September 2019 – The Princess Guide

Posted on September 25, 2019September 25, 2019 by seneeseale

Seasons change: Don’t worry, be happy

Autumn has arrived on the calendar, but here in Texas, it’s still Summer … I saw pumpkins outside my grocery store today literally getting sunburned! I feel like Rapunzel needing to let down my long hair, but it’s just too hot to do that.

This is my favorite time of year because now until the end of the year, it’s full of football, festivals (Oktoberfest, the State Fair of Texas, pumpkin patches, art festivals, etc.), celebrations (homecomings, my birthday, Halloween/Harvest, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s) and the temperature loses its oppressive heat and eventually, slowly becomes comfortable. Waiting for that to happen is the hard part. (I wrote on social media recently that I was having trouble waiting for things to happen.)

I love seasons because when one becomes too much to deal with or boring, you know a change will most definitely be coming (unless you live in a place like Southern California where it’s hot year-round, or at least it was the semester I was in graduate school there … I was rummaging through my closet on Thanksgiving Day to find a sleeveless shirt to wear in the 90-degree heat while eating my turkey dinner — not fun for me!)

My pastor outside Nashville once said, “Some people are seasonal people, and some people are meant to be in your life for the long-term.” At the time, that statement hurt me. I realize now, almost two decades later, that I wasn’t hurt. I was offended — that’s much worse in my book because being offended is a choice we each make. In the last almost 20 years, I’ve watched the revolving door of people walk in and out of my life. Some of them were supposed to be forever friends and family. I had to learn the hard lesson that even those you love the most and are closest to can choose to leave. When this happens, your season changes.

These changes can be difficult, but they don’t have to be. It’s all in our perception. We can choose how we view events in our lives. I believe three of the most important tools for dealing with change and new seasons are optimism, joy and gratitude.

The glass is half FULL

William James put it best, “It is our attitude at the beginning of a difficult task which, more than anything else, will affect its successful outcome.”

You’ll get what you look for. If you’re looking for misery, you will find it. If you are looking for beauty, you will find that, too. The great thing about it is that YOU get to decide what you want to look for. Yes, change can be crappy. It can — and usually is — full of difficult moments, but it can also have beautiful moments, too. I think the reason we don’t see or focus on the beauty is because there are typically more negatives in a situation to take our attention away from the positives.

When I was studying Marriage & Family Therapy in graduate school, I came across a quote from Gary Zukav in our textbook Culturally Competent Counseling, “Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe. What we believe is based upon our perceptions. What we perceive depends upon what we look for. What we look for depends upon what we think. What we think depends upon what we perceive. What we perceive determines what we believe. What we believe determines what we take to be true. What we take to be true is our reality.”

Think about the gold miners during the gold rush. Did they dip their pans in the water and pull them out full of gold? No! They were lucky to find a small nugget, but that small nugget was worth a ton of money and all the trouble it took to find it.

We create our reality, and reframing negative events to see the good in them is a great practice to put into action so that, over time, it becomes automatic. When you catch yourself having negative thoughts, redirect them and encourage yourself. Look for the beauty in the change, even if it’s tiny.

“When everything was hopeless, Abraham believed anyway, deciding to live not on the basis of what he saw he couldn’t do but on what God said he would do. And so, he was made father of a multitude of peoples. God himself said to him, ‘You’re going to have a big family, Abraham!’” Romans 4:18 (MSG).

CHOOSING joy/happiness

This year, I’ve seen an explosion of online personalities talking about happiness. It became a buzzword a few months ago with CEO of VaynerMedia, Gary Vee (Vaynerchuk) talking about it on social media. Then all these other content creators followed suit bombarding my inbox and social media feeds with their pitches on why I needed to buy their online courses to learn to be happy.

While Gary Vee is usually the trendsetter, it was ME who began talking about joy and happiness with blog posts in 2014, and I wrote a newspaper article about it in 2006. There’s a lot of scientific research to show that being happy and having joy in your life will not only make you feel better, but it can enhance your health and longevity.

Here’s the thing: Happiness is an inside job. It isn’t something you find externally. It’s taken me more than four decades to realize this. (I’m working on a book about being happy in which I take you on my journey of regaining my joy/happiness … Stay tuned for information on that!)

This meme really sums it up, “I am in charge of how I feel, and today I am choosing happiness.” You have the power to be happy or miserable. The choice is up to you.

Being grateful for EVERYTHING

I’ve said it many times before, and I’ll continue to say it: I believe that one of the greatest traits of a princess (anyone resonating on a higher frequency) is gratitude. What is gratitude? Webster Illustrated Contemporary Dictionary defines gratitude and grateful as “A feeling of thankfulness; having or expressing gratitude, thankful; affording gratification (the act of gratitude or the state of being gratified).”

“Thank [God] in everything [no matter what the circumstances may be, be thankful and give thanks], for this is the will of God for you [who are] in Christ Jesus [the Revealer and Mediator of that will],” 1 Thessalonians 5:18 (Amplified Bible).

The bad things will all work out for your good — maybe not immediately, but eventually you will see that what looked like a devastating storm actually gave you the chance to rebuild your life into the dream house you’ve always wanted.

I was watching one of my favorite movies The Lake House recently and was reminded of a song I loved as a little girl by Carole King called It’s too late. I really love the lines of the last verse:

There will be good times again for me and you, but we just can’t stay together. Can’t you feel it too? Still I’m glad for what we had and how I once loved you. But it’s too late baby. Now it’s too late. Though we really did try to make it. Something inside has died and I can’t hide and I just can’t fake it. No, no, no …

Even though she’s singing about the ending of a relationship, I love how she focuses on the gratitude she has for the experience. There is beauty in every experience — even the bad ones that devastate us and bring us to our knees. We have to look for it.

“When something ends it seems like the end of something. Consider that the ending of it was actually part of the process of something new beginning,” wrote Hemal Radi.

How can you put optimism, joy/happiness and gratitude into practice during the changing seasons in your own life?

Catch these first-run Write About It Wednesday blogs every Wednesday. For more information on how to have successful relationships and peace of mind, check out the bookstore today!

Posted on September 18, 2019September 18, 2019 by seneeseale

Rebuilding your life after the hurricane

There was a song I used to sing in my 20s called After the hurricane. It was about rebuilding your life after tragedy. I had no idea then how many times I would experience tragic loss in my life — with jobs, love, friends, you name it.

When I was studying Substance Abuse Counseling, everyone in the college system was required to read a book called 1 Dead in Attic. I don’t have the book with me as I’m writing this on the road, but I was told the author visited the college the semester before I started. The book was fascinating to me because it was written by a journalist chronicling the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. He wrote about how people would go to closed convenience stores just to get toothpaste and deodorant. If I remember correctly, he said he left an IOU note when he went. He said people put their refrigerators on the front porches because of the rotten food smells inside. He also said people would sit on their porches at night and drink alcohol to cope with the disaster.

The title of the book came from houses in the city being spray painted on the front “1 dead in attic” after each house was inspected and deceased people were found inside. I was told by faculty members in the counseling program that the author was still clearly dealing with the psychological and emotional effects of the event years later.

When I was working as a reporter and editor at a newspaper in North Carolina, we were trained by the National Weather Service to cover hurricanes. We were told that the media focuses on the wrong thing — they focus on the eye of the storm instead of the bands. The flooding from the rain bands kills and causes the damage.

To me, it’s the aftermath of an event and how we handle it that is more important than the event itself. As I wrote in The Princess Guide to Healing a Broken Heart, no one can determine how long your healing process will take. Think about it like this: the bigger the hurricane in your life, the longer the recovery, clean-up and rebuilding process will take. We often rush our recovery to please everyone around us and say we’re fine and over it. But it literally can take years for us to begin feeling like ourselves again after a psychological hurricane hits our lives. That’s alright! Do the internal work, and let the process take as long as it takes. Tell anyone around you to either get a hammer and help you rebuild, or shut up about your healing process.

I was recently staying at a hotel, and they played a song from the 60s called Undun by The Guess Who. The lyrics caught my attention:

She’s come undone. She wanted truth, but all she got was lies, came the time to realize, and it was too late. She’s come undone. She didn’t know what she was headed for, and when I found what she was headed for it was too late. It’s too late. She’s gone too far. She lost the sun. She’s come undone.

Granted, they’re probably singing about substance use since it was written in the 60s, but these lyrics could describe any tragedy — especially relationship loss.

I’ve come to realize that when tragedy strikes, it’s an opportunity to rebuild and reinvent your life. Madonna has often said that she’s had to reinvent herself many times. I think that’s part of this existence. Some of us make it look easy, but it isn’t. The process is hard, uncomfortable and very unsure. It’s like me being in a car that flipped five times in 2005 — you think you know where you’re headed, but you really have no idea of what’s actually happening in that moment or how it will turn out. Do the internal work. Trust the process, and have faith that everything will work out for your good.

As hard as it is to fathom in the moment, let the process run it’s course like a hurricane, tornado or car accident. When you survive to tell the story, you will have the opportunity to rebuild your life in a way that works better for you.

Catch these first-run Write About It Wednesday blogs every Wednesday. For more information on how to have successful relationships and peace of mind, check out the bookstore today!

Posted on September 4, 2019August 25, 2019 by seneeseale — 1 Comment

Animals are good judges of character

We all know the power animals have to help us mentally and emotionally. Therapy dogs, horses, etc. have been used for years to help people with mental, physical and emotional issues. In my life, to say that 2019 is the year of the animal would be an understatement … I have had so many random encounters with animals that it just blows my mind!

I was walking up my private sidewalk to my front door one day when I noticed something I couldn’t make out or clearly see. As I got closer, it jumped about three feet off the ground and ran up the tree outside my living room. My scream turned into laughter as I realized it was a squirrel. As it was running up the tree I said, laughing, “You scared me!” I think it might be the same squirrel I watch play in the tree outside my balcony on the other side of my townhouse.

During a trip to Los Angeles to visit my best friend earlier in the summer, I woke up the first morning to her son’s two goldfish in the corner of the tank next to where I was sleeping looking at me. I told my best friend that I felt like the girl in Enchanted lately with animals of all kinds being attracted to me. She said I’m Cinderella … She could be right!

One day, I was enjoying a cup of coffee under a tree, and several birds landed next to me. I just started talking to them like I do all animals saying hello and asking how they were doing. A duck and its baby waddled past me a couple of times in my office parking lot. The second time, the duck just stopped and let me get close enough to admire its green neck.

This makes me think about that song by The Carpenters Close to You that was so popular when I was a little girl:

“Why do birds suddenly appear every time you are near? Just like me, they long to be close to you. Why do stars fall down from the sky every time you walk by? Just like me, they long to be close to you. On the day that you were born the angels got together and decided to create a dream come true. So, they sprinkled moondust in your hair and golden starlight in your eyes of blue …”

All of these encounters make me feel honored and special. I’ve become very aware this year of the connections we have with the earth and animals. This realization comes easily for some people. (My grandfather was a genius at growing food, flowers and plants and working with animals.) For me, it has been a slow awakening — beautiful and astonishing all at the same time.

I believe animals have some sense of cognition. At the very least, they have spiritual cognition and know things on another level. Dogs more so than most.

Human’s best friend

I was walking in the parking lot of my workplace one day and passed a man with a little dog on a leash. The dog approached me, then started growling. Dogs don’t usually growl at me. So, I just smiled and walked past them. The next thing I knew, I heard, “Clang, clang, clang.” I looked down, and the little dog was at my feet looking up at me. I realized that he wasn’t growling at me. He was growling at his owner for not letting him get close to me and broke away — leash and all — to be near me. I just laughed as I bent down and said to the little dog, “You like chasing pretty girls, don’t you?” His owner ran to catch up with him and got the leash back saying that he has never done that before. The little dog started licking my feet then started growling again as the owner pulled him away from me.

While on a mini vacation this summer, I was sitting on a bench in front of a hotel enjoying my morning coffee when an older couple pulled up. They got out of the car with another little dog on a long leash. He made a beeline for me, and licked my leg before his owner could pull him away saying, “Come on buddy.” I just smiled at the dog and said, “Hello. How you doing?”

A close friend of mine (and former editor) once told me that animals and children are the best judges of character. She had a huge Great Dane named Goliath. That dog loved me! While I was staying with them during my divorce, he would run to meet me at the door, then proceed to sniff every inch of me. My friend said he was making sure I wasn’t cheating on him. (That always makes me giggle when I remember it.)

Goliath didn’t like everyone, however. I was briefly dating a guy at that time who Goliath growled at like he was about to eat him. The guy was scared … He should have been because that dog knew exactly who he was and what he was up to. It wasn’t long until my friend ran into that guy with one of my close friends from church, of all places! (He did the same thing to her shortly after that incident.)

Sometimes, I wish I had those animal instincts. They could have saved me from a lot of heartache … But they would have also stopped me from experiencing powerful love. So, I can’t regret any decision in life. I’ve learned from all of them and grown into the princess I am today because and in spite of them.

How are you making a conscious effort to be kind to all forms of life and one with nature today?

Catch these first-run Write About It Wednesday blogs every Wednesday. For more information on how to have successful relationships and peace of mind, check out the bookstore today!

Human’s best friend

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