October 2020 – The Princess Guide

Posted on October 20, 2020October 20, 2020 by seneeseale

How to be in love with your fabulous future

It’s my birthday, and this is the day each year I set new goals and envision what I want my future to look like. Our brains are so powerful, and we can have what we envision! That goes both ways, however. So, it’s important to be careful to focus on the positive things you want to see happen in your life and not the negative ones.

I’ve been listening a lot lately to Billie Eilish’s song My Future. The lyrics remind me of myself a few years ago when I started my transformation process, “Cause I, I’m in love with my future. Can’t wait to meet her. Cause I, I’m in love, but not with anybody else. Just want to get to know myself. I know supposedly I’m lonely now. Know I’m supposed to be unhappy without someone. But aren’t I someone? I’d like to be your answer cause you’re so handsome … But I, I’m in love with my future, and you don’t know her. And I, I’m in love, but not with anybody here. I’ll see you in a couple years.”

As I wrote about in The Princess Guide to Loving Yourself First, you don’t have to wait until New Year’s Day or even your birthday to start setting goals and achieving your dreams. I believe that every day should be New Year’s Day, and we can decide each morning to improve our lives. The way I see it, we are all in the process of becoming something. While I hope we’re all moving in a positive direction, we must be careful because we can be doing little things every day to subconsciously sabotage our positive progress.

In a blog post to entrepreneurs, Vishen Lakhiani, founder and CEO of Mindvalley wrote, “We’ve been trained to see ourselves and the world in three simple forms — the past, the present and the future. As a result, entrepreneurs often envision the future as that place where goals and desires are stored — from the amount of revenue and the kind of office we want to earn and have, to the dream home and great car we want to own. While it’s great to be ambitious and bold, it’s also dysfunctional to postpone your happiness.” So, how can we tap into that happiness and achieve the positive goals we’ve set for ourselves? Lakhiani said the key to success is not postponing the celebration until you achieve a future goal. He said to wake up every day and remember where you were two years ago, and celebrate how far you’ve come. I absolutely agree and do this quite often.

I told this story in The Princess Guide to Gratitude … When I was in first grade, I took home a note from my teacher in which she communicated that I was a good student and very smart, but I spent too much time daydreaming. I was bored. I already knew the material she was teaching and wanted to be chasing butterflies in a field of flowers. Kids who daydream a lot are labeled slackers and lazy, but some studies have shown that impression isn’t correct.

A 2012 study conducted by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Investigating Healthy Minds found daydreaming is actually good for your working memory. Working memory allows the brain to juggle multiple thoughts simultaneously. The more working memory a person has, the more daydreaming they can do without forgetting the task at hand.

Scott Barry Kaufman, NYU psychology professor and author of Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined argues that daydreaming can play an important role in personal adaptation. In a 2013 Scientific American blog, Kaufman explained that daydreaming can offer positive personal rewards including self-awareness, creative incubation, improvisation and evaluation, memory consolidation, autobiographical planning, goal-driven thought, future planning, retrieval of deeply personal memories, reflective consideration of the meaning of events and experiences while simulating the perspective of another person, evaluating the implications of self and others’ emotional reactions, moral reasoning and reflective compassion. That sounds more like working to me than it does laziness.

So, how can you begin to focus on your fabulous future? In his book How to Survive a Betrayal, Rev. Mark T. Barclay offers these tips:

Picture what you want in your mind and focus on it.
Use faith — confession — actions to believe in it.
Find scripture verses [or motivational quotes] that motivate you and bring you hope.
See yourself enjoying it. Think about it. Be consumed with it.
Praise God [or just begin practicing gratitude out loud] more and more for it.
Know it is coming. Read the verses [or motivational quotes] until you are assured of it.
Let no one steal it from you. Listen to God, His word and your spirit — not other people.

Our imaginations are powerful. They can help us manifest our dreams by not only giving us the end result, but it can also help show us the way there.

Now, more than ever (we’re still surviving a pandemic, after all), do the words of Dr. Wayne Dyer come to life for me and have greater meaning than ever before. “Never — and I mean never — allow anyone else’s ideas of who you can or can’t become sully your dream or pollute your imagination. This is your territory, and a keep out sign is a great thing to erect at all entrances to your imagination,” he wrote.

Here’s to another day, another year and yours (and my) fabulous future!

Senée Seale is a book author, mental health professional and life guide passionate about helping people create positive changes in their lives and relationships. Are you ready to start attracting positive things into your life through practicing daily affirmations? Get your free copy of The Princes Guide to Gratitude Affirmations.

Posted on October 14, 2020October 14, 2020 by seneeseale

How to love and honor yourself

It’s the week leading up to my birthday and always a time of great reflection for me. We all know that 2020 has been a rough year for all of us — in one way or another — but it has been a year of great joy and fulfillment for me, personally. I’m so grateful for things that have happened this year that have caused me to grow and brought me great joy. One of those things was releasing my latest book The Princess Guide to Loving Yourself First. That book literally changed my life because I practice everything I write about … It’s the only way I can live with myself knowing that I’m practicing the two qualities I value most — authenticity and integrity.

In 2018, I was working in a very stressful environment, and my daily theme song was Love by The Sundays. “Love, love, love. Just love yourself like no one else. Love. It’s enough. And they can say what they like, but they still can’t take your love.” I heard the words every day, but they really didn’t sink in until I started doing the research for the book.

People who are in service to self will tell you that loving yourself is selfish. That it’s wrong. Why? They want you to put their wants and needs ahead of your own to aid in their service to themselves. However, I firmly believe that loving yourself (in a healthy way) is the firm foundation needed for every relationship you have in life. When you love and value yourself, you will make decisions out of a place of empowerment and an abundance of love that will be for your highest good. These decisions will also positively impact others around you even if they don’t result in the outcome they want.

As I talk about in The Princess Guide to Loving Yourself First, when speaking about self-love — also referred to in psychological circles as self-compassion — researchers are finding it is not only the key to positive mental health, but also the key to life. “Though the term ‘self-compassion’ may sound like self-indulgence or may feel like a weakness, it is actually the secret to resilience, strength in the face of failure, the ability to learn from mistakes and to bounce back with greater enthusiasm,” wrote Dr. Emma Seppala. “Self-compassion involves treating oneself as one would a friend, being more mindful and understanding our situation in the context of a larger human experience. When we can be more understanding and gentler with ourselves, identify less with the emotions that surround our mistakes and understand that failure is a normal part of the larger human experience, we become stronger and more successful in the long run … the state of your life depends on the state of your mind. So, be kind to yourself.”

I believe it’s important to honor yourself every, single day — not just on your birthday, once a year. Wordnik defines honor as, “High respect, as that shown for special merit; recognition or esteem. Great privilege.” When we practice loving and honoring ourselves, we build our self-confidence and begin acting from a place of empowerment and not lack. We learn to go to the kingdom within us to find the answers for ourselves, and we also learn how to honor others around us.

I’ve had to learn not to let anyone take my crown and lure me off my throne — meaning: I have to do what is best for me and not allow others to mistreat me whether it be in friendship relationships, work relationships or romantic relationships. Most wedding vows will have each person promise to “love, honor and cherish” their spouse, but how can you promise such a thing if you haven’t even practiced it on yourself first?

If you’ve never known how to practice honoring yourself or want to learn new techniques, Dr. Margaret Paul, a relationship expert, gave The Huffington Post these suggestions in 2015 that still ring true today:

1. Listen within to your own feelings. Many people easily tune into others’ feelings yet have no idea what they feel. If you ignore a child’s feelings, that child will feel unloved. Ignoring your own feelings has the same result — your inner child feels rejected, abandoned and unloved by you.

2. Be compassionate with your feelings. If you judge your feelings, telling yourself you are wrong for having them, your inner child will feel rejected and abandoned by you. If you are kind, gentle, tender, understanding and accepting of your feelings, your inner child will feel loved by you.

3. Be open to learning about what your feelings are telling you. Just as an actual child feels loved when you are compassionately interested in why he or she is hurting, your inner child will feel loved when you explore what your feelings are telling you. All feelings are informational. Just as physical pain alerts you to a problem that needs attention, so does emotional pain. Painful feelings are telling you that you are abandoning yourself, that someone is being unloving to you — or to themselves or to others — or that a situation is not good for you. Compassionately attending to your feelings, learning what they are telling you and then taking action to remedy the situation will make you feel loved.

4. Create a solid connection with a spiritual source of love, wisdom and comfort. Love is not a feeling we generate from our mind. It comes from the heart when our heart is open to our source of love. When you open to learning with your higher power about loving yourself and others, love flows into your heart and you feel loved.

5. Choose to be around loving people. We don’t always have a choice — such as in work relationships — but when we do have a choice — such as in personal relationships — choosing to be around caring, supportive and accepting people will make you feel loved. If, when you have a choice, you consistently engage with unkind, judgmental or abusive people, the message you are sending to yourself is that you are not worth loving.

6. Take loving actions for yourself around others. When you are around someone who is being unkind, speak up for yourself letting the person know that you don’t like being treated that way. Then, either be open to learning about what is going on [with the other person], or lovingly disengage from the interaction. Allowing others to treat you badly sends a message to your inner child that he or she is not worth loving.

7. Take care of your body, your time, your space and your finances. You will feel loved and lovable when you feed yourself healthy food and get exercise and sleep. When you ignore your health, you are giving yourself the message that you are not worth loving. When you respect your own and others’ time and space, you are letting yourself know that you are worth it. When you overspend, putting yourself in unnecessary debt, you are not taking loving care of yourself, and your inner child will feel scared, alone and unloved. Just as an actual child needs to feel safe regarding the necessities of life, your inner child needs to feel the same way.

8. Find work you love. Since work takes up a big part of your day, finding or creating work that fulfills you is vitally important. If you continue to force yourself to stay at jobs you hate, the message to yourself is that you are not worth doing whatever it is you need to do to create a fulfilling work life.

9. Create balance. We need balance in our life to feel loved and lovable. We need time to work and time to rest and rejuvenate. We also need time to nurture our body and soul through activities that bring us joy.

Loving yourself and practicing these loving actions will not only help you get healthy self-esteem that no one can take away from you, but it will also give you the skills you need to love others when the right relationship comes into your life.

Posted on October 7, 2020October 7, 2020 by seneeseale

Being grateful for even the events of 2020

It’s my birthday month, and this time of year I’m always reflecting over the past year and my choices. To say that 2020 has been a rough year would be a total understatement, but it’s also been a great year for me on many levels. I’ve grown so much in so many ways. I was finally healed and transformed enough to see things clearly and make decisions that I had been sitting on for years. You could say that the transformation process became evident in 2020 with clear 20/20 vision.

During the lockdown, people often asked me how I was doing sheltering in place all alone. I would always tell them that I was doing great having dance parties in my house alone, connecting with people I hadn’t talked with in years and using gratitude on a daily basis. It’s easy to be grateful for the good things that happen to us. We should be grateful in those moments, but it’s much more important (and essential for our overall growth) to employ gratitude when things aren’t that great. There were times this year that I literally had to force gratitude in disappointing situations, but it was worth it because it changed me for the better. It changed my perspective and my energy. It gave me hope and a positive outlook on life.

As I wrote about in The Princess Guide to Gratitude, this quote from Albert Schweitzer has taken on new meaning and truth to me, “The greatest thing is to give thanks for everything. He who learned this knows what it means to live. He has penetrated the whole mystery of life; giving thanks for everything.”

Yes, it’s proper and wonderful to be grateful to those who do or say nice things for and to you, but it’s much more Important to be grateful for those who have showed up in your life as tyrants (it isn’t easy to do in the moment but vitally important) because those people are your greatest teachers, as Dr. Wayne Dyer used to say. They are also the ones who will cause you to transform, if you allow it.

As I mentioned in The Princess Guide to Gratitude, in a 2003 study, researchers Watkins, Woodward, Stone and Kolts found that grateful people tend to share four characteristics:

They do not feel deprived in life.
They appreciate the contributions of others to their well-being.
They appreciate simple pleasures (pleasurable things that are freely available to most everyone). When a person appreciates simple pleasures, they are likely to experience grateful feelings more often due to frequently being appreciative of commonly occurring experiences.
Grateful people acknowledge the important role of experiencing and expressing gratitude.

As the seasons have changed recently from Summer to Fall, we can always expect seasons in life to change, as well. Even what appears to be negative changes can work out for our highest good, if we allow them to by focusing on gratitude and changing the things within us that we can change.

“These changes can be difficult, but they don’t have to be,” I wrote in The Princess Guide to Gratitude. “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.”

In each moment, we have a choice of how we’re going to think and respond to events. Sometimes, our choice may be to have no response at all until we have more information and a clearer perspective of the situation. That’s perfectly fine, and the wisest choice of all. We have no control over others. However, we do have total control over the kingdom within ourselves. Staying on the throne and not allowing negative events and actions of those outside ourselves to control how we think and behave is a royal way to live life. Using gratitude — even for the bad stuff that happens — is a useful tool to help us in that process.

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