“You need to unsee the vision of yourself as not good enough and learn to walk away, not because you’re lost, but because you’re found,” Loren Ridinger.  This one almost made me cry because I had to consider not only had I made myself play small, but the fact that I was playing small because that is the version of myself I was most comfortable with—and I had done it to myself.  I saw myself as incapable because I believed all the crap people said about me even when my soul knew differently.  This past summer I was given the opportunity to walk away from what I knew and start over entirely.  I’d been struggling with various stressors in my role and had been considering doing something new for work for a while but nothing seemed to make sense.  Nothing really clicked.  Every chance I took was met with a no and I really internalized that I could never be anything other than what I was.  I settled even when settling felt wrong.  No matter how big the vision I had for what I wanted to do, I couldn’t seem to follow through.  Every no felt like a chip in the armor until I had no clue who I was and I internalized that as well.  If no one is willing to give me the chance then clearly something is wrong with ME.  I never considered that each “no” was because I was going for things that weren’t meant for me anyway.  That small shift in mindset is what it took.

Once I understood and believed that the opportunities that are for us will always find us, I had to consider that it may be the case that I was going for things that weren’t for me, not that I wasn’t capable.  Ability had nothing to do with it—it just wasn’t what was right for me.  I’d spent years doing things I didn’t want to do all for the sake of proving I could do them and I was miserable.  People were treating me like crap, taking advantage of the fact that I had no issue working hard to get the job done even if it was doing things that had nothing to do with my role.  I woke up once I saw that even if I did what everyone wanted me to, I still wasn’t getting credit and soon it became expectation that I would do what they told me. Once my reputation started being questioned, I knew I would never be defended or promoted or even advocated for on my side.  It was that degree of being buried that made me realize I couldn’t continue on that path if I ever wanted to breathe as myself let alone be happy.  I’d always had inklings of where I belonged, I had an idea of what I wanted to do so I could shift my path.  And the timing was finally right to take the opportunity to do something entirely different than what I was used to.  I couldn’t play small anymore because the things I wanted wouldn’t come from doing what I’d been doing already.

I had to let that vision of myself come to fruition.  Even if it was still fuzzy at first, I had to take more steps toward what felt right in my soul versus toward what my mind was telling me I SHOULD do.  Like we talked about yesterday, I had to reconnect with that 8 year old version of myself and take some of that confidence back.  It wasn’t just about walking away and settling for the next thing—it was about the timing being right for the door to open to what I knew I wanted.  I had been asking for an entirely different lifestyle and I had to trust that what I wanted would find me, that what I wanted, wanted me as well because it was what was meant for me.  And find me it did.  I had a moment where I almost said no because it meant turning my life upside down, it meant putting away the work I was used to, the title I had striven for, and walking away.  I had wanted to get rid of some of my stress and I finally understood that to do that, I needed to walk away from what was causing the stress.  I could have kept going on that path but it was taking me nowhere near the person I wanted to be.  So I had to walk away and believe it was because I knew myself well enough to take the chance that was right for me.  That’s how it starts sometimes—with taking a chance to stop doing what we know makes us miserable and opening up to what feels better.  We can only find our path if we start walking it and in order to do that, we must stop walking on the one we’ve rutted into our brains and beings.  Let me tell you, while that first step out of the rut is scary and comes with its own trials, it is the single most exhilarating step toward authenticity we can ever take. THAT is where we are found.

“Playing small doesn’t protect you, it steals from you,” Loren Ridinger.  When we’re kids we are fearless.  I shared the story when I was 8 years old and I wanted to walk home on my own and how mad my mom was that I wouldn’t let it go.  Or how my friends and I would go into town on our own.  Spend the day at the library or even hanging out in the creek.  It wasn’t uncommon for us to be wild like that, exploring, creating.  My own son wants to walk home on his own and we are in the process of teaching him how to do so safely.  I don’t remember at what point I started losing trust in my ability to do things on my own, when I started listening to the bullshit I was being told about my “weak” points and what people thought of me.  I don’t remember at what point I felt like I had to fight to prove myself and started wasting my time showing people they were wrong about me.  And I don’t remember at what point I started to believe the things they thought about me.  As soon as that happened, all that confidence seemed to evaporate.  Being nice and accepted became more important than being seen as me.  Regardless of when it happened, I can tell you I remember how awful losing that sense of self felt.  I didn’t trust myself to do anything I said I could and soon, I lost the ability to do what I wanted to because all I could hear was that I couldn’t do it.

 Society likes us to think in extremes—we have to either be larger than life or we make ourselves so small that we can slip between the cracks, unnoticed.  If we aren’t careful we will convince ourselves that it’s true, that our worth is determined by the number of people who see us and tell us we are valuable—and that is exactly the trap I fell into. It became easier to slide through the day unnoticed and quiet because I wouldn’t face as much ridicule or harassment from people.  I’d share the answers, speak up and talk about things I knew but I’d always leave space for being wrong.  When the overwhelm for being “right” hit me, I started keeping quiet even in those realms as well.  I do remember as I got older that the feeling of losing sense of self took over and I started compromising on what I said I wanted including going away to school.  It was those early choices (or not making those choices) that led me to extreme confusion and settling.  I stand by my choices in the regard of not taking a huge leap when I literally knew nothing about what I wanted to do, but if I could have taken the confidence of my 8 year old self and just said screw it and made ANY choice, I would have reinforced playing a bit bigger than I did. That 8 year old version of me would have never looked back for a second because that 8 year old version of me knew what was right for me more than I allowed the adult version of myself to.

Seeing the confidence kids have today amaze me.  The boldness in what they try out for whether it’s a sport or an instrument, something on computers or singing. I see their dedication to who they are and to me, that is admirable.  I’m working really hard to not instill the same doubt I felt into my kid because I know If we start feeling any sort of doubt in what we can do, we will doubt what we can do and question our confidence—and I don’t want him to doubt himself like I started to.  As soon as I had an inkling of doubt, it spread like a cancer and I didn’t know what I wanted to do.  If we think our dreams aren’t achievable, we won’t act on them and then we struggle with confidence, we struggle with knowing who we are until we find ourselves in that box where we think it’s easier to play small and not draw attention to ourselves.  If we allow ourselves to stay in that box we may as well be buried underground and do nothing because we have just stolen our opportunity to live from ourselves.  We need to consider the idea that we have to dream so big it’s scary—and I will tell you putting ourselves out there after any period of playing small IS scary.  But we will get nowhere if we stay in that box.  If we can find that confidence we had as kids, the knowing that we could do anything, all that goes away and small isn’t even an option.  We need to remind ourselves that it isn’t for anyone else to understand what we do no matter what the consequences we can imagine—we need to understand our path because we are the ones walking it.  If we aren’t brave enough to go for what we want, that’s on us.  So don’t let our own thoughts talk us out of living the life we want.  Invite that childhood version of ourselves to come play for a bit today until we get some of that confidence back.    

Today I am grateful for resources.  I used to be afraid to spend money because of previous traumas surrounding family habits and loss.  I always thought I was being practical in saying I couldn’t afford things, that I couldn’t spend a certain amount of money, or that I didn’t have money to do certain things and I never considered that was demonstrating lack.  I needed to understand that, in all truth, money had very little to do with anything I wanted to do.  I had to learn that the resources we need to make things available to us and to make things happen are always around us.  By saying we couldn’t afford something, we were telling the universe we couldn’t do it and we inevitably never did.  But I’ve learned to reconsider my relationship with the resources available to me including money.  It comes down to understanding the energy we put behind our actions.  I’ve had to invest in my business several times to keep things going and I’ve seen people come and go from the business it was terrifying each time I had to make a large purchase while seeing people leave.  But every time something came through, I felt better.  Every time I invested in myself and something worked, it felt amazing.  It had nothing to do with what I was spending, it had to do with how I felt about what I was doing because THAT energy is where the real return came from.  Every time we need something, there is a way to get it, the universe always comes through.   

Today I am grateful for standing my ground and accepting who I am.  From a social aspect, most of this summer has been spent dealing with some people who have proven to NOT be who we thought they were.  We had to set some tough boundaries and accept some choices other people made in regards to our character and that meant the dynamic of the relationship changed for good.  When people show you who they are, believe them.  I’d put in a lot of effort to making the relationships with several of these people work because I am the type of person who will fight for what I care about.  I cared and I thought they did as well but it was proven again and again that they do not.  I have a rule of 3 where I will forgive a first mistake, I can even forgive a second mistake but I may not trust you, but I will not forgive a third mistake, especially after we’ve had the conversation multiple times.  I reached out to 3 of these ladies 3 times each basically to be told to deal with how I was feeling.  I ended up having a conversation with one of them and I believed it was truly productive but when I walked away I said to myself that I would believe it when I saw it.  Something was telling me to keep my guard up.  Sure enough, a few short weeks later, the EXACT thing I had said multiple times hurt me happened again.  You can’t say you care about someone and then continue to do exactly what they said hurts them.  It doesn’t work like that.  They are telling themselves a story about me that I know isn’t true.  Before I would have cared and cried, trying to make them see the truth so they would accept me.  I’m too old for that shit and the truth is, I knew what they were doing from the beginning.  So instead of playing small, I am standing firmly in who I am and I am FINE with it because I am fine with who I am.  

Today I am grateful for how I was raised.  I was raised to understand what it takes to be a good person up to and including admitting our faults.  Granted I may have taken the extreme on that one and saw fault with all I did, but I have never shied way from admitting when I was wrong.  It took one time in teen-dom of me NOT admitting what I did and seeing how badly it hurt the other person for me to know I would never do it again and my parents were right.  I carried that guilt with me for decades until I was able to apologize directly to that person.  Regardless.  We are human and none of us do things perfectly but it amazes me every time I’m around those who so blatantly hurt others yet still see nothing wrong with what they do—some of them even play victim.  So I was invited to a party hosted by someone who was essentially ostracized from our friend group and had other similar experiences to what I’m going through now and she has been the bigger person and opened her door to us and all the other people involved.  So I thanked her and her husband and told her I was sorry for what she went through at the time.  I remember in the heat of it, I had told the other people involved that they needed to speak to each other and communicate what was actually going on and no one listened and I was given the opportunity to tell her that.  The other people involved in this story who were also invited to this most recent event treated us like crap and I knew that even after the conversations I’ve had with them about how I feel and how I want us to move forward, nothing was going to change.  I can hold my head high because I know I’ve done my part to admit wrong doing and to repair it—they have not and that is on them.

Today I am grateful for witnessing who people are.  I want to add an additional piece to being grateful for how I was raised because, along with knowing what it takes to be a good person, I also learned to be really observant and understand who people are when they show us.  I can’t say I always believed it when they showed me because I was hopeful they’d live up to who I thought they could be so there were many incidents when I stuck around when I shouldn’t have.  That is part of why I became so selective and protective as an adult—I cut people out as quickly as they came into my life as soon as I saw that things weren’t going to change.  If I took the time to tell people I cared about what I felt and they dismissed it, it became easier to just let them go.  So I know the effort I put into my relationships and if you still want to show me that I’m on the other side somehow, that I don’t matter to you, so be it.  I’ve seen you, I’ve given you the chance, you decided to continue on.  I want to share that I understand this might sound like I’m expecting others to live up to my expectations and this is far from it.  This is me understanding that relationships take two and if that relationship matters, we don’t do things that hurt the other party.  When one person says they are hurt, we do what it takes to repair and avoid hurting them again. If they continue, trust that is their character.  I am grateful for witnessing it firsthand because there are people who have the chance to do things behind our backs and I would much rather know the truth—always.  It makes me feel safer knowing the reality even if it’s painful.  So I am grateful that I was given the opportunity to see for myself and to make the choices on what to do next. 

Today I am grateful for health and healing.  Staying the course on doing what is right for ourselves is often more challenging than we think.  If we aren’t raised with health and wellness as a priority, it’s challenging to make that a priority.  Every step I’ve taken on this path to healing has felt like truth for lack of a better way to describe it.  There are layers to healing, there are cycles to it where we repeat behaviors we know are wrong, which became frustrating for me because I felt like once I had made it through something I was working on it was done.  We are never done but that isn’t a bad thing.  Evolution seeks the best outcome and we are evolved to a point where we can decide what we want our story to look like, how we want to feel, what we do, what we want to change.  We are evolved to steer our own course and that means everything from our mindset to what we eat.  Health and healing are the singular most important things we can do because until we are healed, we will continue to hurt.  Once we realize that the hurting is a choice, we can choose differently.  No, I don’t believe people consciously choose the pain, they choose what they know because it is familiar and comfortable, not understanding it causes pain.  When we know who we are and we know what’s right for us, the choice isn’t even a question.  I am grateful to be me and to have my mind and body and to be the person I am.  I am grateful to know I am not perfect and that there is work to do because when I can say I’ve done the right thing to the best of my ability, I can also say I’ve done my part.   

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead

“The demons in your head whispering doubt are just part of the process, you need to go to the process to become.  You can’t just arrive,” Loren Ridinger.  This is another one that’s a bit sensitive for me—or at least it brings out the sentiment.  To this day I never realized just how mean my mind can be.  I never saw how mean I was to myself.  There are things that go through my head that I would NEVER say to someone else because I know it would hurt them.  Along with that, I never realized how little I actually believed in myself.  I always knew I wanted approval from other people and I was dependent on their direction and validation to ensure I was doing the right thing.  That lack of belief is because I was never taught to trust myself.  I had very few people around me that I could trust implicitly.  The people I was supposed to trust made it difficult to truly do that.  When we have that level of doubt, it can feel impossible to begin something new.  It can feel like we will never succeed.  If it doesn’t happen right away then it feels even more like something is wrong with us.  But when I heard this quote, I looked at things a bit differently. If doubt is part of the process, what part is it?

I don’t have the full answer to that but I can say that I’m pretty sure the whole purpose of doubt (outside of survival instincts) is to conquer it.  When we are kids we aren’t afraid to try anything.  We believe we can do whatever we want.  I know I’m not the only one who tried to fly….  As we get older that doubt creeps in because we listen to the voices telling us that we’re doing it wrong because we aren’t doing it the way everyone else is.  We listen to the ones who made us believe we were less than or the ones who had no idea of what we were capable of.  So we are self-taught this self-doubt.  Because it is taught, we can teach ourselves to unlearn it.  I have to believe that the process is really about learning to eliminate false senses of danger.  I think it’s also about finding who we are and learning the full scope of whatever it is we’re taking on so we don’t get complacent in learning.  We need to have a sense that we don’t know what we don’t know but that we can learn whatever we need to. 

If we are teaching ourselves the skills we need to get to where we want to go through listening and fighting self-doubt, then we are also teaching ourselves what to believe in. The use of the word demons is powerful to me with the implication of the true darkness that can take us over if we let it.  There are influences outside of us and it is our brain that filters that information so when we are down on ourselves, it is that little demon of self-doubt that we are feeding—and demons need to be exorcised.  We speak of battles in our head and we speak of the importance of words because words have power.  I just told you how cruel I can be to myself—I know all of you can be just as cruel to yourselves too.  If we speak to ourselves like that then how can we win anything?  How can we win against ourselves if we set ourselves up to be beaten every time?  We can’t.  And we can’t get where we want to go without learning the terrain and walking through it.  We need to fight a few things along the way to know that we have a real handle on the situation.  The goal isn’t just to arrive, it’s to arrive transformed and transformation is a process.  Removing those demons is part of the transformation as well.  If we want to move forward, we need to be really honest about this: are we being honest with ourselves or are we being cruel/critical?  Be patient with the process of learning ourselves over again and challenge those demons over and over again until they have nothing to say and then go away completely.  Let it happen.  One day we will all speak kindly to ourselves because we will remember how important that talk is.  That in itself will keep the demons at bay.  So start talking.

“Blaming the past will become a distraction from the future. You’re not broken, you’re in the middle of becoming,” Loren Ridinger.  This is where I get a little sentimental.  I know yesterday I talked about letting go of the habit of blaming others for where we are in life.  I meant what I said: there are very real circumstances where people have left an irrevocable impact on us.  I also meant the second part that we have to eventually take responsibility and decide to move forward.  This is where the sentiment comes in: I know how hard it is to do that.  I know how much time it takes to heal. Hell, I know how much time it takes to even find the source of the wound. I know the layers we find and that just when we think we’re done, we find something else that tips us over the edge again. I know what broken feels like. I know what that place is where you want to move on but you still feel the same as you did all those years, the reactions are the same.  And I know how long we can stay in that place, stuck, paralyzed from moving forward.  I want to caveat the first part of the quote with looking back on the past will become a distraction. It isn’t just about blame, it’s about getting stuck where we are no longer living.    

We need to remember that there is no life in the past, no matter how real it feels, no matter how many times we play it over in our heads—it isn’t real.  The past are merely echoes of what happened or what existed.  Something that gave me comfort in that is the idea that there is finite information about the past: it happened and can’t be changed.  There may be new stories added but those too are history and do not alter where we are now.  I know some of us want to run screaming to be anywhere but where we are now, but we can’t change what we did then—we can only change what we do now.  The future is determined in this moment because we can make a new choice at any time.  We aren’t broken because we feel things about what happened.  We aren’t broken because we aren’t sure where we’re going.  No one knows what the hell they’re doing, some are just better at navigating.  The process of becoming new means the old won’t work—and that can make it feel pretty broken too.  So in those times we may find ourselves repeating hold habits, be grateful they don’t work out, be grateful it seems broken because that is a sure sign we are on the right path to something new.

Becoming feels vulnerable for all of us.  We have this grand idea of being settled and looking better than we did, feeling better than we did.  The truth is when we are in the middle of transformation we are incredibly vulnerable.  We haven’t lived in that skin long enough to know what feels right.  There isn’t one person who hasn’t struggled with their identity on some level, even if it’s as simple as trying to figure out what we want to do for a living, so we all know what this feels like.  We can leave a job we’ve had for a decade and start over in a new industry and it feels completely off.  We can either fall back to old habits, fighting the broken pieces that no longer work, or we can stick with it and keep moving forward until we find our rhythm in something new.  Because we will find that rhythm.  The more we trust ourselves and understand that this is all part of the process, the more we will learn to move to that beat—the beat we were always meant to follow.  The past is a teacher, yes.  But repeating the lessons over and over again never got us anywhere.  There’s a reason for the saying “History repeats itself” and that’s because when we tell or teach the same story over and over again, that’s all we know.  Don’t be afraid to step out and try something different.  Don’t be afraid to start becoming what we were always meant to be.  Let it break. 

“If it’s uncomfortable, it’s outside your comfort zone and that is where growth is,” Brett Portelli.  Everyone loves feeling good.  They love feeling safe and comfortable.  Knowing what comes next is comfortable because the risk is mitigated—we know what our days look like before they even begin and that makes us comfortable, and I daresay complacent, to life around us.  If we are doing the same thing day in and day out, we will never get anything different.  I am not exempt from this—I needed a routine with the best of them and I felt amazing knowing what I need to do—it was a sense of control.  Until it became a cage.  I couldn’t function outside of my assigned responsibilities, the tasks that needed to be done when they were supposed to be done.  Comfort can become suffocating, enticing us to lay back and do nothing, all the while we’re falling into that fluffy cloud unable to get out.  I personally love a good self-care day with a mini self-spa, soft pjs, great moisturizer, yummy treats, and a good book.  But neither extreme routine or extreme comfort is the reality of life.  We have to do things that make things happen and oftentimes that is out of the scope of what we would normally do.

We’ve had the conversation about growth and comfort zones several times before and it would be easy to follow that pattern because the sentiment is the same in the end: we need adversity to develop skills that help us achieve the things we want to.  But I want to look at growth.  We can look at growth as learning new skills, taking on more, expanding our sphere of influence, or simply enhancing what we have.  We encourage growth with the right environment and the right tools and materials.  That is true of any type of growth whether we are developing muscles or mindset.  When we are in the comfort zone, all of that material has been worked before.  We know it.  There is a reason why farmers let certain fields like fallow between specific seasons: the Earth becomes depleted of nutrients and its structure isn’t the same.  Sure, it may have yielded good crops and we know what we will get out of it, but eventually the crops will suffer and then nothing will grow.  The same is true of our comfort zone.  The longer we till the same Earth and cultivate the same cozy feelings, eventually that feeling will run out.  In that case it’s dopamine and a sense of security.  So to encourage growth, we need to step out of what we’ve known and till some new ground.

We are of nature and nature needs time to replenish itself—so do we.  But there comes a point when we have to take new steps forward if we plan on doing something else with our lives.  When we are ready to step forward, we stop seeking comfort.  We stop seeking answers for why other things went wrong. We stop blaming other people for what happens in our lives.  To the latter point, I will fully admit that there are circumstances when people are responsible for where we are in life and it SUCKS.  It HURTS.  It’s DEVASTATING.  But the sooner we are able to make a new choice and create new belief in ourselves, the sooner we move on and can cut those chains.  Growth is about development, it’s about opening doors, it’s about creating new things.  We can’t get dirty if we don’t dig in the dirt the same as we can’t grow without putting in a little effort.  Like we talked about yesterday, don’t be one of those people who never begins because someone else confuses us.  Take charge, step out of what we know and start forging a new prospect in life.  Trying new things will always feel off at first—there’s always a learning period.  The more we push forward and sew new seeds, the more we will get in return.  So let’s step outside the boundaries we’ve created and know so well and into a space where new things can surprise us—and we can surprise ourselves.  Let’s grow.

They failed at a version of life they never even started.  There are people who profess to know the answers or that they know what’s best in any circumstance.  These are the armchair quarterbacks, the backseat drivers, the “I would have done-ers”.  These are the people who speak as if they have experience doing what we want to do but they have no credible action.  We all know these people and, I’m confident enough to guess that at one point or another, these are the people we would have (or did) listen to.  We took their words to heart and stopped trusting ourselves enough to do what we knew we had to do.  The reality is we stopped ourselves for a person who has no real knowledge of what it is we’re trying to do or what we’re about. The people who seem to have this degree of knowledge are those who haven’t lived their own lives, specifically the life they want so how could they tell us how to live the life we want?

The other viewpoint in this is that we give up before we even start.  We allow ourselves to fail before we really even try.  This is most usually from lack of confidence, perhaps stemming from the people we talked about above.  Regardless of the origin in lacking the trust we need for ourselves, we can easily fall into the habit of convincing ourselves that something is too hard, too far out of reach, or simply not for us before we even make an attempt at it.  We will never know what we can do unless we go for it.  We will never see the fruit of our efforts if we don’t put our effort toward what we really want.  I don’t use the word failure often because I truly don’t believe in failure—even though I’m acquainted with the feeling—but in this case, I believe that the only true failure is letting a dream die before we even try.  We are so gifted, so talented, so capable yet we tell ourselves otherwise.  We convince ourselves other dreams are more important than our own until that dream starts to fade away.

Do not be a victim of not starting.  Make the choice here and now that no matter what happens, the reason something doesn’t happen will NOT be because we didn’t put in the effort.  Plans may change, we may have to change course so things may not look how we think they will—that doesn’t mean it isn’t working.  It doesn’t mean we are failing.  Creation is a tricky process and shifting the trajectory of our lives from one track to another is a difficult process, I don’t pretend it isn’t.  But if we manage to move ourselves bit by bit every day, we can always say that we did something to bring us closer to what we wanted.  Coming close isn’t a failure.  Sometimes close is there to teach us that we really wanted something else.  But if we lose faith in who we are and choose to sit back taking direction from those armchair quarterbacks, that is a failure on us.  I think the saying goes something like, “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”  Even if it’s scary and we’re not sure if we can do it, if we take that chance, we know that we made the effort. 

When I was a young man, I wanted to change the world.

I found it was difficult to change the world so I tried to change my nation.  When I found I couldn’t change the nation, I began to focus on my town.  When I couldn’t change the town, as an older man, I tried to change my family.

Now, as an old man, I realize the only thing I can change is myself, and suddenly, I realize that if long ago I had changed myself, I could have made an impact on my family.  My family and I could have made an impact on our town. Their impact could have changed the nation and I could indeed have changed the world

“Confidence isn’t a gift, it’s a discipline,” Loren Ridinger.  I felt this was an appropriate follow up to the conversation yesterday because when it comes down to taking that leap, if the hold up for us is self-worth, we have to learn to work with what we have.  We have to remove the stigma that confident people were born that way or that we have to fake it til we make it. Confidence isn’t always innate.  It is learned and we learn it through proving to ourselves what we CAN do and that means we spend a lot of time doing things we didn’t know how to do before we learned it.  It’s a discipline which means it’s a practice.  And that’s ok.  We all need space and grace for learning and time and dedication to adapt the practice of becoming who we are.  We have to learn to not be disappointed when confidence isn’t a snap decision or a quick change.  We spent a long time telling ourselves one story so it will take time to learn a different one.

So the discipline of confidence means being willing to be a beginner and admit that we don’t know something.  It’s ok to not know something, that isn’t a deterrent to figuring it out.  The only way we won’t figure it out is if we refuse to do it, if we keep repeating the same story.  Everyone starts as a beginner so it doesn’t matter what we have to learn.  Our job is to take what we know and grow it and dive in.  Success is guaranteed with time if we stay the course and we don’t have to compare that with anyone else.  We set the bar for success.  We determine what that marker is and no one else can be measured against it just as we can’t measure ourselves against anyone else either.  We keep going until we hit that place where we can say, “This is what I wanted.”

Choose how we see ourselves and don’t let anyone talk us out of it.  That is also a discipline and also a really hard habit to break.  But what happens, what would happen if we showed up for ourselves.  We don’t want to live a life where we just get through.  I heard we don’t die when our hearts stop beating, we die when we stop believing in ourselves.  So choose to live in a way that reflects what we want and know that all the little pieces we put together, as imperfect as they may be, all those pieces make up the story of our lives.  If we are determined enough and focused enough we teach ourselves a new way of thinking and believing and that is when we become disciplined enough to realize what we are responsible for.

Today I am grateful for friends.  Sometimes we need our friends to help us put things in perspective and that is something I felt like I’ve needed as of late.  There’s a lot of crap going on and sometimes we need to just realize what is good and having a group of people we can relate to, laugh with, and solve problems with is a gift we should always be grateful for.  There are people we can just meet and they understand us more than those we’ve known our whole life.  Sometimes we just need to know that someone resonates with who we are and that we are understood.

Today I am grateful for nature and outside.  We came back from a business trip/vacation a couple of weeks ago and we were in some of the most beautiful land in the country.  Being near mountains, trees, rivers has always brought me back to present.  There is nothing more awe inspiring than being with nature and seeing what this world is really made of.  We are part of that and all of the nonsense we waste our times with, the crap we waste our time convincing ourselves we need to do, only distracts us from the reality that we are nature. When we stop trying to be something else, we fully embrace where we are and be in our element. 

Today I am grateful for seeing my kid explore and become more of who he is.  I got to watch him with a new friend today.  This kid is very close to a select small group of friends so for him to break out and try new things and realize that he can have fun doing new things was a gift.  Watching him spend time outside with friends and simply be a kid is an absolute joy.  He saw that he could do new things, that there are other people out there who will love and care for him for who he is.  It’s a gift to have a small group of friends and I wouldn’t begrudge him for that but it is also a gift to see that there are other parts of him that people will appreciate and other things he can contribute that he was afraid to before.  This kid has carried a lot of heavier things in his short time here and he takes life seriously, he’s hard on himself.  So watching him be a kid and enjoy it is awesome.

Today I am grateful for opportunity.  Truly you never know when opportunity will hit.  It’s funny how we think we know what we want and we do all of this “stuff” to build the life we want and oftentimes we find the most opportunity being ourselves.  Sharing who we are and what we do should be as natural as breathing because when we are who we are, there is nothing to present—we simply are.  There is magic that happens when we take those opportunities.  We learn about ourselves, what we can do, and what we really want when we take chances on ourselves.  We just have to believe and have the guts to go for it.

Today I am grateful for helping.  When we are able to offer our help it’s a gift.  It is the greatest fulfillment of our purpose.  Being able to remind people of who they are is a huge gift and to do that while being the most authentic version of ourselves is the entirety of why we are here.  To love, experience, enjoy, to share, to remember who and what we are.  We are meant to constantly change the paradigm and we have the opportunity to change it for the better.  How awesome is it that we can offer so much simply by using the gifts we are given? 

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.