JitkaNeuroCoaching

Is there an end to self-improvement?

When will I be able to say “now I am finally self improved“? I have started reading self-improvement books sometimes around the age of 10. There was this column in my teenage magazine called “Ask Sally “. I was an avid reader of this column. Each time a new issue came out of my magazine, I would go to read Sally’s column first. She seemed to have an answer to everything! One day I asked her a question and she invited me for a meeting. It was a huge disappointment!! I didn’t meet a cool young lady near my age. She was a middle-aged woman, and she didn’t know everything. This was it a huge blow to my confidence in self-improvement. Many years later I know that this is about an “attraction factor”. Everyone who is there to help others has something to offer to someone. That lady helped many. For me, I had to find another way at that time.

I would like to help people to become resilient to difficult situations at work. If you are grappling with a bully at work or you have in the past, if you know what it means feeling powerless, if your energy is running low, if you don’t know what to do, I’d like to talk to you. Together, we can set out a NeuroCoaching plan and action it.

You don’t need self-improvement. You already are perfect. Let’s remove the veils that prevent you from seeing it. Let’s “re-wire” your brain 🧠 to get rid of old programming and install new programs that will be more useful to help you find you own path to freedom.

Go ahead and book a free discovery call to find out if we’re a fit.

Book a FREE Clarity Call – click on the image below:

Are you using your freedom?

We often forget how extremely privileged we are in comparison with others in the world. Perhaps our most sacred privilege is our freedom. We take it for granted. But our freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and freedom of choice … that we currently enjoy were hard won. The freedom (or freedoms) that we have today are results of our predecessors’ battles. We should not take it for granted! We should be grateful to our ancestors that they fought for freedom for us. We should appreciate that we have the privilege to be able to make choices that were not possible in the past and that are still not possible in other parts of the world.

I grew up in a society where freedom was limited. Not only by the iron curtain that made it very difficult to travel outside the communist block, but also by the disastrous ways the planned economy was conducted. Goods were scarce, goods were boring, everyone wore the same clothes and owned the same unexciting stuff. Nobody could complain or point out the inefficiencies without suffering serious consequences. One had to be really careful what one was saying to whom. Education and good work opportunities were reserved to those who were complacent with the regime.

So think about it and make use of your privilege! You’ve got the freedom to be what you want to be. Embrace your greatness and create the life that you truly desire for yourself and your family. Because you can. You are free to do that‼️

▶️▶️ Please share this post with anyone who you think may benefit from this reminder 😊❤️

Forgive to improve your well-being

Forgiveness is the releasing of negative and promotion of positive thoughts, feelings, and behaviours toward someone who hurt you. Recent studies indicate that forgiveness can positively impact personal health and well-being as well as personal and professional relationships. Forgiving others can reduce your stress, improve your health and cognitive function. If you forgive, you’ll become more productive, healthier and happier. Think about it: if you don’t forgive, who are you hurting? It’s more likely that holding grudges will punish you than the perpetrators. So why not forgive them and move on to freedom?

Let me know what you think 🤔

References

Toussaint L, Luskin F, Aberman R, DeLorenzo A Sr. Is Forgiveness One of the Secrets to Success? Considering the Costs of Workplace Disharmony and the Benefits of Teaching Employees to Forgive. Am J Health Promot. 2019;33(7):1090-1093. doi:10.1177/0890117119866957e

Fourie MM, Hortensius R, Decety J. Parsing the components of forgiveness: Psychological and neural mechanisms. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2020;112:437-451. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2020.02.020

Lee YR, Enright RD. A meta-analysis of the association between forgiveness of others and physical health. Psychol Health. 2019;34(5):626-643. doi:10.1080/08870446.2018.1554185

Are you experiencing anxiety in the workplace? Try yawning

Anxiety makes you brain’s temperature go up So try not to get hot-heated. Instead, bring the temperature down by yawning . Yawning is the quickest way to eliminate mental stress and anxiety. Turning down the volume on our anxiety brings us more mental clarity and calmness and this allows us to make better decisions.

Neurocise

Try to pause for a minute every hour during the workday (for example in the toilet or before entering a meeting room). And do a few yawns. Fake them until they come naturally. I found that watching a yawning animals video helps. Try to yawn mindfully, fully immersing in the experience: observe where the yawn starts, how it develops, where it ends. Observe the subtle shifts in your consciousness, your mental state and in your mood. It’s a valid form of mindfulness meditation. Hopefully doing this regularly will make you more calm and more ready to face the bully, without too much of an emotional reaction.

References

Yawning and stretching predict brain temperature changes in rats: support for the thermoregulatory hypothesis. Shoup-Knox ML, Gallup AC, Gallup GG, McNay EC. Front Evol Neurosci. 2010 Sep 24;2:108.

Please share with others who may need it. 🙂

NeuroCoaching based on individual one to one interaction can go a lot deeper than you can on your own. If you’d like to book a complimentary 15-minute NeuroCoaching discovery session, please pick a slot

Unhappy at work❓ To feel better, try positivity galore‼️

Focus on what you want. What kind of work would you really like to do? What workplace would you like to find yourself in? How would you feel if you had your ideal job in the ideal place with the ideal people? Imagine it in as vivid details as you can. Really feel the excitement of doing your work every day, getting abundantly rewarded. Turn up the volume on any positive thoughts and memories.

If a negative thought or memory appears, become aware of it and as soon as possible replace it with 3 to 7 positive thoughts or memories. Our brains are organised to see the negative first. It’s about survival. If our ancestors saw a shade behind a bush their first thought was negative: “it may be a lion 🦁 let’s run to safety”. If their first thought was positive: “ah it’s nothing, just wind moving the leaves”, they may be eaten by the lion. Negativity is therefore more strongly encoded in us. That’s why we sometimes need to work to overcome it with a ”positivity galore”‼️ How many positive thoughts 💭 can you generate right now❓😊

If y

Please share with others who may need it. 🙂

Train yourself to savour to increase your happiness

I was cycling in the countryside this afternoon when I became taken with the beautiful light on the trees in front of me. When I turned around, there was a wonderful sunset over the field. I decided to stop and savour that moment.

Alongside mindfulness, savouring the moment is a practice that can enhance our sense of happiness. While mindfulness teaches us to observe the moment without judgement, savouring is about turning up the volume on a positive moment or experience. Really allowing yourself to enjoy it and going deeper into the moment experiencing a beautiful image, a deeply satisfying conversation, tasting a delicious meal.

When we really savour an experience, we create stronger and more intensive memories. We can then consciously recall those memories in moments that are not so positive. If we can develop the habit of savouring positive moments, creating strong positive memories, we can also develop stronger emotional resiliency. This can prepare and empower us to deal with the more challenging moments we may face in the future. A sense of personal resiliency and empowerment can increase our happiness and satisfaction in our lives.

Neurocise

For one week try to savour a moment each day, enjoying a tasty treat, friendly words, loving message, beautiful scenery, an act of kindness… Really turn the volume on the positive emotion that this moment has created. Increase the positive feelings even more. This effects the pleasure centres in your brain. Enjoy the pleasurable sensations and allow yourself to stay there as long as you can. You might try to gently stroke the back of your hand with your fingertips. This can deepen the positive elements of the memory you’re creating even more.

Please share with others who may need it 🙂
NeuroCoaching based on individual one to one interaction can go a lot deeper than you can on your own. If you’d like to book a complimentary 15-minute NeuroCoaching discovery session, please pick a slot

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References

Kiken LG, Lundberg KB, Fredrickson BL. Being present and enjoying it: Dispositional mindfulness and savoring the moment are distinct, interactive predictors of positive emotions and psychological health. Mindfulness (N Y). 2017;8(5):1280-1290. doi:10.1007/s12671-017-0704-3

Fred B. Bryant & Jennifer L. Smith (2015) Appreciating Life in the Midst of Adversity: Savoring in Relation to Mindfulness, Reappraisal, and Meaning, Psychological Inquiry, 26:4, 315-321, DOI: 10.1080/1047840X.2015.1075351

If you’d like to book a complimentary 15-minute NeuroCoaching discovery session, please pick a slot at https://calendly.com/jitkaneurocoaching/15min.

Helping others increases the meaningfulness of our work

Results of a recent study indicate that perceiving own work as helping others has positive impact on the individual’s sense of meaningfulness. So helping others is useful for both parties involved, the person helping and the person being helped. Finding our work meaningful gives us joy and satisfaction. To know that we’re helping people can have a positive impact on our well-being and productivity.

👉👉 I know for sure this is true for me. It is my highest motivation to help others. I find immense joy and satisfaction in meaningfully helping people achieve their business and life’s goals. I do it as a Business Analyst, I do it as a NeuroCoach. It has been one of my greatest fulfilments to see people satisfied with my work and the help it provided them. It is un utmost joy to hear a client has just had an “AHA‼️” moment and is feeling the weight lifted from their shoulders because they realised they can forgive themselves and move on with life!

The key word here is “perceive”. Every job is in a way impacting and helping others. From saving someone’s life in the operating theatre to providing the food on our tables to cleaning the streets… Everyone’s work is meaningful and is having an impact on others. But sometimes we can have hard time to seeing this for ourselves.

If you feel like you may benefit from a brainstorming session on this, I’d love ❤️ to see your comments 😊

References
Allan BA, Duffy RD, Collisson B. Helping others increases meaningful work: Evidence from three experiments. J Couns Psychol. 2018;65(2):155-165. doi:10.1037/cou0000228

If you’d like to book a complimentary 15-minute discovery session, please pick a slot at https://calendly.com/jitkaneurocoaching/15min.

Healing the trauma of workplace bullying

In a previous blog, I’ve described how NeuroCoaching helped me overcome a major setback when I became a target of a powerful bully at work.

Thanks to NeuroCoaching strategies, I was able to gather the strength and energy needed to deal with the bully at work. I needed to focus on doing a good job, building alliances and looking for a new opportunity at the same time.

It took a long time for the situation to develop. It took me a long time to realise that it was bullying. It took a long time to give up on the comfort zone that was no longer comfortable. It took a long time to decide to leave a workplace I loved for almost 10 years. But I also realised 10 years is too long and I was becoming a “dinosaur”!

It took a lot of energy to keep positive in a situation where someone is trying to put you down every single day. Where you know that she’s spreading rumours and you can tell from colleagues’ changed behaviour. Where you get demoted to lower and lower assignments. Where everything seems against you. You start having doubts about your own capabilities.

I tried to stay. I tried to resolve the situation by talking to the bully. I tried to gather evidence of her behaviour. She was too powerful and inspired fear in others. Nobody wanted to talk against her and preferred to lie. The situation seemed surreal.

In the beginning, leaving felt like a failure. But I needed to preserve my health. That was my priority. And moving on to new challenges was now due anyway. Deciding to leave took me a long time. But I was lucky enough to find another job quite quickly. In a much better company where people appreciate what I do.

But the trauma of the bullying didn’t end there. I needed more NeuroCoaching to deal with this trauma. Also to start feeling better about the working environment in general. Bullying can leave deep wounds of self-doubt, self-criticism and self-blame. It took me a long time to understand that the bully is to blame, not you!

I found NeuroCoaching provided me with a set of tools for dealing with traumatic memories by disrupting the traumatic memory reconsolidation in a deeply relaxed state of mindful awareness. If you’d like to book a complimentary 15-minute discovery session, please pick a slot at https://calendly.com/jitkaneurocoaching/15min.

Testimonial

E’ stato molto liberatorio fare la sessione, ho sentito come una rinascita e un senso di profonda comprensione dopo la nostra sessione. Il dopo e’ stato come un susseguirsi delle sensazioni miste a razionalita’ e comprensione interiore. Grazie moltissimo per l’aiuto con mindfulness che mi ha ridato un senso piu’ chiaro delle cose.

Giulia Portuese, Cambridge, United Kingdom

Translation: It was very liberating to do the session, I felt like a rebirth and a sense of deep understanding after our session. It was followed by a succession of sensations mixed with rationality and inner understanding. Thank you so much for helping me with mindfulness that gave me a clearer sense of things.

Dealing with a bully at work?

NeuroCoaching helped me overcome a major setback when I became a target of a powerful bully at work‼️

Once in a meeting, I had the courage to put in doubt what she was saying. I will never forget her look 👀 when I said those words.

Her cold, piercing blue eyes 👀 looked at me very briefly saying “you are dead💀 ‼️ “. I noticed that, but then forgot all about it, thinking she’ll get over it. But she didn’t. Not even after I admitted that she was right and my doubt was wrong. I was already in her black book 📖

She started a campaign to undermine my reputation, my authority with my team, my job security, my financial and physical well-being.

It was a full-on cold, calculated, systematic, and sustained personal attack. On me and on my boss, whose position she wanted.

At first I didn’t realise what was going on. But I noticed a change in other colleagues’ behaviour. People who used to be friendly, suddenly were not able to look into my eyes👀 .

The atmosphere became glacial. I started to feel uneasy but still didn’t fully understand what was happening. I tried to talk to her. I wanted to understand what I might change in my behaviour to be able to work with her. I met with a tough rubber wall. Nothing I could do or say would penetrate the wall of indifference. Everything would just bounce back on me with no effect on her.

One day I found out what had been going on since that fatal meeting. I discovered proof that she was actively undermining my position when I heard her telling my team not to listen to me, and telling them to withhold information from me and from my boss.

I began to feel physically sick. I would lie in bed 🛌 feeling unable to get up, completely exhausted and feverish. But no fever‼️🤒. It was like a serious case of flu, but without the symptoms. I felt unable to move, or to do anything. I was unable to get out of bed and completely unable to work. This lasted three days. Three days in bed 🛏. But no sickness – just complete exhaustion, physical, emotional and mental. Later on I learned from a friend that my experience was not an uncommon response to bullying and was known as a breakdown episode. As it turned out, my three day breakdown episode was not nearly as bad as these sometimes are.

After this I said “no way”, I am not going to sacrifice my health for my job! I started to react. I am not someone who’d get easily scared and I fought back by reporting the bully’s behaviour to HR. The human resources representative talked to my team, asking them about the episodes when they were told not to listen to me and to withhold information. They denied everything. They lied to the HR person out of fear of this increasingly powerful and influential bully.

I went to see my doctor. I told him about what was going on. He said: just leave! As soon as possible! But what to do in the meantime? He prescribed medication. Before going to the pharmacy, I checked the medication online and found that it was a pill for heart disease! I didn’t go to the pharmacy.

I turned to NeuroCoaching… I would yawn, stretch, relax, ground myself in my highest values on hourly basis. Each time it was like resetting the brain. I felt the heavy weight lifted off my mind, a wave of relaxation wash over my brain and I would be refreshed and focused for the next hour.

I also tried to find something positive in the bully. No doubt, she has a high level of knowledge and experience, there were things I could learn from her. In some ways it was a shame we couldn’t work together. Also … she has very beautiful hair. I started to call her “a lady with beautiful hair“.

I tried really hard to find positive aspects in the situation. There always are positive aspects. I am now really glad and grateful to the lady with beautiful hair that she pushed me forward!

I decided to enrol in the NeuroCoaching course in order to help others overcome stressful situations, often beyond their control, faster and in a better way.

A subsequent blog describes more about the process.

If you’d like to book a free 15 minute consultation session, please contact me through
https://www.facebook.com/JitkaNeuroCoaching or https://jitkaneurocoaching.com/contact/.

Blame the bullies, not yourself

Have you been target of a bully or bullies during your childhood? Have you experienced bullying at work? It says nothing about you and everything about the bully. The bully may have a dysfunctional brain! Research shows that some people who lack social empathy have under-reactive amygdala and weaker connection in their social brain that mediates morality. If you’ve been bullied, it doesn’t mean that you’re weak, incompetent, stupid, slow… or whatever the bully wants to make you seem. Mean controlling people (parents, siblings, teachers, school mates, bosses, colleagues or anyone else) will use cunning ways to make you believe that you are at fault when you’re not. Your healthy desire to take responsibility is manipulated by bullies, narcissists, and sociopaths. Bullying is a serious form of trauma and it disrupts the normal functioning and natural development of the brain. If you take someone else’s nasty words and actions seriously you may be damaging your self-esteem and your brain. Facing a bully is a huge challenge but you can come out on the other side victorious! If you are being bullied please seek help by contacting a specialist helpline. Here are some strategies that you can use while dealing with an episode of bullying. And yes, it’s an episode and you can overcome it!

NEUROCISE

First of all, don’t assume it’s your fault.
Take a moment, right now, and deeply relax. Mindfully allow a memory to surface when someone put you down. Don’t judge the memory.
You can stroke your arms or face in a pleasurable way to disrupt the “reconsolidation” of a painful memory or use a soft object such as a stuffed animal to provide a soothing tactile experience.
Observe the feelings of shame or guilt or sadness, whatever comes up knowing that they are memories from the past.
Recall 3-5 memories of your accomplishments.
Visualize and savor your friends and loved ones
Still stuck? Have a Trauma-Based NeuroCoaching session with me.

REFERENCES

Marsh AA, Cardinale EM. When psychopathy impairs moral judgments: neural responses during judgments about causing fear. Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci. 2014;9(1):3‐11. doi:10.1093/scan/nss097

Testimonial

My first ever session of neurocoaching with Jitka NeuroCoaching was a week ago and the results are amazing! Plus they just keep on unfolding. Neurocoaching was quicker and more effective than other forms of coaching because it helped me access my inner knowing really fast and express what it is I really need for success without any sense of struggle or pressure. This novel approach to unlocking potential and releasing blocks bypassed my busy analytical brain and got straight to the core of deep awareness only possible in the deep relaxed state Jitka supported me to enter. I wondered if I was ‘doing it right’ but Jitka assured me that the method works great even when just a few words are spoken by me. I could see that the science behind the approach ensures each word is a golden thread for Jitka to weave into her method. She makes it seem effortless for you as she works her neurocoaching craft.

Christine Ashton, Cambridge, United Kingdom