The 17 Best Lessons I Learned in Therapy

Wisdom from a wise woman.

I’d been seeing a life coach for four months, trying to realign myself mentally and emotionally, and to establish a set of healthy strategies and coping mechanisms. Life’s gotten marginally better over that time. (You may recall, things were pretty bleak.) I walked out of D**** V******’s office yesterday at around 2 p.m. — same as I’ve done every Friday at 2 p.m. — confident as a star quarterback, sun beaming brightly down upon my face, a warm wind rustling through the trees. What follows are the 17 best takeaways I got from 17 visits, distilled for you because I think they could be useful; documented for me because I assume I’ll need the reminder someday.

1. No matter where you go, be where you are. Look around. Focus on your five senses. Detach yourself from memories and expectations. What’s happening now is your life — embrace it!
2. Learn to transcend your surroundings. You can acknowledge your past, your experiences and your habits without becoming enslaved by them. What’s happened before and what’s happening now can shape you … but they are not you.
3. Think of a way out before you hit the panic button. If you can take a beat to let the initial shock of an unpleasant or frightening situation wash over you, you can generally escape it — along with the hell of your own mind.
4. Allow yourself to feel good about yourself. It’s possible to feel pride when earned or deserved while maintaining your humility.
5. Keep writing. In case you feel uncomfortable talking to people about your feelings, you can always write them out to make sense of them and provide a sense of catharsis.
6. Make the best of everything around you. There’s nearly infinite ways to take what you have and turn it into something else. This is how you grow and how you change the world in your own tiny way.
7. If you can solve something in five minutes, do it. Prevent small stresses from piling up by tackling them as you think of them. This helps you de-clutter your mind and maintain your focus on the present.
8. There’s no crisis or memory that cannot be re-framed into an opportunity. This is how you can gain control over seemingly helpless situations.
9. Be like Nike. If there’s something you’re thinking about, just do it, before it consumes you.
10. What you eat matters. Consuming the wrong kinds of foods can leave you sluggish, sick, moody and irritable. Eat nutrient-dense foods that don’t require a lot of energy to digest.
11. Movement matters. An object in motion stays in motion, and — if you’re just laying around wallowing in sadness or fear — odds are you’re probably just 30 minutes of exercise away from a better mood (and better health).
12. Ask for what you want. You don’t get what you deserve … you get what you bargain for.
13. If you need to have a tough conversation, have it. And have it immediately, before it becomes tougher. This will challenge you and challenge others to overcome obstacles — leaving you both all the better for it and earning you respect from the gatekeepers in your life.
14. Let up your anchors. Your past, relationships, debt, health and stress can all weigh on you. They can make falling asleep at night a chore and rising with the sun impossible. But if you detach yourself from these things, you can go places where your baggage won’t follow you.
15. Focus on a perfect process and not perfect results. The outcomes will take care of themselves, more often than not. Cheating your way to your goals won’t make you a better person.
16. Hold yourself accountable. Nobody’s watching you 24x7. Once you realize nobody’s fighting your battles but you, and you’re not beholden to anyone else’s opinions, you can act in accordance with your own code of conduct. This is the essence of integrity.
17. Celebrate all victories, even if they’re small. If you can’t take time out to enjoy what you’ve done, you’ll lose much of the motivation required to do them in the first place.

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