As with any long term relationship, sometimes things get a little rocky.  Work was rough the other day and I’ve been stressed about some decisions I need to make with my business and I know I wasn’t communicating well with my husband.  Simultaneously I know he is going through some stuff as wellI had an epiphany—I want the cookies and the compromise.  I want the pieces of you that make you who you are and I want the pieces of you that can be better.  I want you, and I want the plan, the compromise, the pieces of us that we put together to create something new. Part of a relationship, including a healthy relationship with ourselves is understanding who we are, taking the good with the bad and learning when we need to make choices to improve.  But it isn’t about a constant look for improvement because that leads to searching for “what’s wrong” all the time.  We aren’t a constant work in progress that needs to be perfected or changed.  But we are beings that need to recognize when we need to change, when things are stagnating and when we need to do something else—or when we can be better.

This then spills over into our relationships as well.  I want your given talents but I also want the things that we work on together.  I’m not talking about improving my partner as a project, I’m talking about working together to make something mutually better for the both of us.  For a long time I couldn’t articulate this—I kept hammering home the point that I wanted things to be better, for us to do better.  I see how that could come across as wanting my partner to be something other than what he is.  But that was never the intent.  The intent is to figure out what we want and to work on something together.  It’s about keeping ourselves fresh, not complacent, and looking to level up for the things we say we want.  It’s about follow through together and helping each other achieve our individual and mutual goals.  

So the bottom line is I will take you for what you are—but we can’t stay there because I won’t allow myself to stay where I’m at.  We are meant to be the best versions of who we are and we are meant to remind each other of our purpose and our goals, the accountability to what we agreed on.  It’s time to pick a direction and go that way—together.  I take the pieces that are you and I take the pieces that we need to build.  We have a picture to put together and that requires us working on creating it.  My vision doesn’t need to be yours, but we should be steering the same course.  There are days we will wander, there are days we will stay the course, there are times we will realize we need to take a few steps back and rechart what we are doing—and days we may need to simply stop and take stock of where we are.  None of that means I don’t care for my partner—not in the slightest.  None of that insinuates I need my partner to change.  No, this is about bringing out the best in each of us. 

I’m learning more and more about surrender.  About letting go of the things that hurt us, or we perceive as hurt.  I’m learning to try and see the lessons in it all.  It’s confusing because it simultaneously feels like losing pieces of myself while releasing a weight that needed to be dropped a long time ago.  I know we’ve talked a lot about surrender here and I’ve never hidden my feelings that I physically, mentally, in every way hated that word—and yes, I do mean hate.  I looked at it as one of the most defeatist words in the dictionary and I believed it was a complete stripping of power.  My brain still grapples with it, but I understand now the other challenge deals with our interpretation of the word and our expectations.  How can we be powerful and take ownership of our lives if we are giving in to anything?  I don’t know if it’s because surrender implies there’s a winner and it seems like a fight.  To some degree there is: there is a right and a wrong in many situations.  But not everything needs to be a fight.    

In dealing with surrender, it helped to look at the idea of acceptance because that was more of an implication of taking stock of things as they are and operating from there. That’s helpful because we’re simply looking at what is and then trying to close the gap to what it needs to be. After time that bothered me too because in my mind it suggested complacency.  I realized that I had this constant urge to fix things, to make them be a certain way.  But we can’t make things a certain way and there are times we need to reconcile what is with what we feel and we need to understand that what we feel isn’t always correct.  Those emotions can become skewed so we need a way to reconcile what is real versus our interpretation.  Our interpretation isn’t always correct and we need to be able to discern what is best for us and there are times simply letting go is exactly what we need to do. 

I’ve learned something else about surrender: it isn’t so much about giving up or in or anything else, it’s really about allowing.  The truth is there are things in this world that none of us can control and we will never be able to control.  That means we need to be able to make decisions about where we expend our energy.  Do we want to spend our time fighting against things that will never change?  Fighting against things we aren’t meant to fight?  We can’t do that—it’s exhausting and will rarely get us anywhere.  But what we can do is come to terms (accept) what is and make the decision to engage with that or not.  Surrender is about what we choose to allow in our lives and what we choose to engage with.  And while it can feel like giving up at times, it’s really about accepting what we are able to do. That is an powerful place to operate from because it is real, solid ground.  Surrender is a tool for progressing and releasing the weight of the things we carry but can do nothing about.  Surrender is about letting go, not giving in.  It’s easier to move without the things we hold onto.

JR Ridinger said we will only ever become as big as our dreams, so dream big. Even if we don’t achieve the ultimate goal, if we are constantly striving in the direction of our dreams and taking action, we will certainly end up closer than we would have been if we sat with the belief that we weren’t capable.  Eleanor Roosevelt had the same sentiment when she said, “Shoot for the moon, even if you miss you’ll land among the stars.”  In the discussions we’ve had about limitation and perceptions and reconciliation, I think we need to remember the main issue with limitation is that our goals become limited if we operate from those limited perceptions and beliefs.  Some people are gifted with seeing the expansiveness of the universe from the start.  They treat the world as a playground, a creative outlet that can become whatever they want it to.  There are others who are taught they have to live within the box and that stepping outside the box is dangerous. That takes some work to change.

As I’ve been shifting to some works of fiction to give my mind a break, I think I’ve realized how important it is to keep the imagination going.  When we stick ourselves to one routine, we cut out every other possibility there is.  Some routines are necessary, but if we aren’t careful, soon that routine becomes a rut.  The mind is meant to create, it tells us stories all the time including stories about what we can and cannot accomplish.  We have every opportunity to turn any story into a reality so we have to watch what we tell ourselves.  JR had an enormous vision for people in this world and he whole-heartedly believed in it.  He believed everyone could be expansive, that they could take control of their own destiny and they could make their lives be anything they wanted.  His goal was to set people free by showing them how to better use their mind and see their possibilities—and most importantly to take action on them.  We are capable of achieving amazing heights and it’s important to keep our eyes open toward them.  The purpose of reality is only to show us the gap we need to close, not to show us where we have to stop.     

We spoke about our perceptions and our self-limiting beliefs over the last couple of days.  Today let’s talk about our perceptions of self-limiting beliefs.  Sometimes we have to look at perception as allowing the possibility of something new. It isn’t so much what we are seeing or how we react to what we see, but how we start to feel and relate to things that are unseen or what they could be.  We receive a gentle nudge from the universe, a quiet whisper that tells us something along the lines that we can do more.  At first we may feel like, “who me?”.  We can choose to follow or ignore that—if we believe in the “who me” line of thought, we will continue on our current course.  We have to learn to shift the question in order to break the belief.  What If instead of, “Who me? we ask ourselves, “how do I move toward that?” or tell ourselves, “This is for me,”? Those questions position us as a new player in the game.  Who we were may not have been able to move forward or taken that chance, but this version of who we can be is capable of it. 

There are some things so engrained in us that we may not even realize they are a self-limiting belief.  Simple things like talking about not having x amount of money for something becomes a limiting belief in the regard we aren’t looking at how we do have the money.  What I mean is instead of looking at possible ways to shift things around to free up money or other opportunities to bring in money, we are looking at money as finite and stating it’s gone.  That removes the circulatory nature of cash flow.  For the record because it is a flow, that is how money functions as an energy exchange—it is a constant movement of energy.  What other beliefs do we have that may keep us stagnant?  I’m too old for this.  I’m not experienced enough for this.  I don’t have what they’re looking for.  I couldn’t run like that.  I can’t cook like that. I can’t draw/write/sing/dance etc.  While we may say these things feeling they are practical or reality, they stop us where we are—hence the limitation.

That leads me to the part of perception of self-limiting beliefs: we have to shift our thought to understand that these trains of thought are limiting.  It isn’t easy to stay open at all times or to see all possibilities at all times—that takes a lot of practice.  So the first thing we need to do is slow down our thinking and start shifting our perception of what is a limitation.  Instead of what we consider “reality” we need to speak in terms of possibility.  We also need to speak in terms of what will be and that should always be a positive connotation.  For example, instead of saying something like we can’t do it because we don’t have the time, we need to say something closer to I appreciate the consideration but I’ve chosen to do x at this time.  Make it about our choices and our ownership of the situation and it is no longer a limitation—it’s an action in our control.  The more we shift our beliefs to empowered actions rather than things holding us back, the more momentum we create in our lives.   

I heard a speech from Loren Ridinger the other day where she spoke about our relationship to past self. I am the first person to admit that I am no expert on this topic because this is one thing I’m working through and probably one of my biggest struggles. Loren spoke of forgiveness and understanding for the past self.  I assumed a long time ago that I had reconciled my past.  I understood everything that happened logically and I was able to compartmentalize it for a time.  I thought that meant I dealt with it and that it was normal for little pangs of nostalgia or embarrassment to pop up.  I never considered it was something that needed to be forgiven.  I was never taught that we could or should forgive ourselves for anything.  My family, especially the women in my family are excellent at holding grudges and have long memories, which means we hold onto that feeling and it’s always nice and fresh no matter how long ago the event may have happened.  This includes grudges and guilt against ourselves as well—we are great at replaying the most awful events of our lives repeatedly until we are so down in it we can’t move.  We feel the emotion of it now as we did then. 

I didn’t realize how trapped I was under the past until I really started to see some light on the other side.  That light was an understanding that I was simply not healthy.  My thoughts weren’t healthy, my behaviors and my actions weren’t healthy.  My actions came from my thoughts and my thoughts included things like what a loser I was for showing up at a party early, how stupid I was for repeating patterns, that I wasn’t loved for me but my money, that I wasn’t taken seriously in the business world (true to the extent I haven’t been taken seriously in my industry in the business world—doesn’t mean I can’t be successful in an aligned field).  Loren spoke about how if we don’t reconcile and rectify these thoughts we will continue to keep ourselves down.  We need to forgive ourselves for who we were and what we did because we were operating under what we knew at the time.  That logic is something I’ve followed for a long time—for everyone else.  I completely understood that as far as my relationship with my mother—I knew full well how hard she worked and that her behavior was because she did what she had to do with what she knew.  Honestly, that was also an indicator that I needed to look at the behavior I took from her and break that pattern in my life—it was another little light for me.

This concept of forgiveness for myself still feels foreign to me.  I can’t help but feel that there were instances I should have known better.  There were moments I am 100% positive that if I had chosen differently the outcome would have been different. I guess we can say that about anything.  I struggled because there seemed to be a series of definitive events that I chose in my life and I felt obligated to stick with the results because that was my choice so I needed to be responsible.  But the difference is responsibility doesn’t mean replaying those moments over and over again.  Responsibility means adjusting toward what we really wanted.  Unless it comes to death, the decisions we make aren’t permanent in regards to keeping our position.  We are always able to move toward where we go.  It isn’t a chess game where we are check mated and have to wait for a new round—we are able to find a new path across the board.  Staying where we are doesn’t serve anything.  So it’s more important to learn how to adapt and adjust than it is to make the right decision the first time all the time.  That’s how we learn from the past.  That’s how we forgive the past.  We learn to dance with it.  

“You begin to fly when you let go of self-limiting beliefs and allow your mind and aspirations to rise to greater heights,” Brian Tracy. I thought I had worked through all the self-limiting beliefs.  I thought I knew everything I had that was holding me back.  Sometimes there are these little insidious pieces that we hold onto that we didn’t even know we created.  These monsters can eat us alive inside and we may not know they exist until we are in a moment when we need to be something and suddenly we can’t.  At the same time, we can’t become an entirely new person overnight, but we have to find the piece that’s holding us back. Sometimes it’s simply aligning thoughts/words and actions.  Sometimes it’s digging deeper and finding the things that we didn’t know were holding us back. 

When we start to question why we think a certain way or why we believe things have to happen a certain way, that’s when we discover the truth.  Sometimes there is no reason.  We are afraid of thinking outside the box because we’ve been told outside the box is dangerous.  Either that or we’ve become so comfortable in the box that we don’t even realize it’s holding us back.  Language we used to consider pragmatic or simply the truth can truly be language that engrains itself in our minds and makes us believe we aren’t capable of something—something that may in fact be our purpose, the exact thing we are meant to do.  So while it may be true to say that we are experiencing something in the moment, it’s important to train ourselves to qualify it to exactly that: a moment.  Sometimes the self-limiting beliefs are a matter of putting aside any reason to believe that the things we want aren’t meant for us or that we aren’t able to do it.

We have to start asking why repeat the patterns we do.  Is it because we don’t know any better?  Or do we know better and are afraid to go on the other side of that fear?  Some patterns aren’t that easy to identify as unhealthy or a limiting belief because we’ve done it for so long that it’s a part of who we are.  There is some real discomfort in tearing down who we have always been to see if that is still the person we are.  We are meant to grow and evolve and that means shedding the skin of who we used to be and allowing ourselves to become who we are meant to be.  When we hold ourselves back because of the familiar, we tell ourselves we are safe when really we are preventing who we are meant to be from emerging.  We have to learn to not clip our wings before we know how to fly.  Look at how we really feel and work on allowing that—from there we can do anything.

Today I am grateful for recognizing fears.  It takes a lot of work to dig deep enough to find the specific fears that hold us back—even more work to find the cause of them.   When we do that work, we tap into parts of us that need to be healed.  It’s amazing how much healing takes place in this life.  The mind is also a fascinating thing when it comes to finding out what it needs to heal from.  There are things we don’t even think would be a bother for us only to find out it’s a rooted fear.  There are fears we inherit from our parents—and those can be trippy when we find out it’s something we aren’t afraid of at all.  But the point of recognizing a fear is to heal and in that regard, that is the piece I’m most grateful for.  It can be a slow process to move forward/recognize all of this (it has been) but once we know what the issue is, once we address it, there is no holding back.

Today I am grateful for cleaning up the spaces around us.  It’s true that the oust side truly does reflect what’s on the inside.  When the space around us is chaotic and disorganized, that is typically reflective of our mindset.  Yes, it takes time to clean and organize, but doing the work is so worth it because once the outside clutter begins to clear, the inside clutter begins to unwind and clear as well. We carry so much with us, so many things we don’t even think about, and the longer we ignore them, the more cluttered our lives become.  Seeing the clutter can be overwhelming and we may not know how to begin to address it, but sometimes all it takes is moving one piece.  We can’t let our perception of how long it takes to fix it intimidate us or prevent us from starting to clear the external and internal spaces.  We often make the process bigger than it actually is.  Once we get started, the rest kind of falls into place.    

Today I am grateful for partnership and addressing mindset.  My husband and I are having a challenging time (I have more about this later this week or early next week…) and it has a lot to do with time and how we spend it and what we want for the future.  Cleaning up spaces was something I forced him to address yesterday because we were at the point we could barely walk through our garage (one of three key areas that were barely passable).  I told him that it’s time to get it done, procrastinating isn’t going to solve any of the fears/issues he’s having at this point, tackling them head on is going to get him the answers.  If the outside is clear, then maybe that will help clear the inside.  I didn’t go into anything deeper than that, I didn’t force him to discuss the fears he told me he’s having—we started simply with the physical work.  Sometimes we get so caught up in what we want to do that we focus on the things we don’t have when we really need to be focusing on what we CAN do.  Sometimes when we see what we can do, possibilities open up and the more possibilities open up, the more solutions we see to things that bother us—and we may learn that what we thought bothered us isn’t the actual issue but we see what IS. It starts with one step which is often less scary than we think it is.  We just need to begin.

Today I am grateful for health.  Part of what has been bothering both of us lately has been the passage of time.  As cliché as it sounds, we are at midlife and neither one of us are quite where we want to be.  We are well aware of that, and we are well aware that we need to make a choice in order to move forward.  Neither one of is entirely unhappy with where we are at, but we are acutely aware that this is not specifically what we were hoping for and we both have the sensation that there is more that needs to be done, shifts we need to make.  We have been taking small steps—the first was actually addressing the food in the house.  After we spoke about using our environment to set us up for success, we looked at the food in the house and realized that we needed better alternatives.  I downloaded an app that explained the quality of food and the specific issues with it (risky additives, too high in salt, saturated fats, etc.) and that started making my husband think in different terms—health is something that starts with what we put in our mouths.  We get one shot and we need to set ourselves up for success and that means taking care of our bodies.  Plus I love getting to teach my son early as well (he loved scanning items in the app—he was devastated by Doritos though).      

Today I am grateful for creativity.  I’ve been reading more fiction lately—my brain needed a break—and it has been delightful.  I have so much love and respect for the creative state and it’s a joy to read other people’s works and feel the inspiration.  I also love getting lost in a story, period.  It’s amazing how the art of story telling takes us to another world, another time, place, another viewpoint.  It is such a gift to take a medium and communicate an imaginary place and feel the experience of another person (that doesn’t even exist), and feel vested in their lives.  This is something that I want to do, but I want people to be able to wake up to their own creativity as well.  The creative state is filled with endless possibilities, and I think that is my favorite part about it.  We need a place where anything is possible, and that is the mind.

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.   

We need a little reminder today: So much of life is about perception, rather our choice about our perception.  We can choose what we believe at any time.  We can choose how we react based on that belief.  We can choose what we think about any given situation.  Do we want to feel angry or are we trained to feel angry?  Do we want to be happy for someone or are we hiding jealousy?  Do we want to allow happiness in our lives?  That last question may strike some people as ridiculous but the truth is we spend so much time agonizing over how things aren’t what we think they should be that we forget that by focusing on the negative or challenging aspects of our lives we are simultaneously choosing to not focus on the good.

The good news about all of this is that we can change that story at any time.  We can look at it differently.  I don’t claim it’s easy—I’ve written enough pieces about that here.  The beauty is that we can also change that perception.  We can decide that it’s easy to view the world differently.  We can decide that today we want to do something different and feel differently.  Part of what does make it challenging is our tendency to want to change it all at once.  We can pick one thought and work on that and let it cascade into others. Pick one thing we need to change our perception of and work on shifting toward what we want to think and feel about it.  Amazing things can happen when we change our thoughts. 

“When you built different, you receive different,” George White the Speaker.  This is an encouragement to keep following the path, the feeling you know you’re supposed to follow.  I speak a lot about reaching our intuition and following our knowing, understanding our purpose and path.  Everyone has a path and a purpose, it’s up to us to fulfill that—and that means intuitively knowing what we are meant to do and doing it.  It means following the destiny laid out before us.  The more we honor that, the more we acknowledge what we are meant for, the more we align with that, the easier it is for the universe to give us what we need to fulfill that contract.  Energy can be confusing, manifesting can be confusing because we think we need to behave a certain way.  I know I told myself for years that I was doing all the things and I would complain that nothing was happening.  The truth is I wasn’t aligned with what I sought. 

Energy isn’t merely an action, it is a literal transmission of energy into the universe.  In order to get what we need to receive, we need to emit that same frequency.  Finding harmony with something we are unfamiliar with takes practice.  The more comfortable we become with honoring our vibration, with acknowledging that we are meant for something else, the easier it is to become that person.  I also want to remind us at this point that it isn’t so much a becoming, but rather an unbecoming of all we weren’t and an acceptance of all we are.  We can’t expect the same thing as other people when we are meant for something else.  It can feel lonely or scary at times, but the things we are meant for are greater than us.  This is a truly a new age and many of us feel discomfort because we know it’s a new age and we are still trying to operate in an old system we know no longer works.  That requires everyone becoming immensely comfortable with who they are. 

The final note on this topic is that we can’t be afraid to receive what is meant for us.  Many of us have the underlying belief we aren’t worth what we know we are capable of—but we feel this thing inside of us that we need to do something.  If we consistently fear what others think or if we send out any signals that we aren’t worth our destiny, then it can never fully embrace us…because we are not fully embracing it.  If we are going to receive, we need to believe.  We need to shed the unnecessary fears and beliefs that hold us back and we simply need to attune with who we are and accept that.  The more we accept, the easier it is to receive.  Just believe that if we have these inklings that they are meant for us.  Even if it’s for only 20 seconds, start there.  See what it feels like and then work on expanding it.  See if we can taste it next and expand further.  Once every sense is aware of what it’s like to be in a state to receive and honoring who they are, the rest takes over. 

“You need a reason to keep showing up that is bigger than all the reasons the world will give you to stay small,” Ashmi Pathela.  It’s easy to be discouraged by the state of the world.  The inherent divisiveness, the fighting, the emphasizing the few ways we are different over all those we are the same.  The world makes us feel different if we aren’t the same.  If we stand out, the world will find a way to bring us back down.  Following our lotus discussion yesterday, we are meant to be who we are—we aren’t meant to play small.  We all have the potential to impact those around us even if it doesn’t feel like it.  Even if our impact doesn’t expand globally, think if we are the initial ripple in the pond.  It all starts with an idea, an influence and then that experience cascades out to others.  We (especially us in the West) are trained that if we don’t see immediate results it isn’t worth it or that we have failed.  We are also trained that standing out is a negative or that if we are different we’re weird. 

What if we consider ourselves differently?  When we look at the relationship we have to ourselves an others, what if we saw what we brought to the table as enough?  What if it was enough?  Well, I hope this serves as a reminder that it IS enough.  I think we get lost in the bigger picture of purpose because we’ve looked at the scope of our lives as a series of things to prove or acquire.  We feel we need to prove who we are by the number of people we influence or the number of things we have—or how big our house is, the car we have etc.  We need to understand that even if our influence only expands to our inner circle, that too is enough.  We never know how our actions impact those around us so we need to continue being who we are—no one else can be us, no one else can do what we do and that means no one around us can have the impact that we do.

We need the courage to continue on our path and that means no matter what others think we need to stay true to our purpose.  No one said our journeys were meant to be easy, and honestly, sometimes sticking the course is harder than blazing the trail.  I mean, it’s incredibly difficult to decide on a new course and step off the traditional path, but once we are there it’s tempting to turn around and go back to what others expect of us.  It’s those moments we feel like giving up that we need to stick to it and follow our course.  There comes a point on our journey we all have to go it alone for a while or when it feels particularly lonely if we have to do something new.  We must keep going anyway.  Being alone doesn’t mean we’re doing it wrong—sometimes that’s exactly what we must do in order to learn all the facets of what we need to be great.  We must do it to inspire confidence in ourselves and perhaps a few other people who can then do the same.  Keep going.  Keep going as big as you need to be.  The world is calling.