Author: nataliebotero

Can you manage all of the crises you make? There is a massive competition for our mental energy these days. Mental energy levels can cause strain on the emotions. Certain punishing emotions that keep you stuck, like Anxiety, Guilty Conscience, and Perfectionism, can be great motivators, too. Let’s say that what pushes you to perform better keeps you shooting for the extraordinary and holds a second chance for you. Instead of just getting “it” done, a certain personal awareness of the way you handle a crisis can create a personal shift in your desired direction. 

Perfectionism, for instance, can commonly be a punishing emotion, leaving you at a loss for perspective on what already is good enough. Your self-talk that was designed to be motivating can actually be sabotaging you unconsciously. Being perfect is often mistaken to be the key to accomplishment. Guilt is an especially punishing trick, oftentimes totally undeserved and based on the actuality that you’ve made too many commitments to keep track of in the first place. Anxiety is the perpetual buzz under your feet that signals to your brain and nervous system that something according to your goal is out of place, or out of control. 

Over-committing to things without the impulse to pause kicking in is probably one reason why it is so difficult to get anything done to completion, and if quality suffers, you suffer. So, how do you break through the waste of time the ensuing crisis brings? The first step is to ask yourself that question while checking in with how you truly feel. Take heart, though. The more you are honestly aware of what goes on internally and how it is affecting you externally can balance not only your perspective, but feeds into your unique way of accomplishing that very logic itself, for a long time to come.  

Here are three questions you can ask yourself to bring about your breakthrough: 

1. To handle my perfectionism, can I stop and look and say I have done one thing of quality that I can be proud of? Can I then have the confidence that I can continue in that way and succeed without being overly self-critical along the way? 

2. To handle my guilt, how do I judge myself as being a procrastinator? Is my conscience so overburdened that I assume I must take more and more on because I deserve to sweat just because I took a break? 

3. To handle my anxiety, could I be already over-committed and striving to do the impossible without even realizing it? Am I already inside a situation that is disorganized to begin with? 

If any of these questions spark answers for you, or you need a little more help answering them, here are some suggestions. First, take cues from your environment. Are you freaking out and feeling behind, but when you look around the office, your coworkers seem more relaxed? Maybe they are or maybe they are not, but seeing how this comparison can ground you, it can encourage you not to worry.  

Be aware of when you tell yourself not to feel. Power lies in this one. The good thing about those who can tune into their discomfort is that they can turn around and be powerful agents of change. Lastly, practice self-empathy.  You can take inventory of everything you are going through at any time you need to. Self-empathy with an honest inventory of yourself can help you. Consider an empathic approach to handle and mitigate how crisis has been happening with a compassionate inventory: 

A Self-Empathy Way of Taking Inventory 

Looking back: 

• What task took the most time today? 

• How can I improve tomorrow? 

• What are my special wishes on how to spend my time? 

• I have a hard time making the decision to eliminate the distractions. 

• I want to work toward that…. 

• What would it take to discover, reach, plan, and implement my true calling? 

• What tasks can I delegate today? 

• When I’m stuck on a task and frustrated, I can try setting it aside until later and focus my mind elsewhere for a while. 

• When do I focus best? What would I like more time for?  

• Where do I see the greatest results of my actions? When do I lose steam? 

• What do I avoid?  

• What would simplicity do for me? 

There is some love operating underneath our shaky feet. Love songs are from people, from their commitments and sacrifices. The key to the hell of it all, is playing and delighting in what already is. 

Finding love is such a deep preoccupation for people. Finally finding the love you can’t help but to choose can be completely terrifying. Was it in the past when realizing love was your main destination, that something in your child-self said, “Oh no! I hope I’m going to have a love, but it is going to go away one day! I have to grow up! It’s gonna come. I have no choice!”  

Preparedness for love doesn’t have to be hard. What do you fear? Blocks to becoming more intimate? An understanding of your needs for the right type of person to come in can help you to understand how you are fulfilled. Some of us don’t know that our expectations are demanding and unrealistic and how having them is destined to be that they are never fulfilled for you.  Learn to be a person that satisfies them, and if you need something, you can make a request that is concrete and doable….  

Maturity is years of expanding the self and then leaving it behind… 

Effective decision making is a craft that takes skills of observation, communication, and consideration of alternatives before setting upon a course of action. Decision making is a reflection process where you deliberately select the best courses of action based on what you observe, know and predict. Its process is a selective type of analytical thinking gleaned from trial and error. The type of thinking required in decision making refines with years of experience. In having experience, decision making is learned from past outcomes, including those that we may think of as supposed “failures,” when you were on that steep learning curve in your life or your profession.  

Understand your Problem 

What exactly is it you’re facing and needing to change in the situation? To make a clear effective decision, understand its aspects and gravity. Feeling your feelings on the situation as it currently stands and coupling that with what you rather experience helps you make a clearer distinction. Consider the good of the whole when you consider the change and implement it. 

Identify your Core Values.  

What is most important to you? Focus on reality a bit and then see if it fits with your highest ideals. If your decision calls to making a right a wrong or make conditions better for people, look at what you value the most.  

Weigh the Pros and Cons.  

Think through the benefits of a decision, and the not-so-great side effects of each choice in front of you. If pros outweigh the cons, still consider what adjustments are required and do your best. 

Remember to Make a Decision. 

So, as you span your own knowledge and listen to the array of options that are worth pursuing, still know that effective decision making is a constant work in progress. It is a reality-based process that cannot be rushed and needs to utilize everything you’ve got. In making beneficial decisions and weighing the pros and cons, consulting the values for the good of the whole is invaluable. If there were a rule of thumb to make each decision an effective one, I would choose based on what is good for people. So, what is required to become a good decision maker? By becoming a person who can think and pursue logic and be aware of the consequences for the good of the whole, you can learn to make effective decisions and be a leader. 

The best you can do can always be better than you expect, and as with mistakes, you can only learn. Remember that not making a choice is still a choice. 

Something that’s solid was this—our survival was met, our growth abundant, our love deepened, our Now different, our sadness confirmed. We’re sitting at the dinner table tonight. 

There is some life issue operating underneath our shaky feet beneath the table. My partner’s eyes meet mine. Thinking I had grown, I had the courage to wink at her. I’m not strong.  Just plant your feet on that invisible ground and choose to be held up by your struggling, I heard an inner voice tell me. We’ve made it so far. 

She speaks from an Idealized self-image where she believes her intellectual professions deserve finality. Too much inside her craft to know you can never master it. She became what she and we all most fear. She understands things emotionally. Her family are as dry as sticks. They really have to defend their incorrectness. Inside of her lived a self-glorification, childlike, totally illusioned, not good at hiding except from herself. She seemed to operate from a need for validation from others, ceaseless in her needs for validation. 

Sssshh. Let’s get back to the family dinner where we are happy and expert at…inspection. Since we made the grade ourselves without being courageous enough to say anything, she is revealing typos in her understanding, and we are hearing the word “relationship” as her punctuation. That “forever love” always was her main whim, and something in her at dinner in front of all of us darting our eyes made her say, “Oh finally! I waited all my life for him. I knew he was going to come, but I knew he’d show up. I’m grown! It’s gonna come. Nothing will come between us!” Glancing at wisdom and not admitting we didn’t understand her optimism, the watery queasiness in moment-only recognition, murk-seeing connection was what she yearned to repeatedly capture. With our past discovery of each other, she still had the same language gluing the two of us into hypnotic safety, relief and elusive bliss. I remember the day I walked to her as we planned to meet like this on the day. My razor voice, chiseled features, aloof downy hair, trapped tight muscles that were strong and agitated. She was losing air for words, and we were trembling in fervency. For different reasons, everything happens anyway. 

Eventually, I let myself tell her what was going on in my mind. The story we were telling each other about situations had a problem. It was the way situations were “going” and how it was “unfolding” that wasn’t even the right conversation. Yet, I secretly held back my intuition that the main destination is never going to be won. Maybe a new theory on life just happened. Maybe she’s in love with the ending. Maybe, so she can get on with finding the love for herself. Maybe to tell her what she wants doesn’t exist. 

I’ve come to a personal theory that the eyes are affected by the experiences we have in this life, as well as by all we have been through as a soul throughout eternity. You can tell in the eyes who is used to telling the truth and who is not. Yes, the truth and the eyes are another language. You cannot reverse being wounded. And wizened. 

This has been my process to recover—challenges to concentrate, extreme longing, feelings bordering on despair, like I could slip off a rock on the way there, fall, and hope to die. Sometimes drunk and splattering, honest in my fumbling. Defending my honor, taking great aims to make what I want. 

Narcissism is much more than a celebration of performances. How about for hard work? How about for trying and risking? For our sleeping spirits reflected open? 

Intensity is ALL the way through. 

Talk of war is in the mind, war is in the mind, the mind is at war. 

The world is poor. We cannot avoid losing people. There is no preparation for death. And with war comes regrets, burdens, and the lack of meaning.

Grieving. 

Continue with the story of Oppenheimer, why don’t we? 

There would be a word on intellectual arrogance, profound blindness from light so big it could light the night as bright as a hot afternoon.  

What if you could prevent it altogether? A genius who should keep his property. 

Once Oppenheimer realized that he did not understand the universe, that he couldn’t, his bomb spread grief into the universe. It etched our future and the dark clouds it left, stagnant, hang over our heads–gravity from the heart down. 

Grief makes our values distinctly clear. Boom, Oscar. 

He toiled with the idea that probabilities needed certainty. Why the urgency? Isn’t death final?

Doesn’t your mind get so watery when you hear about the bomb again? Where are they running to?

That’s our nature. All the appropriate chemicals. 

Another war program. Kick the mind to listen. The ones who own the mind without knowing the mind. 

My understanding of this zeitgeist is there is no grief in their archetype; they exploit our worst fears, worsening stress. 

I anticipate beingness is also grief, so I am angry.  

What we’ll create when we’re hungry.

Hell is in the afternoon.