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Winona GreyExcellence can be obtained if you care more than others think is wise, risk more than others think is safe, dream more than others think is practical, expect more than others think is possible.~Unknown
In my quest to actively create a personal and professional life that offers me all the things and experiences I desire, I’ve begun to notice the discrepancy between what I believe I deserve and what I actually ask for.
My conscious mind is in tune with my greatest attributes and I feel as if I’ve always had some degree of appreciation for what I am capable of contributing to a relationship or a job. I believe that I am monetarily worth a significant amount.
Yet, when it comes to asking for what I believe I deserve, I state my bare minimum and offer it up for negotiation. Then, I brood over being completely unappreciated.
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Winona GreyThere are always two choices. Two paths to take.
One is easy. And its reward is that it’s easy.~Unknown
When I was younger, struggling to form bonds with my peers and muscle my way through the turmoil that is adolescence, I always pictured my life ten, twenty, thirty years down the road like an enjoyable trip down a lazy river — one that flowed effortlessly, guided by the wisdom I had gathered throughout the years.
I looked forward to the day when I could reach a plateau and things would come easily, because I had strength, knowledge and an abundance of resources at my disposal. I would be married with kids, surrounded by love that would never evade me.
To me, with age came certainty, stability, ease and grace. I thought that all of the awkwardness that comes with growth and change would be a thing of my past.
So, as I entered my twenties, I spent a great deal of time searching for “perfection” in my personal and professional life, believing that the only way to curb the constant upheaval from growth and change would be to find the relationship and career that would make everything else fall into place.
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Eduardo IzquierdoWhen we can no longer change a situation,
we are challenged to change ourselves.~Viktor Frankl
When you try to hinder the growth process, life has a way of making things very uncomfortable for you.
I learned this because I was extremely uncomfortable in my skin, in my mind, in my physical world for a while before the temporary realities of my life came crashing down around me – in a huge way.
Before I was forced to make a series of big changes, I had resigned myself to this idea that I would just have to muscle through the hardships, that I would need to exert all of my energy into holding on or things wouldn’t turn out the way they were supposed to.
I was exhausted, but I believed that this was just a period of my life where I would need to swim upstream.
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ShannonPeace cannot be kept by force.
It can only be achieved by understanding.~Albert Einstein
Conflict has always been something that my physical body reacts to viscerally, gnawing at my stomach, growing up into my heart and eventually taking up residence in my brain, sitting heavy until the issue can be resolved and room can be made for other thoughts and lighter feelings.
I am a dweller, someone who will spend hours hashing out an issue, taking everything out from underneath the rug in order to inspect it, discuss it and let it dissipate — unless I feel that I am unshakably right and the other party is wrong.
When it comes to conflict, I am hopelessly preoccupied. It can be exhausting — especially when paired with the “right fighter” instinct.
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Things turn out the best for people
who make the best of the way things turn out.~John Wooden
Right around the time I reached middle school, when the presence and opinion of my friends trumped that of anyone else in my life at the time, birthdays started to represent something more than just a day I might get all the things my parents refused to buy me the rest of the year.
Birthdays suddenly became the one day that I expected to have an outpouring of love and adoration, the one day that my presence in the world could actually be validated.
Yes, friends and family could shower me with love on any of the other 364 days of the year, but if they didn’t do it on that one day, that simply meant they didn’t care.
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Eduardo IzquierdoProsperity depends more on
wanting what you have than having what you want.~Geoffrey F. Abert
Any sense of physical security I have felt from the time that I was 18 onward, has, for the most part, been a direct reflection of how much I have in my bank account. It’s always an arbitrary number that I shoot for, an amount that I believe will completely cover anything unexpected with plenty of room left over.
However, for a money hoarder like me, this sense of security is always superficial and never long lasting. It’s leaning heavily on something physical to mask a festering internal issue.
Much like one might inherit a certain eye or hair color, I believe that my money issues are ingrained in my family line, spanning through generations of outwardly negative spending habits to equally damaging behaviors like my own.
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JUCOA man can not be comfortable without his own approval.~Mark Twain
Piling into her lavender Honda with her white terrier scrambling over us in the back seat, my grandmother would turn down the stories on tape my sister and I listened to religiously and tell us that it was time to boast.
What followed was usually always the same; we would squirm uncomfortably in our seats, hoping that we could somehow quickly change the subject.
But my grandma has always been an incredibly persistent woman, so we would reluctantly appease her request.
Flow is the natural, effortless unfolding of our life
in a way that moves us towards wholeness and harmony.~Charlene Belitz & Meg Lundstrom
The majority of the books that sit on my shelves are ones that I have read, or deliberately decided not to read after losing interest after a page or two. So I was a little taken aback when I found one sitting smack dab in the middle of various dog-eared novels that I hadn’t read yet—The Power of Flow.
In all likelihood it was a transplant from my parent’s extensive self-help collection, one that must have snuck into one of my boxes. Yet, I hadn’t noticed it until I was—conveniently—experiencing stagnation in many areas of my life.
I’d say this is what “divine timing” is all about.
I spent the next few hours swimming in the pages, recalling all the times in my life when things seemed to fall in to place and doors opened without any physical effort on my part–the times when I was completely and totally “in the flow.”
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JUCODon’t postpone joy until you have
learned all of your lessons.
Joy is your lesson.~Alan Cohen
Twirling in her pink tutu, slightly tattered and always a little dirty, my 3 year old niece opens her arms wide, calling for all of us to get up and dance with her. She wants to hold hands while we jump, spin and leap around the room.
She shouts along to the music, reminding each of us that we should be joining in. “Papa sing! It’s your turn Papa!” Panting and out of breath, we try our hardest to match her undying energy.
After the music starts to fade, she drops our hands and holds out her arms again. “Ok everyone, it’s time for a group hug!”
We haven’t purposely partaken in a group hug for years now, but we oblige because her smile is contagious and her enthusiasm is impossible to tame.
Three years ago, she struggled her way into this world, red-eyed and out-of-breath. We thought she was in distress, but seeing her now, in full bloom, I believe she was just eager to get started, eager to dive in to what each of us were already taking for granted.
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JUCOAll the art of living lies in a fine mingling of letting go and holding on.~Henry Ellis
Despite my best intentions, I’ve spent the past week looking for a fight.
It started as a small seed of frustration over a few things work-related, and passively I stood back as it bloomed into something far greater and much uglier than I ever should have allowed.
My reaction to the situations I encountered was completely off balance.
I found myself seething with anger when a well-meaning coworker took over a task clearly delegated to me. I started sobbing when a meeting that ran longer than expected left me with a $50 parking ticket.
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Winona Grey
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