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Why it’s so hard to get through the bad stuff by Wendy Keller, writer, mother,…

Why it’s so hard to get through the bad stuff

by Wendy Keller, writer, mother, survivor

Tonight, I read a book that isn’t published yet. It’s about one woman’s 14 year struggle to integrate the death of her 20-something year old daughter. It reminded me of my own journey, now +21 years working (hard) to integrate the deaths of my 4 yr old son and 18 month old daughter. The editor asked me to review it and provide a quote, so I did.

I want to let you in on a little secret: I am well aware that none of this is easy. Life is a struggle. It’s hard. We all get hurt. We get crushed, beaten up, abused, dragged around. Trees fall on the heads of perfectly decent people after Hurricane Sandy. I don’t believe for one minute that your life or mine is easy, or that you can just SNAP! instantly get over all the bad things that have happened to you.

Here’s what I do believe. No, here’s what I KNOW: that you can eventually. That’s it. That’s my whole point with all these blog posts. You can.

If you seek ways, you will find ways.

It isn’t going to be a walk in the park for most of us. That’s our tough luck. But whether you believe in God or Allah, that suffering is a punishment, a test, bad karma, destiny or totally random, here you are. You’re dealing with the stuff you’ve got and it hurts like heck.

There are people everywhere in the world who have suffered something similar to what you’re going through right now, no matter how rare you think your situation is. Some of those people have been crushed by it – they are bitter or they commit suicide or they become bad people. But there are also people who are getting through it. They’re chipping away at it, moving the mountain one tablespoon at a time. I know because I’m one of them. I’m getting through it. I don’t have any special bag of tricks. I’ve just got this damn tablespoon and sometimes, I’m tired of living without my precious children. Sometimes, I feel sorry for myself. Sometimes, I don’t want to keep on trying to make my life and the world around me a better place. But I know the secret to all of this. (Probably, so do you) Here it is: just keep chipping away at it.

Just keep going.

Just get up tomorrow and see if you can do one thing differently. If you can add one more smile to someone else’s life. If you can help one person. If you can show yourself just a little more love and compassion. If you can say one more positive thing, even if you’re not wholly feeling it.

Pretty soon, you’ll find out you’re making progress. You’re getting through. If you’re really lucky, you’ll start to glimpse the light at the end of the tunnel – no, not an oncoming train! But daylight. You emerging into the sunshine again, ready to let your life refill with joy, peace, abundance and happiness.

It’s coming. Just keep going. You’ll see.

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Much love and good wishes. You can do this. Promise.

“How to Match Your Work with Your Best Gifts and Talents” by Wendy Keller People…

“How to Match Your Work with Your Best Gifts and Talents”

by Wendy Keller

People who do what they are naturally gifted at are always “lucky”. They excel in their careers. They are the last ones to be let go. They are the ones everyone else admires. Sometimes, they become world famous. They are the ones who believe “Do what you love and the money will follow”, not the ones who plead “Help me find a job.”

What about you? Is your work aligned with what comes naturally for you? With your true gifts and talents?

If not, why not?

Did someone tell you your dreams were stupid when you were a kid?

Did you try and fail on your first attempt? (Who succeeds on their first attempt at anything, anyway?!?!)

Did you decide you have to “grow up” and get serious and give up what you care about just to put bread on the table?

Or are you just too chicken to give it a real shot?

If you – yes, you – have a gift, a talent, something you’re naturally good at – and you’re not using it, not sharing it with the world, not making a living at it – then you are cheating yourself, your family and the rest of us. Period.

My friend Marc Hardy, author of the upcoming book “Sharing Fire”, says that oftentimes, the reason we don’t ACT on what we know our gifts are is because someone somewhere along the trail said we weren’t good enough. His work is about people mentoring others, so I’m here today as the Good Fairy to mentor you. I’ve helped a LOT of people achieve their dreams in my professional life, and I’ve achieved many of my own dreams, too. Want some sage advice?

Start Now. Feel the freakin’ fear and do it anyway.

You ain’t gettin’ any younger. The longer you hide your light under that bushel basket, the longer it’s going to be dark until you can start making a difference in your life, in your level of daily joy, in the world.

If you can write, write.
If you can sing, sing.
If you can sell, sell.
If you can organize, organize.
If you can paint, paint.
NO! The rest of us CANNOT do it as well as you. Because that’s your GIFT. We’ve got different ones.

STOP taking your gifts and talents for granted.

You have them for a reason!

Want to know what your gifts and talents ARE? The things that come so easily for you that you can’t figure out why others can’t do it as well as you.

Whatever you can do, DO IT. Just start. ESPECIALLY if you’re currently unemployed or under-employed! Figure out the fastest, easiest way to start using your gift THIS VERY MINUTE! DON’T EVEN READ THE END OF THIS POST! Just figure out ONE way to get started.

Maybe if your dream of becoming a famous singer was squashed because you had a baby too young, then make up some flyers that offer your services singing at weddings.

If you’ve been talking for years about writing that book, sit down today – right now – and type the next 10 pages. You can always edit later.

If your skill is cooking, baking, customer service, taking care of little kids, photography, begin now. Start a business. Start a part-time hobby that you charge for. Start volunteering to do it for places where there are people who will eventually pay you for your services.

IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT IT IS – if you love it and you’ve got an aptitude for it and ESPECIALLY if it’s what you’ve “ALWAYS” wanted to do – then TODAY is your lucky day!

The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow has YOUR name on it! Just start. Start NOW. NOW is more important than WHAT. Just begin. Just get going. Just take one step in the right direction and then, whenever the next one appears, take that one too.

You CAN do this, but you have to take that first step off the cliff. IGNORE your fears! DO what you were meant to do. LIVE your wildest talents and dreams. Seize your life – TODAY!

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The simplest, most difficult, most useful way to start feeling better now. by Wendy Keller,…

The simplest, most difficult, most useful way to start feeling better now.

by Wendy Keller, a woman with a past to heal from

If I told you there’s a simple way to make massive progress toward getting better despite the nasty, painful, wrong things that have happened to you, would you give it a shot? I sure hope so. Because in order for things to get better, you have to do something different today than you did yesterday, or things will stay the same. And we both know that deep in your heart, you don’t want things to stay the same. You don’t want to carry this pain, bitterness, injustice or anguish to your grave.

The method I’m about to reveal to you really, truly works. Problem is, it looks too easy. Most basic laws of the Universe are. Gravity, for example. Or that brushing your teeth reduces cavities. In fact, the simple-but-difficult technique I’m about to encourage you to try is something some part of your heart probably already knows and is trying to use, albeit ineffectively.

Write the incident.

It doesn’t matter if you’re not a good writer; if your spelling is bad; if the things you’d write about are so terrible you don’t want anyone to ever see it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t own a computer.

One of the single most effective things you can do to heal yourself is WRITE your story. Write the bad thing that happened to you, from beginning to end. Put in dialogue to reflect what you remember other people saying, as best as you can recollect. Write about what you saw, what you felt, how the whole thing made you feel. It can be long or short, hand written or typed, it doesn’t matter. Add every single last detail you can remember. Start with the first moment you realized something was wrong and go from there.

See? Sounds too simple to work, doesn’t it? How could that work? And what if someone reads it? And why re-open that pain up again by replaying it?

Here’s why this works: because what happened has changed as time has passed. Not the facts, of course. My children still died in the car accident. My house still burned down. Those are facts. But by writing my stories – over and over sometimes, sometimes just once – I see things differently. This especially works with things that happened to you in childhood.

It happens because YOU have changed. You’ve changed and the way you see things has changed. When you’re a little kid and you’re upset that your parents don’t have the decency to get that monster who lives in your closet, it’s all very real. But when you’re 25 or 45, well, that monster incident looks very different. Believe it or not, the process of writing your pain and making sure to include dialogue and what you saw and felt will give you a new perspective on what happened: the perspective of the adult you are today who survived it all.

You probably already do this in some ways. If you talk to people about what happened to you, you are trying to process it. Every time you tell another person your sad story, you hear it a tiny bit different. That’s why you do it (sub-consciously).

You don’t need sympathy – that’s worthless.

You need to hear yourself reframing your story.

This process, when spoken, helps a little and may depend on how the other person responds to your tale. But when you write it, that’s when you’ll really see the transformation, the healing in yourself. It’s when you can finally look at what happened objectively. It’s often the beginning of healing, of forgiving yourself or others.

I’m a literary agent by profession. That means I sell books to publishers on behalf of authors. I never handle life stories. But even so, my company gets offered about 6,000 life stories (memoirs, autobiographies) every year. Why? Because some of these people have accidentally or on purpose discovered the transformative power of writing their story. I always tell them “Your book has already served its highest purpose. Getting published isn’t relevant.” Most will never get published, but the healing and refreshed perspective the writer now has from the process of writing is priceless.

Today, grab a piece of paper and a pen, or open a new file on your computer. I dare you to write just the first five paragraphs of what happened to you. You’ll soon feel the story shifting in you – moving you toward profound and permanent healing.

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It happened. Now what? by Wendy Keller, a stranger who cares about you Have you…

by Wendy Keller, a stranger who cares about you

Have you ever wondered WHY you stay sad, or even traumatized, by the bad things that happened so long ago?

Do you ever think, “Why am I not over this yet?” or “Why does this still hurt after all this time?”

Do you have any scars on your body? I have a scar on the outside of my left leg, from my knee joint to my hip. After the car accident that killed my children, I was so severely injured that they had to slice my leg open and stick in a steel rod. The longest piece of bone left in that mangled mess was under one inch long! That was 1991, but the scar is still there. It’s not the exact same skin, obviously. But the skin “remembers” what happened, doesn’t it?

In this, we find a clue to why emotional memories trigger pain even so much later.

When something important happens in our life, unusually good or unusually bad, or when we just THINK something that happens is important (even if other people disagree), we automatically attach that happening to a person, place or thing. Maybe a smell or a sound. Maybe tall or short men. Maybe women with red hair. Maybe turning left at stoplights. Maybe growling dogs. It doesn’t really matter what it is. Once that association has been made, however irrational, every time we encounter that stimulus, it triggers a response.

This is a part of what is called “PTSD” – post-traumatic stress disorder.

You can probably understand how a traumatized soldier would start every time a car backfires. For years, the smell of smoke – even though I wasn’t in LA when my house burned down – triggered a whole string of emotions. Anything your brain associates with the original event sets off the response in you.

The problem is this: you may or may not even notice what the heck just stimulated you to feel those bad feelings again. And the more often you are unconsciously stimulated, the deeper the groove gets worn into your head, and the harder it is to get rid of it, especially without help. One of the things therapists and others who deal with PTSD and traumatized people do is to bring them to awareness of what triggers their emotions. Then the soldier – for instance – can say to himself, “That was a car backfiring, not a gun.” (Decoding Traumatic Memory Patterns at the Cellular Level, McClaskey, Thomas R.)

By calmly and logically bringing up the stimuli to the conscious mind (by using reframing, NLP, guided imagery, hypnosis, therapy, meditation, etc.) you can disassemble the stimulus-response mechanism inside you and reduce your symptoms so that you can have a freer, more peaceful, more open life.

Summary: You CAN get better! No matter what happened, there are ways to release it and not let those old stimuli trigger how you respond to things that happen in your world today. Promise! If you’re suffering, seek help.

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Why we get stuck in yesterday and how to get out by Wendy Keller, mother,…

by Wendy Keller, mother, inspirational speaker

I’ve been thinking a lot in the last few days about those Evil Twins, “Blame” and “Regret”. Seems to me like those of us who’ve had a bit of a tough time in life tend to take on one or the other as if such dark emotions were some kind of life raft. Maybe they are in the first few months and we need to cling to those feelings, but really, after a while, they become concrete ankle weights when you’re trying to tread water. You gotta let them go, no matter what happened. It’s for the sake of your own survival.

You gotta let Blame & Regret go, no matter what happened. It’s for the sake of your own survival.

Easier said than done, right? Maybe not. You’ll have to forgive everyone involved, including yourself. Here’s the part that whacked me right between the eyes. I met a man last night who is a financial planner for extremely affluent people. He gave me his business card and suggested I needed his services. I told him my old tired story of how I had lost everything in a fire and was still rebuilding. I think of myself as a victim. I’m doing well, I’m on my way, but I’ve still got a ways to go…and that’s when the last piece of this puzzle fell into place for me. Wham! The fire was in November 2007. Get over it already, Wendy!

For a few weeks, I’d been noticing people around me blaming other people and circumstances for how their life is right now; I’d been listening to myself express regret (for not handling things differently after the fire, etc.); it’s crystal clear: letting go of these negative feelings is a decision that must be made if we are to have a more peaceful life, walk a happier path, allow abundances of love, joy, prosperity and serenity into our lives.

It’s crystal clear now: it is a decision that must be made if we are to have a more peaceful life, walk a happier path, allow abundances of love, joy, prosperity and serenity into our lives.

Which brings us to “How?” right? Like the sages say, this is about self-observation. Just like I heard myself with that financial planner guy, you have to catch yourself saying or thinking blame- or regret-oriented thoughts and immediately, instantly, right there replace them with positive thoughts. Sounds so hokey, doesn’t it? Probably because hokey things, simple things, are the things that work.

Listen to yourself for the rest of today. Are you blaming yourself or circumstances or someone else for the sorry life you have now? Are you mired in regret that you did or didn’t do something in the past? IT DOESN’T MATTER if it “REALLY” is someone else’s fault. It’s your life now.

You can’t have a better future until you release yourself to have a better past. No one ever won a race looking over their shoulder at the person behind them! Let your past simmer down. Stop talking obsessively about. Stop regretting it. Stop blaming yourself and others. Stop carrying it around – it’s too heavy for you and you deserve a break.

You can’t have a better future until you release yourself to have a better past.

Start out slow. This takes a little practice. But listen to yourself like an objective observer for the next few days. When you retell old stories, or rethink old thoughts, watch for Blame and Regret and make a conscious decision to let those things go. The past is so yesterday! Infuse your thoughts and speech with sunnier feelings and you’ll start to find your world shifting. Promise.