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Category: Life Skills

Learn how to focus on the soft skills, the people skills like good communication, effective leadership, positive motivation, and managing your emotions.

The Ultimate Meaning of Life Reveals Itself if You Listen

Written by Maria Connolly. Posted in Life Skills, Self-Leadership Skills.

You can find your ultimate meaning in life by mindfully listening for what life asks of you as each challenge, opportunity, and crisis comes your way.“The meaning of life is whatever you ascribe it to be. Being alive is the meaning.” ~ Joseph Campbell

After suffering a severe crisis, people often contemplate the ultimate meaning of life. After surviving the holocaust, Victor Frankl wrote Yes to Life: In Spite of Everything. After a different pandemic claimed two of her children, Mary Shelley wrote The Last Man which explored what makes life worth living. Walt Whitman wrote of this same question, after he suffered a paralyzing stroke.

These people knew suffering intimately. They didn’t try to forget. They didn’t try to pretend it never happened. They didn’t become embittered. Each one emerged from their crisis, with a valuable gift for the world. After allowing themselves time to fully experience their life, including the pain, they derived a sense of meaning from it. Then they bared their souls and we benefit today from their insights.

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Be Ready for Change — How Virtual Coaching Makes Us More Adaptable

Written by Maria Connolly. Posted in Handling Change, Self-Leadership Skills.

Coaches – how can you and your clients be ready for change, when you don’t know what change is coming? You can do so by preparing in these three areas… Doesn’t it feel like changes have been rolling in fast and furious, like the surf in a storm. If you work as a coach, no doubt you want to help your clients cope and be ready for change. How do you feel about change? As a coach, you most likely embrace it as a chance to experience something new and venture out past your comfort zone.  

But what happens when something comes crashing out of left field, completely blindsiding us? We may be left floundering ourselves. How can we not only embrace change but be ready to make the most of it? If we’re not able to do this, how can we possibly help our clients? These are the questions we can not afford to ignore.

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How to Set Mindful Intentions — Make Your Goals Successful and Achievable

Written by Maria Connolly. Posted in Life Skills, Mindfulness, Self-Leadership Skills.

Setting goals isn’t as effective as learning how to set mindful intentions that help you tune into your innate superpowers for guaranteed success!We all know that every year people set goals, yet relatively few of them actually make significant changes in their lives. Why is that? I’ll let you in on a secret…when you’re setting goals you’re not fully engaging your power. Learning how to set mindful intentions instead allows you to tune into your innate superpower! And here are the reasons why I say that…

Goal setting is often based on a negative premise…”I’m not skinny enough,” “I’m not rich enough,” or “I’m not organized enough”. Do you see how each of these thoughts tells you that you’re “not enough”? How could something that says you’re a failure result in anything good? It just can’t.

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Recovering From Emotional Exhaustion? Wholeheartedness, Not Rest, Will Heal You!

Written by Maria Connolly. Posted in Emotional Intelligence, Life Skills, Mindfulness.

When you're recovering from emotional exhaustion, mindfully developing a deep awareness of your mind/body connection is vital to restoring your balance.“Burnout is a state of emptiness, to be sure, but it does not result from giving all I have: it merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place.” ~ Parker Palmer, Let Your Life Speak

We have all been through some pretty hard times, and the world isn’t getting any rosier. There are so many ways to describe how people are feeling today — burnout, emotional exhaustion, mental exhaustion, mentally drained, emotional burnout, nervous exhaustion, overworked, over-stressed, over-committed, over-stimulated, and now we even have Zoom fatigue! And some of the tried-and-true methods for recovering from emotional exhaustion aren’t working. 

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Shame Resilience: The Antidote to Shame Is Vulnerability

Written by Maria Connolly. Posted in Emotional Intelligence, Life Skills.

Shame resilience helps you, as you experience shame, to consciously choose supportive emotions instead — connection, empathy, worth, and power.“Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it. Embracing our vulnerabilities is risky but not nearly as dangerous as giving up on love and belonging and joy—the experiences that make us the most vulnerable. Only when we are brave enough to explore the darkness will we discover the infinite power of our light.” ~ Brene Brown

We long to fit in, to belong, to be accepted. Yet this very longing can keep us from making the deep connections we crave, because we’re afraid to be seen, to show our true selves for fear we’ll be rejected. On a deep, very personal level we’ve judged ourselves as unworthy, so we’re ashamed that something about us isn’t acceptable, “normal” or perfect. This shame, this fear of disconnect, is powerful. But we can shine a healing light on it by cultivating vulnerability. Yes, we can build our shame resilience!

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