Peace Your Way to Success: A foundational guide to cultivate peace, prioritize yourself and achieve your goals

By Kenisha Hanson

In today's bustling world, it's common to get swept up in the relentless pursuit of productivity and success. However, "Peace Your Way to Success," penned by Kenisha Hanson, offers a refreshing perspective that challenges the status quo. Kenisha, a wellness expert and canc

• Language: English
• Publisher: Perceptive Peace Publishing
• Release date: May 7, 2024
• ISBN: 9781738833610

Kenisha Hanson

Kenisha Hanson, a Personal Development Coach and wellness expert, is dedicated to helping individuals find inner peace and fulfillment. Her holistic approach, shaped by personal experiences, emphasizes self-reflection and empowerment. She believes that self-awareness forms the foundation for success in various life domains. With a Master of Science in Psychology and a cancer survivor, Kenisha's grounded perspective, kindness, and inner peace inspire and empower her clients, helping them achieve their goals with confidence.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION:

THRIVE IN PEACE

Welcome to Peace Your Way to Success: A Foundational Guide to Cultivate Peace, Prioritize Yourself, and Achieve your Goals . Thank you for purchasing this book. My hope is by the time you reach the end of this book, you will have the practical tools to evaluate your own life and make the necessary adjustments that align with your peace and give you the clarity to achieve your goals.

We all go through challenges, hardships, obstacles, or inconveniences that try to take our will to succeed. For some reason, it seems as though when you’re ambitious—which I am sure you are because you picked up this book—you experience moments when you cannot seem to catch a break. This shakes you a bit, and sometimes, you want to (or maybe you do for a moment) throw in the towel, yet the desire to achieve your goals remains inside you. I want to congratulate you on choosing yourself at this moment to learn something that may help you get closer to your dreams and your peace. To prioritize yourself is to know and love yourself. It is understanding your needs, wants, and desires and articulating them confidently. It is showing up for you.

This book will allow you to evaluate the key areas of your life to determine if your actions and inactions align with your goals and values. Through alignment, you obtain peace, and through peace, you receive clarity and the mental capacity to move through whatever life throws at you in the pursuit of your dreams.

I am writing this book in 2022, and now, more than ever, you might feel like you’re being pulled in countless directions, bombarded with never-ending to-do lists, and subjected to overwhelming negativity from various sources, including the media, others, and even your own inner critic. If this resonates with you, chances are you fall into one of the following categories or perhaps a combination. You’re likely someone with profound commitment and unwavering drive, always ready to shoulder the burdens of others. However, at times, you might find yourself with less than what you truly need, and a lot less than you deserve. People around you may perceive you as the go-to person, someone they can always rely on, the strong one who seems invincible. But let’s face the truth: you’re only human, and there are limits to what you can bear and how much you can do. Time and time again, you’ve stretched yourself thin, and your hyper-independence often hinders you from asking for help, no matter how much you need it. Lately, it feels like things are slipping out of control, and despite appearances, you don’t have it all figured out – you just carry the load exceptionally well, maybe even too well.

Or perhaps you are diligently striving to pursue your goals—or so it seems. In reality, you may be engaging in busy work, tasks that, while they appear to align with your goal, don’t contribute significantly to making real progress. You only have so much mental capacity at the end of the day to actually do something meaningful. You give so much of yourself, often taking on the burdens of others, and in the process, your own happiness starts to slip away bit by bit. Over time, you realize that people have pushed past your boundaries, and you’ve sacrificed many of your own needs, with everything on your personal to-do list remaining untouched. Yet, despite your exhaustion, you continue to push forward because you feel you have a lot to live up to, and deep down, you’re convinced there must be a way because the dreams you have never seem to fade.

Then there are those of you who have achieved a goal you set out to attain, only to find yourself overwhelmed and unfulfilled. You checked all the boxes, did all the right things, but something is missing. Consequently, a new, even bigger goal looms on the horizon, and you believe this will finally bring you the contentment you seek. However, chances are it won’t, because if you’re anything like me, that dream or goal was never truly yours, or perhaps it was, but circumstances changed along the way. Yet, you never pause to check in and see if it aligns with the current version of yourself. This can lead to confusion and a cycle where you keep moving the goalpost, continually attaching your happiness to a future achievement.

When we neglect to pause, tune into our self-awareness, and evaluate our own needs, we’ll keep satisfying the needs of others, leaving ourselves spinning in a perpetual cycle, with our peace and happiness trapped in the distant future. The good news is that I understand these emotions, which is precisely why I wrote this book.

Living in a perpetual state of internal chaos, misalignment, and mental exhaustion doesn’t serve our well-being or our progress in life. Despite the North American hustle culture, I can assure you that it does not have to be this way. I also want you to know that this book is neither overly complicated, nor am I here to fill you with extreme positivity. Life presents challenges, and it’s not my intent to minimize your experience. Instead, my aim is to provide an actionable plan grounded in practical tools that support you holistically while also giving you the space to adapt it to meet your needs. I’m here to help you clarify your goals and guide you in living in alignment with them. I’ll empower you to reflect on your needs and desires so that you can consistently prioritize yourself and live a life peacefully designed by you.

What’s my story? Growing up, I always had a curious mind. I loved journaling and reflecting on who I was and what the things were that were happening in my life. I was described as happy, optimistic, quite particular and kind. As I grew up, I was everyone’s go-to person. I helped everyone with everything at any time. However, I now realize that many of my seemingly positive characteristics were due to feeling like I did not belong. This resulted in me constantly extending and overextending kindness to others, trying to include people, so they never felt what I felt deep inside. I was fortunate enough to thrive in the school environment. I loved getting good grades, and I loved playing sports. I was on every team, and when I was not on a team, I was in the chess club or the model cars club. I attribute much of this to overcompensation due to my feelings of inadequacy. I felt I was not enough, or I had to do more to be worthy of my father’s love. My parents were no longer together, and it felt like I had to do more to earn his presence. I also never wanted to disappoint my mom because I knew how much she did to support us each and every day. It was us against the world.

In 2018 our lives changed when she became suddenly ill and completely paralyzed with a rare condition called Neuromyelitis Optica (NMO). I watched her in pain every day, and I became a full-time caregiver before the age of 30. I deferred my overseas admission to get a PhD in hopes of attending school the following year. The following year, I was diagnosed with Stage IV Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. It all felt like a joke, and I was convinced that it couldn’t be real. I was healthy, active, and doing everything I thought I should be.

At that moment, I knew I could blame myself and my circumstances and fall into the darkest of places, or I could prove that everything I had done and experienced thus far was to prepare for this moment. It was a tough reality, but I knew I didn’t want to get stuck in the mud. I had to keep going. I had to show up for myself in every way because no one else could conquer this battle for me. I am happy to say that I am in remission now. I have redefined my success and acquired even bigger dreams. I transitioned from law enforcement to a corporate career, and I am an entrepreneur, author, and certified personal development coach. I have learned to meet life with ease and evaluate how I am preserving my peace in every facet of my life.

The purpose of Peace Your Way to Success is to empower you to have your own system to cultivate peace in the key areas of your life, so you can have the mental capacity to achieve your goals. Prioritizing your needs prepares you for whatever may come and allows you to persevere and thrive in the present. My life after cancer has refined how I show up for myself, and I constantly curate how I want to experience life. All that I do is for my inner peace, and anything that doesn’t align with that needs to be evaluated, with a commitment to the appropriate action. Situations, life, and people will drain you if you let them. Hyper-independence is exhausting and so is being the strong one all the time. It’s up to you and no one else to know what is not working for you. No one truly can save you from yourself.

I refer to for my inner peace as a reminder to realign myself with what I need, but it also serves as a reminder to evaluate the key areas of my life:

Finances: What is the current state of my finances? What is depleting me, and what am I doing well?

Mental: What story have I told myself about