There is a story of a fisherman who brings a ruler with him every day while fishing.  He measures every fish he catches, throwing back the big ones.  One day someone asks him why he doesn’t keep the big ones and he replies without hesitation that he only has a 12 inch pan.  Some people see this as a matter of practicality—there isn’t room in the pan for the larger fish.  Some people see this as a problem where the man could have just cut the fish.  But there is one more lesson, one more possibility: what if he just needed to get a bigger pan?  When we limit ourselves to the size of our meal, our speech, our dream, we limit the results we get in our lives.  There comes a time when we have to consider that we aren’t dreaming big enough.  If we break ourselves down to fit in the box (the pan so to speak) we are cutting out or throwing back the pieces of ourselves that could be the most valuable.  How do we solve that?  We need to get a bigger vessel.  Sometimes we need to dream bigger and get rid of the ruler because the only limits we see or feel are in our own minds.  Sometimes we limit what we do because we’re afraid of what more really means—that we CAN do more.  When we remove the box, we remove all limitations, when we see there was never a real measuring stick, anything becomes possible.

Today I am grateful for confidence.  Even if this is something I struggle with daily, I am so grateful for the moments when it comes out.  We had dinner with new friends yesterday evening and they ended up joining us back home so we could play darts and some other games.  I felt some of the old me come out in regards to that younger boldness—perhaps not confidence exactly, but the willingness to try things and put myself out there.  In this case I didn’t do well with the game but I realized off the bat that wasn’t the point.  The point was all of us just having a good time and being with each other.  It’s been a while since I’ve been with people who weren’t in direct competition over anything even if we were playing a competitive game.  We just had fun.  I never considered needing confidence to have fun but the truth is if we are willing to take the chance to have fun we learn things.  So I am grateful to take that chance.

Today I am grateful for good food.  This isn’t something I talk about much but I’ve had a difficult relationship with food most of my life.  I love food, I always have—but I also used it as a coping mechanism.  I struggled with overeating and with sugar addiction specifically (nothing totally out there). Either way the point of being grateful for food is that it doesn’t have to be that kind of mechanism.  Food is a uniter in so many ways, it’s an experience. We bring substances into our body for nourishment and when we do it correctly, our bodies thrive.  Food is a tool and it is amazing what is provided for us with little effort.  Over the last year and half I’ve lost and kept off 40 pounds and that is saying something to healing my relationship with what I thought I needed from food.  But I’ve had a few moments over the year and half, up to and including the last week, where I found myself wanting to fall into old habits and not honoring my limits. But it was in those moments where I felt differently about the test.  It wasn’t about my resolve in those moments—it was about presence.  While we were out of town spending time together on the first family vacation we’ve ever taken together, I realized I didn’t want to worry about what I was consuming.  We were eating things we wouldn’t get back home and the memory of those moments was more important than taking in a few extra calories.  I’ve proven over the last year and a half that I can maintain and that I have the drive and discipline.  I can handle taking the moment to enjoy even if it means a little extra work in the end.  We also had a wonderful meal out the other night and it was a great time together—it was the experience all around.  The food and the people, all of us gathered together to enjoy.  It was lovely.

Today I am grateful for understanding what I have to do.  It’s later in the afternoon than I would normally write this and I had a few moments this morning where I couldn’t even get up for various reasons.  But I understand that in order to achieve what I’m seeking to achieve I need to do what I say I’m going to do.  It’s all on me. It’s all in my choices and actions and what I do or don’t get is a result of what I do or don’t follow through on.  That is the nature of taking responsibility for our lives.  We get what we put into it.  And for the first time, I have more clarity around that.  I have a better relationship with balance and scheduling and knowing what needs to be done.  I had this idea of what freedom is and what it means, thinking I could do whatever I wanted when I wanted to and I developed that into a routine a long time ago.  But freedom also means adapting to what needs to be done. It means finding the balance between what we need and what we want—and then finding the ground to do what has to be done while honoring all the other stuff.  The bottom line is if there is something that needs to be done, we need to be clear about it and do the work to get the work done.  All gets done when it is supposed to so we can trust that we are always on time.  All is exactly as it should be.

Today I am grateful for passion.  Passion can apply to a lot of things we experience and feel in this world.  The desire and drive to achieve something specific.  The joy we feel when we are in a certain environment or doing a certain task.  The way we feel about someone.  The way we feel about a goal.  Passion is what drives us in so many things.  Liz Gilbert wrote years ago about how we have to find our passion to secure our actions and figure out what our lives mean.  There is some truth to that, but she came back after a while essentially apologizing for it because the truth is there are some points where passion isn’t fully clear.  Passion can sometimes be an impulse and we aren’t always able to decide what direction we’re really being pulled in.  For me I became overwhelmed with passion because I am curious about a lot of things and I truly get interested in the process of learning and trying new things.  But with that I was never able to fully settle and become a master or expert on any one thing in particular.  I hated myself for that because I thought I had wasted all my time in this world trying to do everything.  I can look at this a little differently now and understand it wasn’t wasted time, it was time spent learning that there are many beautiful things in this world and having a broad knowledge of them can be a key to guiding others to what they want as well. Passion keeps me coming back to the things I love: writing, reading, sharing, learning.  It keeps me fulfilled.  Even if I’m not the wild success I thought I would be, I am still successful enough to be able to explore the world as I see fit and that is because passion keeps my eyes open for new things.  For that I am grateful.

Today I am grateful for relaxing.  I have a high guilt complex so I am often plagued with feeling like I should always be doing something else, like I should always be somewhere else.  I have a hard time being in the moment and really enjoying what I’m doing even if I love what I’m doing.  I automatically go to thinking that there is something else I should be doing.  The pressure of should takes the joy out of the present moment AND out of the things I should be doing—because if I’m really honest, the things I should be doing are all things I want to be doing as well.  Creating a divide and uncertainty in the focus of the moment is enough of an issue but when we throw guilt on that fire, it consumes all joy we could potentially have anyway.  So there are times we need to learn to relax.  Accept the moment as it is.  Accept the joy of the moment and trust divine timing in everything.  All that needs to get done will, it doesn’t all have to get done at once.  All is well.  So breathe and focus and enjoy the present.  We are here together and that is a gift. 

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead

Your brain not always your bestie.

Thought aren’t facts, stop believing every single one.

Fear, that’s your values waving at you.

Anxiety, you rehearsing a future that isn’t here yet.

Anger your boundaries have been crossed.

Sadness, your body asking you to rest, not give up.

You’re not broken, you do not need fixing, your nervous system is just trying to protect you.

Healing isn’t about bulldozing feelings, it’s learning to sit with them and not letting them drive the bus.

Change? Forget motivation, build habits instead, small shifts done often will quietly rewire your entire life.

Your past it’s a teacher, not a life sentence, stop giving it the pen when you are writing the next chapter.

Feeling triggered?  That’s a mirror,  What you judge in others is often what’s unhealed in you.

Control is an illusion, the only real power you have is your choice.  You’re the architect, your life, your design.

“Reminder: Life is hard either way.  Choose your difficult. Waking up early to work out is hard but so is feeling exhausted and unhealthy.  Having tough conversations to fix a relationship is difficult but so is living with resentment and distance.  Budgeting your money with discipline is hard but so is drowning in debt.  Putting yourself out there is hard and risking rejection and putting your work and heart on the line is hard but so is playing it safe and wondering what could have been.  Growth is hard but regret I would say it’s harder.  Every path has its pain so don’t ask for easy, ask for worth it.  You don’t get to skip difficult but you do get to decide what kind of difficult you live with.  The difference between people who grow and people who stay stuck, it’s not talent, it’s how they handle difficult,” Ryan Leak.  I know we’ve talked about this one before many times, but it is a pertinent reminder that we are in charge of our lives and the choices we make.  It isn’t necessarily about controlling that life because all plans can go awry at any time, but it is about making choices, even if they are difficult.  It is in the choosing, no matter how hard that we learn what we are made of.

If what I wrote a few weeks ago about the unicursal line is true, then it doesn’t matter what we choose because it will all be part of the same path that takes us to the same result no matter what we do.  Again, that has nothing to do with a doom and gloom type of fatalism, it has to do with taking the pressure off and understanding that there is no wrong choice because no matter the outcome, we are safe, and we can’t be anywhere other than where we are.  We can’t go back, we can’t go forward, we can only choose with the information we have now and we do our best.  There is nothing to regret or fear because it is all for a reason and we made the choice for a reason.  I noticed with regret, the only time we start to regret those choices is when we make the choices that we don’t truly believe in—or when we lose the opportunity to make the choice at all.  So make the choice and take the chance because if we have the opportunity now, it’s meant to happen now, we have the opportunity now so take it before we can’t.

No matter what we say, different is hard, but sometimes living the same thing over and over again knowing we had the chance to make a change is harder.  The things that replay in our minds, calling us, telling us they want to be awakened and expressed, the things we want to experience, the things that feel like home even if we haven’t been there or done that before—those are the things that will change us.  Those are the moments we understand what is important and we wouldn’t be afraid if it wasn’t important to us.  If it didn’t mater we wouldn’t worry about it.  What we’ve forgotten, however, is that the experience isn’t always contingent on the result—sometimes it’s about how we get there.  Sometimes we have to go through things a certain way to learn a specific lesson in how to get to the next step.  We have to experience it to understand what it is we really want.  And we have the choice at every turn to either commit and take the chance or to sit and wish for it.  The only way to get it done is to do it so we must always remember that no action is a choice as well.  But we can’t regret what we don’t choose anymore than what we do.  So sit with our hearts and listen to what it tells our minds/bodies/souls and we will know what choice to make no matter how difficult.  It will always be the right thing.

“How much of your life was performing, just fitting into a mold that just wasn’t you?  You know it’s a real awakening because you can’t go back to sleep, there’s a before and an after.  Keep asking every single question that comes to mind. You’re not going crazy, you’re becoming you,” Ross Lara.  This was probably my favorite quote from the entire reel Ross shared.  We are given a persona from the time we are born that we don’t even realize may not be who we are.  Some suspect there is something more or that the life they’re living isn’t quite a right fit—they just feel off.  And often that’s how this starts—with the subtle shift that something doesn’t feel right and that our actions aren’t matching what we feel.  When we see the alternatives and know that we are indeed meant for more, that mold cracks. Of course it feels like breaking and some of us fear that we will never be able to get it back together again—that’s entirely natural because we are trained that the mold is who we are and if that breaks then what else do we have?  What else defines us?  The reality is, when that mold breaks, it’s showing what is meant to be, what has always been inside, the pieces we’ve been trained to hide for one reason or another over the years.

We learn the difference is this process is more akin to shedding a skin than it is to breaking a vase.  This is the realization that we never fit in that vase and we were contorting ourselves to fit into an image someone else held for us based on their experience, and perhaps we don’t know ourselves as well as we thought we did.  Our lives aren’t meant to be spent twisting and flipping, becoming different people for different people.  When we experience the awakening and we actually wake up, we see that the mold we used as safety or as a definition of who we are, rather than it being a place of consistency and comfort, has become a coffin.  The things that used to feed us and make us tick no longer work or resonate.  In many ways it has become a parasite that feeds off us instead of giving us the sustenance we needed. That is awakening.  That is knowing who we are and knowing that we can’t go back.  If the mold is broken then there is nothing to go back to regardless.  What we were afraid of is the belief that we can’t survive outside of what we know even if we know there is something more—or perhaps even the idea that we CAN handle whatever comes next in spite of what anyone else thinks.

We’ve lived our lives asleep thinking we are awake because we are moving and conscious, but when we get that taste that there is something more and manage to get a peek underneath, it becomes that much harder to ignore.  As Ross says, there is the before and after.  The in between can get a little murky because that’s when it seems most bleak, but awakening is like shedding layers and if we keep going, eventually all the costumes we wore for the roles we’ve played come off.  The old no longer fits and we are no longer content to accept the role we had before—even if we willingly took it before.  Many people view this as some sort of crisis and say this is because we are changing and we don’t know ourselves anymore.  There may be some truth to that because we are indeed becoming a new person with a new perspective—but the crisis they speak of is the fact that they no longer know who they are to us and they don’t see us in our role anymore.  And that is ok.  We stay true, hold steady, and like Lara says, we keep questioning until there is nothing left to hide behind nor a desire to hide.  We welcome all we are with open arms and never look back.  So even if the show is over for one portion of our lives, the living begins. 

“The truth doesn’t need defending if it’s the truth; once you start asking questions the floodgates open,” Ross Lara.  Humans are curious creatures by nature.  It comes with the inherent creativity we were gifted and our ability to learn, adapt, understand, and modify the environment around us.  We have to be curious in order to see the possibilities and to learn.  This quote was a continuation of the discussion of awakening in the context of finding the answers to things we always questioned and a reminder to keep questioning.  We have brains capable of understanding all of human history and context, we were driven to record our history, our stories, to leave a mark and it is right to question everything we know because it is all based on what was told before us.  A majority was not through first hand experience—it was simply what we were told and accepted as true.  It wasn’t until we started to care about how we looked and started seeking power that we manipulated the truth.  I mean, with that being said, we started lying as soon as we realized we could hunt because the guy with the biggest kill had the most power.  But then it turned into a game of manipulation to make people behave a certain way so they would fulfill specific interests.  So when we understood that and started asking questions, that was an entirely different game.

Facts needed to line up and when things didn’t make sense, we started to ask about the cracks.  Some people didn’t like that because they didn’t like being questioned or exposed.  Then there were those who simply stuck with the truth because they knew it was the truth.  There are truths we form based on our experience and we can have a different story for the exact same thing, but when we look objectively, we understand that we don’t need to defend ourselves when we are in truth.  The story tells itself.  So if we see someone or feel someone trying to adjust a story that we know didn’t go down a certain way, it feels wrong.  If we feel like something someone shares with us doesn’t make sense, we feel it.  If we see something portrayed as truth that only benefits a few and hurts someone else, we know it’s wrong.  So we get curious and start digging because we know there is more to it.  That is one of the greatest gifts of being human: we have this knowing when there is more to the story. We have this little radar that senses crap. So what really matters is that we can tell whatever story we want to but the truth will always come out.  We don’t need to back it up or posture for it—it speaks for itself. 

It’s when we experience those moments of finding a truth that we start to see there could be cracks in everything we know.  If we could go our entire lives believing and behaving based on one type of system only to find out there was an entirely different series of rules for others, then what else is there?  An infinite amount of possibility.  And we know that humans have a tendency to fight for being right rather than doing what is right.  Before anyone gets too upset at that, I’m NOT saying that is the norm—I know there are people who genuinely care and are honest and consistently act in the best interest of others simply for the fact it is the right thing to do.  But there are people who care more about being right than doing what is right, that is a fact we can’t escape.  So this is where the distinction is and the lesson in this piece: remember that we know the difference between right and wrong, that is something we were all born with.  If something feels off, allow that curiosity to guide is in the direction of what feels right and we will find the answer.  The truth can never stay buried for long because it has its own light about it.  It doesn’t need the glory of any sort of attention: it is exactly as it needs to be.  So trust our instincts and keep searching for what feels right.

“A spiritual awakening isn’t becoming religious.  It’s when you start questioning everything you’ve been taught. The beliefs you were handed, the systems you were raised in, the masks you had to wear to survive, the rules you had to follow just to be accepted,” Ross Lara.  The one good thing about everyone having a platform is that we are exposed to so many different viewpoints, talents, beliefs, ideas, and creative outlets.  We learn different ways of life.  We see that there may be cracks in what we were taught and there are other ways to not only survive, but thrive.  We learn to make the connections that really matter.  The connection to source and self.  That isn’t something religion can even teach us regardless.  Connecting to spirit means being willing to give up familiarity and comfort. 

Humans were designed to question.  We were given creativity and connection and thought and we are most definitely meant to use it.  The truth is there are no rules beyond what we make and sometimes we are the ones keeping ourselves in the cage.  We are given the spiritual awakening so we can unearth something new within us, something new to believe, something new to share.  Religion has nothing to do with it—religion is just another structure designed to keep people in line.  Spirituality—now that is where the meat is.  When we connect to spirit, that’s when we know real truth.  We don’t have to survive in truth, we simply are.  Welcome what we know and watch the entire game change.  It may feel a lot like falling apart, but it is the beginning of creation and the opening of the world.

To be fair, there doesn’t NEED to be a spiritual component to it, that’s just the context I’m most familiar with because my own awakening/epiphanies did have a lot to do with connection and spirituality.  But it doesn’t have to play out like that for anyone.  It can be a realization that we need to break a bad habit, an understanding of a long held concept, creating a new belief.  Awakening is anything that brings us out of our shell and into something new, something greater.  It’s the shifting from what we knew to what we WILL know through shedding what we carried.  That isn’t to say we let it all go, but it is saying that we let go of what no longer works in favor of something that fits better.  If we know there is something greater for us, the awakening will bring us right to it.  We just have to let it happen and then we move from survive to thrive in an entirely new way, with eyes wide open.  Ready. 

“Anxiety and trauma impair decision making.  The fear of making the wrong choice creates analysis paralysis.  The feeling of being stuck is not a character flaw.  It’s cognitive overload.  When someone feels stuck, and I’ve done this to myself, they often blame it on their own weakness, their own laziness, or emotional instability, but the truth is stuck-ness is usually just the result of too many competing internal demands.  Your brain isn’t broken, it’s overwhelmed. Cognitive overload happens when your brain’s working memory is trying to juggle too much at once. Emotionally, mentally, or even physically.  I know you understand because your brain is going a thousand miles per hour and keeps you stuck in a situation.  A 2011 study published in Psychological Science shows high emotional stress impairs the pre-fontal cortex, the part responsible for decision making, planning, and impulse control. When overwhelmed emotionally, clarity is neurologically blocked.  What triggers emotional overwhelm is stacked unresolved emotions, lack of boundaries, neglecting basic physical needs, unmet needs for safety and validation, overintellectualizing instead of feeling, and toxic relationships that keep you in a state of hypervigilance,” JB Copeland. 

Recently there’s been an influx of information shared about the nervous system and regulating it.  The goal is to create understanding around body function and how we can work with our nervous systems to regulate and make better choices.  It explains how our body is wired and the things we do either help or hinder it—and how we can get back to a neutral state to better make decisions.  We live in a society that is always on, always moving, always striving, always proving, always trying to make sense of something.  The human mind and body aren’t designed to function like that.  We need the ebbs and flows, the on and the off so we can recharge.  We make each other feel like we are weak if we somehow can’t keep up with an impossible expectation of doing it all.  Even when we don’t know what doing it all means.  We put ourselves into a state of anxiety where we can’t make logical decisions only to be taught to blame ourselves for not functioning in a way we weren’t designed to function in the first place.  Overwhelm is a dangerous thing.  Multiple drives, directives, desires pull people in multiple directions and we can’t focus. And we make ourselves sick.

We need to understand that mental health is synonymous with self-regulation and awareness.  It doesn’t mean anything is wrong with us, it means we are trying to function in a system not designed for us.  We put too much on our plates and are critical of ourselves and then put more and more on there until we are buried and have no way out.  It’s important to slow down for our sanity and for our actual function.  We need to change the story around the premise that we are supposed to be in constant motion, always doing, always productive.  If we don’t address the root cause of that overwhelm we will constantly find ourselves in that state, unable to move.  Don’t mistake what I’m saying—we are indeed meant to move, we just aren’t meant to move how we do now.  Slow down, take it all in, breathe.  The better we take care of ourselves the better we can make decisions.  So move, flow, don’t force—and in that context it has nothing to do with attracting—it just has to do with getting on track, our own track.    

Today I am grateful for laughter.  Life can get pretty heavy sometimes and if we continue to focus on that, it gets painful.  I’ve often spoken about sharing the lighter side of things, of choosing what we focus on, and on managing our perspective.  I never claimed any of that was easy—we are emotional creatures and it takes a lot of practice and discipline to become aware of our state consistently enough to not let those emotions dictate what we do or our overall mindset.  Sometimes we just need a simple reminder that getting out of that spiral of negative focus is all we need.  I had a wonderful conversation with my best friend the other day and this is someone I’ve laughed with and loved for over 30 years so in that time we’ve gone through everything together.  Not that our conversations are always serious or anything, but we are both in the same field professionally so we talk about a lot of our struggles in that arena—even that isn’t in a negative way, it’s more relating to each other and talking about how we deal with it respectively.  But the other day we had the most ridiculous conversation ranging from cruises and rogue waves to Greenland Sharks and windmills.  In that moment, all we needed was laughter and laugh we did.  The hear, mind, body, and soul know what we need so if we need to laugh, laugh.  It really is the best medicine.

Today I am grateful for inspiration.  This past weekend I’ve been afforded the opportunity of a lifetime.  Talk about changing the trajectory of things.  I attended a conference for my business and it’s something that happens annually but I haven’t been able to go for the last several years.  We all have those moments where something clicks and comes together, and truth be told, I thought that happened for me the last time I went to this event.  And it did in a way—there were tons of impactful moments including the realization that I can travel and do things differently, perhaps most importantly, that we are able to change the course of our lives with a decision to do things differently and a commitment to follow through.  I am stubborn as hell and I know I likely could have been more successful had I been more open and receptive to some of the feedback and/or methods of how the team functions.  I mean, they are all successful in their own right so something they are doing is working.  But I had to learn on my own that there are ways to incorporate that work in a manner that feels right for me.  So in being with the group this time around, I fully understand what it is to take accountability for a life changing thing and to dive in.  It’s all here for us, we just have to be willing to reach out and take it.  For the first time in a while, with all the chaos in my mind, I feel like it’s a real possibility.

Today I am grateful for help.  I rarely talk about needing help because I was trained to never need help in my family.  If we needed help we were either an inconvenience or weak depending on who you were talking to.  Being the youngest, I often needed help but I picked up on the cues of who I could go to and when to do it on my own very quickly.  So many people talk about the youngest getting special treatment and being privileged—and I’d be lying if I said there was none of that, there was certainly some—but what we don’t often talk about is the psychological impact of having to keep up all the time and the constant need to prove that we are worthy of space and capable of holding our own.  I had to carefully choose when to ask for help because it would either mean I was an idiot or a pain in the ass.  So learning when it was safe to reach out for help from others was (and is) a huge thing for me.  I don’t like to bother people. I’m used to being the one people come to.  So in that regard I also like being the one who knows things—and that’s a me thing. Regardless, it’s a huge milestone for me to realize that asking for help and using it doesn’t make us lecherous or parasitic or incompetent or stupid or lazy.  I mean, what kind of lessons are those for a kid?  I hated feeling like that and it made me hyper independent.  Sure, that independence did teach me a lot and made me capable of a lot, but it also gave me a complex where I needed to carry the burden all the time, no matter what it was, I had to learn how to do it.  No one can carry that much on their own so it is ok to reach out for help because we are human and we all need help at some point. 

Today I am grateful for stepping up and understanding capacity.  The last 18 months have been filled with enormous change in nearly every facet of my life.  I struggled with some of it, feeling like it was too big, that I wasn’t capable or that what I wanted simply wouldn’t happen, that I was doing it wrong.  Things started to shift the more I kept at it.  I had to adapt and shift at certain points, some things ended up not looking at all like what I thought they would.  I had to give up on some things I thought I wanted most.  The biggest lesson is that sometimes the things we build up in our heads are just that: in our heads.  We have much more capacity than we think as long as we get rid of all the extra crap.  When we start doing the work it alleviates the fear because we see what needs to be done and we can manage those tasks one at a time.  The greatest things in life may take time, yes, but the truth is we have the ability to manage anything—sometimes just not in one bite.  Once we start doing the work, however we see that time may not be as much as we thought.  It gets easier the more we get moving because momentum is what creates progress.  So when we make progress at understanding our capacity and the work that actually needs to get done, nothing can get in our way.

Today I am grateful for travel and love.  We don’t often take trips and we recently were on a business trip that we threw a few extra days on to celebrate our anniversary.  I love to travel and see different things.  Yes, it’s stressful, yes I hated leaving my animals in someone else’s care, but the experience of other locations is something you can only get quite literally by leaving the comfort zone and doing something different.  If we want something different we have to do something different, right?  Between the trip itself and the significance of this anniversary, it made me realize that I need to celebrate more.  I allow myself to get caught up in the next task so often, I forget to take a minute to honor where I’m at.  We barely celebrate birthdays let alone the achievements we’ve made along the way to getting where we want to go.  But this time was different.  We took the time to be with each other and our son, not rushing to check the next thing off the list, not living up to someone else’s expectations of what we needed to do next and we just did what we wanted to do.  We took the time to breathe and be together and to witness what was around us, to take it all in.  Frankly, we took the time to just be alive and be happy together in our own little unit.  It’s a blessing to have that time together and I promise myself that I am not going to bulldoze those moments to get to the next thing.  Right now is what matters and there is so much to see together—so take the time to do it while we still can.  Live and love to the fullest while we are here.

Wishing everyone a wonderful week ahead.

“For 21 days I want you to keep your mind on what you want and keep it off what you don’t want. Keep your conversations on what you want, keep your conversation off what you don’t want. Keep your dreams, your imagination, your thoughts, your feelings, everything in your environment consistent with what you desire and keep it off of what you don’t want.  Why do we pick 21 days?  For a very good reason. It takes 21 days for a chicken that has a brain the size of a pea to sit patiently, calmly, faithfully on an egg to hatch the egg. Now we feel if a chicken with a little brain like that can sit on an egg for 21 days without seeing any change, just in faith, for 21 days they sit on that egg, we can ask adults who have brains the size of 3 pounds, that have 12 to 20 billion cells and has the capacity to remember and retain all the knowledge known to man, if the brain can be tapped, we’d ask them to keep at it for 21 days, if you go on a positive mental attitude diet for 21 days keep your mind on it. The goal is to become what we call a purely positive person,” Manifestation Wishes.  Just a little reminder that with time and consistency, what we think about can become a reality and will become a part of us, innate, as long as we create the habits with practice and patience.

It takes time and practice but there is no clock on these things.  We have to train ourselves to be what we are trying to be, to be open enough to welcome the life we want.  We can’t handle new things with old habits if they aren’t meant to fit in the same mold we came from.  New ideas and new life come from positive places and it is our job to ensure our brain/mind is a fertile place for that which we want.  Whether it’s a new look, renewed health, a new sense of self, a new job, a new routine, it takes time to make it something natural.  But this isn’t just about making something natural—it’s about the consistency to keep going even when we don’t see the results right away.  I’ve been on a health journey for over a decade—constant ups and downs, trying new things.  Health has always been important to me but I allowed myself to be distracted and I wouldn’t give the work I was doing enough time to take hold.  I didn’t believe I could be that person who looked how I wanted to look and feel how I wanted to feel.  It was only in the last year when I decided that I’d had enough and it was time to make it happen. For me this wasn’t just physical: there was an entire mental component to it as well.

So for the last year I’ve been consistent with the diet and exercise and I see the results. The physical transformation is one thing, but the mental transformation is another.  It has re-instilled belief in myself by showing me I could do it.  It encouraged me to go for something new—more specifically the thing I knew I wanted to do with my life.  My career path has been another series of stops and starts and this time when an opportunity fell in my lap, I went for it.  The timing was right and it was the right place for me.  And I’ve stuck with my business for the last 4 years because I love the work and what it stands for and what I can do for people but it hasn’t seen much action.  And now another opportunity has presented itself and I know that the timing is right for all that as well. These things wouldn’t have stayed on my mind, the opportunities continuing to show up if they weren’t meant to be.  That is something I have paid attention to. In my previous life I would have ignored it and possibly let fear win, believing that it wasn’t for me, that it would come around again.  But this time, I’m grabbing that golden ring and I’m going for it.  Consistency has taught me that as well: you have to go for it when you see it.  Changing mindset is never easy but it is always worth it—it’s a game changer.  So be consistent, be patient, stay focused and let the universe work its magic.