With two weeks left in the year, most of us lean into a natural thought process of evaluation—what went right this year, what didn’t, how we can do better, and what we want for the new incoming year. And while this focus is so prevalent, often something stops us from genuinely diving into this much-needed thought process. What is it? It’s the unwelcome holiday guests that go by the names stress, anxiety, and depression.

As we continue our series to wrap up the year, we are taking on how to prevent the end-of-the-year stress and depression this week, and then next week, we’ll uncover the correct way to write your 2023 vision as it is broken down into the fundamental areas of life.

Each of us has a set of basic human needs that must be fulfilled for us to thrive in our humanness—feeling safe is second in our primal needs on the need hierarchy. So, if I ask you what it means to be safe, most people give me an answer based on physical safety. Yet, what most people do not understand is that safety also expands into our mental, emotional, physical, and even financial pillars of life, which means that safety must be present for the well-being of our minds and emotional bodies.

As we continue our building series to close out the year, we’re taking a one-on-one deep dive into what it takes to feel emotionally safe, why it’s so important to create emotional safety, and, as always, we’ll talk about how to start the process of building emotional security with a few daily practices.

True self-love and inner peace are only possible when we have the ability to see ourselves and own our experiences without deep diving into a spiral of negativity, self-doubt, and emotional dysregulation. After all, self-validation is the ability to accept our internal experiences, thoughts, and feelings.

As we continue our building series through the end of the year, we started with loneliness last week, and today, we’re taking a one-on-one deep dive into self-validation. Being unable to validate our emotions, thoughts, and feelings keeps us from living an emotionally stable life, holds us in a state of perceived unworthiness, and keeps us from our emotional best.

This week we are breaking down and trashing the barriers that keep us from validating ourselves, our emotions, and our thoughts.