“Stop settling, make peace with greatness, and war with mediocrity,” Loren Ridinger.  If we convince ourselves to play small, it’s all too easy to believe a version of ourselves that isn’t real and it’s all too easy to settle. It’s all too easy to get stuck right where we are.  Extricating ourselves from the box we’ve buried ourselves in takes a lot of work and it is painful.  We never realize how insidious the act of burying our true identity is, how easily it infiltrates our beings and tells us that we aren’t good enough to have what we want.  There are times the idea of being bigger than who we are is scary even if we feel like something bigger is calling to us. The weight of doing something else feels heavy at times because we put the pressure on ourselves to do it 100% perfectly, as if becoming someone different is as simple as changing our clothes.  Being great is work and it takes effort—specifically effort different than what we’ve done before.  We convince ourselves that effort is too much and we learn to settle not realizing it’s often the fear of being great that makes us settle in the first place.  The fear of outright failure and not coming closer or even the fear that we can do it and we will eventually fail.  We are also afraid that it can be a fluke and that we won’t maintain what we’ve achieved. 

The truth is we will never achieve anything if we continue to settle for the scraps around us.  I want to be clear that settling is very different than working with what we have.  The person who settles is the one who decides what they have is good enough when they know the slightest bit of effort and energy could get them something that fits even better.  Working with what we have is using the resources around us to create something aligned with who we are.  We trust our instincts and if something doesn’t make sense we call it out or we walk away.  I spent enough time trying to be a version of myself that wasn’t real.  It was a bunch of bits and pieces of things I liked from others around me that I tried to fit in one package so I would be palatable to the masses.  I felt the truth of who I was and I knew what I wanted to do—I simply had to do it.  I had to put aside the fear that I couldn’t do something I knew I could.  I had to be ok with the fact that it might not be perfect but getting it done was better than doing nothing.  Having something done 100% that is imperfectly but totally me is better than a half completed copy of what someone else did. 

We can have the life we want.  We just have to believe it.  We have to accept that we are worth the greatness of what we want and we need to understand that the definition of greatness is different for everyone.  The things I enjoy may not be what you enjoy and what I feel makes me happy or what I am called to do is different than what does it for you.  For so long we convince ourselves the war is with everyone outside of us.  We think we need to spend our time either proving we are right or proving we are worth what we want.  The reality is we are fighting that battle in our minds.  We need to fight the voice inside that tells us we can’t have more or that we need to earn it.  Sure, we will have to put in the effort to make what we want and we have to be flexible on the how sometimes, but that doesn’t mean stopping when it gets tough, it doesn’t mean taking what is thrown our way as all we can get.  If we have a vision of something else then we need to stick with that because that’s what shows the universe that we can do it.  It is what we do that brings about the result-so if we are looking to achieve more, we must do more.  If we want greatness, we must do great things.  If we settle, we will get what we get.  There is no judgement in any of that, this is just a reminder that we get what we put into it so don’t buy into the idea that we can only get what is tossed at us.  We can make it magical.