by Bridgett Hart | NON-VERBALS
Sometimes our anxiety and negative thoughts are a result of our non-verbal behaviors sending messages we can't even hear ourselves send.
What Non-Verbal Communication Actually Is
Verbal communication is the words we use. Everything else, tone of voice, facial expressions, body language, is non-verbal. Our non-verbal communication is always talking for us, and it doesn't always back up the words coming out of our mouth.
Non-verbal communication comes directly from the brain, and it doesn't always check in with our conscious mind first. It pulls straight from our Reticular Activating System, and from our actual, sometimes subconscious, thoughts, to decide how to act. So your words might be coming out carefully chosen, while your non-verbals send a completely different message, because your thoughts underneath are different.
If you've ever had someone pick up on a message you didn't feel like you sent, that might be your non-verbals telling on you.
Hart Habit Six: Non-Verbals
The Ideal State Declaration is: I keep myself cool physically when faced with a tough situation. It gives me time to process before I respond.
How Non-Verbals Are a Tattletale
Our non-verbal communication comes from what our RAS tells our body to do, based on the conscious and subconscious thoughts we're having in the moment. Even deeper than that, it comes from a whole lifetime of things our amygdala has learned to keep us safe, the values and social norms we grew up with, and every layered detail that makes us exactly who we are.
That makes it complicated, and genuinely hard to just control. This isn't a simple fix. If you find it especially difficult, therapy with the right therapist can help you understand why managing your non-verbal communication feels so hard.
The Power of Pause
"Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom." I don't actually know who said this first, it's widely misattributed to Viktor Frankl, but the idea holds up regardless of who said it.
Here's the simple tool: next time someone comes to you with information big enough to trigger an immediate reaction, take a moment and count to ten before you let yourself respond, physically or verbally.
If you need to, close your eyes. Take a breath. Count to ten. Then do whatever you need to do next.
I'm not going to tell you how to handle every situation, but if the information is genuinely hard, give yourself a way to calm down after that count. Walk away for a moment. Or say something like, "pause this for a minute, I hear you, and I need a second to process it, I'll be right back to you, thank you for telling me."
Use whatever gets you into a grounded, thought-out place before you respond. This does two things: it keeps your non-verbals from telling on you before you're ready to say something on purpose, and it gives the other person room to exist exactly as they are, without your immediate reaction crowding them out.
A Story About the Pause
I grew up in a very Christian environment where homosexuality was talked about as one of the worst things in the world. I disagree with that completely, for the record, but that's how it was.
Early on, thinking about this Ideal State Declaration and what it could look like in practice, I thought about people I knew in the LGBTQIA community whose parents were pastors or church leaders. It was common for those leaders to publicly denounce LGBTQIA people from the pulpit. I heard stories constantly about what friends went through when they came out to their families, how nerve-wracking it was to share something so personal with people almost guaranteed to reject them.
I imagined what it might look like if those same pastors, preachers, and parents, reading 1 Corinthians and the line that love does not act unbecomingly, applied it here. What if their child came to them and said, "I'm gay," and instead of reacting immediately, they took a moment. Breathed. Walked away if they needed to. Thought about how much they loved that child, how much they wanted them happy, healthy, and fulfilled. Then came back into the room and did something different.
I'm not saying one Habit would rewrite the course of these young people's lives. But I imagined it could help. Taking that moment opens space for the real questions: What's the truth of this situation? What are my boundaries, and how am I actually involved? How is my Shadow or my Spirit shaping how I'm seeing this?
Once you understand how they work, you realize all the Hart Habits show up here, and Non-Verbals becomes a tool, one more intentional way to communicate exactly the message you mean to send.
Imagine if that pastor, that parent, took the pause instead, breathed, and responded with nothing but a hug. They wouldn't have to decide their moral stance in that instant, or what scripture demands, or how to reconcile it all. In that moment, they could just express love. Imagine what that single small act could do for everything that came after it.
Using Non-Verbals as a Tool
Non-verbals aren't only something to manage, they're also something you can use. If you're feeling down and choose to smile anyway, it can genuinely shift how you feel. If you choose to dance, it wakes your whole body up. Notice what happens to your heart and mind when you let yourself move freely. It has real power to shift your emotional state.
Once you're conscious of how your body communicates, you can see it working both outward, toward other people, and inward, back into you.
If people keep misinterpreting what you think you've said, and it's feeding your anxiety, it might be time to pause. You don't have to understand it all yet, just notice that your non-verbals are speaking. If you don't want to say anything yet, you don't have to. Step back. Breathe. Don't let your body answer for you until you're ready to use it on purpose.
One of the best examples of this in action is Amy Cuddy's TED Talk on how body language can communicate power and confidence, even when you're faking it at first. The science shows your emotions genuinely follow your body's lead, if you let them.
Recommended resources:
Amy Cuddy, TED Talk on body language and power posing
Question of the day: How do you manage your non-verbal behaviors?
by Bridgett Hart | TRUST
If all the people who've betrayed you over and over are a source of your anxiety and negative thoughts, this post will show you how to reverse that trend, and become what you actually want in relationships.
A Story About Choosing Trust
Early in the process of creating The Hart Habits, I was going through a real situation. A person from leadership in my life, someone I trusted a lot, was accused of cheating on his wife with a coworker. It happened inside a church setting, and if you've ever been in that kind of setting, you know the gossip flies and the judgments come fast. Everyone had an opinion about what they'd seen, what they thought, whether he was telling the truth.
At the time I was going through my own catharsis, and I kept thinking, I don't want this anymore. One of the principles from the original text I was working from was "love always trusts." I sat with that. In this situation, it meant I chose to trust the individual when he told me it wasn't true. I decided to believe him and move forward as if that was the case, even with a fair amount of evidence stacking up against him.
One consequence: I got pushed out of the gossip circle, which honestly, I was glad about. I thought, okay, good, one excellent side effect of choosing trust.
Then a few months later, the truth came out. He had cheated. The whole thing was true, a sordid affair, all the juicy details. I had to face what my choice actually meant. I'd chosen to trust him, and he'd lied to me.
At the time, it was a low-stakes experiment for me, I wasn't deeply invested either way. I'd decided how I was going to approach it, and I wanted to see what the result would be. And the result was my peace of mind. Through all six months of the gossip, the meetings, the little pieces of "evidence" people kept bringing me, I wasn't concerned with any of it. I told people what I believed, left it there, and walked away from the situation without walking away from the people in it. I stayed connected to everyone involved without getting embroiled in the slander behind the scenes. Good thing too, because here we are years later, and he's still married to his wife. They worked it out.
Choose Trust as Your Default
The solution to having been betrayed over and over, and the way to reverse that pattern and stop letting it feed your anxiety, is to choose trust as your default. Scary, right?
This is the third Hart Habit. The word is Trust. The statement: "I choose to trust as a default because I listen to my inner voice and I know how to see and carry truth."
If you've been following along, you'll notice that declarative statement leans on Habit 1 and Habit 2, Self and Truth. In the last post, I talked about how everyone gets to hold their own truth, even when it conflicts with yours, and how we can still celebrate it. That's the foundation for everything I'm about to say about defaulting to trust.
To be clear, I'm not recommending you run around blindly trusting everyone, throwing caution to the wind, and letting anyone take whatever they want from you. That's not what defaulting to trust means.
Trust and Verify
The first tool: trust and verify. You've probably heard this phrase before. It's okay to trust someone by default, but if their actions, or your belief in them, are going to affect your life, it's also okay to verify what they're telling you. Trusting someone and verifying what they say aren't opposites.
In business, we call this a contract. You might trust a good friend completely on a deal you're doing together, but that doesn't mean you skip the paperwork. You still get it in writing, and you both sign and date it.
I think about the men I dated before my husband. Early in our relationship, I had to be honest with him: every single man I'd dated before that point had cheated on me. Snuck around, lied about it, spent their time and energy on other women while we were together. Hurt and untrusting would be an understatement.
Trust and verify, for me back then, meant checking his phone. Looking through call logs. Trying to find out what was really going on. What I learned was that I found whatever I was looking for. If I was convinced he'd been calling some woman the night before, I'd find a phone number that seemed to confirm it. So I chose trust, and then I verified that he wasn't trustworthy. Of course I did. That's what happens when verification is really just confirmation bias with extra steps.
Choosing to trust also means being prepared to deal with whatever the truth turns out to be. Love celebrates truth, so I had to actually look at what was true. Was he showing me, with his time and effort, that he wanted to be in this relationship? He called every day. Asked what I was doing. Invited me to his place. Was genuinely interested in my life. That was true. He'd also been honest from the start that he wasn't ready to be monogamous yet, and that we should just be friends for a while. As his friend, I had a lot less say over what he did with his time. So the actual truth was: all I had to do was ask him directly if he was seeing someone else. And every time, he told me the truth.
I'm not suggesting that always happens. What I am saying is that when you bring truth, self-respect, and real trust together, trusting people stops being able to hurt you. It can only help you. Trust and verify doesn't mean digging for "the truth" you already expect to find. It means learning more, gathering real information, understanding your own belief system's role in the situation, building better boundaries, and honoring Spirit, Shadow, and your strengths as you go. Ask what's true for you? What could be true for someone else? How you can celebrate both?
If you're dating someone and you're not sure whether they're monogamous with you, have that conversation. If they're not, you don't have to be either. Good, bad, or neutral, that's not for me to say. That's where your own boundaries and values come into the conversation. Verify. Take every reasonable step to make sure your trust is placed somewhere worthy of it. Then give it freely.
Close the Loop With Systems
The second piece: trust, then build systems that close the loop naturally. Verification stops feeling like suspicion when it's just a built-in part of how you operate.
In business, this is quality assurance, checks and balances. In the group home business I ran, part of our process was a shift-completion form, checked every time, so we always knew things had actually been done, with independent verification built in. Timesheets, clear policies, structured corrective actions, duty checklists, performance reviews, all the same idea.
In personal life, this looks like an accountability partner, or a prenuptial agreement, or simply strong personal boundaries.
The Triangle of Trust
There's a framework I like here, sometimes called the triangle of trust, from Frances Frei's TED Talk on building and rebuilding trust. It has three corners: Empathy, Logic, and Authenticity.
Empathy means really hearing what someone's saying, seeing the situation from their side, celebrating their truth. Logic means applying objective truth: what's actually data-based or evidence-based here, not just what it feels like subjectively. Being cheated on 100% of the time in the past didn't objectively mean my husband would cheat too. It might have felt that way, but it wasn't objectively true.
Authenticity sits at the top, and it's the most important corner. Empathy and logic mean nothing if you're not trustworthy yourself. Put all three together, and it looks like contracts, accountability partners, prenups, assessing a situation honestly, and accepting that objective and subjective truths can conflict, and that's okay.
Wrap Up
The way to stop being betrayed repeatedly, is to choose to trust people, and build systems to verify that trust is well placed. Know yourself. Hold good boundaries. Honor your strengths, your Shadow, your Spirit. Accept that different truths can coexist, even in conflict, and find ways to celebrate them anyway. That's the recipe for choosing trust.
As you trust people and give that to them, they start giving it back. This might be the most pivotal piece of The Hart Habits for actually changing your life, because we're not taught to trust in this society. We're taught to be cautious, critical, always looking for how someone's trying to take from us. In a capitalist society, that fear is well-founded, it was designed that way. So how do we celebrate that truth? By admitting it, and then asking: how do I live my own truth, honoring myself and my boundaries, inside a society built like this?
The answer is disruptive: choose trust as your default anyway. As you do, while still verifying and closing the loop with real systems, other people start believing they can trust you too. The loop grows. We get stronger together. Synergy, look that word up. That's what happens when we trust each other more deeply, even knowing we're all a little bit of a mess sometimes. We do messed-up stuff. That's the truth. But when we choose to trust each other anyway, with verification and systems in place, things can change fast.
Choose trust. Trust and verify. Close the loop with systems. But choose trust. It will help you stop letting anxiety and negative thoughts ruin your life. You'll go from feeling guarded and victimized to feeling trustworthy, and trusted in return.
Recommended resources:
The Thin Book of Trust by Charles Feltman
How to Build (and Rebuild) Trust, Frances Frei
Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown
Mastering the Skill of Trust by Angus Reid
Question of the day: How have you learned to trust others?
by Bridgett Hart | TRUTH
Have you heard the verse "the truth will make you free"?
Have you wondered why it hasn't made you feel free from your anxiety and negative thoughts yet?
I'm going to share the secret about truth that the people in charge never wanted us to know.
Why Some Truths Create Anxiety
Our white American society was built on hiding and avoiding the truth of slavery. We enslaved human beings to hoard, build, and generate wealth for ourselves, and we excluded everybody else from it, even the people who actually did the building. We did that for 400 years. How many generations do you think happen in 400 years?
What do you think that many years of hiding and avoiding the visible truth does to a society? What happens when we shrink all of that down into our daily lives? The fact that we don't know how to celebrate truth is chilling, but it also explains a lot about why we suffer so much anxiety and negative thinking.
Love Celebrates Truth
At the beginning of what became The Hart Habits, I came across the phrase "love celebrates truth." I had to sit with the word celebrate. What do we actually do when we celebrate something? We put it on a stage. We shine light on it. We put up billboards. We make a big deal. We highlight the good in it. We take the time to notice it, and pay attention to it.
Objective Truth vs. Subjective Truth
I like to talk about two kinds of truth: objective and subjective.
Objective truths are the ones we'd generally agree on as a group, usually based on facts, data, evidence, and statistics. The speed of light. The sky is blue. The grass is green. In reality, though, there are very few completely objective truths. Most things become subjective the moment we receive and process them for ourselves.
Subjective truths are the ones subject to our personal interpretation. They come through our eyes, ears, and senses, get processed by our brain, and are interpreted by our heart, soul, or spirit as true. I've talked before about the Reticular Activating System, and how the brain can lie to us to keep our reality matching what we expect. If you want fun, concrete examples of this, watch Brain Games on National Geographic.
Here's a subjective truth: I think I'm a tall woman. I'm five foot eight, which is tall compared to a lot of women. I'm often one of the taller women in a room. But if I'm standing next to a girlfriend who's six foot seven, she might look at me and think, you are not tall, you're small. That's true for both of us. It's true for me that I'm tall, because in most rooms I'm looking over people's heads. It's also true for her that I'm small.
How can I be both tall and small at the same time? Subjective truth. The truth has to come through my filter first, and through hers. Both are still true, even though they conflict.
The Plurality of Truth
You could search this as duality of truth, but I like to call it the plurality of truth, because every truth has more than two ways of looking at it. It's not just my way and their way. There are many different perspectives on any given situation.
Think about the four Gospels. Same story, four different people, different times, different perspectives, different messages. They tell the same story in different ways, and all of them are still true (according to believers), just shaped by whoever is telling it.
Here's the Point
Even when someone's truth is the opposite of yours, love celebrates truth. When you let other people hold their truth and choose to celebrate it instead of fighting it, everything works better.
That's their truth. You're not going to change it. Trying to is what's causing you the anxiety and negative thinking. Instead: shine a light on it. Pay attention to it. Highlight it. Understand it. Make your own decisions with it in mind.
You're free now. You get your freedom from letting them have their truth. You don't have to change them. You don't have to change their mind. You don't have to persuade anyone toward a different point of view. You're here to experience your own perspective and enjoy it as fully as possible, in service of your highest purpose. Gratitude helps with that.
What This Opens Up
Their truth being different from yours isn't a problem. When you can look at it honestly and celebrate it, meaning really pay attention to it, there are real benefits. You get to make better, more informed decisions about how you move forward, what you do or don't do, what your boundaries are, what Spirit is telling you, what your shadow or inner child wants, and how your strengths play into all of it.
You might notice that's the four components of the first Hart Habit, Self, the ones I walked through in the last several posts of this series. Truth is number two on the list instead of number one for a reason. You have to know yourself, love yourself, and embrace your own subjective truths before you can really embrace what other people believe is true too.
Soon, you'll get to a place where you can hold someone else's truth as true for them, and worth celebrating, simply because you want to live a life aligned with love. You'll make better decisions about how you move forward with people, and you'll find yourself more open-minded, more able to hold all the different truths, good, bad, and ugly, that exist in the connections and Spirit around you.
Recommended resources:
Dare to Lead by Brené Brown
The Reticular Activating System
Brain Games (National Geographic)
The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander
Question of the day: What truths are you avoiding, hiding, or trying to hide from? What would it look like to celebrate them instead?
by Bridgett Hart | SELF
If you've been watching anything online lately, you know it's time to connect to Spirit and activate it in your life. But do you actually know how? Before I can show you that, I need to tell you what I actually mean when I say Spirit, because it's bigger than most people assume.
My Definition of Spirit
Spirit isn't a place, a building, or a set of rituals. It's every connection that already exists around you, whether you've noticed it or not. The work isn't creating the connection. It's seeing it, understanding it, and eventually, being intentional about it.
Does that include people? Obviously. Neighbors, the mail carrier, church members, coworkers, people you run with, people you bowl with, anyone you're around for any reason at all, that's Spirit.
What about the people you don't particularly like? They're Spirit too. That connection is real, even when you choose to keep it distant. You don't have to be closely connected to every single person out there, and you never will be, everyone sits at a different distance from you at any given moment. You have real say over how much connection you actually cultivate with the different parts of Spirit around you.
Nature is Spirit, just as fully: the ground, the trees, the plants and flowers, the cannabis I love, the animals we share this world with, the air, the oxygen, the carbon dioxide, every element making up the universe. Everything is Spirit. Nature, ancestors, a conversation with family, a walk, a story, a song, all of it something you interact with energetically.
Even the garbage. We're connected to the literal garbage in the dumpster, whether we want to be or not. That connection raises real questions: how are we treating it? What are we doing with it? Are we paying attention to what it's doing to our earth?
That's the whole definition. Spirit is not a category of special, sacred things set apart from ordinary life. It's everything, including the parts we'd rather not claim.
Connection Is the Starting Point, Not the Finish Line
Once you understand Spirit this way, connection stops being something you have to go find, and becomes something you're already swimming in. The first move isn't building a connection from nothing. It's waking up to what's already there.
But connection alone isn't enough to activate anything. That takes two more things.
Intention
In my Anxiety series, I walk through ten Habits that help minimize negative thoughts, and intention is the word that sums up why all of them actually work. They require putting real, deliberate thought into how you're living your life, your relationships, your decisions.
Intention is how you move Spirit to act on your behalf. So: what is your intention? That's the question, if Spirit doesn't seem to be activating for you, or things aren't going the way you want.
What do you actually want? Is your life currently showing that? If not, why not? You want money, sure, but why do you want money? What will it let you feel, or do? Why do you want that? Keep digging until you find the real why underneath your time, energy, and choices. Once you're honest about your why, Spirit has something clear to work with, because it knows exactly what you want as soon as you do.
Creation
The third piece is creation. You can connect with everyone you know, spend hours in nature, do all the yoga, church, meditation, and breathwork in the world, but without creation, it's an empty vessel. If nothing comes out of you, out of your body, your existence, into something real, Spirit has no medium to work through.
You're not the only creator. Everything you're connected to is creating too. But your own creation is how you activate Spirit specifically on your own behalf.
This is the same idea behind the Hart Habit Show: taking the thoughts, visions, and senses inside you and putting them into some kind of recorded form, audio, visual, painting, sculpture, writing, journaling, whatever fits. If you want a fuller version of this, I wrote about it directly in Vision Board Technique. It doesn't need to be complicated, and it doesn't need to be some divinely inspired masterpiece. You just need to let what's already in you come out, and see what's been created.
A Note on Inclusion
The point of all of this is inclusion. These principles apply to you no matter your religion, your gender, your color, or any label you or anyone else has put on you. You are energy. That's the only qualification. I love you.
Recommended resources:
Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch
Calm
Question of the day: What are your favorite ways to get connected, intentional, or creative?
by Bridgett Hart | The Framework
Trigger Warning: mention of rape, abuse, drug use, suicidal thoughts, and toxic whiteness.
It's uncomfortable and scary to get vulnerable, but freedom is on the other side.
I took a year to step back and re-evaluate everything I'd been building. It was a brutally painful process, peeling back things I'd spent thousands of hours building and promoting. I had to admit that not everything that glitters is gold. Some of it was fool's gold, or a mirage. Some of it was just garbage I'd assigned value to. I had to weigh my innermost thoughts against the principles of freedom and justice for all.
Before I go further, gratitude first: I live a privileged life that gave me the space to go through a process like this at all. This society isn't built to give most people the tools or room to actually connect with themselves. My husband is an actual saint, and I'm grateful to be on this road with him.
I also want to be honest about how hard this was. It's difficult to teach an old dog new tricks, and it's hard to feel like I'm starting over, again. But I learned something vital in the process: the cycle of creation, destruction, and re-creation isn't bad. It's magical. The pain becomes the beauty of the journey.
Where This Series Comes From
Part of my creative process over the past several months has been the videos and posts I've shared, on relieving anxiety, on aligned entrepreneurship. Now I'm digging into my third favorite topic: spirituality, and our connection to "God" and each other. I put God in quotes because my understanding of that word has shifted a lot from the Big Guy Up There I used to picture.
There's a thread running through everything I've shared so far, and it's time to name it: relationships. Everything I've learned points to the same thing, that healthy relationships, with ourselves, with the people and nature we share this world with, and with Spirit, God, the Universe, whatever you call it, are what actually create freedom and justice for everyone.
Love is the answer. But as a society, we don't really know what love is, because we've spent over 400 years suppressing real love in favor of global wealth hoarding and "religious freedom." The love of money is the root of a lot of evil, and this country is a pretty clear demonstration of what that looks like after four centuries of chasing it at any cost.
Where I Started
I grew up in a very conservative, very white town in rural North Idaho. I attended a private Christian school at my church, preschool through graduation, out on a prairie in the middle of nowhere. The whole school had about 50 kids in it. I graduated in a class of one.
I was an overachiever and a perfectionist, so I graduated two years early and started community college at 16. But first, I spent six months in Mexico on a "mission" trip. The pinnacle of being a good Christian white kid was going on a mission trip, even a short one. I did a full six months, alone, so you can see the overachiever streak started early. It was fun, a real adventure, though I'm not sure I accomplished any actual mission. Mexico was sufficiently "poor," so it counted, and I was on my way to inevitable success. As a bonus, I came home feeling very "woke," because I'd spent months with Mexican families and been a minority in a brown world.
I was a very good Christian girl. Until I wasn't.
What Happened the Summer Before My Senior Year
Fast forward a couple years, to the summer before senior year of college. I was still a "good" girl, technically, though I'd had some fun, tried some things, lost my virginity, and genuinely believed I needed to straighten up if I ever wanted to get married, which was the ultimate goal back then.
In my search for love, without understanding the wounds I already carried, I was exactly the kind of prey a serial rapist looks for, and one had just re-entered society in my parents' hometown. He befriended me. He came to church with me. He came to my family's home. He took me to his family's house. After a few weeks of carefully building trust, he got me alone and raped me.
I didn't even know to call it rape at the time. I believed it was my fault. I told myself I deserved it, because I wasn't a virgin anymore, or because I'd gone somewhere with him, so he must have assumed I wanted it. I knew for certain I'd said no, that I'd pleaded with him to stop, more than once. I blamed myself anyway for putting myself in that position.
That night, he drove me home in his two-seater Mazda, an hour from my parents' house. We didn't have cell phones then. It was a long, quiet ride.
Three days later, I got a diagnosis: herpes, and twelve other STDs. I sat in the doctor's office and cried while she told me I wouldn't be able to give birth naturally because of what had happened to me. I called him, told him what he'd given me, told him I forgave him, and told him we couldn't see each other anymore. Then I left to be the youth pastor on a weekend trip to a Christian music festival.
My first morning back, his mugshot was in the local paper. He'd led police on a chase through town after breaking into a woman's home, raping her at knifepoint, and stealing her wallet. As the story unfolded and he went to prison, I learned his charges included serial child rape, that he'd assaulted several girls my age and younger, and that when I met him that summer, he'd only just been released from prison for a previous rape conviction.
Seven Years of Silence
I was in a daze trying to grapple with all of it. My life spiraled downward for seven years before I told anyone besides my younger sister what had actually happened, or admitted, even to myself, that it was rape.
Every single day of those seven years, I thought about how I'd explain to my mother why I couldn't give birth naturally. I thought about how to tell anyone I dated about the herpes, whether or not I told them the story behind it. The stigma followed every part of my life, heavy with shame.
Back at school for my last year of college, I turned to cannabis to cope. I know now that therapy would have been a far better choice, but at the time, therapy and antidepressants carried just as much shame as premarital sex or cannabis did in the world I lived in. I picked the sin that felt best in the moment, and quietly resigned myself to being a bad person underneath it all. I was never fully committed to that story, though, because I still genuinely loved being kind and doing good in my community. I even chose social services over corporate work after graduating, instead of using my business degree to climb a ladder. I wanted a life I loved, even though I believed the tradeoff was staying poor forever. I was willing to accept that as my punishment for not being perfect.
It's chilling to look back now and see how openly shame hid inside my choices and my beliefs about myself. It took years to recognize that I was always working to be worthy of love, because underneath it, I didn't believe I already was.
The Breaking Point
Eventually the shame and the disconnection from my own spirit wore me down completely, and after escaping a five-year abusive relationship, I knew something had to change.
So I decided to quit cannabis, go back to church, and get my life "right." I started therapy. I finally told my parents about the rape. I thought that would be the last piece that got me back on track.
Since I was already starting over, I moved across the country to join the family business, thinking it would be a couple of years while I finished my Master's in Family Life Education. I wanted to eventually help people build better family relationships, somehow. I hadn't fully figured out how yet, and a comfortable family-business paycheck seemed like a fine way to finish my studies in the meantime.
I got distracted from my coursework almost immediately, the way shame-based decision-making tends to work, and quit my master's program with just months left, to go rescue the family business instead. Notice the pattern of trying to be the one who saves everything? That thread runs through this whole story.
A couple years after that, my mental health was genuinely wrecked.
The Moment at My Desk
One day, sitting at my desk, overwhelmed by responsibility and completely unsupported, I had a moment of total clarity where I suddenly understood why people take their own lives. Ending mine seemed, for a moment, like the most plausible solution to everything I was carrying.
If you're experiencing suicidal thoughts right now, please reach out to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. You can call or text 988, anytime. You are not alone in this, and you deserve support.
I told myself it wasn't okay to think that way, and walked down the hall to tell a friend I'd hired that I'd just had that thought. At the time, I'd been back in church, cannabis-free and celibate, for almost four years. I couldn't understand why I felt this way when I was doing everything I believed made a person good, everything that was supposed to earn a good life.
I sang in the choir. I led the youth group. I went to every service. I served as an armor bearer for the pastor's wife. I ran the business, hired a lot of people, bought a house, let other single women live with me rent-free, and even managed to pull the business through hard times successfully.
But I knew I wasn't okay. So I finally let go.
I let go of working with my family. I let go of church. I let go of trying to be chaste and sober. I let go of every expectation I had about what came next, or who I was supposed to be.
I didn't know, letting go of all of it, whether I'd ever be caught. I knew the version of love I'd learned didn't feel good, and didn't make sense. I didn't know if I'd learned it wrong, been taught it wrong, or if it had been a lie from the start.
So, like any good overachiever, I decided to tear apart everything I'd learned about love and rebuild it, living unapologetically as myself, sins and all. I did go into hiding to do it, but inside that hiding place, I finally did what I wanted.
Only a couple of months later, I met my now-husband. He gave me a safe place to actually exist as myself while I dug into what love really was, and how to live it.
That process took almost fifteen years to become what's now The Hart Habits. It took a long time to emerge, but every part of the path mattered in getting me here. There were no mistakes along the way. It was heartache, disappointment, joy, fun, reflection, white privilege, uncomfortable truth, and endless questions, and I'm beyond grateful it led me here.
Who I Am Now
Now I can hold all of my identities at once, and I see the vastness of "God" more clearly than I ever have. That skill lets me see other people through the same lens of radical love and celebration. When I say I love you, I mean it from the depth of my soul. I say it almost every day, to almost everyone I talk to.
I'm still a work in progress. But the more connected I get to Source, the more aligned with my own energetic purpose, the more the universe's mysteries reveal themselves in ways too phenomenal not to share.
As an Aries sun with a Gemini moon, a Libra ascendant, and a chart full of fire signs, I'm not an easy pill to swallow for a lot of people. Think of me as a big ball of fire. Excellent for some things. Difficult in plenty of others. That's why this one's called An Aries Guide to Woo-Woo.
I'll say things that piss some people off. I don't mind that. I'll simplify complicated, nuanced topics enough that you know your first real step. That's the thing I'm actually good at. I'll push you to learn, test, try, fail, and try again, through every excuse you've got, because I've used them all myself. I will tell you I love you, every time, and I will mean it, every time.
The mission is simple: help myself, and anyone who wants to come along, learn how to care for and love ourselves, each other, our earth, and our resources, the way God loves us, so we can survive what's coming and build something beautiful together.
Let the circus begin.
Recommended resources:
Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch
Calm
Question of the day: How do you connect to your inner spirit? Has that changed over time, or stayed the same?
by Bridgett Hart | SHOW
Sometimes our anxiety and negative thoughts can be managed or changed by recording our feelings about the past, present, and future, tangibly.
It's funny how my material crisscrosses. This tool came to mind while I was working on something that felt totally unrelated, and it turned out to be exactly related.
The Seventh Hart Habit: Show
This tool comes from my seventh Hart Habit, which is Show. I've walked you through one Hart Habit in each of these posts, and you can see the whole framework laid out on the Hart Habits Framework page.
Now let's talk about how recording or documenting and showing plays into our anxiety and negative thinking, and how doing it well can help heal those things within us.
How It Works
Neuroscience tells us that when we engage our brain in hearing, thinking, and seeing something intentionally, we can teach it to experience a new or different reality. When we record our vision for our lives in a visual (or other) format, our brain receives it in new ways and gets to work making it happen with us.
We're not limited to sending ourselves messages through the words we say and the thoughts we consciously choose. With our visuals and other senses, we can show our brain what we want to be true.
What to Record
Record anything you:
Currently feel, hear, see, or sense in some way. Have felt, heard, seen, or sensed in the past. Want to feel, hear, see, or sense in the future.
It doesn't matter which senses are engaged for you. If you're feeling it or thinking it, the goal is to get it out of your mind and body, and onto some kind of medium.
How to Record
You could use a paintbrush and canvas, sculpting clay, a nail on a rock, a Cricut, a spreadsheet, a database, or pen and paper. You could use a video camera or a microphone too. There are a million ways to record what you're feeling, hearing, seeing, sensing, or wanting.
The important thing is getting it out of your brain and body, and making it tangible. Engineers and architects build scale models. Consultants write forecast reports. Gardeners draw plans, then grow whatever the earth lets them, depending on the care they've given the process. Audio and video are two of my personal favorites.
What Else to Record
The next thing to record is your progress on goals. If the first thing you recorded was a vision, now it's time to document your progress toward it.
There's no right or wrong way, but generally, working backward from the end goal helps you figure out the smaller steps required and gives a realistic timeline for getting there.
Document your progress on each of those smaller steps, and track the markers that actually tell the story. A great physical therapist writes down every detail of your work together: this many reps, at this weight, on this date, at this time. As you get stronger, you'll see the weight drop and the range of motion improve. Documenting the process helps you know what you've accomplished and where you are on the journey.
The essential third part is to celebrate what you've accomplished.
What to Do With the Records
Once you've recorded your progress and hit a goal, you can share your portfolio of accomplishments. That's not bragging, it's reporting. It tells the story of what you've actually done.
Share it with your boss, your family, your clients, your friends, or just yourself. However you use it, it's a real way to empower and uplift yourself. Sharing it with others can build your credibility, your rates, your brand recognition, and ultimately, it can tell your story for you, if you want it to. It's an objective testimonial to how awesome you are.
If you keep practicing this Habit, you'll get the recognition you deserve more often. You won't be overlooked for credit that belongs to you, because your records will show the truth.
This Is Reporting, Not Bragging
As you start doing this, you might feel resistance, because you've been taught it's bad to brag. Consider this reporting, not bragging. Bragging usually means inflating a story or your importance in it, which is ultimately built on lying. This is about keeping and sharing truthful data, in whatever format actually fits.
Anything you create is data. It doesn't have to be spreadsheets and charts. A series of paintings made while you moved through a life transformation can tell a powerful story that opens new doors. A series of live videos on Instagram could become the thing that launches your next chapter.
Journaling is a powerful way to record what we're thinking and feeling, but I've also made journal entries as coloring pages, painted with acrylic pens, watercolors, or colored pencils. Those pages had messages for me I can still feel.
When you keep this kind of record consistently, people perceive you as humble, not as a braggart. They see what you've put out and think, this is great, and I bet there's even more they've done. It lets them celebrate your accomplishments with you, and celebrate their own too.
In Conclusion
Record. Record your thoughts and vision of the past, present, and future. Record your progress. Then Show those records to the folks who deserve or need to see them. You deserve to be celebrated.
Question of the day: How do you document your thoughts, vision, and feelings about the past, present, and future?
