Your inner critic is going to criticize, it’s what it does, but you don’t have to listen to it forever. Leadership and Business Coach, Mariela De La Mora, shares her tips on how to pass the mic to your higher self. She defines terms like “unlearning” and “reparenting” and offers guidance on how to actually start loving yourself a bit more.
Read MoreLiz Hernandez is the founder of Wordaful, a community builder, and a wonderful friend. In her life pre-Wordaful, Liz was a radio host and entertainment reporter for Access Hollywood, E! News, and MTV. She’s an Emmy-nominated television personality and journalist. Now, she spends her days creating video content and hosting live events that focus on the power of words and how we use them with ourselves and others.
Read MoreI’m knee-deep in prep for the launch of my new podcast, Happy To Be Here, and all that Mental Health Awareness Month will bring with it. It’s an exciting time, but a really stressful time for anyone who works in the mental wellness space. It’s actually quite ironic because in the month that’s dedicated to giving a platform to taking care our mental health, I find it the hardest to keep up with my own mental health routines.
Read MoreOne of my goals for this year is to read a book a week or 4-5 books per month. So far this goal has been a fun one. It’s pushed me to redefine what a “book” is in my eyes — ie it’s not just the biggest novel on the bookshelf — and challenged me to take more time quietly sitting with a book.
Read MoreIt took me a very long time (almost 8 years) to realize that birth control pills just weren’t for me. The straw that broke the camel’s back happened last fall when I realized a new brand I’d started in April (with a slightly new formula) was one of the culprits behind an onset of depression. I finally made the decision to come off the pill at the end of September 2021 and have had 5 menstrual cycles completely off birth control for the first time since my early twenties.
Read MoreHi, it’s been a while.
This felt like the “right” first post to come back with because, well, it has been a while since posting on my blog and this is a bit of an explainer.
Read MoreI shared a post on my IG that told the story of my first time in therapy. It ended up resonating with many and inspired me to start a series on the blog dubbed “Therapy For Beginners.” If I’m honest, I think we’re all beginners in therapy, no matter how long you’ve gone for, because of how much you continue to learn about yourself every single session.
Nonetheless, I do think that as a society we’ve gotten used to encouraging people start therapy without holding their hand through the real beginning stages.
Read MoreI have lofty goals. Currently I’m working on launching courses, finishing a book proposal, coaching clients, and the list goes on and on. I aspire to meet all of the expectations I set for myself. Yet lately the most important expectation isn’t any of the work or life related ones I’ve set. It’s shifting my everyday routine to include my joy.
I know that sounds really sad, like “Vivian! Have you not been including your joy?”, but stick with me here. All of the things on my to-do list, they make me so happy. This book I’m working on? Lord, I cannot wait until I can hold it, hand it to someone, and say, “I promise, this will help.”
Read MoreOur mental health is impacted by our mental wellness routines. Whenever we overload our routines or fill them with things that don’t serve our current circumstances, we do more harm than good. Working in the wellness space I’ve realized that many people and brands push a more is more approach. I’ve been writing these wellness routine recap since January and over these few months have realized that the routines that serve me best are the most simple ones.
Read MoreI’ve earned a reputation as the person in my circle that people come to when they want to figure out how to find a therapist. I wrote a blog post years ago that has a ton of tips around finding a therapist and what the “dating” during those beginning stages can look like. It’s been my cheatsheet link I send to friends, but it’s also been a super helpful resource that others have come across and used as they figure out starting therapy for the first time or restarting therapy after a long time.
Read MoreIt’s been almost 20 years since I first noticed how changing seasons affect my grief. My mom died in January 2003 and the transition of the season from winter to spring made me sad. It felt like I’d left her in the winter and would never get her back. It may seem silly to anyone who hasn’t lost someone personally, or who isn’t triggered by changing weather patterns, but for those of us who are, it’s subtle but real.
Read MoreRecently I published a piece on how having a good morning has very little to do with your morning routine and way more to do with setting yourself up for success. Morning routines and daily or weekly schedules are very similar. In order to ace them, you need to pay attention to your unique needs instead of trying to fit yourself into a one-size-fits-all approach.
As more of us continue to work solely from home, especially as COVID variants become more prevalent, there are a couple of shifts that you can start making today, if finding the right schedule for you has felt impossible.
Read MoreStarting to explore my mental health years ago was a humbling experience. I was a novice. Yeah, I’d learned the alphabet in grade school and with it I was taught to piece together sentences around subjects like biology, history, and every day conversations, but I was never taught the alphabet or dictionary of words that I would need to describe the world that lived in my head. For a long time, it felt unfair. I had an entire experience I lived through daily and that impacted my world endlessly, but no way to tell others what it felt like or how much it actually shifted the trajectory of my day.
I had to learn to use colloquial words — elephant, chest, treadmill, alphabet soup — to build visuals in hopes someone would understand, in hopes someone would throw a life raft so I wouldn’t drown in the soup.
Read MoreWe have a couch! Let’s start there. The journey to feeling settled in our new home has been more tumultuous for me than when we moved from NYC to Portland. There was something about Portland that freed me and something about moving back east that sacked me with more questions than answers.
“Wherever you go, there you are,” this is what my therapist tells me regularly and what I’ve been telling myself.
Read MoreOne of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in my twenties is that we abandon ourselves often. It’s human condition to do things like say “yes” when you meant “no” or ignore our gut when it’s screaming inside of us. I say “human condition” in order to take some of the weight off your shoulders — you aren’t the only one.
In fact, as early as last week, I had abandoned myself out of fear of rejection. Instead of expressing my needs explicitly I wordsmithed them so that the other party never even knew I was making a direct request. I made it seem like a suggestion, but I still internalized their rejection as a personal reaction to my ask.
Read MoreI’ve been feeling my creativity hit new levels lately and it’s felt so invigorating. I know that in addition to resting and family time, this weekend will be spent working through a few different creative hustles. The ones I’m focusing on — mapping out a course, a community platform, and prepping for a photoshoot next week — all fall into the category of creative hustle for me.
But whether you’re pursuing a hobby, a side hustle, or a passion project this weekend, I know weekends spent with your creativity can sometimes feel lonely. A big goal for my community member platform is to give us all a space to connect with others who also value creativity in similar ways. But in the meantime, I don’t want you to feel lonely or alone.
Read MoreI’ve been thinking a lot about my mental health as COVID variants (like the Delta variant) have increased over the last few weeks. My mental health has been easily triggered since our move and while some of the triggers are things I can’t control (like a COVID outbreak), there are others I can (mostly my routines).
Since I got my vaccine back in April I’ve been treading lightly with my own re-entry into “regular” life or society. A big part of this is that we moved just two months after getting our vaccines, so we’ve been knee deep in adjusting to life back on the east coast anyway. But, an even bigger part is that I just wasn’t ready to commit 100% to regular life. I felt skeptical of whether others were taking their responsibility towards their community seriously or whether people were just really fed up with being home and needed to be out at all costs. While I can’t pinpoint other people’s motivations or know their vaccine status, I can control my own personal decisions, how I move in the world, and what I expect of myself.
Read MoreLet peace stay. These three words have been heavy on my mind lately and also hard to swallow. I had a lot of ideas of who I was and the kind of life I had to live and very few of those ideas were full of abundance and even less were full of peace. In working to challenge many of the limiting beliefs I have about myself, I had to answer the bigger question of “what do you do once you’ve challenged the lie?”
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