WE MADE IT!! Here we are, settling into 2021. What a crazy year we all had in 2020, but the important thing is that we made it through!! Every year, many people like to reflect on the previous year and then look ahead to the new year as a fresh start. Many people set resolutions as in "This year, I'm going to stop snacking after dinner," or "I'm going to start walking every day," or after 2020, a resolution might be "I'm going to stop finishing a bottle of wine every night!" Many people make resolutions involving something that they want to stop doing or start doing, and often these resolutions have something to do with improving health. Often times, a few weeks or even a month or two will go by with the best of intentions, but then the efforts toward the resolutions fade out or stop all together. I know this because this often happens to me! This year, I did something different and it has already impacted my life so much in two weeks that I HAD to share it with you!
My childhood friend, Kristen Finch, is a Life Coach and the hostess of the Podcast "Show Up and Love." She has a podcast episode about setting "Re-SOUL-utions" and she offers a simple yet very effective way to actually make positive changes in your life. Give it a listen HERE. Instead of focusing on stopping or starting something, she recommends you focus on how you want to FEEL about 9 categories in your life: Body, Mind, Work, Marriage/Relationship, Family, Home, Money, Soul, and Life. Once you have the feelings identified, you make a list of all of the activities you can do to help you get to the feeling place for each category. By being focused on how you want to feel in these various areas, you will be more likely to make choices that will lead you to the feeling place. I re-read my "Re-SOUL-utions" daily and sometimes re-write them and I can already feel a difference in most of those categories! Sometimes simple things make the biggest difference.
I started thinking about how I can use this concept to improve my client sessions. Most clients I see have some sort of "not-so-good" sensations in their body, such as pain, tightness, or stiffness. Or, they have some "not-so-good" movements that restrict their ability to perform their daily tasks or fully enjoy their life. Up until now, I've always started the sessions asking "How are you feeling?" Then, my clients report where their aches and pains are located, or which movements are limited. As a PT, I've always taken responsibility for trying to help get rid of those "not-so-good" sensations. Many clients feel better in their bodies after moving through our treatment sessions with the therapies and exercises used to help their body's efficiency improve. But one session is not a cure-all and often doesn't help to fully resolve the undesired sensations, especially if those sensations have lingered for a long time. Sometimes I would feel unsuccessful if I wasn't able to take someone's pain away in a session or even throughout a series of treatments, which would then turn into feelings of negativity, sadness, disappointment with myself, and lack of confidence in my abilities as a therapist. After listening to the podcast and doing the work to identify the way I WANT to feel in my life, it made me realize that I have been focused on the wrong sensations with my clients. Now, instead of just asking where the "not-so-good" sensations are located, I have started asking clients "How do you WANT to FEEL in your body?" The answers have been simple, yet profound sometimes. So far, clients have shared that they want to feel "relaxed," "free," "flexible," "youthful," "vibrant," and "energized." By spinning the focus to something so much more positive and desirable the level of satisfaction with our sessions has improved, both from the client perspective and from mine as the providing therapist. What a relief! And what a simple way to make such a huge difference!
So, how is it that YOU want to FEEL in your life? In your Body? What do you want to be able to DO more easily? What happens as you start to focus in on those feelings and activities? Is there something you can do to make yourself feel just a little bit better? Is there something I can do to help you feel just a little bit better?
I'd love to hear how this process is beneficial for YOU as you begin the fresh start of this new year! My hope is that you find ways to feel relaxed, free, flexible, youthful, vibrant, energized or any other way that YOU want to feel EVERY day this year!
