I came across a reel that caught my eye from Rainn Wilson—as the seasons change we all need a little reminder on how to recognize and cope with mental health struggles.  He sat in front of a algae filled, broken fountain and talked about the metaphor involved.  “How many times have you felt like a broken fountain?  It is life giving, it is resurrecting, it is nourishing, it represents God’s bounty.  It is cleansing.  When in mental health struggles we are a broken fountain.  The water (source) becomes dingy and green.  What do you do to begin giving forth that precious water of life?” Rainn Wilson.  When we are struggling with emotion or other things that make us feel out of control, we put a choke hold on life and create the stagnancy, the algae, the suffocating feeling of not being able to move.  We stop the flow of our abundance and life into our being because we are saying we need to be a certain way in order to make the fountain work.  When we feel broken and weak, we need to get close to the fountain again.  We need to make sure the fountain isn’t clogged. 

What struck me about this post is that the fountain is also indicative of flow in general—not just as it relates to our mental health, but to our overall health and how we live on a daily basis.  When we sit still we tend to stagnate.  We feel frustration and anger and disappointment and restlessness, and all of those things alone can lead to mental health struggles.  When we are not promoting the right environment for our overall well-being, it all suffers.  This can start with little things like spending too much time behind our desks doing things we don’t love, and then spread into settling, then into agreeing to do things we don’t love—and soon we are living our lives on someone else’s terms.  When we can’t move, when we aren’t actively in source, we become heavy with unnecessary muck and gunk and that adds to the mental health struggles.  Learning to recognize when we need to unclog, when we need to move is the epitome of seeing happiness in the ugliness—it’s how we take our power and use it, it’s keeping perspective and knowing we aren’t alone.  We need to remember that what makes us unique can (and should) be used for the good and that is where the real living is. 

We’ve spoken of mindset and flow and the natural rhythm of things over the last few days in particular, and this is another indicator that we need to be in a state of flow because as soon as we block ourselves, we suffocate the truth inside of us, the feelings we have for our passions.  The path becomes cloudy and murky and we lose the wind in our sails.  Sometimes we aren’t even aware that we are creating our own fog and confusion, that we’ve muddied the waters with our constant churning and trying to move, when all we had to do was settle for a minute so the waters cleared and we can see which way we need to go.  Life isn’t easy as we face the constant pressures of needing to do and prove and tying our value to things and productivity.  That’s where we get stuck: when we aren’t living up to society’s idea of what we should be doing or what makes us successful.  We feel disappointment in ourselves and our lives.  When we connect with source that’s a big dose of perspective and reality.  Clear the blockage whether it is emotional or physical, and reconnect with what keeps us in a state of connected flow.  Give what we are able to and turn that energy all the way on, allow the fountain of life to flow completely and that fountain, that source will never stop again.    

No matter how imperfect I am at it, I spend much of my focus on mindset and sharing the knowledge I have of the subject, my successes and failures, and my hope that people are better able to focus on how they want to think and feel versus have their emotions and lives dictated for them.  I whole-heartedly believe we have spent too much time receiving input on what is important to us rather than learning how to discern and feel what is actually important to us.  We are fed narratives about what happiness is and what success looks and feels like, and what we need to achieve to hit either of those markers.  But we spend little time discussing the importance of peace, of value, of time well spent, and the power that comes from knowing/honoring/believing in ourselves and our abilities and even less time working on connection and understanding the similarities in humanity.  We have misconstrued power over other people as the marker of true power and success when we should be looking at the power of personal mastery and recognition of our own goals and what is important to us.  The power that comes from honing our skills and then applying them to help people around us.  The power that comes from a solid foundation in our personal values.  When we are solid there, nothing can sway us from knowing who we are.

Over the last several years I’ve worked deeply in mindset work and one thing that stays constant in all aspects is that our mindset will determine our results.  In the last two weeks I’ve heard a quote (or parts of quotes mashed together) from Michael Jordan used several times by other motivational and inspirational speakers as well as some self-help enthusiasts and it’s simplicity holds a strong truth: Jordan says something along the lines of, “Spending time in the mind gym is just as important as spending time in the physical gym; [We can] turn fear into anger, you can run from fear or you can get angry and attack it; I think people like Julius Erving, Denzel Washington, Spike Lee, and Martin Luther King, people I admire, all created their own vision.”  It speaks of the truth of a few things: one, we have power when we have clarity and control over our emotions, and mindset is a practice like any other skill we want to become successful with.  Speaking from personal experience, I am well aware of how much time it takes to master some feeling of control over the mind.  I am aware of the roller coaster of getting close to where we want to be and then falling into old habits.  I am aware of feeling safe with old habits but what we have to talk about with habit is programming.  We fall into old habits because it’s a program well engrained and practiced in our mind.  That means we can learn a new one.

I experience frustration every time I fall back into old habits but one thing I’m learning about is the rebound.  Habits are so automatic we often don’t have the chance to stop them before we repeat them but I believe with all of my being that we are capable of doing just that and thinking entirely new thoughts instead.  While I haven’t replaced all of those thoughts yet, I am absolutely able to add another thought to the negative thought pattern: STOP, that isn’t how I want to feel.  That act alone brings me closer to how I want to feel and the interruption of a pattern serves to start breaking the pattern.  It isn’t until we have control over those patterns and our thoughts that we are able to start a new pattern, and it isn’t until we are clear on our values, beliefs, goals, and how we want to feel that we know we need to stop the old pattern.  Start evaluating life in a new way.  Ask ourselves if this is really on par with how we want to feel.  Asking if it’s what we want to have leaves opportunity to miss the mark so it’s important to ask how we want to feel as that’s a better guide toward purpose.  As we practice more and more, the shorter time it takes for us to rebound and go in another direction.  That’s a skill we need to master on the way toward mastering our thoughts.  Mindset truly is the key and we need to practice the skills of exercising it.

In yesterday’s gratitude I spoke of appreciating the physical experience of duality and change.  While some people lament the changing of the seasons, we all know there isn’t anything we can do about it.  If we look at life in the same way and follow the natural pattern of things, we quickly see that there is an inevitability in life that makes it futile to force our will.  I’m the first person who wants to uphold tradition because it feels right, the first one to imagine going back, the first one to want to redo things because hindsight is 20/20.  But time has shown me that energy wasted on what was and what we thought it could be is just that: wasted.  We are meant to change and we are meant to face the light and dark not only externally, but internally as well.  I allowed myself to get caught on the dark moments for a long time because I was raised to believe that the dark left a sort of mark on us, a branding like a scarlet letter, that we were never allowed to shake off.  I felt that a mistake was a burden we were meant to carry forever.  I was taught that our value was in perfection and making other people happy, making them see us in a certain light.  I want to break the habit of thinking we have control over anything but ourselves. 

There is no stopping time anymore than we have the ability to stop the natural order of anything.  I struggle to let the past go because I still have the scars of what happened as well as the scars of believing it should have been any different.  There is nothing worse than the amount of time we make ourselves suffer over something we can’t change.  It’s wasted.  We admire the change in seasons, and so many of us look at fall as a time of coziness and change and joy that it always struck me that we get frustrated or angry when we enter a season of change.  It doesn’t always line up with the big seasonal changes, but those changes are no different in they are just as inevitable and they are also part of the natural order of things.  We are not separate from nature, we are the embodiment of it, of all the infinite possibilities of the universe expressed in each one of us.  The light and dark are in us so, if we wouldn’t presume to stop the shift in light and the way the Earth turns, why would we try to stop that in ourselves?  In the first place we don’t have that power, in the second place, there is no need to have that power.  It’s our responsibility to take on the mantle of what works for us. 

Most importantly, understand that none of this is about control.  All things in this universe are what they are—and that isn’t a tautology or a negative, that is simply the truth.  We aren’t meant to change them, we are meant to learn to work with them.  We are meant to take up our place WITH them.  What we need to understand is that we too simply are what we are and the more we try to deny it, the more difficult it is to find our rhythm.  That isn’t to say we shouldn’t strive to do our best or improve upon it, but we shouldn’t try to DENY it and become something else.  We know who we are and we feel it in our souls the exact same way the Earth knows the seasons are changing, the way the universe knows it’s time to pivot.  With that, welcome the light and the dark.  Welcome the changing of the seasons within ourselves just as we do outside.  Honor who we are the same way we honor the passing of time and know that time, in the grand scheme of things, means nothing. It too is one of those things that simply IS, and all will happen exactly as it is meant to, when it is meant to.  Feel the light and allow it to shine exactly how it is called to.  This is our season. 

“Shame Shames; That shame may not even be ours.  We take on the feelings of other generations.  We Can break the subconscious patterns of shame.  It’s not about who’s at fault, it’s about how we end it,” JB Copeland.  No one is unique in this—every family has a history of shame over something.  We all have a history of things that make us feel less than in some way, and we aren’t sure why.  It can manifest in so may ways—we never confront people when we’ve been wronged, we try to please people by putting everything we need last, we don’t ask for help, we repeat the patterns of self-deprecation and low self-worth because we feel a certain way about ourselves whether we can explain it or not.  If we look at this strictly from an historical perspective, society has shifted continuously and the definition of what is “acceptable” has shifted with it.  For Pete’s sake there was a time when we let each other die if we couldn’t gather enough food, then it became about the amount of money we brought in or how we earned a living, then the type of clothes we wore, then the type of house we have and the things in it.  But there are other things too—like how we look, how we feel about our nose or our legs and why we can’t explain how annoyed we are with those features or how we do certain things—like we just don’t dance in public etc.  Those things aren’t ours.

We feel so much shame in this family and it is deeply rooted on both sides.  I can trace the moment it was passed to my mother and I can trace the moment it was passed to me—and I can see the moments that I’m passing it to my son.  So that’s key.  This isn’t about carrying those things anymore and it isn’t about blaming those people because the truth is, they really may not have known better.  It’s about understanding what happened in those moments, knowing what was handed to us, and seeing the potential where we can do the same thing—and then stopping that pattern.  We can’t change what happened but we can stop it from happening again.  I know shame for my appearance has stopped me from even trying things that I know I would have loved.  It has stopped me from believing that I could achieve my biggest goals.  It has allowed me to accept poor treatment in many scenarios because I felt I deserved it.  And I spent too much time trying to prove my worth, and in that journey, I further solidified that I was somehow unworthy—and I exhausted myself in the process.  The weight of shame wears us down because we never knew we weren’t meant to carry it.  We never understood we could stop carrying it at any time.            

I’m looking at a physical representation of shame every time I walk into my Aunt’s house.  There are real patterns of addiction to various degrees in the family and addiction led my Aunt to do some terrible things.  I know she felt shame about what she did every day—and she felt pain about the loss that she knew resulted from the things that happened in that house.  Only that would have prevented her from reaching out for the help she so clearly needed.  We have other patterns of shame in the family including making people feel shame over who they are, specifically for things they can’t control.  It’s a deflecting mechanism for the shame others carry as well.  In that regard, this isn’t so much about the shame that was passed down but rather what carrying shame can do.  It can take something beautiful and render it completely useless.  It can destroy the most solid of foundations.  Our inability to admit our wrong and correct it is one of the most destructive things.  Follow that with the realization that we were wrong and too proud to admit it, and we end up carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders, and we will collapse every time.      

It’s up to us to stop the patterns of shame even if that means admitting the shame we feel and what has happened.  The other person doesn’t even have to acknowledge their role in it.  We simply need to be ready to take on our responsibility for what happened and deciding that we are going to do things differently.  We do this by having compassion for those who passed on a pattern that they didn’t even know they had or didn’t know how to break.  We remember that we are one, we aren’t targeted by these people, they didn’t know any better and they were repeating what they were taught.  When we receive shame it feels like one of the most personal things ever but it really isn’t.  We want to break the pattern and we do that with love, and appreciation and practicing gratitude.  That will guide us to our purpose and finding our purpose gives us our passion, the ground to change our patterns.  With purpose we aren’t afraid to face the pain of years of trauma and shame that was passed down because no one knew what to do with.  Our foundation doesn’t have room to carry that any longer and we are strong enough to say that is enough.  The shame ends with us.  

Another fall and I’ve lost another Aunt.  I’m almost numb to the way this year has gone.  I can’t say I’m not hopeful for a good turn around, but this is not what I thought it would be.  And now this loss, a year after my last Aunt, all while things seem to be turning around, has created such a mixed feeling of…otherness.  This year has been a wake up call to me that I do not want to continue in a certain vein where people tell me what to do—I’ve always had that underlying drive that didn’t want to report to anyone, that thought I knew best, that found my own way.  And, as I shared a few weeks ago, I’ve realized how much of that was ego.  I felt guilty for wanting the things I did, I restricted myself hoping for the even bigger pay off, and when it didn’t come, I felt like my world was falling apart.   

We can’t make people be who we want them to be.  People react very differently to stressors and seeing the condition of her house is a testament to someone going one way with tragedy.  She tried to freeze time.  The house was still a mess and this isn’t about cleanliness.  This is about how she tried to hold onto everything that was once the loss happened-and she did it repeatedly at different stages.  The brain handles trauma differently and she definitely faced trauma, loss after loss.  I feel like I relate to her in some ways—it’s why I cling to things in the past as well.  But I see the way she let her life fall apart, how the pain became too much.  And I see the parallel to the loss of influential people in my life early on—as she lost her father, I lost my grandfather, I feared death, I feared more loss.  I have relics of time gone by and I know that it wasn’t normal.  So I began cleaning all of that and then I walk into this and I am proud I started when I did. But this isn’t about cleaning and clearing and talking about the positivity of letting go—again.  It’s about understanding where we are at and meeting ourselves there and then reframing our lives.  When the foundation, the walls, whatever gets knocked down, build something new, don’t try to make it what it was.   

This loss is also a testament to letting people in.  When tragedy happens, we aren’t meant to isolate.  My entire family has a history of doing that—we can handle it on our own.  But seeing how life can become so unmanageable after loss, our minds can become unmanageable, it makes me realize that there is infinitely more we can let go of.  We hold onto things thinking it will help us remember—and it does.  It’s a record of our lives, the experiences we’ve shared.  But the things aren’t the experience itself.  The things aren’t a substitute for the person.  I know I have the things I do because I didn’t want to let go of the person, the idea, the image.  This was a circumstance where positivity and love and trying to refocus didn’t help a damn thing.  There are certain depths that it’s too deep for any of us to go—and it’s painful to witness that sinking in people.  I feel that sinking tendency in myself—between new responsibilities, uncertainty at work/home, troubles in relationships, health scares, losing my support system, this has been the time when I wanted to give it all up again.   

But what I’m seeing is that people will never be who we want them to be, who we think they are.  With all of these losses I’m seeing that I’m missing the version of who they were—not the version of who they became.  The people they became are not the people I knew as a child—that person never would have allowed themselves to fall apart like that.  And then I see that the truth is they will always be themselves and we have no say in how they live their lives.  We have an image, a perception of people and when we get behind the scenes, we see who they really are.  They aren’t always capable or they never were the version of themselves we thought they were.  We can watch people deteriorate, we can offer the life preserver, but if they aren’t willing to grab it, they won’t survive.  We can’t make people be the best of themselves if they don’t see it in themselves.  Not to be dramatic but there has been a lot of tragedy, loss, and near loss in my life starting from a young age and I have a firm example now of what happens when we don’t deal with that—my Aunt shared a similar story line.  I will not let my life fall apart because I can’t hold onto all of the what was.  And that sucks because some of that what was, was really good.  It felt good.  It was who I thought I was, it was a part of me.  So how do we evolve this complicated relationship where that version of ourselves, the one we held up as the epitome of the greatest because we didn’t know what the greatest was… is exactly what’s drowning us?

We have to let go.  Sometimes we have to dive deeper so we can get our bearings and then we come up for air.  We touch the things that triggered us in the first place.  We get close to the pain and see that we can survive it—if we let ourselves go through it.  My boss/mentor/owner of the company suffered a huge loss at the height of the evolution of the company.  She could have easily let herself drown in it, go down with it.  But she didn’t.  And clearly the point of this story is that no two people handle that circumstance the same way, but this is moreso about choice and mindset.  We need to train ourselves to find the way out by seeing where the light gets in through the cracks.  We have to know when to break down the door and when to walk to the next one.  This loss sucks, nearly any loss sucks.  But if we can take it for what it is and learn something from it, break the patterns, then there is a chance it doesn’t all have to fall apart.  And even if it does, we can rebuild.  Don’t let the fire consume us, learn to rise from the ash and make something else.

“If you can’t find happiness in the ugliness you’re not going to find it in the beauty either,” Joanna Gaines.  This is the epitome of perspective and how we choose to look at life.  We can either be the only one who has ever dealt with anything like we’ve experienced and no one can relate or we can accept that we are on a similar continuum.  We need to be able to manage how we see things and how we react to them.  We need to understand the power we have over how we interpret things because until we assume responsibility for our thoughts and actions, someone else will always have the power to determine how we feel and what we do with our lives.  We have to choose to see the good in everything or at least make an effort to understand that, while certain things may be rough, while we wouldn’t consciously choose them for ourselves, there is a reason for it.  And even if we don’t understand the reason, even if we never understand it, we still learn how to move forward with it as it is. 

I know the mental strength it takes to see the good in every situation, it can feel like dragging the weight of a mountain with us.  But witnessing the things I have over the past several years, the culmination of many of them in this year, has shown me with 100% certainty that we will never move onto something good if we choose to see the bad.  I’ve seen my family trying to manage things on their own because we are too proud/scared to reach out for help when we feel like we are drowning, like somehow we got ourselves in to this situation so it’s up to us alone to get out.  The brain will always try to reconcile what has happened, it will try to logic how we got here and who did what, who is responsible.  The brain is in survival so it’s looking for the guilty/responsible party for where we are and why we feel the way we do.  The truth is that all comes from within.  It’s all on us—and we can break the patterns that didn’t belong to us.   

To play off of yesterday’s topic, that broken bone will heal and while it may be different than someone else’s it doesn’t mean that they don’t know the pain of a broken bone.  Stop trying to make ourselves worse off than everyone else and trying to be the victim—we don’t need attention from the negative and we don’t need to highlight anything that causes us pain.  I’ve also learned that if I break a bone in the process of trying to do something unique and I failed, it doesn’t mean that I have to bear the weight of it on my own.  I can still have people help me put myself back together and continue on my work.  We can use that pain and turn it into something productive.  If we can’t see the light in our darkest times then we won’t appreciate it when it gets brighter.  It can suck being in the dark, looking at the ugly, so if we can appreciate at least being alive with it, the chance to create something new, then we can start seeing the beauty around us—and appreciate the beauty we create. 

I have a friend and colleague who struggles with nearly identical mental health issues and patterns that I do but we define our experiences differently.  I will fully acknowledge that the cause and how we got to where we are is entirely different.  I will also acknowledge that the same diagnosis can present in different ways.  But what I’ve noticed in the difference of our experience is how we choose to experience it.  He still refers to himself and defines himself in the victim mentality—and he was a victim.  I was too and then I learned the hard way that the help I needed was not available to me.  The adults around me that could have helped me simply didn’t.  When I went to get help I was told that it wasn’t that serious—and I knew that I had to figure it out on my own.  I had to break the patterns, both mine and what was given to me, on my own.  As much as that left me broken in its own right, it did give me one thing: it made me acutely aware of how powerful we are and how much power we have over the mind.  I may not always execute that power correctly (ie I’ve become too controlling over certain things and I don’t always believe in or apply my power to my own experience) but I am 100% aware of what the mind can do.  And in spite of the physiological difficulties I can’t change (the chemicals that make me experience life like this) I have been able to navigate and compartmentalize my life to make it manageable.

Again, I don’t claim that this is perfect or that it works all the time—but I do know that I have managed to shift my entire mindset toward what I will and will not allow in my mind.  My friend stated that here are simply things he can’t change in his mind, that he has a disorder, that I couldn’t understand what he’s talking about.  And that is when I told him he needed to stop being a victim.  We have nearly identical experiences and he looks at his as something that can never be managed and that he needs to live a certain way because he can never learn to do something different.  Again, I acknowledge the physiological chemical differences in the brain, but I also believe this is a spectrum.  We can move ourselves along the spectrum with focus and determination and a different outlook.  He tried to use the example of a broken bone.  He asked if I ever had a compound fracture of the ulna and stated that if I hadn’t, then I would never know what that felt like.  My response was that I’ve had a broken bone.  There is truth to both scenarios: a broken bone is a broken bone—it doesn’t matter where.  But the severity and specificity of the break can have some differences and that would lead to a different treatment.  To which I told him that’s exactly what I mean: there are other options and avenues he’s choosing not to pursue because he has defined himself as a victim of this disorder.  He isn’t addressing what he CAN do and is focusing on what he can’t do. 

None of this is to say that I’m handling my stuff any better than anyone else: far from it.  I share enough here on a daily basis that most of you know this started as an effort to navigate my own healing.  I’m learning as I go.  But I DO know with 100% certainty that how we approach our healing makes all the difference and that we do have the ability to determine if we stay where we are or if we move on.  There are more ways to cope, to heal, to deal than what we tell ourselves and if we limit ourselves by defining our circumstance a certain way then we will never progress.  We will never heal fully if we limit ourselves to who we are now and what we see now.  We can’t choose our illness but we can choose how we progress with it and if we want to heal, if we want to learn to get to where we need to, we need to embrace the power of the mind and learn that we have more control over it than we think we do.  Even though we have the same issue, we are in vastly different places because of how we define what we are dealing with.  I’m at a different level than he is and he doesn’t believe that he can ever get there because he feels things are out of his control.  I’ve taken control (even if sometimes too far or not in the right area or even consistently) and it has given me a different perspective.

“It is every man’s obligation to put back into the world at least the equivalent of what he takes out of it,” Albert Einstein.  I grew up with the idea that I couldn’t take from people unless I could give back to them.  It’s part of why I decided that I needed to do everything on my own.  I couldn’t take the pressure, the weight of having to repay everything.  I grew up thinking that relationships were a debt, that you always needed to make sure you were holding up your end and then some so people couldn’t say that you’ve used them.  I can’t tell you how many times that mentality got me used.  It hurt putting myself out there so often, helping so many people, doing what I was told and performing to the utmost of my ability only to be left holding the bag or left alone when I needed help the most.  It left me feeling guilty when I had to accept help that I knew I couldn’t return. 

But as I’ve spent more time thinking about this mindset, I realize that this isn’t about debt. It’s about contribution.  Not everything in this world is a 1:1 match.  Just because someone does the brakes on my car doesn’t mean I will do the brakes on their car.  Just because they bought me a book doesn’t mean I have to buy them a book.  What we put back is supposed to come from us.  It’s supposed to come from what we feel, from our talents, from sharing our gifts. We aren’t meant to be copies of each other, tallying what we are owed.  We are meant to be in flow and give what we can.  That understanding flipped things for me.  IT takes the pressure off.  It reaffirms that we are enough as we are.  That our gifts are the reason we are here.  The way we share our energy is more important than the total on the bill. 

For those of us who were raised to take this literally, where we have to give back what we get, I want to encourage you to put that weight down.  You are enough.  You don’t owe more than who you are, you don’t owe what you can’t share.  You only owe the responsibility of sharing the completeness of who you are to everyone.  To be entirely who we are.  It is when we live in that fullness, the complete expression of who we are that we understand the limitless energy that flows in this world.  The exchange is less about dollar for dollar and more about energy and effort and matching frequency.  It’s the most powerful thing.  Just because we don’t have the ability to buy lunch for everyone today doesn’t mean that we can’t make them feel good in our presence.  It doesn’t mean that we can’t open up space for them in our hearts.  Somedays we will prepare the meal and other times we are opening the doors.  Other days we are the guest.  It’s an exchange not a debt and as long as we are always putting in our share, that is more than enough.

We ended last week talking about magnetic influence, so let’s talk about the power of conviction to bring a vision to life.  I watched a highlight reel of D23 from this past year—it was something I have never seen before and didn’t even know existed.  Apparently this is a fan club and they hold a convention every year similar to one that is held in my business.  What caught my eye about this is the sheer intensity and insanity.  All of these people come to an imaginary world and dress up as fictional characters and they are all held to such a standard but it speaks to the power of group thought and acceptance and more than anything, it speaks to the power of conviction and the ability to stand behind our ideas.  It’s a testament to the power of moving forward on all cylinders, full ignition and not holding back.  Follow all the pieces and let them come together.  I think of all the changes and adaptations Disney has faced over it’s lifetime and the premise is always the same: imagination is king and nothing is impossible.  Disney himself created worlds that no one thought possible and it sparked the children, the imagination, the love, the creativity in millions of people.  Disney said, “All your dreams can come true if you have the courage to pursue them.”  I wrote a piece on that as well from the perspective of courage but today I speak about that line from the perspective of the power of dreams.  Seeing all of these people suspend their realities to be someone else somewhere else for the time of the convention is a testament to the power of creativity and conviction and manifestation.  These people wanted it all to be real so a world appeared for them. 

The same thing is true for my (or any) business.  There is power in numbers and in energy.  When we come together with like minded individuals and embrace our power, we can make anything happen.  Disney talked of courage and there is courage in pursuing what seems crazy but more so in the conviction to keep going to bring the vision to life.  There is power in vision so don’t ever let anyone talk you out of an idea that they can’t see.  You see it so it is up to you to make it real.  I said last week that when we like ourselves and have belief in our ideas, we attract at a great rate.  This is a prime example of that.  We have to be willing to let go of what we know and build what we see, and we will attract the necessary tools and support because we have faith and belief in our ability, in our skills.  There is power in numbers and when we have an authentic frequency which already operates at a high level, that is amplified infinitely when people of the same belief come together.  There is power in vision, in sharing an idea, in group thought—there is power in conviction.  To reiterate, liking ourselves was never about power over others or ego, liking ourselves was about belief in our visions and abilities.

With all of that being said, seeing this highlight reel and having experienced the energy of a group coming together with a common goal, I want to hit home on this point: if Disney or any other creator can make something unreal tangible, if they can bring an idea based in total fantasy into reality, that is all the proof we need that we can do the same.  It doesn’t look the same for all of us, but we all have the power to create—and we are meant to use it.  It’s magnetic when we believe in ourselves and that power is amplified when others believe in it too.  It’s amazing how people will naturally be drawn toward that confidence, that assurance, and that conviction.  It’s amazing how we can propel ourselves when we have that level of belief as well.  I’ve seen and heard people talk about fearing that type of group thought but I see it differently: I see the magic in creation and how fulfilling our destiny and obligation brings about the power for others to do the same.  It’s showing people how to make the unreal, real.  Like I said above, don’t let anyone talk you out of what they can’t see—you see it for a reason.  Don’t hold back.