Smart Girls Screw Up Too (2019) is a helpful and empowering guide to turning your life around. It provides an abundance of advice, tools and exercises that will take your life from the downside, a place of low self-esteem and bad jobs and relationships, to the upside, where you’ll be firing on all cylinders and making the most out of what you have.
Bella Zanesco is a renowned life and wellness strategist who has used her self-help techniques to overcome her own experiences of depression, heartbreak, burnout and career dissatisfaction. She’s since gone on to become a world sailing champion, The Australian newspaper’s Travel Photographer of the Year and the self-described Smart Girl Comeback Queen.
© Bella Zanesco: Smart Girls Screw Up Too copyright 2017, John Wiley & Sons Inc. Used by permission of John Wiley & Sons Inc. and shall not be made available to any unauthorized third parties.
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Start free trialSmart Girls Screw Up Too (2019) is a helpful and empowering guide to turning your life around. It provides an abundance of advice, tools and exercises that will take your life from the downside, a place of low self-esteem and bad jobs and relationships, to the upside, where you’ll be firing on all cylinders and making the most out of what you have.
If you’re reading this, you may be familiar with the downside. It’s the kind of life in which everything seems drab, gloomy and uninspired. The author was well-acquainted with the downside – so much so that she became fed up and committed to finding a way to the upside. This is the place where you feel happy, inspired and eager to be productive.
One of the first steps on the path to the upside is to write down three things: the current problems in your life, how you feel on a typical day, and how you would like to feel in the future. Maybe your problem is that you’re depressed and have lost all enthusiasm for the things you once found meaningful. So these days, you might feel sad and disconnected, but would like to feel purposeful, creative and energetic.
By writing these things down, you can begin to identify clearly what needs to change in your life and what that change will lead to. This simple exercise provides a clear goal for your self-improvement.
While you’re recognizing your problems, see whether you can trace them back to a point in the past when things began to go off-track. Often there’s a point in our lives at which our intentions get derailed, and we later find ourselves wondering how we ended up in this mess. Looking back to this point can often help us recognize the passions and hopes we once had, regain those dreams and get back on track.
Maybe you took a job one summer ten years ago, thinking it would be a temporary position, only to find yourself still stuck there – in a career for which you have no passion. So think back to the days before you got sidetracked and remind yourself of what got you excited back then.
Now, there are some people who get stuck in the early stages of self-improvement because they feel like devoting time to such concerns is self-indulgent. But the truth is that we all have needs, and if you’d rather not be miserable, then you have to tend to those needs. This means taking care of yourself and doing things that are good for your body and mind. So let’s look at some more ways to do just that and get ourselves on the upside.