Have you ever felt that you’re just going through the motions in life? You’re not sure of what you want? Your sense of desire is waning and you want to figure out a way to spark yourself again. To feel grounded, connected and inspired. If so, today we’ll dive into the 3 ways to spark a sense of reconnection within yourself.

What causes a sense of disconnection?

Most people think of me as high energy and full of positivity. Most of the time, that would be an accurate perspective. But everyone, including myself, including yourself, goes through periods where they feel disconnected, lost, and overwhelmed. When I began to fill my plate with personal development work, motherhood, wife, employee, entrepreneur, and all the hats we can wear on an everyday basis, I started to witness more moments of disconnection. At first it started with burnout, tiredness, and a sense of feeling overwhelmed. But then, it would spiral into anger, resentment, and blame. The next step was a sense of withdrawal and distrust in the world. This is where the disconnection comes into play. When you start withdrawing from life, and seeing yourself not as an active participant, but someone who is going through the motions. You feel like you have to force yourself to be actively engaged at work, at home, or with your friends and family.

These 3 things (overwhelm, resentment, disconnection) can happen in a split second, and can last for 1 minute to years. For many years I didn’t even realize that these feelings shouldn’t be the norm. Overriding my feelings, intuition, and yearnings for more became acceptable because outwardly, I had so many of the markers of success. But who deemed these to be success markers and if these really were markers for success, why was my health suffering mentally and physically? As I unwound tendencies to overwork, over-achieve, and compete – I saw them for what they were. Ways for me to avoid feelings of failure, inadequacy and unworthiness.

What? Me? Unworthy? But I had x, y, and z achievements! Why would someone like me ever feel unworthy? Well, it’s because I had focused on external validation. Listen to the podcast episode on co-dependency again if you want to learn more about the people-pleasing behaviors that drive many an over-achiever, including myself. External validation is something that most of us understand, but don’t actually know. It’s the 3rd cousin. We know their name and maybe even where they live, but we don’t really know what they do and we definitely don’t think they have an impact on our lives. But like that 3rd cousin, there’s a link there that runs through to you below the surface and if I asked you – really asked you – how much you do because you think about what other people would say, do or react, you’d likely realize how much this relationship is closer than you think.

What does this have to do with disconnection?

Disconnection comes when we’re out of alignment with our internal selves. We are incongruent to our values, our inner compass, our true guide. You’re not sure that what you’re doing matters to your purpose or mission and really, you likely don’t even know what your purpose or mission even is. What you do know, however, is the rules of society – what’s acceptable or not – and you’ve conditioned yourself to play by those rules very, very well. This is why you’re so “successful”, even when you feel so disconnected. This is where the crisis comes into play. This is when you reach that place where you start to connect the dots and say, “wait a minute – there’s something missing here”. This is when you start that 1st process of coming back to yourself.

Understanding what you value

Coming back to yourself starts first with seeing that you need to focus on yourself. If you’re a people-pleaser, you’re likely focused so much on others that you’ve lost a sense of who you are. When I say, who you are – I don’t mean the relationships you have or the jobs you have. I mean what you care about, what thrills you, what fills your cup and what you want your legacy to be. Aligning yourself with your values has to be important enough that you decide to invest as much time, energy and resources into yourself as you do to your relationships or your work. How much time are you spending asking yourself these questions about who you are and what you want? How much time do you spend aligning yourself to your mission and purpose each day? For many of us, this is little to no time. That’s ok. Start now and watch your life change.

Making it real

Once you’ve understood your internal compass, your internal markers of success, and you’re well on your way down this path to inner greatness, you’ll start to feel the initial high wear off. I’ve “found” myself and “discovered who I am” so here we go and nothing is going to stop me! But then something does. What? You mean it’s not all rainbows now? Of course not. Life’s tough so we have to be tougher. Even in your dream job or relationship, you’re still going to struggle, receive more demands than you can handle, and face setbacks.

I realized that if I were to live a full life, I’d have to learn how to handle this rollercoaster of emotions no matter my circumstances. Instead of letting myself fall into this place where life’s demands were greater than my ability to handle them, I’d develop the tools and practices that would allow me to come back from these setbacks time and again. I realized that no amount of changing your external world would change the internal world. You can run from one job or career to the next and still not feel connected. You can take an amazing trip that rejuvenates you and come home to a life you’re not in love with. You can take one class, meet the perfect partner, get the promotion, or hit that revenue goal and after that high, still feel at a loss in your day to day.

Can you see now, why this work is so important? To develop the resources within yourself so that you can continuously face overwhelm, challenges, and setbacks with a sense of grace. This is how you become a leader in your personal and professional life. This is how you lead from the mind, body and heart.

What to do

If you’re feeling disconnected, with or without a sense of purpose in your life you’re going to have to get outside of yourself. Disconnect comes from a feeling of too-much-ness.

1. Get outside of yourself: What we’re feeling is too much so we pull ourselves out mentally. It’s a safety mechanism to protect ourselves from harm. It’s also a warning sign that something needs to be done. This is when we need to seek an outside perspective. We need to ask for help whether it’s from others who have walked this path before us or those whose counsel we trust. We need to ask the Universe how we can see the grace in our situation. We need to anchor ourselves back to the bigger picture. We need to ground ourselves as much as possible in objectivity and a superconscious, long-term perspective. When we see this disconnect as purposeful in terms of a greater vision in our lives, and we can connect the dots to what’s missing, we can start to address it. When we see this disconnect as an outlier, instead of a pattern, we can get curious. Above all, when we can witness this current and temporary state of being without judgement, we can allow ourselves to feel all the emotions and connect to what is at the root of the issue.
2. Move our bodies: Most often, we can rewind the tapes and see that it was an unmet expectation, a sense of overwhelm from too much work/decisions, or emotional energy such as anger or shame or frustration that hasn’t yet been discharged. Many of which are internal reactions to an outside circumstance. These internal reactions hold energy and are often stored in our bodies as neck, shoulder or back tension. Tension in our jaws and tension headaches. This is when we need to get in our bodies. We need to make sure that we are moving, unwinding, stretching, breathing DEEPLY and practices such as mindfulness come into play. Mindful movement allows us to move our bodies and feel what’s stuck and where we are holding tension. Mindful eating allows us not to buffer our disconnect by eating frantically or not eating at all. Getting outside in nature allows us to breathe into the sense that there is energy all around us and we don’t have to hold it all inside and that we can let it out.
3. Take action on the misalignment: Take action from a place of choice. Your power is in your choice and if you’re feeling disconnected, there’s usually something you want to do, but aren’t doing. You want to have a difficult conversation, but you’re putting it off because it’s hard. You need to make certain moves in your career, but you don’t want to rock the boat. These are all ways that we stuff our power away so that we don’t have to deal with the consequences. Either way, you’re dealing with the consequences, my friend. Whether you want to or not, disconnect is a consequence. And so is freedom, if you choose it.

Know that you’re not alone and that you can develop the tools and resources you need within yourself to feel more inspired, whole, and alive again. It’s a daily practice of opening up the blinds in your mind and starting to get a peek to the great and wild unknown of your soul. A place where you can always come back to, that knows more than you can imagine, and houses your limitless potential.

Stay well my friends, and that’s it for this week.

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If you’re ready to Own Your Best Life, I want to invite you to watch the free training on how to Stand Out and Lead, using spiritual, high-performance strategies. You can access the training at https://may-empson.mykajabi.com/stand-out-and-lead.

You can then apply to join my Spiritual Achiever® program, where you’re going to create your next chapter with spiritual and high-performance strategies to achieve time and financial freedom using my proven method. It’s risk-free. You either start seeing results within your first month or I give you your money back. Schedule your call HERE. We’ll see you inside.