Emotions

A Competitive World:

We live in a competitive world that leads to stress. You have to compete in school, to do your best to get into a better University. Then you have to compete for your dream job. If you think you arrived, then you are wrong. With work comes pressure and more struggle, with now also with managing work-life balance. Whether one likes it or not, I believe women work twice as hard as men in many aspects of life, be it professional or personal. What is your motivation to success?

Women wear multiple hats, and to juggle them successfully is an acquired skill, being daughters, mothers, professionals, managers, homemakers, dreamers, achievers. You want to be seen as strong and confident in all that you do. It comes with a cost. It will cost you anxiety for sure and can also cost your health. It dents your self-esteem. Soon resentment sets in, and stress becomes a habit, an accepted way of life. What you need is to learn to step back, pause and introspect. It would help if you gave yourself the time and much earned self-validation to feel confident, which usually takes a beating as you navigate these multiple roles in life; more is stress than in choice.

How do you Identify the Problem?

So how do you identify the problem when it has become a background default and unconscious habit? You have been conditioned over generations with an image of how women should be. When you are young, your mothers unconsciously feed to your image as someone who must not argue, fight, or talk too loud. You grow up accepting a lot of ‘inequality’ or have to work hard and fight against such ‘norms.’ Men have different qualities than women, both important and useful.

As a motivation and wellness coach, I have seen times over and believe, you bring your unique attributes to this world, your society, your family. You can be better nurturers, being emotionally stronger. You are more focused and better managers than men, with greater attention to detail. You need to believe in you and your yet to blossom abilities. Being aware of and focusing on your unique strength rather than complaining or resenting is a significant first step to a confident you.

How to change the Attitude?

What will help you in your quest to be the ‘ideal woman, be seen as an achiever, and follow your big dream? Does multitasking bring overwhelm instead of effectiveness?  Can you change the male-dominated trend in this world by being aggressive or by complaining? Maybe you are devoting more time to your family, your children, much more than your spouse, perhaps. Are you giving any time, value, and self-love for yourself? Are you unwittingly putting yourself in constant stress?

Where is the Balance?

As a woman, you constantly struggle with work-life balance, to give your best to the different roles. You often think you can handle the children better and allow the strain of child-rearing to rest more on your shoulders. You also do not expect, let alone ask for help in household responsibilities. To be seen as equally efficient in the office, you take in more work, more working hours perhaps. If there is physical or emotional abuse, you sometimes accept it due to a lack of better options. If you choose to fight, you can be termed aggressive. Where is the balance? By the way, work-Life balance is not just a woman’s issue, as seen from the research in this article:

How do you cope with this Overwhelm?

How do you cope with all this stress and overwhelm? You cope with stress by procrastination, denial, or ignoring the problem at hand, playing the blame game. ‘My maid is always late and irresponsible; my office staff never gives the report on time, why can’t my children be more responsible… The list is endless. You often go into denial mode. Or you use the escape mode. While smoking and drinking within limits may not be harmful, it can give short-lived results, increasing addictive dependency as an escape from stress.

Stress shows up in your Body:

Your body needs the rest when the symptoms are shouting out there. It could be the aches and pains which doctors have no remedy for; it could help with some gyne issues or just that niggling headache. How many times are you in denial when there is a physical or emotional abuse? You might want to ignore and wish the problem away, as you have no time or energy to deal with them now. Yes, it takes courage. I know from my personal experience and struggle with realizing the problem. It took me time to accept there is a problem in the first place, especially when my body could take it no more and effected by mental wellbeing.  It takes courage to say ‘No.’  and make the effort to change. Yes, there is fear. But everything you want is often on the other side of fear.

All the Solutions are within You:

Now that you recognize the problems and pitfalls, you want to change your attitude, create new habits. But you do not know how to bring about this change. Often all it takes is to physically take the step back, take a deep breath, breathing out slowly. Sounds easy yet powerfully effective. These few seconds are enough to allow your brain to move from its default 24/7 ‘stress’ mode to a ‘creative’ window. When I first reading on this research, I thought to myself, how can it be that easy? We like complex solutions and think only those work. This in nothing but a misapprehension.

I started practicing some breathing techniques, slowing down my breath when I am at it. I soon noticed, when I was stressed, I could bring myself to slow down my breath and this in-turn made my mind calmer, allowing me to handle that stress. My health started to improve, and I felt lighter, with more energy and enthusiasm. All the solutions are within you, right there inside the creative side of your brain. This stepping back and observing ourselves helps.

Other Tools:

What other tools help you access your creative side, other than a few slow breaths? If you want to give your best in all the multiple roles, you first need to provide yourself with ‘Me Time and Me Space.’ If you don’t pace yourself, take a pause, validate yourself, celebrate your small success, give yourself self-love, how can you add value to others, be it in your personal or professional life? Take time out for coffee-breaks with friends, a movie perhaps. It is an excellent platform to share, even bitch a little and laughing your heads off. 

Learn to let-go, to forgive. Forgiveness is only complete when you forgive and forget. It lets the enormous burden off your shoulder. Empathy helps one look at issues from another perspective while not necessarily agreeing with it. Try to understand a colleague’s problems, sometimes beyond work. It will lead to healthy conversations, even if it is a difficult one. Looking for and focusing on even the slightest positive aspect in your spouse and your children and appreciating them is a significant step toward building that solid trust. All these steps help define your boundary better and make it easier to say ‘No’ and be assertive and confident. It boosts your self-esteem and self-worth.

Practice makes New Habits stay:

The more you practice these mindfulness exercises, the more you will access your creative brain and find that perfect balance. It helps you choose, from resentment and stress to happiness and excitement, seeking opportunities in challenges. It allows you to blossom into a strong, confident woman with abundant energy. It enables you to manage your stress and work-life balance, be in choice, and be happy. You can share the happiness while nurturing others and be present for others without compromising you in the bargain.

For more related articles on managing stress, wellness and work-life balance, follow my blogs on https://coachingwithgeeta.com/blog/

The is Coachgeeta signing off…

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How we Build our Perceptions:

We learn from our surroundings, our parents, friends, workplace, and culture. We start adding our meaning to these learnings and start building our assumptions and perception of life. It becomes our reality and gets ingrained in our heads, acting as a background filter.  Many of us picked up that women are meant to stay at home and men to work.  While this may have been a social model a few centuries back, but the women of today are working. They work not only for the income or for the family, but they also work by choice to achieve and enjoy it. Unfortunately, the residue of the past image of women, in men’s heads and even in women’s, comes in the way of achieving success and happiness for women.

What we Think becomes our Reality:

If we think of ourselves as capable, able to manage our family, and have a successful career, then we can achieve it. But if we look at work as a burden, life becomes stressful as something we are just doing for monetary gains. If we want to be career women on the one hand but keep telling this story in our heads that it is a man’s world, and life is unfair, you build on your perceptions and may struggle as a result. I am leaving you with a link to an article on perception vs. reality concerning working women. Enjoy the read. https://wearethecity.com/perception-vs-reality-powerful-women-in-business/

A Winning Mindset:

Maybe women have to work twice as hard to prove a point. So be it.  If you start adopting a positive attitude,  you may still have to work twice as hard, but you will enjoy it.  It is finally about our philosophy in life and accepting life and then taking it up as a challenge and driving it forward. That is a winning mindset. It makes you more enthusiastic and makes you feel light and happy and capable of tackling all the stress and challenges in life. Who said life is easy. But you can still be happy and be successful. It is the attitude you wear that counts.

Is that Easy:

I also grew up almost automatically thinking that men are the providers and women don’t necessarily have to pursue a career.  I am talking of this perception when I was just in middle school. Thankfully, my parents helped me see otherwise, provided the support and love, and cared for me to nurture my career path.  Later on, my husband and children being the most significant support in my journey. I learned to face any challenge that came my way with a ‘Yes, I can’ attitude. I, of course, failed many times, got stressed out, had trouble balancing work and family, but I kept up my curiosity and learning attitude to find my success and happiness.

Are you Stressed out with Work-Life Balance:

So are you successful at work, and then your other priorities like family or social life take a hit. Or are you the type that gets so engrossed in your day-to-day mundane things and can’t focus on the bigger picture?  Are you getting overwhelmed doing so much yet unable to achieve?

What are your Boundaries?

Here is one place to start. How good are you at setting your boundaries, at saying NO? Do you say yes many times, at work and home, and then you feel so stressed doing that work which you didn’t want to do in the first place.  Maybe at work, you said yes because you don’t want to be seen as being less efficient. At home, you say yes to your children and your spouse because either you feel guilty as you assume as a woman it is your job to cook and clean and help with your kids’ homework, and you didn’t even think you could ask your husband to help out. Sometimes you can say no to work in the office if it is more than what you can handle.  You can either ask for help, ask for extra time, or say that you just can’t fit it in.  Same at home, you can ask your children to help you out or your husband to help you out.  Sometimes if you cannot handle it, you can say no in a friendly way, and it’s OK. People will respect you more only if you respect yourself, your time, and your dignity first.

Time Management as a Confidence Booster:

Time management is another area to help with stress and work-life balance. It is a great confidence booster.  I take an hour or two of my weekend to plan my week.  I make a list of crucial and urgent things that have to get done, and I allot them to time slots in that week. I also make a list of things that are not urgent but important. I put them second on my priority. I also leave time slots for surprises like urgent emails that suddenly crop up and need to be answered. Remember, your boundary management also helps you here.  My list also contains what I would love to do but are not helpful. So put them as ‘pending,’ and I may do it if I have time or may not do it.   This exercise makes me less overwhelmed and more confident when I know my week is all planned and sorted out.

Appreciate More:

One easy tip to be a stress-free 2.0 Version of you: Learnt to appreciate more. It just lifts your mood as the other person is happy, and it makes you happy. We are always misers with appreciation and keep looking for blaming others at work and home.    Also, appreciate yourself for your excellent work with small rewards. For example, every 2 hours of focused work, give yourself a coffee/ chat break with a friend as a reward. It helps excite your brain to do more. 

Focus on the Learnings:

To change our perceptions we have built over the years, we have to practice these new behaviors, new ways of being, till they become the new useful perceptions, helping us handle the stress in our life with ease and achieve success in whatever we seek.

Interested in the transformation into 2.0 version?

Have a look at  ‘5 Tips to reduce Stress’

Available from my resource page :

Do you live in Fear and Anxiety?

Do you fear what will happen in the future?  Do you live in resentment about things of the past, and you had no control over it. This blog is about how to face the fear and anxiety of the uncertain future.  It is about how to move away from resentments of the past. And how to meet the Stress of today with confidence, so you feel empowered to create success and happiness at the same time.

Let’s Dive In:

Let us start from the beginning. What are your fears, and what are you afraid of?  Does it create anxiety in you?  Let us examine these things first. As we navigate through life, we build perceptions around us. They are based on our understanding of the experiences around us, and we add our meaning to them, coloring them through our eyes.  For example, ‘I am a mother because I have two kids’. This is a ‘fact.’ I am a bad mother’; on the other hand, it is my perception I have made myself to believe. And over time, it becomes my ‘fact,’ my background operating system, and puts my under stress. So that may lead me to react by spoiling my children to be a good mom.  Anyways we all make such assumptions and get bogged down by them.

We live in the past:

Now, look at the other scenario.  Since we live in the past a lot, we continually think about the past incidences in our lives.  Especially those that didn’t go well and left a mental scar. Based on this, we fear our future. We then think, what if things do not go well just like the last time, what if I will fail, or what if I can’t pay my bills, what if I fall sick, and the ‘what ifs’ never ends.  We live in fear and anxiety and Stress.

So What Can You Do About This:

 Let us start by assuming that you had this big fight with your close friend. You can’t believe that she said such mean things about you after being friends for so long.  So you just shut her out.  But this incidence plays again and again in your mind in loops.  And you can physically feel this burden on your shoulder.  Well, that’s how your mind and bodywork. It attracts past negative thoughts and replays them in loops, equally affecting your body and mind. And now you live in resentment as you cannot let go of that incident from your mind. Have you had a calm conversation with your friend, conveying that you were so angry and explaining why? Did you ask for her point of view? Did you give her a right ear even if you disagree with her beliefs? Sometimes it’s OK to let go and agree to disagree. Sometimes it’s OK to forgive. When you forgive, you bring a lot of peace to your mind, to your heart, and maybe your friendship will become better or perhaps it will not. If it does not, at least you tried, and it is time to place a full stop and move on. I call this acceptance. Once there is an acceptance, there is so much peace instead of Stress. The self-awareness is a good place to start, to make the positive change.

While it is easy to talk about forgiveness and to let-go, let me tell you it was not easy for me. There was a situation in the past, and initially I couldn’t forgive this person. I kept repeating the incidence again and again in my mind. Even during meditation the thoughts kept re-playing itself, making me more upset and stressed. One day when I was walking in the garden, in a relaxed mood, I recalled the troubled event.  I concluded that I tried, the other person cannot see my point, and being an moral issue, I could not agree and I decided I was ok this way. That moment of acceptance just hit me. It gave me immediate peace and I could feel it in my body. This feeling is well worth letting-go rather than holding-on to a negative thought. It makes you feel lighter and attributes to your good health.

Self-Talk of Confidence and Self-Esteem:

As I said, it is always the fear that holds us back from trying out new things, from experimenting.  It is mostly the fear of failure, and especially you will notice, ‘what others think if I fail ‘is somehow very important to us. We are looking for external validation again. If you change the language in your mind and tell yourself, what is the worst that can happen to you if you fail, and say that ‘you can handle it.’ Once you give that self-talk of confidence to your mind, you will be better prepared to take the risk. Now take a calculated risk and try out something new. Maybe you will succeed, then wonderful. Maybe you will fail. That still means you have an ‘opportunity’ here. An opportunity to learn from your failure. Look back and see what made you fail. Check on what your assumptions were and how you can now change things to make them succeed.  It could also happen that what you wanted to achieve needs to be tinkered within the first place. Maybe it was not realistic to start with, and you need to readjust it.  This whole process of being open to change, being flexible, being curious add a lot of excitement in achieving or reaching that goal. It is a good confidence building tool, which adds to your self-esteem as well. This state of positive mindset leads to good health and prevents ‘lifestyle diseases’ like obesity, diabetes and many more.  Since I like to focus on science based research and statistics, I will share this link to check it further of the relationship between confidence and good health.  https://www.successconsciousness.com/blog/inner-strength/increase-your-confidence-to-improve-your-health/

Focus on the Process:

You can easily change Stress and positively impact your health and wellness. Focusing on the process rather than the result is an excellent way of going forward and moving from a stressed way of living to a happier way of living where you are excited about doing things.  You are no more resentful. You don’t have that much fear or anxiety because you now know that no matter what happens, you can handle it. And that enthusiasm comes from within. It is an excellent confidence-building tool. And like Elon Musk says, ‘you fail when you do not take a risk.’  This process of being the positive change, in itself leads to a robust physical and mental health and wellbeing.

Wellness Brain Hacks:

 I want to leave you with some easy brain hacks which will help your mind be more comfortable trying new things, experiment with the change, and transcending your fear.  It will take you one step closer to your overall wellness.

1.        Brush your teeth with the non-dominant hand.

2.        Solve crossword puzzles.

3.        Try doing Sudoku.

4.        Learn a new language

5.        Take up a new skill like gardening, cooking, or any handicraft like crochet, knitting.

What these activities do is, fires different parts of your brain. Especially those areas which we rarely use, being busy making the same old, same old habits.

In Conclusion:

I hope you now have a better idea of handling your fears and anxiety to navigate your life more towards excitement. It builds up your confidence level,  empowers you to be successful in whatever you seek. This mindset change from Stress to enthusiasm positively impacts your work output and your professional life. In turn, your personal life, your health, and overall wellness are also positively impacted.

Practice, practice, and practice your new learning till it becomes a part of you.

This is Coachgeeta signing off.

To learn more about Winning the Game of Change, you can schedule a complimentary coaching call from my website: