Why is it more challenging and stressful to be with family during holiday periods or extended family vacations? Because you go in to those periods with high expectations rather than approaching holidays more realistically. To make this time more enjoyable, you can:

• Plan ahead with important logistics (travel, money, food, rest).

• Anticipate how you’ll relate with different family members and friends

• including what has triggered you or helped you in the past.

• Choose your battles more thoughtfully.

• Set clear boundaries around how you want to approach your visit.

• Anticipate changes and transitions tied to aging and illness.

• Respond with adult emotional resources without letting your reactions get hijacked as they might have in your youth.

People who are anxious or worry a lot tend not to take their worries out to a logical end point, so they continue to worry about the same concern(s) over and over without resolving the worry. Worriers exhibit a lack of belief and trust in their capacity to handle tasks, logistics and feelings associated with each worry.

To Resolve:

Walk your anxiety and worry out to its logical end point by using the “Resourcefulness Reset”. With each worry ask yourself two questions:

1) what’s the worst that could happen? and 2) what if it did, then what. Visualize the resources you’ll need (logistics, people, emotional), then take action based on knowing those resources are available to you for each aspect of your concern.

Check out ‘Ease Your Anxiety’ on Amazon as an additional resource.

Perhaps you engage in habits of thinking, feeling or behaving that quietly become obstacles to your desired self-confidence and success. Awareness is the first step to developing new and more productive habits, so take note of the ones you might be using.

They include close-mindedness, an absence of self-reflection, staying disconnected or distracted from yourself, refusing to stay in touch with your moment to moment experience, disliking change, negative thinking, harsh self-criticism, fearing failure, having difficulty speaking up, isolating yourself and no sense of mission or purpose or an absence of activity that is meaningful to you.

Enhancing your awareness means you are on the path to break these self-sabotage habits, and that there is a roadmap to follow to your confidence and success.

Perhaps you live in an entirely different situation and manner than what you experienced during your youth. Yet it is quite common to react with a similar emotional pattern to the one you once used for survival when you were young.

Key Points To Remember:

• You may still be using that same emotional pattern – the one developed during childhood to “read” present-day adult conversations and situations.
• It may include ignoring danger when danger is present, gravitating back to old unsafe experiences or ignoring safety when safety is present.
• The emotional coping strategies that were adaptive for you and that you used to survive during childhood are often the same strategies that imprison you in adulthood.
• This podcast is about how to reset your internal emotional barometer so you can trust your intuition and more accurately read safety and danger, life events and situations.

Emotional flexibility is the goal. As the environment or context changes, then your coping strategies will ideally change as well.

Tip: Increase your awareness by writing down your own safety and danger signals. Write down how you used to function in the past and how those behaviors may no longer relate to your current situation.

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