactionary to your feelings, the more you will be able to unblock any and all obstacles to getting on and staying on the pathway to your happiness. Reacting impulsively, in self-sabotaging and self-destructive ways will keep you stuck in the kind of emotional suffering that blocks your ability to experience happiness.

A.J. Mahari’s Life Coaching Services

General Life Coaching
Emotional Mastery Coaching
Coaching for those with Borderline Personality Disorder or Loved Ones

© A.J. Mahari, October 1, 2010 – All rights reserved.

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Author and Life Coach A.J. Mahari identifies 3 key obstacles to happiness. Codependence,  enmeshment, and toxic relatonships are major blocks to happiness. Happiness is all around you. You choose whether or not you are on the pathway to your own happiness or whether you are more invested, whether you realize it or not, in continuing to hurt, to suffer, to experience the negativity that may be a large part of your emotional experience.

In my life coaching experience with hundreds of clients these 3 obstacles to happiness and to people living more emotionally peaceful lives are quite common. Not everyone is aware that they are blocking their own happiness. Many people feel that the obstacle to their own happiness is the very person (or people) that they seek validation from, seek to have their needs met by and are in some toxic relational dynamic with. At the center of life for those who are blocking their own happiness is often codependence and unresolved childhood issues.

Are you seeking validation, happiness, that “good feeling” – the feeling of being “filled up” from others? If you cannot find contented happiness from the inside out of you for yourself and to a degree by yourself, you may well have blocks that life coaching can help you identify and overcome.

A.J. Mahari’s Life Coaching Services

• General Life Coaching
• Emotional Mastery Coaching
• Coaching for those with Borderline Personality Disorder or Loved Ones
• Mental Health Coaching
• Codependence/Toxic Relationship Coaching

When you aren’t able to validate yourself or meet your own needs and if you are in a relationship that is invalidating, not meeting your needs, and that is a toxic relationship you will be well acquainted with 3 key obstacles to your happiness.

• Seeking Validation From Others
• Looking To Others To Meet Your Needs
• Being in a toxic relationship

Seeking Validation From Others

When you seek validation from someone else it is an indication that you are not connected to yourself in healthy enough and balanced enough ways to validate yourself. Perhaps you don’t know who you really are. It is necessary to know who you are in order to validate yourself from the inside out. When you seek to have someone else meet your needs it is an indication that you aren’t feeling too positive about yourself. You are not living through your authentic self. In fact, you may be experiencing a lot of negativity and unhappiness and perhaps not really understanding why that is. You may also feel angry easily and/or often.

Seeking validation from others leaves you in a vulnerable place of need. It will end up with you feeling stuck with many unmet needs. These unmet needs can lead to you trying even harder to get someone else to validate you to the point that when nothing someone else gives to you is enough you feel abandoned by the other person when really it is you that is abandoning yourself by seeking to be validated by someone else in the first place.

Looking To Others To Meet Your Needs

In the same way that you may be trying to get or be validated by someone else or by others, you are also invested in having that other person or those other people meet your needs. If you knew how to meet your needs you’d know how to validate yourself from the inside out. Looking to others to meet your need is a mental trap. It’s a psychological trap that hold your happiness hostage to whether or not someone else does what you want or need them to do. That is surrendering your own control and personal empowerment. It is volunteering to be miserable.

Even if someone else wants to meet your needs he or she is unlikely to be very successful at doing so because when you can’t meet your own needs one of the most prominent reasons for that is that you haven’t yet truly identified what your needs actually are. In order to move forward and take more personal responsibility for meeting your own needs andwalking down the pathway to your happiness you will benefit from identifying not only your needs but the difference between your needs and your wants. It is quite common for people who aren’t sure who they really are, what they really want and need in life, or how to manifest and actualize those needs to end up in toxic relationships.

Being in a toxic relationship

Toxic relationships by definition are codependent and enmeshed. What is at the core of toxic relational dynamics is one person trying to do for another what the other person needs to learn to do for him or herself. It involves over-extending one’s self to care-take for another adult human being in ways that interfere with your ability to meet your own needs. So for the person who seeks to have his or her needs taken care of by someone else – something that really can’t be achieved by the way – and the person who tries to give that much, this is a recipe for misery and unhappiness. It will block the pathway to each person’s own happiness.

Toxic relationship lack mutuality and reciprocity. That healthy give and take wherein two people, each taking responsibility for meeting his or her own needs, join together, each from an individual place of emotional maturity and a balanced wholeness as opposed to a still living from a victim mindset and an emotionally immature place of neediness – a neediness that hasn’t been resolved from childhood.

A.J. Mahari’s Life Coaching Services

• General Life Coaching
• Emotional Mastery Coaching
• Coaching for those with Borderline Personality Disorder or Loved Ones
• Mental Health Coaching
• Codependence/Toxic Relationship Coaching

These 3 obstacles block you from getting on and staying on your pathway to happiness. Change is not easy. It can be painful and difficult. Change, is however, the way. Change is the challenge. Change is the lesson. Change is what you need to clear your pathway to happiness of these 3 key obstacles if you are not happy and you can relate to seeking validation from others, looking to others to meet your needs, and being one party or the other in a toxic relational dynamic. Change is what I assist people with every day as a Life Coach

© A.J. Mahari, September 30, 2010 – All rights reserved.

A.J. Mahari, an author and a life coach, talks about the positive and the negative of control and how emotional mastery can teach you to implement positive constructive control in your emotional life. Do you think that you first need to control your thoughts or your emotions? Is there a connection? Can controlling one or the other control both?

Emotional mastery can help you to learn to address self-defeating and self-destructive patterns of trying to controls others in wayward attempts to meet your needs. Emotional control exercised upon one’s self with an inner-focus will lead to positive understanding. Whereas being internally out of control emotionally and attempting to exert control over others is a negative form of control that keeps people stuck feeling as if others are victimizing them. Control is a two-edged sword, emotionally. The more you can surrender the need to control externally, the more you can learn, through the emotional mastery techniques that I teach, to empower yourself toward consistent emotional control internally.

Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life

Achieve Your Goals

Emotional Mastery Intro Audio

 

Change Your Thoughts – Change Your Life

Achieve Your Goals

Emotional Mastery Intro Audio

 

© A.J. Mahari, December 24, 2009 – Updated June 4, 2010 – All rights reserved.

 

 

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Personal Coach A.J. Mahari

Phoenix Rising Life Coaching – Mental Health Coaching with coach and strategist, A.J. Mahari is process that you can explore via telephone or email from anywhere in the world. Life coaching is a supportive, caring, compassionate, vehicle for creating change, identifying goals, healing and recovery, life and relationship enhancement and for breaking self-defeating and/or unhealthy patterns that may be holding you back from all that you desire in your life.

 
A.J. Mahari has been coaching those diagnosed with various forms of mental illness and their loved ones, along with those seeking change and more emotional balance and peace in their lives for whatever reasons for years now. A.J. offers emotional mastery coaching that also includes using strategy to cope more effectively with the many challenges of different forms of mental illness, specifically, or the many challenges of everyday life and its stresses.

This method of coaching, with a central focus of emotional mastery, while it can benefit anyone seeking a life coach like A.J., for whatever reasons, A.J. tailors it to the many different concerns of her clients. If you are looking for general life coaching and you need to be in better control of your emotions, or if you have BPD or any other mental illness, or if you are the loved one of someone with BPD or NPD, or any other form of mental illness this coaching program can help you. Mahari’s expertize comes from her own life challenges and experience. A.J. is an excellent, compassionate, and validating listener. She provides her clients with support, information, feedback, well-informed questions, and helps clients to identify goals and strategize to meet those goals. Often for those with any form or type of mental illness, even where recovery is possible, the over-all framework of mental health coaching is one that stresses coping and education about the client’s mental illness empowering the client to make choices that can produce positive change in their quality of life.

A.J. Mahari on Emotional Mastery & her Emotional Mastery Coaching

Emotional mastery coaching offers A.J.’s clients dynamic tools and techniques to learn how to change the way that they think, manage their thoughts and control their emotions in healthy, functional and productive ways. Emotional mastery frees up your energy to manifest your goals and dreams in terms of the Law of Attraction. It is the change that will further reveal each individual’s own personal path of ever-increasing authenticity. Change is a constant in life. We are always learning, growing, healing, and changing. Developing a personal style of mastery with one’s own change is not only a way to recover, heal, or grow, but it is the sacred path of spiritual change. It is the path upon which each soul seeks to leave its footprint in the ever-shifting sands of authentic self-actualization.

As a life coach I provide a caring, compassionate, safe, confidential, non judgemental, validating and supportive relationship within which clients can feel empowered to explore their present-day needs. I essentially act as a human mirror for my clients. I share with my clients an outside and unbiased perspective as to what I observe in listening to their feelings, experiences, and concerns.

© A.J. Mahari – All rights reserved.

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Who is responsible for your happiness? Many people are seeking to find validation, fulfillment, and happiness from outside of themselves – from others or from what they do or what they have materialistically. Just who is responsibile for your happiness? Have you ever asked yourself that question? Or, is it possible that in your experience of unhappiness or a lack of happiness that you find places to hang the hat of that unhappiness? Do you think you are unhappy because of what someone else said or did? Are you unhappy because you can’t buy the latest in thing that you really want? Stop and think about this, is your happiness dependent upon someone or something else?

Do you ever just sit still - still with yourself in a quiet enivironment with no distraction in a state of simply being you? Would you know what that would be like for you? Does that sound rather daunting or intimidating? Do you have the feeling that you would find this very uncomfortable?

Many people believe that they are unhappy because someone else said this or that or someone else didn’t understand them or validate them or agree with them. Many believe that their happiness is directly tied to the emotions that are felt in reaction to others. That is a way of actually abdicating your responsibility for your own happiness.

To choose to believe that others have that much control, any control really, over whether you are happy or not, is to set yourself up to stay stuck in an unhappy, frustrated, and/or angry state of mind.

In life, we are either learning – growing and  evolving – or we are protecting. It is not possible to do both learn and protect at the same time. Protection comes from a victim mindset. Protection blocks learning. Protection blocks your ability to create, fulfill and experience your own happiness.

Have you taken responsibility for your own happiness? What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you read that you are responsibile for your own happiness? Check in with yourself, honestly. Do you still “feel” (believe) that you may be feeling unhappy because of someone else? If so, how can you challenge that thought, that belief? Do you understand, on an emotional level, that you will need to change that belief in order to take responsibility for your own happiness?

© A.J. Mahari, January 31, 2010 – All rights reserved.