New Love - Hold The Glass Slipper

Okay. It’s time to burst another love fairytale bubble. I must warn you this may be painful at first and then hopefully it will be liberating.

Ready?

No human relationships last forever. None.

Ouch!

You know this on some level. Nobody is born at the exact same time and nobody dies at the exact same time. Those are facts.

You come in with yourself and you leave with yourself.

So why not begin to love yourself?

Oh, I know. You have been told that you must love everyone before you love yourself. Everyone is worthy of your love before you are. And you wonder why love seems to hurt.

Enter oversweet romantic social conditioning. You have been taught in subtle and obvious ways again and again that someone will swoop in and rescue you, anticipate your every need and treat you like the perfect diamond we all know you are.

Remember happily ever after?

What exactly is YOUR happily ever after? Do you want to find and be completed by your other half? Do you want to love and be loved forever? What is your love vision?

I am here to help you shift out of fairytale thinking into what feels better. I help you clarify what you want in your relationships and why. And then get it (yay!).

Think about it, fairy tales can be damaging and destructive. They can encourage you to compare your love life to other people’s love life and relationships. They might make you question your actions and your life.

That does not feel good!

Will it feel better to stop missing a perfect romantic partner and start living your life like only you can do? Or will it feel better to stop feeling misunderstood by your partner and start understanding yourself on a deep level? What does it feel like to trust yourself and know that you have all the answers you need inside?

I am here to encourage you to step into more of your power and strength to become responsible for your own emotions and actions. To use them as guidance to choose to feel better. To know that you can handle and adjust and change to what your life brings to you.

To connect with your core abilities and love.

This is empowerment. Genuine, beautiful, authentic taking care of yourself because that is what you are here to do. Honest strength and freedom.

So, if you ever have bought into the fairytales, the toxic social conditioning or your friends and family’s well-meaning judgment or your own judgment of you, STOP! Stop right now.

You can make a shift this instant. Or as soon as you decide that you get to call the shots in your love life.

You are responsible for your own happily ever after. You get to create love how you want it!

Blend your amazing qualities and quirks to create and share love as you see it.  You can do it on your own and take the long way, or you can use fresh strategies that work begin working now. I can help. If you want to get more of this delicious way forward, schedule a free 30 minute call with me here: https://calendly.com/optimizedrelationships/lovecoaching

Until we talk again-

Love On,

Risa

p.s. - Also have you checked out my free Face Book group?  We have a lot of LOVELY fun in there…. It’s called loveologists, check it here: : https://www.facebook.com/groups/1503456919702692/

Photo by Joshua Reddekopp on Unsplash 

Not Going Down the Lonely Road

Alone.

Few words trigger as much emotion as the word alone.

Being alone motivates people. It motivates some people to go off on their own, get quiet and enjoy themselves as they rest, relax and recharge. Solitude is precious.

Being alone motivates other people to search high and low for another person or people to spend time with. Being alone feels lonely. Being alone is to be avoided.

I have felt both. And here’s the thing – once you learn how to love yourself on a deep and authentic level, you can enjoy being alone without feeling lonely. You know how to feel connected while being alone.

Okay, so it starts with self-love. To me, self-love is accepting, appreciating and treating yourself as you would your best friend or a lover. It’s embracing the fact that you are with yourself always, so why not enjoy it and treat yourself as a loved one? Lighten up, you are a loved one!

What makes this so incredibly difficult is that most of us have been taught, told and sold that it is selfish to love our self. It’s not humble. It means you don’t care about other people.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Self-love is where all love begins.

Self-love starts inside by learning to stop judging yourself. Judgment slices open your heart. Judgment scars. Judgment is the opposite of love.

When you remember to release self-criticism, you begin to step towards self-love. When you begin to appreciate all the light and the shadow that make you different from everyone else on the planet, you begin to release the toxic social conditioning that tells you to put everyone else first.

As you stop putting everyone else first, you become responsible for your own emotions and happiness. You learn how to stop filling up from the outside in. You go within and appreciate all that you are and have. And when you master this genuine self-love, you give yourself a wonderful internal foundation and compass to live by. To trust.

When your internal universe is filled with unconditional self-love, you are centered in love. A love that bubbles up to you and then naturally flows to everyone else. And everything. With this comes peace of mind and an ease that other people feel without you forcing it. 

True love.

By loving your self on a deep level, you show other people how to do it too. You model it. You invite them to love who they are. Share who they are.

Imagine this: we have self-loving people that take responsibility for their own emotions and happiness.  No more blame or trying to control.

Then we choose to create love relationships or not. No judgment. When we become people anchored in unconditional self-love that consciously create the relationships we want and release the relationships we don’t want, we are love naturally.

Because self-love feels natural and joyful, more people want to participate in it. Like laughter, self-love is contagious. As we become centered in self-love, fewer and fewer people will be judged and taught to feel lonely or unwanted because they are not coupled off or paired with someone.

Toxic judgment will be released and replaced with true connection.

People that feel true joy will connect with people that feel true joy. We will help each other. And the planet. Through love, we are unstoppable and unlimited in our potential.

The definition of grace.

It starts with self-love and where it ends, I don’t know. We can figure that out together. Take feeling alone and transform it into self-love.  

Love On,

Risa

Photo by Bryan Minear on Unsplash

Backwards and In High Heels

Tony Robbins.

I have watched, read and listened to many Tony Robbins videos, books and audios. I usually agree with a lot of what he says.

Then his #MeToo videos went viral. The videos of a female at one of his seminars asking him about the #MeToo movement. Robbins responds that it is a play for significance and then goes into an explanation of how a few of his powerful male friends are having second thoughts about hiring attractive females because of the #MeToo movement.

Say what?

This is so far from the empathy he usually espouses.

It’s his experience and I respect that. I don’t respect equating sexual abuse survival struggle with making it hard for his friends to hire qualified job candidates.

Robbins subsequent walk speaks volumes. He uses his tall, intimidating frame to walk this female backwards in an “exercise” to me that physically demonstrates his lack of empathy for her experience.

I am reminded of the Ann Richards quote: “Women have been doing everything men can do, backwards and in high heels.” as Robbins walks her backwards literally and figuratively.

Sorry Tony, to me that is bullying.

Next, I read his polished public apology on Face Book. I am baffled once again. I don’t know if this is a heartfelt apology or a clever attempt to do damage control and/or win back lost followers.

And to me, it doesn’t really matter because how can we ever know for certain someone’s intentions and motives in any relationship? We have their words and their actions. Talk and walk.

What now? We move on with a little more knowledge. We move on with more information about ourselves.

With more clarity about what we want and what we don’t want. To me, now is not the time to draw a line in the sand. Yet again.

It’s not about being right. It’s about learning from each other.

Can we begin to respond in a new way? Are you game? Instead of taking a side and bolstering our opinions with convincing information and arguments, let’s pivot.

Let’s stop identifying with and defending our points of view.

Let’s send all parties involved compassion, empathy and non-judgment. Let’s go further and send compassion, empathy and non-judgment to everyone viewing and consuming this information, rather than picking a side and clinging to it.

Human interactions are messy and imperfect. We all have fucked up interactions every day and yet we do our best. We pick ourselves and each other up.  It’s time to dust ourselves off. Judgment stops here as soon as we decide it does.

Are you listening Tony?

Love On,

Risa

p.s. - You are worthy of less judgment and more love. Absorb that. Check out my free love guide to help you get started: https://optimizedrelationships.com/5steplgbridge

Photo by NordWood Themes on Unsplash

Love Fairy Tales Expire

Snuggly stories read at bedtime and incredible animated movies linger in the back of your brain long after The End.  You drift off to sleep with neat endings and all is well tucked safely in your amazing heart. You carry the stories so long, you hardly notice they are still there. . .

You continue to learn in subtle and not so subtle ways that you need someone to love you, save you and understand you on a deep level. A prince goes with a princess. Sunsets are for lovers.

You dream of the One, your soulmate and your other half.

But, nobody is coming to save you.

It’s time to gently awaken from the fantasy. You have been lied to and misled.

It’s on you to save you.

It’s on you to love you, save you and understand you on a deep level. It’s on you to be responsible for your emotions and actions. It’s on you to feel complete.

It’s your right and responsibility to give yourself the love you were taught to give to others. Give this love to yourself first.  Love yourself fully and first then unconditional love organically ripples out from your heart center to all.

Self-love doesn’t make you selfish or uncaring, it makes you indestructible. It’s giving yourself permission to become deeply happy with all that you are now and sharing it in a way that feels comfortable for you. In ways that don’t look like the old fairy tales.

Self-love is treating yourself as well as you treat others before you care for others. It’s eliminates people pleasing. It’s realizing you don’t need to be fixed and the only time you are broken is when you believe it. The only time you are alone or separate is when you think or believe it.

It’s beyond time to stop believing in the toxic social conditioning and comparison that hurts. You are worthy of big love.

It’s time to stop waiting and save yourself. 

Start with unconditional love.

Start with yourself.

Start now.

Self-love is the gift you give to yourself that we all feel love from. Self-love is a new empowered ending for your love story.

Love On,

Risa

p.s. - I have new information, exercises and approaches to self-love.  You are worthy of more love, joy and connection. Absorb that. Today is the day you flip your painful love script to your pleasant new love results. Check out my free love guide to help you get started: https://optimizedrelationships.com/5steplgbridge

Photo by xiaole Zheng on Unsplash

Bridges to Love

Questions are amazing little bridges from here to there. From confusion to clarity. They fire up our brains and get our energy flowing. Ask yourself these questions to begin to clarify what you think and feel. There are no right or wrong answers, so let loose with your love responses.  Create your own bridges with your answers to get clear on you and your love.

13 questions to help you clarify what you feel about self-love and love relationships:

Do you expect love to fix most problems and heal you?

Do you calibrate your relationship expectations?

Do you expect your partner to know what you want?

Do you expect someone to love or communicate with you in the same way you love and communicate with them?

Do you want your significant other to love you for you to feel valued and worthy of love?

Do you want to change your partner?

Do feel complete if you are not in a romantic relationship?

Do you love someone else more than you love yourself?

Do you think men and women usually have specific mindsets and behaviors?

Do you consistently feel alone or lonely?

Do you worry what others think about you?

Are you attached to other people, pets, experiences or objects?

Do you feel overwhelmed?

13 questions to help you remember your magnificence:

Do you practice authentic self-love?

Is your self-worth based on anything outside of yourself; anything external?

Do you know how to self soothe?

Do you realize you can choose to feel better or worse?

Do you consciously allow, learn from and then release your emotions?

Do you move and exercise as much as you can?

Do you do what increases your well-being?

Do you trust other people?

Do you use your imagination to feel more joy?

Do you choose to be a victim or empower yourself?

Do you mindfully open your heart and mind?

Do you choose to guard yourself or become vulnerable?

Do you remember to shine and share your inner light?

What do you think and feel?  If you want to take your answers to the next level or talk more with me about all matters love related, click here: https://m.me/RisaKelley    

Love On

Risa

p.s. -  You are worthy of more love, joy and connection. Absorb that. Today is the day you flip your painful love script to your pleasant new love results. With new ideas, information and exercises (like my free love guide) to help you get started: https://optimizedrelationships.com/5steplgbridge ), you can create love relationships that you - well, love!

Photo by Liu Zai Hou on Unsplash

Strength is On It's Way

Do you know pain?

The pain of feeling lost.

The pain of not being included.

The pain of not feeling heard or understood.

The pain of feeling separate.

The pain of not being loved.

The pain of being unfairly compared to anyone else.

The pain of not being valued for your contribution.

The pain of wanting to help others and not knowing exactly how to do it.

You know pain. All types of pain. You have unknowingly drawn pain deep inside your being. You have numbly filled your heart and consciousness with pain on a personal and then global level. You have imbibed intense, searing, abundant pain without knowing how to release it effectively. As you attempt to avoid pain, you create more.

The definition of feeling stuck.

So, you notch your brain into overdrive in the quest for the solution to your pain. Your certainty that there is an answer drives you further on a never-ending pain reduction quest. If you just found that one elusive bit of information or the perfect strategy, you would celebrate as you connect with more joy and love in this instant.

This has been a problem that has morphed into your pattern: thinking your way to feeling based solutions. You have bravely attempted to employ your amazing brain only to liberate yourself from the hurt. You believe you can think your way to feeling better while silently stuffing the nasty old pain down deep inside. One feeds the other.

It’s time to break the cycle. To balance your thinking with your feeling. Feeling better requires feeling.

Feeling the whole messy spectrum of your emotions. Learning from your experiences. And finally releasing that emotion. Feel, learn, and release your emotions. Learn to let go of unpleasant and pleasant emotions as you naturally move through your days, nights and adventures.

How?

Observe yourself.

Balance your incredible brain with your amazing heart. Use your awareness and emotions to liberate yourself from that old repeating cycle of hurt. Stop avoiding pain and begin to process it. Mindfully choose to release your self-criticism and judgment.

Stop resisting and allow. Stop controlling and trust. Stop judging and love.

Don’t do it by yourself. Ask for and accept help from others. Get more strategies or schedule a time to talk with me that works for you here: https://calendly.com/optimizedrelationships/lovecoaching   

Offer your help to others.

Appreciate.

Live in gratitude.

Challenge yourself to live into your potential.

Create the life you dream of.

Strength arrives through pain. Be the balanced solution you seek. 

Love On.

Risa

p.s. –  You know pain and now you know you can turn it around. Here’s to you.

Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash

The First Date Shakes

You are crystal clear that you want to date.

You know exactly why you want to date and aren’t afraid to share it.

You are open minded and open hearted while you also know your deal breakers.

You set yourself up for dating success. You put thought and time into your profiles, photos and messages. You are social. You joined groups, commented on people’s posts and started friendly conversations.

You are ready for fabulous dating fun with your eyes open.

Now it’s on to a first date or twenty as you think of meeting someone face to face, one to one and in person. You feel an avalanche of emotion. You anticipate the shakes. Allow those shakes, if you feel nervous and you are excited at the same time, you are ready.

Ready-ready.

Take a breath and trust yourself. It’s okay to feel nervous. Reframe and remember why you want to date. Stay grounded in your self-love and genuine confidence. Reconnect to your dating intentions and purpose to center yourself and move forward.

Move forward with a mutual choice.

Choose where you want to go and what you want to do on your first date with the person you are going with. Together. Yes, start out in balanced energy. Both of you have equal input and veto power. Begin this new experience with respect, honesty and courage. Use your voice and be real.

Do not agree to do something that you don’t like to do. Don’t get caught up in what you imagine the other person might think of you. Don’t invite someone on a date because you don’t want to go alone. Use your empathy and compassion.

Forget impressing each other.

Forget flowers.

Forget the expected first date.

Don’t start off in a tangle of old stereotypes and expectations. Do not put on a mask or play games from the get go. Don’t make your first date a job interview or an interview for a possible sexual partner.

Don’t do the same old trap. Don’t go to a nice restaurant for dinner and drinks. Don’t expect one person to pay. Don’t set up an intimate meal with someone you are not physically or emotionally intimate with.

Don’t set yourself up for disaster and then wonder why it happened.

Go easy on the alcohol and weed.

Do get to know each other in a low or no pressure environment. Do meet in a public place with people around for your safety. Do have a friendly date before you have a romantic one. Play. Do something you each can afford instead of something luxurious and lavish.

Do something you like or have wanted to try.

Do something new.

Do get to know each other.

Be yourself.

Pay for yourself.

Share yourself.

Enjoy yourself.

Love On.

Risa

p.s. – if you want to chat with me more about dating or all things relationships, click here: https://m.me/RisaKelley?ref=LetsChat

Photo by Hàn Vi Phạm Thị on Unsplash