Today I am grateful for laughter.  Life can get pretty heavy sometimes and if we continue to focus on that, it gets painful.  I’ve often spoken about sharing the lighter side of things, of choosing what we focus on, and on managing our perspective.  I never claimed any of that was easy—we are emotional creatures and it takes a lot of practice and discipline to become aware of our state consistently enough to not let those emotions dictate what we do or our overall mindset.  Sometimes we just need a simple reminder that getting out of that spiral of negative focus is all we need.  I had a wonderful conversation with my best friend the other day and this is someone I’ve laughed with and loved for over 30 years so in that time we’ve gone through everything together.  Not that our conversations are always serious or anything, but we are both in the same field professionally so we talk about a lot of our struggles in that arena—even that isn’t in a negative way, it’s more relating to each other and talking about how we deal with it respectively.  But the other day we had the most ridiculous conversation ranging from cruises and rogue waves to Greenland Sharks and windmills.  In that moment, all we needed was laughter and laugh we did.  The hear, mind, body, and soul know what we need so if we need to laugh, laugh.  It really is the best medicine.

Today I am grateful for inspiration.  This past weekend I’ve been afforded the opportunity of a lifetime.  Talk about changing the trajectory of things.  I attended a conference for my business and it’s something that happens annually but I haven’t been able to go for the last several years.  We all have those moments where something clicks and comes together, and truth be told, I thought that happened for me the last time I went to this event.  And it did in a way—there were tons of impactful moments including the realization that I can travel and do things differently, perhaps most importantly, that we are able to change the course of our lives with a decision to do things differently and a commitment to follow through.  I am stubborn as hell and I know I likely could have been more successful had I been more open and receptive to some of the feedback and/or methods of how the team functions.  I mean, they are all successful in their own right so something they are doing is working.  But I had to learn on my own that there are ways to incorporate that work in a manner that feels right for me.  So in being with the group this time around, I fully understand what it is to take accountability for a life changing thing and to dive in.  It’s all here for us, we just have to be willing to reach out and take it.  For the first time in a while, with all the chaos in my mind, I feel like it’s a real possibility.

Today I am grateful for help.  I rarely talk about needing help because I was trained to never need help in my family.  If we needed help we were either an inconvenience or weak depending on who you were talking to.  Being the youngest, I often needed help but I picked up on the cues of who I could go to and when to do it on my own very quickly.  So many people talk about the youngest getting special treatment and being privileged—and I’d be lying if I said there was none of that, there was certainly some—but what we don’t often talk about is the psychological impact of having to keep up all the time and the constant need to prove that we are worthy of space and capable of holding our own.  I had to carefully choose when to ask for help because it would either mean I was an idiot or a pain in the ass.  So learning when it was safe to reach out for help from others was (and is) a huge thing for me.  I don’t like to bother people. I’m used to being the one people come to.  So in that regard I also like being the one who knows things—and that’s a me thing. Regardless, it’s a huge milestone for me to realize that asking for help and using it doesn’t make us lecherous or parasitic or incompetent or stupid or lazy.  I mean, what kind of lessons are those for a kid?  I hated feeling like that and it made me hyper independent.  Sure, that independence did teach me a lot and made me capable of a lot, but it also gave me a complex where I needed to carry the burden all the time, no matter what it was, I had to learn how to do it.  No one can carry that much on their own so it is ok to reach out for help because we are human and we all need help at some point. 

Today I am grateful for stepping up and understanding capacity.  The last 18 months have been filled with enormous change in nearly every facet of my life.  I struggled with some of it, feeling like it was too big, that I wasn’t capable or that what I wanted simply wouldn’t happen, that I was doing it wrong.  Things started to shift the more I kept at it.  I had to adapt and shift at certain points, some things ended up not looking at all like what I thought they would.  I had to give up on some things I thought I wanted most.  The biggest lesson is that sometimes the things we build up in our heads are just that: in our heads.  We have much more capacity than we think as long as we get rid of all the extra crap.  When we start doing the work it alleviates the fear because we see what needs to be done and we can manage those tasks one at a time.  The greatest things in life may take time, yes, but the truth is we have the ability to manage anything—sometimes just not in one bite.  Once we start doing the work, however we see that time may not be as much as we thought.  It gets easier the more we get moving because momentum is what creates progress.  So when we make progress at understanding our capacity and the work that actually needs to get done, nothing can get in our way.

Today I am grateful for travel and love.  We don’t often take trips and we recently were on a business trip that we threw a few extra days on to celebrate our anniversary.  I love to travel and see different things.  Yes, it’s stressful, yes I hated leaving my animals in someone else’s care, but the experience of other locations is something you can only get quite literally by leaving the comfort zone and doing something different.  If we want something different we have to do something different, right?  Between the trip itself and the significance of this anniversary, it made me realize that I need to celebrate more.  I allow myself to get caught up in the next task so often, I forget to take a minute to honor where I’m at.  We barely celebrate birthdays let alone the achievements we’ve made along the way to getting where we want to go.  But this time was different.  We took the time to be with each other and our son, not rushing to check the next thing off the list, not living up to someone else’s expectations of what we needed to do next and we just did what we wanted to do.  We took the time to breathe and be together and to witness what was around us, to take it all in.  Frankly, we took the time to just be alive and be happy together in our own little unit.  It’s a blessing to have that time together and I promise myself that I am not going to bulldoze those moments to get to the next thing.  Right now is what matters and there is so much to see together—so take the time to do it while we still can.  Live and love to the fullest while we are here.

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.