Prepping for my second book

I spent the night journaling about the prompt on self-regulation. It was a little triggering, the word self-regulation. I feel like it comes from a very clinical psychiatric modality, and I’ve always thought that about the word ‘self-regulate’ —like what?!

On the streets, when you talk about “regulate yourself,” it’s almost as if you're straightening up what is crooked. It sounds more like a command than an invitation.

If I’m in a moment of crisis, I don’t want to hear any commands of self-regulation. I need to invite myself to respond in a different way so I can have a different outcome than usual.

So I came up with this whole other way of saying self-regulate without actually saying self-regulate.

I called it ground and grow— grounding yourself like a plane landing or a car quickly stopping, take a 360° look, breathe, expand your view, and ask yourself: is this really that serious? Is this worth my ultimate control?

Release the inner power struggle being grounded doesn’t mean giving up power, it means standing in it calmly.

My mantra is to move away from reacting to witnessing.

Step 2 Grow

When you let curiosity lead instead of urgency. Reframe and adjust.

Ask yourself: how important is it for me to respond right now? What happens if I wait and listen or do less? What part of me wants to follow the status quo, and what part of me wants to shift?

My mantra: I ground to release the inner struggle to meet the moment differently.

Now I’m thinking I should call it Quick car stop or landing the plane.🤣🤣

I took four days to be in Florida just so that I could relax a little bit, decompress from a really heavy couple of months of preparing for our annual event. Midwest Mujeres has taught me so much about leadership.

And I’m working on my second book, which is all about journaling and overcoming the fear of journaling, and this is one of those things that I feel like it’s going to be part of the book because I see journaling as a way to heal, and it’s also a way to play with common self-help modalities like self-regulation.

We hear this term a lot in popular culture right now. The youth don’t know how to self-regulate. didn’t regulate anything as a kid. I did what I had to do to survive. As I mentioned earlier in this blog, if I am to self-regulate, it sounds too much like a command, and I need it to become an invitation.

So, I took pen to paper and wrote out a couple of ideas, playing with them and really visualizing them. What does self-regulation actually mean? What kind of metaphor can I play with, and this is what I came up with🥰👋🏼😊💯🫶🏼

Also, I am open to teaching seminars for mental health centers that need continuing education credits. The last seminar I gave was to approximately 80 people, and they absolutely loved it! I led them in a grounding mindfulness moment in Spanish and English. We discussed common pitfalls when delivering services to Latinas in therapy, how to overcome them, and how to support their Latino and Latina employees.

If you would like to hire me for this, let me know! 📥