Every lost opportunity for connection hurts

I sometimes pull away from social gatherings because I feel drained by them. I’m an ambivert, so I need a balance between extroversion and introversion to thrive. But I’ve realized that what truly drains me in social situations is superficial conversations. You know the ones where you talk about the weather, traffic jams, gossip about other people or complain about everyone else being idiots. Puh, I feel totally empty after an interaction like that. And sad.

I believe we’re here for love. And connection. And even though our souls are all connected we won’t find that with every human. That’s okay. But there are a lot of times when I feel there could be an authentic interaction but the opportunity is missed. Because of fear; of exposing oneself, of not being understood, of being perceived as weird, of vulnerability.

I wanna know how your heart is. I wanna know of a recent struggle and what you learned from it. I wanna know your desires and dreams. I wanna know what you love. I wanna know what solutions you have for challenges in our world. I wanna know you. YOU.

I do believe a lot of people are longing for authenticity and that I’m not alone in this. Whenever I have these kinds of deep conversations I feel it’s well needed and received. One challenge is of course time and space, you wanna be in a space where you can really listen and be present when someone is opening up. So create it. Create the time and space for real connection and gift it to yourself and others.

With all my love,

Helena

Practicing the pleasure principle

I heard it in a wedding speech for the first time and I realized that the woman giving the speech actually did practice the pleasure principle in her own life. She took responsibility for creating pleasure in her everyday life.

This is the idea: Life can be hard and pain is part of it. But we don’t need to build an altar for suffering. Pain will find you when it’s time. Your job is to live and enjoy your life as best you can all the times in between.

Pleasure can be anything you want or need; smelling your tea, beauty on your plate, a good song, a walk in nature, an extra long hug or closing your eyes on the subway. That’s your job. Giving space for love.

But a lot of people do build altars for their suffering. They feed themselves with fear-based news. They dwell in their problems by telling everyone about it without actually moving forward or getting constructive about it. They hold on to resentment with the belief that the other needs to deserve forgiveness. They put their focus on what’s not working and let their ego feed off the victim mentality.

We all have a choice here. Who are you? Who do you wanna be?

With all my love,
Helena

You are allowed to ask for what you want

I heard Iyanla Vanzant on Oprah Winfrey’s podcast the other day saying:

I have the chance to ask for what I want and the right to respond to what I get.

I love that. Yes, you’re allowed to go out into the world and ask for what you want, create the opportunities you long for and be the person you want to be. You can control that. But you do not control how people react to whatever you put out there. The ball is no longer in your court.

Someone reacts, respons, passes the ball over to you again and you have the chance to react in whichever way you like. When we get conscious about this game that we’re constantly playing with the world around us, we can discern between what is our responsibility and what is not. What’s in our control and what’s not.

When you consciously start playing with what you have, you start creating the life you want. And you are allowed to ask for what you want.

With all my love,
Helena

With whom can you be your softest self?

We were sitting around a small table in an apartment in Little Venice, London, when Nancy asked the question: With whom can you be your softest self? We all went round the table to answer. Someone said their kids, another their clients, I said my person. She who sees right through me. I don’t have to hide anything from her and I can’t lie to her. She feels me even more than she knows me. So my softest self is all that I can present.

But the question still lingers in me. What does it mean, soft? Authentic? Real? Raw? Open? Honest? Transparent? Small? Weak? Complete? Is there power in softness? I believe so. If so being soft also means being all of who we are, in the moment, no matter what that looks like.

There’s an epidemic of loneliness in our world today. We’re more connected than ever yet so many feel so separate, so alone. Would that change if we could be our softest self with more people? What if we could be our softest self in all of our close relationships? I honestly think that most people aren’t. Because being soft requires courage, time and presence. Our society lacks in all those areas.

I become softer and softer with every year, and I long to empower more people to soften. First to themselves and then to the world. It’s not weak, it’s our greatest strength. With whom can you be your softest self?

With all my love,
Helena

When your no is clear, I'll believe in your yes

Boundaries. So important. Boundaries. So hard. I used to think that boundaries meant distancing, closing the heart, loving less, shutting out… Now I know it’s the opposite. Love without boundaries is weak, and non-accountable, and less that what it has the potential to be.

If you say yes to everyone and everything all the time, eventually your yes is eroded. When you take a breath, listen in before you respond to any request I will know that you’re following your intuition and being real with me. When your no is clear, I’ll believe in your yes.

Some of the most powerful people I know have really clear boundaries. They also happen to be the most loving people I know, because they don’t deplete themselves in the false pretense of service. When they serve or give they do so from an overflowing heart, from abundance of energy and love and care. Brene Brown found in her research that the most compassionate people are the same people that have the strongest boundaries. Because you can only give what you have and boundaries is self-compassion. It might be surprising but also so obvious when you think about it.

No one else can be responsible for your boundaries but you. No one will thank you for not having any. And no one else but you knows where they are.

I believe we all need to practice, I know I do. But the next time someone asks you to do something, give something or go somewhere; take a pause. You always have five seconds to spare. Take a deep breath and listen in; is this aligned with what you need or have to give right now? If you don’t feel a ‘hell, yes!’ or a ‘No.’ right away, ask to get back to the person. They can usually stand to wait a couple of hours or a day.

And remember, ‘No.’ is a full sentence. If you want to put a lot of effort into explaining yourself, you can, but you don’t have to. Usually it just mashes your no in with a lot of maybe’s and unnecessary words and you end up being unclear.

When your no is clear, I’ll believe in your yes.

With all my love,

Helena

Wasting life, is that possible?

Sitting on the Gatwick Express going into London, an action packed week ahead of me; staying with friends, meeting Danielle Laporte, taking the train to Paris for the weekend to spend time with my nieces who live there, going back to London for some more friends and a big talk on Monday night before I fly home on Tuesday night. Some kind of calm always come over me in situations like these. Calm because I know I’m living fully.

Summer vacation is always a bit stressful before I have planned everything out; knowing who to be with when and where. It’s not that I constantly have to do, do, do, but it needs to have some kind of purpose. If the purpose is relaxation then I’m fine with that.

But no purpose, no doing, no plan, that feels like waste. Anxiety-producing. I didn’t even know that that’s what I felt about it until I articulated it to a friend. She asked me why I was constantly running, learning, exploring, adventuring, moving… and I said it: “Otherwise it feels like I’m wasting life.”

It’s been lingering, since I said that. Can you really waste life? Is a life filled to the brink a life better lived than a more quiet one? Is doing a virtue at all?

Life quality is not about doing things, it’s about how you’re feeling as you’re doing what you’re doing (Danielle taught me that!). The more you get to feel the way you want to feel the better you’ll perceive your life quality. And the trick is to learn how to produce those feelings in the small things in your everyday so that you don’t have to wait for the few and far between grandiose moments in your life (which usually are overrated anyhow).

I don’t have an answer to this yet but her question is certainly getting me thinking. And this is where I’ll be for a bit I think. Enjoying the question without having to have a clear answer. Figuring out the balance between doing and being, between thinking and consciousness. I know where my edge is, where’s yours?

With all my love,

Helena

Summer blogging

Summer’s here and it feels like a lot of people are running around in a frenzy as if the world will end right after midsummer. I know mine won’t because I just started a new big HR consultancy projects that will run into the beginning of July ;)

I love this time of year, and I also get easily overwhelmed by all of it. Fun things happening all the time, feeling some stress over how to plan a meaningful summer vacation and feeling accomplished with what I’ve done in these first six months of this year. None of which are my real metrics of success, but my mind is really active right now and that’s the KPI’s it’s working under.

Alignment before action, I know. So that’s what I’ll focus on when it comes to my blogging, newsletters and social media the next coming months. If it feels aligned I will write and share, if it don’t I won’t. Usually I produce more when allowing myself to feel into it, but if that won’t be the case that’s okay too.

You always know where to find me, I won’t be too far off the grid. But I also wish for you to get some time off your phone/ computer/ tablets or wherever most of us spend a lot of time these days. Enjoy the people around you, nature and your own company. And remember, your mind is just a tool that you can choose to detach from if you want.

With all my love,
Helena

ps. I’ll probably re-launch the online course for one more round over summer vacations, more info about that on my Instagram within shortly!

Lessons from two years as a solopreneur

This past weekend I celebrated 2 years as a mostly digital solopreneur, by hanging out in the woods with no wifi :) And I reflected a bit about what I’ve learnt on this journey. It’s been a wild ride of course, mainly emotionally, but it’s also been so rewarding, teaching me things about life more than about business. I could probably come up with many more but these are three main keys that’s worked as guideposts to my entrepreneurial journey so far.

Alignment before action

I’m a very action oriented person. Or, maybe, I used to be. The first six months of my journey was a lot about getting things done. Creating for the sake of production and getting the word out to as many people as possible. I hustled. Very little happened.

At the beginning of 2018 I took an online course, with Jess Lively, called Flow with intention. It was all about the law of attraction and talking to my intuition and I realized one main thing; alignment needs to come first. When I get into action from a space of forcing or striving or needing to be “the good girl” I attract tension, and neediness and guilt. When I first focus on my alignment; meaning feeling the way I want to feel and taking care of myself properly, I’m a vibrational match for all that I want more of.

As I started focusing the first hours of every day on alignment things really started flowing for me. Opportunities showed up from unexpected places, creativity started flowing in a new way and most importantly, I was so much happier in my life in general.

Focusing on alignment first doesn’t mean that it’s not okay to have a bad day. It’s about adjusting schedule, plans and goals when needed. We can force and strive and do as much as we like, but if we’re out of alignment doing it it’s time wasted. At the same time, one email in alignment can change the whole trajectory of your business or life.

My main commitment every week is still this: Alignment before action. And I still forget sometimes. And when I do, I’m reminded by the way I feel and by things not flowing as they normally do.

So many people say that you need to work day and night, and so hard as a solopreneur to make it, quite the opposite has been true for me.

Community is everything

Just as I was leaving the uncomfortable but safe cocoon of my corporate career two important things happened; I connected with Intenco and I walked into the castle. I was clearly lead to both places.

My “door opener”, who called me the night I knew for sure that I could no longer stay in my current job, collaborated with an HR consultancy firm called Intenco. Getting to be part of this community of senior HR professionals with so much love, confidence and experience has had a huge part in my first two years being so rewarding.

The Castle is a co-working space located opposite the royal castle in Stockholm where a new acquaitance invited me in the spring of 2017. I knew, the moment I stepped foot in the door, that this was the kind of energy I needed in my life. This is where I go to feel at home, to meet my family/colleagues/friends, and this is where I get so much inspiration for my creative work.

Following the cues when it comes to building my network as an entrepreneur has lead me to so many amazing people, experiences, lessons and adventures. I’ve grown so much from all the community I have around me everyday.

So many people say that being an entrepreneur is lonely and isolating, quite the opposite has been true for me.

Intuition leads the way, authenticity is key

I started blogging about my health journey seven years ago, in the midst of my own despair. I continued blogging because I wanted to log everything I learned and share it with others who might benefit. I’ve always written with an intention to serve, myself or others.

As the blogging grew and I grew as a teacher, student and communicator with different tools I slowly realized that I was growing a business. But as soon as I realized that I thought I needed to change. And I have, of course. But there’s a lot of do’s and don’ts out there when it comes to digital entrepreneurship and so many self-proclaimed gurus in the field.

I love to get inspiration and some advice is really great, but whenever I get too influenced I lose my footing. I wanna be real with you. And, I wanna reach the people who really need the advice/ inspiration/ knowledge/ hope that I can offer. It’s a balance I’m still trying to find, and it will probably always be a balancing act.

So many people say that there’s a proven formula for how to do this thing, quite the opposite has been true for me.

Two years has felt really long and super short (there’s that paradox again). But I’m so grateful, most days, that I get to do this, that I get to be here. And to be able to conclude that I work less, feel abundant, have more fun and feel like I’m actually making a difference in peoples lives is worth it all.

If you’re an entrepreneur - what do you think of my lessons above, have they been true for you too? If you’re not an entrepreneur - what did these lessons bring up in you? How could you translate these into your current job?

With all my love,

Helena