To grow doesn’t mean to change or fix. It means to increase or expand naturally and organically.

The gifts and miracles you are meant to express, experience, and enjoy are already within you. To increase and expand, they need the right conditions: love and gratitude.

What if gratitude for your unique gifts, not wishing you were different, could be the thing to help you thrive?

It is easy to listen to the advice of fear or one of its children, like doubt, avoidance, resignation, or confusion, and take action from that place. The voice of fear is loud and manipulative and offers the temptation of instant gratification.

However, the advice of Wisdom is always available if we are willing to listen. This voice represents courage, strength, kindness, and purpose. It doesn’t baby us, yet it is gentle. It offers us long-term happiness and abundance if we are willing to do the work.

How might your choices and actions open up today if you asked yourself, “What would wisdom do?”

The point is to have a happy life, not escape all discomfort.

If you make your life about running away from discomfort, you can guarantee an unhappy life. If you make your life about moving towards what makes you happy daily, you can guarantee more happiness- and discomfort.

Choices, tension, focus, intensity, and letting go are all part of taking responsibility for your enjoyment of life. There isn’t a place to get to that will make life's challenges go away, and you have the power to create more contentment every day.

What if you stopped running away from what you’ve been running from and moved towards the source of your happiness each day?

If you want more of something, discover and study what creates it.

If you want more happiness, discover and study what creates it for you.

If you want more peace, discover and study what creates it for you.

If you want more abundance, discover and study what creates it for you.

If you want more of anything, don’t wait around for it. Go discover where it comes from. What if it’s a never-ending, expanding, and compounding world, bigger than you ever imagined?

Bright light attracts flies.

As you shine brighter and more flies come your way, don’t put yourself out. Just get a great, easy way to eliminate the flies as they inevitably come.

Where have you not been able to provide illumination because you have been afraid of attracting flies?

The best part about an emotionally intimate relationship is that you can go deep quickly. The stuff underneath the obvious is the good stuff.

When you find yourself at the end of the obvious with yourself and bump up against “I don’t know,” know that you are just getting started. Keep letting yourself go deeper and see what else is there. It may feel like uncharted territory because it is, and that is where the beauty lives.

How about you allow yourself to go deeper than usual with yourself today?

The thing that takes the least time may make things the hardest in the long run.

Having that one-on-one, uncomfortable conversation or re-writing the draft for the tenth time might feel harder than rushing through, yet it will make life so much easier in the future. Handle it with intention now so it doesn’t show back up needing even more attention and clean-up later.

What is that one slower, more time-intensive thing you could do today that would make life much easier?

When you sense a change wants to happen, remember that it will happen whether you want it to or not. It’s in your best interest to facilitate and nurture the transition process with love rather than resist it.

When you work with change, you get to co-create it instead of being created by it. If you want to grow and evolve, the only way is to allow the things around you to grow and develop because they are anyway.

What change are you sensing and resisting rather than celebrating and choosing?

Just because you have an opinion about something doesn’t mean it’s true and certainly doesn’t make you anywhere near an expert.

Our opinions tend to energetically open us up to judgment, resentment, confusion, illusion, and a false sense of safety. Our work is to remember that while we always have a perspective that can sometimes be helpful, we can only fully understand something when we are the one person experiencing it.

What if you stopped wasting your energy trying to convince someone that your opinion is correct and instead invested it in curiosity, wonder, and collaboration?

What is it that you want to feel confident in? Practice that thing until you feel confident. You won’t feel authentically confident without the reps.

What is helpful on your journey to confidence is confidence that you will become confident. This means that even if you feel awkward, scared, silly, or messy as you learn, you can bring a sense of ease to all that, knowing the confidence will come because you are putting in the work.

Where do you need to put in more effort to gain more confidence? Where do you need to have more confidence that you will become confident?

I see a lot of conversation on the internet (myself included) about how important it is to release the need for others to agree with, approve of, like, or accept how we express ourselves. This is one of the most essential practices for your contribution.

However, to make it whole, we also need to practice what we hope to receive. That is, we each need to practice releasing judgment on the ways that others express themselves. If we only do half the work, it doesn’t work.

Self-expression, acceptance, and curiosity are only powerful when we all get to receive them. How might you help yourself and everyone by being less judgmental, more open-minded, and more understanding of others?

The price tag of freedom is taking responsibility. It often feels easier to give that responsibility away so we don’t have to deal with the uncertainty of the unknown.

If you genuinely want to be able to choose how you show up and what you show up for, are you willing to take responsibility when there is no clear-cut path?

Faith is important because it connects us to our wisdom, showing us our path.

When we lose faith and substitute fear or one of its many cousins as fuel, we cut off our connection to our innate brilliance, creativity, and guidance. It can be tempting to succumb to fear because it gives us a false sense of control, yet only knowing what we deeply believe to be true gives us our true power and authority.

Faith is not confined to religion. It's a universal concept. Faith is our readiness to take responsibility for what we lean into, rely on, and ms this understanding that shapes our actions, and our actions, in turn, shape the future we co-create.

What is the one truth that reconnects you to your wisdom that you can let guide you?

Inconvenience is the essence of transformation.

If you are resisting something you know deeply is good for you because it feels new, uncomfortable, awkward, or difficult, you have the choice to either succumb to the seductive and rational excuse of inconvenience or, you have the opportunity to surrender to the process of transformation and dive right into the discomfort of it.

What might become possible if you chose transformation over convenience each time you reached a fork in the road?

We often resist commitment because we don’t want to feel all the things that achieving our goal will require. We think there will be too much to manage. Yet, what if we didn’t have to manage anything? What if our commitment could be big enough to shake up everything around us, allowing what is holding us back to fall away?

Management aims to keep everything in a predictable status quo. Commitment seeks to change things for the better and for good.

What if you stopped trying to manage anything, including the opinions of others, and instead allowed your commitment to lead you?

Your actions follow your focus.

Your focus will drift. Your power comes from reclaiming your focus so you have a say over your actions.

Your focus is your power.

It’s always a paradox.

For example:

You don’t need to know right now because you will see when you need to know. And, if it is time for you to know right now, then do the uncomfortable work of getting clear and knowing.

There is always a truth that meets you where you are, and you are always somewhere different.

Growth is not linear, clean, comfortable, or standardize-able. It is dynamic, messy, uncomfortable, and completely unique and individual.

If you want to give yourself, other people, your organization, or your community space to grow, the number one skillset you need to cultivate is the ability to hold space for the unpreferrable and uncontrollable. If you can learn to allow yourself and others to be uncomfortable, frustrated, confused, or any other sort of emotional as things change, you will be able to see almost anything through.

People, ourselves included, don’t always see the benefits of growth that are waiting for us. Part of our job in holding space can also be to remind people of the big picture by continuing to envision it.

Progress is unpredictable. What if you gave up control and instead practiced trusting the process?

When you are at the edge of what feels easy and comfortable, you are really getting started. Everything else was just the warm-up.

The warm-up may take the majority of the time, and the time spent in the breakthrough zone may be a fraction of the warm-up duration, yet your next level of growth is likely past what your mind considers your edge.

What if your mind’s resistance point is the beginning of your purpose?

There is something that comes naturally to you that doesn’t come as naturally to others and also contributes to others. This thing is part of your genius.

Imagine if you spent just a bit more time being intentional about bringing your genius to life. What structures might you put in place? What might you practice? What else might you take into consideration or share?

The world is in need of more of your unique magic, and with just a little more effort, you can play a significant role in making that a reality.

What would it take to gift yourself some more time to support your inherent brilliance?