Hello and welcome! My name is Heather, I'm a registered professional counsellor and a certified
life coach. So today, I wanted to share with you some of the important life lessons that my
clients learn in my sessions that I think you'll find helpful. The first lesson is: Don't let fear
stop you. Often times, our actions are dictated by fear. Whether it's fear of being judged,
fear of failing, or fear of not being good enough. Let me share with you a personal story. About
eight years ago, I wanted to start my own YouTube channel and I wanted to be able to help people on
a larger scale. I think for me there was just so much fear that prevented me from being able to
continue or to follow through with that dream. Honestly, I got scared. I was worried that I
was gonna get judged, I was worried that people wouldn't like my content and um it really stopped
me from being able to post any videos. Fear got the best of me and I kind of just let YouTube be
a distant dream. It was something that was always on my mind, but I felt like it was never the right
time and I was busy with school and I always had excuses that prevented me from following through
and posting videos on YouTube. But as of last year, I've started posting and the first couple
of times it was super uncomfortable it was a huge learning curve. Building up that fear and that
expectation of how awful it was going to be really stopped me from being able to move forward and
honestly I didn't think that I would be where I am today. I didn't think that I would be close to
a thousand subscribers and I'm just so grateful to have such a wonderful audience who's really
supportive, who loves the content that I'm putting out there. So thank you all so much for supporting
this channel. If you haven't already, make sure to like this video and subscribe so it can reach more
people. I realized that there was really nothing to be scared of and I really wish that I started
this years ago when I wanted to. So if there is something you want to do; maybe you want to change
careers, maybe you want to go back to school, maybe you want to make new friends, or change
your relationship status. Whatever it is, don't let fear stand in your way. It's perfectly normal
to feel a sense of fear or to feel scared to try something new because it's the unknown. Fear
usually comes from a place of worry, right so, it's worried that we won't be successful or worry
that we're gonna be judged and it's there because it's trying to protect us. It's trying to protect
us from getting hurt, but most of the times the things that we want to do isn't actually going
to physically hurt us, but our brains have a hard time distinguishing that type of fear
from fear of rejection or fear of feeling that we're not good enough. If you do feel a sense
of fear what I want you to do is acknowledge that the fear is there. I don't want you to
try to ignore it or push it away because feelings are feedback and if you are feeling scared about
something it's important for you to have that time to be able to process and understand where that
fear is coming from so that it doesn't prevent you or stop you from following your dreams or
following and moving forward with your goals. Was there something that you always wanted to try, but
fear got the best of you or maybe you did overcome that fear. Let us know in the comments below so
you can inspire others! The second lesson is: stop comparing yourself to others. I know that it's so
hard to do that now especially with social media nowadays. It's hard not to compare our lives with
the lives that we see on social media it's so easy to judge ourselves when we compare ourselves to
these strangers that we follow online and this takes a huge toll on our self-esteem
and our self-worth. Maybe we feel like we're not living our best lives. If you do find yourself on
the comparison train and you're constantly looking at other people's lives and you feel the sense
of envy, what I want you to do is disconnect from social media. So taking a break every now and then
from social media. You don't need to go on Instagram. You don't need to go on Tik Tok or
Facebook to see what other people are doing. Often what happens is people wake up in the morning and
the first thing they do is they roll over and they check their social media. Try not to do that. Try
putting your phone out of your room if you can and spend your first waking moments doing something
that you love. What you can do instead is to focus on yourself. So you can do some light stretching,
some journaling, think about things that you're grateful for, do some meditating,
read something uplifting. There are so many other things that you can do to invest your time in
and invest in yourself and comparing yourself constantly to these people on social media
isn't going to help. As human beings, our attention spans are quite small so ask yourself,
"do you want to focus your attention on these strangers and compare your life to theirs or do
you want to start focusing on yourself and taking steps to move your life towards something you want
it to be?" The third lesson is: learning how to communicate better. Often times in my sessions,
clients come to me and they say, "Heather, I don't really know how to communicate with my partner."
I say this often: we were never taught how to communicate functionally. So what that means
is being able to express yourself in a way that is honest and true to your feelings and in a way
for the other person to understand and respect what you're saying. So this might look like
being assertive with what your needs are and how you're feeling or being okay and comfortable with
expressing your more vulnerable side. Often times especially when it comes to females
being assertive is something that we feel is a "bad" thing. We feel that it's not okay to be
assertive and to say what exactly it is that we want or we're looking for or how we're feeling.
We expect other people to know how we're feeling or to read our minds
and that's not really fair because no one can read our minds. This also means using "I" statements
and taking responsibility and ownership for how we're feeling instead of blaming other people or
making assumptions that someone is doing things on purpose. Being able to ask for clarity about
what happened and what their intentions were behind their actions. Often times on my channel,
what you'll see especially with my therapist reviews videos is I'll give examples of how things
could have been communicated differently instead of what was shown in the show or the movie. I try
to make this a learning opportunity for my viewers to really see how we can communicate better
because there's always room for improvement and it can also improve our relationships as well. So
taking our communication styles and our communication skills seriously and
learning that at an earlier stage in our lives to find ways of how we can communicate better
is definitely something that I see a lot with my clients and my sessions and that's something that
we work on together. The fourth lesson is: setting boundaries. So setting boundaries means respecting
our wants our needs and our promises to ourselves and also making sure that other people respect
them as well. It might mean not overextending yourself to others and being comfortable with
saying no with things that you don't want to do or things that you're not comfortable with.
Oftentimes when people say "no", they worry that they're coming across as mean,
but really saying no means respecting your time, especially if you are already overstretched. Being
comfortable with saying "no" means that you're respecting yourself and your time and you're
letting other people know that it's important for them to respect your time as well. Just because
you say "no" it doesn't mean that you're gonna lose that relationship or lose that friendship
and honestly if you do say "no" and that person stops talking to you, why would you want to be in
that relationship or that friendship in the first place? It's important for you to have a clear idea
of what your boundaries are and what they mean to you and making sure that other people understand
that as well. The fifth lesson is: making self-care a priority. So self-care is more than
just skin care routines or taking bubble baths although that may be a part of it. Self-care means
taking care of yourself as a whole being so that means focusing on all aspects of your life that
might mean emotional, physical, mental, spiritual - whatever that means to you. So that might mean
getting enough sleep, eating right, drinking enough water, socializing with your friends,
journaling, being able to process your emotions, having time to yourself, spending time doing
things that you love, learning new things whether it be an instrument or a new language.
Self-care isn't just doing more of something it might also look like doing less of something else
so it's spending less time on social media, cutting out toxic friends, re-examining
certain habits that might be harming you. Self-care is not selfish. If you're interested
in incorporating self-care into your daily life, watch my other video where I talk more in depth
about how to start a self-care routine. There's also a free guidebook that you can download
so make sure you check that out afterwards. If you found this video helpful make sure to give
it a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel to receive more helpful advice. Thank you so much
for watching and I look forward to seeing you in the next one, until then be kind and love yourself