This Is The Part Where You Find Out Who You Are

Revised 4/14/22

“It is not who you are that holds you back, it’s who you think you’re not” – Denis Waitley

I was recently talking to my coach about my book that is being published this summer.  It is a collection of 90 of my posts and it will be called, ‘Timeless Treasures for Today’s Living’.  We were talking about how to promote the book and she was telling me of something that she had read about another author.  They had created a program, where if you bought 50 books, you became an ambassador of the book and author.  In return she included a bunch of bonus items wrapped around some personal coaching calls, her monthly subscription program etc…

The first thought in my mind was I am not worth someone spending that much money on me.  No one would think that what I have is that valuable.

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent” – Eleanor Roosevelt

This quote includes not letting your own negative mind talk make you feel inferior.  Immediately check those thoughts of being unworthy.  What was so interesting is that I had been looking for new graphics for a post, and I saw this picture with her hand on the mirror and looking away.  I felt immediately called to write about self-love.  My intuition was telling me that another layer of not accepting who I am was about to be revealed.

You wouldn’t let anyone tell you that you’re not worthy or capable of doing whatever is in your heart to do.  So why would you allow your inner negative critic to do so?

It used to take me awhile to recognize that “Cami” was running my mind and was in control of my thoughts.  I named my negative mind talker Cami, because she is so good at camouflaging herself.  She sneaks into random thoughts, inserts herself into conversations and just all around makes a pest of herself.  Cami and I journal together sometimes.  I will write down a question for her, and then just detach from the answer and wait for her to tell me what to write down.  She comes from a place of fear.  She puts the worst interpretations on everything.

Have you ever been at work, just minding your own business and you get a call to go into your boss’s office?  What is the first thought that comes into your head?  Is it, “Oh no!  What is wrong?  What did I mess up?  Am I going to get fired?”  And then you go into your boss’s office, and they just have some random question for you?  That is your own internal Cami at work.

“The happiness of your life depends on the quality of your thoughts” – Marcus Aurelius

Your Cami is just trying to protect you.  She is afraid of everything.  She criticizes you to keep you within her designed comfort zone.  Within that zone she controls the world and keeps you safe.

The problem is that you’re busy expanding that zone.  You’re busy learning new things.  You have dreams that you want to grow.  So, when you are looking for ways to expand your own comfort zones, you will need to confront, reason, and work with your own version of Cami.

“Embrace the glorious mess that you are” – Elizabeth Gilbert

The quickest way to bring your own Cami around to your way of thinking is to take what you want to do in steps.  Kind of like when you take a small child to learn to swim.  First you hold them and get their feet wet.  Then they would stand, and you would walk out deeper and deeper into the water.  Each step is a new victory.

The only way to be confident of your own talents, gifts and abilities is to do what you are afraid to do.  So, make your Cami a deal.  You will walk so far and then you will talk and negotiate a new distance to explore.  Eventually you will have her swimming in the deep end of the pool with a new comfort zone.

If you try to bulldoze her, she will trick you.  Like being lost in the forest, you will walk in circles. You will think that you are making progress, but little things will keep drawing you further and further away from your chosen destination.

Have you ever had a day, where you planned out this list of things that you were going to get done – yet you find yourself 12 hours later, exhausted and you only were able to cross off 1 thing?

That is your Cami at work again.  Bright shiny objects grab your attention.  A sudden desire to clean out a closet.  You went to the grocery store just to buy milk and you came home with a months’ worth of groceries 3 hours later.  Cami struck again.

“I am strong because I know my weaknesses.  I am beautiful because I am aware of my flaws.  I am fearless, because I learnt to recognize illusion from real.  I am wise because I learn from my mistakes, I am a lover because I have felt hate.  And I can laugh because I have known sadness” – Unknown

By trial and error, you too can find a way to deal with your Cami.  Maybe like me you will learn to journal and negotiate with her.  Maybe you will be successful with willpower and bulldoze your Cami into submission.

There are over 80 different kinds of hammers.  Most of us are familiar with one kind.

Now you can use that hammer for a multitude of projects, and sometimes it will sort of work out.  You might have a few dents, scratches, dings, but you will have a finished product.  Or you could use the right kind of hammer, and end up with a beautiful work of art.

Take the time to learn who your Cami is.  What she is afraid of.  How she wants to communicate with you.  Learn how to reassure her.  Appreciate that she is doing what she thinks is the right thing, based on your own past experiences.

• What are your dreams, visions, your life purpose?
• Are you on track to bring them into reality and complete them?
• Have you allowed distractions to sidetrack you?
• Are you unclear on what your life purpose is or how to bring it into reality?

If you want some assistance to name your Cami, to discover who he/she is – contact us.  We are here for you.  Keep trying to find the right hammer for your progress.

Notions of Grief

Notions is a word that reminds me of creative arts.  Sewing, paper arts, crocheting/knitting and so on. Tools that you use to make something beautiful and wonderful.

The dictionary says notion is also: “a conception of or belief about something,” and/or “an impulse or desire, especially one of a whimsical kind.”

In the case of this quote a notion is a belief about what grief is all about.  It isn’t something that is just outside of you – or inside of you.  It’s both about how you are inside of yourself and how you impact the world outside of yourself.

It’s about vision, both internal and external.  And like looking through a kaleidoscope, what you see outside of you changes each time you turn the mechanism inside.  For you, each of those moving pieces inside the kaleidoscope are made up of your personal stories.

• the stories you tell yourself about who you are – your definition of who you see yourself as being, your self-worth.
• the stories you tell yourself about your experiences in life – did they happen to you or for you?
• the stories you tell yourself about the roles you have in your life – do they reflect the true you are or they an act?
• the stories you tell yourself about what your potential is – are you living up to it or running away from it?

In a recent article in the Washington Post, they were discussing political views around Russia in a recent poll.

“It goes to show you that in terms of public opinion, people remain in their silos” Vera Zaken, an expert on the intersection between information and foreign policy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me.  “They’re going to believe whatever truth or disinformation fits their views.”

I thought this was so interesting in how we all live our lives.  We live them filtering out anything that doesn’t support our beliefs.  It’s as though we don’t hear or see anything that contradicts our worldview.  Like we have this force field bubble around ourselves that bounces out any contrary beliefs, thoughts and only lets in what will confirm our beliefs.

This is what change, loss, and grief is about.  It’s an opportunity to examine your beliefs.  To peek out of the filters that keep you confined in your comfort zone.  To see the possibilities of something else.  To see the potential that is waiting right across that line of the comfort zone.  To admit in new truths and let go of whatever no longer serves you.

Like shedding an old skin, the process of grieving requires you to transform your life.  To alter in some way, from who you used to be into a new person, a new self-definition.

These beliefs you protect are really all about who you have been told all of your life that you are.

• Smart – or not smart.
• Pretty – or not pretty.
• You let others in – or you keep them from getting close.
• What you draw your meaning in life from – a job, a spouse, a parent, etc…,

Watch any good detective mystery show.  The main character is always a flawed hero in some way.  Yes, they catch the bad guy, but their motivation to do so comes from a brokenness.  Going back to the main quote, whatever happened to you, became an altered part of you.

One of my favorite stories, is about how you throw a rock out into the water.  It creates ripples that expand out to every part of the shore, until slowly the ripples fade back into the still calm water of the lake.  It looks like nothing happened.  The lake has the same water line, as the rock wasn’t large enough to create an impact to the water levels.  Yet the lake has forever been changed, as at the bottom lies a rock that wasn’t there before.

The stories you tell yourself about your life are like that rock.  Each story is created by the impact of that rock as it breached the surface of you, the lake.  As time passes, the ripples of grief you experienced die down and everyone around you thinks you are fine.  You even think that you are fine.  But you are changed forever by the rock that impacted you.

You experience a form a grief for every rock.  Some rocks are very small – someone hurt your feelings.  Others are larger, like losing a job, or not getting the promotion you worked so hard to get.  Then you have a huge boulders of grief from the death of a loved one or a divorce.

Some rocks are just part of life, like the kids going off to college or moving out to get married.  Retirement.  Things that are part of “normal” life experiences, that aren’t viewed as life altering but really are.  Because what they do, is alter or change how you view yourself.

The empty nester wonders who am I, if I no longer have kids to mother on a daily moment by moment basis?  The retired person wonders who am I if I am not “this job title”?  They both wonder what do I do with the rest of my life?  What is my purpose if I am no longer …, (what I have identified myself as)?

These rocks are not problems to be solved.  There is no mystery to them.  They are just the reality of your life.  These rocks are experiences that shape who you are.  It is what you do with the rocks that matter.

So, enter into the world of unfiltered “what if’s” – take out a piece of paper and write down 4 things that have happened to you recently.  And start writing out possibilities of what you can paint on your rock.

• What if…,
• What if…,
• What if…,
• What if…,

The easiest way to do this is through imagination and curiosity.  Take any experience that happened to you from conception through the age of 18 that you believe has impacted your life in some way.

If you are really honest with yourself, you will be able to find some silver lining to any experience.  I read years ago something that has profoundly changed how I view all such experiences and it was around forgiveness.  It took me a long while to incorporate this into my belief systems, because for many years it was just too big of a leap.

It is around the concept of how you come to earth to experience things.  And you travel in this soul group, there are members that volunteer to be the catalyst for some of your life experiences.  How that person loved you so much, they volunteered to provide either the negative or positive experience required as part of living your purpose here on earth.  The author stated that if you can find yourself in this space, then you can honestly say “thank you” for what happened.  It incorporates the saying, “life happens for you, not to you.”

What this belief allowed me to see was a different way of looking at what I have experienced in my life.  From there I could see how each thing in my life has built upon what was already there.  If some of those “steps” had been missing, then I wouldn’t have made it through some of the harder things.  It was like I was being trained for an Iron Man – each thing strengthened some part of me.  I didn’t see the patterns of strength training being connected, but when I look backwards, I can see how everything is connected.

When you see how everything is connected, what you realize is that removing any piece would cause the whole construct to fall apart.  Each piece however painful at the time, was necessary.

When you first start training for an Iron Man, you probably experience sore muscles.  You probably received blisters.  You experienced the moment when you thought you couldn’t take one more step, and then broke through a barrier and found you could go another mile.

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet.  Only through experience of trail and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired and success achieved – Helen Keller

What if…, every time I experienced a breakdown, I smiled and started celebrating the breakthrough?

Transformation Is Not One And Done

Transformation isn’t a one and done kind of thing.  The butterfly is used as a pretty common analogy for transformation.  The caterpillar building the chrysalis and emerging is the common use.

But did you know that the transformation for the caterpillar begins much sooner?  Monarch Butterfly caterpillars’ lives are divided into 5 instars – this is the time it takes to outgrown one skin and burst into a new one.

This is where choice comes in – do you simply shed a skin, and move seamlessly into your new stage of growth, or do you fight the moment of growth.  Do you try to stay in your comfort zone so long that you burst through your current comfort zone?  Bursting sounds a little messy and very painful.

One way or the other you will change.

For example, you may have outgrown your current position at work.  Or you may hate your job, but you have those golden handcuffs on, in that you make too much money to leave.  It doesn’t matter if you love or hate your job, the time has come to move on and expand into your full potential.

Shedding your skin means that you are proactive and look for the next position, either within your current company or outside of it.  Bursting your skin means that you leave in the worst possible way, either getting fired or quitting in a temper.

When you shed your skin by bursting it, it leaves you to clean up a mess.  I had one job in which it took weeks before I had worked through the bad emotions and was capable of updating my resume and getting into looking for a job.  It took much longer to work through the lessons learned from bursting my skin.

Each time you expand your comfort zone you develop new skills and grow your own internal gifts.  I took a job once that I thought was going to finally help me break through being a senior loan processor and become an underwriter.  That was how the job was sold to me.

I started work and in addition to processing loans they had me review, edit and complete a manual that they used for mortgage brokers that sent their loans to this company to be sold to them.

I worked hard on the manual and upon completion the company that I worked for decided they needed to downsize and laid me off.  I was devasted and angry that I had worked so hard on that manual.  I felt like I have been used up and thrown away.

I wasn’t able to find another position in the San Diego area because interest rates had increased, and everyone was laying off people.  I ended up having to relocate to find work.

What I realize when I looked back at this time is that I was being pushed into a new comfort zone.  When I relocated, I was hired as an underwriter.

The savings and loan I worked for needed a servicing manual, so I wrote one for them.  They needed training done for their loan officers in their many branches, so I wrote out a program of training and trained them.  I ended up teaching classes at South Seattle Community College for the bank for loan processors and loan officers.

All of these skills I had acquired at that job in San Diego.  Without that job, I wouldn’t have had the skills or the confidence to step up to those opportunities.  When you shed a skin or burst a skin you have the opportunity to grow of stagnate.  To take on a new color, or stripe, or to shrivel up and remain where you are.

When you shed a skin or burst one, it can take time to grow into who you are becoming at this stage.  You may need recovery time.  It could be that where you are living now is not where the next opportunity is for you to grow into who you are becoming.  You need to allow the space and time for things to unfold.

When the butterfly at last crawls out of the chrysalis it needs to take the time to pump its wet crumpled wings.  It can take up to 12 hours or more before it is ready to take its first flight.

When you consider that the adult butterfly’s life is between 15-50 days, that 12 hours takes on a whole new meaning. It is not a short period of time for the butterfly.  It is like months of time.

Learning and adaptation are how you embrace and absorb new skills.  And as you learn and adapt you need to let go of the old way of doing things.

A baby first learns to roll over.  Then to crawl.  Then to stand up.  And at last, to take that first step.

Trial and error are involved.  Failure is a given.  But with hard work, resilience, and determination progress is made to go from that initial learning to roll over to running.

• Sometimes, that time and space you need to allow yourself means that you are required to take on new knowledge, such as going back to school.
• Sometimes, it means that you are taking a lateral job move instead of an upward job move.
• Sometimes, it means that you are taking a position that is lower than what you previously had.

To shed a skin requires a mind shift and an identity shift.

We all have the habit of identifying ourselves with our job, our position. We give ourselves a label that describes who we are.

This means that in each of these periods of growth, you are required to let go of “who you think you are” and reinvent yourself.  You need a new label.

What happens is that as you try to stretch and challenge yourself, you’ll have a really hard time finding anyone to talk about it.  Someone who can understand your new level.  Every time you get into a creative space, something transformative will happen.  As Alice said, “I knew who I was this morning, but I have changed a few times since then”.

“Explore the things that shake you up as well as the things that bring you joy,” says writer Alexandra Elle, the author of the guided journal In Courage. “When you stay curious, you can become your own greatest teacher.”

Richard Powers shared that at its root the word “bewilderment” actually means “to head out into the wild”.

• It’s time for you to shake up your understanding of that word and to head out into the wild yourself.
• To shift your perspective of the world around you.
• To feel a little unmoored, so that you look at things in a new way.
• To lose your certainty and remove your head from the sand.

So, this week I’m inviting you to be bewildered. To let go of your certainty and your self-protectiveness and to come alive to the world’s magic. I wish you grace. I wish you peace, and a great week everybody—bewildered.

Bridging The Gap Between Knowledge And Action

Revised 1/12/22

The biggest gap in your life is between what you know and what you do – Bob Proctor

It is up to you to be a prisoner of your past, by remaining in it; or to be a champion of your future by building it. If your life path was to travel from one of these formations in the above photo, to the next one and so on to the end, how would you do it?

You could anchor yourself and rappel down the mountain, then walk to the next peak and scale up that peak.  Then cross the peak, rappel down the mountain and repeat over and over again.

We are human.  We are not perfect.  We are alive.  We try things.  We make mistakes.  We stumble.  We fall. We get hurt.  We rise again.  We try again.  We keep learning.  We keep growing.  And we are thankful for this priceless opportunity called life – Unknown

Or, you could become a bridge builder.  You could build a temporary bridge out of ropes or wood, or a bridge designed with stone or steel that would last for many years.

Living Your Life From A Place Of Curiosity

Albert Einstein traced the root of his accomplishments to curiosity.  What triggered Sir Isaac Newton to discover gravity from a falling apple, as apples had been falling from trees hundreds of years.  Had no one ever got curious as to why the apples fell in a downward motion?  How much of the world around you, do you observe with wonder?

Awe is a part of wonder and curiosity.  Psychology Today has described awe as “an overwhelming, self-transcendent sense of wonder and reverence in which you feel a part of something that is vast, larger than you and that transcends your understanding of the world.”

Taking a walk in nature can result in being awestruck.  I love that word.  If I am going to be struck with something, please let it be awe.  To suddenly see something with new eyes will send you off with a sense of adventure.  To me it is like the photo of these two boys.  They will question everything they see.  They haven’t yet entered into the age where they think they already know everything.  They will ask a lot of “why” questions seeking to understand.  They will see things in a different way, because they don’t yet know the “rules” of how something is supposed to work.  And that is where the sense of discovery, wonder, and curiosity begins.  It is the beginning of an adventure.

“Noticing the world as constantly changing can help us dance with the flow of life.” – Sarah Jane Shangraw

In reading an issue of Mindfulness Magazine, they stated the following steps in taking a walk in nature what will bring “awe” into your life.

• turn off the electronics on your person.
• believe you are going to experience awe during your walk
• use all of your senses in discovering that sense of awe
• go someplace different – a new park, or a different path
• look at the details, see the veins of the leaves, the depressions in the bark or look up into the higher branches instead of just seeing what’s at eye lever
• slow down, powerwalking is not a voyage of discovery
• pay attention to the details, listen into what you thought was silence and hear the breeze stir the leaves, rattle the branches or hear the small creatures digging into a hiding place

Curiosity and exploration floods your brains with dopamine, which makes you feel happier.  It gives you higher levels of positive emotions, lower levels of anxiety, and greater satisfaction with your life.  It’s a skill that can be developed. It is a habit of applying wonder, and feeding your desire to learn more.

Curious people want to try new things – so next time you go to a restaurant, try a food you have never eaten before.  Curiosity begins with asking questions.  In searching for different answers.  In making a new or different connection.  In taking what you discover and using it to make sense of your newly expanded world.

“Becoming happier is one of the most vital and momentous things that you can do for yourself and those around you.”  – Sonja Lyumbomirsky

Some adults think that asking questions somehow implies they lack knowledge.  But what I have found through the years, especially with the meanings and emotions triggered by words, is that there are a lot of words that I think are communicating one thing, but were received as another.  Words can have more than one meaning.  So I try to communicate what I have to say, using a lot of examples and analogy’s.  Then I watch how it lands.  If it seems to have landed wrong, I then use another analogy.  I keep doing this until I know that what I meant, is what is understood.  I ask a lot of questions, seeking understanding and connection.

Asking yourself the right questions can make a huge difference in how happy you are.  We can train our brain to look for answers by asking it to focus on a certain task.  If you ask yourself these three key questions everyday, your brain will step outside of the negative self judging that your mind tracks down.  These questions will help rewire your brain to focus on the positive.

• What have I done well in the last 24 hrs? (Celebrate it!)
• What is one thing I want to improve in the next 24 hrs? (Discover, investigate from a place of curiosity, not judgment)
• What is one action step I can take to help make this happen? (Curiosity, ask more “how” questions)

Curiosity is a strength within the virtue category of wisdom, one of the six virtues as described in Positive Psychology.  The other strengths in the wisdom category are creativity, judgment, love of learning and perspective.  According to Wharton University, curiosity has a genetic component, which can be grown or limited according to ones environment.

NASA’s rover on Mars is named Curiosity.  She’s been on Mars since 2012 and since her battery is thought to be able to last for only 14 years, she’s nearing the end of her lifespan.   NASA is looking for answers by collecting data on Mars.

It will certainly be interesting to see what they discover in that adventure – answers they were looking for – did Mars ever have the proper conditions for life to survive.  So far they’ve discovered that Mars had sulfur, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and carbon – all key ingredients for life.  What things will be discovered that no one knew to ask?

From Britannica Curiosity Compass, “10 Ways to Improve Your Curiosity”

• Power up your passion – doing what you love keeps those curiosity juices flowing
• Ask awesome questions – “tell me more about that”, “why do you believe that or why is that important to you” – then listen with an open mind/heart
• Teach and be taught – ask about someone’s most treasured memory, their biggest passion, favorite hobby – all of which helps you to “know” something about someone.  It stirs your curiosity to learn more.  It opens doors to others teaching you something new, to learn about something in a new way
• Connect the dots – how can you use the fundamentals from a game or the basic elements of cooking in other areas of your life?
• Walk it out – taking a walk stirs your natural curiosity and stimulates your senses
• Get uncomfortable – Try something new.  Push yourself to do the thing you are scared of trying.
• Embrace thine enemy – Part of being a critical thinker is understanding the other persons viewpoint – argue both for and against all of your beliefs.  You will gain empathy and learn something new about your own beliefs.
• Tech Time-out – play a musical instrument; drawing; cooking; any hobby that doesn’t involved a screen.
• Explore your environment – walk in a new direction; check out a park; hike in the woods.  Get to know something new.
• Mirror, Mirror on the wall…, – Reflection is also an important part of having a curious mind.  Through reflection comes a higher understanding and brings you even more curiosity.

Curiosity makes your brain more receptive for learning.  It is like a muscle and the more you use it the stronger your mind becomes.  When you are curious, your mind expects and anticipates new ideas related to what you are curious about.

One of my favorite things about Jim Rohn was when he would get this look on his face, with his hand on his chin and say, “I wonder what happens next?”  It was his way of not going into negative emotions when something you might judge as a bad experience happened.  He used the analogy, when someone cuts you off driving down the road – instead of getting angry, say “I wonder what happens next?”  I started saying, “Thank you for getting in front of me, because you are in a hurry and I don’t want to be the person you rear end when you follow to close.”  This is because I have been rear-ended several times and gotten hurt twice.  So I am truly grateful when this kind of driver passes me, even if he is cutting me off.

So using curiosity, and “I wonder what happens next?” thinking – what things happen in your life, could you turn around from a negative experience?  How instead, could you turn it around, staying calm and centered in wonder?

Life is full of change.  Seasons change.  You change.  Use the fall season to complete and release what no longer serves you.  Use the winter season to rest, digest and restore yourself.  Use the spring season to get curious about what new things can you seed into your life to grow you as a person.  Use the summer season as a time to harvest the new beginnings that you started in the spring.

So go on some new adventures.  Ask open ended questions.  Listen intently and ask others why this is so important to them?  Give others experiences instead of things.  Learn a new hobby.  Go on long walks, listening, looking, smelling, – using all of the senses to discover what you have missed.  Live a full, happy life!

The Darkness You Go Through Defines Your Light

Are you a half empty glass or a half full glass kind of person?  I think that neither one of those statements are true.   I don’t believe in either or statements.

I think that the truth is always contained in an “all of the above” kind of answer.  I think that every answer depends on the situation and the day it happens.  Sometimes you will view your life through your limitations and sometimes you view it through your strengths.  It’s all up to you and the choices you make.  Your emotions will always be the colors of how you see your life.

Sometimes you will allow your limitations to rule your emotions.  What if it is your limitations that make your story have real value in helping someone else in their own life journey?  When you think about the “feel good” books, movies, stories that we love to watch and listen to – isn’t that what makes the heroes journey so amazing?  The fact that they were able to rise above the limitation?  It’s what separates your story from simply being an “ordinary boy meets girl, falls in love and marries to live happy ever after” kind of story.

There is no growth of character in that story.  It is the overcoming of the obstacles to true love that gives the story a reward.  If Snow White had no wicked stepmother that was jealous and wanted her dead; if Sleeping Beauty wasn’t cursed by the evil fairy; if the Little Mermaid didn’t foolishly trade her voice for legs with the Sea Hag; all of those wonderful stories we grew up with wouldn’t have survived through the centuries.  It is the drama of overcoming the limitations that feeds our souls, not just the “happy ever after” ending.

It is from the damage you have had in your life, that the gold within you is purified.  It is the refining of your soul through life’s fires that makes it into pure gold and shines out brightly for others to see.

“The light you’re seeking out there is already within you.  You hold the light of millions of stars inside your own beating heart.  Stardust runs through your veins and comets shine through your eyes…, My beautiful friend, no one can dull your spark because it comes from within you, it’s yours.  Your spark comes from being wildly yourself; it comes from accepting yourself – strengths and flaws and all.  It comes from being the person that you’ve always wanted to be.  And the more you align with your heart, the more you allow your true light to shine.” – Nikki Banas

It isn’t that some people are heroes and others are not.  It is in the overcoming of the obstacles, the living through the adversity to the other side, that you are revealed as a hero.  It is in the doing of the thing that you thought you couldn’t that your inner strength is revealed.

J.K. Rowling said, that if she had succeeded in anything else, her true calling would never have been called forth.  The one place that she belonged, would never have been uncovered.  So when you think that you’re just a failure, think again.  It simply means you are still revealing who you really are and what you were born to do.  Failure is simply a matter of opening the wrong door.   Keep walking down the hallway and trying more doors.

Adversity is a stepping stone, not a stumbling block.  Boiling water soften potatoes and hardens eggs.  It’s not about the water boiling, it’s about who you are and what you are made of.  You have the strength to be a shining star in the dark night.  Just keep taking one more step.  Don’t look at how far you still have to go.  Just keep taking one more step and give it all you  have.  You can do this!

“People are like stained-glass windows…, when darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”  – Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Just remember each time you made it to the goal line.  Each time you climbed another mountain.  Each time you were defeated and got back up again.  It is in the conquering the challenge, that you begin to understand just how strong you are.  Every time a doubt enters your mind, think of all of the times you conquered a similar doubt.  Every time a fear tries to stop you in your tracks, think of all of the other fears that you have walked through.

A really good friend of mine has a different kind of bucket list.  His list isn’t of the places he wants to see, or the things he wants to do.  It’s a list of the things that he’s afraid to do.  And every year he crosses out one or more things on that list.  He loves the feeling of conquering a fear.  It gives his life a special meaning.  It lights him up.  He sails high on the adrenaline rush for months afterwards.

“Do the things that light you up from the inside out.  Write that book that you want to see written.  Make the pottery that you want sitting on your shelf.  Cook the delicious meals that you want to enjoy.  Fill your walls with art that you adore.  You are meant to live your life beautifully and entirely yours.  You are meant to fill it with all of the colors and art and wonderful things that fill you with delight…, You are meant to live in a way that lights you up from the inside out.” – Nikki Banas

Are you living through a challenge right now?  Get excited about it.  Get passionate about fighting for your dreams.  About living your passion.  About tearing down the barriers.  About crossing the line and living the life that scares you.  Discover what you are made of.  Broaden your horizons.  Learn something new.  Experience something that scares you and makes you heart beat faster just thinking about it.  Create a bucket list that challenges you and changes you.

“Be a warrior.  Fight for what you believe in and never, ever hold back.  Fiercely go towards your dreams with boldness and lust.  Hold your ground in the face of conflict.  Knock barriers down with courage and grace.  Do not give up when you find yourself face to face to an obstacle, instead continue forward with abandon.  Keep the fire in your heart burning strong and do not ever let your flame fade away.  Remind yourself that what you are fighting for is worth it.  And remember that you will overcome everything that comes your way – because my beautiful friend, you are a warrior.” – Nikki Banas

This Letter Is To You

I love that we are all the same at certain points in our lives.  No one is perfect.  No one lives a life without getting scars, both the kind you can see and the kind that no one is allowed to see.  There are days when you feel all alone.  But in truth you never are alone.  Not in what you are going through.  Not in how you feel.

When the storm is raging through your life, there is that moment of calm, right before it all blows away.  The sun comes out and the winds blow away all of the clouds.   In a short time you can’t even tell that there was a storm.  It seems like life has gone back to “normal”.  But you know what changed.  You know that sometimes nothing can be the same again.

So when life’s storms batter you, and leaves you feeling lifeless on the ground – you must remember that you are loved.  And while it might not be in this moment, or even this week,  the day will come again, where you will be having the best day of your life.

“Don’t forget while you’re busy doubting yourself, someone else is admiring your strength.” – Kristen Butler

Until then, remember you are loved.  There are people like us everywhere, who are just waiting to know you and love you.

You are like a wildflower, so let yourself be scattered by those winds when they come.

• Grow wild wherever you land.
• Grow tall and brave to face whatever the weather brings to your door.
• Grow in the cracks of the brokenness of your past.
• Grow into your full potential.

Put your face to the sun.  Let it warm your soul.  You may have blemishes.  You may have scars.  You may feel tarnished and dirty and like something the cat dragged in.  But beneath the dirt and dust your soul is shining like a jewel.

“I am changing…, but not in a way you’d expect.  I am changing how I view myself.  I am changing how I talk to myself.  I am changing what I allow and who I allow in my life.  But most of all.., I am no longer changing myself for others, the pressure to fit it and be anything other than myself.  I am creating a revolution in my own self care.” – @ MOULE_T

When you look at the word struggle, it seems too much.  It has a weight to it that makes you feel like it can’t be lifted.  But if you just adjust the meaning, a tiny little bit – you see it hides the sparkle that is laying beneath it.  Struggle is like see the sign on the highway, rest area ahead.  Your journey has been long.  You might need a bathroom break.  You might need to just stretch your legs.  You might need to grab a snack or something to drink.  Struggle means:

• Change, and change is good.  It means something new and exciting is entering your life.
• Growth – Remember as a child measuring your growth against the wall and seeing how tall you were?
• Expansion – a good stretch and walk to widen out the boundaries.
• Progress – Remember when you were in grade school and you took home a progress report?

If you change your definition of something that seems scary, like struggle and change – you widen your worldview to see how all of those words are something to celebrate, not fear.

I learned something a long time ago about decisions.  It came from antique shopping, of all things.  I had started collecting those green milk glass dishes because my grandmother had them and they reminded me of her.  There were times where I found a unique piece, but it was a stretch financially to purchase and I would vacillate on whether I should spend the money or not.

Sometimes I didn’t, then I would go back a few weeks later to buy it, and (heavy sigh) it would be gone.  So I started asking myself this question – “If I come back tomorrow and this is gone, how upset am I going to be?”  Sometimes the answer was “oh well”.  And sometimes the answer was “very upset”.  I always walked away from the “oh wells” and bought the “very upsets”.

“Trust the wait.  Embrace the uncertainty.  Enjoy the beauty of becoming.” – Unknown

I started making decisions in life the same way.  Opening up my heart and asking “what if…?” this works or doesn’t work.  How will it affect me?  How will it affect my life?  How will it affect those I love?  When you get quiet in your soul and ask the right questions, the right answers are found there, just waiting for you.  You have to step out of the wants, needs and desires of others.  You have to feel into that space of inner calm and see what surfaces.

It really is simple.  Living life as your true self is what will make you happy.

• It sounds hard.
• It sounds like you are being selfish.
• It sounds like you will lose those you want to love you.

But those are the lies that are told to keep you in that place of being the good girl and doing what you are told.  That place that leaves you unhappy inside.  That says you are not enough and just need to try harder.  That is the place that you need to grow from.  The place that needs to be expanded, so that you can grow into your full potential.  To be the sweet wonderful person you are at a soul level.

“The only difference between where you are and where you want to be is the steps you  haven’t taken yet.” – Rigel J Davidson

Don’t Live Your Life On Other People’s Terms

I love words.  They are so much more than squiggly lines on a page.  They have width and depth to them.  They affect our emotions.  They have layers and layers of meaning.  So I love when I have the chance to explore a words meaning beyond the formal dictionary definition.

Some words change meaning over time.  In Biblical times the word shambles (which means a mess to me) meant the meat market.  Thomas Crapper was an inventor and he invented a toilet, and in time his last name took on a whole new meaning because of his invention.

This past week I was reading an article that was really talking about decision making.  It was focused around two words, Anxiety and Entitlement.

Anxiety (which is fear fully expressed) is triggered in response to the perceived threat of our values.  If one of your values is around honesty, truthfulness, integrity – whatever word you choose to mean you don’t tell lies (you hate, hate, hate, being lied to), and you suspect that this value is being threatened, this would create anxiety for you.  Say for example, your mom told you to lie and say she wasn’t home.  You want to tell the truth, but your mom (authority figure) is telling you to lie.  Do you go against your values?  Or do you tell your mom no?

Anxiety lives in the space of worry about how to make the decision.  You might make a trade-off for example, and “squish” the truth, telling them that she’s not available at the moment.  Once you’ve compromised yourself in some way, that is when anxiety morphs into something new.  It becomes resentment.  “How dare mom make me tell a lie.”  You blame the other person for your compromising your values, rather than taking responsibility for the decision you made.

“All of us have the privilege and responsibility of choosing our attitudes, no matter what circumstances or situations we find ourselves in.  The key word here is choosing.  Attitudes don’t just happen; they are the products of our choices.” – Joyce Meyer

This is where I came across a new shade of a word that we’ve heard a lot about, entitlement.  For me entitlement was always about “the right” I have to something.  I am entitled to an education, for example.  It also has the meaning of special privileges, which is where the words “white entitlement” has come from in reflecting the ways that racism has been expressed in society.  When you feel entitled to something it amplifies your anxiety, feeding it so that it grows in guilt and blaming others for your current situation in life.

This article I was reading was discussing how denying the reality of your situation is a form of entitlement — and entitlement breeds resentment.  When you deny the reality of your situation, what you produce is anxiety – which is a fear of something.  Going back to the example of your mom asking you to lie about her being home.  Is there a more creative way to do what your mom is asking and not be lying?  Can you protect your value of truth and honesty and still obey your mom?

There are probably many ways of doing this, but what came to mind for me was what if you said, “My mom can’t talk right now, but maybe I can help you?”

My mom once told one of my sisters to answer the door and say that she wasn’t home.  So my sister answered the door and said, “My mom said to tell you that she’s not home”, needless to say, that was the last time my mom did that.  LOL.

“Your life and how you experience it is entirely your making.  Only if this absolutely sinks in, will you make the necessary changes” – Sadhguru

So lets just say that as a child you were asked to lie for your mother on a regular basis.  As a result your value of truth and honesty was constantly being bombarded.  Now imagine that you are in a working environment where you are being asked to lie.  Telemarketing comes to  mind as a kind of job that could impact a persons values for honesty.

I remember back when we still had a landline that my husband answered a call that was from a telemarketer about home loans.  She said that was she was returning our call, pertaining to the refinance of our home.  That we had asked to be contacted regarding reducing the mortgage payment for our home.

She went into her sales pitch and once she paused my husband asked her why she was working for a company that required that she lie with her first sentence.  He told her that not only had we never contacted them regarding a refinance, but that his wife worked for a bank and that if we were interested in refinancing that is where we would do it, because of the benefits for employee loans.  He suggested that she think about finding a job where every sentence she said wasn’t a lie.

She was neglecting her values, by failing to take responsibility for them.  She probably blamed her job for this.  She probably felt in conflict with meeting her financial obligations and keeping her job and failing to live up to her own personal values.  She was probably ignoring the inner conflict, tapping it down.  Her inner emotions would be in a turmoil and her whole life would be impacted.  Feelings of guilt can turn into anger and rage.  When you live a life in this manner, you think that you’re mad at the unreasonable demands of your job, but in reality it is because you are failing to be responsible to your own internal values.

“How people are is their choice.  How I am is my choice.  No matter what they do, no one can make me angry, happy, or unhappy.  These are privileges I have kept to myself.” – Sadhguru

When you hate Mondays, because you hate something about your employment – it is time to take a look at your inner values.  If you find yourself in a relationship either with a person or a job that is creating a lot of stress, anxiety, and emotional turmoil – it is time to take a look at your inner values.

Don’t neglect them.  Take responsibility for your own inner conflict, your own needs and priorities.  Don’t blame others for the misery.  Instead start making changes to bring your life back into connection to your inner values.

You need to create psychological safety for yourself.  You need to experience the “truth” of what is happening in your life, the reality – not the story you are telling yourself and others.

The choice is always yours.  You can fix yourself – make the changes in a job or a relationship by staying true to your inner values – or you can try to “fix the truth”.

Fixing the truth, or bending your values and choosing to stay in relationships with a person or a job that is not in your best interests just keeps you in conflict and misery.

“Privilege can either blind or be an eye-opener.  The choice is ours.” – Renita Siqueira

• It is your Privilege to live in an “anxiety free zone”.
• It is your Privilege to “face the fears” and conquer them.
• It is your Privilege to stop being “entitled” and denying the truth and the reality of where you are.

Take a stand.  Stop letting others push you into denying your values.  Instead, put life on a pause.  Take the time to regroup.  Make the time to nurture your soul and start taking small steps to live your life from the place of your values.   Always have faith that God will lead you where you need to go.

Be Yourself, Everyone Else Is Taken

“The day you find yourself will be the most beautiful day, because after that –  you will never accept less than what you deserve. – Ruby Dhal

It’s not about “finding yourself” in the terms of you being lost.  It’s about remembering yourself – finding that person you were before life started shaping and molding you into who others wanted you to be.  There are so many stories of people who go through the proverbial hero’s journey to re-discover and fully accept who they are.

“Don’t spend all of your time trying to FIND yourself.  Spend your time CREATING yourself into a person that you’ll be proud of.” – Unknown

From earliest childhood we all knew that one of my sisters was gay.  But she never acknowledged it.  When she got married we were all shocked.  My mom tried to talk to her about it, but my sister just pushed it away.  She had a daughter Kelly, and when Kelly was around 4-5 years old my sister was in a car accident.  She had fallen asleep at the wheel and went off a ravine.  She spent over 6 months in a hospital for back injuries learning how to crawl.  She was diagnosed as a parapalegic and told she would never walk again.  All those months in the hospital and almost dying scared her enough that she finally came to terms with her sexuality.

You hear similar stories, like the man who was in college to be a lawyer.  He was diagnosed with terminal cancer and given 6 months to live.  He quit school and started playing the violin.  He loved music and it gave him great happiness and joy.  6 months passed, then a year.  His cancer had went into remission.  He continued his musical career and left behind the legal field that his parents wanted for him.

“There will be very painful moments in your life that will change your entire world in a matter of minutes.  These moments will change you.  Let them make you stronger, smarter, and kinder.  But don’t you go and become someone that you’re not.  Cry.  Scream if you have to.  Then you straighten out that crown and keep moving.” –  Unknown

Both these examples highlight, that it wasn’t a matter of the person not knowing themselves.  It was a matter of accepting who they were, and pursuing what made them happy.  As children you learn to please others.  To put others desires above our own.  You have to unlearn the thought that pursuing what makes you happy is somehow selfish and wrong.

“Finding your passion isn’t just about careers and money.  It’s about finding your authentic self – the one you’ve buried beneath other people’s needs.”  – Kristin Hannah

When people are in hospice or extended care through the transition of life, the most common thing that they regret are the things they didn’t do for themselves.  The things that others wouldn’t have approved of.  They realize how much they missed of the life they really wanted to live.  That belief that they weren’t good enough or deserving of the happiness that they saw in others lives.  They let their fears of judgement and insecurities hold them back.

“To work on yourself is the best thing you can do.  Accept that you are not perfect, but you are enough.  And then start working on everything that destroys you.  Your insecurities, your ego, your dark thoughts.  You will see, in the end you’re going to make peace with yourself.  And that’s the greatest thing in the world.” – DogTrainingObedienceschool. com

It’s extremely important to accept and acknowledge who you are.  To live your own life, your own way – without regret.  Let go of the compulsion to conform.  Instead be drawn, pulled in the directions of what you love.  Creativity, curiousity, exploring playfully whatever grabs your attention.

When my kids were small, I put off writing until they were all in school.  Then with working fulltime and having 4 kids, I put off writing until they were all grown up.  By that time, the habit was to put off writing for the magical someday, when I had the time.  Then my nephew was murdered and the only way I could process the grief was writing.  I started posting what I was writing and before you know it LemonadeMakers was born.

“Finding yourself is not really how it works.  You aren’t a ten dollar bill in last winter’s coat pocket.  You are also not lost.  Your true self is right there, buried under cultural conditioning, other people’s opinions, and inaccurate conclusions you drew as a kid that became your beliefs about who you are.  Finding yourself is actually returning to yourself.  An unlearning, an excavation, a remembering of who you were before the world got its hands on you.” – Emily Mcdowell

I know how hard it can be to let yourself be drawn by what you love.  You tell yourself you don’t have any talent for it.  Or you can’t make money doing it.  It isn’t the career for you.  Nobody will want to read what you write.  Everything you want to say, has already been said by lots of other people.  And so you constantly put it off to someday.  Please don’t deprive the world of your talents and gifts any longer.  You will be shocked at how much they will be valued and how much they are needed.

“You don’t have to be what other people want you to be.  You don’t have to be interesting or agreeable or entertaining.  You don’t have to tone yourself down, quiet your voice, or hide your feelings.  You don’t have to be outgoing or spontaneous or sociable.  You don’t have to be thin or beautiful or anyone’s definition of attractive.  You don’t have to be anyone other than who you authentically are, and you sure as hell don’t have to spend your time and energy trying to convince people that you’re worth keeping around.  The right people are going to recognize your worth.  They are going to respect you, appreciate you, and accept you, without forcing you to compromise who you are.”  Daniell Koepke

Just like a fingerprint, you are absolutely unique when you live authentically who you are.  The things you find interesting, the things you find humorous.  Your sarcasm, your wit, how you approach everything in your life has its own individuality that belongs to you.

It’s self judgement that keeps you from being who you are.  When you relinquish judgement, you let go of the feeling that you have to be different than who you are.  That is when the beauty of who you are shines out. It is your difference that is the beauty of who you are.

“Finding yourself is a time of harmony because you develop that philosophy or belief system that will carry you throughout the rest of your life.  When you love yourself and who you are, you will savor and enjoy both life’s pain and pleasures.” – James Spector

 

What would your life be about, if you fell so deeply in love with who you are, that you spent the rest of your life doing whatever it was that would make you happy?  No guilt, no labels of selfishness.  No more living a life to meet others expectations, but rather creating a life of meeting your own expectations for you.

What if you picked up the keys of self discovery and took yourself for a drive?  Seeing each new sunrise and sunset with new eyes, breathing in the fresh air of change and transformation.  Listen for the symphony of living life to your own music.  Hearing the beauty of your own soul.

So lean in.  Hear the calling of your own soul.  Be brave enough to cross that river, taking only the essential parts of you and letting go of everything else.  Be courageous, be authentic, and trust the magic of new beginnings.

To Understand Your Full Potential, It Is Necessary To Step Into The Unknown, Part Two

In part One of this blog we talked about how:

• Every story has a story.
• How the story is shaped and defined as you grow.
• The way forward is never down a straight and narrow path.
• Growth is like what happens in the “Alice In Wonderland” story, where you do “Six impossible things before breakfast”.
• We think that growth is a linear measurement.  It isn’t.
• All growth doesn’t happen with forward momentum.
• Progress can happen when it feels like you’re sitting still; when it feels like you’re backing up
• Progress can happen even when you are walking in circles lost in the woods; when it’s one minute before the midnight deadline

Charting your course means that you need to be open to adjustments, revisions, false starts, rewriting your goals, refocusing your passions.  You need to be able to both dig in your heels and let go at the same time.  You must, must, must have a willingness to change.

Step 1 – Be Curious

Step 2 – Live life as an Imperfectionist

Step 3 – Have Dragonfly Eyes

What I love about “Alice In Wonderland” is that nothing that she experiences was normal, predictible behavior.  Her journey gets started because she is curious.  She follows the white rabbit, who was talking to himself about being late and holding a timepiece as he runs by.  Curious, she follows him down a rabbit hole and falls into an unbelievable world.  She is faced with choice after another choice, with no reliable way of knowing what one is the right one.

Along the journey she meets The Caterpillar with his famous line, “Who are you?”.  He helps Alice to adapt to Wonderland by eating the magic mushroom.

She meets The Cheshire Cat several times in her journey.  He floats, evaporates and disappears and shapeshifts throughout her journey as he offers cryptic pieces of advice.  He is the only character who actually listens to Alice as he attempts to help her navigate Wonderland.

In Alice’s adventures through Wonderland she is faced with truly “wicked problems” as she trys to get back home with her head still attached.  It is her curiosity that gets her through as she meets  new characters and tries to understand the stories strange rules of how life operates in Wonderland.

As you live your life you will come across many rules that others blindly follow, without asking themselves ‘why’.  When you ask why, they will say, “that’s the way it has always been done”, because they don’t even know why.  They have no curiosity about the rules.  “It’s just the way they do things here”, they will say.

Step 4

“Life is like a game of chess. To win you have to make a move. Knowing which move to make comes with insight and knowledge, and by learning the lessons that are accumulated along the way. We become each and every piece within the game called life.” – Allan Rufus

Each chess Game consists of 32 initial pieces.   The game of chess has specific rules on how each of the pieces can be moved.  In theory it is possible for a game of chess to never end, with an infinite number of moves.  Consider the whole board when making a move, because each move impacts the entire board.

When my kids were teenagers I used to try to get them to understand the importance of the decisions they were making in their lives using the chessboard analogy.  I taught them that while the move or decision that they were making might be according to the rules and thus legal, it didn’t make it the right decision.  Sometimes the right decision is to take another path.

The chessboard shows up in Alice’s journey in Wonderland.  “Chessboard Behavior” in this quote refers to how in playing the game of chess you make strategic moves.  You think ahead to the piece you are contemplating on moving.  You try to guess the other players response and then your response in turn.  You envision out multiple moves and then then go back and think through another move and contemplate it out several moves.  You keep doing this until you can choose the best strategy.

While you are guessing on the other players moves, as you get to know how they play the game, your guesses become more and more accurate.  You gain knowledge, skills, and with natural talent you can make winning choices.

“The chess-board is the world, the pieces are the phenomena of the universe, the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us.”
– Thomas Huxley

Step 5

There is an article published called “Brain-Heart” which contains way too much information and is in such detail that it isn’t easy to put into a simple sentence or two.  In this article, he links spiritual traditions and science together in an interesting way.  He is demonstrating Dragonfly Eye thinking, by combining the boxes of both science and religion to see what else could explain how in quantum physics atoms could be linked across far distances.  That energy is informed by what David Bohm called the implicate order and what physicists now regard as the quantum vacuum or zero-point field.

The experience of the universal domain of consciousness, is the same in all religions, and in all religions it inspires a sense of oneness and belonging. Michael Beckwith affirms that “when you strip away the culture, history, and dogma of every religion, the teachers of those religions were teaching very similar principles and practices that led to a sense of oneness.”

Ervin Laszlo says, the quantum vacuum is like  “the Akashic Field of ancient Hindu spiritual tradition. The Hindu say the Akashic record is a field from which all the universe is formed and which holds all that ever was, is or will be.   The Hindu also say that the Big Bang that started the universe, and the big crunch that will happen when the universe goes into reverse and collapses back into itself, is only a part of many cycles of universes, just like ours, appearing and disappearing, just like the subatomic particles in our world.”

Putting this into a simple example that I read about many years ago, is what happened around the world when 9/11 happened.  Scienctist have for many, many years recorded the magnetic waves rising from the earth into space.  Many months had passed since 9/11 and they were looking back over time tracking the waves on the report when they noticed a huge spike simultaneously around the world.  When they tracked backwards they discovered it happened just as the planes were hitting the twin towers.  It was if the information had been communicated around the world at the exact same moment.  It was the field.

I remember the day as though it was yesterday.  Literally 20 minutes before the crash I was writing in my journal before work.  In my journal I recorded how I couldn’t comprehend how someone could become so wrapped up in hate and dogma that they felt that God wanted them to kill people they didn’t even know, who had done nothing to them.  They hadn’t committed an act of atrocity that required revenge.  The actions themselves are designed to create fear, chaos and hatred – to cause separation.  The planes hit the towers as I was driving to work.  It still gives me goose bumps as I feel that in that moment of writing I had tapped into the field.  I didn’t know what was about to happen, but somehow I knew something was about to happen.

When you tap into this field, I think you tap into divine guidance.  In mediation, in journal writing, in walking through the forest – there are times when your mind is freed from the controlling structures you keep it in.  When intuition comes forth.  It’s how you get the idea to call a friend or family member.  It’s how when you have that thought, the phone rings and it is them.  It’s a connection to the field.

Step 6

Storytelling engages the emotions required for actions.  Show and tell is how you connect others to your story.   When you want to sell something showing through storytelling is like sitting them in a theater to watch an engaging drama.  You can make them cry (pictures of abused animals or a small child in torn dirty clothing looking like they are going to cry).  Commencement speakers tell how they graduated from this college, share the story of their careers.  “I did this and so can you” is the motivational theme of the speech.

Using the show-and-tell mindset you are bringing whomever you are talking to into the picture you are creating.  You need to be clear in your own  mind what actions you want to flow from your story, what idea or thought process you are trying to change.

In the graphic above, you can imagine that the children pictured are trying to talk mom or dad into paying for them to join a sports team or a dance class.  In the child’s imagination they are going to be a star.  What is it that would make mom and dad open their wallets?

If you can get the person you are talking with to enter into your vision, you need to create a moment of “awe”.  This past month two different billionaries left the atmopshere for a very short time and saw something amazing.  The astronauts say that when you see it you can’t help but be transformed.  The saw the earth from space.  It is called the Overview Effect.  It creates a cognitive shift, something changes when that happens.  An emotional cracking open of yourself, a blast of realization and resonance.

I have felt this moment of “awe” a few times.  The first time was holding my newborn son.  I don’t think that it is possible to explain the shift that happens in that moment.  The transformation that happens when you realize this small tiny baby depends on you for life, and that you would give your life for that child in a heartbeat.  Awe is something that happens in a heartbeat.  A shift that says your world has changed, and it can never be what it was before.

If you can tell your story with “awe”, there is nothing that you can’t do.  Nothing you can’t accomplish.  “Awe” draws those who are listening to your story to see all of its potent possibilities.  All of the paths of the chessboard that you can move in.  It takes you in to Dragonfly Eye thinking.  You are floating through the field and soaking up the knowledge of the universe.  You see the hand of the divine in the story as it unfolds.  You embrace uncertainty as your closest friend.  And curiosity takes you on a new adventure.

 

 

 

To Understand Your Full Potential, It Is Necessary To Step Into The Unknown, Part One

Every story has a story.  How the story is shaped defines how you grow.  The way forward is never down a straight and narrow path.  Growth is like what happens in the “Alice In Wonderland” story, where you do “Six impossible things before breakfast”.

We think that growth is a linear measurement.  But all growth doesn’t happen with forward momentum.

• Progress can happen when it feels like you’re sitting still
• Progress can happen when it feels like you’re backing up
• Progress can happen even when you are walking in circles lost in the woods
• Progress can happen at one minute before the midnight deadline

Charting your course means that you need to be open to adjustments, revisions, false starts, rewriting your goals, refocusing your passions.  You need to be able to both dig in your heels and let go at the same time.  You must, must, must have a willingness to change.

Step 1

In starting any journey of self discovery, it is important to engage your curiosity muscle.  When you are around a little child you see that muscle in action moment by moment.  From the minute they are born, they are wide eyed looking at everything.  Everything is new and wildly uncertain.  They are on a mission to discover and understand this new world they were born into.  They grab onto everything.  They put everything into their mouths.  When they start talking, everything becomes a “why”?  For every answer you give, you get three more “why’s”?

For some reason you lose this voracious appetite as you grow older.  You start thinking that you know the answers, or you are afraid that everyone else does but you.  So you stop asking why.

A great exercise to start bringing more attention to your curiosity muscle, is to start putting a question mark behind your first thought when trying to solve a problem that has come up in your life.  Start asking why is this, the way it has to be done?

Most things in life can be successfully completed in a variety of ways.  There are usually multiple solutions, and multiple paths.

Focus on using curiosity as a focal point for engaging with creativity.  Sometimes you have a better journey when taking the long way home.

Step 2

Uncertaintly is hard to live with.  You want to know everything there is to know about something, so that you can feel that you’re making the perfect decision.  That your work will be perfect.  That your life will be perfect.  But that isn’t how anyone’s life is.  If you were to talk to anyone who you think has the perfect life, they will tell you that fame, fortune, status – whatever criteria you want to measure by – doesn’t make their life perfect.  They still have problems.  They still make mistakes .  They still make bad decisions.

When you throw away the word perfect, you are left with imperfect.  Which is how we all are.  We are all perfectly imperfect.  We are all left feeling like we are blind as to how to make the best decisions in our lives.

So what are we left with then?  Uncertainty.  We are left with blindly following rules that have a multitude of exceptions, based on faulty or fuzzy logic, and sometimes just plain guesswork.

Watch any good mystery or crime drama and at some point someone is going to say, “I have a bad feeling about this”, or “My gut is telling me not to walk away”, or something similar.  In the real world you use your gut instincts or intuition a lot.  Subconsciously you may be making decisions without your mind even knowing why you just turned right instead of left.  It just felt like the right way to go.

One thing that I have learned in the corporate world, you can make facts and figures, statistics say pretty much whatever story you want to tell.  I love logic, but I also know from experience that if I walk out my front door feeling like there is something I am forgetting – I am 99% of the time forgetting something.  I have sat in my car ready to leave going down a mental checklist as I tell myself that I can find nothing that I have forgotten.  But the minute I get to my office and sit down in my chair, a random thought surfaces with the thing I forgot.  My intuition was right.

Knowlege is always provisional and incomplete.  There are always new facts that surface as time goes by.  New evidence comes to light.   If this wasn’t true then there would never be a drug company being sued for side effects discovered as time went by.  No airplanes would fly in the sky.  The world would still be flat.

So when you think you know everything there is to know, just be aware that you don’t.  So what do you do?

Step 3

Dragonflies have large, compound eyes, with thousands of lenses and photoreceptors sensitive to different wavelengths of light. Although we don’t know exactly how their insect brains process all this visual information, by analogy they see multiple perspectives not available to you.  Dragonfly-eye perception is common to great problem solvers, as they take in 360 degrees of perception to encompass multiple viewpoints and ideas at once.

Kalidescope eyes that view life through multiple lenses. This way of thinking is a way to see beyond the familiar patterns that your brain pushes into place. By widening out the periphery of your vision, you can look out beyond all of the filters your mind sees the world through.  You look at a problem from multiple perspectives.  This is where compassion comes in.

When a two year old has a meltdown at a store, many times you will see a mother about to have one herself.  A compassionate viewpoint sees two over-tired individuals, not a bad child or a bad mother.

• The two year old that doesn’t know how to express his/her feelings in any other way.
• You see a mom who is also overtired.
• A mom who worried about if she is just doing this whole motherhood thing wrong?
• A mom who is flinching from her own self judgment and self perception, that she is now being judged by those who are witnessing the meltdown of her child.
• A mom who has a million other things she has to get accomplished on her “to do” list, and now she’s wondering if she just go home and forget life altogether as this is a complete disaster.

Your brain like to think in patterns.  Good or bad.  Black or white.  This or that.  Putting things in containers that belong together free’s up your brain to think faster.

By using dragonfly eye’s, you can view the world around you in an entirely new way.  Whatever problems you are facing; whatever decisions need to be made; you can start to see the many possibilities and probabilities in front of you.  Instead of just:

• Rabbit holes – unlocking secret doors and passageways, or
• You can start down a new life path and go to a tea party, or
• This way or That way, or
• Wrong way or Right way, or
• Down here or Down there, or

You see “and” not “or”.  You can go up, down, backwards, forwards, straight, crooked, ladders, slides, caves, etc…,  you see all of the possibilities at once.  The secret to developing a dragonfly-eye view is to “anchor inside yourself” rather than outside as a starting point.  To work on that curiosity muscle.  To develop more trust in your intuition muscles.  To exercise your compassionate view of yourself when you try to be perfect.  To embrace uncertaintly.  To have dragonfly eyes.

1 – Be Curious

2 – Live life as an Imperfectionist

3 – Have Dragonfly Eyes

 

In this blog we covered steps 1-3 of the below diagram.  Read the next blog for part 2 as we review steps 4-6

 

Say Yes To Living An Inspired Life

If there is one thing that is making a big turnaround today, it is the thought of how you influence and inspire others.  For years in social media many have had this misconception that you can create a perfect life online.  That somehow this “perfect” version of yourself would inspire others.  All of the posts were about these “perfect” moments that were happening in a persons life.  Nothing was posted that didn’t fit into this perception of perfection.

Like the years of photoshopping models into this idea of what a perfect body should look like, instead of inspiring others to reach towards perfection, it created the opposite.  It fed into the lie, that some how you are not good enough.  Not rich enough, not skinny enough, not smart enough – that your breasts were too small, your stomach not flat enough, your thighs were too large, you had the wrong kind of hair, the wrong color skin, etc…, this idea of perfection (which shifts with the seasons and years) is not how we inspire others.

The problem is that perfection isn’t how life is.  It’s messy.  It’s imperfect.  Most of the time it feels like a disaster.  Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, not the advertising agency or the social media influencer.

“Seek the approval of no one.  Never change who you are.  Don’t fit the mold that others have created for you.” – Adverstu.com

I worked fulltime when my kids were growing up.  I tried bribery, threatened grounding and created punishments.  Nothing convinced my kids that they should walk into the house and put their things in their bedrooms when they got home from school.  Nothing I tried convinced them that when they finished raiding the refrigerator because they were starving, that they were capable of putting those dirty dishes in the sink – let alone the dishwasher.

Instead, this was our pattern.  On Mondays the house looked presentable, because I had spent the whole weekend cleaning.  Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday our house slid downhill in a mountain of toys, discarded clothing, schoolwork that fell out of bookbags, whatever the dogs and cats had played with or destroyed, and of course dirty dishes.  By Friday I would collapse under the mountain and pray that no one would come knocking at my door expecting entry.  My house never looked like the perfectly organized home I always dreamed of.

You don’t inspire others by being perfect.  You inspire them by how you deal with your imperfections.

“When you are living the best version of yourself, you inspire others to live the best version of themselves” – Steve Maraboli

For me the inspiration came not from working myself into exhaustion.  It didn’t come from yelling and screaming at my kids in frustration.  It came from doing the things that I knew were the most important.  Those things changed as my kids grew older, but it all started from the same place – spending time with my kids.  Sometimes that was just relaxing and watching T.V.  Sometimes it was watching them play in the back yard.  Sometimes it was taking them to the movies and watching something that I never would have chosen to watch, but that they did.  We went roller skating, to bonfires on the beach, to backyard bar-b-ques with friends and families.  As they grew older, it was transporting them to outings with their cousins and friends.  Then it was the terrifying years of being in the car with a student driver.

It was different activities, but the inspiration was the same.  Supporting my kids in whatever way I could to grow up happy and healthy.  Now that they are all grown up and having families of their own.  Now I get to laugh at them going through the same states of imperfection in raising their children.  And I get a lot closer to that imagined state of a perfectly organized home 🙂

What is being inspirational to others about?

• You seek inspirational people to inspire you – without the burden of putting them on a pedestal and thinking that they don’t fall short themselves.  Remember no one is perfect.
• You try to always come from a space of love – everyone has something going on in their life that they need to be shown love to make better.
• You are mindful and compassionate first with yourself, and then with others.
• You have a curiosity to understand and explore who you really are deep inside, which then deepens into a curiousity to better understand others.
• You are passionate about living your life.
• You are open to learning and understanding more about yourself and others.  You realize that todays truth may be discarded tomorrow, when your opinion is changed by a deeper truth.
• You give without expectation of how that gift will be used, or of getting anything in return.  Your gift is a hand up, not a hand out.
• Having a value filled life.  Living with a strong sense of purpose, reflected in both professional and personal life.
• Living a life filled with possibilities.  Seeing and reaching for the highest expression of your human potential.

Simone Biles demonstrated what being inspirational is all about in the 2020 Olympics, when she pulled out of some events to focus on her mental health.  There is greatness in listening to yourself and advocating for your needs.  She identified within herself where she was.  She drew her own boundaries in order to keep herself safe and healthy.  Like Naomi Osaka, she recognized the interconnectedness of mental and phsyical well-being.  When Simone decided she couldn’t compete in several of her events, she stayed and supported her team.

She took a different path than expected and it took tremendous courage to stand up before literally the whole world and do this.  She demonstrated the courage to protect her heart, soul, mind, body and spirit.

I love the thought, that each decision we make to walk our own  path, is a comma, not a period.  The path didn’t end.  It is continuing onward.  There are times when we need to stop and refuel.  It isn’t a period, it is a comma – a pause to take a breath.  You refuel so that you can have the energy to finish – it’s the finish which is a period.

And at the end of each finish, you get to choose what new adventure awaits.  You get to start down a new path of self discovery.