“Choosing” a side often feels safer than choosing to trust yourself.

Maybe it feels easier to pick a side so you and others can know where you “fit in.” Instead of choosing one person over another, perceiving one as right and one as wrong, or believing that one group has to lose or take the blame for there to be a winner or a good guy, could you practice being vulnerable enough to stand for something bigger than division?

Maybe by not choosing a side, you get to choose yourself.

People will tell you not to focus on yourself. However, if you don’t focus on yourself, you can’t be responsible for your Self, which is the one thing you were put here to do- be responsible for You.

Being responsible for your Self does not mean you act selfishly- that is not what your Self is designed to do. You are designed to help, give, serve, teach, and love. You can only do these things when you are present in your body and can notice the energy you are allowing in from others and putting out to others. Your job as You is to be entirely focused on who you are being, allowing everyone else to be responsible for themselves because they are the only ones who can be.

What would be possible if you focused on you?

Embrace your old habit to create the new one.

When you feel pulled toward the old pattern, that’s your chance to leap into the new way of being. Each moment of tention is an opportunity to choose again, further integrating your learning until it becomes your new easeiest, default setting, eventually replacing the old.

Love the friction—it’s an opportunity to grow and not just survive to make it to the next moment. This tension increases the odds of lasting change, which is where our fulfillment lives.

Where is it time to celebrate the old to make way for the new?

The most simple and profound tool you have is your breath.

Your breath connects you to the wisdom of your body, which knows how to love because it is designed to love. Imagine yourself calm, mindful, present, emotionally regulated, physically connected, emotionally aware, and inclined towards gratitude. This is the state that your breath can connect you to, opening your connection to your true intelligence.

Instead of trying to think your way through it or fight your way through it, whatever it is, what if you focused on breathing your way through it and trusting love to lead the way?

If you want to transform something in your life, you must face it head-on. If you want to transform yourself, you must face something new and face it head-on.

Transformation doesn’t happen when we work on the exterior or periphery. It happens when we are willing to feel the intensity of going straight in.

Hope can be the first step of a transformation, yet it won’t do the job. Faith is what comes next, and faith is not a wish. Faith is action followed by action followed by action until the transformation is complete. Finally, it is only faith if it comes from a place of love.

What are you willing to lovingly confront today in the name of transformation?

The only path you can be on is yours. The people you meet, the experiences you have, the truths that resonate with you, and the things you feel drawn toward work together and compound to create a beautiful, expansive, wonderful pathway that takes an entire lifetime to discover your way down. And it is only this path, uniquely curated for you, that holds the keys to your contribution and your blessings. 

Any amount of time you spend wishing you were on someone else’s path is time you could spend learning, trusting, receiving, giving, understanding, and enjoying. To live the most beautiful life possible, you must give up your right to wonder if someone else’s path is better. There is no better path for you than yours.

What if you fully surrendered to your life’s particular, distinct, perfectly imperfect path?

You are always envisioning something, and that something is either helping you or hindering you. And the good news is, if it is helping you, it is helping the rest of us. Conversely, if it hinders you, it is hindering all of us.

As creative beings—which we all are because we are constantly creating—our job is to learn to pause frequently enough and stay present in our bodies enough to notice when we envision something counterproductive. Our bodies will always tell us when they want to change course to something more supportive. 

You have the power to weave together as many moments of purposeful picturing as possible, opening up the pathway for your purpose. However, part of dreaming is being unattached. Dreams are meant to lead you and not limit you. We all have different powerful futures to imagine, and our job is to meet on our way and co-create something that none of us could see on our own. 

What if you chose what you envision rather than going with the default?

A way you can guarantee you won’t make your impact is to try and live your life somebody else’s way.

People who have gone before you can provide fabulous insight and powerful best practices, helping you learn more easily. However, this is only half the equation. The other half of your work comes from sensing and discovering your unique way of approaching work, life, love, family, vitality, wealth, and contribution. You are the only you who has ever existed and will ever exist, and no one else will ever be able to live your life with the inner knowing that you have. 

We live in a beautifully created ecosystem where we are all so similar and so different. We thrive when we embrace both. Value the perspectives of others and your own.

What if you trusted what feels true for you? 

Fear will always arise when it’s time to enter a new level of your power (also known as love, joy, impact, etc.). However, you don’t need less fear in your life to make your moves. Instead, you need to allow more courage into your body to move you through the fear.

You have infinite courage available to you if you are willing to feel fear. 

What if the sensations of fear that you feel are actually courage waiting to be harnessed? 

There will always be reasons why you can’t or shouldn’t take your next action to create your vision. Only spend time entertaining these reasons if you don’t want to succeed.

If you want to succeed, the second you notice doubt, your job is to smile and know you are up to something. Doubt won’t waste its time with you if you don’t have something to contribute.

What if you allowed doubt to be there and stopped entertaining it?

When it comes to what to focus on, there is no “right” thing. Your power comes from choosing to focus, not from choosing the one right thing from the infinite choices available to you.

There are high-quality things to focus on and low-quality things to focus on. As you grow and trust yourself, the next “right” thing for you will always reveal itself. The only way to get life wrong is to let your focus be stolen from you and not authentically choose. Evolution is different than distraction. Your body knows the difference. 

The next time you notice your mind saying you are confused or you hear the voice of doubt trying to scatter you, know these types of thoughts will never go away. They are just a signal to own your power and refocus. 

What if you weren’t confused? What if you were discovering? What if you already knew? 

There is no big learning or event or thing to change about yourself that will fix everything because there is nothing to fix. There is just the perfect thing to do at this moment. Each moment is a moment that can not only change your life, but is changing your life. Have the discipline to be present to the miracle of this moment, and your whole life will become a miracle. 

This doesn’t mean we should stop learning, growing, or leaping; it simply means we do so as another essential part of the process that has our life flow, not with the pressure of needing to fix something permanently.

Your life is a series of experiences to build on one another. What if you could trust this one moment as a vital part of that and every moment hereafter? 

Often, our courage arises to help us hold space for unimportant things to fall apart a bit so that we can give our attention to what is most valuable to us. 

Our minds will always plead with us to focus on the trivial and tell us we don’t have time for what is true for us. Our minds often regard time as something we need to get more of or a force working against us. However, time isn’t something we have or don’t have. Time is something we create by taking our attention off of things that don’t matter and redirecting it to what does. 

Courage is also not something you need to get. It is something you have within you that you need to call on to support you when you want it. It often shows up as a fluttery stomach or an elevated heart rate. This is how courage does its job.

Creating time for what is essential may take courage, yet you have plenty of it. You just need to access it. 

Awkward is different than harmful. We should work to stop and eliminate behaviors and circumstances that harm ourselves and others.

When things are awkward, however, our work is to love ourselves and others enough to let it be awkward and to know we are growing through it, and that awkwardness is an essential season to any growth, just like spring is for our garden. If we eliminate the awkwardness as soon as it comes up, we end up cutting things off before they have the possibility to grow and thrive. 

Where do you need to let someone be awkward as an act of love instead of fixing it? 

In my many years of coaching people in their visions and goals, I have been asked countless times when someone can know that they are “ready.”

You know you are truly ready for something when you realize you don’t have to do it, and therefore, you aren’t doing it because you “should.”  You are ready for something when you are doing it because it is an authentic choice based on what is important to you.

You can, of course, accomplish tasks and check boxes from a place of “have-to” or “should”; you just won’t be ready to receive the fulfillment that is available if you were doing it from a place of choice and self-worth.

What if there was no “should”, and only “could”?

When we say yes to something that uplifts us and others, we must understand that by committing, we are preparing to say no to many other shiny objects that may pull for our attention.  Whether we are committing to a relationship, a project, a role, or a way of being in the world, our commitment serves to help us focus our energy and deepen our positive impact on those we touch. When we do this, we deepen our impact on others and open ourselves up to be impacted by the important people in our lives. This reciprocal impact on one another is one of the most essential parts of being alive, if not the most. 

While you may need to say no to many things to fulfill your commitment to what is most important, if you truly are giving your energy to what is essential, you can guarantee that you will feel the freedom that comes from genuinely expressing yourself, receiving love, and contributing to the world. There is no greater freedom than not needing to give your energy to what is trivial and meaningless.

What is it time to commit to, so you can have your freedom?

My greed, selfishness, over-indulgence, laziness, meanness, resentment, sense of obligation, frustration, exhaustion, self-neglect, fear of looking bad, and self-importance don’t serve you. That is how I know they don’t serve me. 

The way it works is if it doesn’t serve someone else, it doesn’t serve us. If we want to serve ourselves, our job is to serve others.

What if your path to a happier life was the path to helping others have a happier life?

You are loved and valued by what created you, and what you are inextricably connected to- whatever you want to call that “thing”.

Your job is to remind every other person and thing that they are loved and valued by that same thing. When you aren’t hustling for love, you can give it freely. When you give love freely because you know love is what you are made from, made of, and connected to, you receive it and no longer need to waste your precious energy searching for it. 

What if the love you seek exists right here, right now, in the eyes reading this? 

You know what is available to you. You know what you need to let go of to receive it. Your holding on has been holding you in place. 

You know what is available to you. You know what you need to embrace to create it. Your unwillingness has been keeping you stuck.

The fear of letting go of what has felt safe and embracing something new may feel real in your body, yet maybe the sensations of fear are actually sensations of courage. You don’t need to do everything you feel scared of, yet when you know in your heart it is time for something to come to pass, you can trust that freedom is right on the other side of making your new choices. 

Are you willing to have the courage to trust what you know?