By SHANNON SKAE, health and life coach at Revive with Shan
It is often difficult to accept the ending of relationships, the death of someone, a drastic change in your life, something traumatic that has happened to you, when someone betrays your trust, loving yourself, criticism from others, growing older, and the list goes on.
So how do we reach or strive towards acceptance?
Here are some tips:
- Focus on the things you can control and can change rather than the things you can’t.
- Set meaningful goals for yourself, especially short-term ones, one step at a time.
- Live in the present moment and focus on today.
- Be gentle with yourself, especially if you are going through a hard time.
- Seek help from others to whom you can talk.
- Find helpful coping strategies.
- Allow yourself to feel negative and unwelcome emotions – they are still normal.
- Acceptance is not agreement – you may not agree with what happened, but you can still accept it.
- Face the facts – write them down.
- Sometimes closure does not happen – accept that you may never understand what happened.
- Shift your focus to what makes you happy and do hobbies you enjoy.
- It takes time to accept things – don’t rush the process.
- Understand that if you put one foot in front of the other you will be okay.
- Your happiness does not depend on others – you don’t need anyone; you should just want/not want them in your life.
How do you know when it is time to let go?
Some questions to ask yourself:
- Am I wasting my time and effort?
- Do I put more effort into the person/job/situation than the other parties involved?
- Are they taking away energy from my life that could be better served elsewhere?
- Do the people in my life stop my growth and potential?
- Is it better for my mental, physical, financial, and/or emotional well-being to just let this go?
- Do I wish things would change?
If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then it’s probably time to let go.
Imagine you are holding a pencil very tightly in your hand – chances are your hand will get sore and cramp or you may break the pencil. However, if you loosen your grip then both your hand and the pencil will be fine. When it comes to acceptance then, it is often in letting go and loosening our grip that can be key to both our healing and others’ healing as well.
Acceptance of the difficult things in life is fundamental – especially understanding that life is hard and accepting this from the get-go can save us time and energy from worrying about things we can’t change.
