Meet Alyssa Berthiaume

 

We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Alyssa Berthiaume. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Alyssa below.

Alyssa, so many exciting things to discuss, we can’t wait. Thanks for joining us and we appreciate you sharing your wisdom with our readers. So, maybe we can start by discussing optimism and where your optimism comes from?

I believe my optimism has been learned by the people in my life who have modeled optimism and I see optimism as walking hand-in-hand with hope, faith, and resilience.

I had hardworking and hardy grandmothers. My maternal grandmother was a farmer’s wife who helped in the barn, managed the family finances, raised six children, cooked everything from scratch, made her kids’ clothes, and hardly complained. My paternal grandmother also worked alongside my grandfather in whatever business venture he took on and managed the household finances. My paternal grandparents lost a son in his twenties, well before I was born, but despite their loss, they carried on, persevered, and continued to be successful, well-known, and respected. Their grief was felt, but they kept living. Both of my grandmothers were women of faith, attending church every Sunday, saying the rosary, praying, and counting their blessings and both encouraged their grandchildren to do the same.

My father also modeled optimism on the regular. He was a glass-is-half-full thinker. He often played “devil’s advocate” when decisions were being made, always counteracting a negative view or possibility with a positive view or possibility. Or, if the occasion arose that we were getting a little too near-sighted on a personal matter, feeling negative or down about something, would remind us of what we had, what we were capable of, and what to be grateful for.

And my daycare provider, a woman near and dear to me, battled breast cancer and went through a mastectomy, chemotherapy, and radiation when I was twelve. While she was afraid and the battle was a hard one to fight, she never lost hope or faith. She believed she would beat it. She had hope for better days. She prayed. And on the hard days, she focused on the small positive things like a day she could sit up without feeling nauseous or wash the dishes without feeling fatigued or could taste chocolate without a metallic after taste.

I can’t say that I was always an optimist as a child or even adolescent. I don’t remember myself that way, but I grew into it the more struggles I personally faced. As I began to experience challenges and adversity, I began to rely on my own faith and hope which cultivated my personal resilience and eventually my optimism. I’m not sure if this would have been true had I not had so many wonderful people in my life modeling it for me at such a young age.

Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?

I’m a lightworker masquerading as a memoir coach and ghostwriter. People come to me feeling called or tapped to write a book, or share a story, based on their personal experience. They want to help at least one other person by sharing the things they’ve been through. They want to make a difference, an impact. I blend my emotional intelligence, my intuition, my formal education in writing, and background in mental health to guide them along their writing journey and develop an emotionally compelling and authentic manuscript. In that process, they end up activating new layers of their healing and empowering the next version of themselves. They come wanting a manuscript and they do have that when they leave, but more importantly, they walk away as a new version of themselves and seeing or feeling their story differently.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

I believe doing the inner work to better understand who you are, what makes you tick, where you succeed, where you fail, what trips you up, etc. and embracing all that you are, is a key to success no matter what area you work or play in. The more you know yourself, the more you can accept all of you (the good bits and less ideal ones), and the more authentically you live, the more at home you are within yourself. When that is true, when you feel at home in your own skin, everything else around you, looks and feels different. I started doing the inner work in high school when I started seeing a therapist for the first time. I was struggling with a number of things and my pediatrician suggested I speak with a counselor. And so I embarked on a personal development journey that began with therapy but branched into several other things over time–reading self-help books, studying psychology, learning my human design type, taking the Enneagram, learning my top five strengths, having my cards read, etc. The more I know about myself, lean into who that is, and embrace it, the better everything gets. Inner work is an ongoing journey where I am always learning more about who I am and who I can become. As a part of that, it requires curiosity, an open mind and heart, grace, and forgiveness. The more practiced I am with myself, the better I am with my clients.

Before we go, any advice you can share with people who are feeling overwhelmed?

Overwhelm can be particularly challenging for me as a manifesting generator (human design type). As a manifesting generator, I tend to have a lot of ideas and visions that excite me and that create a swirl of energy and adrenaline that is fun but can also be overwhelming when I try to bite off too many things at once. This ends up being especially true when I don’t take the time to pause and check in with my gut and truly assess if this is something that would serve me in my current season or if I’m saying ‘yes’ for some other reason, such as, to not disappoint someone else.

While a part of me can thrive in multiple projects at one time, there are other times I’ve over-stretched my capacity and it creates the sinking feeling of my feet being stuck in quicksand or concrete that hasn’t yet hardened. This can cause me to remain standing still, paralyzed by inaction. What does this look like? It looks like me reviewing my to-do list a thousand times as though the tasks will change simply by staring at them and when I shake myself out of it, realizing that several moments have passed and I’ve done nothing other than waste time.

Strategies that have helped have included walking away and taking a break. At first, this seemed counterintuitive because walking away felt like more of a waste of time. Time that already felt fleeting and like it wasn’t long enough for everything in front of me. However, if I’m in a state of overwhelm, the quality of my work or output is terrible, my concentration is shot, and mental clarity is nonexistent. Walking away actually provides a spaciousness to refocus, reenergize, and come up with a plan.

Prioritizing on the most urgent or deadline-driven assignment and zeroing in on that one thing also helps. Now instead of focusing on all the things, I’ve narrowed it down to one. Work on that one thing, get that one thing done, check it off, and then return to the bigger list. We don’t eat a whole plate of food at one time. We aren’t snakes, digesting an entire meal in one gulp, unhingeing our jaw to get it all down the hatch. We eat our plates one bite at a time.

My last resort when I truly feel overwhelmed and at a shortage of time and space to attend to the must-dos is to cancel anything that isn’t a priority. This might be connection calls with new contacts I don’t know yet. Or coffee meet ups. Or nice-to-have tasks or activities. By removing these from my calendar or list, I visually see space come back to my calendar which switches my energy from feeling pinched for time to being back in control of my load.

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Image Credits

Credit: Elisabeth Waller Photography
Credit: Adam Tougas

 

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