Trust the balance
Your inhale and your exhale work together to create your complete breath cycle.
You likely don’t waste time wishing you were inhaling when you are exhaling or vice versa. What if you could learn to trust the different spaces you move through over the course of your day or life and fully allow them to happen, knowing they are part of the whole?
If you're yearning for more balance and flow, could you shift your perspective? Instead of wishing and resisting where you are, could you start valuing it?
Are you thinking big enough?
The thing that could be keeping you from thinking big enough is thinking.
What if you valued sensing, feeling, desiring, and allowing your way into seeing what might be possible rather than rationalizing yourself there? Could it be that your mind is simply iterating on what it has seen in your past and the path laid out by others? Could it be that you are focusing on the “how?” way too soon rather than the “why?” or the “what?”
Our thinking and rationalizing minds are powerful and help us execute many incredible things, yet we are meant to begin elsewhere—with the heart.
To dream and open up your doorway to contribute big, stop thinking, and start feeling, wondering, and allowing.
Where could you let your heart lead you to what is possible instead of your mind?
Resistance blocks our blessings
When we resist the self-transformation that life is asking us to undergo, we are resisting the blessings waiting for us on the other side.
Resistance repels the good things waiting for us. Acceptance and surrender open the space for us to receive.
What transformation are you resisting, where you could be receiving?
Tolerating the wrong thing
One of your most powerful resources in supporting yourself in expanding is a healthy dose of “So, what?”
We often tolerate our mind’s excuses and whining as acceptable reasons to abandon our dreams, longings, and commitments. When we can notice these normal yet harmful reactions to new and inconvenient things and be playful about how insignificant they are, we can choose to create our lives no matter what.
What if next time your mind said something like, “I would, but it’s hard, and I don’t know how,” you responded, “So, what?”
Expanding is growth, not fixing
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?
WWWD?
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?”
A happy life, not a comfortable one
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?
What if it curiosity could open the door?
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?
Invest in a good bug zapper
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?
How to surprise yourself
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?
It’s not easier just because it’s faster
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
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?
Your opinions don’t qualify you
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?
Confidence comes from doing the work
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?
Understand others to help yourself
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 choice
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?
Your connection to your wisdom
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
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?
The shift from management to commitment
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?
Focus comes first
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.