Start Walking, Be Aware, Watch For Possibilities

“It is not the perfection of one’s life but the direction of a life that provides evidence of regeneration”  = John Macarthur

My mother had this habit of saying that she was working on “getting it all together”.  One day I found this cute little card and I had to buy it for her.  It had the picture of a tall filing cabinet with the drawers partially open.  There were files half way out of the cabinet with the papers spilling out of them.  In one of the filing cabinets was a mouse going through the files looking for something.  The caption read “I finally got it all together, but I forgot where I put it.”

“Happiness is not perfection.  It’s looking past imperfection and see the beauty of life” – Surbhi Bhosie

Your life will not be fully lived if you are waiting on getting “all of your ducks in a row.”  You have to begin where you are.  Like the momma duck you need to starting walking and have faith that the ducks will line up behind of you.  There is a joke about how when you finally got your ducks all in row, you’ll discover that they’re not even your ducks!  It isn’t about perfection.  It’s about creating something, anything that gets your closer to your dreams and goals.

Never Turn Away

It has been said, “If you want to get your ducks in a row, you must first get your head above water.”  We are living in a world that is becoming hard to recognize as anything normal.  If you work in sports, entertainment, retail, the restaurant industry, the travel industry – you may have lost your income.  You may still be employed but working from home with children driving you to distraction.  You may be caring for elderly parents terrified that they will get this virus.  In one week you have decided that being a couch potato and binging on T.V. isn’t as relaxing as it sounds.

“Being happy doesn’t mean that everything is perfect, it simply means that you’ve decided to look beyond the imperfections” – Iliketoquote.com

So with everything in your life going sideways or upside down, how do you find beauty in a world that feels like it is breaking apart?  By creating beauty in the world, wherever you find yourself.  There is an artist that did this magnificent beadwork on canvas, and then she tore it to explose of the beauty hidden underneath.  When you find yourself feeling broken, remember to look for the beauty in the brokeness.

“I realized that to be more alive I had to be less afraid.  So I did it.  I lost my fear and gained my whole life” – Mantraband.com

In mosaics there is great beauty by taking the broken pieces and creating a new piece of art.  It tells a story.  Instead of throwing away the broken things in your life, look for ways to incorporate them into a new meaning.  Don’t abandon your dreams and goals for 2020.  Just look for new creative ways to keep growing your comfort zone and reveal the beauty of hidden possibilities and potential.

Focus

“The road remains wide open while your dreams are alive, only fear can block the way” – Fratley

What is it that you are currently focusing on?  That is the direction you will find yourself heading.  Years ago I was driving home from work one night.  I saw that the car coming towards me had wandered into my lane.  I quickly steered my vehicle off onto the shoulder of the road.   The driver of the oncoming car continued crossing over into my direction.  I could not get out of his way and he hit the side of my vehicle on the drivers side just past the passenger door.  My vehicle was bouncing back and forth, from side to side.  For a moment I thought I was going to roll the vehicle over.

I was sitting in my car, trying to calm my heart down and he came running back to my car.  He kept repeating over and over how sorry he was.  Apparently he was looking at the concrete wall that had been built into the hillside of a new subdivision and was not paying attention to where he was steering.  When you look off to the side of the road, you will unconsciously steer in the direction that you are looking.  By the time he realized he was going to hit me it was too late.  He had not only left his lane, he had crossed completely through my lane and hit me off the road on the shoulder.

 

That is why focus is so important.  It is so easy to swing the pendulum from one side to the other and not be grounded in the present.   If you are too far to the right you might ask yourself:

What is running through your mind as the hamster wheel endlessly spins?  Is it negative mind talk or positive “I can do this” thoughts?  Have you basically already surrendered your life to fear and anxiety? Instead of listening to the minds endless list of “I can’t because thoughts”  what if you turned the sentence around to view it with curiosity – “how can I?”

• I can’t do this because . . . , change to: I wonder how I could do this?
• I can never get anything right . . , change to: I wonder why I think I can’t get anything right?  When did I start thinking that?
• I won’t ever be good enough . . , change to: What is my definition of “good enough”?  Where did I get that definition?  If my best friend or my child told me that sentence what would be my response back to them?  Why don’t I say that to myself?
• Someone will always be better than me . . . , Change to:  answer back  “so what?”  “Who cares?”  I am better than someone and someone else is better than me.

Just Go For It!

“Life is a balance of holding on and letting go” – Rumi

Right now there is a lot of things that you can’t control.  Right now there is a lot of unknowns about what is going to happen next.  The world is shifting and transforming right in front of you.  Instead of feeling like running around and screaming “the world is falling” what if you just got still?  If you just took a deep breath in and let it out slowly over and over until your mind quiets down?  What if you sat in the space of learning to live between effort and surrender?

Something important to remember is that before you try to balance anything, you need to make sure that you are on firm ground.  A steady foundation.  Ask yourself, what do I need to stay grounded, in touch, in love, connected and emotionally balanced in this moment?  You are not going to find it outside yourself.  Look within, to find it.

What if you just looked at what to let go of – all of the cursed unknowns in your life right this moment, and just surrendered them.  What if you got into the space of curiosity – of wonder  – of imagination?  What if you rethought/restructured what dream needs to take flight and just went for it right now?

Put your trust in your higher power.  Embrace change.  Embrace life.  Expand instead of contract.   There is tremendous power in your dreams.  Use it to take flight.   Start by recognizing your “super powers”, your talents and then find ways to serve others by using them.  Do great work even in trying times.

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!

Awaken The Sleeper, With 20/20 Focus and Vision

 

Revised 11/14/2021

Vision tells us our destination.  It doesn’t tell us how to get there, it just tells us how we will know when we arrive.  Focus is what helps up to do the work to arrive at the destination that vision has uncovered in our heart.  Focus is the road to the destination.  If we don’t have a vision we can’t have a destination. Without focus, we will find ourselves asleep wandering lost in the forest. We will just keep going in circles back to where we started. Lost, dazed and confused.

If you look back at the last two year’s – did you follow your vision or did you go in circles?

Without focus you travel down the road forgetting where you came from.  The journey becomes the destination in a twisted sort of way.  You will find yourself trying to fill a bottomless hole by acquiring more of everything.  To possess things which promise to make you whole, but which instead create an insatiable appetite for more and more.  Without focus life becomes a merry go round that never stops.

“When you are clear on your vision, it will pull you forward and out of bed in the morning” – Sean McCabe

We have all heard the story of the person who worked at a job for 30 years, retires and gets the gold watch.  Then after a short while of sitting at home with nothing to do, they die.  They never uncovered their life purpose, their reason for living.  They dragged themselves out of bed each day and went to a job that didn’t fulfill them.  They never discovered the reason they were born.  Instead they punched a time clock day after day, month after month, until the years fled.  They never found their way out of the forest.

Awaken the sleeper

The only way to find that vision, your life purpose is to look for it.  It is deep inside your heart.  It is connected to the things that you love to do.  It’s not about something that happens in some distant future.  It is about the quality of choices you are making in your life this moment.  It’s about what you choose to see, to perceive, to feel and what you choose to do in this moment of time.  The choices that push you to engage in life at its deepest meaning for you.  It changes who you are NOW.

“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart.  Who looks outside, dreams.  Who looks inside, awakens” – Carl Jung

It’s a funny thing when one day you wake up to your vision.  You might have been wandering in circles for years, looking for that one special person or that title at work that said “I have arrived!”.  You might have worked your fingers to the bone for years to find elusive fame and fortune.  Whatever you thought was the answer to that longing deep in your heart, once you had it, you discovered it wasn’t it.  It was just another circle in the forest.  Then one day it happens.  You finally realize it isn’t outside of you.  It’s not a person, a career, money in the bank, a dream house or car.  It is something inside of you that is calling you home.

Usually what wakes you up is being disillusioned, disappointed, that feeling you have hit rock bottom.  Too many bad decisions and failed plans.  When you stop fighting the uphill battle, give up and give in – when you are in that spot of finally understanding what it means to “let go and let God” it finally happens.  Your heart feels calm, whole and centered.  Your soul comes alive and feels truly safe for the first time because finally we are listening to the inner voice.

Listening with your heart and soul

Your vision becomes clear as you climb a high tree and see the way out of the forest of lost causes.  You understand the connections to what has happened in your life and how each trial and tribulation, each circle around the forest was teaching you something vital that you needed to learn.  Peace with your past, present and future permeates your bones.  You see far off the destination your soul is leading you to.  You realize the importance of the journey.

The journey has places where you became confused as to what the right choice was – at the same time that confusion is where you learned something new that stretched your comfort zone.  The journey was where you were betrayed and broken by someone you thought loved you and would never hurt you – at the same time it was how you learned to heal your heart.  The journey lead to lots of frustration as you tried and failed, over and over to learn something critical to your dreams – at the same time those frustrations lead to more authentic decisions based on your own judgment and not someone else’s.

Make the right choice

Even the parts of the journey where the sadness was a deep pit of despair, you learned to listen the heart, hear the words of wisdom of the soul and recover your happiness and joy.

2022 can be your year of focus, and vision.  With the global pandemic, most people have lost focus.  Their vision has dimmed.  It seems like every time we think that we are moving past the masks and restrictions, this virus mutates into something else.

Instead of waiting for whatever “normal” is going to be and then settling into a new vision, it is time to just do it anyway.  Some of your plans will fail dramatically, and you will learn something.  Some of them be will duds that don’t even get lift off before they came crashing down – and that’s ok.  Plans to go in one direction, will actually come about 180 degrees to go in another direction – which seems wrong but will be exactly right.

• Look for the self sabotage.
• Look for the places where you missed the road signs to turn left or right.
• Look for where you missed the detours.
• Look for where you got lost.

Now program your GPS system with your updated vision.  Get clear about what it is you want to feel and be open to the feeling and not how or what is going to get you there.  Look for signs, clues, and ask for directions.  Don’t give up on your dreams.  Listen to the voice in your heart and soul.  Get back on track to where you are supposed to be.

Be fearless

Have a vision  

Get inspired

Believe in yourself

Always hustle

Stay determined

Stay focused

Stay motivated

Keep pushing

Be happy

Get out there, own the day

Create your own personalized dream map, claim your own unique goals of change and transformation; refine them into goal crushing gremlins; and finally, to truly understand what your motivation around those goals is all about.

 

Brand New Ending?

 

What I love about life is the ability to always make a change.  To do something different.  To be someone different.  It’s all about choice.

There are many people who look at their lives and decide they have no choices.  That life is somehow against them.  That they can’t be any different.  It is the excuse of people who feel hopeless and helpless.  But the reality is that you do get to decide how you are going to live your life.

Is this the life

you want to live?

There comes a point where it all becomes too much.  When we get too tired to fight anymore.  So, we give up.  That’s when the real work begins.  To find hope where there seems to be absolutely none at all – Christina Yang

When you are in the middle of life’s storms it may seem like all of the trees have been blown over.  The roots were just not strong enough to keep the tree anchored in the soil.  The homes around you may have suffered extreme damage and become uninhabitable.  They weren’t maintained or strong enough to survive the hurricane force winds.  When every structure you have created in your life has been ripped apart – what then?

That is the moment to notice that you are still here.  You may not be standing; you may have been knocked down.  But you are not out.  It is in this moment of realizing that you have survived that you can take stock of your life.  Because it is in this moment you learn that you were strong enough to survive.  That you get to decide what happens next.

Is this the person you want to be?

Are these the relationships you want in your life?

Is this the job/career you desire?

Is this the BEST YOU CAN BE?

Can you be stronger?

Kinder?

More Compassionate?

I’m sure that you have heard the saying “let go and let God”.  It is one of my constant reminders to myself.  It feels like letting go is easy.  It’s sort of like handing over the trouble to someone else to handle.  It relieves you of the responsibility of fighting for how you want things to turn out.

At the same time, it is human to keep the comfort zone the same.  So, while you are busy telling yourself that you have let go, you are in fact fighting to keep things the same.

How do you know if you’re fighting to keep it?  By noticing that you haven’t really moved on.  You have the same furniture in your comfort zone, you just moved it around.  In order to have a real change in your life, no matter how painful it is, you have to let it all go and move on.  You need to have a moving sale, “all must go”.  You have to donate that old furniture and get new furniture.  It’s the only way we can continue to grow.

Letting go is a release.  If you have the balloons all stacked up and tied together, they aren’t going anywhere.  It’s when you untie all of the balloons and let them go one by one.  It’s when you let the wind take up each balloon and blow it across the sky until you can’t see it anymore – that’s when you have really let it go.  What you are letting go of is not the dream itself, but the version of the dream you were trying to fulfill.

I think it is human to have some really deep-seated desires, beliefs, wishes that you know aren’t ever really going to happen.  You were raised to believe in fairy tales, in the tooth fairy, or Santa Claus, in the white knight in shining armor that was going to sweep in and rescue you.  You told yourself they weren’t real.  You thought you had released them.  Then something in life happens, and you realize you are still holding out for that forgotten dream.

It’s that kind of faith, in realities not yet beheld, that keeps us going.  And once in a while something comes into your life that gives you hope.   The hope that just maybe that thing you are still hoping for, fighting for, might just come true.  That you are going to turn the corner and have your breath taken away by the surprise of how it shows up.

The best thing in life is to go ahead with all your plans and your dreams, to embrace life and to live life everyday with passion, to lose and still keep the faith and to win while being grateful.  All of this because the world belongs to those who dare to go after what they want.  And because life is really too short to be insignificant – Charlie Chaplin

I think that sometimes we don’t see it, because we are demanding that it to show up in a certain way.  When in reality it has been in front of us all along.  It’s like the love story when the boy or girl is looking at someone as being their soul mate, when in reality the best friend they’ve had their entire life is the one.  They didn’t see what they already had.

New Endings

I think that is what new endings are all about.  To realize that the fairy tale is just slightly different than what you have been looking for.  That the dream is here right in front of you, just waiting for you to see it in its disguise.  Waiting for you to realize you’ve had your own keys all along.

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.

Life changes when you realize you have the keys to your happiness in your own hands.  Don’t let them go.

Message us for more ideas on how to do this.

Don’t Let Something Amazing Pass You By

“Sometimes, thing don’t go as planned.  Life doesn’t always go the way you hope it will.  You can’t plan everything.  Life takes you where it wants to – you’re pretty much just along for the ride!  Just breathe – Re-Evaluate – Step out of the box – Forgive – Be grateful.”  – Namala Lakesh

I believe in plans.  But I also believe in being flexible.  I believe in taking stock and making constant adjustments.  It’s like a sailboat.  You are subject to winds and currents, but with the rudder and sails, you have the ability to maneuver into the direction you want to go.  Which is why I love the way I plan out my month and year.  I make plans and then as life happens I see where I need to make adjustments.  To re-evaluate what is really most important in the current time and space to accomplish.  That’s why I am sharing this system with all of you.  It works!

“She stood in the storm and when the wind did not blow her away, she adjusted her sails.”  – Elizabeth Edwards

Sometimes things happen in the reverse order of your expectations.  The patience comes in because you automatically put expectations on the plans.  You visualize them out step by step, and then life happens.  You lose you job, the promised promotion and/or raise doesn’t materialize.  Someone close to you is faced with a critical medical diagnosis.  The money you had planned for vacation now has to go to put in new plumbing.  In short, life happens.  You need to adjust your sails.

“Obstacles don’t have to stop you.  If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up.  Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.”  – Michael Jordan

Sometimes obstacles are like the monsters under the bed.  You hear a noise.  Your imagination runs wild.  Your heartbeat goes out of control.  Suddenly you are screaming.  And it was all in your head.  Other times they are legitimate.  I remember one of the contestants in America’s Got Talent had been a singer, then tragedy struck.  She went deaf from a medical condition.  She stopped singing and gave up her career.

“Our life doesn’t always turn out the way we planned, but sometimes that’s because what we planned wasn’t suppose to be our life.”  – Gdonell

Mandy said in an interview, “I made the mistake of associating my entire identity with one single dream, and when that dream died, I very much felt like I died. I became a husk of a person for awhile.”

“Life doesn’t always go according to plan.  Sometimes heading in a new direction can be scary until you realize you’re headed toward a new and exciting destination.”  – Susan Cole

Then she got an electric tuner and spent 10 hours learning to sing each note perfectly.  “I couldn’t believe it”, she says, “My perfect pitch and muscle memory all came together.”  Mandy Harvey.

“If people are doubting how far you can go, go so far that you can’t hear them anymore.”  – Michele Ruiz

Then one day she decided to stop fighting against her dreams and start fighting for them.  She began writing her own songs and singing again.  She discovered that this real obstacle could be overcome.  She discovered that a big chunk of the real obstacle was in her own mind. Singing a song she composed she got sent straight through to the finals on America’s Got Talent.  She finished fourth.

“You don’t always need a plan.  Sometimes you just need to breathe, trust, and let go and see what happens.”  – Mandy Hale

If you take a good honest look at your life so far, you will see times where what you had planned fell apart – and that it was a good thing.  You underestimated what you were are capable of. You made plans that were far too limiting in regards to your potential.  When you let go of the expectation of the plan, and how it should go – and instead learned to feel your way with intuition, amazing things happened.

“We must let go of the life we have planned, so as to accept the one that is waiting for us.”  – Joseph Campbell

You discover hidden talents.  You uncover better ways to expand your comfort zones.  So when the path you are walking on changes direction, don’t be afraid to keep going.  When the sign says “dead end” don’t be afraid to go off the path and create your own.  When the wind blows you backwards, grab a tree and hold on.  When life challenges you to sit it out, get up and fight to keep moving forward.

“If we can just let go and trust that things will work out the way they’re supposed to, without trying to control the outcomes, then we can begin to enjoy the moment more fully.  The joy of the freedom it brings becomes more pleasurable than the experience itself.”  – Goldie Hawn

LemonadeMakers is hosting a monthly free class on goals, resolutions, plans – whatever you want to call your means of change and transformation in your life.  We discuss on a live Zoom call what is happening that is working and not working.  Ideas to try to get us motivated to change and transform our lives.  Where we might re-evaluate our plans.  How to adjust our sails.

We invite you to join with us the first Saturday of every month.  The next class registration is opening today.  Come join us!  Click on the box to register now.

Do You Have The Courage To Fulfill Your Dreams?

“If your dreams don’t scare you, they aren’t big enough”  – Unknown

It takes determination when you are knocked down to get back up, but it is only when we have been knocked down that courage enters.  It takes courage to face the failure.  It takes courage to try it one more time.  It takes courage to find failure once more in your face daring you to try again.

Is it failure or part of the divine plan?

In life many things don’t happen the way we plan them.  In a lot of cases what seems like failure is actually part of the divine plan.  Years ago I walked away from a pretty secure job because I was promised the opportunity for advancement at another company.  I took on the responsibility of completing a manual of guidelines for the new company because the person they had hired for it wasn’t getting it done.  I had never written anything before other than papers for school.  I figured that I could simply expand that knowledge into something new and I did.

Then shortly afterwards the market turned and I was laid off.  Because the market had slowed down in Southern California, there weren’t  any jobs available and we ended up having to relocate back to the Seattle area for me to find employment.  I had berated myself for leaving the previous company; for believing the owner of that new company; for the market turndown.  I had beat myself up pretty badly.

An interesting thing happened in Seattle.  The Savings and Loan I was hired to work for hired me in the advanced position I wanted.  The S&L needed a servicing manual and I had the experience to write it.  I was also hired to teach a course for loan processing and underwriting at South Seattle Community College and Renton Voc-Tech.  All things I wouldn’t have had the courage or opportunity to reach for if I hadn’t made that job change back in California.

I believe it was all part of divine planning.  Can you think of such examples in your own life?  Times when what you planned shifted and changed into what you thought was failure, but was actually part of the plan all along?

Of Caterpillars and leaps of faith

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams”  – Eleanor Roosevelt

It is in seeing the beauty of your dreams that you are able to get back up after you have failed.  Finding your life purpose and then bringing it out into the world isn’t an easy journey.  While your soul will not give up, your mind is constantly entreating you to give up.  Seek the peace of sleep.  Take it easy.

“You get in life what you have the courage to ask for”  – Oprah

It’s a constant tug of war between mind and spirit.  When your soul is inspired it sets you on fire.  You find yourself doing things you never would have dreamed it was possible to do.  Every negative thought your mind produces is shot down.  Like the caterpillar you have the push to transform beyond any understanding.

“Don’t spend time beating on a wall hoping to transform it into a door”  – Coco Chanel

Like the caterpillar you learn new skills, building a space in which to transform.  That is what goals and dreams are all about – change and transformation.

You have this yearning to be something different from what you are currently being.  You have these feelings that you can’t really put words to.  You just know that you have to do it.  Can you imagine the caterpillar building a chrysalis and then standing back and judging it as not being good enough?  That the caterpillar would just turn away and forget the whole transformation thing?

The caterpillar doesn’t care that he has never built anything before.  He doesn’t care if it isn’t the perfect shape, or on the wrong branch.  He doesn’t care if the wind is blowing it sideways and maybe today isn’t the best day to complete it.  He is so involved, that he has gone so far out of his comfort zone, it isn’t even in the same town or state.

He is so involved with using these skills – skills that he didn’t even know he was capable of learning, that he is taking a huge leap of faith.  A leap of faith that what he has built, is what it is supposed to look like and feel like.  He trusts his divine inner guidance and forges ahead.  He trusts that what he is becoming will allow him to transform his outer being in such a way that he will fly.

Where does such trust come from?

• It’s in the realization that everyone else is just as scared as you are.
• It’s in the realization that everyone fails.  Falls down.
• It’s in the realization that at the moment you have a choice – to quit or remember WHY you are trying in the first place.
• It’s in the realization that fulfilling a dream means that you are striving to do things you think you cannot do.

You know down deep in your heart and soul that you will never regret giving everything you have to accomplish your dreams.  You know that giving your best effort and then digging down to bring up that tiny bit of extra you didn’t know you were capable of will be worth the cost.  How do you know this?

“The women whom I love and admire for their strength and grace did not get that way because shit worked out.  They got that way because shit went wrong, and they handled it.  They handled it in a thousand different ways on a thousand different days, but they handled it.  Those women are my superheroes”  – Elizabeth Gilbert

Because you see everywhere examples of where other people have done just that.  They worked stuff out, no matter the cost.  It’s not a one size fits all world.  It’s through trial and error that we work stuff out.  You have a secret weapon.  You figured out that in every single change, rather than judging it as good or bad, you see the possibilities rather than the problem.

That’s what the loss of a job in Southern California and the wonderful opportunities that opened up in Seattle taught me.  In every single change, there is a long hallway.  A hallway with all of these doors of possibility open and inviting you to step through.  That is where is courage comes into play – stepping through the door and into the possibilities.

Get Clarity By Magnifying Your Life Purpose

“If you can tune into your purpose and really align with it, setting goals so that your vision is an expression of that purpose, then life flows much more easily.”  – Jack Canfield

There is a dream that you had as a child.  It was a persistent dream.  It was a longing that would not be denied.  Maybe you went for it and failed.  Or maybe you were too scared to even try.  Or maybe you had the “one hit wonder” and then faded away, too afraid that you could never repeat or even surmount the dream.  That dream contained your purpose.  How it was fulfilled was your vision of what it could be.

“Focus on your own happiness, focus on your own life, focus on your own vision.”– GreatestQuotes.net

My dream was to write. 

I did well in school.  I loved learning.  I would read 6-7 books a week.  I would check out the maximum number of books every week and read them all.  My family was always moving somewhere new.  Until my Freshman year in high school I didn’t attend any complete grade in one school.  So books were my best friends and my escape.  And every single book I read, I would say to myself, “I could write this book.  Maybe even write it better than the author did.”

“Life will only change when you become more committed to your dreams than you are to your comfort zone.”  – Peerhustle.com

The problem was while I told myself that, the doing of the actual writing was outside of my comfort zone and I was terrified that I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was.  The fact that I got straight A’s and was in honors didn’t overcome the fears.  In fact it magnified them.  In my mind I was sitting on the pedestal and if I actually tried to write a book, I would topple off the pedestal and be subject to ridicule.

“Don’t try to overhaul your life overnight.  Instead, focus on making one small change at a time.  Over time, those small changes will add up to big transformation.  Don’t give up!” – emilysquotes.com

So I dreamed of writing year after year and fed my purpose a starvation diet of book after book that someone else who was smarter and braver wrote while I just dreamed about it.  I believe that God plants your purpose inside of you.  It never goes away.  I believe that door after door of opportunity comes you way to express it to its full potential.  I believe that the ups and downs of life itself are generated in such a way to try to coax you or force you to take up your dream and live it.

“A vision of a desired future allows you to engage and identify immediately in your focus with an improved condition.  It changes what you perceive and how you perform – NOW.  It’s not about achieving something in time.  It’s rather about the quality of choices you are making in this moment – what you choose to perceive, feel, and do.  It’s about getting the most out of your experience.”– David Allen

I believe that at least one of the New Year’s Resolutions or goals that you set – are a part of your life purpose. 

When my nephew was murdered I was forced through the door of writing.  I didn’t really understand what was happening at first.  By the time I realized that I had committed myself to writing LemonadeMakers I had literally changed my world.  All my goals before that were about changing myself to make other people happy.  Lose weight and be healthy for my family.  Climb the corporate ladder so that my family would be secure financially, and so on.

“Focus on where you want to go instead of the obstacles in your path.  Drive and persistence will take you to your desired destination.”– slideshare.net

Now all of a sudden, the question that I was asking was,

“Who do I need to be to make LemonadeMakers be what it is supposed to be? What do I need to learn? What habits do I need to bring into my life? Who can help me?”

It is such a unique space of focus away from fear of not being loved if I wasn’t giving all of me to my family or job – to the space of how can I help others find this place seeing “what else is possible”? It is kind of funny when I finally understood that giving all of me to my family or job was from fear and not love. And now I am finally living most of my time from love and not fear. Fear still shows up, disguised as self sabotage. Then fear is shown to the door, when once again I recognize it for what it is.

Somewhere in your goals that you are setting for 2020 is a part of your life purpose. 

It is the thing that you dream about when your mind wanders.  What is it that you do, that is similar to my inside my head comment when I was reading a good book.  What is your version of a “I could do this”?  Think about the thing that pops into your head, that is immediately discounted by your negative self talk.  There is something there to explore and understand more fully.

That “thing” will keep showing up month after month, year after year, decade after decade.  That idea or concept will not leave you – it can’t. It will keep haunting you, until you are expressing it to its fullest potential or you have died with the dream still unfulfilled within you.  So take a leap of faith.  Be brave.

Come join us on February 1st for our “Living the Dream” free workshop and take the first step in putting your dream into reality.

We are going to explore some ideas outside of the box on how to start living our dreams.  We are going to dig into our goals and expose the root systems to see how they connect to our life purpose.  It is more than a dream board.  It is more than writing the dream out on paper.  It is more than a calendar full of appointments and meetings and blocking out time to implement what needs to be done and when you will do it.  It is  more than a single leap of faith or five baby sets of doing something.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light. . , that most frightens us. . , ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ . . , who are you not to be?. . , Your playing small does not serve the world . . , We are all meant to shine. . ,  as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” ― Marianne Williamson

I invite you to join us on February 1st for a live workshop on how to make 2020 the year of achievement. Get clear on what you want and how to obtain it. If your 2020 goals are already stalling, get recharged and refocused. Learn how to pivot to success.

Just click below to get started.

During the call you will have the opportunity to create, find a pivot or two, reimagine and refuel your life dreams.

I know that if someone gives me something I may or may not make the time to actually do the work. But if someone takes the time to work with me through the material I get some action and forward momentum started. So take this small first step for 2020 and lets create something personally designed just for you!

Instead of just thinking “I could do this” come and find out just how much you can do, confront your deepest fears. Stop playing small. Shine out in all of your brilliance. Give yourself permission to be all that you can be in 2020.

 

What Story Will This Year Add to Your Life?

 

They say that we all have at least one book inside of us.  It could be a biography; a cookbook; gardening; crafts; fiction or nonfiction.  You could write science fiction, mystery, comedy, drama and so on.  You might have overcome tragedy and write about how you did it.  All kinds of ideas can come creeping inside of your head on what you would want to pass on to the next generation.  Lessons learns that can help others live a happier more fulfilled life.

Your entire life journey ultimately consists of the steps you are taking at this very moment – S. Williams

You might look at the goal of writing a book and shrink back.  It’s going to take a lot of time and sacrifice to write.  It might not be, no – it definitely won’t be any good.  The publishers will reject it and then I will have wasted all of that time and effort.  You might come up with a million reasons and excuses on why not – but what if you did it for the one right reason?  What reason?

You have a story to tell

What if this year is different and you choose to tell it?  How could you make it happen?  How do you make any kind of big hairy audacious goal happen?  The same way the joke says that you eat an elephant – one bite at a time.

A pivot to me is an about movement.  A turning point.  A radical way of viewing something that expands your universe as well as your personal space.  It is the realization that we are all the same, yet at the same time you have the ability to be your own unique person.  It is the understanding that one size does not fit all, and you have the gift of being able to alter any situation into one that does fit the one of a kind “YOU”.

Your vision helps you focus on your dreams – Chris D Costello

So, what is your big dream?

• Writing a book?
• Making a change in your career?
• Going back to school?
• Moving someplace far away?
• Traveling to see the world?
• What is on your bucket list?

What’s holding you back?

The typical answers are time and money.  You might have one but not the other.  But that isn’t really what is holding you back.  Fear is what does it.

Chase one rabbit at a time

There is a proverb that says that if you chase two rabbits, you won’t catch either one.  Maybe one of the issues with New Year’s Resolutions is that we are all chasing more than one rabbit?

That’s what I love about the idea of changing the time frame from a yearly resolution to a smaller time frame.  You can chase one rabbit at a time.

So, this year try something new.  Take your goal, your big hairy audacious goal, and put it into bite size chunks.

It could be one week at a time, four weeks at a time; twelve weeks at a time – you decide what works for you.  Say for example you want to write a book.  Start with a story line – Who is your hero?  Your protagonist?  What are their stories?  Their dreams of life and their failures.  Sketch them out – families, school, work, friends.

Focus means:  F-ollow;  O-ne;  C-ourse;  U-ntil;  S-uccess – Unknown

Start with a three-hour block of time per week.  You can have one three-hour block of time, or three one-hour blocks.  Do what you know you can commit to.

Keep a notebook with you to write down thoughts and ideas as they occur to you.  Write down your dreams the minute you wake up, because your subconscious is going to start working in your favor.  It’s going to give you whole scenes to write down.

Your story is based on who you become in your lifetime.  It is based on small decisions and large ones.  It is based on what life throws your way and what you throw back.  It is based on what you create out of what you have been given.

When I was first married my husband went to an auction with one of his friends.  He came home with a box.  It was a random box of stuff that they auctioned unopened.  Inside was stuff you probably would have thrown away and not even given to the goodwill.

What can I make out of this?

I was mad at first that he wasted his money.  Then I became determined to do something positive and useful with this box of stuff.  I took apart all of the material from the clothes inside the box and created a baby quilt out of it for our first child.  I still think of that today whenever life has given me a box of stuff, I think I can’t use.  I take it apart and say, now what can I make out of this?

When I dare to be powerful – to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid – Audre Lorde

• What is your vision?
• What is your three most critical things to do with your life this year?
• What is your plan to get it done?
• As time passes, how is your focus on getting it done?

What distractions and obstacles are showing up in your life at this moment?

From a solution perspective, how do you live your life on purpose?  A key ingredient is knowing when to pivot, to rethink your plan, while still accomplishing your goals.  It’s a new year – you have made some plans, goals, or resolutions for this year, is it time to pivot? To rethink your plan?

Don’t waste any more time

Don’t waste any more time avoiding your dreams or thinking that they are impossible. Pick them up and make them a priority.

Need some ideas to unlock your potential?  Contact us.

Find Your Missing Puzzle Piece To Living A Life Of Purpose

 

“A vision is not just a picture of what could be; it is an appeal to our better selves, a call to become something more” – Rosabeth Moss Kanter

When you are living a life on purpose, what does that really mean?  You see yourself on a journey to accomplish something that is important to you.  Say for example that you want to run a marathon.  You set a goal of getting up every morning at 4 AM to run before you go to work.

Now you and I know that there are going to be mornings when you don’t want to get out of bed.  When you promise yourself that you will just sleep in this one time and that you will run when you get home instead.  But of course, when you get home, you have so many things to do that evening that you are too tired to run.

When your will power runs dry, what then?

Your actions will always, be 100% congruent with your thinking.  So, if you set a goal to run a marathon, and you set up a plan of how much running you must do in order to complete the marathon – yet you find yourself not getting up at 4 AM as planned, then your thinking is not congruent with your goals.

“You have to have a lot of passion for what you are doing because it is so hard …, if you don’t, any rational person would give up” – Steve Jobs

You need a change of thinking.  You need a breakthrough.  A breakthrough is a natural result of a shift in your thinking.  You suddenly connect past, present, future into a thought that sheds light on something you never saw before.  When you have a breakthrough, it feels as though the DNA in your body has changed every single cell.  Like one moment you knew who you were.  Then the next moment you are someone totally new.  You realize that you can never go back to what you were before.

Shifting your mindset can create opportunities that you never imagined were possible.  Many times, it happens when you run out of ideas.  When you hit the wall.  When you finally let go and let God.  It clarifies and simplifies everything.  It’s like the spotlight appears out of the darkness and shows you the way home.  You become more of who you are supposed to be.

Become more of who you are supposed to be

“Awareness is not a giver of solace – it is just the opposite.  It is a disturber and an awakener” – Robert K Greenleaf

It is kind of funny what happens when you wake up and become aware of how simple life can really be.  You are full of plans to run the marathon.  You are taking action.  Then something happens, and everything changes.

• Do you give up?
• Do you throw in the towel?
• Or do you do something outside the box?
• Something risky – something you’ve never tried and aren’t really sure can work?

Your “WHY” is what creates a compelling vision for your life of purpose

How does your “WHY” relate to the vision you have created?  Your “WHY” is what creates a compelling vision for your life of purpose.  It will clearly capture and establish an emotional connection to keep you on purpose to your vision.

It gets you up at 4 AM excited to go running, even in the rain or when you are just too tired to even press the snooze button.  Your “WHY” is the means to get you to the end result – running in that marathon.

Around 20 years ago, in the month of January, my middle son got engaged.  They set the date to get married in August.  I was so happy for them.  I wanted to pay for their dream honeymoon.  I contacted the travel agent they were working with and got all of the details.  I sat down and planned it out exactly how I could pay for it.

“Hold the vision.  Trust the process” – Unknown

A couple of weeks later they decided to move the date to May.  I was devastated.  I could see no way to pay for it in time.  I decided to try something new I had learned about at a real estate seminar.  I sat down and wrote out a letter expressing how happy I was that I could pay for their honeymoon.  How they had the best time at their dream destination.

About two weeks later I got a phone call out of the blue about 10 acres that we owned in rural Upstate New York.  The neighbors across the street wanted to purchase the property for cash and they were ready to close it immediately.  We settled on the price and two weeks later I had the exact amount needed to pay for the honeymoon.

Want to learn how to do the same thing?

How did this happen?  I created a compelling vision of what I wanted to do.  Not how it would get done.  I captured all of the emotions involved in being able to do this for my son and his new wife.  It created an emotional connection to my vision.  It opened doors I didn’t even know existed.  Want to learn how to do the same thing?

“If you are working on something exciting that you really care about, you don’t have to be pushed.  The vision pulls you” – Steven Jobs

I know that if someone gives me something I may or may not make the time to actually do the work. But if someone takes the time to work with me through the material, I get some action and forward momentum started. So, take this small first step for 2022.  Create something personally designed just for you!

If you want some ideas and brainstorming, contact me via LemonadeMakers.

Launch Yourself on Every Wave

 

Life, like surfing, is all about wave selection and balance. Never let the best waves in life pass you by. Ride it now before it’s too late – Kiteboardstuff.com

I believe that your dreams, your true dreams, are given to you at birth.  That you are designed to grow and stretch beyond what you think you are capable of.

That you were given heroes journeys to push you to accomplish the dreams.  That those dreams are what make you passionate and give you a life of purpose.

I think of people who are adventurers and broke open new journeys you didn’t even know you could go on.  People like the Wright Brothers, who pioneered the ability to fly.  Pilots like Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart who created and broke records in pioneering flight.  Amelia Earhart said, “What do dreams know of boundaries?”

She had true unfaltering determination and pushed her limits.  She said, “when you fail, your failure must be but a challenge to others”.  I love the concept of my failures actually serving as something positive – to challenge others to succeed in their own dreams.

You don’t get into something to test the waters.  You get into things to make waves – Rituals

Every year there are new tech companies that are creating a new cutting-edge business or disrupting an industry.  Right now, someone is launching themselves in trying to fulfill a dream they never thought they could accomplish.  The really critical thing is to not give up on your dream as being too far beyond your capability to accomplish.

When someone decided one day that they wanted to be a mountain climber, they didn’t just walk out the door and climb a mountain.

• They got training in how to use the equipment
• They got training both in the body and the mind, to equip them for the journey.
• They started with small mountains and worked their way up to the bigger ones.
• They joined a club with others who like that sport, becoming a member of a team.
• They fell down, got back up and fell down again and again, until they started reaching mastery.

It is done step by step, day by day, year by year.

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance – Alan Watts

You have to grow and expand your comfort zone again and again.  You have to have the trust that you deserve to fulfill the dream.  You work hard to get the skills that are necessary to make it happen.  You learn to trust yourself and your team.

Change is part of the dance of your life.  You learn to trust the dream as it shifts, changes and transforms too.

Sometimes as you are moving towards the dream, it is like driving through fog.  All you can see is the next 10 feet in front of you.  You travel towards what you see and as you travel, you see farther and farther.  You might see what you thought was a mailbox on the side of road shift into something else as you get clearer eyesight.

This is because your brains will take what little you can see or decipher, and basically guess at what you are seeing based on past knowledge. But as you get more clarity by pursuing the dream it seems to shift its shape into something totally different.

It’s not so much that the dream is changing as it is that you are getting a better understanding about what the dream really is.  Each problem that you encounter and solve changes you.  Each change brings the dream into more clarity.

You begin to realize that there are 50 different ways you can achieve your dream.  That your expectations around the dream are what is really changing, not the dream itself.  You begin to truly imagine the possibilities of the dream.

The big waves in life might come from outside of you, but the ability to ride them comes from inside of you – from your character strengths – Fatima Doman

Over and over again you can see the concept of “as above, so below”.

The teaching of the tree of your life reaching high into the heavens and deep below the surface with the roots.  Life is not lived in one direction only.  If you are reaching only for the sky and neglect your roots, the imbalance in your life may create temporary success, but will inevitably fall over.  And if you only feed the roots and neglect reaching for the heavens, then you won’t produce anything positive in your life.

It is the combination of inner and outer growth that leads to true lasting success.

I love the concept of “together we are an ocean”.  If you are interested, I can help you learn how to create your own personalized dream map, claim your own unique goals of change and transformation; refine them into goal crushing gremlins; and finally, to truly understand what your motivation around those goals is all about.

It’s not just about writing some words on a piece of paper that says in 30 days I will . . . ,   It’s not just about creating a vision board with pretty pictures of our dream house, vacations, our dream body or $1M in our bank account, and then waiting for the “magic” to draw in what we want in our lives.

You need to brainstorm your way to make your dreams a reality.  To map out your detours around your own unique self-sabotaging obstacles, and finally be able to fully implement your plan.

What I know for sure is that you will hit walls of failure, fatigue.  At some point you will get that feeling that “Life happens to you”, when it really is happening for you.  It will feel like when you are getting hit with a sledgehammer.  It helps to have a few tricks up your sleeves to handle those times, so that they just create slowdowns.  Just don’t give up and stop completely.

As a kid did you ever play the game Red Light/Green Light?  You had someone who called out Red Light for Stop and Green Light for Go.  The goal was to reach the finish line first.  Let’s change that game just a little.