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Hannes CasparWe are not meant to be perfect;
we are meant to be whole.~Jane Fonda
It’s the crisis of the modern era: stressed-out, disconnected, working so hard and not knowing what, exactly, we’re working for. Entire lives are planned around promotions and pay raises, or around simply surviving the day-to-day, and then we look around and ask ourselves: Is all this work actually getting me where I want to go?
I’ve found myself in this position–the position of the person who has figured out how to work hard and achieve things, but has realized with a sudden and startling clarity that she doesn’t actually know that they are things she wanted.
What do you do when you’ve pursued the things you’ve been conditioned to want, and find that once you’ve got them–they weren’t what you really wanted?
Perhaps what you’ve sought was some outward measure of perfection, and now the journey is towards wholeness.
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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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Hannes CasparThe authentic self is the soul made visible.~Sarah Ban Breathnach
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about visibility after a two-day retreat dedicated to bringing my business to the next level.
For women, visibility can be a very mixed bag. And until this past week I hadn’t quite connected the dots around how our beliefs and fears about personal visibility so deeply impact our ability to put ourselves (and our heart-centered businesses) out there.
I grew up in the West Village of New York City in the 80’s. As a pre-teen walking the streets of NYC I attracted a lot of unwanted attention from men.
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Valerio BoncompagniExpose yourself to your deepest fear;
after that, fear has no power,
and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes.
You are free.~Jim Morrison
I was pacing back and forth after the plans were almost finalized.
I was going, finally, to meet this guy who I’ve been chatting with from an online dating site–my first foray into the world of online dating!
As soon as I hung up the phone with him, I was trying to talk myself out of going. I was trying to think of the possible reasons why I had to cancel.
The lame excuses included: I had to take my cat to the vet. There was a work deadline I had to meet. I came down with the flu.
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Jonathan JacobsenStriving for excellence motivates you;
striving for perfection is demoralizing.~Harriet Braiker
My neighbor came to my door while I was baking my first loaf of gluten-free bread. She said she admired our diets and told me how she was doing more to eat less sugar.
“I’d heard from a lot of people that it makes a lot of sense for them,” I said, “but I just didn’t think I could cut another thing out. I mean, after getting rid of dairy, wheat, caffeine and sugar, what would be left?”
She laughed a little and said, “Well it’s all about just cutting yourself some slack. You don’t have to be perfect or anything.”
Here’s my confession: I have this compulsion to be perfect. Everything I do has to be just so, or I don’t want to do it at all. And I don’t think I’m alone in this.
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ShannonThere is not one big cosmic meaning for all,
there is only the meaning we give to our life.~Anais Nin
What is MY purpose?
This is the recurring question I would ask myself over and over: searching, seeking, arm-wrestling with each day, in a quest to find where my place was in this grand universe.
I would look around and feel a bit left behind; others seemed to be intensely purposeful, wholeheartedly embracing a career, a path . . . why couldn’t I? What is my path?
I have read dozens of books over the years, complete with countless worksheets and self-development exercises to expand my sense of belonging in the world.
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Hannes CasparThe walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keep out the joy.~Jim Rohn
Not too long ago, I found myself sitting around with a group of friends playing the One-Word game—a game where each person uses one word to honestly describe another person in the group. Everyone goes around until they have been “worded” by everyone else.
It’s fun and exciting until you get labeled as something you don’t necessarily identify as positive. The word that kept coming up for me: Guarded.
I got it. It made sense. I have a difficult time opening myself up to people.
I’ve seen it happen so many times: In casual conversation, without really thinking about it, I start a sentence off with, “Our couples counselor…” and I’m startled when I see the eyebrows raise.
Amid what has become my utterly ordinary reality–we see a couples counselor–I forget myself. I forget that for most people, working with a couples counselor is the sort of thing you’d only reveal to intimate friends and family (and perhaps not even then).
But this is my truth: my partner of seven-plus years and I work with a couples counselor, and have done so since about the two-year mark of our relationship.
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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.
Today I received an email from a man named Nick (not his real name) who wants help finding a job. He has two different resumes, one for his “business life” and one for his “adventure life”.
As I browsed through his resumes, his many accomplishments stood out. So I began to wonder why Nick needed my help to find a job? He certainly has his pick of fields from which to choose.
Then it dawned on me. If Nick was a carpenter and only a carpenter, he would search for carpenter jobs. Easy. But, since he is an adventurer as well as a business man with many accomplishments in various fields, the issue really was finding the direction, not finding the job.
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