Tag: practice

Inspiration and Impact

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Grace Cheng (she/her/hers), Low Entropy Volunteer Writer

 

Globally, the current pandemic affects everyone. There is a great deal of stress associated with the changes and uncertainty caused by this crisis. It has been shown that stress negatively impacts health. The consequences of stress can be minimized by providing encouragement, social support and care. Many of the damaging effects of stress are more likely to occur when there are no safety nets, partners, family members or friends who can offer a listening ear or help. There are many helpful and creative ways to enable remote care, provide additional support, establish contact and launch other heart-warming initiatives aimed at supporting each other during this time. It has been inspiring to observe the creativity unleashed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

 

By sharing your innovative ideas about ways to inspire and help others, you can have a greater impact on your community and country. It is one of the ways in which you can contribute to a better future for everyone.

 

Humans are naturally drawn to inspiration. In fact, inspiration is one of the primary stimuli for creativity. Having a positive attitude helps us be our best despite negative circumstances. The question is, how does one inspire others?

 

Listed below are ten suggestions to get you started:

  • Showing Care 

You can ask them questions. Show genuine interest in the people around you. Showing your genuine concern for others will make you an inspiration.

  • Being Sincere

No one will be inspired if you appear insincere or fake. You must believe what you are saying and adhere to your view of life. To show that this matters to you, it is essential to make it matter to you.

  • Encouraging Others

Everyone experiences hard times from time to time. This is a great opportunity to inspire and motivate a person to see the best in him or her and in their situation.

  • Showing Enthusiasm

If you wish to inspire others, you must be willing to express your passion. Simply by expressing publicly that you are enthusiastic and passionate about a subject, you can gain a tremendous amount of influence. Expressions of passion can be contagious, as they arouse curiosity in those around you. People will wonder why you are so passionate about what you are passionate about. Some will naturally take the time to understand what it is about the topic that interests you.

  • Seeing the Best in People

Seeing the best in people is one of the most effective ways to inspire them towards improvement. It motivates them to reach their dreams and goals. To inspire others, you should emphasize their positive qualities rather than their negative ones. You will find that inspiration will flow easily if you focus on these qualities wherever you interact with them.

  • Active Listening

By actively listening to others, you show them that they are important and that their ideas are worth considering. Eye contact is important when someone shares their problems with you. Ask follow-up questions to show them you care about what they are experiencing and want to understand their viewpoint as well as you can. 

  • Helping People Heal

Stand by them and help them build a better future, rather than judging them based on their past. By positively impacting the lives of others, you are also positively impacting your own. You can make someone happier or reduce their suffering if you focus on others’ needs. We all appreciate the gift of unexpected assistance and those who can provide it.

          

  • Trusting People

The key to inspiring others is to trust in their ability to learn, adapt, and grow. Everyone makes mistakes at some point in their lives. To inspire them to do better, we need to trust them to learn from their experiences.

  • Giving Hope to Others

The most important aspect of inspiring others is hope. It is imperative to give them hope. It is crucial for them to believe that there is a goal, a reward at the end of the tunnel, for the challenges they will face.

  •  Being a Good Communicator

You must be able to communicate effectively to motivate and inspire others. You should be aware of your voice and how you speak. The words you speak can have a profound impact on the way in which someone feels about themselves.

 

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Grace has an accounting and finance background. She enjoys reading, writing, listening to music, watching movies and playing sports.

Self-Therapy: An Introduction

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Anastasia Lee (she/her/hers), Low Entropy Volunteer Writer

 

Therapy is expensive. Each session can cost between $60 and $250 or even more, potentially racking up thousands of dollars per patient per year. Although therapy is effective, it is not a solution for everyone, and there is no one-size-fits-all kind of therapy. Everybody’s psychological needs differ, and sometimes professional psychological treatment isn’t enough.

 

Depression and anxiety are becoming more and more common as psychological disorders, especially after a year-long global pandemic. Mental health decline is on the rise, peaking in the past decade, and it is worsening due to debilitating economic conditions. Losing jobs, homes and assets can be traumatic, as being stripped of your necessities can force you into survival mode. The cost of living is becoming more and more expensive. Considering these major challenges and dramatic changes in the environment, it is no surprise that depression and anxiety are becoming more prevalent in our society.

 

Self-therapy, which is any healing tool that provides mental alleviation and emotional support, has the potential to become the future of mental health therapy. It focuses on the individual becoming dependent on their cognitive and support systems, instead of relying on others for therapy. It is bringing back the power to the individual and creating a solid foundation for their mental health. It is not a replacement for therapy with a trained professional, but more so a way to cope with challenging, complex circumstances when one cannot afford therapy.

 

I must re-emphasize that self-therapy is not a substitute for therapy. It is a coping mechanism. There is no professional training required for self-therapy, and therefore it is not considered an form of medical therapy.

 

What is self-therapy?

 

Self-therapy is a potentially effective practice with all kinds of benefits: processing negative thoughts and emotions; coping healthily with trauma; rediscovering unconscious, shadow aspects; reflecting on your actions, habits and behaviors; keeping track of your progress and much more. Self-therapy isn’t limited to a specific set of practices. It is formed and shaped according to the needs and desires of the individual. Self-therapy is very much like self-care; it is for the mind and heart.

 

How is it an effective tool for coping with negative thoughts and emotions?

 

Self-therapy is a channel for self-expression and conscious processing. It brings unconscious and subconscious programming to the conscious surface. It is essential for working through trauma, which is often responsible for negative thoughts and emotions. Whether through journaling, voice messages, videos or other forms of self-therapeutic expression, it is a productive and constructive coping mechanism for releasing heavily suppressed thoughts and emotions. In this way, they do not remain trapped within the psyche, where they wreak havoc on our mental and emotional well-being.

 

How do I prepare for self-therapy?

 

  1. Intention-Setting: Before diving into self-therapy, evaluating your intentions for why you believe therapy is necessary and how you will undergo the process is essential for an effective session. Every session doesn’t have to be the same, and depending on the needs of the individual, the intentions can differ as desired. This intention-setting practice can be performed in various ways: writing down purposes in a journal, repeating them aloud in front of a mirror, sharing them with a trusted friend or family member, or expressing these intentions through art and music, to name a few.

 

  1. Creating a Safe Space: Your sanctuary can be created anywhere. Whether it’s your bedroom or outside in nature, being where no distractions or problems can reach you is the best place to be. It can be by yourself or with a friend or trusted partner, and it is encouraged to have someone assist you in the process if possible. You can put on music or surround yourself with the things you love and appreciate the most in life. Build your safe space as you like, and change your environment as needed.

 

  1. Practice Vulnerability: If you’ve spent years hiding who you truly are from the world, then it’s time to open up and express yourself, finally. Use your voice to talk about your thoughts and emotions. Don’t overthink anything you’re saying. Just speak. Detach from any judgments projected on you. Take it easy on yourself and ease away from being self-critical. It is okay to have flaws and imperfections, and practicing vulnerability requires accepting these aspects of yourself. Become more comfortable listening to your voice, feeling your emotions and hearing your thoughts.

 

  1. Ask Yourself Questions: When practicing self-therapy, it’s essential to guide yourself with the right questions. It is beneficial for you also to ask yourself questions to assist you with your healing process. Write down your own questions and answers throughout each session and, if needed, go completely off track and dive deeper into what needs confrontation. Every session is meant to be for your personal needs, so do exactly what you feel is best for you.

 

  1. Acquire the Right Tools: Self-therapy is relatively cheap and easy. The essential tools needed are a journal, pen and mirror. Of course, these aren’t requirements. Self-therapy can be talked through without notes, but having a mirror may help you connect with your body, language and ways of expression. A journal and pen may be useful for writing down things you want to remember in future sessions, while also tracking your progress and seeing what you need to work on and integrate.

 

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My name is Anastasia. I am 22 years old, and I am from California. Ever since I was a kid, writing has been my passion because it is a channel of self-expression. With every piece of writing, I hope to build a collected masterpiece of art to share with the world.

Life Lessons: Emotions, Acceptance and Experiential Learning

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Ling-Yee Sze, Low Entropy Volunteer Writer

 

I have been, for the most part of my life, a person who is very meticulous about not making any mistakes, not allowing myself to be hurt or punished, or even just trying to ensure that I am spoken of in a respectful manner by other people. I feel a bit underqualified to write about learning from experience, because at this age and time I have found that the predominant strategy I used to learn from upsetting life events – becoming even more hypervigilant about potential triggers and even more avoidant of them – is not serving me these days as an adult who seeks to live more in alignment with my authentic self. 

 

I have a strong need for acceptance and approval. It probably has something to do with my upbringing. I did not live with my mother until the age of five, and when I moved in, I needed to adjust from being a wild, carefree child in a small village to being a socialized child at schools in a new hustling city. It was only a couple of years ago that I found I have the high sensitivity traits defined by Dr. Elaine Aron. Without skillful parenting, highly sensitive children tend not to cope with changes and difficult childhoods well. Now that I think back on it, I processed many things as a child quite deeply and tried to learn every lesson I could to avoid experiencing upsetting emotions. My biggest wish during primary school was to be invisible, but I led a double life and when I returned home to my grandma, I would become the only object of her attention and receive tremendous amount of love and significance from her, who was living in the city without legal documents and barely stepped outside our home. She passed away when I was 14 and I have since tried to seek ways to fill that significance and attention bucket through sources and people other than myself. I have often caught myself ruminating, for instance, about what I had said that might make an auntie dislike me, and how could I correct this the next time. It was never enough. When people do approve of me, I undervalue their approval. The rate at which others filled my approval bucket was way slower than the rate at which the bucket was leaking. 

 

It was only months ago on my self-help journey, when I came across the Personal Development School site, that I realized that trying to correct and avoid every mistake, especially in interpersonal relationships, was actually doing more harm than good for my personal growth and life fulfillment. I thought, as a hypervigilant and detail-oriented individual, that I should catch as many clues and micro-expressions as I could and walk on eggshells to avoid repeating the same mistakes. But when I step back, I observe that my patterns of self-sabotage, violating my own boundaries, and projecting my needs and opinions onto others (stemming from my need to satisfy the standards of my parents and society) have always been there and are repeating themselves, even though my circumstances vary – I was not learning the real lessons from my life events.

 

To be honest, I have little to offer in terms of how to break through old patterns and remove unhelpful emotional and behavioral imprints, but I have some suggestions of approaches that I have found very helpful.

 

The first thing is that if overwhelming emotions arise when we think about a past event, we should try not to judge them or beat ourselves up for not being able to get over them. Many therapists or mindfulness professionals stress that emotions are neutral, and it’s the way we react to our emotions that might be undesirable to others or ourselves. Emotions can even be seen as precious feedback, showing us where in our current life we have some unmet needs or limiting beliefs. Identifying these things is important because we might want to set intentions about working on them.

 

Secondly, accepting that negative past or present events are parts of our stories might be more encouraging than it seems. My counsellor sent me a quote from Brené Brown: “Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we’ll ever do.” I pondered this and thought, yes, if I resist changing my reality my life will not improve. My past has dark spots that will exist regardless – I have to hold them closer to my eyes in order to have a chance of painting a different color onto them. There is a difference, in my perception, between pushing the problem out of sight, versus pulling it closer to improve my relationship with the mistake and work on it.

 

Thirdly, I think reducing the practice of blaming others and taking full responsibility for who we want to involve in reparenting our wounded inner child is helpful too. Yes, other people are involved in our wounds, but they are not the key to healing. In fact, it would be another layer of concern if they were, because that means we would not have much control over what values or parenting styles we want to bring in to heal our wounds or reparent our inner child.

 

I believe all of the above things are easier said than done, and I am definitely at a stage of getting better and progressing. One cognitive distortion I often find myself falling prey to is all-or-nothing thinking: because [my past life event], I will never […]. I often need to remind myself that this black-and-white thinking stems from my fears or other emotions, and they are like the clouds – there is always a clear sky in the background, and it coexists with the clouds all the time. I can take a variety of different actions even though I feel the same emotion, and my restrictive belief -> emotion -> action cycles can then be broken.

 

***

 

Hi, my name is Ling-Yee Sze and I am a personal development enthusiast who began a self-help journey four years ago. Along the way, I have met many inspiring people. I hope to share my personal stories and collected learnings with you!

How to Cope with Racial Tension as a Biracial Person (and Take Your Power Back!)

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Low Entropy Volunteer Writer Daniel Quinney’s mixed-race background has prompted the same set of conversational questions over and over again, but for a long time Daniel struggled with finding an answer to feeling disconnected and excluded. For anyone who has felt the same way in this increasingly polarized world, Daniel shares some ideas on how to create a space where you belong.

 

As an individual of biracial heritage with an Irish-Canadian mother and an African father, I have always struggled with the fact that I often feel that I come from two different worlds.

 

How can a person, with one parent from a dominant group in society and another from a racialized group, deal with the tension that arises from belonging to both groups? Or the unwelcome feeling that they belong to neither?

 

How do we find our voice to speak up and live our truth as only we can?

 

Too black for white people. Too white for black people. 

 

I’ve heard these sentiments echoed often from people I know who have mixed-race backgrounds like mine. 

 

When I was younger, people would ask, “So, what are you?” Of course, it would be game time for me at this point, so I would tell them that I am a person.

 

A human was also acceptable if I wanted to be extra cute.

 

So they would then ask, “Ok, but what is your nationality? “

 

I would say Canadian. They would come back with, “Yeah, yeah, but what is your ethnicity?”

 

I knew what they were getting at. Even though I was born in Vancouver, I would eventually relent and give them what they want.

 

Half-Tanzanian, half-Irish, I would say. 

 

At an earlier age, I would have simply said half-African, but as time passed I think I wanted to up the level of difficulty a little (a bit of a pattern with me).

 

Yet ever since I found a deeper appreciation for the African side of my identity as a teenager, I often had this nagging feeling that half of me was on the wrong side of a conversation or dispute that had been going on long before I was born.

 

I gradually came to understand that people of all walks of life, of all colours, abilities, genders and orientations, can feel disconnected or without a sense of belonging in this world, and that I didn’t have a monopoly on that feeling of not fitting in. Over time, I found constructive ways to do something about what I was experiencing.

 

Along that journey, I developed coping mechanisms to give myself, as a biracial person, a sense of place and belonging in the world. I hope I have done an adequate job of passing these on to my children, and others as well.

 

  • Love your uniqueness: Only you are exactly like you. Be proud of yourself, both mentally and physically. Textured hair? Green eyes? Big ol’ butt? Don’t be ashamed of the features that make you unique as a mixed-race person. Don’t hide what you are, embrace it. Forget about the so-called “traditional” standard of beauty; it’s a new world out there. 

 

  • Use your creative voice at work and within your community: Be vocal about the things you care about. Listen to the stories of other voices, other communities, other races. Support causes you truly believe in. If you are an artist of any kind, reflect that passion in your artwork, whatever it is, since it is a reflection of you and your thoughts.

 

  • If you can’t give dollars, give your time:  Give back to the generations that are coming up. Volunteer to be a mentor, or a tutor if you are an expert in your field. By the way, we are all experts in something. Time to pay it forward.

 

  • Share your culture: Go to the festivals. Celebrate the customs of both cultures, whatever they may be. Talk about your history and the story of your family. Encourage strong ties with grandparents on both sides. Embrace and show off the things you enjoy about your culture(s) with your kids, and your friends too. 

 

  • It’s OK to not talk about race all the time: Not everyone is a Malcolm X or an Oprah or MLK or Obama, and that’s just fine. People define themselves in different ways, least of all by race, and that’s the way it should be.

 

  • Don’t play the role or try to fit a stereotype: Find positive role models who look like you and embody the way you want to be and how you want to live. Trust me, they’re out there in abundance.

 

  • Racist situations can be teaching opportunities: If people you encounter in everyday life say inappropriate or racist things, call it what it is . . . politely and in a nonviolent way. Safety is the priority, no matter what feelings get riled up in the heat of the moment. This is a time to show others the way to confront racism, so take advantage of it. Take emotions out of it, and just call it by name and say why it is wrong, but be safe.

 

  • Take care of yourself: The endless race and culture debate, whether experienced first-hand in a spirited discussion with colleagues or through the media, can bring a kind of fatigue or numbness. When this occurs, in your personal life or out in the world, make sure to take some time out for yourself to reflect and heal.

 

  • Be prepared to talk about the bad days as well as the good: Talk about racism, the legacy of slavery and other uncomfortable things, and in the process, you will educate others, both on the progress that has been made and how we still have to move forward. Truth is truth.

 

How has your race, ethnicity and/or nationality informed who you are? Share your stories with us on any of our social media platforms, in person at a Conscious Connections meeting, or simply hop down to the comments below!

Building that Bridge

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You can build it, once plank at a time: Low Entropy Volunteer Writer Kanak Khatri writes on how achieving confidence can simply be a matter of working your way toward it.

 

The best explanation that I have for confidence is that it stimulates a situation where there are admirers and a performer. A  performer can be someone who just does something better and, because of that, has more confidence. However, I have always felt that the difference between spectator and performer is the time and effort that anyone can put in to become better in something and, hence, more confident.

 

But why is it important to become more confident?

 

Imagine yourself mesmerising a crowd in a TED Talk in the future. That’s one way to envision the benefits of confidence in action.

 

You can seize opportunities that pass by, and the positive results will build your confidence. Ace that interview or climb that corporate ladder. Personally, I let a few opportunities pass by without even considering them, as I was not confident in myself. You, with confidence, will also be able to stand up for yourself, be it in front of a manager with unrealistic expectations or within a toxic relationship.

 

All in all, confidence might not prevent difficulties from occurring in your life, but it will equip you to handle them in more efficient ways.

 

Where is the handbook to become more confident?

 

There is no one method that can fit all different cases, because we all lack confidence in different aspects of our lives. The only fundamental technique that might apply is to get out of your comfort zone and start building the bridge toward confidence. When we see confident people, we do not see the trials, errors and failed attempts that led to their current positions. For instance, I used to be very unconfident when speaking publicly, be it in a school presentation or just answering a professor’s question in class. 

 

I came to a situation where I did not want to live without confidence any more, so I exposed myself slowly to speaking publicly. Working at a fast food joint helped a little, as it required me to constantly talk to customers. Whenever I had a presentation, I would put effort into preparation and practice, which also helped me be more confident. Practicing in front of two people, then three, and eventually a bunch more helped as well.

 

Similarly, if you’re not confident talking to someone, maybe practice talking to familiar, supportive people, and practice the conversation in your head before talking to them. One day, eventually, you will eventually be a pro without even realising it.

 

I also realised that my attire and the way I looked were also determinants that affected my confidence. If looking a certain way makes you feel confident, I would suggest you go for it.

 

Let’s take another scenario: say, for instance, I am not confident in my photography. I would take suggestions from someone skilled in photography and learn ways to improve. With that feedback, I would improve and become more confident.

 

Building that bridge

 

I realised that developing confidence was important to growing as a person, and the only way to do it was to get out of my comfort zone, as scary as it seemed. Failing and being nervous of uncharted territories are part of the process. The people we admire have been through failures, and we should look up to them for inspiration. Building that bridge and reaching your goal of being more confident may be a treacherous project but, in the end, is worth it.

 

In what area of life would you like to feel more confident? Share your ambitions with the supportive and positive Low Entropy community in the comments below, on any of our social media platforms, or in person at a Low Entropy meet-up!