Colleen Ryan-Hensley
Reimagining mental toughness at the intersection of performance and mental health.
Enabling you to take the reins from escapism and finally find the magic of embracing life wholeheartedly.
Colleen Ryan-Hensley
Reimagining mental toughness at the intersection of performance and mental health.
Enabling you to take the reins from escapism and finally find the magic of embracing life wholeheartedly.
Finding ways to cope with what life throws at you isn’t easy. While the desire to escape is natural, it’s what we choose to use, the amount and the frequency of use, and how we judge ourselves for our use that makes the difference between healthy and unhealthy for us as individuals. Often we turn to unhealthy, mind-numbing coping mechanisms to help us escape and find the calm we struggle to get in our everyday lives…
But in doing this, we aren’t healing or creating peaceful, clear-headed states for ourselves.
Instead, we’re simply giving our minds different distractions from what’s going on around us and inside our minds.
This isn’t our fault as many of us aren’t taught how to express and process our emotions, instead, we’re told to push through and in doing so many of us inadvertently turn to one of the many toxic or potentially toxic escapisms that society readily presents to us.
However, there is another path that leads to more.
If you continue to avoid your emotions and the negative and distract yourself through escapism, you’ll find yourself becoming more and more disconnected from your life.
Disconnected from your feelings, your relationships and your purpose and you’ll never allow yourself to heal.
Only YOU can choose to redirect your energy, strive for more and reconnect with your life.
I know this because I’ve been there and lived it!
After spending many years using escapisms to disconnect from life under the guise of mental toughness, I have found a way to nurture healing through #BingingSober. Now, I am dedicated to helping others overcome their own blocks and find a path towards a healthier, more connected life.
Hi, I'm
Colleen
Hi, I'm Colleen
I help people who are searching for more in their lives to understand the impact of escapism, manage it, make conscious decisions and learn how to counteract the impact so they can reclaim their energy and embrace life wholeheartedly.
As someone who was raised in the “rub some dirt on it” generation and then spent 10 years in the Navy where I fully embraced the stoic, masculine culture that being in the Navy breeds, I understand how difficult it is to learn to be present with emotion and heal.
By 21, I had transformed into an unfeeling robot.
Although this made me an excellent sailor with a complete focus on the larger mission, it also left a lot of things festering underneath the surface.
One of these was the rape I experienced during my training for the Navy. After this, the only way I found to move forward was to disregard it and disconnect…to pretend it never happened, to repress it, then implement what I had been taught my whole life by society: Avoid.
I clung to toxic escapisms like alcohol and thankfully more natural escapes like long-distance running to quiet my thoughts and dull my emotions.
Eventually, this all came to the surface and I decided I wanted to feel again. This led to me gaining my advanced degree in Performance Psychology.
After years of putting in the work, through traditional and alternative therapies, learning more about the human mind and finally processing my past traumas, I was able to find the magic in wholeheartedly embracing life and stopped leaning on escapisms to see me through the tough times.
Now I act as a performance coach mental health advocate and am focused on helping others discover preventative, proactive and accessible mental health care. Through my #BingingSober process, I help people discover and embrace the sober mindset. Which is a calm, peaceful, clear-headed state. It’s a lack of intoxication from the things we use to distract ourselves from our emotions, traumas and negative mental states.
It is possible to reclaim your energy and reconnect with life. I’m here to show you how!
The new mission
As a society, we have the potential to adopt a preventive and proactive approach to mental health. While we have come a long way, there is still room for progress and growth in this area.
The #BingingSober movement is here to inspire a new perspective and begin the evolution of mental toughness.
By healing ourselves we heal our families, our communities, our country and our world.
We create a space free from judgment. All experiences are accepted and embraced as necessary to the full experience of life.
We model, preach and teach vitality and balance. This leads to an appreciation for life and all of its parts.
We trust ourselves, the universe, and God in our own unique and inclusive way. With blind faith, we can step into our purpose and tap into pure guidance.
We embrace our authentic selves and full disclosure. We can only lead as far as we go.
#BingingSober is a practice to collectively move us towards a better future where we can all embrace the magic of real- life.
The Story Behind The North Star
The North Star is a traditional sailor tattoo that means you always find your way home.
The North Star theme you’ll find throughout my business isn’t just a nod to my experience in the Navy. To me, it’s more spiritual than that and represents my mission as a person, as a speaker and as someone who helps others. To me, the North Star represents something that I believe we all have within us that acts as a guiding light showing us how to connect with our harmonious life.
Our life’s purpose and mission are always there, we just have to connect to them. This is where #BingingSober comes into play, helping you find that space of connection and harmony that releases those escapisms from controlling your life and allows you to process, heal and connect to your true purpose.
The true spirit of #BingingSober
This is my mission.
I’ve experienced how first-hand neglecting your mental health can have a severe impact on not only yourself but those around you. This is why I care so much about supporting, educating and empowering others to create the space they need to heal.
Life has taught me that the battles we don’t choose can be the very ones that define us. From the shadows of depression and alcohol abuse to the heart-wrenching loss of my grandfather, and confronting the trauma of an assault, I’ve weathered storms that could have broken me. But with each trial, I’ve grown stronger, more compassionate, and more committed to shining a light for others on their path to healing.
I want to debunk the myth that admitting to, let alone talking about our issues, is a sign of weakness.
There’s a grand adventure waiting for everyone on the other side of healing, and I’m here to guide you towards that horizon.
Let’s navigate together, find your North Star, and focus on creating more meaning in your life.
Ready to transform your life and break free from feeling weighed down by your stressors?
Ready to stop simply surviving and start reclaiming the wonderment of your youth?
