Our Relationships

Your Relationship Status

Hello. My name is Kristin King, and I am a Transformational Mindset and Life Coach and owner of Kristin King Coaching LLC. I am grateful for the opportunity to write this month’s blog for the Gunnison Valley Women’s Networking Group as I have a deep passion and desire to help women – nothing brings me more joy than to help another to feel and live their best life showing up as their best self.

When a woman feels her best, those she loves around her are positively impacted as well. When everyone’s life is better, it’s a win-win for us all!

For the sake of this article, and because there are so many topics that are swirling in my head as I write this, I want to talk about three that may be on people’s minds right now, and if they are on yours, then perhaps this will bring some clarity. The topics I want to touch on today are your relationship with health, with the changing season, and your relationship with yourself!

Your Relationship with Health

Let’s start by focusing on a big topic right now on so many of our minds – health. And health can be adversarial for some. I meet people all the time who are critical of themselves, or they want and believe they ought to be doing more, and therefore feel a lot of guilt and shame around that. Many of us are very focused on our weight as opposed to how we feel; thinking the number of the scale will bring us peace. What I have learned is that health is very individualized and there’s no right or wrong way to do it. Focusing on living a healthy lifestyle goes much further than focusing on a number on the scale. The number doesn’t mean we all of a sudden hit the jackpot of perfect health, just like the number in our bank account won’t bring us happiness. We all need to do what’s best for us and take care of our own health the best we can, and getting really clear to your current relationship with your health is a great place to start.

Health and healthy living can be about listening to your body and eating the foods you want to eat – foods that bring you energy and make you feel good. It can be simply about taking a walk because you’ve had a stressful day and know some fresh air and time with your pup would be 45 minutes well spent. We all have repeating habits or patterns that we know will help us feel amazing, and we also have those that cause us emotional or physical pain.

I have experienced these patterns many times in my own life. From working out too hard in the gym and paying for it with 3 pinched nerves in my neck over the span of a couple of months, to struggling to honor my desire for going to bed earlier…each person’s health journey is a work in progress, and it’s an ongoing one. I encourage you to view yours in the same way, listen to yourself, and be open to trying things differently if needed.

How do you feel about where you are in your life, from a health perspective, right now? If I asked you what one thing you would like to do to improve your health, that you have thought about, and are still interested in doing, what is the one thing? Now I want for you to figure out where you can schedule it into your life, and commit to this one goal.

Whether your goal is to drink 3 more glasses of water a day, develop a meditation practice, walk in the woods, get to the gym, stop drinking alcohol, do a cleanse, eat a salad every day…. whatever it is, know that you are in control of making that thing happen, and then set yourself up for success by mapping out how and when you will fit it into your life!

Your Relationship with the Seasons

This time of year always gets me. I LOVE Fall, and it seems to come and go quickly but I resist the cold of winter around this time each year. Ever since I was a kid growing up in Maine I have really dreaded the winter months. And why do I feel this way? I don’t have a great answer other than it’s a pattern and a mindset that I hold about summer going bye-bye and winter knocking at the back door, and I have a personal challenge transitioning from one to the other – until I get to a certain point, and then I flip the switch.

Here’s how I’m thinking about the seasons changing from fall to winter this season:

1) I get to choose. I can choose to stay stuck in summertime thoughts and excitement, even though the reality is I can’t do anything about it, or I can make a choice to get excited about the fun in the snow to come, and buy my Nordic ski pass already.

2) I can remind myself that transitions can be powerful. Transitions are not scary or bad (unless you are my 2 year old). What can I do to thrive in this transition time, whether I am talking about the season of the year, the change in activities based on cooler climate, or even the stage I am at in my businesses? Also, what needs to happen for me feeling the way I want to feel and to keep moving forward? The transition of the seasons, and the transitions in life are not bad. Change is not a cause for panic or fear. However, resisting the season while feeling these feelings is not helpful and it’s actually consuming extra energy and filling our headspace with thoughts that are not serving us.

3) Find the opportunity. What opportunities come into your life in the fall? Less busy-ness after summer wraps up, and school begins? More movie nights and family snuggle time on nights and weekends under blankets? More pumpkin muffins and tea? More drinking coffee by the fire? More time to focus on projects that were hard to finish up this summer? Hiking through bright yellow and gold aspen groves, and telling yourself that nothing is better than the mountains in the fall? What do you love about fall and shift to feelings of gratitude and appreciation. Write it down if it helps!

Your Relationship with Yourself

I saved the best for last, as this is the most important!

Your relationship with yourself is the most important relationship in your life. WHY? Because you are stuck with you, forever. When we don’t love ourselves, when we are not kind and thoughtful of our wants and needs, we don’t have the full capacity to love others the way they deserve. When we don’t accept ourselves, we don’t have the capacity to accept others. When we are not happy with ourselves, we are not going to be happy with others. The relationship you have with YOU impacts how you feel, act and show up when you are interacting with anyone else. The relationship we have with ourselves impacts our mental, emotional, physical and spiritual health. And it doesn’t just stop there. It impacts everyone in our world and all the people around us.

How is your relationship right now with the number one person in your life? (And remember, this person is YOU) On a scale of 1 to 10….10 being you love everything about you, and you don’t desire to change a thing, what number would you give yourself right now? Would you say a 5, a 7, a 9… maybe a 1? There is no judgment about where you are right now and what your number is. This is just an exercise.

What could you do today to bring your relationship with yourself, and your number up by one point? Just one. This is not meant to be hard, and it’s 100% meant to be achievable for all. What are your top 3 strengths? Are you leveraging your strengths in your life regularly and on a daily basis? If not, why? Can you bring more of your strengths to the table so that others can benefit from more vibrant YOU are well?

I could go on for days about personal development, self-love, mindset, and health, and I do share quite a lot in my book, You 2.0 - 3 Secrets to an Empowered and Stress-Free Life, but for now I want to encourage you to look at the honest reality of your relationship with yourself - your body and mind, and everything else. Do you take care of yourself, do you make time for the things that really matter and will make you feel healthy, rested and calm?

Only you know how to best care for yourself and address your individual wants/needs. If you are not doing those things, and you are feeling massive stress and imbalance, you might take 5 minutes to ask yourself why that is.

Last week I finally scheduled the massage that I had been putting off for weeks. I had been telling myself that it wasn’t necessary and to keep plugging away - I had myself convinced to keep pushing and working diligently on the work deadlines, all the while feeling more disconnected from what I wanted and needed, and experiencing emotional imbalance, as well. The appointment was about making my wants and needs a priority. And once I did it I felt so proud of myself for taking action on what I needed and reconnected and rebalance to “me” again.

A Final Word on Relationships

Whether the relationship is with health, the changing season, ourselves or anything else, the methods for getting there can feel easy – or they can feel exceptionally challenging. We have a choice to acknowledge, accept and then find the perspective that keeps us moving forward feeling confident and empowered, or we can take the perspective that ignores what’s going on, pushes it away, feels weird, resists, causes anger, poor health, injury, and potentially unwarranted stress.

It’s ok to be honest with yourself about the relationships you have in your life, and then ask “what would I like to do about this? Or “what do I need in this area of my life right now?” Or “what do I know that I want, that I am still not allowing?”

For more information on what I do as a mentor and coach and how I support and serve women to break their patterns of chronic stress and anxiety in order to live their best life, you can find me at www.kristinkingcoaching.com. Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you on the trails soon!