Five Fresh Tips

Learning how to have more energy and confidence by setting healthy boundaries can be overwhelming, but you’re not alone! Check out these 5 Fresh Tips to help you learn to set healthy boundaries and have more energy and confidence with boundaries and burnout coach Kara Regas.

Kara Regas supports parents and working professionals through the process of recalibrating their relationships with themselves and others. Folks come to Kara overextended, frazzled, and generally burned out from taking too much responsibility for the people in their lives, both at home and professionally. She partners with her clients to identify what they want and need and helps them understand that they have permission to have wants and needs(!). Together they unravel what makes it difficult for them to assert these critical aspects of selfhood, then they integrate ways of asserting themselves into their lives in the areas that will make the biggest impact for each individual.

You can learn more about Kara Regas on her Fresh Starts profile.

5 Fresh Tips to Help You Land on Your Feet After a Major Transition or Reinvention with Reinvention & Transitions Coach Meg Trucano

Learning how to land on your feet after a major transition can be overwhelming, but you’re not alone! Check out these 5 Fresh Tips to help you land on your feet after a major transition or reinvention with reinvention and transitions coach Meg Trucano.

I am a reinvention & transitions coach for women. A psychologist by training, I specialize in empowering women to embrace change, transition, and reinvention by aligning their resources (time, energy, attention, money, space) with their deepest, most authentic desires--and get exactly what they want. My clients are hard-working women have reached a point of success in their careers, but they find themselves feeling weary, exhausted, or empty and seek that “something else” to bring more meaning, purpose, and authenticity into their lives. Through my coaching, I help my clients find the clarity, contentment, and momentum to reclaim the vision they once had for their one wild and precious lives.

You can learn more about Meg Trucano on her Fresh Starts profile.

5 Fresh Tips to help grow you land on your feet after a major transition:

1. Acknowledge that you are not crazy, making things up, or being dramatic if you are feeling like things aren’t quite right, or if you need a change. That’s your intuition talking, but people socialized as women are often conditioned by society and by the expectations of others to suppress their "drama," and are criticized for "overthinking" things when they feel that something is off. In reality, the feeling that something is off is our subconscious running up a red flag that we are out of alignment with what we truly believe in or want for ourselves.
2. Whether you are switching careers or reinventing another major part of your life, trust that you can land on your feet on the other side of that major change. There are scores of women who have left toxic relationships, unsupportive friendships, and terrible jobs. They are now thriving, and look back only to realize they wish they’d made the leap sooner. Trust your own ability to adapt to change.
3. Find your support crew. These will be people that will encourage you and support you, whatever that change looks like. Hopefully, these people are the ones closest to you–family, friends, your community–but sometimes, these are the people who will resist your change the most. Be mindful that your support crew may look differently than you hope, but there are people out there who will support you through whatever changes you want to make. And don’t forget that there are likely others just like yourself who want to change in a similar way to you–find those people and support each other.
4. Believe that your happiness and well-being are worth something, both to you and to the rest of the world. Don’t fall for the trap of believing that what you want should come after everyone else’s needs and wants. Your wellbeing shouldn’t be an afterthought, something to “get to” once everything else has been ticked off of your to-do list. You have a right to be here. You have a right to take up space. You have a right to show up as the best version of yourself. And when you do show up as the best version of yourself, the world benefits.
5. Realize that wanting something more in your life does not make you selfish for wanting it OR ungrateful for what you already have. Cultivate a gratitude practice to ground yourself in the comfort of what you do have, and savor that frequently. Do this while at the same time acknowledging that there is more in this life for you if you want it, and have the courage to pursue it. Oh, and don’t forget to have FUN with it–the possibilities for you are truly boundless and infinite.

How to Regulate Your Nervous System with Nervous System Clinician Jessica Addeo

Learning how to regulate your nervous system can be overwhelming, but you’re not alone! Check out these 5 Fresh Tips to help you regulate your nervous system with nervous system clinician Jessica Addeo.

Jessica Addeo is an occupational therapist and specializes in the nervous system. Her role involves guiding women in understanding their nervous system in their daily lives, helping them feel more present, connected, and less burdened by guilt.

You can learn more about Jessica Addeo on her Fresh Starts profile.

5 Fresh Tips to help you regulate your nervous system:

1. Being calm is not the goal, that is not what regulation means (to me). Regulation is a verb not a state. It is a set of tools that you can call on to help you when you are feeling overwhelmed, stressed, burnt out, etc. The goal is to feel "in control" and resilient in the face of daily stressors. For many people the goal is to slow down and feel safe enough to even define "calm" for them. But no one is regulated all of the time. The goal is feel good about your life, which you can't do without your nervous system being regulated.
2. Nervous system reframe is EVERYTHING! When you are dysregulated your thinking brain goes offline (that is just plain science). So if you aren't your best self in one of those moments, it isn't a character flaw, you aren't an awful human. You got dysregulated (basically you can drop the guilt!). What can you do about this? Start to learn your signs of dysregulation.
3. Knowing all the states of your nervous system is super helpful. What do you look like when you are super activated (a fight or flight response), what do you look like when you are regulated or in your "window of tolerance", what do you look like when you are in a freeze or shut down response? Being inside our window of tolerance often feels best, but it isn't necessarily the "superior" nervous system state. It's about knowing how your nervous system communicates with you so you can grab the right tools. And sometimes being dysregulated is the APPROPRIATE response.
4. We all have different thresholds for sensory input. And we actually have 8 sensory systems, not just the 5 outward facing ones we think of. Sight, taste, touch, sound and smell are your exterior facing senses. Proprioception, Vestibular and Interoception are the senses that tell you about the inner state of your body and where you are in space (two things that are really important for survival and therefore important for your nervous system). Finding your just right level of these different sensory inputs is SUPER regulating for a nervous system. It is also really important to know your thresholds, maybe a certain space is too loud or bright for you. That doesn't mean you don't go that space (unless you don't want to), but it does mean you plan accordingly for YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM. I teach something called the "nervous system bank account"- where you basically learn how to balance the input going in and out of your nervous system.
5. Nervous system regulation is about communication. Your nervous system is always communicating with your brain, we often miss the messages (because we haven't been taught to listen in this way) and then the nervous system speaks louder. The louder could be things like panic attacks, adult temper tantrums, elevated heart rate, difficulty taking a deep breath, chronic inflammation, chronic stress, difficult sleeping and so on. When you live in a chronic state of fight/flight you often end up feeling like one misstep and you will came crashing off a cliff. Your nervous systems job is to keep you safe and alive, so it is trying to protect you. Learning to speak this language is a game changer. So next time you "freak out", afterwards, instead of judgement get curious. What is your nervous system saying to you in those moments?

5 Fresh Tips to Help You Get Your Marital Home Ready to Sell (and help you get through it sanely) with Realtor Holly Martins

Learning how to get your marital home ready to sell can be overwhelming, but you’re not alone! Check out these 5 Fresh Tips to help you get your marital home ready to sell (without losing your mind) with realtor Holly Martins.

I’m a divorced mom of two kids and a full-time Realtor. With a background in social services, and a lifetime of experience in the world of divorce, I understand and empathize with the many transitions that occur during the process. That’s why my business is client centered: my goal is to ensure the people who I’m working for are educated, advocated for, and taken care of from start to finish. This is not a sales business to me, it is the business of helping people and families move onward and upward.

You can learn more about Holly Martins on her Fresh Starts profile.

How to Find Clarity When You're Feeling Lost with Astrologer Alice Smith of Alice Smith Astrology:

Learning how to find clarity when you feel lost can be overwhelming, but you’re not alone! Check out these 5 Fresh Tips to help you find clarity when you feel lost with astrologer Alice Smith of Alice Smith Astrology.

Alice Smith Astrology provides astrological counseling through one-on-one readings, performs at events both big and small in the Pacific Northwest, and is the resident astrologer for the Asian-American media platform JoySauce. She is passionate about democratizing astrology to make it easily accessible to the masses--to distill the wisdom of the stars into plain English so that everybody can benefit! She helps people to shed the stories that don't fit them so that they can become the heroes of their own lives.

You can learn more about Alice Smith on her Fresh Starts profile.

5 Fresh Tips to help you find clarity when you feel lost:

1. Take care of your physical needs. Remember to eat, hydrate, and sleep. We are comprised of body, mind, and soul. When we're feeling lost in the mind or the spirit, we can at least take care of the body. While taking care of your physical body isn't going to solve all of your problems, it can help to bring a sense of balance and control to situations where we feel out of control.
2. Learn to sit with the discomfort of uncertainty. In the modern, Western, capitalistic world that's achievement and money oriented, we're incredibly uncomfortable with "liminal space"—the place that's neither here nor there, which is exactly what transitions are. Our discomfort with liminal space is why we dread planetary retrogrades (like Mercury retrograde), because it sends us into energetic liminal space where we can reassess, reevaluate, and reconsider. But in these modern times, we don't know what to do with anything that isn't forward-moving motion. Liminal space is uncomfortable, but it's also a gift because they're opportunities to reorient, recalibrate, and course-correct. It's okay for things to be unclear.
3. Normalize fear and doubt. Realize that our fears and doubts magnify when we're about to embark on meaningful change and expansion. Our rational brain has one primary goal, which is to keep us alive and safe. Expanding into unknown territory is the very opposite of safety, but necessary for our evolution when it's our time to grow. Fear is not only normal—it's incredibly helpful in uncovering your tenderest wishes. Fear protects your most heartfelt wants, and if you can sit with your fear and examine it, you can actually use it to gain clarity.
4. Let go of imagined deadlines. Everybody evolves at their own speed and lumping on extra anxiety because you're not aligned with an arbitrary timeline isn't productive. Realize that arbitrary timelines have more to do with your "shoulds" and "oughts" than they have to do with reality.
5. Get to the heart of the issue by asking, "Why would that be a problem?" This question helps us get to the real heart of issue, which is so important because we often orbit the real issue. For example: If you don't get a promotion, why would that be a problem? Keep asking yourself that same question with every answer and you might realize in the end that it's not about the promotion but, rather, your belief that your loved ones only want you because of what you provide. Hence, the real issue is you feel unworthy of love