Therapy and Consultation
Helping people to heal and grow in their lives.
Are you looking to improve a certain aspect of your life? Maybe you're a performer, athlete, or competitor. Or possibly you're a student, parent, or someone striving to improve their work performance. If so, you know the importance of being able to function optimally in challenging situations, such as:
Perhaps you can remember a time when you failed to achieve your goals because you were feeling stressed, overwhelmed, and lacking confidence. In contrast, you may also recall a time when you were feeling calm, confident, and focused. In result, you may have been functioning at a high level and achieving your goals.
Do you wonder what it would take to eliminate the obstacles to your success and start functioning optimally on a consistent basis?
My counseling approach focuses on three areas, designed to help you to maximize your potential in the most important parts of your life:
If you're like most people, when it comes time to perform or face a challenging situation, your confidence level is influenced by an accumulation of past experiences. Negative performance experiences can erode confidence around your ability to perform optimally. Examples of performance obstacles include difficult (i.e., embarrassing, humiliating, upsetting, overwhelming, or traumatizing) experiences when:
Another key stumbling block to optimal performance relates to the beliefs that you hold about yourself. Negative thoughts about your capacity to achieve or perform at a high level get in the way of peak performance. Past negative performance experiences reinforce a negative mindset. Common negative beliefs include:
Your beliefs determine whether you feel confident and focused or full of fear and self-doubt when you are performing.
Your body responds to your thoughts. Negative thoughts directly lead to fear, anxiety, and doubt. This is reflected in statements such as, "I got choked up" or "My heart was racing" and "I had butterflies in my stomach." Conversely, positive thoughts foster a sense of confidence, focus, and relaxation within your body.
So the first step toward optimal performance is to release the obstacles (i.e., past unsuccessful performance experiences, negative beliefs, and uncomfortable body sensations) that get in the way of your success. I find that EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing) can be very helpful for processing through past distressing or difficult experiences. EMDR has successfully been used in the counseling and therapy field for over 20 years. EMDR is excellent for overcoming negative beliefs, challenging memories, and difficult feelings related to past performance experiences.
The second step in performance optimization is to explore any other barriers to peak performance. Examples include:
The third step is to optimize performance. Once obstacles to successful performance are released, your positive resources can be strengthened. This step can significantly support you to reach peak performance and achieve your life goals. Examples of positive resources include:
This is another area where EMDR is very powerful. By working with your brain and central nervous system, EMDR can be used to strengthen your inner resources, and help you to function at your highest level. By using EMDR, we can address your old negative template that has led to ineffective performance and support the development of a new positive template of how you will look, feel, act, think, and behave when you are performing successfully.
An important aspect of my counseling work is to help you make positive changes so that you can achieve your important life goals and fulfill your potential.
For Counseling in Portland, feel free to call me today at (503) 887-3309 or email me to book a counseling session or to set up a FREE consultation.
Office located in NE Portland, Oregon. Serving the Portland metro area, including Beaverton, Hillsboro, Lake Oswego, Tigard, West Linn, Milwaukie, Oregon City, Tualatin, Gresham, and Vancouver, WA.
