You’ve probably heard it say that you can only love someone else as much as you love yourself. But it is also an act of self-love to love others when you feel pulled to do otherwise.

When you choose to harbor anger, resentment, judgment, or anything else of a similar flavor towards anyone else, you are the one stuck with that feeling, not the other person. Love yourself enough to share love out. You receive what you send.

And everything else was just extra?

If you are burdened with all of your expectations for yourself, it might be helpful to remember that your job is to love yourself and others. Everything else is just extra and not required. Even if someone else expects of you, it is not the same as a requirement.

You will probably find that when you release the shoulds, you show up more powerfully because it is from a place of ease and not a place of should.

You (and your love) are enough.

Are you committed or not? Answering this question honestly brings the ultimate freedom.

Your life organizes yourself around your true commitment. If you aren’t sure what your commitment has been up until this point, either conscious or unconscious, look and see what your life has been built around.

If you sense you are ready to commit yourself to something new and more meaningful, ask yourself if you are willing to resolve to prioritize that thing and allow yourself to experience the discomfort of the familiar falling away. If the answer is no, be honest enough to know you don’t have a commitment; you have a preference.

You don’t need to commit to anything you don’t want to or aren’t ready to, and you do have the power to.

Your job is to love unconditionally.

Your job isn’t to like unconditionally.

Don’t beat yourself up because you don’t like something or someone. Get back to focusing on how you can contribute through love.

The key to personal responsibility and, therefore, personal freedom is to notice when your lower personality wants to do one of two things:

1. Internalize something someone else needs to be responsible for and make it about you. Otherwise known as taking things personally.

2. Externalize something that is yours to deal with and try to place blame or project on someone or something else. Otherwise known as offloading.

Your freedom comes from discovering how to love yourself enough to allow others to be themselves and do your work. And yes, loving others unconditionally is part of your work. And yes, you can love someone without engaging with them.

Is not about what is most convenient.

It’s about what will leave you feeling proud about who you were, which often means doing what is best for others.

Over the course of your lifetime. And, there is only one thing to do right now.

You can’t do everything at once because you aren’t supposed to. Get present and sense what the one thing to do right now is. Then get present again and become clear about the next thing.

There will always be more work in the future as evolution is our job. Yet, forward movement doesn’t come from solving every problem today. Progress takes presence.

We kill off possibility by expecting to see the entirety of the whole “how” right now. Divine inspiration would never ask you to do anything that you already knew how to do and were already doing, so this type of clarity is impossible.

Clarity comes from listening closely enough to feel your purpose. The journey of expressing that purpose is a step-by-step revelation and co-creation. Keep holding your vision, and give it space to evolve. Instead of stressing because you don’t know every detail of how to get there, stay present, and you will see the part of the “how” that there is to do right now.

Do the new thing.

The voice of doubt wants you to stay the same. Trust the encouraging voice of love enough to move towards the new, good change.

Courage is deciding now to forgive others and ourselves for all the things that will happen that we didn’t plan for. We often “choose” not to move forward because we fear the missteps, judgments, and failures along the way. Choosing forgiveness ahead of time helps us clear the path to make our move.

Mistakes and things we don’t prefer will happen; that’s a given whether we take a risk or not. If we choose now to have the courage to love ourselves and others no matter what, we are free to create our lives and live regret-free.

Is to own your creative power.

Meaning you are not bound by your past or by circumstances. You have the freedom to make a new choice right now.

If you play it safe and claim to be uncreative, suffering will be your norm. If you decide to open your heart and embrace how you show up right now is generating the world you are a part of, fulfillment can be your foundation.

The reason to do the loving thing for someone else is because it helps you.

When you give love, you receive it. It’s not about what you get first or in return. It’s about what you offer.

Give love to live regret-free.

Fun is one of Source’s most powerful manifestations. It cuts through the heavy and restores us to our humanness.

If you are feeling burdened, how might giving yourself permission for some fun at some point soon help you connect to some hope? How might bringing some to someone else help them see a new possibility?

When you commit to truly loving someone, you must commit to a powerful relationship with discomfort.

The people you love will move through big things and they will express or suppress those big things in ways you can’t control, many of which will make you uncomfortable. These uncomfortable moments where you want to run, fight, or check out are the moments your love is most needed. Love holds space for big things, it doesn’t avoid them.

Love is different than like. Love takes strength.

Don’t wait around until you change to make a new choice. Instead, embrace the discomfort of making an unfamiliar choice as the pathway to change.

If you wait until you are different you will be waiting forever. The choice comes first. The change follows.

Doing the hard things is easier than not doing them.

With consistency, hard things eventually become easy. Without consistent action, they stay hard forever. The undone challenges pile up to make life heavy.

Through practice, get great at doing hard things so life can be easy.

When you believe that your worth or value is tied up in something there is no space to love yourself, let alone love the other person, place, or thing.

This goes for your romantic relationship, your outcomes at work, your personality traits, your children’s happiness, your body, and any other impermenant thing you identify with. You are not any of these things. You are something indescribable.

Space is required for love. Everyone and everything has its own distinct life and beingness. Allow yourself to be separate from those things so you can have enough space to experience your own love. From there, you can choose to extend that love out freely.

There will often be a gap between what you want and what you have.

We know that nature abhors a vacuum, so you must decide what you want to fill that gap with, or it will get filled with something you didn’t choose.

You can either use the gap to inspire you into action right now, or you can use the gap to beat yourself up and play the victim. Our authentic desires are meant to call us into joyful action, not to weigh us down with shoulds.

What action could you take right now that would move you closer to what you want? What if the action was the whole point, not the result?

Your purpose may not be clear to you yet, and it will become clearer and clearer if you want it to and allow it to.

Over time, you will notice there is something you feel more and more called to focus your energy on. This is your purpose, or at least a big part of it. It could be love, creativity, service, discovery, or anything else life-giving.

Your purpose will continue to unfold because life will continue to reveal to you what you value and don’t value, what you believe and what you don’t believe, how you want to feel and how you don’t, what you see is helpful and what isn’t, and what is important to you and what isn’t. Enjoy the discovery of your ever-evolving contribution.

What are you called to focus your energy on now?

You have a genius within you that lives to contribute and elevate. When you take time to create something, whether a piece of writing, a painting, a presentation, a talk, a gathering, new code, or a meaningful conversation, you are giving your genius a way to be realized in the world.

You don’t even have to know what your genius “is” to release it. Just sense what you are drawn to create and let it flow.

What does your genius want to contribute today?