Ep. 17 Coaching Lesson 4: Hope – are you ready for change?

As a bereaved mom for 17 years now, I know the depths of despair and what it feels like to lose all hope there is a better life waiting just around the corner. Whatever loss or adversity you are coming from, it is essential to have hope if you want to create a better life!

In this coaching episode from Lesson 4 of the "Get Me Started!" online course from the Beyond Bereavement series, learn the two key things you need to consistently create the life that you want and how to feel hope again if you can't feel it today.

Get your free mini-personal growth journal to follow along here.

TIMESTAMP:
0:00    Welcome
0:12    Introduction to episode
1:43    From Disempowerment to Personal Power
5:11    What is hope?
6:43    Loss, despair, survival
10:04  Hope - your starting point
12:42  Types of giving up
14:59  Tap in to your potential
17:02  Two key things to create change
19:50  Dealing with Disorders
20:39  Pitfalls to avoid
22:15  Can't feel gratitude?
23:04  We are all powerful manifesters
24:35  Closing

BOOKS (by Vonne Solis)
Lessons in Surviving Suicide - A Letter to My Daughter
Divine Healing - Transforming Pain into Personal Power
The Power of Change

RESOURCES (Blog, Course & Meditations)

COURSE Discount

COACHING EPISODES:
Start at Lesson 1:  Regrets: Letting Them Go Audio or Youtube
Go to previous Lesson 3: Self-Forgiveness: You need it to change your life! Audio or YouTube

Subscribe to the podcast! Share your favourite episodes! Connect with Vonne on LinkedIn and Facebook.

Transcript

Vonne Solis  0:00  
Hello, welcome to another Grief Talk Coffee Chat episode. I'm your host, Vonne Solis.

Vonne Solis  0:12  
Okay, so welcome again to Grief Talk. This is a another solo coaching episode. We are working on Lesson four today of my online course Beyond Bereavement "Get Me Started!" If you've joined me, in the other three, or any one of the other three coaching calls, you may know that there is a PDF download to your very own mini-personal growth journal that you can follow along in these first six coaching episodes of the 13 that I'm going to be doing and work at your own pace either with the call, on your own in your own time, revisit the lesson sheets, just to give you a little bit of a heads up about what the course is about. And also familiarize yourself with some of these steps that I have put together in my online course and specifically for people who are coming from tough circumstances, loss, adversity. Don't let the word Beyond Bereavement scare you. A lot of people while they don't consider themselves in grief or having suffered any kind of grief, don't relate it to an experience that is not human loss. And one of my missions here on this podcast and in my other work is to help people understand that grief can be related to a number of experiences, not just human loss. 

Vonne Solis  1:43  
So in that vein, my work is all about empowering people. Connecting to their core personal power. I am a bereaved mother of my daughter who was 22 when she took her life in July 2005. And so in the last 17 years, I've dedicated my life really, to working with healing and integrating the shock, the trauma, the painful experience, all into one of my greater life experiences. It without doubt is the most impacting experience I've ever had. But to not let the experience ruin me. To not let her death be for not. To not, you know, wither up and crawl into a corner and stay there. 

Vonne Solis  2:36  
So while my teaching is not directed strictly at, as I said bereaved from human loss nor bereaved parents specifically, I have found in meeting a lot of people who have just come from really trying circumstances, it could be ill-health, you know, it could be divorce, it could be financial ruin. It could be a lot of different things. In some cases, not even, you know, pursuing their dreams that they once had, and feeling like their life was was really just that they were really kind of dealt themselves, you know, a bad deck of cards. Or life dealt them a bad deck of cards more usually. But at any rate, whatever it is, that is not allowing ourselves to live a very fulfilling life, or a life that isn't as packed with fulfillment as we want it to be. We are always changing and growing as human beings. And when we consciously tap into that part of ourselves that understand we will we're here to grow, we're always going to be growing. And it's whatever we subject ourselves to, surround ourselves with. Environments we choose to put ourselves in. The things that we do. The passions that we find. The purpose that we develop in life. These are some of the things the spirituality perhaps. Those things that may take us out of just the human living experience and into something that is much more expansive. These are all things that help us become really well-rounded, super fulfilled, happy, loving, compassionate, empathetic human beings.

Vonne Solis  4:19  
So I'm on that journey. My daughter's death really plunged me much much further into the already you know, established foundation I had of spiritual interests and metaphysics and you know that questioning. There's gotta be more to life! I was a dedicated mother. Had wonderful family life, and um, all of that imploded when my daughter Janaya died. So, understanding at the core of my values is family, and leaning on my foundation of understanding we're here on this planet for a reason. For lessons. Some of us are really tapped into what we're here to do and I found my purpose fortunately, and unfortunately, with my daughter's passing. 

Vonne Solis  5:11  
So on that note in Lessons one, two and three, we covered letting go of regrets in Lesson one. Understanding failure as your friend or foe in Lesson two. And self-forgiveness in Lesson three, where you need it to change your life. So here we are at Lesson four and this one is all about hope. And are you ready for change? Now, because I don't want to get too too deep into losing hope, I will say enough to say that in my own experience as a bereaved mother, and I had lived a pretty darn good life until that point. I had come since I was 25 years old, understanding, studying manifesting. Spiritual stuff, and you know, all the intention. And basically, I have to be honest, manifesting whatever I wanted in my life. So, when we think about manifesting, and this, I'm going to tie into hope in a second here, a lot of of, in my opinion, over the four decades, I've been involved in this stuff, a lot of manifesting can be centered around material gain, and money. And go get that luxury car. Feel it, breathe it in. All of this. And a lot of it is is centered around materialism. And that is natural, because we are wired, one for competition, and two, to show our worth and how great we're doing often it is very materialistic-based. 

Vonne Solis  6:43  
So when I lost Janaya, of course I wasn't really striving for that anyway, prior to her death, but I had a charmed life. And home was very important to me. And things were important to me. And travel was important to me. Not competing with the neighbors, but just basically feeling abundant. So that's another word we're used to, is abundance. So materialism, abundance, manifesting intention, okay. And so when she died, I lost all of that. Nothing, nothing actually mattered. And as a matter of fact, all I wanted to be surrounded by was white walls. Absolute, absolute white walls, and nothing else. Now, obviously, I couldn't do that. So what really saved me in those very early days and and and as I got and helped me get stronger and stronger and stronger and more centered and focused, and to the point where I am today, has been angels. And while we're not talking about that, today, I'll be doing some work with that in in the new year in 2023. And I do have one episode, that, you know, in my podcast that speaks about how I turned to the angels and that whole journey for me to find them just before her death. And then how I workedwith them in in my earliest bereavement daily, and became an angel healing practitioner, and how all of that set a foundation for me. So I don't go not one day without communing with angels and depending on them to be my guides through any challenging and all wonderful times. 

Vonne Solis  8:22  
But that is an aside. And so getting back to this feeling of despair in the midst of destruction, it was very, very hard to see hope in anything. And for me, personally, I went through a number of experiences that were extremely challenging in addition to you know, trying to cope with the trauma of Janaya's suicide. For several years, there were a number of other secondary losses, and other major challenges. Relationship. Financial. I do have PTSD and that wasn't diagnosed. And so I was living with a lot of survival instincts and everything just became a real challenge. So it was very, very difficult to see a better life in any of that. And if I'm being really truthful and honest with you, even today, when you are living with PTSD and trauma, and it's not diagnosed, and the brain isn't sending the right signals, and it's not interpreting, and there's nothing really logical, which is why a lot of you know, bereaved parents say they feel like they're going crazy, and maybe other people in grief as well say they just feel like they're going crazy, you know, you're just so busy surviving. And you could say the same thing about taking it away from human loss. Say financial loss. You've lost your job. You gotta pay your bills, you got to pay your mortgage, you got to pay your rent, you got to eat. You got to make a choice. Is it going to be this grocery item or that grocery item? You know, you're really, really busy surviving. You're not really thinking about hope and you're really not thinking beyond the moment and how you're going to get through that day and the next day. And that is a whole different experience and definition, if you will, of living one day at a time. 

Vonne Solis  10:04  
In a perfect, wonderful world where the money is there, the abundance is there, the materialism is there, the house is there, everything is really secure and all that. You're happy. You're doing what you want, you know, all that stuff, living one day at a time means something completely and utterly different. And that means trusting. You're living the life. You're, it doesn't you don't have to be rich to be doing this. You could just you could be living in a very small cottage by a pond, by a lake. You could be living in a tent. The point of it is you're living the life you're most comfortable living and feeling very aligned with your space on the planet and your place in your environment. You're happy. You're content. Living one day at a time means you're trusting and you're just allowing life to unfold. But when you're living one day at a time in survival, it's what I said earlier. You're just basically trying to get through the day and make ends meet and put out the fires. So in that context, you need hope to change your life. You really do because in order to have hope you have to see your potential. Hope means, I'm really hoping this is going to work out. It means that you trust in an intended outcome. 

Vonne Solis  11:27  
So if you can't recognize within yourself any potential, then what are you working for? You may not even feel like you have anything worthwhile to contribute to your immediate loved ones, your family, your environment, your work your own life, your future. So starting at a point where you say, Well, wait a minute here. Wherever you're starting from. Whether you're starting from your most devastating, or you're starting from the middle of the you know, hey, I'm doing okay, but I want more for my life. I'm going to keep working at it. Or you're starting from, I'm in a really great place, but I just want to hear what this person has to say about hope. It's still the same. We're wired as human beings to always want to be achieving and striving for more. Don't ask me why. But we are wired that way. And I've talked to therapists about this. This is just you know, and we're, we're pack animals, and we're wired to always be going after more. Maybe it's part of our very basic survival skills where, you know, we were pushed every single day to go out on the hunt. And so maybe we're just hunting in different ways, you know, in modern times, but with our relic brain. Whatever it is, wanting to achieve. 

Vonne Solis  12:42  
When you give up. When you find due to limitations, illness, disabilities, other types of limitations, immediate or longer-term circumstances that have just knocked you off your feet, and you just can't seem to get up or you get up and you just can't stay up. Status quo, like, meaning that you you've accepted where you are in life, and don't really believe that there's anything better you can create for your own life. Lackadaisical approach, you just meh, meh, you know. What's it all? What's it all for anyway? Or you are completely committed to the well-being of others and have totally forgotten about yourself. Or you have been so disappointed. Have had too many disappointments, because you've had experiences show you over and over and over again, that you can't create what you want. Whatever it is that is challenging you to not have hope, have some hope but you can't maintain that state of feeling hopeful, or it's just literally been extinguished in your life due to a circumstance. It could be a death, which is much more than a circumstance. That is a life event. Whatever it is, where, you know, you and I feel all of us actually are even challenged by world events, to kind of go, I mean, I do. What? What's going on in the world? And how can I even keep on with my messaging if, you know, we might all be blown up or something? So I mean, you know, it can be we can we can talk about hope on the very personal and microscale. And then we can talk about hope on a very large scale where it starts getting into, you know, communities, collectives, social groups and all of that. The point is, however we feel, in whatever way we feel personally or otherwise hopeless, we need to tap into the potential of changing that situation. Changing ourselves or changing that situation. To trust that we can have more.

Vonne Solis  14:59  
So how do we do this? Well, there's two things that we need to do. The first is, and I'm going to keep this to the personal. I'm not going to even get involved with larger, you know, macro events going on, such as hope for the world. It's however we look at whatever we want around us to be almost sacred. To really have that respect for life. To really understand we want to tap into the power that we have. Personal power that we have and I'm talking about that in a really good way. Just the ability to change our life to have more. To keep ourselves in environments that are soothing, gentle, growing, expanding, purposeful, passionate, worthy, and experiencing that centeredness. Having having always these these things surround us in what we're doing and who we're with, and how we're acting and what we're bringing into our life as really nurturing and expansive for us. This is essentially the the, the type of manifesting I focused on after my daughter's death. Not really being satisfied by anything material. So it was that inner peace. It was that inner calm, it was that inner power of knowing that I could, and others can choose to shape their lives in a way that that was always bringing them contentment, relief, satisfaction, joy and growth, amongst maybe some other things. But everything positive. Get rid of the negative. I want to just I just want everything to flow. It's not to say we don't have problems and we don't have challenges. It's to say that we learn how to manage them in a way that it doesn't upset the applecart. Us being the applecart. 

Vonne Solis  17:02  
So the two things we need to consistently create positive change is to decide what you really want. And the second thing is to trust that whatever you really want, will actually manifest in its right and proper timing. When we tap into this personal power and when we've had enough experiences that demonstrate to us, wow, that happened. Wow, that happened. In my own personal case, my daughter's death, and for many years, robbed me, or I allowed the experience to rob me of remembering, I had all this fantastic ability of intending and manifesting what I wanted prior to her passing. And my world was, as I said, very charmed. My life was felt very charmed. So getting that back has taken years to remember that, because when our experiences are either so painful, or so numerous, or a combination of the two, which hopefully that's not happening, happening for anybody, but if that is, it's pretty easy to quickly forget any power you did have, or appreciate any power you could have. So my work is about tapping into the authentic wants that we have, not the ones we think we want. But the ones deeply, deeply aligned with our heart. And maybe sometimes we can even feel them aligned with our soul. And spiritually, it just feels at peace. And it's just this wonderful, holistic blending of everything working out. And it is this that I am hopeful to connect with other people wanting to create this consistently in their life. From my starting point being well, I used to have that. My daughter's death, knocked it all away from me and years and years and years later, after doing a whole bunch of self self-work and therapy and, and all sorts of things and writing books which we heal as we write, bringing it all all to a point here 17 years later, where I am finally on that path where it's not about the end result. It is about having the tools and the mindset to remind ourselves that we are continually connecting to our personal power and if we ever slip from that we know how to get ourselves back to center. Back to that connection. Back to that heart space in the blink of an eye. 

Vonne Solis  19:50  
And those of us dealing with disorders, anxiety, PTSD, limitations, illness, breakups, financial problems. You know, anything that is happening that rocks us in the human experience, which it will. None of us are going to get away from having these challenges - we know how to tap into that personal power that is centered in a lot of things with hope, being one of them. Our ability to hope, which is different from wishing. Hoping things are going to turn out because we know our potential. We've put it out in the universe and there's that little bit of hope, I hope it works! 

Vonne Solis  20:39  
Now, when we talk about having trust in our ability to intend and manifest, there are some pitfalls to avoid. So, we understand we're powerful human beings. We have our worth. We have value. We appreciate what's happened in our lives, but we've patted ourselves on the back because we're here. We've survived. Now, we want to, like a captain of a ship, chart our life understanding we can't control the weather. But we can certainly with the right tools and mindset, always safely take ourselves wherever we want to go. My course will go into a little bit more detail on this, but some of the things as a just a quick reminder, I want people to think about is even when we can tap into that ability - this lesson is about helping you remember, you have potential. You may not see at all, but just understanding you have potential. You can hope again, okay?And you can learn with the right mindset and tools over time, and it is a bit of mind conditioning, to trust that everything is going to work out in its own way and time, when you know what you really want, and you're committed to getting it. The pitfalls are what to do in the times that things aren't really happening. So to avoid the depression, the frustration, and I'm not talking about clinical depression, I'm just talking about meh. Disappointment, you know, impatience, all of those things. What you can do is just have an appreciation for everything you do have in your life today. 

Vonne Solis  22:15  
Yes, we talk a lot people talk a lot about being grateful and having gratitude, I kind of talk about it, while those things are very important, for people that can't yet feel gratitude, I like to talk about just having an appreciation for all you have come through and have respect for where you are today as a result of it.  Maybe going a little bit slower than someone who hasn't had the same challenges. It's not a race. You don't even need to compete against yourself. So in order to do that, have this appreciation for yourself and still trust. Remember all the things that have worked out in your life. And even if you're going to sit right now and hear that and go, nothing's worked out in my life, I will challenge you to think of at least one or two things that really have worked out in your life positively. 

Vonne Solis  23:04  
Another thing I'm going to remind people here, which we don't talk about too, too much. But when we are powerful manifesters? Everyone is a powerful manifester when you consider we create our own worst experiences as much as we create our beautiful, wonderful, happy, joyous experiences. So I'm not going to talk about that today. But we are very powerful human beings, with the ability with the right mindset, with the right consciousness, with believing and trusting we can have what we want. And anyone that doesn't believe it, again, I will challenge you to think about anything that you really, really, really wanted in your life and you made it happen because that's how much you wanted it. That is what you have as you're starting foundation to create, even and in fact, all of those things you think are still too big for you to create or that you don't deserve. 

Vonne Solis  24:05  
Okay, that's all I want to talk about today. Again, there is the PDF download. Your mini-personal growth journal with some exercises attached to this lesson. Just to get you thinking about your life in a little bit more expansive way, and helping you get clear about some of the changes you may be wanting to make in your life today. Again, there's 50% discount if you do want to get in on that online course. 

Vonne Solis  24:35  
I thank you very much for watching or listening to this coaching episode. And I look really really forward to seeing you on any of the other episodes. Until next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai