Therapy for Women: Boost Your Energy
Everyday life can drain our physical energy, leaving us fatigued. But emotional energy is rather different. It is more a sense of happiness and hopefulness. Too often, as women, we focus on our physical and ignore our emotional needs This week, as I focus on therapy for women, I want to look at 3 different ways to boost our emotional energy.
Emotional energy drains look like anger, worry, and fear. Any of those emotions sound familiar? Just like not eating right or getting enough sleep can leave you depleted physically, constantly living in those emotions will leave us running on fumes emotionally. But steering clear of those emotions is a lot easier said than done. So what are our options?
Boost your Energy Tip #1
Anger usually comes from a place of feeling as if our needs have not been met. How much time have you wasted replaying a scenario and thinking of ways you wish you’d responded? If our needs aren’t being met, then it’s our responsibility to fix, not someone else’s. We need to be very clear on what our needs are and then communicate them.
Getting our needs met helps us feel validated and secure. For example, if you have a co-worker who continually does a project wrong and you have to go back and correct it, it’s not the co-worker’s fault that you’re angry. It’s yours! You need to communicate the error and maybe re-train him/her on the project so it will be done right the next time around.
Boost Your Energy Tip #2
Worry is wasted energy concerned with something that might or might not happen. A lot of times, the worry is over something we don’t even have control over! The present is the only truth we have. And it’s fleeting. If we spend all our time worrying about the future, we’ll miss out on all the blessings of the present and never be satisfied.
Keep grounded in the here and now by taking care of the details we can manage now and trusting that what we need will be provided to us when we need it. For example, you can worry about how you’re going to pay for college, or you can focus on the present by putting a dollar a day in a jar. Now you probably just jumped to “$1 a day won’t pay for anything!!” But you don’t KNOW that!!! What if your child gets a scholarship. What if it’s just a $1 a day for a year and suddenly your situation changes and you can start putting more in? The truth is you don’t know and worrying doesn’t solve anything. It just depletes your energy.
Boost Your Energy Tip #3
Fear has a lot to do with what other people think of us. If we’re constantly focused on whether we’re measuring up, fear will run our life. “Will I be found out?” “Everything will fall apart if they really knew!” That’s a lot of wasted energy. Instead, energy is renewed when we come to accept who we are – warts and all!
Living our life as the person we were created to be and playing to our strengths will add energy to our every moment. For example: I’m not very spatially inclined. Whenever I try to do a task that calls on these skills, I feel lousy about myself and get frustrated. But, I’m a very empathetic person. I feel energized when I’m able to help someone in this way. Rather than beat myself up over my weaknesses, I let someone else handle the spatial tasks. I focus time and energy on tasks that require me to be empathetic.
Your Vibrantly Live Challenge:
In our focus on therapy for women, I’ve shared 3 different ways to boost your emotional energy. Clearly communicate your needs rather than be angry, keep yourself focused on what you can accomplish in the here and now – rather than worry, and accept who you were created to be – rather than fear. Choose the one that spoke the most to you and begin outlining a plan to make that a reality in your everyday life.