The WOOP Method For Habit Change And Goal Setting

Earlier this year, I participated in a free Yale online course called “The Science of Well-Being.” As a whole, I loved the class. I found the psychology behind how humans make choices about what they think will bring them happiness contrasted with what actually brings them happiness incredibly fascinating. But one of my favorite things I walked away with was a strategy for habit change and goal setting.

I am no stranger to trying new things, especially in the wellness realm. I’ve wanted to become a flexible yogi that can do handstands, stay on my clean diet, and have strived to become a morning person. But I’ve always fell a little short with the longevity of my goals.

I’m sure you’ve been there. You decide you want to do this new great thing to become this new great person. You’re excited and 100% confident you can get there. Until you actually start doing the thing… Suddenly the inspiration and excitement is gone. You’re tired… you’re hungry… something else just sounds better and you decide the new habit can wait for tomorrow… until you wake up and realize that you haven’t practiced your new habit or made any strides towards your goal in weeks.

Which is where the WOOP Method comes in. The WOOP Method is a science-based mental strategy created by Gabriele Oettingen after gathering more than twenty years of research in order to help people create lasting habits of their own making.

WOOP

Wish

Outcome

Obstacles

Plan

What makes this method so different from other goal setting?

Strategy

Proven Four-Step Strategy

WISH
Get specific with your goal/wish. The more specific you are about what you want, the better you’ll be able to strategize later.
OUTCOME
Write down your positive outcome. What will happen once your goal is achieved? Who will you be? How will you feel?
OBSTACLES
Write down any obstacles that are likely to come in your way.
PLAN
Create a self-regulatory strategy in the form of an “if-then plan” that can lead to better goal attainment based on your obstacles (this is where the magic is) BEFORE you start your new goal/wish.

THE METHOD IN ACTION:

My wish is to meditate for 5 minutes each morning.

By meditating for 5 minutes each day, the outcome will be that I’ll gain more inner peace and solace while creating a lasting routine.

An obstacle that I may face is that I’ll be too tired in the morning (or lazy) to meditate.

So, my plan is that if I wake up and feel too tired to meditate, I’ll get up from bed, drink a glass of water, and then sit or lay down to meditate.

Other examples of “if-then” scenarios:
“If there are donuts at the conference, I’m going to turn around and grab an orange.”
“If I pick my phone up more than three times per hour, I’m going to shut it off and put it in the other room.”

This method is unique in that it allows you to look at all the puzzle pieces. It’s easy to pick a new habit and say you’re just going to start. It’s another thing to stay for the course when things get hard. By thinking about the desired outcome contrasted with the obstacles, it allows you to get a clear picture of what could happen. And lastly, by creating a plan for what to do when obstacles come your way (because they will come), you are giving yourself a better chance for success—with a proven 3x more success rate than if you did not create an “if-then” statement.

So what habit or goal are you hoping to finally achieve with this technique? What have you always wanted to do, but had trouble achieving long-term? Here is your opportunity and strategy to make it happen!

Emotional Health
Jun, 01, 2020

Am I Psychic?

It is clear to me that there is a lot of confusion around the word ‘psychic.’

As a Psychic Cheerleader, I am regularly asked if I am a psychic medium, or if I am able to foretell your future.

To which I respond, a medium is psychic, but not every psychic is a medium. Let me explain.

Psychics are simply individuals who are able to hear, see, smell, taste, feel, sense, or have intuition beyond the boundaries of the physical world. Just like you have 5 senses — you also have clair senses or extrasensory abilities that correspond to them. When you tap into these senses, the messages you receive can be used to make life choices that are in your best interest.

Because extrasensory gifts vary greatly in intensity and application, it’s best to imagine psychic skills on a spectrum. We all have intuition or a psychic nature — whether you refer to it as a gut reaction, instinct, or foresight. The question is whether or not you are listening to the signs, and whether or not you learned how to trust the information you are receiving.

As I’ve come to work with more and more women, I continue to share and educate others on my own psychic experiences in order to help clear any resistance around what being psychic “should” be, or how it continues to show up for each person. What is important is that we enhance and affirm how you receive information, in a way that makes the most sense for you. Everyone has a dominant clair sense. Mine happens to be clairsentience, the ability to clearly feel.

Almost everyone I’ve worked with has some sort of resistance or trauma and is afraid to receive the information or “do something wrong,” so we work together on releasing those particular beliefs out of your emotional and energetic bodies as they begin to reveal themselves. This allows you to enhance and develop your intuitive skills at a pace that is right and comfortable for you, continually empowering you to receive incredible clarity, internal guidance, and direction in your life through learning how to keep these energetic channels clear.

So Where Does Our Lack of Belief Come From?

We develop our psychic abilities during childhood. These gifts are passed down through close individuals who teach us to notice more — basic survival instincts that enable us to move safely throughout the world.

However, if I grew up without relatives or grandparents who were practicing shamans, and if I wasn’t shown to hold a deep reverence and spiritual connection to pacha mama, I would have to attend shamanism school as an adult to reaffirm my connection in this way. I would need to rebuild my trust in the powerful insights and wisdom available to me by relearning how to journey with my spirit guides.

And if my “crazy” Aunt Carolyn doesn’t happen to be a practicing psychic, and my entire family doesn’t believe her premonitions, and makes fun of the “weird” things she says during holiday dinners, I learn to let go of all my intuitive abilities and psychic gifts, shunning any gifts I may be aware I have, and disconnecting from them completely in order to fit in with my family.

I learn to stop believing in my own innate power and discovering my own immense worth.

Remembering Your Innate Power and Gifts

Until we have an awakening experience and truly seek out the ability to enhance and develop our own intuitive abilities, so we can listen to and embody our own inner truth and wisdom, our relationship to our psychic gifts are based upon a combination of our family’s belief systems and any thought patterns we’ve absorbed while growing up.

We’ve also consistently received false and conflicting information.

We’ve been warned all our lives about psychics being a scam. And we’ve also experienced the Hollywood version of psychics and wizards, complete with a velvet table cloth, crystal ball, a fog machine, and vague information or obvious answers which help to confirm our disbelief.

As children we are told to stop being so sensitive, that ghosts aren’t real, and that pain is always physical. Through this conditioning, we start to believe that emotions and intuition aren’t as valid as science and reason. We begin to need proof.

So we continue to suppress our gifts, sneer at clairvoyants (the clair sense of clearly seeing), and accept the physical realm as the full extent of our reality.

Learning how to tap into your own intuitive abilities requires that you release yourself from being deceived, and from all of the times in your life that you have ever been deceived. That deception is what lies between you and your belief around whether or not psychics are real — and if you can become one too.

While there are some people who call themselves psychics and can take advantage of and prey upon your deepest fears and vulnerabilities, this does not mean that working with a psychic will always lead to exploitation and your being gullible or tricked.

So while you are reading this, let’s un-create each of the beliefs that we’ve covered above, delete, and destroy each of them across all time, dimension, space and reality for you. Take a deep breath, exhale, and allow it all to go.

Now how does that feel?

Were You Told Your Imaginary Friend Was Not Real?

I don’t know about you, but I experienced a kindergarten class where I was handed a peach crayon for drawing the skin color of my family. If I had chosen green because I saw what was considered an alien walking around with me all day, as part of my “family” it would have raised an eyebrow from my teacher or a pointing finger from the student sitting next to me. I know my mom would not have believed me, and told me to “stop daydreaming” like she regularly did.

So any early supernatural events I experienced were regularly dismissed and discredited, and I grew up thinking being psychic was similar to learning magic (tricking someone) or describing a make-believe fairytale such as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. I was also the baby of the family and was regularly told I was wrong, or “not born yet” enough times to doubt any magic abilities or my capabilities to change my current set of circumstances in any meaningful way. And being hyper aware, I desperately wanted to fit into a world that made absolutely no sense to me, so I silenced myself and my intuitive abilities in defense.

I also experienced a religious upbringing, which brings about its own set of passed down beliefs. For many of my early childhood years, I received the message loud and clear that I was not powerful. In addition, I was taught that my power was outside of myself and lived in something I could not possibly comprehend or understand. I came to accept through my religious experience that I had no control over my life and to put my trust in god’s hands. So I prayed every night for over a decade, and after not receiving what I was asking for, I decided god hated me and in response became an atheist.

And let me tell you, adopting the powerful limiting beliefs that atheism requires led me through a path of death and destruction in my life for many years. I became angry, justified, lost, fearful, anxious and completely off my spiritual path by shunning my spiritual connection, gifts and awareness. My reality quickly and inevitably reflected all of my beliefs about myself and the world.

So in order to eventually pierce through my “dark night of the soul”, I had to first completely walk away from a life of disbelief. Then through incredible instruction and guidance from those around me, I was led through identifying, then clearing the beliefs I held surrounding my wanting to be here on earth at this time (instead of somewhere other than here) so I could fully love, believe, accept, and begin to manifest my life here in an abundant way in this 3rd dimensional reality and lifetime.

And that is when everything changed. I suddenly and vividly remembered again why I’m here – just like I did in childhood. There had been a bunch of stuff that happened from late childhood into adulthood that got in front of me remembering my gifts anymore, and more than likely, the same thing has happened for you.

Tapping Into Your Psychic Abilities

Right after a physical, mental, emotional and spiritual crisis in my late 30’s which cracked me wide open, I began training as a Reiki student in order to integrate, process and heal from the inner child work I was doing with a trauma-informed psychologist. At the time, I remember feeling like my Reiki Master teacher or my Shamanism Leader were in a special group and I could never be as spiritually powerful or masterful as they had become. They both had unshakable self-belief in their intuitive awareness.

If I’m honest, I felt shame for not having a deeper understanding or a connection to how to use my gifts, or learning them earlier. I wished I had been born into a family who had encouraged my intuitive abilities. This emotional attachment was something I had to work on to release, eventually coming to a place of acceptance of what “should have” happened, and instead embrace the reality that I am already all-knowing, and I have the rest of my life to become the best version of me in this lifetime.

You are also all-knowing; however some, if not all, of your psychic abilities might lie dormant inside of you, which does not mean that it won’t be a journey to even deeper awareness. Our experiences and soul lessons may be different, and I may have started practicing my intuitive gifts before you, but that does not mean you aren’t as powerful or psychic as I am. I’m here to remind you of how gifted you truly are, and together, we are able to create some incredible and powerful shifts in your life.

I remember having a conversation with a Reiki Master higher up in my Reiki lineage. I told her how gifted she was with a meditation she led me through, and that I hoped to be as good as she was some day. Jennette politely laughed and said, “Everything is unfolding perfectly. You are perfect just as you are.”

Her response of unconditional love, non-judgment, and non attachment left such an impression on me that I had “Everything is unfolding perfectly” written in all kinds of places to remind me for several months, so I could regularly take it in.

A few years later, at the beginning of clairvoyant training, I again found the director of my school all-knowing, and was thirsty to answer my deeper questions about developing specific abilities — to only know what she knew— then I would become a master. Halfway through her program, I recognized that my perfectionism and wanting to “get things right” was creating resistance around deepening my own spiritual connection and receiving the answers I was looking to her to answer.

That moment of awareness was extremely powerful for me – simple, but incredible. I still remember which class I finally felt able to and knew how to release what stood between me, and being about to clearly see (clairvoyance), and when my ability to see my spirit guides or trust the information I was shown became even more pronounced and easier for me to “see”.

It was through each teacher’s guidance, leadership, mentoring, and training that I unravelled what I personally believed about being psychic or having intuitive gifts and abilities. I was a non-believer and had to practice and exercise my dormant abilities. This is how I am able to witness and hold the same space for others to do the same.

Whether one refers to him/herself as psychic, I want you to know, it’s not a secret club. It is my firm belief that every human being can access their intuitive abilities — and that in learning to access and build on those skills, you can experience less anxiety and have more trust in yourself and the world.

Want more ways to enhance your abilities? Take a psychic class or meditate. Learn how to work with your guides by asking for what you need and trust your perceptions as truth. Become attuned to Reiki, or learn practical tools to keep your energetic centers open and in alignment. Keep a dream journal.

Psychic abilities are one of the greatest gifts of nature. They enable us to sense something beyond the realm of our existence. A connection to something so much larger than us. They are abilities that everyone possesses to some extent, although most of us go through life not realizing the vast potential that lies within us — and must be cultivated with intent. These abilities are more normal than the traditional modes of communication that we attribute to the spirit and which are limited through the five senses of the body. If anything, our psychic abilities and intuition become even more pronounced and astute with exercise and use, just like any other muscle or organ in our bodies, and incorporating them throughout your day is life transformative.

Spiritual
May, 21, 2020

Is Your Self-Talk Preventing You From Self-Care?

If you were to write all your thoughts down on an average day, would the majority of your self-talk be positive, neutral, or negative?

Negative self-talk is so common for so many that it isn’t even considered problematic. Perhaps it is even recognized as an appropriate response to your actions.

What if I told you that pervasive negative self-talk is a detriment to your ability to accomplish tasks and experience sustained well-being. Would you believe me if I told you that compassionate self-talk is an accessible daily practice you can do to reduce pervasive negative self-talk? Imagine what your life would look like if the majority of your thoughts become compassionate, kind, and motivating.

Now, try to imagine what our world would look like if the majority of people experienced thoughts that were compassionate, kind, and motivating.

Is it a world worth creating?

Dr. David Burns created a list of 10 common cognitive distortions, which he named Twisted Thinking. These twisted thoughts lead us to believe that our negative experiences are true.¹ When you begin to recognize these thoughts as twisted you can start to do the work of untwisting them so that you can give yourself appropriate self-care

THE PROCESS LOOKS LIKE THIS:

Decide you want to have more thoughts that are compassionate, kind, and motivating
Acknowledge when your thoughts are twisted
Invite self-compassion because of the majority of us have been conditioned to have these cognitive distortions
Explore alternative thoughts that acknowledge your inherent worth and value
Take action from a of place compassion, kindness, and motivation

Use the guide below to begin to incorporate more compassionate, kind, and motivating thoughts and self-care practices into your daily life. You deserve it!

TWISTED THINKING

Definitions, Examples, and Alternatives

All or Nothing Thinking is looking at situations in absolutes. You put things in black-and-white categories.

When your first thought sounds something like this, “I never accomplish my goals. I am always going to fail! I might as well give up, and binge watch tv for the rest of the week.”

Try to replace it with this, “That was not the success I was hoping for, but I did do ______ pretty well. I am going to rest, watch my favorite show, and then reevaluate a new plan to achieve my goals.”

Over-generalization is viewing a negative situation/event as a never-ending pattern of defeat.

When your first thought sounds something like this, “My body is always sore. I am terrified that I have a muscle or neurological defect!”

Try to replace it with this, “My body is sore, I am going to enjoy a warm shower, take a break from high-intensity workouts for the rest of the week, and then see it how it feels after.”

Mental Filter is when you ignore all the positives and only focus on the negatives.

When your first thought sounds something likes this, “I am so gross, ugly, and undeserving of love.”

Try to replace it with this, “All humans are inherently worthy, and that includes me. What are a few things I feel grateful for today?”

Discounting the Positives is a similar distortion where you insist that your accomplishments or positive attributes do not matter/count.

When your first thought sounds something like this, “I was just lucky that I passed that class and graduated from college.”

Try to replace it with this, “A few things I learned that helped me finish assignments and study for tests include…”

Jumping to conclusions is when you conclude that everything is bad without having any evidence. This includes assuming that people are reacting negatively towards you (mind-reading) and predicting that things are going to turn out badly (fortune-telling)

When your first thought sounds something like this, “Everyone is looking at my funny, they must think I am so stupid.”

Try to replace it with this, “I am going to ask a friend or teacher for feedback after my presentation to see where I can improve.”

Magnification or Minimization is when you blow things out of proportion or make them seem less important.

When your first thought sounds something like this, “It’s okay that I didn’t eat dinner the past few nights, it’s just a meal.”

Try to replace it with this, “I am going to spend 15 minutes meal planning for the next week because I don’t want to make a habit of skipping meals.”

Emotional Reasoning is when you over-identify with your feelings at the moment.

When your first thought sounds something like this, “I feel so hopeless, I must not be worthy of joy.”

Try to replace it with this, “Even though I am struggling with feeling hopeless right now, I acknowledge that this feeling will not last forever. Just like there was a time I didn’t feel hopeless, there will be a time in my future when I no longer feel hopeless.”

Should Statements is when you criticize yourself or others with “shoulds,” “shouldn’ts,” and “musts.”

When your first thought sounds something like this, “I should do all the things on my to-do list and if I don’t I am not healthy.”

Try to replace it with this, “I could do the things on my list today, but instead, I am going to take it easy today and pick one thing from the list that is most approachable/enjoyable.”

Labeling is when you define yourself by a behavior.

When your first thought sounds something like this, “I ate all those Oreos today — I am disgusting.”

Try to replace it with this, “I am feeling gross because I decided to eat all those Oreos. I am going to call a friend to release some stress and eat a balanced dinner because my body is always deserving of a meal.”

Blame is when you take responsibility for something that you were not entirely responsible for.

When your first thought sounds something like this, “I have no self-control and am incapable of reaching my goals.”

Try to replace it with this, “What are some external factors that are making it hard to reach my goals?”

The hope is that with the increased awareness of Twisted Thinking and the practice of compassionate self-talk, you will begin to see a positive transformation in your self-care practices. When you take proper care of yourself, you may also begin to see improved clarity of purpose, passions, and relationships.

So go! Be gentle and kind to yourself on your journey. Set the intention to unconditionally love and accept yourself even as you struggle, fumble, and fail. You are deserving of quality self-care, everyday, regardless of how you look or feel.

Mindfulness
Apr, 07, 2020

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The WOOP Method For Habit Change And Goal Setting

WOOP