Motivation Mondays: Recognizing and Surviving The Adult Bully

Not all bullies are ten year old kids waiting for the perfect moment to pounce on you from behind the big tree to demand your lunch money in return for a knuckle sandwich.

Not all bullies are running around with guns and knives threatening to end your life.

Not all bullies are teenagers on Facebook spreading false rumors about Friday night’s party.

Some of them are close family members who have “your” best interest at heart.

Some of them are loud and obnoxious people who spread gossip and rumors or embarrassing stories they know about you.

Others are those who work with you and intimidate you through power-struggles or  one-upmanship all the time.

Many won’t let you form your own set of values, opinions, or morals and force you by intimidation to accept theirs.

Adult bullies are everywhere. And you can protect yourself.

Though this is JUST not enough time to cover such an in-depth topic, I’ve given you a few tools to help you identify those who use intimidation, control, and manipulation/retaliation, so you can begin to create boundaries to protect yourself.

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Remember:

1. Pray (Ask for control, empathy, and the courage to stand your ground and protect yourself, your beliefs, and remain bold in Truth. You need God to equip you.)

2. Create Protective Boundaries: If you have a stalker or violent individual (domestic violence) do not hesitate to take immediate legal action!

To create boundaries: You may need to limit your time with toxic people. You may need to change who you hang out with and for how long. You may need to change your work environment if possible. You may need to tighten up your social media and ban specific users, family members, and “friends”. You may need to take measures to protect your children from the manipulation of the individual. It might be time to stop talking about your dreams, goals, and plans with those who gossip or try to manipulate and worm their way into your life to control how you do things and what you do. Do not talk openly to people who feel the need to give you their approval on your life decisions. You need a plan to remain in control of your life, work, and forward movement without giving that person any entry point. It might be time to rock the boat and stand up for yourself in ways that preserve your integrity (although you don’t want to use their same low tactics).

You might decide that the best plan (for now) is to let them continue to spew all the crap they want to about everyone else (including you), because once they spew enough, they’ll be bound to step in the piles of their own mess. Sometimes you just need to realize that some people will not change, (because they do not desire it), and your best option is to determine whether it’s better to always expend our valuable time/energy to battle them, or to preserve it by walking away from, leaving them nothing to control (which will be very hard!) and leave them despite the blame and guilt (manipulative tactics) they try to place on your back. Finally, learn to recognize manipulative traits of people and patterns and try not to take them personally. You should never feel guilty for protecting yourself and your family. Being a Christian, does NOT make you a doormat.

3. Surround yourself with positive people who will pray for and with you. You need supports.

4. Seek professional counseling, legal assistance, or other resources for professional advice in serious situations or situations that you are not able to deal with on your own.

Remember, this is such a vast topic, it is impossible to discuss every single topic and outcome. The best thing to do is to develop your own action plan using resources you find helpful. And if it’s beyond you…seek assistance and personal support from the pros.

Motivation Mondays: Stuck On Excuses

How do excuses affect your life? What if you try to “play” them off and act as if they are ok? Can you be hindered and stuck by using excuses for your life areas?

Do excuses affect your health?

Your spending habits?

Your timeliness?

Your addictions?

Your accountability in your relationships?
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Finally, do we live in a culture that embraces excuses that really keep people stuck and on the wrong path? And are they destructive?

We take a look at excuses in-depth in today’s episode of Motivation Mondays. Listen now-just 15 minutes is all you need! Grab a pen, take some notes, and start paying attention to how excuses play into your own life. Are you being hindered? Or are you being propelled toward change? Find out now!

Motivation Monday: Own Your Mondays LIKE A BOSS and Overcome What Holds You Back!

Are you ready to own your Mondays with excitement, passion, and a willingness to conquer and overcome what lies ahead?

Give this episode a listen and learn how to:

• Renew Your Mind (Romans 12:2)
• Overcome obstacles
• Change your mindset
• Focus on hope and a future
• Blast and charge through what lies in front of you
• Enjoy what you have now and find contentment and peace during the storms
• Apply your adversity to your life as an opportunity for growth.

And more!

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Got 15 minutes? Get encouraged now and live this day with all the boldness you can muster! You’re not going to give up! Tune in each Monday and find these episodes right here in my blog. Got a topic you want me to talk about? Let me know!

This is coaching and training to build up and strengthen the Body of Christ: Mind, Body, and Spirit. Be sure to check out the interactive magazine and life management coaching and training course for all your life management and perseverance needs. It’s time to Move Into Action!

I Cleaned Out My Social Media Life, and Here’s Why…

I know you might be thinking I’m now a party-pooper, but I can promise you I’m not. I just value my sanity.

Social media is great. I love it. I use it quite a bit in my coaching practice to encourage, inspire, motivate, and share my faith with those I connect with online. It helps me not only connect to people. It also keeps me up to date with the latest news, technology, and helps me stay in-the-know. But, as a life management coach and professional life chaos buster, I had to draw the line.

Just as I coach others, I, too,  must follow this rule:

Clean out your life. And your social media life.

In the early days of social media, I found I liked about every page, and I followed just about anyone. I loved the ability to connect with so many, and I loved all the things social media offered.

• I could keep up with the world.
• I could save money by liking every single coupon and money saving resource I could.
• I liked every faith-based resource I came across.
• I loved educational pages and pages my kids could benefit from.
• I loved all things social media that could tell me how to grow my business on social media successfully.
• I could learn to do more, be more, achieve more, have more, and much, much more!
• I could even attend the church services of any and every church service in the world if I wanted to as long as they had a page and a link available.

I especially loved new productivity inducing apps,  natural, at-home, product making resources, and even following the pages for all of my favorite foods and drinks. Wow. I could like it all! I was living the social-media life!

But over time something changed.

My Facebook, Twitter, and all other social media sites began to overwhelm me. I mean did I REALLY need to have all those updates in my news feeds? Did I need to get updates regularly from my favorite fabric softener, toilet paper, or soda company? No, I didn’t. Did I need all the drama? Nope. And slowly I began to eliminate the unnecessary from each of my feeds.

I’m not talking about one news feed either. I had 12 social media feeds!!! My life was super-busy, and I was overwhelmed online. Busy does not equal happy, content, nor productive. It just means busy and consumed in the moment, and it makes life management difficult. Once started, I began to take my social media clean out further, and I knew I wanted to do more with much less interference. To me that was much more fulfilling and meaningful. I then realized I had to clean up all of these feeds:

• Facebook (my personal)
• Facebook (my 4 or 5 pages that I ran for various products, community pages, etc.)
• Twitter and Hootsuite
• FourSquare
• Tumblr
• Instagram
• Linked In
• WordPress
• Pinterest

Life was getting crazy. CRAZY! I hit a social media turning point the day that my news feed was full of sponsored ads to like even more things, as though I needed to have more to follow to keep my mind more consumed. I had apparently not reached the social media point of insanity yet and was still only at social media level crazy. Most of the nonsense I was seeing was all about chasing things that were supposed to”fix” life which merely contributed to the chaos of life.

I had a better idea. Instead of adding more chaos to my already busy life, I followed my life management coaching advice from my videos and decided to clean out my social life. I was going to do something really radical, people. No regrets! I chose to start opting out, closing unnecessary accounts, and unsubscribing from emails from all these resources. I did even more, too!

I put my finger on the DELETE button.

I used the UNFRIEND option.

I even (gasp) got the courage to go for the UNLIKE and UNFOLLOW selections.

And you know what? I SURVIVED!  And so did those pages and folks that I let go. Who knew?!

Life is busy for all of us. My life is no different. I have only so much time, attention, energy, and resources, and I like you, must manage my time and energy well and dedicate it to the proper priorities I’ve set in my own life. I thought about simply muting the negativity, controversies, and drama prone sites and people by hiding or silencing those pages and individuals, but honestly, it made more sense for me to eliminate them.

It was past time to clean my social house, and rather than keep all those unwanted house guests active, with free room and board, mentally clogging my feed (and my brain), putting my eyes on overload, and making my head pound, I started disconnecting from the unnecessary. I didn’t need my stress levels elevated with the task of keeping up with the unimportant nonsense. Why did my life need to be filled with pages and people who weren’t the most important thing who were consuming my body’s limited mental and physical resources? This was a drain and it was affecting my ability to put my resources where they really mattered, and I wanted to put a stop to it. It meant taking back control over who had my time and attention, where, and how…even online.

For me, this is when life management of my social media life became a priority. Life Management is a priority in your life both socially, professionally, and personally. How so? Look at it from a different perspective using the following examples:

I don’t read every single newspaper to keep up with current events and news. I don’t have time, and I’d wear myself out trying to do so. I don’t eat every single thing on an all you can eat buffet. It’s too unhealthy to stuff myself so full of unnecessary foods or things I don’t even care for or need. I don’t want to know every single detail about all the drama in the reality TV shows, so I choose carefully what I do with my TV time. Just because some people’s lives are reality shows on display in social media without all the commercial advertising, it’s not drama I find attractive or entertaining. I’d rather not watch it even if on a news feed.

If I don’t want to use my time and energy watching junk and unnecessary drama on TV, why should I be subjected to it online through social channels when I’d rather not be? There are things in this world that I connect to for the good of my mind, body, and soul. And there are things that are not, and I don’t allow them into my life. I don’t normally choose to surround myself with bad friends in life, so why on earth would I want to surround myself with such negative things in my social media life?

BINGO! I don’t want to. And I changed that. A social media life is just like your in person life. You need to set and create healthy and beneficial boundaries. And you need to know when to say enough and do something about life when it gets overwhelming-even if that life is online. You may not be the popular person, but since when did life become about securing the most likes? Oh, yeah. Thanks Facebook. But, I’ve had enough now. I love social media. But, I now play by my rules and boundaries.

I get many requests from people on Facebook to like this page and that page or to follow this or that. I also get it from about every other online social site out there. But the truth is, I can’t follow everything. I just can’t. And honestly, I don’t want to. That’s not social. It’s social insanity!

It’s not healthy for me. And it’s not healthy for you.

Life Management Online

Here’s what you can do:

1. Limit what you allow in. There’s a lot of good stuff out there. So you need to be extra careful to look for the GREAT stuff, and then only follow the GREAT and helpful resources and people by using filters. What filters? Is it helpful to you? Are you passionate about it? Is it one of the top three or four sites on this subject matter? Is it a go-to resource? Is it someone you like hearing from? If friends and family are negative drains you may have to create boundaries in your social life just like you do in your personal life. Not all people are good for us. There is such a thing as a toxic person. Know what resources and people add value to your life. And then follow or friend the best for you in your life season. If not, you might want to consider it a good resource and reserve your like and follow for the greater resources. Not all resources are created equally. Please understand that.

Take Christian resources for example. There are many of what look like good Christian resources out there. But how many of them are truly prosperity driven messages focused on 1/2 truths? Is this what your focus and time and energy should be spent on? Using good filters (explained more fully in the life management coaching segments) should help you eliminate those that are based on false teachings and gain/prosperity driven messages.

2. Use filters: Filters help you learn how to identify pages you should be cautious over such as those pages that encourage you to “do what I did, so you make your first million, too”. Many times we don’t use filters and end up with too many things that are meant to be good, but just aren’t in our feeds. Do you see a hidden agenda behind those types of messages? The truth is, the million dollars they made are off of the people who flock to their sites to purchase their step by step instructions. They make that money off of folks with their encouraging and sugar coated messages of “despair to over-night riches”, bringing you in as prey with the hopes of selling you a program and a promise they probably can’t deliver. A million dollar return on a $50 program just doesn’t seem right, so beware. If it’s too good to be true it probably is! Be selective and use a filter for what you follow, because your time and energy are precious resources, and they are not unlimited. Don’t waste them by following empty promises. Filters are necessary for catching things that clog your feed and slow you down.

They will help you learn how to be selective over what you will give your time and attention to in the best way possible for your season of life. I’m not saying all pages and people are like this. They are not. But the vast majority are, and if you’re not careful, you’ll be consumed with following nothing more than someone else’s dream. Don’t get consumed by the lure of other people’s successes and their bank accounts. Maintain your time and energy for your own. The truth is, most of our success is locked up inside contentment. What do you have now that brings that? I’ll bet you have quite a bit, but that’s another coaching topic altogether!

3. Keep it simple: See, it’s impossible to keep up with it all, and you should never feel you have to. Sift for the things online that elevate you, challenge you (in a positive way), and limit contaminates and negative impurities (people and opinions) that weight you down, add stress, and overwhelm you. Get rid of the false promises. Get rid of the spiritual influences that promise riches in THIS world. And use your time and energy for the priorities and things in life that you want while finding contentment in the here and now with what you already have. It can be done and brings much less stress and more focus on the good in our lives already. While it’s great to have dreams, and goals and work toward them, we shouldn’t get so caught up in chasing the good life that we fail to live the one we have.

5. Prioritize: You only have so much time and energy in a given day. You only have this life. So why waste it being bogged down in the always on, always in demand of your time and energy, non-stop lifestyle of the social? It’s time to take back the control over where your time, energy, and resources go. They are yours. And you must manage them well. Social media is good. But like everything: use it in moderation. Be selective of everything you follow.

6. Clean it out: You just might find it’s time to do some spring cleaning of your social media life. People change. Life changes. And our needs change. Pay attention to the season you’re in, keep what works, and clean out what doesn’t.

One last thing: don’t feel guilty for doing so. Take a deep breath. De-stress. And enjoy your focused content. You’ll find your life doesn’t need to be so overwhelming after all. Even when it is online.

For more on life management:

Life Management Videos

Christine’s Blog and Radio Show

Move Into Action, Life Management Magazine

Worry Less: Live More!

Life Management Certification

Motivation Monday: Coaching to Build Up The Body of Christ And More!

I am asked ALL kinds of questions regularly, and I welcome them all.

People are curious about faith-based life coaching. They want to know things like:

What is a Think Drink that you mention from your life management book “The Think Drink Life”?

How does coaching help me grow and use what I learn in my faith?

What about the interactive Life Management Magazine, Move Into Action? Is this faith-based coaching?

Why isn’t your coaching geared toward finding happiness and health in prosperity driven messages?

Can I use your coaching to find contentment and prioritize my life in a way that keeps me focused on Christ first?

Is the 7 Day Sermon Workbook now part of the magazine? (YES!)

In this episode, I talk about The Think Drink Life, Think Drinks, faith, priorities, and building your life on solid ground. I also take it one step further to talk about WHY prosperity driven messages are NOT the answer and why I don’t promote them.

This is life coaching to build up and equip to stand and stand some more. Listen now to hear what I’m talking about!

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Move Into Action is about building up the Body of Christ to be Christ-centered, well equipped, healthy in faith, and prioritized by living and building upon Christ as we are fighting a battle every day for our time, energy, and resources. As the body is trained, equipped, and challenged, it grows stronger and stands ready to fight against the schemes that exist to weak and take it down.

We are NOT that body. And it’s time to Move Into Action and live it.