Take A Transformational Anchored Adventure

 

Lately there haven’t been any adventures in my life.  Between working from home all day and working on LemonadeMakers, I’ve been spending all of my time in front of the computer.  I am starting to itch to just go for a drive, anything to get out of the house.  So, I started thinking about adventures – what are they all about?

Surprisingly, I’ve been on adventures during the entire lockdown, I just didn’t know it.  I’ve read books, listened to podcasts and Ted Talks.  All ways to go on an adventure.  Have you learned anything new in the past few months?  That is going on an adventure.  So come on an adventure with me now –

Catch the trade winds and set sail.

Explore.

Dream.

Discover.

“In order to realize the worth of the anchor, we need to feel the stress of the storm” – Corrie Ten Boom

Change is a scary word. It has a heavy weight to it, like an anchor.  When your anchor is hooked in the rocks on the sea floor, it prevents the uncertainties of life from casting you adrift.  When life’s chaos erupts in your life, change is the anchor that helps you cast off for a new adventure.

Change challenges you to look honestly at your life.  You can’t spell challenge without change.  To rise up to life’s challenges, you have to be prepared for change.  Every challenge is an opportunity for self-transformation.  The change in the challenge is what grows you.  Change becomes something to look forward to, instead of something to resist.

“Don’t be afraid to take on big challenges. They give the best rewards” – Spencer Christensen

When the anchor is pitched into the sandy seashore unattached to the ship, it serves no purpose.

• The purpose of the anchor is to hold fast in the rocks of the sea bed, when the winds huff and puff to blow the ship into the raging seas.
• The purpose of the anchor is to hold fast in the rocks of the sea bed, when the tides pull the ship out to sea or push it against the shoals of the shoreline.
• The purpose of the anchor is to hold fast, no matter what the height or the depths of the waves.

The anchors in the photo below are not doing what they were designed to do, which is to hold you steady in life’s storms.

This year you have risen to a few challenges.  You never know with supply chain shortages what you will find missing at the store; first you’re required to wear a face mask outside your home, then not – but maybe still depending on where you live or where you go; maybe you decided when schools began again to continue home schooling your children; and remote working from home or hybrid or fulltime back at the office; all have been challenges to both you and your household.

Failing to reach your goals, another year of watching your dreams slip through your hands, struggling to make ends meet—all that is far harder than rising to the challenge of going on a new adventure. This pandemic is a wake-up call to focus on your personal growth.

“Often what feels like the end of the world is really a pathway to a far better place” – Karen Salmansohn

What’s funny is realizing that every single challenge is an adventure.  Adventure’s not only challenge you to change your normal routine, they teach you new things.  For example working from home – now you know if you like working from home.  You’ve got a whole new respect for the teachers that teach your children nine months of the year.  Your company has discovered that they may not even need an office.

“Focus on what only you can do. Give the rest of it away.” —Elise Mitchell

You don’t have to be the bravest or smartest person.  You don’t have to know how to do everything.  You just have to be courageous enough to realize that every decision you make has some risk attached to it.  You can’t face a challenge without change happening.

So go for the challenge that makes you smile instead of anchoring in around your limitations in life.  Sitting in an empty field with your anchor raised up, is anchoring in to those limitations.  You are not looking ahead.  You are anchoring to your past.

If you think that you can’t sing, get singing lessons.  It’s not the mountain you conquer when you take action.  It is your past beliefs and limitations that are being conquered.  It is you refusing to buy into “I can’t do that”.

Taking on challenges you’ll see that you are capable of doing more than you thought.  You see that it wasn’t as hard as you thought.  It will strengthen your mind, gaining self-confidence.  How you handle what happens to you, determines how far you go. Challenges can take you apart, refine you, and change who you thought you were.

Create Your Growth Anchors

Hope is not a growth strategy.  Action is the only answer to a challenge.  You are in a time of disruption.  Life is ripe for opportunity, as well as full of danger.  Both action or inaction create risk, meaning it impossible to avoid risk.  So take the risk of action – go on an adventure!

Learning is an adventure.  Learning will challenge your habits, your beliefs and stretch your comfort zone.  Travel the universe while sitting in your living room.  It is the perfect time to challenge yourself to climb a new mountain.

• Cultivate a growth mindset – Spend 30-60 minutes a day reading a life-changing article or book
• Work with a life or business coach (we are here to help) – discover your purpose, highest values, deepest desires.
• Wake up to where your life is out of alignment – he who looks outside dreams, he who looks inside wakes up.
• Journaling daily about your goals without limits, celebrate your failures
• Reflect on your life to see reality clearly.

Every minute of attention that you focus on events outside of your influence, is a wasted minute.  Focus on what you can control, ignore the rest. To thrive, you need to adapt yourself to a changing world.  Focus on what you love doing.  Choose a goal that you’ll enjoy chasing for the next five years, minimum, to ensure you’ll follow through.

“Strength doesn’t come from what you can do.  Strength comes from overcoming the things you thought you couldn’t” – Unknown

Play to your strengths.  A hedgehog is great at rolling up into a ball to protect itself. Decide on your hedgehog concept to be really good at ONE thing.  Focus on what you can be the best in the world at.

The Anchor of Partnership

• Create a tribe to keep you accountable and energized,
• Create a tribe so that others are strong where you’re weak.
• Create a tribe to deliver results that are more than the sum of its parts.

The synergy that happens with a group that takes action is beyond amazing.  Multiple solutions abound when you’re open to all suggestions from your tribe.

LemonadeMakers is a tribe of people who get together to talk, share, and help each other through life’s changes and transformations.

Finding a mentor doesn’t just mean finding a person who has done what you’re trying to do.  It doesn’t have to be a real live person.  There are great mentors from historical biographies.  YouTube, Ted Talks, or watching a video by personal development experts, are all great examples of finding a mentor.  There are great inspirational movies out there too.

From the movie Peaceful Warrior:

“Socrates:  Everyone wants to tell you what to do and what’s good for you.  They don’t want you to find your own answers, they want you to believe theirs.

Dan Millman:  Let me guess, and you want me to believe yours.

Socrates:  No, I want you to stop gathering information from the outside and start gathering it from the inside.”

The Anchor of Taking Action

What’s important in your life?  Write down in your journal how you currently spend your day, minute by minute, then create your ideal daily schedule. As you work to close the gap between the two lifestyles, you’ll find time you didn’t know you had.  You’ll discover you are more productive than you thought.

Do not schedule every minute of your day.   Many of the activities and obligations that you thought were important, have turned out to not be necessary. Taking action requires blank spaces in your calendar—for solitude, room to breathe, creative space—so protect this freedom.

Personal growth means knowing there’s always more to learn.  Start now by learning about ways to have a happier life:

1. Visualization:  Spend even two minutes each morning making mental movies of your best life—including how you want to feel most of the time, how you spend your day, where you’re living, who you’re with—and you’ll manifest these desires.
2. Afformations:  A term coined by Noah St. John. Instead of using traditional affirmations like, “I am so happy that I am earning $1M a year”, which your mind is going “liar liar?”  He suggests using an affirmation which is asking questions instead like, “How could I earn $1M a year ?”  Instead of your brain going down the “liar, liar” path, it begins searching for answers to your question.
3. Great people:  They say, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.  This is because of “mirror neurons” in our brains.  These neurons will copy the beliefs and habits of others around us.

There’s at least one person in history, in your social circle, in a podcast, in a TedTalk – who has faced a situation almost exactly like yours and wrote about it.  There are 1,000 of YouTube videos that can teach you how to do anything from applying makeup, to changing your cars oil, to building a shed, to programing a software program.  Challenge yourself to learn something new.

Failure Is Just A Part Of Growing

 

• What does the word “Risk” mean to you?
• Is it married to your fear(s) until death do you part?
• Does the phrase “course correct” imply to you that you’ve failed?
• Does the idea of “untapped potential” make you break out in hives?
• Do you avoid the “road less traveled”?

Fear makes almost everyone uncomfortable.  Fear is an integral part of risk; of going down the road less traveled; of even thinking of putting yourself into a situation where you would need to dive deep within to bring up some of that untapped potential.

But – if you are brave enough to get your friends to open up to the dreams they have, you will see some of their untapped potential being exposed to the light.

If you are brave enough to open up and share your own dreams, you will learn things about yourself that you didn’t know.

Risk is like a barometer to show you much courage you have allowed yourself to have.  You have extraordinary dreams that you would do in a heartbeat, if you could be guaranteed that you wouldn’t fail.

Courage will tell you that you have to let failure

be a normal part of putting action to your dreams.

I currently subscribe to an online newsletter called “The Profile” and it features Polina Marinova.  She is doing things a little differently.  She is doing deep dives on prominent figures and it is really interesting.

I wanted to share some of the things that one her profiles had to say about failure.  While this article pertained to pursuing a business, the lessons contained can be applied to any kind of change or transformation you are thinking about making in your life.

Click the link and check her out (you don’t have to subscribe, click and the part that says to check her out), she has both free and paid subscriptions.  (everything in quotes is from her article and reading her article inspired me to write this one).

“Failure is not the outcome – failure is not trying. Don’t be afraid to fail.” – Sara Blakely

Sara Blakely says that she is no stranger to failure.  She failed her LSAT tests ending her dream career as a trial attorney.  She had an interesting dad, who taught his children to celebrate failure.

When she was growing up, each person at the dining room table had to share their biggest failure for the week while they were eating dinner.  If they didn’t have one, her father would be disappointed, because that meant they hadn’t put themselves out there to do something impossible.  She learned from this that the only true failure is when you don’t try.

One night getting ready for a party she stumbled onto an idea for a gap in the fashion industry, and that began the creation process for Spanx.  She stated that she kept the idea to herself for a whole year while she worked behind the scenes, before she sought validation from friends and family.  By the time she told them about it;

• she had named her product,
• researched the market,
• patented it,
• created a prototype.

She knew that all of the negative comments about her idea would have killed it if she had talked about it immediately.  How many ideas have you had, where that happened to you?  Her advice?  Don’t seek validation from others until you’re ready with proof of concept.

It is common when an idea pops into your head to discount it.  Today while writing this blog, a neighbor was mowing his lawn, and the noise of the lawnmower was irritating me.  I said to my office partner that someone should invent a solar powered electric lawn mower.  It could be that someone has.  I don’t know.

I thought about it for a moment and said. “it could have a rechargeable battery that sits in the sun all week just waiting to be popped into the machine.  It would be quiet like an electric car, as well as being better for the environment.’  My car is a hybrid and when it is in full electric mode you can’t hear the engine.

Just think that both the lawn mower and the leaf blower could be quiet – I swear that there isn’t a zoom meeting that happened in the past year where someone wasn’t apologizing for the yard maintenance people and the noise in the background.

Now like Sara –

• I know nothing about getting something like that done.
• I know very little about solar power or engines.
• I am not mechanically inclined.
• I don’t know other things an inventor would commonly know.
• I have no connections or funding on how you would do this.

The only difference between Sara (with her initial lack of business, manufacturing, and fashion industry knowledge) and myself is the level of passion she had for it.  For me, this is just a wonderful idea that I am happy to give to someone else.  For her, it was an idea she was in love with.

“Don’t be intimidated by what you don’t know. That can be your greatest strength and ensure that you do things differently from everyone else.” – Sara Blakely

When you take fear out of the equation, it becomes easy to embrace the unknown. One of the keys to her success, is that she was a fashion outsider, and didn’t know how it was supposed to be done.  Her ignorance became her greatest asset.

“I had no idea how things were supposed to be done, and if you have no idea how something’s supposed to be done, I guarantee that you’ll end up being disruptive,” she said. When you are an outsider you see things in a different way, because you don’t know how it’s supposed to go.  Beginners mind always starts by asking the question “why” over and over again.

In 2000, Blakely used her $5,000 in savings to start her company, and by 2012, she was named the youngest self-made female billionaire.  Sara still owns 100% of Spanx because she never took on outside investors. She sees an opportunity in every failure or disappointment. “Spanx wouldn’t exist if I had aced the LSAT,” she says.

Take control of your mindset by immersing yourself with great books that teach you how to life a positive life.  Sara tells how her dad bought her the Wayne Dyer program called “How to Be a No-Limit Person”  when she was having a hard time with personal and financial issues.

Most of higher education teaches you what to think, Wayne Dyer taught her how to think.  A critical part of using failure to be successful, is that you have the ability to control your own thoughts and confront your self-doubt. “Now more than ever, your greatest weapon is your mindset,” says Sara.

I have followed Wayne Dyer for years.  I was privileged to see him at a conference.  The world lost a great wisdom teacher when he passed away.

“Success, to me, is finding the courage to live your fullest and biggest life.” – Sara Blakely

How about you?  Are you living life to your fullest potential?

As always, we are here to support you – to whisper words of encouragement – to celebrate each and every failure and success!

Shine Your Light, Transform The Darkness

 

“Transformation is often more about unlearning then learning” – Richard Rohr

When you were a little child you started forming your values based on how you were raised.  As you grew older those values grew, changed and transformed based on your experience of life.  Those values influence what you focus on as being important.  They influence how you live your life.  They reflect the reality you perceive and the behaviors you demonstrate in the daily living of your life.

“A mistake is an accident.  Cheating and lying are not mistakes, they are intentional choices.  Stop hiding behind the word mistake when you get caught” – The Coach from Raise Your Mind

Being imperfect, you will make mistakes along the way.  You will make bad decisions, bad choices.  Some of those will be intentional based on your fears.  Some you won’t realize are intentional.  This is because your subconscious is self-sabotaging you due to its fear of what might happen if you do the right thing.

Your values if you have chosen them intentionally, will assist you in your life journey to achieve the goals you set for yourself. Your values will also excuse or accuse your bad decisions.  This is because your values can validate the difference between the simple wrong choice, and the times self-sabotage intentionally made that wrong choice.  It is up to you to try, or not try to do better in the future.

At first the goals we form are all education types of choices.

• Do you finish high school?
• Do you go to college or a technical school?
• What kind of career to you want?
• Do you want to get married and settle down to have a family?
• Do you want to travel and experience life and settle down later?
• Does life happen for you or to you?

Unforeseen tragedies can shift your values and focus, such as when my nephew was murdered.  Any kind of major unexpected life event can significantly transform your life.  In my case, LemonadeMakers was a direct result of my own life event.

“The Hero’s Journey is a concept to describe people’s self-perception when they are in a growth process” – Unknown

When life events cause you to question everything in your life, you have entered upon a Hero’s Journey.  It is common for fears to crop up.  Grief creates a whirlpool of emotions, you blame yourself for everything falling apart.  You question all of your life values as being incomplete, unstable, and not good enough.  You push feelings deep down inside of you.

“Intentional living is the art of making our own choices before others choices make us” – Richie Norton

Transforming your life is a process with a lot of ups and downs.  Intentional living can help you to sort out what values you are keeping and what values you are letting go as they were adopted as habits from those you lived with.  What’s vitally critically important is that you stop standing in the ruins of your life.

Acknowledge the impact of what happened.  Make choices that mean something for you in your life and “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater”.

• Choose to live by choice,, not by chance
• Choose to make changes, not excuses
• Choose to be motivated, not manipulated
• Choose to be useful, not used
• Choose to excel, not compete
• Choose to live with self esteem, not self pity
• Choose to listen to your inner voice of intuition, not the random opinion of others

“Transformation isn’t sweet and bright. It’s a dark and murky, painful pushing. An unraveling of the untruths you’ve carried in your body. A practice in facing your own created demons. A complete uprooting, before becoming” – Victoria Erickson

The thing that you fear the most isn’t powerful in and of itself. Your being in fear of it is what makes it seem powerful. Facing the truth instead of pushing it away, takes your power back from the fear.  The Hero’s Journey is a time of self reflection.

“I traded easy answers for honest questions.  Replaced being judgmental with open-hearted curiosity.  Stopped warring with myself and found peace with others.  I burned all the old maps and then discovered my true path” – John Mark Green

Run to whatever inside of you is hiding. Pay attention to what is triggering responses inside of you. Who or what is making you angry? What is triggering the arguments you are having with others? That is what you need to follow, to find the honest answers about what inside of you is calling out for transformation.

“It’s not about perfect. It’s about effort. And when you bring that effort every single day, that’s where transformation happens. That’s how change occurs” – Jillian Michaels

This can be viewed as a spiritual journey.  It is a path of recovery of those values that you should keep, and a time of personal growth for the new values that come from the release of past negative beliefs and actions you have uncovered in your transformation journey.  Through the struggle of uncovering the false beliefs and values in your life you gain strength to continue your journey.

“Change is inevitable. Growth is intentional” – Glenda Cloud

It is comparable to when the caterpillar has transformed into the butterfly in the chrysalis and is ready to break out and take flight.  There is first the struggle to break out of the chrysalis and then spread the wings to dry – this process strengthens the wings allowing the butterfly to gain the strength to actually fly.

The past couple of years has challenged all of us.  This has been an unforeseen tragedy for everyone.  There has been drastic changes in being forced to stay home.  Work from home.  Loss of income.  If you are a first responder the fear of contracting the virus, both for yourself and your loved ones.  Not being able to hold funerals for those loved ones that passed away.  Children staying home from school and being home schooled by parents.  So many challenges and struggles that will be continuing for some time in the future.  Just not knowing what’s next.

These challenges create a lot of frustration and other negative emotions.  It certainly impacts your values.

• How do you cope?
• How do make sure you have the “right” attitude for what comes up for you?
• How do you come out of this transformational fires burning away all that doesn’t belong (old values) to you?

In A State Of Divine Grace, I Can Move Forward Into A New Life

 

“Missing puzzle pieces do more than complete the puzzle.  They fill in an empty space” – Luanne Rice

Have you ever been working on a puzzle for days or weeks and you get to the end and there is one piece missing?  How did that make you feel?

Did you move furniture, sweep under cupboards, and generally take the room apart looking for that last piece to complete the picture?  Have you ever taken the extreme measure of taking a photo and sending it to the puzzle manufacturer to see if they can send you that missing piece?

If you found the missing piece underneath something, how excited were you to fit it into place?  It’s like a state of grace settles over you.  Calmness.  A feeling that all is right in the world in that moment.  The adrenaline settles down, the anxiety or frustration of lost hours of work dissipates.

Sometimes in life you will miss an opportunity.  You might not have recognized it, or maybe you were so busy with the chaos of life, that you totally didn’t see it.  Then when you do realize it, do you kick yourself over missing it?

Right now, you may feel like you did with the missing puzzle piece that you looked everywhere to find, that you are now an incomplete picture and everything you’ve been doing up until now is just a big waste of time and effort.

What is wonderful about opportunities in real life, is that there is always another new door just waiting to be opened.  I love the saying that “opportunity dances with those already on the dance floor” as it signifies how important it is to be looking for them.  You can’t find them if you are not looking for them.  Looking for opportunities within your dreams or aspirations are the perfect place to find them.

“If somebody offers you an amazing opportunity but you are not sure you can do it, say yes then learn how to do it later” – Unknown

• What is the lens you look at life through?
• Does the thought of saying yes and not knowing how to do it make you scream “no, because what if I fail?”
• Are you willing to go all in?
• Are you willing to take a leap of faith?

Opportunities are supposed to grow you.  If you will only take on what you know 100% for sure you can do, where is the growth?

I always think of cats.  Some are a living example of grace.  They will stretch themselves out in leaping up a tree or a fence.  And whether they make it or land on the ground, they always land on their feet ready to try again.  Others are scaredy cats are always hiding, afraid of everything.

So which kind of cat are you?  The one taking the leap of faith, confident of landing on your feet? Or are you the one hiding under the bed shaking in terror, letting those scary opportunity pass you by?

“You walk in grace, or you walk in fear.  You can’t have it both ways”– Carlos Santana

When you are young, you think that you have all of the time in the world to explore a myriad of opportunities.  But this is an illusion.  Don’t waste time looking backwards.  You aren’t going that way.

Don’t waste time by constantly daydreaming about the future.  You haven’t arrived there yet, and when you do so many things will have happened between this moment and that future, that you won’t even recognize you have arrived.

You need to let go of what no longer serves you and live in the present moment, where the opportunities are.  You need to live in this present moment in order to make space for what is new to come in.  When you are not in resistance, the illusion of time “taking forever” is released. 

“To turn inward, to be courageous and trust our heart – to lean into our independent judgment – a brilliant opportunity we ignore too often” – Amy Jalapeno

In today’s world problems seem to be multiplying like bunny rabbits.

• You may be currently furloughed or laid off from work
• You are trying to home school children while trying to work from home
• You may be worried that your job is not coming back and the industry you work in is not looking good for future job opportunities
• Health issues from Covid-19
• Elderly family member currently in an extended care facility and you can’t visit them
• You may be about to graduate from college and job prospects are extremely limited
• Your employer is going out of business due to financial constraints

“The chaos doesn’t end, you kinda just become the calm”– Nikki Rowe

Grace changes everything.  It gives you the space to go inward and out of the chaos.  To reconnect with your heart and soul.  By leaning into intuition and independent judgment you begin to see a way forward.

I read a story that gives a great example of this.  Look at movie theaters.  Most people will not want to go into the closed space of a movie theater for several hours to watch a movie.  And while the day of the drive ins seemed to be past, they now have the opportunity to make a comeback.

In Germany an architect wanted to create the communal aspects of watching a movie as a group.  So, he launched Windows Flicks, which projects a movie on large exterior building walls.  People living in apartment complexes can watch through windows, patios, or balcony’s and drink a glass of wine and take in a movie while practicing social distancing.

What kinds of projects might you brainstorm for reinventions of businesses that may be facing extinction?  The architect in Germany is fundraising for the German cinema industry, so he was able to both provide a reinvention of watching a movie with others and supporting a business that needs to reinvent itself.

Any crisis can give you the opportunity to reinvent your life in some way – will you take a leap of faith, or hide under the bed scared?

I love this concept.  It takes a fire in your soul to put actions to your dreams.  To keep walking your sacred path to your destiny, even when it feels like the sky is falling.  Grace from the heart tempers this fire, so that it is the exact amount of heat to get your feet moving.  Grace changes everything.

And remember, you never have to walk alone.  Grace is always a step in front of you, and all you have to do is open your arms to receive it.

Self Awareness Is Key To Transformation

Your future dreams are being held in the gift of time.  When divine timing thinks you are ready, your dreams will unfold, one by one.

How can you make progress so that you can draw your dreams into reality?

You can stop thinking that ignoring your negative emotions will make them go away.  What happens instead is that they become buried deep within you and start roots.  Those roots manifest themselves in your being triggered every time someone else’s behavior mirrors that same emotion.  Each root becomes an anchor designed to hold you in place, which keeps you from growing into who you are capable of becoming.

At this point in your journey you are being given time to dig up all of those roots.  When you expose them to the light of day, they will shrivel up and turn to dust.  How do you expose them?

• By promoting healing immediately when others let you down, don’t meet your expectations, or are just mean and cruel
• By stopping yourself from becoming a victim or having victim mentality, and to instead embrace life as a safe place to grow and thrive
• By growing up and embracing your own personal identity, instead of hiding the real you away in fear of not being worthy
• By letting go of all of the things that are not true to you at your core being
• By unpacking the past and learning its lessons
• By resolving the past, in order to get past the “stories” you tell yourself subconsciously, and peeling back the layers to expose the truth
• By embracing yourself as being the powerful being you are.  Acknowledging that you can save yourself, just as you’re meant to

Encourage yourself by looking for what is working in your life at this moment.  What things can you be in the space of gratitude in your life right now?  Where do you see room for more of your potential to come out and shine?  Ask those who know and love you where your greatness is if you can’t see it for yourself.

Realize that it takes time to heal and go through all of the stages of grief.  The stages of grief don’t only apply to the loss of a loved one in death.  It also applies to divorce, loss of a job, most kinds of trauma, even to children leaving home to go off to college.  Take whatever time is required to unpack all of your baggage.

Understand what life lessons are there, and what needs to be let go of because it doesn’t serve you any longer.  It takes time to peel back all of the parts of you that don’t belong to you.  It takes time to expose and accept the parts of you that you have hidden away.  Your life can’t be transformed by waving a magic wand and poof you’ve changed.  It is changed step by step, bit by bit, day by day.

When life falls apart, you think that everything can be solved by just going home again. You think that “going home again” is about a place.  But it isn’t.  Those memories of home are all based on a time, which is in the past. It is why you cannot truly “go home again”. So this chasing of home is not about a place. “Going home again” is more about you chasing a feeling of love, security.  Something that you feel will help you cope with whatever life is currently throwing at you.

“Productivity is how you run away from yourself.  Creativity is how you become yourself”  – Brianna Wiest

When life throws you lemons, you think that you need to do something.  You just don’t know what that something is.  You think that you’re waiting for help. You think that if you ask everyone, someone will tell you what the right thing to do is. Even though, at the back of your mind, you already know what that is. So all that you’re really waiting for, is a time when you’re forced to do it.

When life has fractured you into pieces I want you to remember these things:

• Nothing about you is ugly.
• Beautiful things are made from life’s fires, where the heat cracks you open.
• Beautiful things are made from where you have cracked, letting the light of God shine through.
• Beautiful things are shaped from the parts of you that have fallen apart.  Don’t discard anything that’s lying on the floor.
• Beautiful things are discovered within you, all of those places where you are judging as not being good enough anymore.

Instead of judging yourself by all of your shortcomings or things you failed to do, why not instead let your life be defined by how much you are loved by others.  Repair your foundation in life, your core beliefs and values.  Rebuild and repair your cracked walls and ceilings, as represented by your archetype’s and the labels you identify yourself by.  Sweep up the broken glass and create a mosaic of your life with gold filling in the gaps, these represent windows that you look out of – how your see your world.  Remember you are made of beautiful things.

“You may not see it today or tomorrow, but you will look back in a few years and be absolutely perplexed and awed by how every little thing added up and brought you somewhere wonderful – or where you always wanted to be. You will be grateful that things didn’t work out the way you once wanted them to” – Brianna Wiest

Life is a journey.  There are patterns you will see as you travel to your many destinations.  Life is sometimes remarkable, sometimes terrible, sometimes strange and yet hauntingly beautiful.  Look for the surprises underneath the wrapping paper.  When the moments of despair happen (and they will happen) bring out all of your beautiful memories and hold them close.  Remind yourself that whatever is going wrong now, that this storm will also pass.

The first Saturday of every month we get together on Zoom to talk about our challenges, to encourage each other, and provide inspiration to continue on our individual journeys.  Join us for the next conversation and become even more inspired to reach out and pull your dreams into reality.

 

 

Who Are You Being?

 

Sometimes a sentence can grab your attention and send you down a rabbit hole.  This sentence grabbed me and shook me awake.  “You have to stop just completing and begin living.”  I immediately thought of the difference between doing and being.

Doing is all about completing.  It is a “to do” list.  You complete the objective, tick off the box, and immediately start on the next thing on the list.  At the end of the day, you might be able to proudly look at a completed list, but the question begs to be answered – at what part of the day did you begin living?

What are the things you can shift in your life to make those changes easier?  How can you get off the treadmill of doing and start living the life of being.

“The highest level of creativity consists in being, not doing” – Marianne Williamson

Who or what are you becoming?  How you are being reflects how you are growing.  If you are too busy doing, then no growth is happening.

• It’s about the choices you are making in each moment.
• It’s about the things you are saying, not just out loud, but within your head.
• It’s about how will you be different after reading this?
• Choose wisely

It begins when we enter school.  We are taught to excel at doing.  To give the answers they want, the ones in the book.  Creativity is frowned upon in most subjects.  If you espouse a different opinion on what the writer might have meant, it becomes the “wrong” answer.  I always thought it was funny, how someone other than the author could know beyond any reasonable doubt what the writer might have been alluding to.

This continues through grade school, junior high, high school and even the colleges and universities. A lot of very successful creative minds left college partly because their creativity was being squashed.  They all have the entrepreneur mindset.  They all have some things in common, which includes doing things different than the norm.  They look at what is, and wonder what else could be?

• Richard Branson – Virgin
• Steve Jobs – Apple
• Bill Gates – Microsoft
• Mark Zuckerberg – Facebook
• Travis Kalanick – Uber
• Oprah Winfrey – media mogul
• John Mackey – Whole Foods
• Sophia Amoruso – Nasty Gal Fashion
• Coco Chanel – Fashion
• Anne Beiler – Auntie Anne’s Pretzels
• Barbara Lynch – Restaurant Chains
• Debbie Fields – Mrs. Fields Cookies.

Oprah has said that she was hired for a T.V. news show as an anchor.  Unknown to her at the time, the other anchor didn’t want her on the show.  Several months later he got his way and she was demoted.  It was very devastating.  Within every “failure” there is a nugget of gold.  She lost her job, but her demotion put her into a talk show format.  She said that the minute she took on that show, she felt like she had arrived home.

That is a sign – when your “job” feels like home.  You know that this is what you are meant to do.  It is being a “creative”.

Steve Jobs found this out when Apple ousted him.  It took him awhile to recover “who he was” because he had become so identified with the company, that he had stopped being and was just doing.  It essentially created a mid-life crisis.  He was looking at all kinds of possibilities from politics to becoming an astronaut.  He went on to launch both Pixar Animation Studios as well as NeXT.

“I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter into one of the most creative periods of my life,”  Steve Jobs

He then goes on to say pretty much what Oprah said:  “I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love.”

“Once you shift your order of priorities from “having – doing – being” to “being – doing – having” your destiny will be in your hands” – Sadhguru

This reminds me of putting batteries into something.  Batteries have a positive and a negative side.  If you put them in backwards, they don’t work.  It is only when the connections are correct that they “turn on” the item.

When you approach your life with “having – doing – being” you have the heaviness in your life.  You are pushing the boulder up hill.  You might make it to the top, but the success won’t be fulfilling.

It is only when you approach your life from the “being” first, then the doing and having come afterwards.  Then your batteries are fully charged and working to speed you up to the hilltop.  The success is fueled by your passion, love and creativity.  You are a human “being” loving all parts of your life.

Both Oprah and Steve Job’s had failures.  Those failures led to connecting or reconnecting to “having – doing – being” in the right order.  You  have these wonderful talents,  They take the form of creativity, which becomes the doing part.  When you are living your life from the having your talents expressed through creativity, then you enter the being part of your life.  This is because you are living your divinely planned destiny in those moments.  The more of those moments you connect with in your life, the more on purpose you are.

“Being free from the fear of failure means you can focus more clearly on what you’re doing – and will be more likely to succeed” – Zen Health

It’s like you have these batteries not only installed correctly, but they are being recharged or fueled by your living the “having – doing – being” in the correct order.  You may not see it today, or even tomorrow as some things take a while to grow and mature.  But there will come a time when you look back and you will be awestruck how every little misstep, mistake, and seeming failure adds up to bring you exactly to where you are supposed to be.  In that moment, you will be so grateful that things didn’t go the way the mind planned, but instead the way the heart directed.

Are You Inviting Hope Into Your Life?

“Consult not your fears but your hopes and dreams.  Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential.  Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what it is still possible for you to do” – Pope John XXIII

You may at this moment be facing a similar landscape in your mind.  Your mind is filled with fears of:

• I can’t . . ,
• I must not . . ,
• I don’t think I can . . ,
• It’s safer not to look . . , think . . , see . . ,

How do you embrace hope instead?  You begin small and when the mind says “I can’t” or “I don’t” you replace those thoughts one by one as they appear.  You approach it as a curious question, “I wonder what if?” I did this, or said that?  Then as you strengthen those hopeful thoughts you can begin to replace them with:

• I will  . . ,
• I can . . ,
• I must . . ,

Hope is stronger than fear and you can fill your hopeful space with courage to forge ahead into the great unknown.  To explore all of the possibilities of a moment, and choose the one that fills your heart with the most hope.

Choices

“May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears” – Nelson Mandela

Every morning you have a choice.  You can rise up with the light laughing at the fears you had last night.  Or, you can roll over whining and cowering in fear, as your mind carries you deep down into the darkness.

Every day you can hug the world with a great big bear hug.  Or, you can curse the world because you don’t yet have want you want, or need from it.

Every evening you can dream big dreams, longing to give more laughter, joy, and love to the world.  Or, you can dream nightmares where you are all alone, abandoned and just waiting for death to take you away.

“Hope is the fuel of progress and fear is the prison in which you put yourself” – Tony Benn

Emotions

Emotions can heal you or control you.  Fear based emotions are toxic.

• Fear kills dreams
• Fear kills hope
• Fear ages you beyond your years
• Fear holds you back from living up to your potential
• Fear can paralyze you so that you don’t reach out for your dreams

Emotions are fueled by your perceptions of what is happening.  You have a choice to perceive what is currently happening in your life as a train wreck, the worst trip of your life.  Or, as a learning opportunity; a mission to where no one has gone before; an adventurous quest in which you find your purpose in life.  Your perceptions reflect the reality that you are creating.

Positive emotions are creative emotions.  When you look at your world through the lens of love, you become creative.  Singing, painting, writing poetry, dancing, crafting beautiful objects out of your imagination.  Love is the passionate search for your own personal truth.  A calling down deep within your soul longing to be expressed.  It’s a part of God, and it is an act of reaching out to the greater good.  That is what births hope.

Hope is the Pearl born from Fear

“Hope is the only thing stronger than fear” – Unknown

It’s a funny thing how fear and hope are connected.  It is like the oyster which takes an irritating grain of sand and turns it into a pearl.  Fear is the oyster who is afraid of the hope that the sand is bringing to the oyster.  So it coats it over and over, hoping to bury it and by seeming accident it creates something beautiful.  Inside of every fear you have is that grain of sand.  Irritating you to make another choice.  You keep trying to cover it over, but eventually the fear is broken open and there in the middle of the shell is the beautiful pearl just waiting to be plucked out.

It’s an interesting dichotomy that both fear and hope are entwined together.  Where you find one, you will always find the other.  It’s just a matter of looking back at your past experiences.  Follow the thread of how fears are born from uncertainty.  You might be learning something new.  You are afraid to fail.  Fears becomes that irritating grain of sand.

But as you learn and take in knowledge about it, you start to gain some experience of what this is going to be like.  That grain of sand starts getting a coat of confidence.  You start to gain some confidence that you can figure this out.  You acknowledge that you will make mistakes.  But those failures or mistakes can actually provide vital information.  Another coat of confidence coats that grain of sand.

If you understand that every experience is in fact a learning tool, it will in turn build more confidence.  Slowly those fears of failure turn into hope that you haven’t bit off more than you can chew.  Hope provides even more confidence and slowly the uncertainly disappears.  Your grain of sand has become a pearl of wisdom and dreams being fulfilled.

What is Shaping your Future – Fears or Hope?

“When it rains look for rainbows.  When it’s dark look for stars” – Unknown

Always look for the reasons to smile.  My sister and I were talking earlier about the Covid-19 and how the enforcement of staying at home has been affecting people.  A friend of hers back east has lost three friends to suicide in the past few weeks.  It has certainly been a trying experience for a lot of married couples.  Jada Pinkett Smith was talking about her marriage to Will Smith and how she has now realized that she doesn’t really “know” her husband at all, even after 25 years.   She says that she goes straight to “fight” and that isn’t an option when you are forced to remain at home under quarantine.  They are choosing to  “go through some stuff” and become best friends again.

It is raining right now.  Are you looking for rainbows?  When the darkness comes into your head and heart, do you look for the stars?  Again look back at the cover photo – are you choosing to see the beautiful green meadow with the sun shining through the fog – or, are you choosing to just see the rain and the darkness of your life’s current event. When you look back at the cover photo do you only see the reflection of the death of everything in it?

Don’t be afraid of your fears.  They are a sign post telling you that something is coming into your life that is going to change everything.  Instead of feeling a sick feeling in the pit of your stomach, imagine that your fear is in fact anticipation.  The anticipation of opening that oyster to find a beautiful pearl just waiting for you to pluck it up and wear it proudly.

Never let fears stop you from pursuing your dreams.  Don’t let your fears of what might happen, mean that you don’t make anything happen.  Come join us for our next Zoom call.  Bring all of those creative “hope” juices to the table and let’s see what we can make.

Choose To Live By Your Choices, Not Chance

 

365 days a year LemonadeMakers posts a blog about something positive and potentially life changing.  I write about my own life, the struggles I’ve had and the struggles I am in the middle of.  I write about the beliefs I’ve come to adopt.  I write a lot about change and transformation.

“You and you alone make the decision as to how you view the experiences in your life and it’s important to know who you are; not to judge, not to focus on your flaws and imperfections, but to discover who you want to be and decide if you’re living by choice or chance” – Live Purposefully Now

It started with my nephews murder and my writing myself out of a dark time.  Right now we are all dealing with some aspect of the Covid-19 in our lives as well as the “normal” life lemons that show up for all of us.

“Choice is the most powerful tool we have.  Everything boils down to choice.  We exist in a field of infinite possibilities.  Every choice we make shuts an infinite number of doors and opens an infinite number of doors.  At any point we can change the direction of our lives by a simple choice.  It is all in our hands, our hearts, and our minds” – tinybuddha.com

LemonadeMakers just recently hit the milestone of 100,000 likes/follows on our page.  In connection with that milestone I asked for some comments about how LemonadeMakers has impacted your lives.  Some of you responded and it made us so happy to see that LemonadeMakers was able to have a positive impact for you.

Just three of the many comments received:

• “I started following this page . . ,  It brought hope, inspiration, power to have control of my life again.”
• “You have encouraged me on many levels. From story to questions, you have made me think and feel. I love that you are constantly improving and sharing the moments in life that seem vulnerable yet they strengthen you.”
• “I have drawn inspiration for the day from many of your posts and have tried to make several of them a habit of my daily practice . . , much to my personal joyfulness (and hopefully, others around me as well).”

“Every morning you have two choices:  Continue to sleep with dreams or, Wake up and chase your dreams.  The choice is yours . . ,”  – Unknown

“Life isn’t always easy.  I struggle day to day.  But I choose to live life to the fullest and keep reminding myself that I am stronger than anything that stands in my way”  – Tanya Masse

I have been thinking about how while we have reached this 100,000 milestone, most of the people who have become fans don’t see our posts.  On an average day less than 2,000 people see our posts reflected in their daily feed.  I get complaints from both friends, relatives, and fans that Facebook doesn’t show LemonadeMakers on their news feed.  LemonadeMakers wants to support you during the struggles of your daily life.  In order to support more positivity in your life, here is how you can make sure that Facebook is reflecting LemonadeMakers in your newsfeed.

• If you’re not seeing any LemonadeMaker posts, go to our page and leave likes and comments on a few recent posts.
• Next go to your Facebook page. I’m going to show you how to edit your news feed for your mobile phone, since that is the most common way LemonadeMakers read our posts.

To edit your News Feed preferences on your phone:

• Tap the 3 lines at bottom right corner of the Facebook app.
• Scroll down to Settings & Privacy.
• Tap Settings.
• Scroll way down to News Feed Settings.
• Tap News Feed Preferences.
• Tap Prioritize who you see first
• When you start to scroll down the icons for your friends, family etc. . , a search button will display
• You can simply touch the icon/face and a star button is attached to the photo.

(I suggest at this point you type in LemonadeMakers, because if you are like me you have hundreds of friends and pages you have liked over the years).  You are limited to 30 picks for prioritizing who you are seeing first.

Your selections aren’t ranked #1, #2, etc.   It is random how it comes up.

Notifications:  If you really don’t want to miss LemonadeMakers posts, you can get notified each time we post.

• Click on notifications settings
• Go down the Pages you follow
• You can turn on/off allow notifications
• You can turn on/off to receive it as a Push
• You can turn on/off to receive it as a Email
• You can turn on/off to receive it as a SMS

Please note that we do post more than one post a day, so if notifications annoy you, don’t activate this.

On the Facebook mobile application on the bottom right hand part of the screen is a little bell – if you click on the bell it takes you to all of your notifications.  You will see not only a LemonadeMakers notification, but any friend requests, birthdays and people who are asking you to like their pages.  That way you can find us really easy if you missed our posts when they popped up.

Hopefully this helps you stay connected with us.  Another way to stay connected is our monthly Zoom call.  Click in the box below to register.  We have a lot of fun conversation.  I bring some ideas and everyone has the opportunity to join in the conversation or to just sit back, relax and listen.

“It’s not circumstance.  It’s not chance.  It’s the choice we make that determines the destiny of life”  – RVM

 

Turning a Corner

There is an old curse that people used to say, according to various fiction writers.  “May you live in interesting times.”  It was meant to imply that you would live in times of great change and unrest.  You might be wondering if you are today, this moment, living in interesting times.  If you are, how do you “aim true”?

In thinking about this I wonder if you are in fact living in a time of great shifting and upheaval.  Think of the change in a landscape after a volcano has blown its top.  We used to live outside of Seattle, WA and I remember going camping, hiking and fishing around Mt. Saint Helens.  When the mountain had its huge eruption, the landscape totally changed.  You would walk down the same path as before, only it wasn’t the same.  The eruption changed the landscape into something surreal.

Are you experiencing changes on a personal level, such as going to a grocery store with a list of items that you can’t find?  For those few items you do find, are you being limited by the store as to how many items you can purchase?

Turning A Corner In WW II

One of the things I love to do is get curious about patterns and shifts in life.  During WW II all of the men went off to war.  This left factories without workers and so many women were called upon to join the workforce to keep the machines running.  It was a time of great upheavals and shifts.  When the men came home they expected the women to go back home to the kitchen.  Women had stood in the place of their husbands or boyfriends and worked a fulfilling job for several years – as well as keeping care of the home and children.  Many of them didn’t want to go back home into their old roles as solely a wife or mother.  They felt that they could be more than that, and wanted it to continue.

Overnight it seemed that the roles of a man and woman had shifted.  They had turned a corner and it wasn’t possible to just go back to the way it was.  It’s taken a long time for those roles to continue shifting and solidifying into true equality.  It is still going on to some extent.

It feels like you may be about to have a similar experience of what happened to the workforce during WW II.  What if the result of this virus is that you are about to experience a “turning of the corner” moment, in multiple ways of how you used to live your life?

“Happiness is letting go of what you think your life is supposed to look like and celebrating it for everything that it is” – Unknown

Is This The End Of The World As We’ve Known It?

Malls have been slowly dying for the past 10 years or so.  Is this the end of malls?

Working from home has been moving one step forward, two back for a few years.  Where I work it wasn’t encouraged.  It was well tolerated for a few years, but lately they had decided they wouldn’t approve it for fulltime employees who wanted to shift from the office to home any longer.  Now of course for those states on lockdown everyone who can work from home is.  If this home lockdown truly continues for a couple of months, will businesses have turned a corner and begin abandoning commercial multistoried office buildings?  Will working from home become the “norm” of the future?

Has the virus killed ISP data caps?  Internet providers have been lifting the data caps due to everyone being at home and using the internet – both for work and entertainment.  Once you have given something away for free, it is very hard to put the genie back into the bottle.  It becomes a negative experience for your customers and they will go to someone who is still not capping their online connections.

What if we have just “turned the corner” for movie theaters?  You see Disney and several other companies releasing the movies to either buying the movie or streaming it and paying to view it.  If this was to continue there would be need to be a drastic change to how much it cost to make a movie in order for the industry to survive.  Would the mega dollars paid to the big stars go away?  Would movies become all computer generated, with voices being the only real part of the movie?

What about the million dollar contracts for sports stars if the big arenas were no longer deemed safe?

Once you start down the rabbit hole of wondering, there is no telling where you might end up.  The world is full of patterns.  The patterns continue until they transform, collapse or end.  When you are in the middle of a pattern that is in transition, it is really hard to recognize what is happening.  Even if you recognize that a pattern shift is being played out, it is really hard to determine where it is going.  It is impossible to guess how fast or slow the change will be, or how much it will impact you.  You just know that transformation is in motion.

If you go back to the caterpillar to butterfly analogy you are inside the chrysalis and you are still just goo.  Until you break free of the chrysalis you won’t know what it is that you have transformed into.  You won’t know the true impact on your life.  What corner(s) have you just turned that you can never go back from?  It is like one of those pictures that you can connect the dots on.  It is only after the transformation has been completed that you can see what you have transformed into.

How Do You Aim True?

I feel  like there is an elephant trying to go through a door and it has gotten itself stuck.  On the other side of the door is a brand new world to explore.  I can get glimpses to see that it is a new world.  I can’t however know how much of a change has actually occurred.

Will we all be working from home and will commercial real estate transform all of those buildings into housing?  What would that mean for your goals that you are aiming for in your life?

Will the majority of people order groceries and have home delivery?  Will grocery stores become more of a shipping facility than a store where you walk down the aisles and buy more than you planned on because of impulse buying? What would that mean for your goals that you are aiming for in your life?

Will drones become the future of deliveries?  Will self driving cars that self sanitize become the way of getting from point A to point B if you do have to leave home? What would that mean for your goals that you are aiming for in your life?

All questions and answers can be discussed and explored – but nothing will be truly known until the elephant clears the doorway.  Even then it will take time to fully realize that the corner has been completely turned.  Before you can see how much the new direction impacts your life.

What you have in this moment though is the ability to be curious.  To explore, not with a depressing attitude that the world is changing and you want it to remain the same.  But with a curiosity that says, “I wonder what happens next?”  “Do I aim high or low with my life goals and dreams?”

I  Wonder What Happens Next?

I firmly believe that there are going to be some great opportunities when we clear that doorway – when we turn that corner.  You can make guesses.  You can get curious and talk with others – but only from the perspective of good things are about to happen.  This isn’t said to try and make light of the health and economic devastations that are happening.  It is said to let you know that you don’t have to let fear take over your life.

You can’t control everything that is happening, or is about to happen.  You can take the recommended steps to protect the health of yourself and your family.  But once you have taken those steps – then go back into curiosity.  Go back into wonder.  Stay in the positive emotions of love, joy, happiness.  Tell fear that it is in quarantine.  Don’t let it out to take over your life.

Come and join our conversation on April 4th.  Let’s talk about whatever is showing up for you and how you can turn the corner on fear and change your relationship with it.  Let’s talk about your dreams and goals and how you can still be proactive in bringing them into reality.  This isn’t the time to go into retraction with your life.  It is instead the right time, to proactively take whatever positive steps you can to keep moving forward.  To keep expanding the love, joy, happiness, curiosity in your life.

Shots Fired

“When something bad happens you have three choices. You can either let it define you, destroy you, or you can let it strengthen you” – Unknown

In April of 2010 around 11 PM as my nephew and a friend were cutting across the park to go to his friends mom’s house the first shot was fired.  As my nephew was hit, he yelled at his friend to run.  When the second shot hit my nephew his friend started running.  As the third shot hit my nephew and he crumpled to the ground his friend stopped, turned around and saw the shooter emerge from the bushes and take off running.

His friend helped him up and somehow got my nephew to his moms house and they called 911 for an ambulance.  The doctors tried to get a lifeline helicopter but the fog that night was too thick for the helicopter.  After working on him for over an hour, they thought they had him stable enough for transport to another hospital 30-45 min away.  As my sister tried to catch up to the ambulance driving over the mountain pass, they phoned her to tell her to turn around.  My nephew had died in route.

Let’s go back in time to the beginning of this fateful Friday.  My nephew woke up early and grabbed his surfboard.  On the way to Lighthouse field he stopped and gave away some breakfast sandwiches he had made to several homeless guys as he checked in on them.  It was a regular routine for him to encourage them to quit drinking and take back control over their lives.  He then went on to meeting one of his best friends at Lighthouse Field.  His friend was going to film him surfing.  The waves were supposed to be really good and he had this trick he had been working on for some time.  He wanted to have it filmed so he could see what it looked like.  The waves were as predicted and he nailed his trick.

From there he went to work at O’Neils Surf shop.  Then he met another friend and together they went to another friends house.  Close to 11 PM they started across the park so he could get his bike and ride home.  Then “Shots Fired” happened.  A random gang banger shooting.  The shooter never said a word.  He just blew up our world from the cover of darkness for no reason that we could ever understand.

“Sometimes the bad things that happen in our lives put us directly on the path to the best things that will ever happen to us” – suburbanment.com

Fast forward a few years.  Our family is still recovering from my nephews murder.  My sister started a non-profit Mother Grizzles Against Gangs, but she ran out of money and closed it down.

Santa Cruz Sentinel 2014> "Four years ago this month, JoAnn Tennent lost her only child in a shooting near Grandview Street in Santa Cruz. Carl Reimer was 19, and no one has been arrested in his homicide.  Wednesday evening outside Santa Cruz City Hall, Tennent shared her grief with more than 80 people gathered at the third annual Victims Rights March of Solidarity. She also carried a message of hope and strength to stand together against gangs and violence in Santa Cruz County. “Carl wasn't just my son, he was your son. Because all your children are my children too,” she said. “When someone takes someone from your life, it's devastating. We can't just act like this doesn't happen.”  As part of National Crime Victims” Rights Week, the march started at Santa Cruz County Superior Court at 701 Ocean St. and ended at city hall. Participants held pictures of loved ones who had fallen victim to crime in the county, and they marched with posters with slogans such as “Stop gang violence” and “Violence does not only affect the victim.”"

As a coping mechanism I had started writing to heal my sadness and grief.  I was posting things on my personal Facebook page that I was writing.  I thought just maybe it would help my friends and family.  We were all rebuilding our lives around Carl’s loss.

“if you have the courage to begin, you have the courage to succeed”  – Unknown

A lot of people started commenting and sharing what I was writing and they encouraged me to do more.  And so this LemonadeMaker page was born.  I named it LemonadeMaker because I believe that we are all making lemonade out of life’s lemons.  It all started as part of my own recovery, and it grew into a life purpose.  It’s a vast vision, a dream that I work to fulfill every day.  It’s a calling. Although we lost someone we loved so much – the day of his death was also a day that Carl was following his own dreams.  He had a great morning.  He was really stoked that he had nailed his trick with his surfboard.  He wasn’t leaving his dreams for someday I will . . . , he was living them on purpose.

“In the end, some of your greatest pains become your greatest strengths” – Quoteslife101.net

I looked at my life and realized I wasn’t doing the same.  I was putting off my dreams for when I retired.  For later.  So when I started LemonadeMakers it was for the purpose of realizing my dreams of being a game changer.  Of being an influencer.  Of helping others to fulfill their dreams now.  Because none of us are promised a later to do it in.

 

Steven Pressfield stated in “The Art of War”, that most of us have two lives; the lives we live and the lives we are capable of living.

5 years later LemonadeMakers has almost 100,000 followers.  This happened because I saw something positive to retrieve from the ashes of my grief.  My nephew left me a trail to follow and I have been walking down it ever since.  It has totally changed my life.  I had put off the dream of writing, because my mind fears said I would fail.  Obviously that wasn’t true.  I had told myself for years that I was an introvert and couldn’t communicate with strangers.  Too my surprise this was also totally not true.  How many mind fears – lies – are you listening too instead of pursuing your dreams?

Don’t put your dreams off to tomorrow.  Start fulfilling them today.  Live the life you are capable of living.

Sign up now.  Click the button to register now.

 

 

The Light Is In You

 

“Know what sparks the light in you, then use that light to illuminate the world” – Oprah

Inside of you is a box of matches.  Each of the matchsticks is a gift that you have to Illuminate the world with.  Striking the match enables you to bring light to some sort of darkness in the world.  The darkness is filled with all of the problems in society we face today.

Each time you light one of your matchsticks, you can see some small part of what is hiding in the darkness. Your light will always shine on something that you can help to change in the world.

If you are brave enough, you strike a match and get curious about the secrets that are hiding in the darkness. Inside of every one of society’s problems lies the seed of the answer to what must be changed.

Those seeds are germinated with your passion.  In order for change to happen, it requires that you strike a match, get curious, and get creative about how to illuminate the possibilities within the seeds.  Trust your heart and your calling will light the way.

“To be a star, you must walk your own path, shine your own light and don’t be afraid of the darkness, that’s when a star shines the brightest” – Joel Brown

In times of hardship the automatic reflex is to contract, when in fact you need to expand. You feel that life is shutting you out. That failure is condemning you. Life is unfair, so you wail and kick your feet in frustration. You just want to dig a hole and disappear into it forever. Yet this is the exact time you must open your hands to receive.

Receiving isn’t just allowing someone to help you.  It is also saying yes to yourself; to risk; to higher potential; to new adventures. Opening doors to new opportunities. Learning about yourself.  Life is all about understanding something you’ve known about your entire life – in a new way. Be willing to be a beginner again, for a whole new world of opportunities is just waiting for you.

“At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lit the flame within us” – Albert Schweitzer

Somedays it feels like you just can’t motivate yourself to get out of bed.  You’re exhausted from beating your head against the obstacles in your life.  There are dark shadows obscuring your ability to see what needs to be done.  You try to strike a new match to get clarity and nothing happens.  You try another match.  Then you try a new area to strike the match.

Sometimes you will need to your light to be rekindled from someone else’s light, and sometimes you can help to illuminate their light source.  That is the importance of being part of a tribe.  Connect to others who are shining their lights to change themselves and thereby change the world.

Instead of just being preoccupied with your problems, you open your heart to the adventures and obstacles of their journey, and your own journey becomes illuminated.

“Most of us are about as eager to be changed as we were to be born, and go through our changes in a similar state of shock” –  James Baldwin

Steven Pressfield stated in “The Art of War”, that most of us have two lives; the lives we live and the lives we are capable of living.

Many times the worst danger you face is your own uncertainty that what the light is revealing is something that you can face and deal with. Curiosity may have opened the door, but what you find may still feel like it is going to kill you.

Truth will both refine you and define you. It measures you. It takes caution and understanding to know what to do with the truth of who you are.  To accept who you have been in the past.  To be in awe of who you are revealing yourself to be today.

Part of the search for understanding who you came here to be, is to understand that change is how you grow those seeds which will crush the obstacles in your path.  Spirit understands whatever adversity you face, is also an opportunity. That when you embrace change, change also embraces you.

“Illumination is nothing if you do not share it with anyone.  Illumination is about spreading light across entire nations.  It’s about wearing that crown that shines like the sun on your head, and getting other minds to synergize with yours” – Suzy Kassem

If you have a vision but no plan, then you have a pipe dream. If you have a vision and a focused plan but lack action, then you’ll have a lot of frustration.  This is because you won’t achieve momentum when some days you take action, and some days you don’t. It makes it impossible for you to know what’s working and what isn’t.

If you are not intentional about what you say yes to, and what you say no to, then every day will control you and nothing will get done.

That’s where illumination comes in.  That’s where striking your match comes in.  You need to learn how to keep your lamp lit.  You need to learn how to strike your matches and use those divine gifts with purpose to not only shift and change your world, but the entire world.  Find your spark and light up those matches!

Are You Pushing Your Limits?

“Bravery is not the absence of fear.  Bravery is feeling the fear, the doubt, the insecurity, and deciding that something else is more important”  – Mark Manson

Every year we commit ourselves to making changes in our lives.  We may or may not call them goals, or new years resolutions.  The thing is that we all change, whether it is on purpose or it just happens.  Those changes can happen in uncontrolled chaos, or from being committed to something vitally important.  Whether change happens to us or for us, it is up to us to make those decisions, day by day & moment by moment.

“I wish for the same thing I’ve hoped for since the beginning.  I wish for a life so brave, so unpredictable, so full of unexpected joys and unforgettable love that no box could possible contain all my memories.  Such a life won’t be perfect.  It’ll be something better.  It’ll be my own paradise”  – Patti Smith

I think that the one thing all of humanity can agree on, is wanting a happy life.  It may look different depending on our age, our sexual preference, our religion, our culture, our politics – but it is still desiring joy and happiness in our lives, and our families lives.  Each decision that we make in this regard comes from us following those things mentioned above.  The funny thing is, the personal definition of what constitutes all of those things  — may not be authentic to who we are at a soul level.  A lot of them come from following someone else’s value system.  Our parents, our teachers, our mentors or the society that we associate with.  As they say in Texas, “that dog don’t hunt”.

It’s not perfect, It’s a work in progress

“Finding the passion and purpose in your life is a trial-by-fire process.  You don’t simply wake up one day and become happy doing one thing forever and ever.  It’s a constant work-in-progress”  – Mark Manson

It’s kind of funny how we have this notion in our head that if we are able to make this one change or answer this one soul searching question about our life, that it will be a one and done thing.  That somehow one thing changing would make us happy forever.  There is no one-size-fits-all for anything in life.  This is because growth is a constantly changing who we are.  What makes us happy today in this moment is fleeting.  This is because in life, you literally cannot pass this way again.  Everything is changing and so this moment in time doesn’t last, it doesn’t repeat itself.  Progress is change.

“Passion will move men beyond themselves, beyond their shortcomings, beyond their failures” – Joseph Campbell

What I love about figuring out how to accomplish my desires is the concept of failure as an ending.  When you are on your way to someplace that you’ve never been before, even with a navigation system you sometimes end up on a dead end.  Just this past week I had a doctors visit and they had moved their office.  So I am following the directions on the navigation system in my car and I end up at a dead end.  Thankfully there were some security guards talking next to this gate to the high school who knew where I needed to go.

“Believe in yourself and all that you are.  Know that there is something inside you that is greater than any obstacle”  – Christian D Larson

Reaching a dead end, my journey to the doctors office had failed.  I didn’t just turn around and go back home.  I sought new directions.  It’s the same thing with whatever our current life goals are.  If you reach a road block, a dead end, the bridge is out – you shouldn’t just quit trying to get to where your passion is leading you.  You should try something else.  You should go in a new direction to the same destination.

New Directions required –

BE different to MAKE a DIFFERENCE

“If you desire to make a difference in the world, you must be different from the world”  – Elaine Dalton

A big part of being able to make the changes in your life that you desire, is a healthy self esteem.  It is how you bring your life into soul alignment.  It is living a life in integrity to your soul’s purpose.  What your true values are deep inside of you.  Without going through a process of determining what belongs to your soul – and what was adopted from outside of you from an deep seated need to belong – you can’t make true lasting changes in your life.  You can make temporary changes from will power, but it will not result in the personal transformation that you desire.

“Don’t give in to your fears.  If you do you won’t be able to talk to your heart”  – Paulo Coelho

If you don’t want to continue falling back into old patterns and habits you need to learn a new way to facilitate your life changes.  To learn a process that helps you to spot the patterns as they begin again to interfere in your passions and desires for change.  As you increase your awareness, you will find those old patterns hold less power and control over your life.  They began from a desire to keep us safe.  But as you grow and change in life, those patterns become out-grown, outdated.  They need to be released.  That can only happen by your developing awareness of why you created them and how your subconscious is trying to avoid the risk of standing out and being different.

This year you have some dreams that you are working on. You have some goals that you are struggling with. It might be that you are ready to break out of your comfort zone. To go to that next level in your life. To realize your full potential in your job/career; your personal relationships; your health; financial or spiritual goals. Don’t let them go.

Do something different, join us on March 7th and find a new direction to fulfilling your dreams, goals and commitments.