Dear Reader,
Settle in and take a deep breath. Let’s engage in a profound conversation, and bring your full attention and senses to these words! Contemplate:
How do you believe you create your life?
What shapes our lives? Is it fate, guidance from a higher power, our genetic makeup, or the alignment of the stars? Do we follow the expectations of our families, traditions, or society? Is there a unique purpose driving us forward, or are we stumbling along, surviving only by luck?
I believe we are all creative life artists, and our lives are the canvas we fill with our unique colors, shapes, and forms.
Our early childhood experiences instill in us the values we
perceive as most important and these values function like an inner compass. We use that compass to guide us to live in alignment
with our values, and to understand when our decisions may
conflict with our values.
Plus we develop coping mechanisms in answer to experiences our young self perceived as threatening, dangerous, or overwhelming.
In my life, I was shaped by my upbringing as an only child, with both my parents and grandparents grappling with severe trauma, haunted by wartime suffering and abuse. As a result, I was the emotional caretaker of my entire household. My environment was cloaked in heaviness and anxiety, and this forged my core values: Love, freedom, a thirst for understanding, and a longing to change myself and help others to do the same.
My childhood struggles birthed my life’s purpose, which was the ongoing quest to answer the question: "What do humans need to live truly fulfilled, happy lives?"
To live my purpose, I guide business owners and executives using a process I’ve designed that unlocks unquestionable freedom, unconditional love, envisioned identity, and impactful power in their lives. FLIP: Freedom, Love, Identity, Power. FLIP allows them to turn past frustrations into new possibilities!
This process embraces spirituality, human consciousness
research, applied neuroscience, Intentional Creativity®, and
somatic trauma-informed coaching. It is at the core of the new field I defined and I’m trademarking: Neuro CreativityTM. It was originally sparked by my insight into our brains’ capacity to shape our personal reality as “meaning-making machines”. We write our own inner stories about everything and then project those stories onto the world including ourselves. When we rewrite those stories, our perceptions change, and with that everything! We are all freer than we believe we are! Reverse-engineering my personal experience led to the creation of this transformative, repeatable coaching process for my clients.
Contemplate for a moment:
How free do you perceive yourself to be?
Are there areas in your life where you feel freer than others?
How do you define freedom for yourself?
Freedom and love are intimately intertwined. After
redefining freedom in my life, I was able to heal my love wounds in just a few months. I will never forget how it felt in my early thirties when I released the fear that kept love elusive and conditional, and as a result, I was flooded by feelings of unconditional love. This allowed me to accept my parents as they are, and create the marriage of my dreams. My husband lived on the other side of the world, yet the power of reframing the meaning of love allowed our relationship to succeed against all odds. Our children are now college students and we live a bliss-filled life in
beautiful Southern California.
This reframed experience of love is vastly different from
what my younger “seeking self” was searching for and what societal expectations perpetuated through media had fostered as unrealistic notions of romance. Love doesn’t hurt. Marriage is not daily work and compromises! Instead, I defined unconditional love as the fertile space for two people to grow safely into their highest possibilities
together.
Stop for a moment and really contemplate this:
What are your top three beliefs about love, and how are
they connected to expectations of others or yourself?
Think of someone you know you love and sense in your
body the sensations that this love triggers and describe
them to yourself. Do your muscles relax or tighten? Does
your chest expand or contract?
How clear is your sense of loving unconditionally? Are
you extending this sense of unconditional love toward
yourself as well?
Stop for a moment and really contemplate this: What are your top three beliefs about love, and how are they connected to expectations of others or yourself? Think of someone you know you love and sense in your body the sensations that this love triggers and describe them to yourself. Do your muscles relax or tighten? Does your chest expand or contract? How clear is your sense of loving unconditionally? Are you extending this sense of unconditional love toward yourself as well? I carried for a long time the beliefs that I am not enough, that there is something wrong with me, that I am not loveable, that I don’t
belong, and that no one understands me. The woman who lived according to those beliefs was not the woman I dreamed of becoming. I conducted research into human psychology,
childhood attachment, and change management theory. What I discovered was that many of my beliefs led to self-
sabotaging behaviors, and these were all protective coping mechanisms I had created when I was a young, overwhelmed child. Learning to relate as an adult to my inner little girl and heal her fears and loneliness was the biggest gift I gave myself. Developing true compassion and unconditional love for myself was the beginning of embodying the woman I felt called to be. I am still in the process of becoming that woman. Yet the progress I made over the years is astounding. It’s a bit of a paradox: I didn’t know what was possible before I embodied it intentionally! Now I have daily rituals, effective self-coaching processes, and proven tools I use and teach as a coach, edutainer, and author to others who long for self-realization as a creative process of self-discovery and self-curation. Check in with yourself:
Envision your ideal self. What characteristics define this version of you?
Identify areas where you already embody aspects of your ideal self.
Consider one next step in your evolution towards your dream self. Sadly the word power has for many women a negative connotation and bad reputation. Most women define “power” as “power over others”, “exploitative”, “manipulative”, “bullying” etc. For me, power is the adult word for the magic I believed in as a child. The power to create something that didn’t exist before I created it. The power to change oneself. The power to influence, support, coach, teach, and empower others. The power to impact the world and leave a legacy. I love power. The final fourth letter in FLIP, the “P” is power and on the one hand, grows automatically as a side effect of the growth of the previous three: Freedom, Love, and Identity.
On the other hand, it needs conscious ego-management to stay humble, smart strategic thinking and tactics, in order not to burn oneself out and to have the desired impact in the world in alignment with our responsibilities to make a living, serve others, and live in alignment with our inner values. One form I live this power is through my authorship and coming into your life through articles, chapters, and solo books. (You can see some examples of book covers here on the side of my article.) My most powerful internal mentor is “facing death”. I ask myself every few weeks: “If I were to suddenly die today, have I lived courageously and committedly enough to leave a lasting legacy in the
world?” It is hard to capture in words what the peace the answer to this question gives me feels like… Contemplate:
What is your relationship to power?
How powerful do you perceive yourself to be to change yourself, influence others, and impact the world?
What is one belief or one fear in your way of embracing your power fully you are willing to drop right here and now while reading this article? Thank you for the precious energy, time, and attention you spend with my words. I would love to hear about your takeaways from this article. Please email me at sylvia@becker-hill.com with “BAUW Magazine” beginning the subject line. If you want to introduce yourself in a 15 min chat scan the QR code at the end of this page and I’ll see you soon on Zoom! May you discover your “FLIP it! Power” more and more. You are freer, more loving, more wonderful, and more powerful than you think you are.
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