High Achievers
Let’s use your superpowers to spark inner growth.
As for most high achievers, your systems and methods work really well…until they falter.
There are a lot of reasons for this: bringing home a baby, reeling from a loved one’s death, relocating to a new home/town/city, accepting a new professional position or making a career pivot, or planning a wedding. Any big transition can bring out big feels.
What I notice: Folks get really pissed at themselves. They think they should be able to keep going as usual. But when they can’t keep going as usual, they turn on themselves in self-judgment and get caught up in frustration.
Sometimes we have to catch up to our current needs rather than looking back toward how it used to be and wishing. Wishing won’t help you feel better. Here’s what can help:
Slowing down and systematically tracking your thoughts, feelings, and actions.
Finding curiosity about your experience, lowering self-judgment and increasing self-understanding.
Examining the confusing tangle you find yourself in, then sorting, organizing, and re-organizing, so you can make sense to yourself.
This process can be difficult, because you won’t know what you’re doing for a while. And you’re typically so good at so much. It’s a positive sign you’re doing something new. Creating new neural pathways. And that’s the only way lasting change happens.
We will be looking at what you’re doing right as we blaze a new path:
Recognizing good intentions behind unhelpful habits.
Respecting all you’ve gone through to get here.
Celebrating wins that would otherwise get glossed over.
Amplifying glimmers of change, so that more and more change becomes possible.
Increasing trust in yourself and your capability in listening to yourself.
Your inner work will shine in your outer life as you act from a new, secure vantage point.
Why I love doing this kind of work:
I was a thought machine. Thoughts, thoughts, thoughts. I would think about feelings and call them feelings. And at the same time, I was a deeply feeling person. So I held this dynamic and ever-present tension between my stream of thoughts and my intense sensations.
When I first did somatic/experiential therapy (two general names for the kind of therapy I practice), I realized that what I thought I felt and what I actually felt were different. I needed to listen to my body, because it was doing and feeling what it was doing and feeling, no matter how much I tried to shape it to my desire.
I know firsthand that complex, organized minds especially benefit from giving room for our nuts-and-bolts, here-and-now bodily experience. That we can use our robust mind to name and categorize what had previously been inchoate and overwhelming about our somatic experience. Perhaps both surprising and unsurprising, when our emotions—as experienced in the body—are worked with, this gives us priceless and ongoing information that works in the service of goals.