Beyond survival: How to thrive and get out of survival mode
Do you ever find yourself in yet another situation that makes you feel like you’re just trying to stay afloat? Do you ever wonder when it’ll stop feeling like you’re just trying to survive? What if I told you all this time the reason you don’t thrive is because you choose not to thrive? You keep choosing to just survive, never choosing the path of thriving. I can imagine you’re thinking “Wait, what? Why would I keep choosing to struggle?!?!” Let me explain but first let’s explore the difference between thrive and survive.
The definition of survive is: “continue to live or exist, especially in spite of danger or hardship” (1)
The definition of thrive is: “prosper; flourish” (2)
Photo by Kier... in Sight on Unsplash
Why We Stay Stuck In Survival Mode
We keep choosing survival mode because we keep allowing ourselves to sabotage our happiness. Being in survival mode means you have experienced hardship and danger and found a way to survive those dangers. Some of these experiences may include childhood trauma, emotional neglect, domestic violence, sexual abuse, toxic relationships etc. Often substances are/were the way to cope with the emotional and mental affects of trauma and being in “survival mode”. But even in recovery, you can still be stuck in survival mode.
For 12 years into my recovery, I was still just surviving. I was stable in my recovery but I wasn’t happy and it seemed like I was just trying to get through another day, surviving but not thriving. If you ever find yourself “living from experience” and protecting yourself from the world and life because “life taught me lessons”… you are living in survival mode. If you’ve read my article on positive intelligence here, you’ll know what I mean when I say all the saboteurs help you live in survival mode. Saboteurs are the negative voices in your head that respond when a challenging or stressful situation arises(3). The saboteurs may even be telling you you’re not in survival mode by saying… “it’s maturity, it’s wisdom” and it is… but it’s beyond that. It’s trauma and living from there is not thriving.
Photo by Kier... in Sight on Unsplash
What Thriving Looks Like
Thriving on the other hand is getting all the things you want out of life. Prosperous and flourishing in life as if you’re a plant that’s been fertilized and loved and cared for in the best of environments and have plenty of shoots to give without even touching your core needs and roots.
Imagine if you have a plant with a few leaves, a shoot or 2 coming out but it’s green and surviving. Imagine I take a piece to propagate. How much will that cutting take away from the original plant’s survival? It may really impact its health to take half of it for a new propagation! Now imagine a plant that’s thriving with 5-6 shoots, 30 leaves, big and beautifully full and just thriving like it’s been in the best environments; and take a cutting from that one. That cutting will not impact it in the tiniest bit, right? Those cuttings are all the life stresses we live with, and we must be in a place of thriving in order to offer any healthy part of us to others. This includes our children, our partner, our family members around Thanksgiving and Christmas time… Everyone at all times.
How to get out of survival mode and thrive
There are 2 resources out there to help you get out of survival and into thriving mode. The first is therapy and the second is coaching. Often people are resistant to going to therapy and this is because what therapy is at its core: It’s the process of becoming aware of why we are having a problem and exploring ways (actions) to fix the problem. If you download my FREE workbook on the 3 Pillars of Change, you will see there is an important 3rd pillar: Motivation. As a spiritual/wellness coach, focusing on motivation is a huge part of my client’s success.
Most of the time, the stickler saboteur (find out your saboteurs here) motivates us like this: “I got 1 day of self-care out of 60, that’s not enough, I need to do at least once a week”. If you’re familiar with the ”tough love” type of parenting you recognize how beating yourself up about not being good enough is somehow motivating. But motivation is truly motivating when it energizes us into taking action and makes us feel good about even the smallest change such as “great job giving yourself a day of self-care even though it was hard to ignore the laundry”. Do you feel the difference in those statements? It’s a whole different area of the brain that lights up!
This is your time to thrive
When you work with me as your coach, you transform your life to thriving through positive mental fitness and motivation from a place of enlightenment and encouragement so you handle your kids’ breakdown about not being able to find his socks, or your car breaking down, or a friend you didn’t know was using offers you a hit of some “good shit” the day after you found out your partner cheated on you… and you keep thriving like a Goddess from a place of self-love and choosing tp THRIVE no matter the situation. Schedule a FREE consultation with me here
1 definition of survive - Search (bing.com)
