“I think we both know you can do it. The thing you just thought about. The thing you want to do, the dream, the goal whatever it is. You know you can do it. Maybe you’re worried that it’s outside your comfort zone. Maybe you’re worried it will take you to places you’ve never been before. Or it might be hard and uncomfortable but you CAN do it. And deep down you know that. You look at people doing it and you’re inspired, you know you should be there too. So maybe this is your sign to do it. To chase the dream, to do the thing. Because deep down we know you can. Once you realize that and you accept that, it’s going to be beautiful. You just have to take that first step. You just have to believe it enough and then it can all fall into place. And it will. Just time we go for it,” Harrison Davis. Mindset is key to all we do and it may take years to understand the depths and layers of what we need to unpack. We may think we have it, that we’re over it, past whatever was holding us back, when suddenly the trigger hits and we’re left feeling helpless again. True strength and belief in self is so powerful. It’s something innate we talk ourselves out of, but we can learn to get it back.
Allow for the small wins. Remember that each win, no matter how small compounds and builds strength and trust in self. Those little moments that we feel are mistakes and we think have been so destructive to our path turn out to be exactly what we needed. Sometimes that path had to be redirected or shifted a little bit and we wouldn’t have gotten where we needed to be if fate didn’t step in. We always have the choice to believe a hindrance is helpful or harmful. We can get annoyed with it or we can take the lesson and be grateful for it. All it takes is that series of wins and incorporating the lessons we learn to establish belief in ourselves. Everything we’ve ever done has brought us here and we have survived every “un-survivable” moment up to this point and we will continue to survive. But the more we push past the doubt and insecurity and the fear, the more we see we can reply on ourselves and accomplish what we want to. We know what we are capable of: don’t let the voice we picked up from everyone else tell us anything different. Remember.
Your brain doesn’t believe what’s true, it believes what you repeat.
Your thoughts shape feelings, feelings drive actions, actions become your identity.
Your brain is always rewiring so who you are is changeable.
Say something often enough with enough emotion and your brain starts to believe it. That’s why self talk really matters, it’s like casting a spell for your brain and body.
How you speak to yourself shapes how you feel about yourself and your life will always reflect who you think you are. Your brain doesn’t know the difference between real and imagined so when you’re visioning the confident, clam capable version of you, you’re literally rewiring your brain for it. You can’t think your way out of a feeling but you can feel your way into a new way of thinking.
Most of your behavior is automatic, your brain guesses what’s next based on old experiences.
“Don’t let them talk to you any type of way and you don’t talk to you any type of way either. See disrespect don’t start with other people’s mouth. It starts with how you teach them yours is worth listening to. Ever notice how someone only talks reckless when they feel safe being reckless with you? How they only raise their voice when they know you’ll lower your standards to stay? That’s not just communication, that’s a test of your boundaries disguised as tone. Because the moment you flinch at disrespect, the moment you let ‘They didn’t mean it,’ become your new peace treaty, you train people that you silence is cheaper than your self-worth. You are not the vent for people who refuse to deal with their storm, you are not the verbal punching bag for people who call it ‘just how I am’. No, let them be how they are somewhere else, by themselves, not involving you. Check yourself too, because sometimes the harshest voice you hear is not theirs, it’s yours. The one that tells you you’re too sensitive for wanting basic respect. That internal monologue that excuses mistreatment because “at least they’re still here”. Stop calling mistreatment a misunderstanding. You’re not hard to talk to, they’re just not used to people who require accountability. So no don’t let them talk to you any type of way, not out of habit, not out of history, not out of fear, you will be alone if you speak up. You don’t have to choose between peace and people. Choose the kind of people who bring peace with them,” Jay Douglas.
We’re going to launch into a series of pieces about how we treat ourselves and the impact of internal talk. We don’t let the world determine who we are and when we have weak boundaries, the world will fill in the blanks as they see fit. Those who support our authenticity won’t require your silence or your looking the other way at how they treat you. Human nature is to test the limits—we are animals, after all. We need to know where we stand with people and, frankly, who they are to us and what we can get away with. We’ve perpetuated a hierarchical pattern in our society so we are always trying to find the pecking order and the systems we have in place bank on us knowing exactly where we stand. The people we surround ourselves with, the appearance of our lives, all of that is a mirror of how we feel about ourselves and our true mental state. So we need to be strong enough to go against the grain and to stand up for ourselves even in those situations where everyone else tells us not to. The thing I hate (and I feel strongly enough that I will use hate) about this society is our ability to make an action and turn it around on other people as if we have no part in how people react/feel. As much as we tell ourselves that we are responsible for our own actions and choices, we have to understand the reciprocal effect in that some of those actions would be elicited without provocation or a different action.
I’ve said it a million times before and I will say it again: we do not operate in a bubble. If someone wants to step in and disrupt peace, make us question who we are, make us feel like we are too much for expecting basic respect, that person has no business being in our lives. I don’t need to make space for those who think my existing is taking up too much space. Because of that, it is very clear that the way you treat me and what I ultimately decide to allow in my life, is a direct reflection of your choice in how you treat me. And I will make that decision based on how I treat myself, what I accept for myself. Do not be surprised if the door that used to be open is now closed and I walk the other way. Once I learned the way I had to handle myself and what felt right, I knew that lesson needed to be applied to those around me. The ones who cared and were in it for me, the ones we have a mutual understanding with, they get it. The ones who make conditions on the expression of my authenticity: they’re out. As Jay says, we don’t have to choose between peace and people. If you are determined to take away my peace, or expect me to disrupt my peace for your sake, or if you find the disruption of my peace funny, that tells me all I need to know. We don’t have time or space for that. So we set the boundary and wish them well.
I’ve shared repeatedly that people’s stories are important. We all have something to share in this world and we wouldn’t have been given the gifts of insight and communication if we weren’t meant to use and share them with each other. The fact that we are taught to feel any sort of shame in our stories is absurd yet it is protection so we continue to perpetuate the cycles of creating masks for every scenario we are in. I’ve never been good at wearing masks because it’s so much easier to just let the truth out. Sometimes we wear so many masks and tell so many stories in different scenarios that we forget what that truth is. We learn to really believe what we tell people whether it’s the truth or not. I’m guilty of that as well because no matter what I do, my experience is my experience so that is my version of the story. What happens when we think we are doing the right thing? In the scenario I talked about yesterday regarding relationships, I know with all of my heart the people involved truly believe that they are doing the right thing, they believe they are right. There comes a time when your truth needs to become THE truth and that can be painful to accept.
So when we tell stories, there are lessons to learn on all sides. There may be a lesson in the story itself like some moral parable. There may be a lesson on how we tell the story and what it means to tell the truth even in difficult circumstances. And there are lessons in life when we share stories, like when we see the true side of people. None of this means to stop sharing stories. Stories are the foundation of who we are and they can last forever. With time, any story is subject to the telephone game and the message might get a little convoluted or shifted a tad, some details exaggerated or forgotten, but even that adaptation has meaning. The question becomes what story do we want to tell? Do we need to be the person who changes the story depending on the room they’re in or do we share who we are? My hope in being raw, in my inability to wear a mask, is that people learn to become more comfortable with who they are so they understand the mess we’ve made and that we can clean it up. We don’t have to keep telling the same story. We can make our own and we are supposed to share the one from the core of our being.
We can’t make ourselves right at the expense of someone else or at the expense of the truth and that is the difference between the stories I’m talking about and an outright lie. We can convince ourselves of anything and sometimes we can convince others as well. I wrote about being convincible last week. Sometimes it isn’t people trying to convince us, they’re trying to convince themselves and they plant their feet and whole heartedly believe that they are in the right. I’ve witnessed people destroy relationships over it, over pride, over ego, over what they wanted to be right rather than working with someone they claim to care about to find what is right rather than who is right. So, I guess there is a need to make sure we take care of our stories, that we do our best to tell the story we want without diluting the truth of what is. It makes life so much easier in the long run.
I’ve learned a lot about relationships over this summer. There are people you could know for years and feel like you have a real bond, a real connection with them who suddenly feel further away from you than ever before. There are people who live hundreds of miles away who barely know you that treat you better than your neighbors. Then there are the people you’ve always loved that you may have taken for granted for a while because you know they know you and you know them so it’s easy to let time slip away and you forget how amazing and easy it always was until you connect again. There is something that happens with time, when we are aging, that makes it suddenly seem like it’s going too fast and this past year in particular has felt like a blink. It felt like that last year as well but I feel like this year is on hyperdrive, and in that regard when we think of our age, when we hit a certain point in life, we start to understand what is important enough to focus on and fight for and what simply isn’t worth our time anymore. People are very good at wearing masks and they do it for many reasons, it’s human nature. But as we get older, we are also able to see through the masks easier and there are some people who think they can still pull it over on us and take offense when they can’t. Perhaps they try to turn the table on you, but the secret is this: it doesn’t matter if they do because time is too precious and short to waste it on jerks who would expect you to play a role in their lives and wouldn’t lift a finger for you.
I would be lying if I said these lessons didn’t affect me and that I was completely cool with the resulting situation I’m in right now. It still hurts like hell thinking you know someone only to realize the entire thing was so far from what you thought it’s practically in the next state. Self-preservation is natural and I don’t fault people for looking out for their best interest—I encourage that because we can only offer the best of ourselves if we are being that best self. But when self-preservation turns into narcissism and demand that other people comply with what you want, that isn’t a relationship. And that hurt. There were moments over the last year that hit me harder than anything in my life. Those moments were the reason why I started on an entirely different path for myself. I realized that within those moments, the people who claimed to be my friends were nowhere to be found. That’s fine, there are some things we have to go through alone—and some of them I wanted to go through alone if I’m honest. But what was interesting is that no one took the time to understand the aftermath of what I’d been through alone. I wasn’t the same person, drinking away what hurt, pretending everything was fine. My truth and my experience made people uncomfortable but they were still comfortable with SOME people. And even that is fine as much of a mindfuck as it is. On the other hand, I’ve developed a closer relationship with someone from my business, someone who doesn’t even reside in the same state and this person has shown more compassion and willingness to be there than people who KNOW me.
When it comes to time, it’s fairly insignificant how long we’ve known people. I saw a meme the other day talking about how some people got close so fast and it was because they didn’t need to tell that person how to be a friend. In the context of people just aligning with each other and that sort of instant connection, I get it, you DON’T need to tell anyone how to be around you and it just clicks. But there are times when we don’t know what to do with each other because we don’t know what someone is going through and it is what we do in those moments, how we show up, how we work through it together that define a relationship. I’m going to use the word blessed here because I believe it: I have been blessed with many amazing people in my life. I think that’s part of the reason why I’m so easily able to recognize the real side of someone, they can’t hide it from me because I can feel the truth and that scares the shit out of some people almost as much as being held accountable to that truth. No, it’s more about the vibe between people because energy doesn’t lie. If someone can turn away because they saw a crack in the armor that person doesn’t deserve a spot at your table. It’s the people who show up and make the effort to understand that matter and I got tired of being the one to always bend, to always make the concession because I understood—and I thought that was what friends did for each other. The truth is far simpler: keep the people with both feet in your court close, the ones with a foot on the other side of the line need to make the choice to be all in or get the fuck out. If they can’t choose, then there’s the answer.
Today I am grateful for reminders to live without regrets. Life is too damn short and moves too quickly to waste a moment regretting what we do. Make the choice, do the best we can, don’t intentionally cause pain, and always stay the course—our course. We are a skittish sort of species and I see how I’ve already passed my fears on to my child. It’s hard for me to accept some of the things, the wildness he has only because I fear for him getting hurt. But the more I fear for him, the less he will trust himself and then he won’t develop the skills he needs to actually stay safe because I will have to be that safety for him. I don’t want him to regret not doing the things he wants to do because he was afraid he couldn’t do them—especially because his mother instilled the fear in him. I have a mini-mountain of things I didn’t do because I was afraid and I am working on tackling those one at a time so I don’t have those regrets. And so I don’t continue to shape my life with fear and my son’s life as well. Life moves in a blink and we don’t always get a second chance to do what we want to do so if we are afforded an opportunity, seize it. Take it right then and there and don’t let go. Trust that it’s the right moment and jump. The worst that comes of it is a lesson and we try again. So perhaps it isn’t so much live without regrets as much as it is this: simply live.
Today I am grateful for pain. I’m having a moment of struggling with time again, realizing how damn fast everything truly goes and it’s ripping my heart out. But at the same time, I’m grateful and I’m happy because there have been such wonderful portions of my life that impacted me enough to want to go back, to not want to let go of those moments. Even if I’ve had a million moments since then, and I’m grateful for all of those as well, I’m lucky to have had something that engrained itself in me so well that I identify with it to this day, that it makes me feel good to this day, that it is still familiar to this day. I can acknowledge the difference from when I wanted to simply hide in what I knew—big fish in a little pond where I knew it all and was safe in that knowledge. Branching out and learning new things, new people scared the crap out of me because they didn’t act how the ones I knew acted so I kept wanting to go back to when I felt I had my feet under me, when I felt protected. Seeing the ones I love change and realizing that I’m changing, realizing how much time has passed and the fact that 30 years feels like an instant terrifies me. But it’s emphasizing to me the genuine need for presence. The people I love, the time we shared, the times we will have together are a gift, and losing them, things changing is always going to hurt to a degree. But if we stay present and aware, we won’t miss a second of our time together. All of it is a gift and I am so grateful because, yes the thought of losing any of it (any of the people I love) hurts like hell, but it means that there was something worth hurting for.
Today I am grateful for stepping outside myself. There comes a time we have to put aside our own bullshit and learn to look at what people need. That isn’t to say we sacrifice our own needs to make others happy, rather, we put aside the doubt and bullshit we tell ourselves long enough to see how we can take those skills and use what we have to help people. It’s always been easy to get wrapped up in our own heads—we have a constant voice that is both audience and creator in our minds and sometimes that voice isn’t always so kind. It’s responsible for both the greatest and darkest moments we face in life. This summer has been an emotional roller coaster—and I’m noticing the summer season is like that for me lately but that’s another story. So instead of getting wrapped up in what I fear and the thoughts I’ve told myself for ages, I told myself to shut up and just get the work done. Just do what needed to be done and see where I could be of use. It shifts everything. This is by no means an epiphany, rather a reminder that we are still capable even when we feel low. People don’t need us to be anything other than what we are in that moment, and we can get out of our own heads to be who we are meant to be. Being locked in the head is a lonely place to be and it often doesn’t get us anywhere. We need to learn to tell a different story because as soon as we do, the real magic happens.
Today I am grateful for freedom. I’ve worked hard over the last 6 years to get myself to a point where I can create the life I want without permission, more specifically without constraints related to a 9-5 or what other people thought I should be doing. I switched jobs at the beginning of the summer and that was a tough decision because it meant stepping down from leadership and a role I was used to for the last 6 years. That job was tough on so many levels and I constantly felt in over my head. I doubted who I was all the time, even when I know I made the right decisions, I constantly deferred to those above me. So I had to make the choice to give up what I knew, a familiar path with potential for higher movement, and a routine that, while it was a pain for me, was something I knew. I also knew whole heartedly that it wasn’t healthy for me, it wasn’t who I am. Every day felt like dressing up and literally playing a role and I was constantly tossed around between people, trying to make everyone happy and not doing much more than trying to find ways to make people happy. This new job is teaching me amazing things and I feel the inherent trust in the role where my choices will be supported—always. That has allowed/afforded me a new sense of trust in myself knowing that I have made the right choices and that I am capable of right choices. But this role has also offered me something I didn’t have: time. Adapting to how this role worked challenged me in the beginning because I was constantly seeking what to do next, always making sure I proved what I was doing, that I was holding my weight. But it’s been made very clear that this is a position I wouldn’t have gotten if I wasn’t capable and I’m happy to have a clear understanding that I am doing well. Belief in myself has afforded me the ability to do the job and to trust my use of the time I have been given—and all of that has allowed me the freedom to do the things I want to be doing, to pursue the things I want to go after and to actually take action on creating the life I want. That is freedom.
Today I am grateful for opportunities and next steps. I’ve taken a healthy dose of my own medicine in regards to accepting freedom and seizing the moment/opportunity when it comes our way. The summer has been packed with a ton of work and activity and overwhelm but also progress, joy, and ultimately satisfaction. There have also been some surprises in the way of moving forward on a few things that were going to be on the back burner for a while. It wasn’t how we planned but we were given an opportunity to rekindle a spark related to a project we’ve worked on for years and we have a chance to gather full force with it, to experience the power with it, and to get in the middle of it all. We initially weren’t going to, but this is something powerful and we can’t deny it any longer. We can’t ignore the fact that we have been called to this and we have stuck with it this long, even with no results at this point, for a reason. So, given all the changes over this summer and the spirit of moving forward, this was a chance we decided to pounce on. We both know it has to be different this time and we need to be more active participants—we’d been waiting for that moment when we could focus our efforts. But the time is never right, never perfect and sometimes you just have to take the leap and start the damn thing. So that’s what we are doing. We were given a gift, we are taking the chance, and we aren’t looking back this time. THIS is the time we are given and the time is now. I do not take that for granted.
“When you allow them to think you’re convincible, they will try to convince you,” Bishoi Khella. This quote hit me on a level that I didn’t want to admit. I will start with some grace for myself in that I’ve always been really good at seeing all sides of the situation and I’ve prided myself on making logical decisions and being able to arrive at a reasonable middle ground for people. What I’ve noticed as of the last 7-10 years is that I’ve lost some of that spark for myself and my own opinion and I’ve spent far more time seeking a middle ground than I’ve spent understanding what I believe personally. Seeing the middle ground isn’t a bad thing, frankly that’s always my goal, but the problem is it has turned into a behavior where people come to me seeking my agreement with them, seeking the way I see that they are right. In hearing this quote, I realized that people aren’t coming to me for logic, they’re coming to me because they think I will be on their side—that I will support and believe their side, that they can convince me that they are right. I don’t look for WHO is right, I look for WHAT is right and somewhere along the line, that became misinterpreted as me appeasing people. I realized that the way I present myself can make it seem like I was trying to be amenable when really I was trying to gather information in a safe way and to get to the truth.
The reality is this is about maintaining the “no.” We aren’t here to be swayed in a particular direction, we are meant to have our own opinion. We are meant to develop the skill of seeing all sides so we can arrive at a mutually beneficial conclusion, that is true. That doesn’t require me sacrificing myself and aligning with what you think is right over what I know is right for myself. That requires saying “no,” using our voice because we know what we stand for. If we feel something, believe something, if we are trying to make something happen, we are responsible for the boundary of maintaining what it takes to achieve that something. There are times when keeping the peace means sacrificing our voice and, even if we have good intentions of hearing it from someone else, we need to let go of the fear of being too loud or being seen as difficult so we can convince ourselves we know who we are and what we are talking about. We are given thoughts and opinions for a reason, we don’t have to adopt what anyone else tells us. There are many people in this world who prey on those with weak resolve, those who could serve their purpose rather then their own—and I allowed myself to fall into the former for the sake of appearing easy and reasonable. We have to speak up or we will be spoken over.
There is a way to maintain our opinion and express that opinion without dominating a situation and we are allowed to receive opinions without being forced to accept them. This is why we have a brain capable of complex thought engineering and deciphering. I had a conversation with a colleague experiencing something similar to what I went through and I felt fortunate enough to help him navigate that situation because I had insight to share. But at the end, I realized that this was a circumstance I’d warned him about already. It didn’t bother me so much that he had to experience it himself to understand and appreciate what I went through, but it bothered me that this was an instance where I knew what would happen and he thought he had control over the situation, that it wouldn’t go the way I said it would. He’d tried to convince me that he would be able to handle this, that he knew what would happen. I didn’t need to be convinced that I knew what was going on—I’d already lived it. So I nodded and politely told him I understood and that this par for course. It isn’t my job to convince anyone either, so we will go about our business and we will support each other as appropriate.
“Without a visual reference to what we need to do, we will follow what we see,” Brendon Bouchard. This is a testament to the fact that we need to have a clear vision of what we have to do in order to get where we want to—we can’t just do things willy-nilly and think we will find our way otherwise we will end up working on someone else’s dream. If we don’t have a plan for our life then someone will fill it in. I often struggle to find the middle ground so when I’m working out what needs to be done, I go to extremes: either every detail is planned to the second or I have no plan at all and wing it. Neither is exceptionally effective because we can’t control every detail and winging it really won’t get it done. The reason this quote caught my ear is because all life is a balance but it is so easy to get off track because we follow what we see. We all need guide rails every now and then.
I thought of the visual reference as a cue—and that’s really what it is. What we have in our environment is a trigger for us and it can set us up for success or failure. No matter how organized we are, what we surround ourselves with has an impact on us. For those of us with ADD/ADHD there are other challenges there because we may have the best intentions on doing something but we will squirrel off in a moments notice. So for me, especially now that I work from home with my 9-5, I have had to create very distinct times/areas for me to do specific work. That isn’t to say they don’t overlap, but in order to get anything done successfully, I need that defined space. The space itself reminds me of what I need to do.
So this piece wasn’t meant to be a big inspirational deal, more of a reminder to set ourselves up for success no matter the arena. If we are working toward personal freedom, we need to be disciplined about it and figure out what that means so we know what to do to achieve it. When it comes to mental health, it pays to clear the unnecessary clutter and do the deep dive to figure out what matters and what we have the power to change in our lives. No matter what we are working on, the message applies: make sure you have the tools and support you need to do the work and execute a plan. You don’t need to know every step of the way but you need to be able to see that next step so get out of your own way.
There is a concept of a unicursal line where no matter which way you go, you will end up in the same spot. The idea suggests that no matter what you choose, you will end up in the same spot so the choices we make are fairly irrelevant. The don’t matter because no matter what the result is the same in the end. If we treat life like that, the pressure is relieved because it suggests that no matter what we choose we will always get where we are meant to be. Some may look at this as a defeatist mentality and question the futility of life but this is something that gives me hope because it takes the weight off of the every day. Sure, we have a say in what happens, sure we can choose a different route to get there, but the unicursal line suggests that we were always meant to make that choice anyway—that we always WOULD have made that choice. So it isn’t so much a matter of doomed to an outcome, but rather we have already played out every possibility and we would have settled on what we chose regardless so we are right where we need to be.
I fell in love with this because at this moment I am experiencing a different type of existential crisis. I’m watching the strongest people I’ve known in my life, the ones who were my guardrails, my guides, my heroes, the giants of what I thought it meant to be to LIVE, I’m witnessing them in their most human and vulnerable of states. Of course they were always human. They always had these states and they always had their weaknesses but witnessing the vulnerability of life is a reminder that we are all here at he same time and we will all endure the same fate at the end of the day no matter what our path looks like. Some are granted a prettier path than others, that’s for sure, but even those with the glittery view will see the same thing in the end. That gives hope to a degree—we are all human and, regardless of what you believe the next step in this world is, we all return to the Earth in the end.
I spent a lifetime putting so much pressure on my decisions that I gave myself, not only decision fatigue, but I PTSD from trying to think so many steps ahead to see every possible outcome and what could happen to me. I recently read that when we grow up in a home where there was a lot of yelling or the kids were yelled at in particular, we learn to be quiet because the smaller we are, the less noticed we are, the less chance we have of being “in danger” of being yelled at. In that regard, I can speak from experience and know this is true and it carries well into adulthood. In full transparency I wasn’t yelled at directly very often, but I witnessed a lot of yelling in so many circumstances (yes, at myself but also at my siblings, at employees from the family business, from sibling to sibling both in the house and in the business, teacher to student, etc.) and I didn’t want to be on the receiving end of that. I wanted to be received and accepted and I didn’t want to be shunned—I already felt on the outside enough I didn’t want to add being in trouble to that equation as well.
So I chose the path of least resistance and keeping people happy in order to avoid being unhappy myself. AT least I thought that made me happy. It made me pliable and compliant and lost because I was small in so many ways. When I raised my voice, no one bothered listening or that is when I was outright told I was doing something wrong so that taught me very clearly that I was….wrong. That my opinion was wrong, that I should just keep quiet because the voice making noise belonged to someone else—not quite on the edge of seen and not heard but close enough. I didn’t know how to reconcile it, reconcile the fact that I had ideas and knew they were good and that I came here to share ideas and simultaneously was being told to keep quiet. SO this is my path: it doesn’t matter when I share the message because those who are meant to receive the message will get it in the right time. I never lost my voice, I just needed to be in the right room to remember my power and to have it appreciated and, mostly, I needed to appreciate it myself. So nothing I’ve done prior to this has damaged my ability to fulfill my purpose—I’m right on time, right on track, right where I belong. This is it: life is now and it is everything it was supposed to be.
“You are not responsible for how your growth journey makes other people feel,” Sahil Bloom. Full transparency this quote was used in the context of children carrying the burden of adults around them and how not all adults are safe just because they are considered an adult. This last line Bloom said, however, is remarkable in how it simply hits on the truth of a matter that applies to far more than just children learning to suffocate under the authority of an adult: it speaks to every time we undergo a change or evolution in our character and how people will always try to keep us as we were because it makes them feel safe and secure because they know the role we play in their lives. Simply put, we don’t need to stay small because it makes other people feel better. My growth may impact you, yes, it may affect how we interact and what we are able to do moving forward, even who we are to each other moving forward. But that doesn’t mean I need to curb my journey to accommodate your desire to stay who you were when growth is called for. And the truth is, I don’t get to decide when and how you grow/evolve nor do you get to choose that for me, so we can choose to grow together, or we can move forward on our path as we see fit.
Growth, change, evolution, taking the leap are about how WE feel, not how others feel. I’ve borne witness to what life looks like when we have the opportunity to change and we cling so hard to what WAS that we lose the opportunity to move onto that next step. It becomes a lifetime of wondering what the fuck happened and how we got where we are. That is a feeling I have desperately tried to avoid at all costs because it is painful, sometimes even more so because it’s also avoidable. I know what regret feels like (we all do) but I don’t want to regret missing out on the life I could have had because I was too afraid to move forward or I was more concerned about what you felt like in potentially leaving you behind (or the perception of leaving you behind). Those who are meant to be with us will be with us on that journey and a good rule of thumb is that those who are supposed to be on the journey with us will be happy for whatever that evolution brings—and those who are REALLY in it will deal with their own evolution as well. That’s how growth works—what works stays, what doesn’t falls away.
As a society we already fall into the habit of living up to standards from external influences and creating an image. From the lizard brain perspective it makes sense because the more we fit in, the less exposed we are to any type of danger. From the internal mental/emotional perspective, it’s a hindrance to who we are and, honestly, to those around us as well. If we never align with the authentic version of ourselves, we inhibit our growth and the growth of those around us who were meant to learn. What we are meant to be honestly never comes from outside—we know what it is. When we have that knowing, we know that we can’t base our decisions on how other people feel and what their fears are. We pass on fears and doubts along with bravery and boldness and we have the choice of what to express in our lives. We have the choice on what wins and that needs to come from ourselves. Whether someone likes it or not, we each get to express and live in our truth—their opinion on the matter is irrelevant. We are responsible for not hurting people but not at the cost of ourselves. We are not required to hurt ourselves to make other people feel better about their choices. Grow even if others decide to stay in the dirt—we can’t force them to face the sun. Perhaps we can give them enough shade to poke through and see the light but if we can’t, we still need to bloom.
The Intentional Dreamer 