I realized that I like the planning stages of things—I like the anticipation and the excitement of a new project.  I like the feeling of creating and developing ideas.  The execution is a different story. I find myself distracted and doing things that don’t help the initial cause so to speak.  When I complete something I’ve planned, I feel a sense of pride, yes, but I also feel a hollowness of like, what’s next?  A weird sensation of falling flat that doesn’t necessarily come from failure or things not turning out, it’s just when things are over, there is this natural come down that we all experience—a slight deflating feeling.  I love the excitement that comes from a vision forming and creating a plan to make it happen.  And I don’t know if I subconsciously like keeping myself in that state because I will find myself accepting more and more work and getting more and more behind in what I want to be doing and I never really start what I want to do.  Eventually I have such a full plate that I end up doing nothing.

That is the problem with being in a perpetual state of planning:  it doesn’t do anything.  It’s all talk and hype, and yes it feels amazing—but it isn’t resolving anything.  Sometimes the work is boring and I’ve looked at people with different careers and I’ve asked how to keep that initial excitement alive.  How do I learn to enjoy all parts of this sandwich?  I’ve written a piece about this before, but I want to reference it again: Brene Brown says that all things we undertake have a shit sandwich—nothing is all good.  So she says we need to figure out what shit sandwich we are willing to eat.  What are we comfortable taking the good AND the bad of?  What excites us even through the bad parts? When things get rough, are we still excited to keep going/eating?  It’s hard to face the let down of a set back when things don’t go as planned, and yes, it’s a bummer to come down at the finish of something.  But there is also a different high when something is executed how we envisioned it.

We can be planners and we can get excited over what we see.  But more than planners, talkers, reworking, whatever we want to call it, we need to be doers.  We have to go beyond where we are comfortable and see if our ideas hold water and we need to be ready to try again and do that over and over again until we get to the point we were looking for: the resolution.  I think this is an old habit, stemming from when I was a kid and didn’t know who I was.  I would plan what college I wanted to go to and then get afraid of something arbitrary—ultimately I was afraid I couldn’t take care of myself—and then I would retreat.  Then I’d get excited and plan again and retreat.  So the full exploration of self never really happened.  And that left me with the thrill of planning and thinking of things to create.  The follow through is where the meat is, however.  We can’t let old wounds and habits dictate where we are at and we aren’t meant to live in a constant state of pre-event high.  We eventually need to see things through, we need to decide who we are and follow through.

“’It could well be a trap.’  He wanted to scoff in her face and turn right around.  Let them find another way in, past the magic wards that surrounded it.  But then Sage stumbled.  He watched closely as she giggled and stumbled again, this time looking to the sky and shaking her head with a light smile, glowing.  Unafraid to laugh at herself, unafraid to look upon her missteps with anything but a brave sort of joy.  She took each moment of her life with a natural good humor, no matter how painful, no matter how tragic.  She trekked on with nothing but her will.  No magic to protect her.  Just faith and optimism and belief in her survival.  Being a cynic doesn’t make you wise.  It makes you a coward,” Hannah Nicole Maehrer, Apprentice to the Villain. First things first—I can’t tell you how much fun I have had reading this series by Maehrer.  This is book 2 and book 3 doesn’t come out until August and that feels cruel 😊.  Any-who.  Without giving too much background detail, this particular passage stood out to me beyond the humor of the book.  The content of the book has some dark topics, some truly painful moments of betrayal and real physical hurt.  But this character continues, no matter what, to see the good and the possibility in life.  She refuses to believe what people believe about themselves—she believes what she sees in them, what they have done.  The other part of this is not allowing the pain of the past dictate how we behave in the present.  She surrounds herself with some fairly vengeful people but understands they may do bad things for good reason.  That is enough for her.

Life can deal some pretty crappy hands sometimes and it doesn’t always feel good.  We have the choice to let it drown us, to constantly see the world watered down and hopeless.  We also have the choice to look up and find the good in every circumstance, to see the light the world offers even in the dark corners.  The character Sage has nothing to protect herself beyond her body but she still goes into the world and trusts she will be fine and can handle what comes her way.  The character of the Villain has magic to protect him but he was condemned for it and hurt for it so he took that power and refused to let anyone hurt him or anyone else again.  She took her gifts for what they are, never asking for more.  He took his gift and learned to use dark for good even if it gave him a bad name.  Here is the thing: perspective is all that matters.  For even kings hurt their people for the bottom line, claiming it is the name of the greater good when it is for their personal gain. Sometimes it is the one who stands against the crowd, the one who offers the truth no matter how ugly, no matter how dirty they get in the process.  Sometimes it is the things we fear that bring in the light.  In any case, how we view the situation and what we do with that information, how we act, how we view the world, the people around us with what we know—that is what matters.  The names people give us mean nothing, how we act means everything.

There are people who let the events of their lives bring them down—and in some cases, that is rightly so.  I mean, it would be expected to have a fairly sour outlook in those cases.  But there are people who no matter what comes their way, they seem to carry no weight on their shoulders.  They operate differently because they see the world differently.  Their training is to see the light no matter how dark.  The secret is that in having that view point, they often become the light.  Many people fear that and try to dim it.  But those are the people hiding behind their fear.  Those are the people hiding from the light because they fear they will either be exposed or see something they don’t want to see.  And that can be true.  But the truth, while painful in some aspects, is always exactly what it is.  There is no room for interpretation—it is nothing more than the facts.  It isn’t meant to be cruel, it is meant to level the playing field for all.  We can be joyful in difficult times, and in sad times.  We can take the challenges and see the good. But we don’t have to let the events of our lives define how we feel—even if we’ve felt that way a long time.  We can change that viewpoint.  The light isn’t meant to hurt us—it is meant to bring the truth to the surface for all to see.  We don’t always see the results or the full picture.  But we always have our faith and can choose to move forward with natural good humor no matter how painful, no matter how tragic.  Just have faith and optimism and belief in our survival as our character says.  Cynicism will break us because it makes us brittle not strong.  The ability to be hurt and remain soft is the mark of true strength.  Don’t hide behind it–move gently and with truth and the view of the world changes.

Today’s cards stuck out to me so let’s dive deeper.  The cards (from Gabby Bernstein and Micaela Ezra, the decks I use every day 😊) were: ‘I slow down and listen to the guidance that’s available to me; The moment I embrace my peace within and surrender the outcome is the moment that the universe can get to work; I am a lightworker in disguise, I don’t have to talk about it, I can just be it.’  I immediately wrote the following: Sometimes we just have to stop.  Stop talking, stop thinking, stop pretending, stop proving, stop controlling, stop being everything we are not, stop being who we are told to be.  Stop all the doing, being anywhere but where we are.  But we can’t do nothing.  When we stop, we must listen.  We must surrender all we know (or think we know) and allow the universe to guide and carry us to the point we can stand on our own completely in who we are. Only in our fully authenticity can we understand the freedom of allowing, because that is when we have allowed ourselves full communion with mind, body, soul, and source.  Lately we’ve been doing it all (I know it isn’t just me) and it all seems to lead nowhere, running against the current.  So today we slow, stop, and listen to guidance….surrender the doing in favor of hearing.  Who we are will become clear and we simply be. 

Sitting in silence, waiting, is one of the hardest things to do.  We are trained to do, to constantly move.  Our brain doesn’t understand not doing.  The body/soul/mind get the need for peace, but we are trained to ignore that.  We ignore what real peace is and what we do to find real peace.  I’ve always become frustrated with the people who reach out for advice and then do the exact opposite of what I’ve shared only to have to go back and do what I suggested in the first place.  So why do I do that with the universe?  If I’m told to relax, that what I’m working on isn’t where I should be focusing right now, why do I insist on pushing through?  Why when the inspiration hits, when I know I need to work on my projects do I deny myself that opportunity?  Do I do it because I love what I’m “supposed” to be doing?  No. I do it because I feel I have to do those things—people don’t understand what I’m trying to do so I prove myself with what I’m supposed to do.

There’s a message of inherent worth in here along with allowing.  We don’t need to prove anything, we don’t need to earn the right to be who we are.  That isn’t to say what we love isn’t work—no one gets through this life on a free ride—but it is to say that when we embrace all we are and we learn to listen to that guidance (and heed it) that work looks and feels different.  I’ve carved away significant portions of all the proving and the work I was doing in order to “earn” my time doing what I love and I have focused on these projects with abandon.  Yet, I am reminded every day how much further I have to go.  I still feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of diving into what it feels like to lose ourselves in the love of who we are, the work, the things, the being, the flow of who we are.  I’m still caught in the endless doing.  The only way we break that pattern is through full acceptance, clarity, and surrender—act on the advice/guidance we are given.  Even if it is scary and different than what we’re used to/what we would normally do, heed the advice like we would have given it to ourselves and see what happens.  Simply BE. 

“Big journeys start with small steps,” unknown.  We must not confuse getting things done with taking more on—or assume that taking on more and more will lead to success.  It is the sum of all the small daily habits we embrace that determine our success in life.  It is the every day, the things we put our energy toward and how we execute all of those things that show us what we get.  Some of the major milestones in life are reached simply because of taking the first step.  It doesn’t matter how big the idea is, it always starts with one single step.  Then we take the next one.  Each of those steps will lead us to precipice where we can take the biggest leap of our lives.

See we feel terrified when we take the leap into the unknown, and I want to be clear that for real change to occur we all have to take the leap at some point, because we don’t know what comes of it.  But when we’ve taken the little steps to get to the point where we need to fly, we are better prepared and we know what to do when we reach that ledge.  We know we are able to fly and we know that we can take that leap because even if we can’t see where it goes/where it leads to, we know that we will be able to carry ourselves through/over/under–wherever.  So many of us spend time planning—we’ve been talking about the planning stage.  It’s exciting, it’s thrilling, it’s full of possibility.  But when we crowd ourself with doing and doing, that becomes mere movement.  And we’ve spoken many times of the difference between movement and progress.    

If we have a big vision, we need to take big steps.  We need to follow through.  We need to be who we are meant to be.  and we don’t come into this world knowing how to fly—we just know that we can fly.  So the real key is this: We have to take the little steps that lead us to the point where we know when we spread our wings we will soar, we will carry our own weight on the wind and we can direct our own course.  The vision we have sets the tone for our actions and we can sit there and get overwhelmed with the millions of little steps we must take to achieve those goals—or we can simply take one step.  Because sitting there thinking of all we have to do, worrying about the weight of what we have to do, gets nothing done.  taking that first step, while only a step, is what brings us closer to flying.  Once we know and develop the strength in our wings, that will carry us as far as we want to go.

“We choose Love or we choose fear—we can not serve two masters,” Don Miguel Ruiz.  I ended last week talking about not being able to advance our dreams when we work on someone else’s and this is a pattern that follows: The most basic reminder that the energy we put out is what we receive so if we are extending confusion by living in a state of fear while trying to express love, the universe doesn’t know what frequency to pick up on.  It doesn’t know what to express back to us because we aren’t clear on what we are sending out.  I spent my life discussing my fears—I fixated on them, praying please don’t let X happen and I would get so angry when that exact thing happened, not understanding that it was on me.  The universe doesn’t understand the nuance of “don’t” in the context of us attempting to block/avoid a specific thing.  All it understands is we are focusing on a specific thing, and THAT it can pick up on. 

When we choose the emotional state to operate from, we are choosing what we send out and receive back.  From that logic alone why would we choose to live in anything but an elevated state of love?  If we knew we would receive pain, why would we ask for pain?  So if we know we will receive fear and have to live in that state, why would we put out fear?  Love can be confusing because we assume there are contingencies attached.  But the truth is love is unconditional.  When we put conditions on things, that is when we create fear because if we don’t do X, we won’t get Y-and that fear of loss becomes the motivator.  When we choose love, we accept what is, we understand abundance and reciprocity.

So look at our habits and ask which master we are serving.  Are our actions based in real, unconditional love that comes from our authentic self?  Or are they from the fear of losing?  And get really honest and ask if we have a foot on either side of that track.  When we can’t commit we create confusion for the universe as well.  Understand the connection between our thoughts and actions and what we receive.  Remember it all comes down to us and what we choose to think, what we choose to do as a result of those thoughts.  Do not let fear be the master—live in love. 

Today I am grateful for the ability to care for myself.  Sometimes we get repetitive in what we are grateful for because we need to know it’s the little things that become the big things that matter.  So.  I’ve been on an amazing health journey, truly dedicated, over the last year.  I managed to get most of my blood work back in range, I’ve lost 38 pounds, and I have a consistent routine that feels right—and more importantly, it feels good.  In spite of all that, I had other issues going on in my body that I have been very well aware of for a while, and now being over 40, this isn’t something to ignore any longer.  I have had additional testing done and now there seems to be another issue unrelated to what I thought was going on.  Hazard of 20 years in healthcare, we think we know what’s happening in our bodies, things we think are normal aren’t.  Which is ironic because things we think aren’t normal sometimes turn out to be normal.  Anyway.  I fully recognize that I am privileged to continue on this path and figure out what is going on and to resolve it.  I haven’t come this far to only come this far.  I fully intend to continue being grateful for the ability to care for myself because when we care for ourselves we can fulfill our purpose and care for others.  Because it feels good to live.  Because it feels good to live to our highest potential.  It feels good to know that we have more.  Another day isn’t always promised, so do not take any of them for granted—take care of ourselves in the smallest of ways to the biggest. 

Today I am grateful for connection and reminders to progress.  I had a wonderful conversation with my best friend the other night. We hadn’t spoken in a long time because we are legitimately super busy and we work different hours.  Regardless, I had heard that she was making some changes in her career and possibly where she’s living and I reached out, feeling a little guilty that we hadn’t connected sooner.  She confirmed some of the upcoming changes in her life and I was a little taken aback.  I hadn’t realized some of the changes going on in her career were on the same trajectory as mine.  And I couldn’t help but be so proud of her for deciding to follow what works best for her and her husband.  I had watched as they developed over the course of their relationship, finishing school, moving out of state, going back to school and starting over in an entirely new state, having a house built.  Their consistency and teamwork always impressed me and to see them be able to pick up and navigate through these changes in their life reminded me that the changes going on where I’m at right now aren’t life-ending in a negative way.  They are just the end of this way of doing things and that we have to continue to move with it.  Michael leaving my 9-5 and moving across country, my best friend moving to follow her dream, me navigating new opportunities at work and in my business—it all happens for a reason.  Progress doesn’t happen from doing the same thing.  Progress happens when we move. 

Today I am grateful for the reminder that we are all doing our best.  This was a tough concept for me to swallow.  I remember reading Brene Brown and she was talking about attending a conference where the person she was roomed with ate a cinnamon roll and then wiped her hand on the couch because “it wasn’t theirs” and how that same person put her shoes on the couch.  The way Brown described it, I was completely on her side, appalled that someone would behave like that.  Thoughts of integrity flew into my mind like, you wouldn’t do this in your own home, why would you do this to something that isn’t even yours?  You’d be pissed if someone did that to your stuff because they didn’t know you.  Brown then goes on to describe how she realized after many therapy sessions that people truly are doing their best.  They do what they think is right based on what they know and what they have.  In speaking with my best friend, who by all counts is one of the smartest people I know, I noticed she tended to express some guilt behavior when it came to decisions she had to make for her animal.  I don’t pretend to understand the entire range of emotions or her thought process but I fully trust that she made the decision she did for a reason—she doesn’t need to justify anything to anyone.  Would someone else have done the same thing? Absolutely.  Would someone else have done it differently?  Absolutely.  We all make choices based on what we have and what we know at the time.  We are all just doing our best even if our best(s) look a little different.  It isn’t up to us to judge.

Today I am grateful for not taking offense.  This is a complicated one because it started out slightly offensive, but once I understood the context, I was grateful to keep the focus on what it needed to be—the work I want to do and the future.  My husband made the comment about my friend working her ass off to get where she is in reference to the fact that she is now able to afford a certain lifestyle due to her job–and I was a little taken aback at first because I thought of all the work I’ve done over the years, keeping a roof over our head, food in our bellies, clothes on our backs.  I’ve worked full time, I’ve put myself through school and got my bachelor’s, I put myself through massage school, I stared a business, I got a book deal.  He had never once acknowledged that I had worked hard.  I thought maybe my actions weren’t producing the results we wanted so maybe it wasn’t focused effort, simply the work I’ve done hasn’t gotten us the results we wanted and my friend seems to have exactly what she wants.  And then I realized that he has a component in this too—if it’s a life we want then we need to make it together.  He’s been doing amazing work on our home for the last several weeks and I am beyond impressed with him.  He has a wide knowledge base and he applies it well.  So I realize now that what I want to do is apply my skills as well.  I’m tired of trying to do all the things and make everything take off at once.  It’s too much.  And I realized that I was feeling guilty for wasting time not doing the things I wanted to do to completion.  I also realized that I can still do it, still create what I’ve said I wanted doing the work I want—we can still do what we want to do, too. 

Today I am grateful for absolute creative inspiration.  I’ve had to lay low for most of this week due to the health issues mentioned in today’s first gratitude so I’ve spent an amazing amount of time reading (I read nearly every day but never in the chunks of time I want) and I’ve been focused on watching shows about baking—another passion of mine that I don’t spend a lot of focused time on.  I finished a series that caught my eye previously and once I started reading it, I could NOT put it down.  It was funny and poignant and for fantasy, just so relatable.  Plus from a technical standpoint, it was very well written.  I finished the second book in the series this week and have to wait a while for book 3 so I started looking up info on the author and found her TikTok page.  I was floored to find out that this entire thing was made possible because she was sharing little reels of her bits of the story and it took off.  I was amazed.  So I may be behind the times in a lot of regards because I do NOT spend a lot of time on TikTok—I’m on other socials but not really on that one because I felt like it was way too ADD inducing for me (which, honestly, it is).  So watching the author on this journey, my first thought was I wish I had known about her sooner because that would have been so much fun to follow that journey up to publication—plus she has done an amazing job navigating this story.  Then I realized something: I have yet ANOTHER layer to break through in regards to my authenticity.  I’ve been so proud of all the layers I’ve peeled over the years and even more so in the last few months because I realized I needed to double down on authenticity—and here, I see the full vulnerability of sharing a story in its infancy with no shame, with amazing humor, and it was captivating.  I spent so much time thinking of how I wanted to package the message and how I wanted people to receive it that I’ve lost sight of the damn message.   Learning is a lifelong thing, truly.  There are so many ways now to share what we do and who we are that it can be overwhelming to figure it out.  I’m grateful to remember this is about the message, not making people see it a certain way.  More control to release.  It’s a wild ride to let go of more of what anchored us. 

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.

“It’s impossible to achieve your dream working for someone else, working on someone else’s dream,” Steven Hu.  I attended a business conference a couple of weeks ago and this was a reminder that we are capable of achieving our dreams—and that we can only achieve those dreams if we do the work to achieve those goals.  The more time we spend focusing on someone else’s dream, no matter how lucrative it may be, no matter how secure it makes us feel, the less time we have to dedicate to the things we enjoy doing or to our ultimate goals. 

The brain is amazing and can convince us that we do things for the right reason.  Like we can go an entire life doing nothing to work toward are dreams under the guise of doing the right thing for someone else.  We train ourselves to believe our dreams and goals don’t matter in the context of other people’s goals and dreams.  We convince ourselves that we have to settle for other people’s dreams because we don’t see how they can fly just because someone else is further on the runway—even if our wings are already spread.  People get confused with the idea of self-sacrifice, thinking giving up what we love hoping someone will do the same for us is somehow noble.

The bottom line is we can’t achieve what we do not work on.  We will never get what we don’t put energy toward.  It quite literally doesn’t work like that.  Energy flows where attention goes, so if we don’t give the appropriate amount of attention to our projects, the things we want to do, then how can they come to us?  And if we are working on other people’s dreams, then how can we work on our own>  And if we manage to work on our own dreams, are we giving it the same attention and care that we would give others?  Are we giving it too much, making the point about perfection?

Make sure we know what we want, how we feel about what we want, and make sure we dedicate enough time to the things that bring us joy.  It’s fine to help others and we should help others—but we should never help others at the expense of who we are and what we love.  I’ve known some people who feel they need to put themselves last in every situation in order to be worthy.  That ends when we know our worth and we have clarity on where we are going.  Believe enough to know our capacity and capabilities and our worth and then go for it all with complete faith and abandon.

“I can’t wait for everything to be ok for me to choose to be ok…because if I wait for everything to be ok, I will never be ok.  I don’t want to wait for things to be perfect before I choose to live life to the fullest.  There’s things [going on] that we can’t control, but what can we control?  We can control the fact that we’re going to choose to be ok,” JB Copeland.  What a perfectly balanced perspective on mindset and action.  The concept of waiting for things to be ok/right/perfect/right timing is predicated on outside factors aligning how we feel they should.  There are so many sayings that directly conflict each other in terms of action and the what/how/when we should do things that we create confusion and misunderstanding about priority and action in our lives.  We talk about the right timing, like waiting for our ducks to be in a row, to have all of our pieces before we begin, making sure we are prepared and that directly opposes things telling us to take the leap, we will never be ready, it will never be all perfect.  In either case, we are not taught to trust ourselves.  Trust is the key. 

Life is a mix of knowing when to wait and when to move and understanding we can’t control everything, not all of life will play out how we plan it.  Things fall apart and change and move, and we start to change and move and develop new ideas of what we want and what makes sense for us.  We can’t stick with an idea of how we want things to be just because that is what we planned years ago—we need to be able to let go of what isn’t working.  Just because things get a little unsteady (and even when they seem to fall apart entirely) it doesn’t mean that we can’t choose a new course of action.  We can get buried or we can build.  Either way, it depends on us and how we want to approach it.  We can decide and plan and make moves, that is always true, but we have to decide the most prudent move to make based on where we are at, what we know, and what may get us closest to the goal.  We also have to know when to pivot the goal and aim for something else.  That, too, involves entirely trusting ourselves and that depends more on knowing/being clear on who we are rather than making sure we feel ok. 

I often get frustrated at the scenarios where it seems people are deciding the outcome of my life for me.  A silly but pertinent example is driving.  It isn’t my fault you’re running late and speed around me when I’m already doing 5-10 over the speed limit.  Or why did you choose to inappropriately enter traffic when I’m already at speed causing me to slow down for you?  I don’t like it when I have to alter the course of my actions for the sake of someone else’s ignorance.  The same can be said when major changes happen—changes as I’ve described at my 9-5 that are deeply unsettling and entirely unexpected.  I could sit and wait for decisions to be made regarding my specific function and do nothing on a daily basis.  Or I can continue on my path, on my projects working on the pieces that make sense for me to work on and doing what I am supposed to do until a decision has been made otherwise.  It isn’t easy.  I still feel like my fate is ultimately in someone else’s hands.  The truth is, it is.  I have no say in when the company will decide to do the next round of changes and I have no idea if I will be involved in that.  All I can do is what I’ve been hired to do on a daily basis.  Now that doesn’t mean I’m ignorant and waiting for the ball to drop.  No.  I’m simultaneously networking and making other connections to keep possibilities open.  I have no idea which way things will go, but if I wait for that decision to me made I will end up stuck here or completely out on my ass.          

As trite/cliché as it may sound, we have always turned out alright.  Alright in the regard that we are alive and we have another opportunity to make things better, different, to change our focus.  I’m not saying that we aren’t a little beaten up for it or a little scarred, but with the premise that we can only control what we can control, the truth is if we are alive and breathing we have the chance to do things differently and to do them again.  Whether or not that feels good, feels right, feels fair, feels like what we want it to be is all irrelevant.  We are still here and moving forward, making our own decisions, choosing to take what we can from whatever situation comes our way, and do actively do something with it.  And if we wait for the right moment for everything, we will waste the time and life we had available while it was here.  The last thing we want to do is look back and regret the things we could have simply chosen to do differently.  And I say simple—I didn’t say easy.  I have a lot of pieces I’ve shared about that distinction so don’t get upset about it.  The decision is simple: we don’t want to feel a certain way, we don’t want to wait.  The fact is there are somethings in our lives we have to jump hurdles in order to take the action we need, and sometimes those hurdles are still in our mind, and sometimes they are very real.  But with everything, we can decide to keep practicing so the jump becomes easier or we can continue fighting the walls as we try to walk around the hurdle.  The point is the hurdle won’t go away in either situation—the choice is ours how we get around it.

“Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do.  Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors.  Try to be better than yourself,” William Faulkner.  Competition doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things.  We know being the best at Candy Crush really doesn’t matter.  Being the best at anything really doesn’t matter.  What matters is what we do with it and what we do with the privileges and opportunities being in that position can afford us.  We are only limited by our minds so why would we place a limit on ourselves to only surpass others?  Great, we got there first, but what do we do when we get there?  Are we just waiting for the next race to start?  When we push ourselves past what we thought we could do, we set a new bar for ourselves, and perhaps in the process, it’s a new bar for others as well, but the point is that we don’t know our true limits until we push the boundaries of what we thought we were capable of.

I had a realization that I’m going to dive into more later in the week about enjoying the planning stages of things.  That stage is absolutely magical because when we are at that point of imagining and envisioning something, there are absolutely no limits.  Literally anything is possible—if we think it, in that moment, it is real.  There is something so freeing and exciting in limitless opportunity.  In that moment we are the flea without the lid on the jar, able to jump to our fullest height.  Not that we want to be fleas, but the point is we haven’t been limited by the lid on the jar—our own fears, doubts, uncertainties that creep in.  Once those take root, we can never attain the height we are capable of.  When we reach a goal, of course celebrate and be happy, but start looking at the next benchmark until we are fully satisfied with the outcome. 

Competing with others becomes hollow and pointless after a while.  There will eventually be no one else to compete with because they will either lose interest or we will.  Either way there will be a point when we will not feel the same sense of satisfaction we used to when we accomplish something.  We have to learn to love what we do, not for the sake of winning, but for the sake of doing our best.  When we approach our goals and dreams that way soon we see that we can go so much further than we ever thought.  Competition with others was never the point—the point was to develop ourselves enough that we become the best version of who we can be.  There is purpose and satisfaction in that—and purpose is the ultimate goal in life.  When we are 1% better than who we were yesterday, we open up new doors just by bringing that little extra to the game.  Imagine how we can change the game when we get all the way up.  Think of the fulfillment from living life all the way on.  THAT is where the excitement is. 

“It won’t end here.  Your faith has got to be greater than your fear,” Julian Casablancas.  There are moments in life when it feels like time stops.  What we thought would destroy us happens, what we thought would break us happens, where we thought we couldn’t go any further happens—and we have to go further.  The truth is time is infinite and there is always something more.  There is always something else.  As long as we have air in our lungs and the ability to function, we can find something else, we can try again.  As long as we are gifted tomorrow, we can try again.  Don’t let fear be the thing that stops us.  Time is our greatest gift and what we do with our time speaks volumes.  How we spend our time tells the world who we are—and it’s how we find who we are.  We have the very real ability to create the life we want to live, we just need to be bold enough to take action on it.  The day we stop connecting with our creativity and stop doing the things we love is the day it is really over.  The day we stop feeling joy is the day it’s over.

One of my cards today was that joy is the ultimate creator and another was when I’m connected to my joyful presence I attract support from the universe.  Joy is the greatest creator and it can eliminate any type of doubt, and yes, it can eliminate fear as well.  Think of the thrill of a roller coaster—we may feel trepidation and fear while we are waiting in line, hearing the screams of people on the ride.  But once we get on the ride and get over that first drop, we feel the thrill of it and suddenly fear turns to laughter.  We can transmute the fear of anything if we stick with it long enough and focus on the good of it.  Fear in context of todays world means different things.  There are still people who face very real issues of discrimination and fear of harm to their person for being who they are.  But there are fears that have no basis in reality—like being afraid of making a mistake that makes us look silly.  Looking silly won’t kill us, that’s just ego we have to get past. 

We have moments we wish we could do over for whatever reason and we have moments when we know we need to just keep going. Those are past and present focused emotions.  The funny thing about life is we need to find that balance between past, present, and future in order to successfully navigate to where we want to be.  We have to integrate what we know from the past with what we have available to us now in order to get what we want in the future.  And so much of life is a guessing game—it’s a matter of trial and error to alchemize the life we are capable of creating.  Sometimes we are capable of so much more than we thought and we only learn that by knowing there is something else, picking up, learning from the experience and trying again.  We connect with the joy of it, the thrill of it, believe there is something greater and we keep going, knowing there is something more on the other side.  Believe that, feel that faith and trust every time—and keep going until we get to the other side.  Fear is temporary, regret is forever so do not let a temporary emotion ruin something greater.