The beginning of a transformation starts with recognizing that we need to change. Now let’s dive deep into this. Get your pen and paper ready!

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Do you experience imposter syndrome? Do you find yourself comparing to others and feel that you're not good enough?

Do you sometimes find that you have relationship anxieties? Do you find it hard to open up and let someone in?

All of these come down to your ability to accept yourself. And you can never fully accept yourself until you heal that wound with your parents around acceptance. 

When you can make peace with self-acceptance issues with your parents (whether to heal OR to forgive & move on), that’s when you can feel truly secure within yourself; that's when you will stop experiencing imposter syndrome; that’s when you can find true love - the kind of love that truly accepts you for who you are. 

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After a long-winded conversation with my friends on Saturday about different personality traits - not only in terms of dating but also within family dynamics, I was reminded of this fact again after having long-winded conversations with my parents (separately as they are divorced).

Sometimes a conversation with parents has a way of making a detour to visit issues, conflicts, and misunderstandings that happened during childhood. The discussion started off light-hearted but somehow ended with me (or maybe both of us) having to close our phones or else we would just keep filling our heads with thoughts that stir up unpleasant feelings.

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Whether you’re in a relationship, single, or in a complicated situation, I think we can all agree that working on our relationship is really working on ourselves. 

There’s no other place as intimately challenging as being in a relationship. A relationship is where can heal all of our intimacy, commitment, and abandonment wounds and fears - if we allow ourselves to confront our deepest fears and greatest vulnerabilities. Many of us choose to run. But there comes a point when we’re mature enough to realize that running away doesn’t make anything better. Running away might seem like the right thing to do in the moment, but it doesn’t make us feel fulfilled. We still feel hollow because we run away from our deepest need - our need to be loved.

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If there is one word I could use to describe 2021 for me, it is “unpredictable”. 2021 was unpredictable.

Everything that happened wasn’t planned. Everything that happened I couldn’t have planned. The pandemic has changed life paths and goals for a lot of people. Routines were interrupted. Relationships either ended or became stronger and reached new heights. Career choices were evaluated. Families became closer and either grew more acceptance of one another or fell apart. You either fall more in love with your city or realize that it’s time to leave.

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1. Our past/childhood gets carried over into adulthood.

Many of us had this issue. Where maybe at some point, usually when you’re little, you may have been told you’re not good enough, not smart enough, or not pretty enough. Whether it was intentional or not - by teachers, parents, or friends - the feeling you felt when you were told that you’re not good enough never truly fades away. It’s been embed deep in your subconscious mind for years after. This hurt feeling gets carried over into your adulthood and affects how you live your life. You may find yourself not feeling confident to do certain things and you don’t understand why. You may find yourself working so hard and never feel truly satisfied no matter how much you achieve. 

This can become an exhausting, never-ending cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy. 

If, as a child, you had to work so hard to get love and acceptance from parents, you subconsciously felt that the love was “conditional”. You have to be a high achiever, or else, you’re not worthy of love. This doesn’t only affect your personal life where you find yourself constantly working. But in your romantic relationships, you also find yourself subconsciously drawn to romantic partners who make you feel loved the way your parents made you feel loved. You will be drawn to romantic partners who validate you for “being good enough” the way you had to get love and acceptance from your parents. This is because it feels familiar.

Until you understand this and work on rewiring your beliefs around this, you will continue to be attracted to the same type of people and relationships that may not be healthy for you in the long run. You may find yourself being attracted to people with the same childhood traumas. You may find yourself being attracted to people who treat you as well or as badly as your parents did or as your parents treated one another. 

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2. It is important for one to have the freedom to explore, find, and become their most authentic self in order to find their happiness.

If you grew up with parents who are similar to you and are more relaxed and chilled, you may not have struggled with this. However, if you were, different from your parents and the majority of people in your society, then you may have felt like a “misfit”.

Being a misfit is not easy. As a child, we all want love and acceptance from our parents more than anything else. As a teenager, we all want acceptance from our friends. If you’re a misfit, you may have struggled with feeling like you’re not good enough and that your parents wouldn’t love you unless you become who they want you to be. You couldn’t be your authentic self. The love was “conditional”. You never felt truly accepted. You felt like you’re weird and your parents wanted you to be who they thought you should be. And they probably wanted the best for you. However, their dreams and insecurities are not yours to bear. But since we usually live with our parents for the first 18 years of our lives, we cannot escape the fact that their thoughts, beliefs, values, and patterns affect who we are.

Unfortunately, for most of us, unless we have done a lot of personal development work and become aware of our subconscious thoughts, feelings, and actions, we tend to subconsciously pass on our fears and insecurities to those closest to us. 

This can be exhausting as you may have followed the path you thought was right for you - only to never feel truly fulfilled. You follow other people’s dreams, but not yours. You’re not being completely yourself. 

I truly believe that we can only find our true happiness when we can fully accept ourselves and love ourselves unconditionally. And sometimes, we just have to accept that we can never truly accept ourselves until we accept the fact that our parents are the way they are, and other people are the way they are, and we cannot change them. The only thing we can control is ourselves and what we do, act, and feel. 

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3. We can change our patterns and beliefs. 

When you grow up in a household with negative energy and limiting beliefs where parents have negative ways of thinking and limiting beliefs, such as, believing that money is evil; life is unfair; or having the tendency to focus on the possibility of negative outcomes, you subconsciously adopt those beliefs and ways of thinking from you parents. They become your thought patterns and you live your life through those lens. 

Once you recognize these patterns of yours and the fact that you can never see the world and circumstances in life differently until you change them, then you can begin to work on changing them and find your happiness. After all, happiness is a state of mind. It lies in the way you look at things. 

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4. The end of happiness is the lost of gratitude

Following the previous point, you can focus on what you have and feel happy, or, focus on what you lack and feel unhappy - the choice is yours.

And if, by default, you tend to focus on what you lack because you grow up with someone who kept talking about what they lacked in life, you need to work hard to change these patterns. You can start by starting a gratitude journal. It will feel weird at first to force yourself to think about what you’re grateful for. It will feel repetitive to have to do this every day. However, repetition is the key to making any thought become deeply embed in your subconscious mind and become a belief. Every time you think a new thought or take a new action, your brain fires a new synapse. Each time you think the same sort of thought or take the same action, that same path gets repeated and becomes stronger. You need to practice the new way of thinking over and over until the new way of thinking becomes stronger than the old way of thinking.

Happiness can, after all, be easily ignited through the practices of gratitude. And the more grateful and positive you feel, the more beauty you will see in life and the more positive people you will attract into your life. We don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are. There are millions of things happening around us every day. We can only see things which match what lies in our subconscious mind. So nurture your subconscious thoughts and beliefs. They are the control panel of our heart, mind, and soul. 

1. Guided journaling helps you explore your inner world and understand how your upbringing and past experiences affect who you are today.

2. Guided journaling allows you to observe your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors from an objective standpoint. With practice, you can learn to select and manipulate them. You can become the master of your own self and your own mind.

3. Guided journaling helps you become more mindful and intentional about how you live your life.

4. Guided journaling helps you change your patterns as it provides a framework for you to set goals and follow through with actionable steps.

5. Guided journaling helps you relax as it takes your mind off the busy-ness in life.

6. Guided journaling helps you turn life experiences into valuable lessons and wisdom.

7. Guided journaling helps you gain acceptance of self and love for you and your journey.

8. Guided journaling helps you grow and expand.

Have you ever been in a long-term relationship with something that isn’t good for you? But somehow you stick with it and keep going back to it because it’s the only thing you know to have been able to help you feel better when you were at a low point in your life; when you were depressed; when you were sad; when you were unhappy.

Somehow this thing you started becoming acquainted with became your best friend over the years. It’s your muse, your escape, your cave, and your sanctuary. It makes you feel safe and comforted. Yet, at the same time, you know that it’s not good for your health. You’re wasting your health away. You’re wasting money. You’re wasting time and energy. You’re sabotaging not just yourself but also relationships in your life because of your emotional attachment to your bad habit. But because you’ve been reliant on it for so long to help you feel better throughout the ups and downs of life, you don’t know how to cut ties. You don’t know how to break up with it. You don’t know how to say goodbye.

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Have you ever been at a crossroads in life where you have to make a decision but you feel stuck? You keep changing your mind back and forth on your options. I feel like many people are at crossroads right now. With lockdown, restrictions, and changes that have been going on with jobs, many people are considering a career change, moving to another city, and even ending relationships.

I have been at crossroads myself. Sometimes I feel that it might have been easier to be told what to do and to have to follow a certain path like some friends because the paradox of choice is real.

But no matter how confusing making a big decision might be sometimes, I've learned that in the end, you will always find your answer. Your answer might not come to you at the moment. It may take months or years. No matter how much you force it to come, it will not come to you. You will arrive to your answer when you’re ready. You will find the opportunities you seek when you’re ready. You will find the person of your dreams when you’re ready. You will take a leap of faith and believe in yourself when you’re tired of the old path and are ready for the new path.

We will never be fully ready and equipped with all the skills necessary to do what we want to do and to succeed in the new journey we’re about to embark on because that’s a part of the journey - you learn, grow, and gain new skills on your journey. But at some point, you will feel ready to make changes, to jump, to take a leap of faith, and to expand your horizon once again. 

So if you’re trying to make a decision right now - no matter what it is - career change, cities to move to, staying in or leaving your relationship - let’s lay it all out and gain some clarity!

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This year has been full of uncertainty and change. And the wheels are still turning. Things are still shifting. We’re still going through the transition.

I hope this blog post can act as a reminder and a guidance to help you build your mental strength whether you still feel lost in this transition or if you’ve managed to build a routine and find your way around it. 

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