3 tips to get started with almost anything – immediately

Last week on the blog I wrote about 5 ways multi-passionate, creative women such as yourself can declutter their minds for success. While the tips I mention in the post are pragmatic, and actionable, there is one thing that remains absolutely necessary in order to achieving anything – success included, and that’s to get started!

After spending years overcoming the fears that kept me from doing what I wanted to do, and be who I wanted to be, I know how hard it can be to get started. Much harder in fact than many things that come after it.

One of the things I procrastinated the longest on was putting myself out there. Spreading my message. Articulating my ideas. Sharing my beliefs. Now that I’ve sort of come out on the other side of that fear of being visible, it’s easy to forget what it took to get here, or how I felt before. When I think about it hard enough, like now when I’m sharing this personal story with you, I remember the hard work that was involved, the fears I had to overcome, the questions, doubts, and insecurities that I’ve worked through…

But what I remember most, and what stands out as an act of personal bravery in my book, is that I got started. Whatever came after, all the successes (and failures) I’ve had until today, none of that would have happened if I hadn’t taken that first step.

You wouldn’t even be reading these words.

That’s why today I want to share 3 tips with you that I’ve used successfully to get started with almost anything – immediately.

The beauty of these tips – as you’ll see below in just a minute – is that you can practice them anytime, anywhere. And what they’ll teach you is how to put the powerful mantra of “do first, think later” into practice for you. Something that has been instrumental in helping me get started on so many of my projects in the past few years.

#1 Ignore (silence) your inner critic

The whole point of doing first, thinking later is that you don’t think but do. Duh! Now listening to your inner nasty doesn’t count as not thinking. However unconscious or subconscious the listening may be, there’s a mental process going on that is keeping you from taking action.

Working my way through my own procrastination, I’ve found that silencing that inner voice really helps to get me moving. One of the ways that really works for me is to acknowledge her, then challenge her beliefs using questions such as “So what?”, “Who cares?”, and “What’s the worst that can happen?”.

#2 Focus on one small step

Failing to take action often comes from wanting things that seem way too big. You’re in a job you hate, single while you’d love to have a relationship, you don’t make the money necessary to live the lifestyle you desire, you’d love to start a business, be fluent in another language, bake cookies for a living… but when you look at where you are right now, you can’t seem to imagine you’ll ever get where you want to be.

I’m here to tell you that there’s nothing wrong with your dream, and that you can achieve it, I have no doubt. But you need to forget about the dream, already! That’s right, in order to work on your dream you need to forget about it so you can focus on one small, and simple step. Nevermind the flourishing business you want to have, the fluency in which you want to speak a new language, or the tons of delicious cookies you’re eager to delight children with. Instead ask yourself what the first step is that you can take to start your business, learn that language, bake a cookie today.

#3 Let your body lead the way

Finally, and this is the tip that really brings all of the above together, let your body take over. To get started we need to physically move our bodies – always. When we imagine doing something we’re firing neurons through our brain, sending signals to our body that something’s about to happen. The body’s reaction is get into motion.

This is not only true when we want to get a snack out of the kitchen, choose a show to watch on Netflix, or grab our laptop to Google something. This is also true when we tell ourselves we should email that accountant about that business we want to start, or pick up that language book and start with that first lesson, or get our ass into the kitchen so we can bake some cookies! The best way to get started is to let your body lead the way. When you’re feeling the body’s readiness to get into action to go and grab that book, let it lead the way.

Before you know it, you’ll have started working your way towards your dreams.

In the spirit of taking action right now, and letting your body lead the way… in the comments below let me know what your big dream is that you’re finally ready to take action on! And if not yet, what’s stopping you from doing it?

The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women by Naomi Wolf

What is beauty? And why are we so obsessed by it?

If you’ve ever suffered to make yourself more “beautiful”, as I suspect you have if you’re a woman alive today, then those questions are worth asking. Not only because of the massive amount of accumulated pains, and moments of physical or emotional discomforts you’ve put yourself through, but more importantly because of the effect it’s had on your personal development, and your position in the world.

I remember my first leg waxing experience as if it was yesterday. I was fifteen, and had just entered puberty. Over the course of a school year I went from flat chested to busty teenager, from boyish hips to curvy, and from hairless girl to hairy lady.

At first I didn’t think much of it. At home beauty wasn’t a thing. My parents were struggling with many issues, for sure, but their appearance, or that of my siblings and I, wasn’t one of them. Actually, if it wasn’t for my then best friend, a girl I did absolutely everything with in total Barb Holland style, I could have walked around like that much longer (OMG imagine that!).

When social pressure turns nothing into something

So one Summer day that year, while we were hanging out my friend looked at my legs, pointed with her index finger towards my tibia, and articulated a alarming “eek!”. Following my friends’ “good advice”, a plan was immediately put in action. She would make an appointment for me to have my legs waxed. A few days later, by then convinced that having hair on your legs was a terrible thing, I laid my faith, and my legs in the hands of a beautician.

I don’t know if you were around in the nineties, but getting a wax back then was a real adventure. It wasn’t quick, or easy. In fact, it was an excruciating process with lukewarm wax paste that could only be pulled off your legs slowly, and little by little.

So I cried, and screamed the entire time. And I also learned a thing or two that day.

First, that when it comes to pain for beauty you’re not supposed to scream, or cry about it, but instead be a brave girl and take it. The beautician made me well aware of this by rolling her eyes about a million times, puffing almost all the air out of the torture chamber, to eventually – when I didn’t get her subtle social cues – telling me to shut up. By the end of the session I must have gotten it, because as I was leaving with my brand new pair of legs, I apologised to her for my seemingly unacceptable behavior.

Then I got a glimpse of what suffering to be beautiful really meant: real pain. There was nothing self-loving or self-caring about the experience, it was just painful. Writing these words as I think back on it I feel for my younger self, and shiver at the thought that our society has managed to brainwash girls, and women into believing that such an act of self-hatred towards the body, and the self is – in fact – self-caring.

The sad thing is, it was my first time going against the nature of my body, but certainly not my last. And so many years later, among many other “self-caring” beauty treats I endure, I’m still having my legs waxed. Aren’t you?

Finally, I noticed the difference. Boys my age were also starting to show hair on their legs, but nobody was telling them to lay down on the torture rack to fix it. In fact, while I was worrying about hair growing on my body my male counterparts were competing with each other to see who was getting the most facial hair…

What about the book?

A long but kind of necessary intro to get to the central premise of The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women, written by the incredibly talented Naomi Wolf when she was only 26 years old.

The book, whose first edition dates back to 1990 (how appropriate), poses the thesis that, as women found a way out of the house, and into the workforce corporations shifted their sales efforts away from women’s homemaking and onto women’s bodies. Where previously advertisement had focused on tyrannizing women into being good homemakers, the pressure is now coming from within as much as outside, with an entire industry telling women to live up to unrealistic beauty standards. This pressure, still present today, then leads to an exacerbated preoccupation with physical appearance both by women, and men, unhealthy behaviors such as eating disorders, and eventually undermines the position of women socially, economically, and politically in society by stealing away their power. Wolf writes:

A culture fixated on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty, but an obsession about female obedience. Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women’s history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.

Throughout the book, Wolf addresses different areas in which beauty is used against women: our workplaces, the cosmetics, and the diet industry. She also discusses the elusive notion of beauty in relation with aging, and states that when women grow old the grow invisible.

The economic animal cares about profit, not women’s rights

Unlike Wolf I don’t believe there’s someone, or a group in particular out there with cunning plans to keep women oppressed, but I do believe there’s an economic animal living a life of it’s own that has been thriving on our insecurities, and that those insecurities are the result of social norms created, and upheld by a masculine – not to say misogynist – society.

This animal feeds on our desire to be loved, and appreciated by feeding us the same lie over and over again: that we’ll never be good enough.

You have to go back to a time before time almost, to an era where the world was ruled by goddesses instead of gods to find societies where feminine qualities were revered instead of shunned, and where being a woman was enough to be called beautiful. I cannot imagine that in such a time women would have the same issues with feeling good enough as we do today.

And so I follow Wolf when she sees this obsession with appearance, and beauty as the current expression of a long lineage of instruments of oppression against women.

Right after the myth of the immaculate home now comes the myth of the immaculate beauty. Especially when you understand how elusive a concept beauty really is…

Reform cures the symptom, but doesn’t fix the problem

In a recent conversation between Ava DuVernay and Oprah Winfrey (a Netflix original that I can only recommend you watch), DuVernay talks about how the criminal justice system in America (following her incredible documentary 13th, another one you really have to watch), is the modern-day equivalent of slavery, only disguised by law, perpetrating an system of inequality primarily affecting the poor, the black, and the brown (as she calls them). DuVernay says:

Historically reform has always led to further repression. Because reform is really people reshaping these mechanisms, these systems to their own end. (…) Which is basically just change it and make it so that it benefits me. And so reform isn’t really what’s needed.

I believe that the same mechanics are at play where the beauty myth is concerned.

Ever since women started being oppressed by men we have fought back. And when the fight was long, and hard enough things (seemed to) change. But why then are we still fighting? One of the reasons lie in the concept of reform.

What we are given every time we “win” isn’t really what we asked for, but a reshaped version of what we had before.

In a way, it’s a problem of semantics.

We get what we seemingly ask for, nothing more, and quite literally.

For instance, women had to fight until the 20th century to be granted the same voting rights as men, but we’re still waiting for the first woman president in the USA, and in countries where women attain the top politically, they still only represent a very small percentage of available positions. So we got the right to vote (literally) but the implied right to participate in the political system… not so much. Wolf writes:

As soon as a woman’s primary social value could no longer be defined as the attainment of virtuous domesticity, the beauty myth redefined it as the attainment of virtuous beauty. It did so to substitute both a new consumer imperative and a new justification for economic unfairness in the workplace where the old ones had lost their hold over newly liberated women.

Or what about this “new” social fixation on how women look, born almost exactly at the same time that women entered the workforce, some 50 odd years ago?

In her conversation with Oprah Winfrey, Ava DuVernay goes on to say that she is in favor of prison abolition as it exists today. Again, I see the parallel with the beauty myth. As long as the oppressor has a say in what the reform will look like, the inequality – how well-disguised it may be – will remain. The only real solution is for the oppressed to take charge.

How do we fix it?

Wolf ends by stating something similar when she says that it is not men who will change what society dictates us to look like, but that if we want real change we’ll have to do that ourselves. By loving ourselves more, but also by reshaping the relation women have with one another. She writes:

By changing our prejudgments of one another, we have the means for the beginning of a noncompetitive experience of beauty. The “other woman” is represented through the myth as an unknown danger. “Meet the Other Woman”, read a Well hair-coloring brochure, referring to the “after” version of the woman targeted. The idea is that “beauty” makes another woman – even one’s own idealized image – into a being so alien that you need a formal introduction. It is a phrase that suggests threats, mistresses, glamorous destroyers of relationships.

This makes The Beauty Myth an ode to sisterhood, and a plea to reframe the relationship we have with each other back into what I believe is our natural state: one of friendship, compassion, support, and love for one another.

Only then will we be able to challenge the status quo. Only then will we achieve women empowerment, gender equality, and peace on Earth. Wolf ends:

Let’s be shameless. Be greedy. Pursue pleasure. Avoid pain. Wear and touch and eat and drink what we feel like. Tolerate other women’s choices. Seek out the sex we want and fight fiercely against the sex we do not want. Choose our own causes And once we break through and change the rules so our sense of our own beauty cannot be shaken, sing that beauty and dress it up and flaunt it and revel in it.

What about you? How do you feel about beauty, and our society’s fixation on appearance? Let me know below, I’d love to know.

52 books in 52 weeks is a self-improvement goal I’ve set for myself, and my business this year. You can follow my progress here, and/or offer a book suggestion here.

Why forgiveness is an act of kindness towards yourself

Last week on the blog I wrote about what to do when someone hurts your feelings. One of the things that I mention in the post is forgiveness, as a way to help you move past whatever someone did to hurt you.

Since the post has been up, I’ve received a number of emails from readers telling me how difficult it is to practice forgiveness sometimes, and how unfair it feels having to be the one “doing the work” when someone else should be doing it instead.

Thank you all for sending me these great questions. They made me think, and want to dig a little deeper into what forgiveness actually is, and why it’s a true act of kindness towards yourself…

Learn to forgive yourself first

We all have things that we’re not proud of, that annoy us about ourselves, that linger on from the past. Bad decisions we made, situations we didn’t deal with as good as we could have, people we hurt…

I like to think that everything begins with ourselves, forgiveness included. And just like I believe you cannot love someone deeply, truly, fully until you give that same kind of love to yourself, I believe you cannot enjoy the benefits of forgiveness entirely until you’ve learned how to forgive yourself.

So the first step towards forgiveness is not about giving your blessings to someone else, but surrounding your own bright self with the loving-kindness that comes from not beating yourself down anymore over a mistake you made, accepting that you’ve dealt with a situation in a shitty way or made a mistake, and silencing your inner nasty when she’s putting on the blame game.

An easy, yet super powerful way to practice self-forgiveness is this:

• Give yourself credit for recognizing your mistake (or whatever it is you’re blaming yourself for). This is the first step towards growth, and not a trivial thing! You deserve to be proud of yourself. Shoulder tap lady!

• Accept that mistakes are a part of life, and that you’re not the first one to make one, nor that this is the last one you’ll ever make. As a recovering people-pleaser, and somewhat of a recovering perfectionist too (hum hum), this was a difficult lesson for me to learn. For a long time my anxiety, and worry revolved almost entirely around me making mistakes. This made it hard for me to be social, go out and enjoy myself because the next days I would be filled with anxiety, worrying about what those people at the party thought of me, and whether or not I’d said the right thing, and been the right way (as if that exists!) all night long. A total nightmare! Until I accepted that I would never be perfect, and that mistakes were part of my life’s journey.

• Know that you are a magical being that learns, and grows all the time! Mistakes are always in the past. And guess what? You don’t live there! You live in the present. Every moment of your life you have the choice to learn from your mistakes so that you can grow into a better version of yourself. I use this growth mindset attitude on a daily basis. Understanding that I’m not my mistakes, that I can outgrow them, and learn from them at the same time comforts me, and helps me to forgive myself.

Now it’s time to start forgiving others

Forgiving yourself is the most important step – but it’s only the first one. Practice it often, whenever you feel you need to. But don’t fall in the trap I fell into for so long: becoming great at forgiving yourself, but walking around with frustrations, sadness, and hurt feelings as a result of what others have done to you.

If you do, you’ll hang on to toxic energy that – newsflash! – only you feel! That’s right. The person that hurt you is most probably totally in the dark about what you’re feeling, and is not being hurt back. Only you are – again!

Forgiving others is a difficult thing to do. Believe me, I know!

And if you’re anything like me, it won’t come to you overnight either… (damn ego!). But you can do it, and it is so absolutely liberating, that I promise you.

The way I forgive others is not driven by selflessness (sorry Buddha, not there yet) but by sheer self-love.

Because forgiving others means being happier, living a better life, removing toxic energy, moving on… good things that will affect your own life first, not always that of the person you’re forgiving.

Forgiving someone comes down almost the same steps as the self-forgiveness practice above:

• Give yourself credit for recognizing that someone has hurt your feelings. You’re protecting your boundaries, and taking good care of yourself there. Well done! As a people-pleaser, I really had to learn this the hard way… actually recognizing that I’d been hurt instead of internalizing all of it.

• Accept that mistakes are part of life, and that other people are only human too. It might not make the hurt go away, but it can certainly deflect it from your ego, and help you realize that we’re all in this human experience together.

• Use the growth mindset to figure out what you can learn when someone hurt your feelings. I believe there’s a silver lining to everything, and this is no exception. Maybe you’ve stumbled on a sensitivity you have that you need to safeguard more, or you weren’t clear on your boundaries enough. This is certainly not to say that you are to blame for someone hurting you, but simply that you can learn how to protect yourself from it.

When you learn to forgive yourself, and others, there’s one universal outcome I believe will come your way: you’ll have a better life. Less stress, less worry, more love, more compassion, and so many other wonderful emotions, feelings, and experiences.

That’s why it’s an act of kindness towards yourself. And for that alone, it’s worth it.

Now do tell me. Is it easy for you to forgive yourself? Others? What works well for you? Let me know below.

What to do when someone hurts your feelings

Throughout my life I had my share of people hurting me, and I can say with absolute certainty that I’m not alone in that. We all get hurt. At certain times though it felt as if being hurt was the natural state of my life, never understanding what I was doing wrong to deserve it, feeling pretty sorry for myself, with no clue at all about what to do when someone hurt my feelings.

Then a few months ago, someone that was pretty close to me lashed out at me, out of nowhere, quite literally in the middle of the night. The incredible thing was that I didn’t feel all that hurt about it, and the hurt that I did feel went away quickly… In the past few years i’ve become much more self-aware. Of my feelings, what I’m made of, what I stand for, and what I believe in. I also started to love myself – finally, and through this process what hurts me, and how I react to other people’s not-so-fun behavior towards me has drastically changed.

This post is an attempt to share what I’ve learned along the way about what to do when someone hurts your feelings, and how a shift in perspective, and true love for yourself makes all the difference.

#1 Who’s hurt you

No two hurts are the same. Depending on the person who hurts you, you’re reaction will be different. Whether you’re full of self-love or not, some people just get to you faster, and deeper than others. My husband for instance doesn’t have to use that many words to hurt my feelings, while some distant relative or acquaintance will have a much harder time shaking my world.

At least that’s the case today.

As a recovering people-pleaser things were pretty different before. When all I wanted was for everyone to like me (never gonna happen lady!), anyone could hurt my feelings – easily. All it took was a few words. It’s only when I learned that I couldn’t possibly be liked by everyone that the hurt started to go down. But that’s not where the biggest transformation happened.

Things really started to shift when I understood it was OK for me not to like everyone either!

When I realized this a lot of the hurt went away on it’s own, and ever since before letting feelings of hurt get to me, I ask myself if I really care about the person who’s doing the hurting. If not, I drop the hurt feelings, and sometimes the person too.

#2 How have they hurt you

There are many ways someone can hurt you. That’s why this is such an important question to ask yourself when you think someone has.

Very often feelings of hurt are a result of our own wounds, and weaknesses. So again, not all hurts are equal. Did someone say something that triggered you? Or was she actually mean to you?

It’s important to be aware of this two main reasons. First, you don’t want to blame someone for something they didn’t do. Then, especially when there’s an internal trigger, you want to use the opportunity to grow. Nobody wants to keep nasty triggers for life, right? So getting clear on what sets you off by analyzing your feelings can help you to grow as a person. And, like knowing who’s hurt you, will help alleviate the hurt itself as well.

#3 You’re in control of your reaction

I believe that in life there are two kinds of events: the ones that you have control over, and the ones that you don’t. How people treat you is part of the latter, but how you react to it isn’t. You have control over that. In fact, when it comes to ourselves, and our feelings, there are many choices we can make because we’re almost always in control.

We can choose not to believe our thoughts, we can choose to feel good even when things don’t go our way, we can even choose to forgive someone who hurt us (more on that below). What we can definitely choose is how we react when someone’s hurt our feelings.

This may sound difficult, maybe even impossible to you. Believe me, it sounded like that to me for a long time as well. Until I realized nobody was actually making my choices for me, hence nobody – whatever they had done to me – could make me feel anything. Only I could do that. Of course having someone hurt your feelings always stings a little. But I’ve learned not to let it get to me or giving it a lot of thought, by asking myself one simple question, something that an anxious mind like mine welcomes with open arms, believe me. How do I want to feel?

#4 Is it worth working things out

Let’s say it’s not an inner trigger that is causing you to feel hurt, but a not-so-fun thing someone said or did to you. Let’s also say this is not a random person, but someone you know or that you can’t simply forget about.

The question to ask yourself now is whether it’s worth working things out with them or not. Is this person worth your time, and do you want to keep them in your life?

This may sound like a very selfish question, but I believe it isn’t. It’s a self-love question. We’re not meant to be for everyone. This implies that not everyone is meant for us either. Just like you have control over how you react to things, so you do about who you allow, or don’t allow into your life. Someone hurting your feelings, especially if it’s deeply or more than once, asks you to consider the relationship, and what it’s worth to you. Is this a reciprocal relationship? Are you happy with it? Would you rather not have this person in your life? Are you the sole giver, or are you also getting in return? These are important questions to determine whether or not it’s worth working things out. If it doesn’t feel right, you have the right to move on.

#5 Forgiveness is an inside job

Finally, when all is said and done, you can choose to forgive the person that hurt you. Not working things out, and moving on are not the same thing as forgiveness. The big thing to understand about forgiveness is that it’s an inside job.

Forgiveness is about you, not the other person. The reason is that all the feelings you walk around with are your own. In most cases, the people hurting us are unaware of our inner life. And when they aren’t what they know of it is usually the tip of the iceberg…

Yet we think we’re punishing them when we’re angry, sad, frustrated. We don’t tell them anything, but we walk around with all those feelings, expecting them to magically know about it, and suffer as we do. Or we’ve put an end to the relationship but still we carry those feelings with us, they linger on, weigh us down. That’s why forgiveness is important. Not for the salvation of someone else’s soul, but to free your own. And that’s why I try to practice it as much as I can, whatever anyone has done to me. Not to heal them, but to heal myself.

In the end what it comes down to for me is, when someone hurts my feelings I’m the one in control. This means I don’t have to “take” anything from that person, not her behavior (obviously) but also not the feelings of hurt she’s given me, not the frustrations or sadness, not even the relationship if I don’t feel it serves me anymore.

When someone hurts my feelings what I do is take control, do everything I can to heal myself, to learn, and move on.

How about you? What do you do when someone hurts your feelings? Do let me know below, I really want to know.

7 best planners to achieve your goals

The new year is just around the corner, the best time to start setting some new goals for yourself. Making the decision to do something might be easy, but sticking to them throughout the year is always the hard part. If you want to get closer to achieving your dreams this year, you need to get organized. And the right planner can make you to do just that.

When I choose a planner I look for a number of specific things, of which the major ones are: clear overviews for months, weeks, to-dos and task lists, great paper quality, enough writing space, interesting prompts, and most important of all systems that help me to create, and achieve really big goals!

Based on those criteria I’ve put together a list of what I consider to be the 7 best planners to achieve your goals in 2017.

#1 The Clever Fox Planner

The Clever Fox Planner is an agenda, daily planner, gratitude journal and goal-setting tool all rolled into one. That’s why I feel it deserves to be #1 on this list. According to its designers – a team of five passionate online entrepreneurs – this planner is the solution for anyone looking to boost their productivity and hit their goals while also increasing their happiness through self-development.

Vitaly, one of the creators of this unique planner, explains:

We are all about productivity and personal development, so we knew we needed a system to track our goals and to help us increase our performance (and overall quality of life). As true believers that pen and paper works wonders to program our subconscious mind, our quest lead us to paper planners.

Vitaly and his team tried out several productivity planners on the market, and although those were great, they knew something was missing. Either the planners were only for 3 or 6 months (while they wanted a 12 month planner), either the planner lacked some very important features (such as a habit tracker or yearly goal focus section), or they did not have enough space for notes, to-dos or goals. In the end, for lack of finding the planner that would 100% satisfy Vitaly and his team’s needs, they decided to create it for themselves. That’s how The Clever Fox Planner was born.

Click here to discover The Clever Fox Planner

I love The Clever Fox Planner for many reasons. The most important ones are that you can start with this planner any day of the year thanks to its unmarked calendar, that each weekly overview comes with its own habit tracking section, to-do list, main goal and priorities overview, and room to reflect on your week’s wins and lessons learned.

At the beginning of the planner you’ll find a gratitude and self-awareness section, a page to add your daily rituals and affirmations, a double-sided spread to create a vision board. The planner also included a double spread for your life and business goals followed by an overview page to list your five most important goals of the year, and a mind map section.

I also have great news for bullet journal fans (and note takers like moi). The end of the planner has a large section of dotted pages. Perfect to bullet journal, keep notes, organize your thoughts, track ideas and so much more. A must-have for any planner lover if you ask me!

#2 The Passion Planner

This structured planner is designed to help you navigate your passions, transform them into reachable goals, and define a roadmap to achieve them.

Founder and designer of the Passion Planner Angelia Trinidad says:

I wanted to help people overcome that feeling by making a tool that sat them down to clearly define their goals and dreams, break them down into more actionable steps, and then write them in a place that they would see and use everyday.

Angelina shares her story about the planner here.

Click here to discover the Passion Planner

I love the Passion Planner because it really delivers on its promise. It has super simple directions on how to use it and why, a monthly calendar view for each month (which I cannot live without!), and pages for reflections. The reflection section is what makes this planner really unique. And I love that on the right side there’s a blank area for you to get really creative – brain dump, draw, create a mind map, write notes. Anything you need to achieve your goals!

#3 Day Designer

The Day Designer is really a work of art. It’s beautiful, intuitive, and has so much space for everything! I like the classic look of this planner (how can you say no to a black, white, and gold combo?!)

Whitney English created this planner because she saw a void in organizational tools for fellow female entrepreneurs. You can check the Day Designer story here.

The first pages of the Day Designer offer different worksheets, each designed to help you find out your personal skills, values, vision, passions, and strengths. Yes, it’s very important to understand yourself in order to achieve your goals!

Click here to discover the Day Designer

The planner gives each day a separate page, except for Saturday and Sunday, which share one page. Each weekday, Monday through Friday, has an hourly schedule from 5am to 9pm (great for early birds!), op 3 to-do prompts, a general to-do list (checklist), an inspiration quote, dinner planning, a spot to record daily gratitude, notes and more.

The Day Designer has a monthly calendar with beautiful tabs and daily pages for your appointments/meetings, a to-do list, and a section to remember your projects and deadlines. This planner is an extremely helpful tool to help organize all of your goals, ideas, tasks, thoughts, and even memories!

#4 Daily Greatness

I love the Daily Greatness journals, and planners! They’re between Leonie Dawson’s workbooks, and more mainstream daily or monthly planners, and offer a well of incredible tools to gain clarity, work on your goals, and achieve more!

I particularly love the Business Planner, who has literally everything you need to be launch a new business, or elevate an existing one to the next level. It’s so good, that I recommend it to almost all of my business coaching clients!

Click here to discover the Daily Greatness planners

This year, Daily Greatness came out with a new Yoga Journal, and Parents Journal. Absolutely worth checking out if you’re looking for more structure in your life, business or both.

#5 Inkwell Press LiveWell Planner

The Inkwell Press Livewell Planner is an absolutely delightful planner. My favorite part of this planner is the focus on goal setting and productivity. At the beginning of the planner, there‘s a section for planning your yearly goals. Every month has a mission board for setting new goals in areas such as Personal Goals, House Plans, and Health and Fitness. Each month also comes with note pages, and you can reflect on the past month and plan for the next.

Click here to discover the LiveWell Planner

There are also some fun features at the back of the planner: a gift list, travel records, a books and/or movies list, a monthly bill tracker, and a section where you can record important dates (birthdays, anniversaries, etc.).

The Inkwell Livewell Planner is a colorful, playful, and very feminine planner.

#6 Danielle LaPorte’s Desire Map Planner

Danielle LaPorte’s Desire Map Planner not only helps you plan your to-do list, but also inspires you to feel the way you want to feel. This is soulful planning at its best, and a core piece of setting goals successfully!

Click here to discover Danielle LaPorte’s Desire Map Planner

The Planner was created by Danielle LaPorte. Here’s what she says about the planner:

I’m going to say something a bit audacious and salesy-sounding. Here goes: The Evergreen Desire Map Day Planner could totally uplift your life. Because being mindful, reflective, honest, optimistic, on time, and at least a bit organized — is a daily deal. The inspired and “together” life you dream of has got to have practical applications. This is it. A Day Planner that incorporates your soul and your to-do list; your core desired feelings and your goals; your gratitude and your plans for change.

The Desire Map Planner leads you to focus on your soul, life, and goals. The planner will help you to keep track of small and large intentions in your personal and professional life, take better care of yourself, focus on your mindset, creative ideas, and feel grateful throughout 2017!

#7 Erin Condren Life Planner

Are you looking for a planner that can do it all?

Erin Condren Life Planner is full of tools you can use to plan your year. This planner is created to help you set goals, figure out what you truly want and take charge of your life.

What makes the Erin Condren Life Planner (even more) awesome is that you can totally customize your planner to make it unique:

• You can choose between a neutral or colorful interior. You can pick a cover, or interchange them by purchasing different beautiful laminated ones and change them depending on your mood.

• You can decide between different weekly layouts ( vertical / horizontal / hourly) and 12 or 18 month options. Every new month has a beautiful internal cover page with inspiring words.

Once you open the planner, you’ll see the year-at-a-glance pages. There are 12 boxes that are perfect for writing (and keeping track of!) your monthly goals.

Click here to discover Erin Condren’s Life Planner

An entire week is spread across two pages (from Monday to Sunday) and each day features a lined section. After all of the monthly/weekly spreads in the planner, you will find the notes section.

You will also get two pages with stickers (birthday, vacation, days off, and so on). Another feature is the Perpetual Calendar where you can write down all important dates, and it’s really great because you can take it from planner to planner.

All of this makes the Erin Condren planner very easy to use, super functional, and absolutely beautiful and unique at the same time!

Now do tell me. Do you use a daily or monthly planner? What’s your favorite, and why? In the comments below, share how you plan and organize your days. I’d really love to know.

7 easy things you can do to release anxiety (immediately)

In the past years, I’ve worked really hard to overcome my anxieties, to stop the worry chatter in my head. Along the way, through my coaching practice, I’ve also helped a lot of women overcome their anxieties, fears, worries.

Through this work, I’ve learned that anxiety can be lessened, sometimes even cured entirely, but that to do so you need to change one or more aspects of your life.

What Is Anxiety?

Anxiety is a terribly unpleasant feeling of fear, worry or even panic. When we’re anxious we feel stressed out, our heart pounds in our chest, our breathing changes, our mind goes into overdrive, with what seems like millions of thoughts per second. Or we’re so focused on one fearful thought or experience, that we can’t get it out of our head, as if it was haunting us! We get up with it in the morning, we go to bed with it at night. This can last for hours, days, weeks on end. Believe me, I know, I’ve been there many times.

The thing is, everyone experiences anxiety sometimes. We all inevitably worry about ordinary, day-to-day issues, such as health, family, work, money. That’s perfectly OK.

When Fear Or Worry Won’t Let Go

The problem starts when you can’t seem to shake a fearful, negative thought or when – even after a particular experience has ended – it remains in your mind, and you still worry about it. Another expression of anxiety, one that I struggled with for a long time (still do sometimes) is worrying about all possible, negative scenarios concerning an experience (past or present), a person, or a thing.

Most of the excessive worry is irrational, yet the fear or worry won’t let go. Unpleasant to say the least, often difficult to live with, anxiety can be mild or strong depending on a number of factors, ranging from higher emotional awareness, sensitivity to stress, family history, trauma, or even genes.

Your environment, what you eat, the amount of sleep you get, the people you surround yourself with… all of these things can also have an impact on your level of anxiety.

7 Easy Things You Can Do To Release Anxiety (Immediately)

Throughout the years I’ve learned how to deal with my anxiety, and worry much more efficiently. The good news is, there are simple and effective ways to get rid of big chunks of anxiety, calm the brain, relax the body, get back on track with your life. Some start working right away, while others need more practice, may help lessen anxiety over time.

1. Get Enough Sleep

Women often don’t get as much sleep as they need or don’t sleep well. But sleep is designed specifically to help control stress. It’s something you should never skip on purpose.

Go to bed at the same time each night and wake up at the same time each morning (even on the weekends). Try to schedule a full seven to nine hours of snooze time every day.

When I don’t get my eight hours of sleep I’m not just tired, I’m more anxious too, I even get a tat depressed (another symptom of anxiety to some people).

2. Eat Well-Balanced Meals

Give the body the support it needs. You should limit your intake of rich, fatty, or spicy food, especially during your evening meal.

Try to eat more products that contain vitamin B, omega-3s, healthy whole-grain carbohydrates.

A morning glass of green juice can get you on the right side of calm. You can try this recipe (which is one of my favorites) for a guaranteed mood-booster: combine one banana or green apple, sliced ginger, a bunch of kale, one lime, cucumber slices, a few ice cubes, a cup of water to a blender or juicer. For more protein add an egg, yogurt, nuts, or protein powder.

3. Get Rid of Clutter

A messy workspace or home can make it difficult to relax. Make a habit of keeping things clean and anxiety-free. Take 10 minutes to tidy up your living space or work area every day. I don’t do this nearly enough, but when I do the feeling of bliss that comes over me when things are neat and tidy is incredible.

If you have too much stuff cluttering up your living or work space, try this quick hack for instant clean-up madness:

• Choose just one drawer, cabinet or closet to clean out

• Take everything out

• Categorize the stuff you don’t use (I usually get rid of anything I haven’t used for four consecutive seasons) by making three piles for items to throw away, to donate, to sell

• Only put back the stuff you use

• Get rid of the throw-aways immediately, mark your calendar for the ones to donate or to sell

4. Meditate

Meditation or mindfulness training can help you learn how to better cope with stress. One aspect of anxiety is racing thoughts that won’t go away. Meditation helps with this part of the problem by quieting the overactive mind. Or it will teach you how to not let yourself be affected by your thoughts, which is my case.

Give yourself the gift of serenity, start the day with 10 to 20 minutes of solitude and positive energy.

I’m a big fan of transcendental meditation. It has helped with my anxiety tremendously, amazing results from a practice of two times 20 minutes a day.

5. Hold Your Breath

Yoga breathing has been shown to be effective in lowering stress and anxiety. There is a classic yoga breathing technique “The 4-7-8 Breathing Exercise”, also called “The Relaxing Breath”. This was one of the first breathing techniques I was every introduced too, long before I was practicing transcendental meditation, or any other effective anxiety-relieving method, I was using this technique successfully.

One reason it works is that you can’t breathe deeply and be anxious at the same time. How great, right? To do the 4-7-8 breath:

• Sit comfortably in a straight up position.

• Exhale through your mouth, making a ‘whoosh’ sound.

• Close your mouth, inhale quietly through your nose for 4 seconds.

• Hold your breath for 7 seconds.

• Exhale through your mouth, making a whoosh sound for 8 seconds.

• This is one breath. Now inhale again, repeat the cycle three more times for a total of four breaths.

6. Get Hot

Heating up your body reduces muscle tension, anxiety. One of the symptoms of my anxiety has always been muscle stiffness. When I get stressed, my muscles contract without me realizing it. This puts a lot of pressure on my body.

Take a long bath or hot shower, you may find that your anxiety decreases right away (it does with me).

Warming up may be one of the ways that exercise – not to mention curling up by a fire with a cozy cup of tea – boosts your mood.

7. Create a Vision Board for Your Anxiety-Free Life

If you believe that positive things are going to happen, they usually do! I’m a big believer in visualization. One way to enjoy the benefits of visualization is to create a vision board. This is a type of blueprint for the kind of life you’d like to create for yourself.

It’s important to make sure that your vision board not only holds the vision you have for your life, but also reflects the feelings you want to see come forward when you’re actually enjoying that life, looking at the board.

When it comes to anxiety, your vision board should be about things that calm you down. Sounds crazy, I know, but it really does work!

You can also try to make an e-vision board using Pinterest for some Pinspiration. Keep this vision board within your reach. Look at it with love, know that each time you see it, you’ll feel grounded, happy, calm.

Remember, life isn’t something to take too seriously. Often when we worry, that’s all we do. Everything is so serious, so scary, so fearful. When I’m working my way through anxiety, I try to remember to make time to do something I truly enjoy: read a book, talk to a friend, craft, learn something new.

Especially when your anxious, it’s important to find balance in your life focus on the good things that surround you.

Looking forward to hearing from you below. So do tell me, what works to reduce your anxiety? How do you deal with worry?

FREE MEMBERS: DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE ANXIETY WORKSHEET

Did you know that free members of The Sisterhood Collective get access to my free resources library? To become a member, and download your free anxiety worksheet, simply click on the picture below.

How to overcome your fear of conflict

For as long as I can remember, I hated conflict. Until well into my adulthood, I was unable to confront anyone about anything in a more or less decent way. I would keep things bottled up for as long as I could, until there wasn’t any room left to bottle any more. Then, everything would come out. In those moments I’d change from a nice, and understanding woman into a nasty, and irrational version of myself.

After a confrontation had taken place, when I would calm down, my opponents would tell me that I couldn’t handle criticism, that there was no way to reason with me during those phases of anger. And of course they were right.

Fear of conflict is a complex issue

It took me a long time to see that I had an issue with conflict. I thought I was good at it, strengthened by the fact that I had almost no conflict in my life. Until I understood that it was not diplomatic skills, or perfect negotiation abilities that made it so, but rather that I did everything I could to avoid conflict. Always. Everywhere. At all costs.

As a recovering people-pleaser, and a highly sensitive person, I’ve come to believe that my fear of conflict shares its origin with my people-pleasing, and perfectionistic tendencies. In fact, I’ve been able to pinpoint four factors that greatly contributed to me being so afraid of conflict:

#1 I’ve had to deal with conflict growing up

Throughout my childhood, I’ve been witness to, and victim of conflict, mostly because of the recurring, often hurtful confrontations between my parents. So my childhood didn’t feel safe. In fact, I grew up in an environment where emotions weren’t dealt with properly, where anger wasn’t allowed, where anxiety was all around. As a result, I’d become totally conflict averse, and have not learned to stand up for myself in a healthy, positive way.

#2 Unresolved conflict shaped me as a people-pleaser

Because conflict was never resolved at home – just suppressed until the next outburst – early on I started to internalize this conflict anxiety until I believed all of it was my fault. I became a people-pleaser as a means to try and solve the recurring conflicts. Of course other events, and experiences helped shape my people-pleasing behavior, but consistently being exposed to lingering conflict at such an early age definitely played a big part in it. Trying to please everyone became so important to me, that I couldn’t stand the idea of someone being mad at me. So I became even more afraid of conflict. How ironic, right?

#3 People-pleasing led to perfectionism

Trying to please everyone all the time quickly led to perfectionism. As much as I hated the idea of anyone being mad at me, I hated the idea of losing self-control even more. Still in an effort to resolve the conflicts at home, through people-pleasing trials and errors that led me nowhere, I developed a cruel version of a perfect self. I convinced myself that once I’d be that girl, all would finally be well. But because that girl didn’t get angry, was always composed, accepted everything without complaining it became impossible for me to stand up for myself. By this stage I wasn’t just afraid of conflict, I’d also rationalized why it was imperative to avoid it at all costs.

#4 Avoidance of conflict hurt my self-confidence

Growing up with unresolved, lingering conflict, and developing people-pleasing behavior, I wasn’t able to build a strong foundation for self-confidence. When you keep on trying to fix something that is not in your power to fix, and keep blaming yourself for it, you’re like Sisyphus, eternally trying to roll a rock up a mountain. I felt something was deeply wrong with me, otherwise why would this situation persist? This only made things worse. I wasn’t just afraid of someone being mad at me, or of shattering the picture-perfect image of myself. Because of my low self-confidence I also became terrified of the result of confrontations. Because of my lack of self-confidence, the potential retaliation was unbearable to me, a source of much of my anxieties. Having never witnessed conflict being resolved in a positive way, I was terrified by what the other person would do when I stood up for myself by confronting them.

How to overcome your fear of conflict

In my case, the healing process started when I understood the underlying dynamics that caused me to fear conflict so much. By doing that work I was confronted with my lack of self-confidence, self-worth, and self-love.

Having worked my way through understanding fear, overcoming fear, and helping my clients get through their fears, I believe (as Susan Jeffers so beautifully said in her magnificent book Feel The Fear And Do It Anyway) that all our fears come down to one and the same thing: we’re all afraid we won’t be able to handle it. That we’ll be all alone.

What if I told you that from now on until the end of your life, whatever comes your way, good or bad, you’ll be able to handle it. Would you be afraid of anything?

Probably not.

But when you lack self-confidence, self-worth, and self-love like I did, it’s hard to believe that you can handle anything, let alone conflict. So you’re afraid of it. Like I was. And you don’t engage in it, desperately trying to avoid:

• people thinking bad of you,

• people not liking you,

• people seeing through your picture-perfect self,

• people retaliating,

• and so on…

… so that you could finally be loved, because you’ve convinced yourself you’re not lovable to begin with.

The way out of fear is through self-confidence (and self-love)

Conflict is unavoidable. You’re not alone on the planet, there are people all around you at work, and at home. You’re a social being that interacts with other social beings. So you’re bound to run into things that are unpleasant, and that you need to defend yourself for, or confront another person about. And that’s OK. It happens every day all around the world.

Some people are actually pretty good at handling conflict, and resolving confrontations in a positive way. What differentiates those people from how I used to be is their level of self-confidence.

When they confront someone, their self is not in jeopardy. Whatever comes out of that conflict will not dictate how much people love them, or more importantly, how much they love themselves. By believing in themselves first, and having a healthy dose of self-confidence, self-worth, and self-esteem, these people can work their way through conflict in a healthy way.

Self-confidence means trusting yourself

Whatever your level of self-confidence today, you have the ability to work on dealing with conflict more easily. And it all starts with trusting yourself.

The more you believe in yourself, the less you’ll be affected by:

• what other people think of you,

• by people not liking,

• by not being perfect all the time,

• by how people might retaliate,

• and so on…

Or, as Gary Vaynerchuk says (slightly paraphrasing here Gary, hope that’s OK), they put zero weight into anyone’s opinion about themselves, because they know exactly who they are.

What a powerful statement, right? Bathed in a tremendous amount of self-awareness, self-confidence, self-worth, and self-love. And that’s exactly what you need to focus on to overcome your fear of conflict.

Now it’s your turn. In the comments below, let me know what your biggest fear is when it comes to conflict. How do you deal with it? What’s been helpful when you needed to stand up for yourself?