My focus is to ensure that you rise above your current challenges, not to cope with it. Coping can only ever be an interim solution until the real answer is found. If coping becomes a long-term solution, it means that we don’t fully understand what we’re trying to solve.

Some examples of coping mechanisms include breathing exercises, affirmations, mantras, and specific techniques to practice in a given situation.

Coping mechanisms fail

If a coping mechanism is working for you, it means that your level of self-awareness is not where it needs to be. Consider which is more effective. Being able to face a challenge with confidence, or having to adopt a technique to avoid the confrontation?

Avoidance means that it could recur at any point. Facing it and dealing with it effectively means that the likelihood of it recurring is reduced, if not eliminated. It also means that even if it does happen again, your level of confidence in being able to deal with it effectively means that it will have even less impact on your mental health than before.

Coping mechanisms also fail for a very important reason. That is, by design, a coping mechanism is intended to deal with a specific set of parameters. For example, the role we play in a specific relationship, the expectation we have from others, or the nature of the issue that we need to cope with. The moment any of that changes, our coping mechanism needs to be updated, adapted, or replaced.

If we’re not aware of the change in parameters or circumstances, the coping mechanism fails us without warning, leaving us in a worse position than we were before we started using it.

My approach

I am driven by my passion to understand why that decision was the only decision that was possible at the time, rather than judging the poor outcomes of a decision. It is through gaining a healthier perspective of what influenced us to make a bad decision, or an ineffective one, that it becomes possible to make a conscious choice on how to undo the impact of that decision.

We must realise that there are no truly bad intentions. But there are too many poorly informed decisions. The moment you understand what you were not aware of at the time, you’ll be able to make peace with the outcomes and move forward in a way that does not keep you anchored to that moment in the past.

Protect your dreams

Don’t ever abandon your goals or your dreams. Instead, together, we gain insight into what has been hindering your progress towards achieving it.

When you find it difficult to achieve those goals that you’ve set for yourself, rather than judging yourself harshly, or looking for someone or something to blame, improve your perspective and understanding about what you couldn’t have known at the time.

By owning that choice, we own our space in life. This allows us to change our course of action without feeling incompetent or foolish about it. More importantly, we cannot make decisions about things we’re unaware of. That’s why my focus is to help you to improve your self-awareness so that you can make conscious decisions about what works for you, rather than relying on advice from those who may not know you well enough.

It’s not about judging ourselves harshly for having made poor decisions. It’s about having a more informed perspective about the decisions that we took.

This is the root of empowering and uplifting ourselves towards creating that life that we deserve.