too long, didn't read

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Hello love,

I have a question for you today:

How do you usually react when someone makes a comment on your choices, whether in your business or in your lifestyle?

The other day, I told a friend about my work, and how the website is coming together. I explained that the challenge is this: I don’t do just one thing, like “mindset coach,” “strategist,” or “copywriter.”

I’m a blend of powerful tools serving one common purpose: Helping sensitive women lead a business they love, one that feels like home.

He paused. “Too long, didn’t read,” he said.

Excuse me?

“You know,” he added, “when I look for an electrician, and I see they’re also a plumber, a carpenter, a painter and a roofer—I skip their ad. It just means they’re not good at any of those things.”

This kind of comment used to immediately activate my nervous system.

• I would either defend my choices vehemently for 20 minutes,
• or spiral down into self-doubt and self-loathing for a couple of days (or weeks).

This time, I smiled and changed the subject.

What's changed? I responded instead of reacting.

And that's not magic, that's the result of months of observing my trigger responses and what's behind them.

You see we all have triggers: things that make the alarm system in our brains to go off.

• Maybe that's a friend criticising your business,
• a sales campaign receiving zero clicks,
• a beloved client ghosting you,
• or your life partner doing (or not doing) things that hit a nerve.

It's human to want to eliminate the triggers, but you can't prevent them because you can't control other people.

What you can do, however, is to start paying attention to what happens inside of you when a trigger occurs.

Open a page in your journal just for this, and map out 6 columns:

1. Trigger: what happened (the facts as neutral as you can)
2. Emotions: name what you felt + the intensity of your emotions response from 1 - 10
3. Thought: what were the thoughts behind the emotion?
4. Belief: what does it say about you?
5. Reaction: how did you react this time?
6. Choice: how would you rather react next time?

Observe yourself in business and in your close relationships with grace and compassion.

Over time, you'll start seeing patterns in yourself, you'll start understanding why maybe you react the way that you do. You'll start seeing that the threat your brain perceived in the trigger isn't a threat after all, and so now you have a choice to respond differently in the future .

You see, we sometimes waste so much time and energy trying to understand why other people act the way they do, or to make them understand us and convince them to think differently about us....

But if we put that same time and energy towards understanding ourselves, that's when we start making a real difference.

That's how we cultivate peace.

Power and light,

Jessica