If you care more about how kind, courageous, or committed someone is than the way their outfit, car, job, or body looks, talk to them about the former rather than the latter.

What we give attention to grows, and we are all responsible for what we give our attention to.

Letting go of what makes you feel in control can feel scary. The question is, what are you trying to impact? Your happiness or your perceived level of certainty?

If we optimize for certainty, we will stick with what we know. If we optimize for fulfillment, we will learn to let go of what is heavy and draining and move towards what we truly love doing and contributes to others. We are designed to optimize for contentment, not certainty. We can know this because contentment feels better.

If you notice the fear of uncertainty has been holding you back, can you practice prioritizing something that you know fulfills you even a little bit more?

It is ok to give the squeaky wheel oil because it needs the oil. There are two things to be mindful of as you take care of your squeaky wheel:

1. Are you giving the wheel so much oil that the cost of the oil is higher than the cost of replacing the wheel?

2. Is there something else even better than oil that you can give to the other wheels that are rolling along and doing their job well?

3. How many wheels do you actually need?

Are you in a season where something that used to feel easy now feels hard?

It’s ok. We are supposed to feel challenged so we can learn to be more compassionate with ourselves and others in the long term. The way out of the hard season is not to make it harder by beating yourself up or thinking it shouldn’t be happening. The way out is to work with it and learn from it from a place of ease so you can receive all there is for you to gain from it. And you may find that when you stop resisting, it moves on more quickly.

Your least favorite season never lasts forever. While you patiently wait for the next season to arrive, is there anything you can appreciate about what you are in so you can invest it in your future?

People likely won’t perceive you the way you hope to get them to because we cannot control how we are perceived. Trying to look good is an un-winnable game, so it is best to use our energy for something we can succeed in.

If we want to feel fulfilled, we can shift from controlling to listening. Not only does listening to folks help us learn and contribute, but listening to ourselves and the wisdom available to us in the present moment helps our bodies know what to say and offer in a way our strategizing minds cannot.

Where might it serve you to stop trying so hard and to start allowing yourself to be present instead?

Knowing what is important and true is easier than expressing what is important and true.

Suppose you want to learn to speak and act from the truth with greater skill; first, practice knowing the truth. Knowing what is real for you requires reflection and introspection. As you discover what you sense to be true, your job is to learn to express it with your words and actions. As you practice expressing what you know, it will be imperfect, and you will be misunderstood and even do a poor job sometimes. This is the nature of practice and growth. Just because you are still learning to express it doesn’t mean you don’t know it. As you practice, you will get better and better.

How could you spend more time with what resonates so you can express it more easily?

Fixing is different than transforming.

When I find myself in a challenging situation that I don’t like, I often blame myself and try to figure out what I need to fix about myself to avoid discomfort in the future or what I could have fixed about myself retroactively to avoid the hardship. This reaction makes me feel guilty, stuck, fearful of the future, and other unpleasant things. These feelings block me from evolving into who I need to be to grow through the circumstances and thrive.

When I notice this happening, it is an opportunity to remember that there is nothing to fix about myself. In fact, I can even find a hint of joy and excitement amid the frustration, knowing I am in a transformational process and that there is no way I can’t expand through what I am learning if I do choose to learn. If I allow myself to transform rather than beat myself up for not being perfect as a way to “protect” myself, I can trust that life will always become more rewarding.

We are designed to evolve for the better, and we can only do that by loving ourselves enough to see the opportunities available to us in life as they are, not as they should be.

Where do you need to stop fixing so you can transform?

There is not one action you can take that can fix everything forever.

However, there is always one action you can take right now that can change everything.

The little actions that don’t fix everything at once but move you forward one step at a time are the choices that lead to significant changes. Please don’t give up before you start because it feels overwhelming. Give up looking for a fix-it, and you’ll see the next step on the path.

Just like you spend time reading a book or watching a video to learn new information, you are meant to spend that same type of focused quality time listening to your Self.

Whether it is meditating, writing, creating art, or talking out loud with a powerful listener, you will be the most powerful version of yourself when you take the time to discover what you know.

You have an indescribable abundance of information about you, your life, and your contribution within you that no one else has. It will only become available to you when you take the space to discover what you know.

The need to know the “right” way when creating in the unknown blocks you from seeing and doing what you actually know to do. And we are always creating in the unknown.

Your mind thinks there is a right way, and your body knows what is blocking you now. Trust where your senses are taking you and create your path by unblocking yourself, step by step.

What if you stopped believing you don’t know and started trusting what you do know?

The problem with committing to excellence is that people expect excellence from you. This is a problem worth having.

We often create mediocre things because we don’t want the responsibility of standing out, yet holding back and settling in this way will always leave us feeling unfulfilled.

When expectations are high, you may miss them sometimes, and that’s ok. You can use the tension of the gap to help you grow. When others don’t meet your expectations, you can love them instead of judging them to help them grow.

Where can you love yourself and others enough to embrace the problem of excellence?

Your contribution and your happiness are most important, not your agenda.

Your agenda comes from your attachments to the things you want to prove or avoid, and your highest contribution comes from letting go of these things.

How can you work with your circumstances in this season to contribute at your highest level now, rather than pushing forward an agenda from the past that has nothing to with what’s needed now?

There’s the learning you seek out and there’s the learning that seeks you out. Both are essential.

The learning is seek out might be more obvious. You may register for a course, take a class, or read a book. Learning that you seeks you out may sneak up on you, and your body will tell you when it has arrived.

Our bodies often communicate that we are receiving unexpected learning opportunities with sensations of anxiety, fear, excitement, revelation, relief, ot anything else that grabs our attention becuase it is out of the ordinary. While some of these body sensations don’t always feel pleasant, we can always use them as an opportunity for learning. Our bodies are always telling us when to take action or when to take note.

Where is it time for you to embrace a learning that has sought you out?

You will speed up when you stop rushing.

Your growth, contribution, and success are not linear; they compound over time when you move with intention and take responsibility for completing each moment, season, and task with wholeness. Wholeness is what supports you in taking the leap from incremental change to inexplicable transformation.

To get somewhere beyond where you can even imagine, stop rushing and start learning.

Where is it time to slow down so you can expand with wholeness?

You do not need to abandon or hide your own needs to serve your relationships. The more deeply you take care of yourself, the deeper your relationships can become.

The end result of true self-care is the ability to love more deeply and receive love more freely. More love makes every relationship better.

Where do you need to stop overriding what you know and need so you can show up as your most loving self? Where do you need to allow others to care for themselves so they can be more loving?

When you feel your buttons being pushed by the people or things around you, it is an opportunity to expand your ability to create yourself rather than being created.

Other people, places, and things can create us to be irritable, unkind, angry, hateful, rude, scared, or a multitude of different things if we let them. When we learn to notice the body sensations associated with these less-than-ideal states, we can catch ourselves giving over our choice away and instead practice creating ourselves to be who we want to be. Just as we can use our bodies to help us see when we are becoming something other than what we want, we can use our bodies to generate the feelings of who we want to be if we focus and practice.

What have you been created to be that you are not? Who do you choose to create yourself to be instead?

If you have been waiting for permission or someone to hold your hand and make you leap, that person will have to be you.

 You already have all the permission you need available; you just need to be willing to be responsible for all the inevitable downs that will bring the ups. The permission is already there; you must decide whether you will commit to enduring the journey.  

Are you ready to commit?

Love is the best feeling there is. Love is better than checking out.

We have all been taught to check out to protect ourselves. What if you found a way to experience love more deeply?

Experiencing more love can feel challenging at first because it often lives on the other side of our deeply ingrained habits, yet if we are willing to do the work to break through, love is on the other side.

What do you imagine could help you experience more love in the long run rather than missing your life?

We use the word “bad” too broadly. What if we took the time to consider there is a good bad and a bad bad when it comes to our feelings and sensations?

We need a healthy dose of the good bad to grow. This is the experience of knowing something is good for us even when we feel resistant or it feels wildly uncomfortable. We can embrace this feeling by knowing the outcome will be good.

We don’t need to create any more bad bad in our lives. Pain and suffering are different than resistance and discomfort. The bad type of bad experience is the one where we deeply know something is harmful to us, someone else, or the world, yet we feel trapped in doing it anyway, so we do it. Some of us even get stuck in the bad type of bad because we feel like we aren’t strong enough to endure the good and bad, yet here we are putting up with so much pain.

What might happen if you take the energy you put into suffering and instead channel it into the discomfort that comes from the good type of feeling bad?

Most of us try to hide while in the awkward beginning or learning stage or wish we could blow through it, not understanding its purpose and value.

The only way we can get to the fully integrated, masterful expression of something is to celebrate and talk about our journey as we fumble through learning through failure. If we want to move through the beginning stages more quickly, we must become more transparent about our awkwardness, not hide it.

 Where could you accelerate your learning and your contribution by talking about your process rather than hiding it?