Change.Cake

There is no need to fight against the grain or keep to yourself in order to identify who you are. Put yourself in a place where you are surrounded by people who will support and encourage your true beliefs. Put yourself among people you respect. Put yourself around people who you hope to be like when you grow up. In this place you can feel safe and supported. In this place you can be respected for who you are. In this place, you can thrive.

Continuing with the practice of surrounding yourself with people who will have a positive impact on you and who will build and support you, it is imperative that you build an inner circle of friends that you can trust, respect, lean on and give back to. On the flip side, it’s perhaps even more important that you make clear boundaries with those who bring you down. These boundaries need to be ones you can understand and respect internally just as much as you need to have them externally. This will do so much for your self worth and continued growth. This will also be painfully hard to execute.

This will require you to believe in yourself or at least pretend that you do.

As much as you work to surround yourself with good people, your relationships can only be as healthy as you are. Life will inevitably bring people that take advantage, speak for you, make choices for you, judge you, whether it be from someone in your inner circle or someone you encounter at the supermarket. It is up to you to stand up for who you are, what you choose to do, why you choose to do, if you’ll stand by your choices and whether or not you will feel guilty about it. This step is a very difficult one and it may take quiet a bit of time pretending you believe in yourself until you actually do. But I really hope you do, because your voice is a unique and special voice that was chosen to be included in the world today. Also, you cant really change your life if you can’t speak up for yourself.

Wow do I feel qualified to speak about this. I have ten years of experience sitting on the couch and I’ve learned so much on how to effectively use therapy as a tool for my life along the way.

1. You are in control of your therapy

2. Respect the process

3. Set goals to accomplish outside of therapy and use your time in therapy as a guide for accomplishing your goals.

4. Don’t stagnate
a. This applies to when you’ve already been working with a therapist that you know is a good match for you. If you see that you are not moving forward with your goals and you have reached a plateau, which you can recognize when you keep going over the same points over and over and not moving forward with them then it’s possible that you’ve stagnated. This therapist you are working with may have given you the bulk of the insight they have to offer you. There is only so much one person can offer. Keep in mind, sometimes you might feel like you’re not changing but change is really happening. Change is a slow and difficult process. Be discerning about whether you are stagnating or if you’re working through the very real struggle that therapy can prove to be. If you can’t decide, it can help to ask a friend or mentor that really knows you well.

5. What your therapist tells you is not gospel. They may be the expert but you are the one who has to live with your choices. Ultimately, it is up to you to decide what you believe about yourself and others and it is up to you to decide what choices you make.

6. If necessary and you decide you want to, put yourself on medication. More on this in the next step.

7. Find affordable solutions for getting the therapy you need. However, pay for at least a portion of your therapy if at all possible. Therapy should be an investment of your time and money, this way you won’t waste it.

This too requires your active involvement in your own self-help. You are your most important advocate. Life is full of struggle that will come inevitably. Medication can take a mountain of problems and smooth them out so you can be more able to face the challenges ahead of you that will lead you to your goals. That being said, taking medication is a very personal choice. It affects your body and mind. It also indicates a very tangible reminder that you need medication to get you through life. These can be very difficult realities to come to terms with. Like I said in regards to therapy, respect the process. This is your journey. In Ellen Saks’s book, The Center Cannot Hold, where she details her struggle with schizophrenia, she tinkered with her medication dosage and with going on and off her medication for approximately 20 years before deciding to commit to a medication and dosage that worked best for her. This was important for her; to show herself she tried her hardest; to test the limits of her mind. Each person should weigh for themselves their choices regarding medication or not and its consequences and decide for themselves what their priorities are. After making an honest accounting of this for yourself, I believe that no answer is invalid.

Some tools for your journey with medication:

1. Couple psychiatry with psychology and if you have a different person for each, connect the two of them so you can properly get the most out of the help you are receiving.

2. Again, respect the process. Each new medication can take weeks to kick in and this can be an exhausting journey when you need to try a lot of different medications before finding the one that works for you.

3. Reassess. Make sure to stay in contact with your psychiatrist. Don’t let years pass without sitting down and discussing what is and isn’t working for you. Otherwise, you might be spending years of your life taking a medication that isn’t the best fit for you at the time. This may lead to unnecessary struggle in your life.

4. Finding a support group can be extremely helpful with normalizing and understanding what it is you’re dealing with. You are not the only one dealing with this issue.

When facing life’s challenges, it’s important to understand that you need your mental, emotional and physical health to be in shape. You are the brave, lone soldier marching through towards reaching your goals. You need to be in tip-top shape to achieve this. Tip-top shape will mean different things for different people. You may be fighting extra hard if you haven’t fed your body in a while. Different foods will have different affects on different people. Also, different foods will affect not only our bodies but also our minds (with caffeine being the most obvious example.) Get to know your body and how it reacts to different foods, how much sleep it needs, when are the best times to wake up and go to sleep, when the best time to exercise is. The more you can understand your body and all of its needs, the more ready and able you will be to tackle the challenges you will face when working through making change in your life.

This piece of advice is most useful when coupled with clear goals that are continuously reevaluated. That being said, often times when working through a challenge you won’t notice change until far off in the future. Why then should you struggle so hard for an unknown future that seems so distant from where you are now? Because you can either stay stuck with this thing you want to change in your life for sure or you can try valiantly, try hard, try over and over again and run the possibility of living a changed life for the better. What you might not be able to see at the time is that the journey to get there will build you in ways you never dreamed possible. As Malcolm Gladwell so famously said, it takes 10,000 hours to achieve mastery. What he didn’t say was, it takes 10,000 successful hours to achieve mastery. This stands to reason that the 9,999 hours leading up to mastery can be spent in either failure or success (and most probably it will be a mix of both) but as long as they are spent in the struggle you will be moving towards reaching your goal!

It seems to me a natural part of struggling though change starts with confused immersion from within the struggle. However, when you begin to work through the struggle and better understand it, you will be able to start seeing things from the outside looking in. From there you’ll realize, you’re not the only one. It’s as if being able to help others serves as a barometer of when you’ve finally worked through the challenge enough that you’re no longer completely immersed in it. And just like you could not have gotten through your challenge without the help of others, you are now able to stand on the sidelines and assist those still going through the struggle, whatever it may be.

In times that can seem so hopeless, it’s important that you believe that something good can exist, has existed, will exist in the future. You might be the one who has to bring it to places where it isn’t.

This is something I’m still figuring out myself. However, I know it is so important to have that control over your life. To know that you can take responsibility for yourself in this way. To not allow this to fall in someone else’s hands or to have that lost feeling of not knowing how to take the reigns over your finances at all. Make a budget. Know how much you make. Know how much you spend and where that money goes. Become financially intelligent. How to invest wisely. Money is such an important and necessary tool. As much as you can, work to ensure that you know how to manage this for yourself.

I cannot stress the importance of this enough. I did not start with this because I didn’t want to take away from the weight of the other steps. Setting goals is like climbing a mountain and sending a rope up ahead to help get you where you’re trying to go. When you set goals, in a small-big way, you have already reached that destination because you have defined what is important to you and set your intention for a certain path and ultimately for a certain destination. You may be off course upwards of 90% of the time, like an airplane, but as long as you have a goal in mind you will still be moving towards it. This should give you an impression of the weight that goals carry. Set goals for yourself and write them down. That being said, it is important to reassess and reevaluate your goals. Are they suiting you? Are they leading you to where you really want to be? Your goals can change many times over the course of your life. As you mature and gain wisdom, your goals will become more sophisticated and evolved. Make sure to account for this by reevaluating them.

Best of luck on your beautiful journey. As long as you are developing yourself and living intentionally working towards becoming the person that you consciously choose to be, no efforts are in vain. Through this journey you will find your self along every step of the road and that is the most beautiful part of it all. The world needs your beautiful light in it today.