Day 15 of the 2021 Empowerment Guide For Sensitive People! Today’s article from Megghan Thompson explores strategies for parents during challenging times like the ones we are in.
About Megghan Thompson
Megghan Thompson is a Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor, a Registered Play Therapist-Supervisor and a Parent Coach/Mental Health Consultant. She has been working with Highly Sensitive Children, teens and their families for 10 years, and owns a group private practice in Maryland that specializes in working with HSCs, HS teens and young adult HSPs who engage in life-threatening behaviors like daily meltdowns, aggression, suicidal actions, promiscuity and self harm. Megghan’s mission is to defeat the statistic that HSPs make up 50% of the population that seeks therapy but only make up 20% of the population. She’s doing this by building an army of parents equipped with the support and accountability to rapidly transform their relationships with their children. Connect with Megghan at her website, or on Facebook or Instagram. For more support on what helps to break down the meltdown cycle, and truly support your child as an empowered parent.
Day 14 of the 2021 Empowerment Guide For Sensitive People! Today’s article about the impact of the pandemic is from Jacquelyn Strickland.
About Jacquelyn Strickland
Jacquelyn has been a Licensed Professional Counselor since 1993, having worked exclusively with highly sensitive people since 2000. She is one of the very first pioneers, with Elaine Aron, of what is now an international movement connecting HSPs around the world. Jacquelyn & Elaine co-founded the HSP Gathering RetreatsSince 2001 , and there have been 36 and counting, national and international retreats. We will be celebrating the 37th retreat as soon as it is safe to gather, and possibly we will gather virtually as well. Jacquelyn’s background in Social Work, Women’s Studies, cultural diversity and a graduate degree in Counseling have empowered and informed her work since first finding out about our HSP trait in May of 1996. Her psychotherapy practice included therapeutic orientations, coaching principles, mixed with a client’s spiritual foundation. She has been trained in hypnotherapy and loved her work as an EMDR, Level II practitioner. She has been certified to utilize Myers Briggs Personality Assessment since 1991, and is also well versed in the use of the Enneagram, using both of these modalities, when helpful, in her work. She now connects with highly sensitive people around the world as an HSP mentor, coach, educator and retreat & workshop leader, including the HSP Gathering Retreats, and her Nature as Teacher and Healer retreats held in beautiful Colorado where she lives. She is an expert on Sensory Processing Sensitivity and a member of ICHS – International Consultants High Sensitivity, a group of international professionals trained by Elaine Aron in 2018. Jacquelyn has been married to a non-HSP introvert since 1978 and is the mother of two grown sons, one an HSP, and one simply very kind. She is the grandmother of three delightful grandchildren, ages 3, 4 and 6. One granddaughter is almost certainly a sensitive extrovert like her grandmother. Connect with Jacquelyn at her website or on her Facebook page. Sign up for her newsletter, HSP Highlights & Insights – website
Welcome to Day 12 of the 2021 Empowerment Guide For Sensitive People! Today’s article from Mary Kay Parkinson, a long time HSP coach, is about listening to the body.
About Mary Kay Parkinson
HSP Mary Kay Parkinson is an energy healer and life coach based in Maryland. Her site offers information about the HSP trait, and many articles about living well as an HSP. Mary Kay is an energy healer and coach in spiritual development. She has a BA in Psychology, and has studied at the Center for Intentional Living, Barbara Brennan School of Healing, Mentor Coach, Bert Hellinger Institute USA, and the Potomac Massage Training Institute. Connect with Mary Kay at her website, on Facebook, Twitter or Google Plus.
I would to like to recommend a new book to you, which I do not often do, by a dear colleague of mine, Michele Mercer, Ph.D. Michele’s new book is on visual thinking and how we might come to use easily acquired tools of visual note taking and visual communications as leadership tools in fast-changing organizations and companies.
Visual Quotient is a big 8×10 beautiful book that Michele has lovingly crafted in full color to bring her concepts to life and provide practical tools to develop visual skills. The book is set up as a workbook that is suitable for use in training, teaching, and referencing a broad and far-reaching articulation of four distinct mindsets that break down the way we think, learn, lead, make sense of information, and communicate with others.
I’m so incredibly proud of Michele for taking on the enormous task of creating a significant addition to the evolving and emergent field of visual thinking/design thinking! I might add, as well, that Michele is a HSS/HSP!
Day 11 of the 2021 Empowerment Guide For Sensitive People! Today’s article from Brooke Nielsen explores energetic boundaries: what they are and how we can maintain them.
About Brooke Nielsen
Brooke Nielsen is a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist and founder of the Therapeutic Center for Highly Sensitive People in Boulder, CO. With advanced training in trauma therapy and relationships, she’s spent thousands of hours helping Highly Sensitive People (HSPs) thrive. She’s also the founder of Intuitive Warrior, an online learning community which guides HSPs to discover the gifts that lie hidden in what they thought were the worst parts of themselves. Learn more at Intuitive Warrior.
Day 10 of the 2021 Empowerment Guide for HSPs. The COVID19 pandemic has surely been a disruptive force in society to say the least as workers found themselves suddenly confronting being at home and, either, being unemployed or working from home for the first time. This unintentional “experiment” has allowed many to get a taste of what it might be like to work from home, including the challenges and opportunities. Some HSPs will simply love the newfound freedom and time and space to think and process, while others will miss the interactions in person and the exterior life of moving about in society.
In a real sense, the pandemic has fast forwarded us to new ways of thinking about work, career, and how we accomplish work. Going forward, as the vaccine rollout unfolds throughout 2021 and society begins to navigate how to return to a new reality, the learnings for HSPs are not things we should casually toss aside as work again calls.
If you have benefited from working from home you should work towards setting up a situation where that may be your longer-term arrangement, even if it means changing companies, industries, even your whole career focus, if you have one. 2021 is the time when you need to speak up and ask for what you need, without fear and without equivocation, because now you have likely demonstrated that the same work may be accomplished while working from home, to the same or better level, and companies and organizations have seen these results as well. The coming fight is for worker’s rights and for the ways we perform at our best when our needs are met.
Maybe that means you need to be self-employed or work as a contractor, or maybe it means you need to retool your skills or gain some marketable skills. Whatever you need to do to make your life work for you, do it now and stop hesitating and procrastinating. The opportunities of the 21st century are there to be had. Now is the time to make your life work you as a highly sensitive person.
Today’s article is from my dear ICHS colleague, Elena Lupo. Dr. Lupo does incredible work in Italy to raise awareness of sensory processing sensitivity, as well as teach coping and healing strategies to HSPs and their sensitive children.
About Elena Lupo
Elena Lupo, Ph.D. is a Psychologist and Psychotherapist based in Italy. She works in a body-oriented approach (Biosistemica) with highly sensitive men, women and children investigating and advocating coping strategies, psychosomatic issues and supporting the healthy parenting and teaching of highly sensitive children. She is the author of “Il Tesoro dei bambini sensibili”, 2017 and leads workshops about having boundaries using the body oriented approach. She is a member of the International Consultants on High Sensitivity. Connect with Elena on Facebook or Instagram.
Day 9 of the 2021 Empowerment Guide for HSPs. Today’s article is from Ritu Kaushal and explores the ever-present need for many HSPs to energetically ground.
Day 8 of the 2021 Empowerment Guide for HSPs. Today’s article is from the founder of Sensitive Evolution, Maria Hill, and asks us to consider life beyond the current circumstances of rejection drama versus rejection in general. Understanding that the human species will forever feel compelled to separate itself into unique peer groups and demonize all other groups may sound like a disheartening basis for the future but we always have free will and free choice in how we choose to experience life.
The astounding aspect of human life on this planet, for me, is that if we just consider it objectively we have this wonderful world with numerous resources and possibilities in which we could create ANY kind of culture or civilization we wish to and, yet we seem to prefer, even feel compelled to acting in mindless ways that betray our abilities to create, connect, and collaborate.
For example, what will happen if and when we colonize Mars? Will it be egalitarian and leave behind the limited ways of thinking and being that we seem unable to escape here on Earth? Or will we simply replicate the same old tired inequities and hierarchies of privilege and power? There is a great sci-fi series called The Expanse that looks into a future where we have distinct and unequal groups, with predictable results of conflict, violence, and horrific inequalities.
Writing a new story on a personal level is always up to us and finding the willingness to eschew old ways of thinking and being, while embracing new ones with people we resonate with. What will be your NEW possible self in 2021? Who do you wish to be that you are not now? Begin to write that story every day this year!
About Maria Hill
Maria Hill is the founder of Sensitive Evolution. She is the author of The Emerging Sensitive: A Guide For Finding Your Place In The World. In addition, she has created the immersive Emerging Sensitive Program of “sensory processing yoga” using frameworks to help sensitive people master their sensitivity and turn it into the asset it can be. She also offers the Emerging Sensitive Movie Club focused on movies and discussions about living in the world as a sensitive person and navigating the challenging cultural shifts of our times. She is a longtime meditator, reiki master, student of alternative health and Ayurveda. Maria is also an abstract painter whose portfolio can be found at Infinite Shape and also very interested in animal and human rights and the environment.
Day 7 of the 2021 Empowerment Guide for HSPs. Today’s article especially applies to the high sensation seeking highly sensitive person in ways we will instantly recognize. The detours, divergences, and easy boredom are all part and parcel of life for we HSS/HSPs and part of our trait. This is not to say that HSPs do not also experience some of the same issues with staying on goal; rather, that being a reflective and deep minded person means that both HSS/HSPs AND HSPs will identify with a need for structure and a way of disciplining our efforts.
List making is a good strategy but is also so easily overlooked or set aside as procrastination sets in. The act of making a list, of making our thoughts concrete on paper, is a useful one because it makes real what may only be swirling vapors of thought in our minds. Another way to stay on goal is to have someone else to be responsible to. Someone who is expecting a draft or segment of a project by a set time. Deadlines are often a great motivator!
About Jason Freeman
Jason Freeman is a professional speaker, author, and bravery coach who travels the country sharing his inspirational and transformative journey with captivated audiences . . . and he does it with a pronounced speech impediment. From the dream affirming standing ovation following his TEDx talk in Sugarland, TX to his earliest moments in front of an attentive crowd, Jason has learned to trust his seemingly contradictory calling to speak in front of live audiences. He has shared the stage with well-known speakers in the transformational, entertainment, entrepreneurship, and business worlds and has charmed audiences at The California Teacher’s Summit, Kyle Cease’s Evolving Out Loud, The Habitude Warrior Conference, The People First Conference in San Diego, and San Diego State University, amongst others. Connect with Jason through his website, Facebook or Youtube channel.
