Today I am grateful for time.  As I look back over the summer so far, I realize how quickly it has gone.  There have been so many moments of joy, laughter, excitement.  Moments filled with life and love.  I’m not sure we’ve ever had a summer busier than this one.  It has made me keenly aware that how we spend our time determines results.  It has also made me realize that we have all the time in the world to accomplish things—we just need to do it.  When we prioritize our lives into the things we set out to do, the thing is done.  How we spend our time is our choice.  We are so lucky to be alive and to choose what we want to do next.  I used to think boredom was a luxury, and I realize that I was so emotionally busy that I never prioritized actually getting things done.  Shifting focus has made all the difference, and suddenly time is mine.

Today I am grateful for recognizing my mistakes.  I have this weird habit of simultaneously taking responsibility for everything and shifting the blame.  It has made me take ownership for things that aren’t mine and shift the blame onto others for things that I wanted to do.  I allowed myself to be distracted and play the victim when it came to my choices for a long time.  Understanding what is mine to carry and what I actually need/want to work on has made all the difference.  I still fall into the victim habit every now and then because it’s easy and familiar.  Taking ownership of our lives isn’t always easy because the results are directly correlated to our behavior and action.  But as soon as we do it, the power we felt over us from other people, the attempts to manipulate others go away.  Suddenly the choice becomes ours, and we choose differently.  I may have to make that choice every day, but it is worth it every time.

Today I am grateful for releasing fear.  Not a new one but I am learning to appreciate every time I recognize that I have to let go of fear to progress.  Progress is such a mental game that for those of us who struggle with anxiety, depression, people pleasing, addiction, it can be a daily fight to choose differently.  It can be a daily struggle to figure out that we are in the same pattern again—sometimes right when we are in the middle of it.  The key is patience and to learn to let go a little bit at a time, even in the heat of the moment.  Let go, allow, and breathe.  We always have the option to choose again.  We always have the option to face our fears.  I know it doesn’t seem like much of a choice, but when it comes to resilience and progress, making the hard choice is what we have to do.  Ironically, we can make that hard choice easier by approaching it with intention.  Know the purpose is to let go of fear.  Some days are easier than others.  But we keep going.

Today I am grateful for creativity.  This is one of my favorite things to be grateful for because I love living in the area of creativity.  I literally feel my spine tingle when it comes to starting new projects.  I love the thrill of the start and the organizing and brining something to life, sharing my vision.  I’m working on the follow through to make sure that my life isn’t a continual series of starts, but the first step in that is falling in love with a project.  There is potential in every beginning and I love to imagine what things will become.  Honestly, I simply love the thrill of potential.  It’s a flame I want to nurture and explore.  In that space, we never get burned by the fire, we simply fuel it.  As we fuel it, it expands and opens up new avenues to other creative endeavors.  The paths are endless in the best possible way. 

Today I am grateful for my skin.  For so long I’ve struggled to fit in and prove where I belong.  If I’m totally honest, nothing ever felt right and I still struggle with it today.  Even if people are perfectly kind, I still struggle to let go and fully embrace who I am with people.  I mean, I know the difference between over-sharing and building a relationship, and I know there are appropriate times to share who we are regardless of who we are with.  But I am grateful for the ability to discover who I am.  I am grateful to be doing this work, to take this journey, to define aspects of myself and live in fluidity in others.  I am grateful for the person I am.  I love my humor and joy, I love how I love those closest to me, I love the ideas that spin through my head, I love that I can help myself be better.  I love that I am finding where I’m comfortable in my own skin. 

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead. 

Dr. Ramani did a talk on Women of Impact where she brought up the things that impact/harm our health and she called out how toxic relationships seem to have an equal negative impact on our health to smoking.  The body responds to the state of mind and that is with us 24/7, so if we are constantly under stress, duress, and pressure, the body never finds its way to a relaxed state to allow normal function.  Constantly living in fight or flight mode creates unhealthy levels of stress hormones and responses and those things impact our basal rates in such a way that the body begins to thing stress is the norm.  Dr. Ramani also brought up how we ask about smoking, drinking, and exercise but we don’t talk about the impact of relationships.  Dr. Ramani went so far as to call out that getting relational trauma off the table can help people live longer—physical and mental health are not two separate entities.  Dr. Ramani expresses we have concern about things like smoking, drinking, and sleep but we don’t ask about our mental state enough.  She flat out stated that bad relationships are just as bad if not worse for health than smoking.

Our society doesn’t do well to demonstrate healthy relationships or healthy habits.  We glorify the drama and the busy life and the constant hustle and the jaded/angry/frustrated persona.  We have confused ego with self-care and we do not know how to function in cooperation with people so we have unwittingly normalized dysfunctional relationships.  We confuse boundaries, control, and respect by either tolerating behavior we shouldn’t or allowing ourselves to be manipulated. It’s also common that we fail to process things that have happened to us so we repeat our unhealthy habits.  Having a firm sense of self and truly knowing who we are prevents some of this behavior.  We have to do the work first (and on our own) in order to eliminate narcissistic behavior—ironic we need to focus on the self in order to focus on others.  Once we get to a healthy state of mind about who we are, we can look at the state of our relationships—the more familiar we are with ourselves, the more we can catch our patterns and recognize things in others.  We need to be healthy to have healthy relationships because the impact we have on each other is profound.

That isn’t to say throw away our relationships like we throw away smoking or any other bad habit.  It is to say we need to create an awareness around our behavior and habits.  It’s better to understand what we are capable of changing and work on accepting that than it is to allow the stress of something that doesn’t work or is completely unhealthy to infiltrate us to the point of making us sick.  That is the truth of it: certain relationships make us sick and if we are going to turn things around we need to have a better relationship with ourselves and understand the impact of the people we allow access to our lives.  We do not need to engage in stressful behavior to make others happy.  We need to empower ourselves to have healthy boundaries and healthy understanding of what we need.  It’s ok to walk away. 

“We don’t get what we ask for, we get what we believe.  What we believe about ourselves shows up in our energy, it’s how we walk into a room, how we communicate through body language.  It’s whether we sit up straight or hide out in the back of a meeting.  At times my own energy has been saying I’m cool with the bare minimum, don’t give me more.  Without knowing it I stunted my growth because I was scared to be magnificent and doubtful that I was.  There’s still more I can do, other ways for me to grow.  It’s ok to own a desire for more,” Alicia Keys. This is a perfect follow up to yesterday’s piece about self-limitation.  Energy is a very real thing and where intention goes, energy flows.  So if we are stuck on a path, telling ourselves that there is no way forward, that is the energy we attract and we will limit the possibilities we see.  Belief in self is an energy we can’t hide from the universe no matter what we say verbally.  Truthfully, what we believe is an energy we can’t hide from the universe no matter what we say.

The universe knows where we are at energetically all the time.  There are certain things we can’t hide with a smile—we all know that.  The universe is like that but to a higher degree.  It knows if we really believe in our abilities or if we are just giving lip service to them.  I think that we are all terrified of what we can do at times.  It’s natural because we are so used to the physical world and the beliefs engrained in us from birth that we truly think there are limits in everything we do.  We are taught that we are judged and we are taught TO judge early on, no longer out of physical survival but out of social survival.  We’ve equated the social aspect to life or death and called that normal.  But if we can get beyond that and trust where that power comes from, to know that we are all designed to expand this world, then we start to change our beliefs because we’ve changed the vantage point.  We change the entire game if enough of us learn how to tap into this.

Limits are a game of the mind.  Growth is infinite in the soul.  We are meant to climb as high as we can, to help others attain that as well, and to spread as much light as we can.  We are limitless and infinite.  Sometimes it just takes a while for the physical to catch up.  Managing energy isn’t about control, it’s about tapping in, opening doors to new possibilities when we see them.  Managing energy is about perspective and keeping focused on the bigger picture, our small part in it, and what we do with it.  That choice is always ours—we can recognize a gift and never open it, or we can relish it and use it to create something even bigger.  The point is simply this: there is always more out there than we can see from where we currently are.  There is more inside of us than we are willing to share at times because it can be scary to show that type of vulnerability.  If our intention is to get to our highest capacity, then we learn to look beyond what we can see and step fully into who we are.  Let go of the limits we impose upon ourselves and embrace the possibilities.       

“Don’t limit what we believe is possible,” Brett Portelli.  We can find success in myriad ways.  We plan and we think we are thinking big but the reality is we’ve capped ourselves.  We set a limit of x amount of people we want to share a message with, we say that when y happens we are successful, or we think a certain number makes it so.  What if we could go higher? What if you could do more?  This isn’t solely about pushing beyond a limit, this is about understanding that there is no limit, only levels.  There is no cap.  We have great capacity and so few of us use it.  So few of us share what we know because we don’t believe in ourselves or our ability to carry the message.  These things wouldn’t be ours if they weren’t meant to be.  It’s true that in certain positions we can only see so far so we may believe that we are peaked.  But once we turn around, change the vantage point, or climb just a bit higher, we see there is more.  There are endless possibilities in this world and when we are on the right path we are unstoppable. 

I want to reinforce that we are all capable of that type of momentum.  Once we start something that is meant to be, incredible support and forces and energy conspire to open the doors and continue our progression.  Just because we can only see what’s in front of us now doesn’t mean more doesn’t exist.  There’s a quote that says the top of one mountain is the bottom of the next.  I used to feel overwhelmed by that because, to me it implied that there is an endless journey toward something that we may never attain.  Now I see it as a journey of possibility.  How amazing is it that when we get to each level that there are doors we didn’t know about, more to learn, and new ways to expand?  Just because we can’t see it yet doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.  In yesterday’s piece, I wrote that I wasn’t sure who decided the bottom was bad.  The bottom doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve fallen—it may mean that we’ve found the beginning of our next opportunity.  It can be foundational or it can be a springboard.  The point is, it’s our choice.

When we approach life with the mindset that we need to learn as much as we can, to share as much as we can, to help as much as we can, and to love as much as we can, we find opportunity in everything we do.  We have to learn to accept that what we’ve been told so far may not be 100% accurate because those lessons were taught and learned with the knowledge we had at that time.  We are meant to expand and explore.  We are curious by nature and purposeful in connection so there is nothing other than the imaginary framework we’ve passed down for millennia holding us back.  Even now with the greatest technologies the world has experienced, we still limit their use and function.  We aren’t meant to confine ourselves to parameters set by man—we are meant to align with the energy we’ve been given, the energy inside of us that tells us exactly what we need to know, exactly who we are.  We are meant to be limitless. Step outside of the box and look at the world that awaits.  You never know what you will find—it may be the entire universe at our fingertips.

“If you’ve hit rock bottom, go sideways,” Wynonna Judd.  Full transparency, I haven’t heard this song but someone shared this quote with me and the phrasing resonated.  Life has its ups and downs as a natural part of the course.  But there are times we know we feel lower than we have before.  We may even feel so dark we can’t find a way out.  I want to use this as a reminder that shifting perspective is key and understanding that rock bottom is a gift.  When we are at the bottom we limit the choices we see—but we still have a choice.  We can choose to wallow and complain about where we are or we can look around us and determine what comes next.  We can tap into the creativity and ingenuity that we feel in us.  Sometimes rock bottom isn’t a matter of having something taken from us, it’s a matter of showing us what’s really important.  It’s a stripping away of the distraction and the external stimuli to find who we are.

The beauty of being at a low is that we see our path isn’t always linear, or that if it is, that isn’t always in the direction we thought.  Sometimes there is another way around.  We’ve been trained to believe that these are shortcuts and that things need to be difficult in order to be worthy.  The truth is, our path is easy because it is exactly right for us.  Sometimes being at the bottom is simply eliminating any other way we can follow but our own—and it might not look how we thought or how we were trained to think it should look.  Creativity is a powerful thing and we all have it.  if we can look past what we were trained to fear and what we were trained to be and simply connect with who we are, the rest falls away regardless.  On the outside that may look like a failure, and without ample belief it may feel that way.  But the truth is that is simply the beginning of the path meant for us, the awakening of who we are.

I also want to add that I’m not sure who decided that bottom is a bad thing.  I think we need to recognize that in our lives there will be ups and downs, times we reach the clouds and times we come back down to earth to see what’s really going on.  The truth is the ground can be nice.  It holds us, it can energize us, it literally grounds us.  There is purpose in finding the bottom if we look for the reason.  There are also times when we need a hand up and times we become the hand for others.  We can’t do that if we are too far above others.  We need to find the balance, the answers, and sometimes we need to simply sit where we are and feel something solid beneath us.  We don’t need to fear the bottom.  We can embrace the gifts it gives us and continue to move from there.     

The encouragement you’ve offered to others has helped them succeed.  It’s time to offer the same encouragement to yourself.  This thought jumped at me this morning when I looked in the mirror.  I’ve put great effort, focus, time, and care into myself the last few weeks because I’ve diligently been working toward a new life.  I realized that I looked different and for the first time in my life I offered myself a sincere compliment.  I’ve had wild insecurities most of my life and it hit me: I’ve helped so many people succeed.  I have mentored and counseled hundreds of people, and while I haven’t been perfect, I have witnessed a majority of positive results.  I have helped people through everything from addiction to suicidal ideation to career planning.  I never realized how much I questioned my own advice.  Why wasn’t I listening to myself?  I often had the same insight and intuition about myself but I would ignore it. 

When I saw myself in the mirror, I finally understood that I was no different than anyone else I had mentored.  I know the steps to succeed, I know what works for me, and I know what I want to be doing so there is no reason to not move forward.  Aside from a bit of refining and clarifying, there is no reason to not execute.  There comes a point when we realize that we have to spread our wings and we need to be our own cheerleader.  We are more often our greatest enemy but we have the amazing capacity to be our best friend as well.  To honor what we are thinking and feeling and go treat ourselves with the same love and respect we’d give to anyone.  When we get in our own corner, it doesn’t matter what was said before because now we know who we are.  Get excited about what we do.  Get excited about who we are.

The more love and gratitude we express in our lives, the more love and gratitude we receive.  That includes love and gratitude for ourselves.  There comes a point when we realize that our inner talk is so self-destructive that we can’t go on as we are.  If we feel like crap after going through our inner dialogue, then clearly our inner talk is effective.  Why not change the tone?  Change the message?  We are all beautiful and worthy simply because we are here and have a gift to share.  That is the only purpose we need to worry about.  If we can offer support to others, then we are surely capable of offering that support to ourselves. As I mentioned yesterday, we don’t have to be great to start but we have to start to be great.  Start recognizing the good in who we are and celebrate that person.  Treat yourself as a friend and see how life turns around.     

I want to share a simple reminder: You don’t have to be great to start but you have to start to be great.  I love this.  As I work through transitioning fields and projects, I realize how much I held back out of perfectionism and the desire to be liked—and the desire to “take off” immediately.  Having the time off from work that I did a few weeks ago changed a lot for me in regards to this.  It has nothing to do with being liked, it has to do with being relatable.  We have all had moments of starting.  We need humility in order to learn and to grow.  We need courage to be novices.  We all have a jumping off point.  No one starts off knowing all the answers or how to do anything 100%.   

There may have been a ton of things we wanted to do in this world.  How many of them have we pursued?  How many have been put to the back burner?  How many have been forgotten because we took a safer path?  I know that I don’t want to live a life questioning what it would have been like had I gone after something.  At the end of the day, it isn’t about being great, it’s about what we’ve done on the journey that feels great.  Did we make great use of our time?  Did we share and create great love?  Did we share great ideas?  Did we create great opportunities in our lives?  None of this has to do with what others define as great.  It has to do with what feels right for us and going after what makes greatness in our own lives based on our own definitions.  Don’t ever let fear tell you what you can and cannot do.  Screw the definition of greatness and perfection: live messy and wild and to the greatest capacity we have.  That is greatness.  Start today.

Today I am grateful for reclamation.  It amazes me how quickly we fall back into habits without even realizing it.  Sometimes the feelings we experience lead us to familiar coping mechanisms before we even realize what we are doing.  We aren’t always aware of how to interrupt that thought process because we are in the middle of feeling it so we subconsciously revert to what gave us comfort or to behaviors we used during a different time.  I had been feeling pretty rough about work this past week for a variety of reasons and I’d been super crabby (for lack of a better word) without being able to put my finger on why.  It took nearly the entire week to process it, but I was feeling like crap because I’d been repeating patterns from over a month ago that set up the day poorly.  As soon as I realized that, I was able to turn things around and step back toward who I want to be and make different choices.   It was an absolute reclamation of power. 

Today I am grateful for acceptance.  We logically know that life doesn’t always go our way.  That doesn’t mean it feels any better when things take a turn or when someone does something other than what we expect them to (or when they fall into old habits).  If we really pay attention, there comes a moment when we understand that some people are simply who they are.  Their reactions have nothing to do with us, they are a reflection of who they are.  The sooner we understand a tiger doesn’t change its stripes, the easier it is to move forward.  That isn’t to say it’s without sadness or even disappointment, but it is to say that we have a clear view of what’s happening (or what won’t happen).  There are certain places in our lives that others can’t join us and we have to understand that we will be held back if we continue to wait for them to be something they are not.  Acceptance brings us closer to where we are meant to be.

Today I am grateful for focus.  I never realized how many external things impacted my ability to focus on what I wanted.  I also never realized how much ego, the thought that I could handle it all held me back.  Adult ADHD is no joke.  I often flitted from thing to thing, leaving stuff undone because I’d change projects on a whim always thinking I’d go back and finish whatever I had started.  The more I said yes to doing stuff, the less stuff got done and then the overwhelm and self-soothing would kick in.  The ego was more about proving to myself that I could do it all and then allowing myself to fall into victim mode, claiming people didn’t understand how busy I was as I continued to say yest to things I had no business saying yes to.  As soon as I started addressing my habits and allowed things that didn’t matter to fall away, the rest began to clear.  I still have trouble differentiating what is mine to handle at times, but letting the unnecessary fall away has made all the difference in eliminating pressures and following through.  Knowing my limits hasn’t confined me, it has set me free because I’m moving forward in a positive way.  Focus makes the magic happen because I can focus on the magic.  Energy flows where attention goes.

Today I am grateful for connection.  Becoming who we are meant to be can be a lonely exercise because the people we usually surrounded ourselves with may no longer be the ones who are capable of supporting or understanding us in our new reality.  So when we are in that new space, the space that honors who we are, when we find people who work with us there, it’s a gift.  Connection to the spiritual has changed things as well.  I have worked at my 9-5 for nearly 18 years and I never knew there was a labyrinth on the property next door—and it was built in 2012.  I’ve taken my lunch hour or my time away and spent it visiting the labyrinth.  I love the feeling of getting to the center and taking my shoes off to feel the grass beneath my feet, feeling the sun and the breeze.  It’s a beautiful place and I love the energy exchange while I’m there.  I’d sit and sulk in frustration most days, but connecting with nature and spirit have proven infinitely better.  Connection is key. 

Today I am grateful to make decisions.  It isn’t about making others see me in a certain way, it’s about seeing myself as I want to be seen and honoring who I am.  The greatest power we have is to decide who we are and to take the steps to be that person.  No one gets to take that away unless we allow it.  I’ve given away that power for far too long and it is an amazing gift to be able to decide who I am and take the steps toward supporting that.  It is complete liberation to let go of what wasn’t working and pick up or change course toward what feels right.  We’ve been caged for too long and deluded into believing a certain path in life works for everyone when we each have our own path.  We need to take the road that leads to ourselves and never look back.  Always choose who we are.

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.   

I’m going to work through people questioning me.  One of the hardest things with reconciling our growth and ego is creating boundaries.  Learning to let go of pleasing others for the sake of our own sanity and peace causes an internal struggle at times because we are so used to doing what others need and being what others need that it can seem selfish or even egotistical if we set a boundary that doesn’t put others first.  When it comes to defending ourselves, our work, and our point of view, there’s also a difficult line between boundary and ego.  We have to be firm and clear with our beliefs.  We have to learn that people can question us and it may have nothing to do with us.  Their questioning us can be about simple curiosity or it can be about their ego—and defending ourselves may have little to do with defending our own ego.

With all that being said, there comes a point where we have to come to grips with the fact that not everyone will agree with what we say.  While we know this is common sense, it can be hard to grapple with in those moments when something is truly meaningful.  We have to work through knowing when to trust ourselves, when to stand our ground, and when to simply let people believe what they want to believe.  It all comes to the context and content of the relationships.  It also comes down to the passion and purpose we feel on the subject as well as the goal of the other person.  As mentioned above, sometimes people are simply curious.  Other times we are faced with people who try to get our goat so to speak. 

If we can master our emotions in order to convey our message with clarity and conviction, that is more than enough.  It doesn’t matter what others think and it doesn’t matter what they ask: if we know what matters and we express ourselves clearly, the right people will find us.  Set the goal not to be liked by everyone.  Make peace with that.  Once we understand what we are capable of attracting and creating, their opinions mean little anyway.  Let go of the ego that says we have to defend ourselves and our opinions at every turn and welcome the conversation that comes from people wanting to know more.  If people are trying to push you, then learn when it’s time to walk away.  Practice these boundaries with ourselves.  Set the goal of knowing that questioning ideas is a good thing and that if someone asks things it opens a dialogue that can make things better.  If it doesn’t, then walk away.

“Allow the grief of the passing of who I was to go through me,” Ashmi Pathela.  We spoke last week about letting go of the people we were when we needed to get through something. There is an honoring of the past and a welcoming of the future.  There is a need for safety and we learn that we provide safety by remembering that we made it through everything so far.  We learned and we became the people we are because of what we went through.  It’s ok to feel the comfort in who we were—that version has been through all of this and knows how to react.  But to move forward, we need to adapt and learn new things.  Like I said earlier, the person we were can’t come with us into the future.  That adaptation was and is wonderful and holds a plethora of information so there is going to be a transition with the loss of the familiar.

Growth is painful on several fronts.  The first that we are expanding beyond what we know.  There is bound to be a certain level of discomfort in the unknow and the learning curve can be steep for certain things.  The second is that we enter this new territory alone.  Our respective journeys are for us alone so the people and things that brought us comfort will not come with us.  The third is a loss of identity.  We knew who we were prior to the moment we decide to move forward—without familiarity to what we know or the people we had around us, we question who we are.  That is a loss, and a painful one at that.  Once we acknowledge that we are grieving what we knew it becomes easier to process and become what we are meant to be.

Growth and grieving can be a simultaneous action—and sometimes one is required of the other.  Sometimes in order to grow we have to pass through grief.  We have to mourn what we won’t be and who we thought we were.  We have to honor the pieces of us that we know are no longer necessary but that often carried us through the hardest times of our lives.  Grief is natural in many stages of life.  We are no longer children, then no longer teens, then no longer young adults, and then we find ourselves the adults, then we lose our parents, and suddenly we are facing the natural end of our time.  This isn’t about morbidity, it is about the common ground we all share in our humanity.  Love who we were and welcome who we are meant to be.