“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.      

“We lock ourselves in a cage where ‘not now,’ ‘not ready’ and our comfort kills dreams. Don’t choose comfort over courage,” Loren Ridinger.  A perfect follow up to what we talked about yesterday. I’ve hit on these points quite a bit this week but this one is a bit more subtle than the others.  Sure the overarching theme is the same: we choose our path and what happens is a result of our actions.  But this stood out because of the nuance of the thought. It really is something as small as saying “not now” or believing we aren’t ready because we don’t think we can do it perfectly that can keep us right where we are.  Comfort is nice and we seek it, but if we really think about it, that isn’t what we want.  We are seeking safety and safety is outside of our comfort zone believe it or not. Because when we seek comfort, we are looking for things to be easy and attainable and within reach.  The safety we seek comes when we have a means to attain the things we want that will continually provide.  It has nothing to do with how we feel, it has to do with how we set up the path of our lives—security in freedom.

Every time we choose “not now” or “not ready” we are telling the universe that we don’t want what is being offered—even if it’s the exact thing we were asking for.  Whatever lies behind that feeling of not being ready is where we have to start.  Identify what it is that makes us feel not ready.  I know in many instances it’s the lack of self-worth that keeps us where we are but I’ve recently had to tackle the demons around the idea that it isn’t the lack of self-worth but the fear of succeeding and that is something I thought I had done a long time ago.  The idea that we would reject our own success is ridiculous, right?  The reality is success brings a lot of unknowns.  Will I be able to maintain it?  Will I be able to duplicate it?  Will the people I love still support me?  What if they don’t believe in me?  It does take courage to take a leap into something new because we can’t see what’s underneath.  I learned that taking the leap often does turn things upside down and when you jump you will eventually get back to the top.

I don’t know what that thing is that will make people feel strong enough to do it because I certainly don’t in spite of the fact that I had to make some difficult choices and changes recently.  I had to get really honest with myself about my role in my journey.  Look at the distraction, look at the fear, look at the choices I was making and ask if that was in line with what I wanted.  I have a giant pool of things that I want to do and I know all are feasible and tie together but instead of focusing on those things I make sure everyone else’s stuff is done first.  Then I ask why I haven’t been making progress on what I wanted.  That habit is a “not now” moment as well.  Sure, it’s nice to be helpful but when it cuts away at the energy and time we have for our own ventures, we have to ask if that’s the right thing to do, if that’s what is really needed in that moment.  It’s a prime example of knowing what we have to do and having evidence of success.  So reframe—not now becomes yes, now and not ready becomes the chance we were waiting for.       

“The door to the life we are meant to have unlocks inside our head.  We hold the key to the treasure we seek,” Loren Ridinger.  Another reminder that it starts and ends with us, more specifically, with our thoughts.  I can’t say it enough: the mind is an incredibly powerful thing and it will pave the path to our dreams or our nightmares depending on what we let it do.  It is literally up to us.  The thing is, I’ve somehow always known that and I think we all have on some level.  But what I think we all miss is just how seriously we need to take our thoughts.  The mind doesn’t distinguish thought from reality so what we allow to race through our brains is considered very real.  From that context alone why would we want to take a chance and put anything negative in there?  Sometimes the negativity is so subtle we truly don’t know we do it—that little doubt about wearing that shirt or eating that ice cream, or applying for that job, calling that person—it may not seem like much and we may chalk it up to nerves but the truth is we are putting the seeds of doubt in our brains and that is all it takes for those cages to start to go up.  We create our own traps in our minds and we also hold the key—I’ve talked about that a lot. We have everything we need inside of us and around us and if we don’t see it, we have the capacity to get it.

As cliché as it may sound the truth is that if we can see it in our minds, we can bring it into reality.  We can create it.  The thoughts and feelings we have aren’t all by accident.  The feelings we get are the cues we need to direct us toward the life we want.  The choice to act on that is always up to us, and like I talked about yesterday, if we don’t decide to do something different, if we don’t decide to follow those instincts (actively take action) then nothing will change.  It really is as simple as that.  I don’t suggest there are no repercussions to the choices we make, but the same can be said for not making a choice.  The life we envision, if the vision is big enough, lies on the other side of what we won’t do—or what we think we can’t do.  It’s all what we tell ourselves.  When we are kids, we feel invincible.  We can take on the world and we have dreams of the highest caliber, things that take us to the highest peak.  We start to let those little seeds of doubt build those cages I talked about earlier and we forget how high we can go.

So between too small pans, too many cages, too many fears, the message remains the same: it’s up to us to manage our thoughts and make the choice to be great, to do something bigger, something more.  Frankly, to do something that is more aligned with the truth of who we are so we can fulfill our purpose in this world.  We sometimes think we seek attention and notoriety when we are really seeking connection and truth.  Sure, it’s nice to have people know our names, but think of the legacy we leave behind.  There are just as many people who have left this world with a scar that we remember as much as those who have tried to help it.  So the point is this: the power is in the mind all the way, all the time.  If we want something we have to go for it with full commitment and belief that we can get whatever it is that we seek.  We have to be audacious enough to believe that the world will work with us to get us where we need to be and that the result will be as beautiful, if not better, than we can imagine.  Be bold, be honest, be authentic because those are the real keys to the life we seek.

“We don’t rise to the level of vision, we rise to the level of our decisions,” Loren Ridinger.  It’s one thing to have great vision it’s another thing to bring it to life.  A decision is just that: clear choice coupled with action—the key is in the action.  In order to rise, we have to believe in the vision.  We have to believe in ourselves and our ability to fulfill that vision. At conference I had another take away which is that we must decide like the person who lives that vision would decide in order to experience what we want to experience.  I’ve said it before, you can imagine going to Bali all you want—that’s your vision—but buying a ticket to Florida is not the same thing—that’s the decision.  If we keep deciding like we always have then we will get what we always got.  Life gives us what we put into it so we have to make sure we are very clear on what we want—and what we need.

When it comes to the level of our vision, it’s safe to say that we often dream too small.  We may have a big idea but with no workable way to do it, all it stays is an idea.  A vision requires steps and action and the choice to take risk.  That risk can be anything from saying yes to something we haven’t before or saying no to something we haven’t before; it can be walking instead of driving, taking the stairs instead of the elevator.  It can be as monumental as wiping the entire slate clean and starting somewhere new.  But the point is this: if we don’t do something different nothing will ever change.  The good news is it doesn’t have to be a huge life-altering step from the get go, it can be something small that breaks the pattern.  It compounds from there because we see that changing course is often a series of small adjustments that gets us where we need to go.  At the end of the day every big move starts from the smallest of decisions.

Life changes in a blink—sure it may not be overnight, but it changes faster than you think.  One moment, one step, one choice at a time moves us closer to our dreams or further way.  It’s all up to us.  We can have an idea or an image of what we want in our minds but if we do nothing that idea will never come to light.  Not everyone is aware of what they want right off the bat—we aren’t all that fortunate to remember who we are early in life and for most of us, the world gets in the way and wreaks a little havoc on us until we settle into who we are.  We can’t let the noise and fear and distraction get in the way of the real dream.  We have to recognize that calling, that hope, that voice, and yes, that vision—and we need to support it.  If it was given to us it was meant for us and there is nothing that will take that away, so as long as we are clear and are willing to take responsibility for those choices, it becomes inevitable.  Choose wisely.  Choose big.        

“We see signs along the way, we just don’t pay attention,” Loren Ridinger.  This is about the lies we tell ourselves when we know something is wrong with a situation and we stay.  We ignore all the warnings even when we know that something just isn’t right.  We stick with the things we know will hurt us, the things that can break us and then we act surprised when something backfires.  If we get really honest with ourselves, we can admit that we knew what was coming.  My family has a long history of staying.  Like, when shit hits the fan and we know we should run, we stay.  When we know someone won’t change but we have hope for their potential, we stay.  When we know an opportunity is for us and that little voice is telling us it isn’t, we stay nice and secure in that little bubble.  We set up our own destruction when all the signs were there along the way.  The brain can convince itself of unbelievable things. 

So what happens if we start paying attention?  I think of the time I could have saved and all the things I could have accomplished if I had cut my losses on some facets of my life sooner.  I think of the ease of that life, the one I convinced myself I wasn’t worth having.  I paid attention and I turned down each and every one of those chances that came my way.  I stayed in the rut knowing full well I was burying myself deeper, not building a ladder.  Whether it was in any type of relationship or goal, I managed to get myself right back to where I started.  This is an easy arena to fall into the could have/should have nonsense.  And it is nonsense (even if it’s right) because we can’t change it anyway and the universe said it had to be THIS way so that’s why things went down the way they did.  But what I learned is that we can start paying attention now.  We can start believing in ourselves now. 

When we know who we are and familiarize ourselves with stepping out of the bubbles we made, we start to take our interactions more seriously—or at the least we start to consider or view them differently.  We recognize the truth of the situation sooner than we would have previously and we are better able to navigate and steer ourselves away from a course we don’t want.  We learn to trust our instincts and know that what we pick up on and act on what we know is true.  This is different than impulse—this is about specific decision making.  The truth is not everyone is toxic or has motive to hurt other people—far from it.  That doesn’t make them any less self-serving, so we always need to be on the lookout.  It becomes easier to know what to do because the path is laid out in front of us.  All we have to do is stop pretending we can’t see it. 

“We lie to ourselves to avoid the risk of becoming,” Loren Ridinger. I didn’t want to admit the truth in this statement.  Like our parable yesterday, I didn’t want to take responsibility for anything more than I felt I could handle and I thought I was being practical.  We tell ourselves someday or that we will do it when the time is right knowing full well we are setting some arbitrary standard to mark when we start living our lives. Make no mistake, there are real issues we face that sometime would legitimately impede us from moving forward in a productive manner.  But when we take the every day mundane details and use them as the reason why we can’t get out of performing the every day mundane details, we’ve created our own mental trap.  The things we want to break out of suddenly become the things we are reliant on to keep us in our little bubble.  So we tell ourselves a story where we get to be the victim—we’ve done the work but look, nothing has happened so that’s not my fault!

It is a risk to decide to be something else.  It’s a risk to shed what we know in favor of something we don’t know all on the chance of what could be.  But we can’t let our own thoughts and fears be the very thing that hurts us or holds us back.  We tell ourselves we can’t for whatever reason before we even try—if we don’t try we will never get anywhere anyway.  If the caterpillar never built the cocoon it wouldn’t grow wings.  If the bird never broke out of the shell it would die.  So why do we cut off the exact opportunity we need?  Because we aren’t sure we can carry ourselves through becoming who we are meant to be.  We know who we are, we are comfortable where we are so even if we say we want to make the move to something different, when it comes down to it, it makes it nearly impossible to shift.  We know what we have and we feel safe.

Ending with this concept of safety. We can create the safest nests for ourselves that we love and tend to with care and purpose and several things can still happen:  we can still feel like we need something more, still feel the call that the space is too constricting. After time we may feel the need to change the surroundings entirely but we fear hurting someone’s idea of who we are—or our own because we aren’t living how we thought we would.  The other thing is some outside forces can destroy what we built and we may have 0 control over it.  All the planning, protection, and care in the world will not stop certain things from happening—not even the worst things.  So the point is this: we are afraid of becoming because of what we have built.  We need to start asking ourselves if what we built is still what we want, and more importantly, is it what we need in that moment?  Don’t ignore what we know already which is that we are all fully capable of becoming exactly what we need to be and going higher than we ever thought possible. We just have to take the risk.