GROW INSTEAD OF COPE AFTER DIVORCE

After divorce, once you disconnect enough from the past, you are  able to concentrate on getting reacquainted with who you are now. You are different than before the divorce, and you have some different challenges and maybe even lifestyle changes not experienced before.

Furthermore, becoming aware of who you are now goes deeper than just creating harmony and balance among the four pillars of well-being. The four pillars of well-being are physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual parts of you.

When you are able to bring harmony among these four areas, you will then have power, strength, and control to do the deeper work that is needed to move forward. Specifically, you want to improve your self-image. You want to grow instead of cope.

Oftentimes, self-image takes a big hit after divorce. Without improving your self-image, you will not grow and succeed anywhere near what is  possible in rebuilding your life full of joy and happiness.

Take A Look At Your Attitude.

How you perceive yourself now has everything to do with how you are able to face challenges and change in your life. Your perception of self is instrumental in your ability to achieve new goals you set for the new future that lays before you.

The best place to start with reconnecting with self is to take a look at your present attitude. Your attitude consists of thoughts, feelings, and actions that give the results you are getting in your present life.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

Do you have a good attitude regarding yourself?

When you think about your self-image, is your attitude about it positive or negative?

How does your attitude make you feel inside about your self-image? And as a result, how do you behave?

Is your present attitude giving you the results you want in your life?

How’s Your Self-Image?

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

One a scale of 1-10, how much do you THINK you like who you are?

One a scale of 1-10, how much do you THINK others like you?

Describe your PERCEPTION of the person you are?

Define how you THINK others see you?

Explain how you see yourself when you look in the mirror?

Here’s An Example:

In an earlier blog, I wrote about how you can begin to break an unhealthy habit or addictive behavior  by learning to respond to “thoughts and feelings” instead of reacting to them. When you are “triggered” by a person, circumstance, or situation, you learn to become aware of the thought trigger. As you learn to become aware of the trigger, you can then respond instead of reacting to it.

You don’t pull the trigger but instead put the trigger back in a neutral position. How do you do that?

You replace the unhealthy inclination with an alternative behavior to put in place of it. You take a step back, a pause, and give a different response to the impulse. You change your perception and your thinking. By doing so, you have power and control over yourself.

This is the start of change, but unless you change how you see yourself, your self-image, you will eventually revert back to your old ways.

Why Do You Revert Back To Your Old Ways?

Deep down, this is how you believe about yourself. It is your belief system or your paradigm. You will always revert back to it even if you don’t realize that it is so. Subconsciously, you want to stay where you now are or in your comfort zone.

For example, when people diet, unless they change the self-image inside, the outside will revert back to the original state. The weight that comes off goes right back on. Your self-image has to match the new behavior or goal you want to achieve.

Growing instead of coping by changing your self-image is an inside job.

Here Are The Steps.

The first step is to make a DECISION that you are going to change your self-image. When you make this decision, you are making a commitment to yourself and are willing to do the work to make it so. You may not know how you are going to do it, but you have made the decision to find out how. You may even want to share this with someone else who will hold you accountable to your decision.

The second step in the process is to be aware of the fact that you are not going at this by going against the tide of “what is”– what already exists in your present life. What you want to understand is that what you are about to do is to create a new self-image as you step into your new life.

Don’t think of it as, “Oh, I have to change myself”.

Instead say, “How can I grow into and create a new and better self-image?”

Remember the flip phones and now the i-phones? Remember the typewriter and now the word processor? These are along the same line, but they are fresh, different, improved.

Buckminster Fuller says it perfectly, “Never change things by fighting existing reality…to change something, build a new model that makes the old one obsolete”.

The third step is to use one of the six gifts that we all have in our conscious mind. It is the imagination. Close your eyes, and for a few minutes build a picture of how you want to be. Imagine it in great detail.

Next, Write It Out.

Describe how you want to see yourself in your mind. How do you want to THINK, or what thoughts do you want to think when you think about yourself? (I know it is a lot of thinking but it is all about our thinking. We are what we think about.)

Then, and with great enthusiasm, feel passionately caught up in the feelings that new self-image creates inside of you. With those feelings, imagine that you already have become that person that you envision yourself to be.

How does it feel? Do you feel differently? Isn’t that a great way to feel about yourself? Imagine feeling great about yourself a lot of the time. Imagine what you can be, do, and have when you feel this way about YOU.

Repetition of those thoughts and emotions of the new self-image help to make it manifest. Everything we do and say will either bring up our self-image or bring it down. The more self-aware you become of your thoughts, the more you can replace negative self-talk with positive self-talk.

How Can You Tell When You Get Off Track?

How can you become more self-aware of when your self-image is taking a nosedive? Check how you feel inside. If you are feeling uncomfortable, uneasy, or discouraged, those and other negative feelings are a signal that you are off track.

Immediately, you want to replace those thoughts with the positive vision you created on the screen of your mind. Use your will to hold it there.

There are lots of adjustments and changes after divorce. You will achieve better results if your self-image matches your desire for rebuilding your new life on your own terms.

Growing into the person you are meant to be now leaves little room for just going along and coping with what life puts in your path.

Watch my FREE masterclass to motivate and inspire you to start moving in the right direction moving forward out of the past and into a future full of joy and promise.