Tiny Buddha

Category: meaning & passion

  • 10 Signs You’re Being True to Yourself

    10 Signs You’re Being True to Yourself

    “The most confused we ever get is when we try to convince our heads of something that we know in our hearts is a lie.” ~Karen Moning

    It’s painful and stressful to feel like you’re living a lie. Like you’re hiding how you really feel, saying what you think other people want to hear, and doing things you don’t actually want to do—just because you think you’re supposed to.

    But sometimes we don’t recognize we’re doing this. We just know we feel off, or something feels wrong, and we’re not sure how to change it.

    It makes sense that a lot of us struggle with being true to ourselves.

    From a young age, we’re taught to be good, fall in line, and avoid making any waves—to lower our voices, do as we’re told, and quit our crying (or they’ll give us something to cry about).

    And most of us don’t get the opportunity to foster or follow our curiosity. Instead, we learn all the same things as our peers, at the exact same time, and we live a life consumed by the mastery of these things, our bodies restless from long hours of seated study and our minds overwhelmed with memorized facts that leave very little room for free thinking.

    To make things even worse, we learn to compare our accomplishments and progress—often, at things we don’t even really care about—to those of everyone around us. So we learn it’s more important to appear successful in relation to others than to feel excited or fulfilled within ourselves.

    This was my experience both growing up and in my twenties. A people-pleaser who was always looking to prove that I mattered, I was like a chameleon, and I constantly felt paralyzed about which choices to make because all I knew was that they needed to be impressive.

    I never knew what I really thought or felt because I was too busy suffocating my mind with fears and numbing my emotions to develop even a modicum of self-awareness.

    This meant I had no idea what I needed. I only knew I didn’t feel seen or heard. I felt like no one really knew me. But how could they when I didn’t even know myself?

    I know I’ve made a lot of progress with this over the years, and I have a mile-long list of unconventional choices to back that up, as well as a number of authentic, fulfilling relationships. But I’ve recently recognized some areas where I’ve shape-shifted in an attempt to please others, and in some cases, without even realizing it.

    I don’t want to be the kind of person who panders to popular opinion or lets other people dictate my choices. I don’t want to waste even one minute trying to be good enough for others instead of doing what feels good to me.

    I want to make my own rules, live on my own terms, and be bold, wild, and free.

    This means peeling away the layers of fear and conditioning and being true to what I believe is right. But it’s hard to do this, because sometimes those layers are pretty heavy, or so transparent we don’t even realize they’re there.

    With this in mind, I decided to create this reminder of what it looks and feels like to be true to myself so I can refer back to it if ever I think I’ve lost my way.

    If you also value authenticity and freedom over conformity and approval, perhaps this will be useful to you too.

    You know you’re being true to yourself if….

    1. You’re honest with yourself about what you think, feel, want, and need.

    You understand that you have to be honest with yourself before you can be honest with anyone else. This means you make space in your life to connect with yourself, perhaps through meditation, journaling, or time in nature.

    This also means you face the harsh realities you may be tempted to avoid. You’re self-aware when faced with hard choices—like whether or not to leave a relationship that doesn’t feel right—so you can get to the root of your fear.

    You might not always do this right away, or easily, but you’re willing to ask yourself the tough questions most of us spend our lives avoiding: Why am I doing this? What am I getting from this? And what would serve me better?

    2. You freely share your thoughts and feelings.

    Even if you’re afraid of judgment or tempted to lie just to keep the peace, you push yourself to speak up when you have something that needs to be said.

    And you refuse to stuff your feelings down just to make other people feel comfortable. You’re willing to risk feeling vulnerable and embarrassed because you know that your feelings are valid, and that sharing them is the key to healing what’s hurting or fixing what isn’t working.

    3. You honor your needs and say no to requests that conflict with them.

    You know what you need to feel physically, mentally, and emotionally balanced, and you prioritize those things, even if this means saying no to other people.

    Sure, you might sometimes make sacrifices, but you understand it’s not selfish to honor your needs and make them a priority.

    You also know your needs don’t have to look like anyone else’s. It’s irrelevant to you if someone else can function on four hours of sleep, work around the clock, or pack their schedule with social engagements. You do what’s right for you and take good care of yourself because you recognize you’re the only one who can.

    4. Some people like you, some people don’t, and you’re okay with that.

    Though you may wish, at times, you could please everyone—because it feels a lot safer to receive validation than disapproval—you understand that being disliked by some is a natural byproduct of being genuine.

    This doesn’t mean you justify being rude and disrespectful, because hey, you’re just being yourself! It just means you know you’re not for everyone; you’d rather be disliked for who you are than liked for who you’re not; and you understand the only way to find “your tribe” is to weed out the ones who belong in someone else’s.

    5. You surround yourself with people who respect and support you just as you are.

    You understand that the people around you affect you, so you surround yourself with people who respect and support you, which motivates you to continue being true to yourself.

    You may have people in your life who don’t do these things, but if you do, you understand their issues with you are just that—their issues. And you set boundaries with them so that they don’t get in your head and convince you there’s something wrong with you or your choices.

    6. You focus more on your own values than what society deems acceptable.

    You’ve read the script for a socially acceptable life—climb the corporate ladder, have a lavish wedding, buy a big house, and make some babies—but you’ve seriously questioned whether this is right for you. Maybe it is, but if you go this route, it’s because this plan aligns with your own values, not because it’s what you’re supposed to do.

    You know your values are your compass in life, and that they change over time. So you check in with yourself regularly to be sure you’re living a life that doesn’t just look good on paper but also feels good in your heart.

    7. You listen to your intuition and trust that you know what’s best for yourself.

    You not only hear the voice inside that says, “Nope, not right for you,” you trust it. Because you’ve spent a lot of time learning to distinguish between the voice of truth and fear, you recognize the difference between holding yourself back and waiting for what feels right.

    You might not always make this distinction immediately, and you might sometimes be swayed by well-meaning people who want to protect you from the risks of thinking outside the box. But eventually, you tune out the noise and hone in on the only voice that truly knows what’s best for you.

    8. You do what feels right for you, even if that means risking disapproval from the people around you.

    Not only do you trust that you know what’s best for you, you do it. Even if it’s not a popular choice. Even if people question your judgment, vision, or sanity. You recognize that no one else is living your life, and no one else has to live with the consequences of your choices, so you make them for you and let the chips fall where they may when it comes to public perception.

    This doesn’t necessarily mean you have everything you want in life. It just means you hear the beat of your own drum, even if it’s silent like a dog whistle to everyone else, and you march to it—maybe slowly or awkwardly, but with your freak flag raised nice and high.

    9. You allow yourself to change your mind if you recognize you made a choice that wasn’t right for you.

    You may feel embarrassed to admit you’re changing directions, but you do it anyway because you’d rather risk being judged than accept a reality that just plain feels wrong for you.

    Whether it’s a move that you realize you made for the wrong reasons, a job that isn’t what you expected, or a commitment you know you can’t honor in good conscience, you find the courage to say, “This isn’t right, so I’m going to make another change.”

    10. You allow yourself to evolve and let go of what you’ve outgrown.

    This is probably the hardest one of all because it’s not just about being true to yourself; it’s also about letting go. It’s about recognizing when something has run its course and being brave enough to end the chapter, even if you don’t know yet what’s coming next. Even if the void feels dark and scary.

    But you, you recognize that the void can also feel light and thrilling. That empty space isn’t always a bad thing because it’s the breeding ground for new possibilities—for fulfillment, excitement, passion, and joy. And you’re more interested in seeing who else you can be and what else you can do than languishing forever in a comfortable life that now feels like someone else’s.

    —

    As with all things in life, we each exist on a spectrum. Every last one of us lives in the grey area, so odds are you do some of these things some of the time, and probably never perfectly. And you may go through periods when you do few or none of these things, without even realizing you’ve slipped.

    That’s how it’s been for me. I’ve gone through phases when I’ve felt completely in alignment and other times when I’ve gotten lost. I’ve had times when I’ve felt so overwhelmed by conflicting wants, needs, and beliefs—my own and other people’s—that I’ve shut down and lost touch with myself.

    It happens to all of us. And that’s okay. The important thing is that we keep coming home to ourselves, and we eventually ask ourselves the hard questions that decide the kind of lives we lead: What am I hiding? What am I lying about? And what truth would set me free?

  • Why Many of Us Chase Big Dreams and End Up Feeling Dissatisfied

    Why Many of Us Chase Big Dreams and End Up Feeling Dissatisfied

    “A dream written down with a date becomes a GOAL. A goal broken down into steps becomes a PLAN. A plan backed by ACTION makes your dreams come true.” ~Greg Reid

    We all have dreams, some of them really big. And if we are serious about achieving these dreams, the next logical step is to set a goal, make a plan, and start taking action.

    But we are missing out on one very important step in the dream-creating journey.

    This step is one that has taken me, personally, two decades to come to realize. And my first clue came from my kids’ bedtime story book, of all places!

    Down in the depths of the ocean lived a sad and lonely whale who spent his days searching and searching for the next shiny object, never feeling complete or fulfilled in his quest for more. Then one day, stumbling upon a beautiful reef, a clever little crab stops him and asks:

    “You are the whale that always wants more. But what are you really wanting it for?”

    We seem to spend our whole lives setting goals and planning out our dreams, but we rarely stop to ask ourselves what we want these things for. What do we want the new car, job, promotion or house for?

    If we stopped to think, and if we were really honest with ourselves, we would all have a similar answer. Because our goals and dreams often boil down to the same underlying human need for significance: to feel good enough, valued, validated, accepted, loved, or worthy.

    Most of our goals are essentially attached to our need to feel good enough in the eyes of others and ourselves.

    The Missing Step of Having an Unattached Goal

    Having an unattached goal is the missing step in our dream-living process. It is such an important step for two simple reasons. When we have goals that are conjoined to the need to be good enough, we can only end up with one of two finish-line photos:

    • You on the podium with the winning medal around your neck, but looking around at the next shiny medal to chase, not fulfilled by your achievement.
    • You not crossing the finishing line, with an “I’m a failure” sign around your neck, left with an even bigger hunger for validation and self-worth.

    Cease the Endless Quest for More

    Just like in the children’s book The Whale Who Wanted More, a typical pattern is to chase goal after goal, finding that we are never satisfied for long and continually hatching plans for the next shiny object to chase.

    It makes complete sense when you realize that these goals are forged together with the need for significance, acceptance, or validation. Because if we don’t fill those needs first and instead use our goals to meet them, there is no car, house, promotion, or partner that will. And we will always be looking for that next thing to meet those needs.

    Cease the Self-Sabotage

    Self-sabotage was my MO for many years. Just like an ironsmith beating his flame-red metal into shape, I had beat and bent my purpose so that it would fulfill what I lacked in self-worth and what I secretly craved in acceptance and validation. I would be enough only when I achieved my purpose-related goal.

    And here’s the kicker—I not only needed to live my purpose in order to fulfill my need for significance, I also had to swim against the undercurrent of feeling like I wasn’t capable of actually doing it.

    The fear of failure was so real, because if I failed at this I wouldn’t get the validation and worth that I needed. So any time I felt like failure was in sight, I would give up and hatch a new plan to reach my purposeful goal, and in doing so, sabotage my own path to it. My way of seeing the world had become: better to keep the dream of a possibility alive than have the reality of failure come true.

    The Question That Opened My Eyes to My Attached Goals

    I lived for twenty years under the guise of a pure purpose, a burning flame to help others. And though that was very much part of my drive and work over the years, it was subtly intertwined with the need for recognition and “becoming someone.” And it had slowly and silently transformed into a shackle for self-worth and significance.

    About a month or two after reading that bedtime book to my children, I heard a question that split my tug-of-war rope in half; a question that left my goal on one side and my self-worth safely on the other. It gave me the separation, distance, and freedom I needed to be me and to go after my goals with no emotional agendas, just pure passion and purpose.

    And the magic question was:

    If you don’t get what you want, what would that mean about you?

    When I first heard that question, my answer came so quickly:

    I’d be a failure.

    It seemed like a simple mathematical truth to me: don’t achieve my life-long goal equals failure. What other answer could there possible be?

    As it happens, there is only one right answer to this question. And it wasn’t the one I gave. The right answer sounded simple. There was nothing complicated about it, but it just didn’t sit, settle, or disperse in any way. It just kind of hung there in front of me, just waiting for something to happen.

    And something did happen, about a week later.

    I was running through my typical pattern: the way I would always approach my purpose-related goals and how, after seeing and concluding that nothing would ever come from my efforts, just give up.

    But that day, I suddenly remembered the question, if you don’t get what you want, what would that mean about you?

    And more importantly, I remembered the right answer:

    Nothing.

    Yes, you read that right. The right answer is nothing. Not getting what you want changes nothing about who you are. You are still you.

    You are still worthy. You are worthy, whether or not you achieve your goal. When we tie so much meaning and worth to what we are trying to achieve it becomes a huge block. And we end up chasing that goal or that dream for all the wrong reasons: so that we don’t feel like a failure; so that we feel loved, accepted, and recognized.

    Your goals do not complete you. You are complete whether you achieve them or not.

    When you truly feel that not getting what you want means absolutely nothing about you, you know that you have an unattached goal. And when you have an unattached goal, you are free to go after it without those typical self-sabotaging patterns and to enjoy achieving your goal when you reach it.

    A dream written down with a date becomes a GOAL. A goal broken down into steps becomes a PLAN. A plan backed by ACTION makes your dreams come true.

    But a dream unattached to your self-worth is the real dream come true.

  • How to Live an Extraordinary Life, Starting Right Where You Are

    How to Live an Extraordinary Life, Starting Right Where You Are

    “Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” ~Rumi

    “Isn’t this a miracle?” I asked myself in the milk aisle at Whole Foods.

    It was a Wednesday night after work, and I was buying a few staples to get us through the week. It was a completely ordinary moment in a completely ordinary day, and it was miraculous.

    Rewind a few years, same Whole Foods, same shopping list, and you’d find me absentmindedly wandering the aisles, lost in a head full of worries. I couldn’t tell you now what I was worried about then—the house, the kids, money, probably.

    My body would be tense, with a hint of tears right behind my eyes.

    “Isn’t this supposed to be a miracle?” I might have asked if I had the words to describe that feeling.

    For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be one of those interesting people who did interesting things like paint murals or write books. I wanted to see every continent and learn as many languages as my brain could hold. I wanted to feel excited by my life.

    As a child, I had no doubt that this is what growing up would be like.

    But, for just as long as I can remember, I also lived under the assumption that I had something to prove. My intelligence, my worth, my place in this world.

    Somehow, these two ideas became intertwined.

    That part of me that felt so certain that her life would be extraordinary started to have doubts.

    Could I really pull it off?

    Had I really earned it?

    Was I being completely delusional?

    Over time, that vision of an extraordinary life felt like a silly childhood dream, and I stopped myself from following it. I worked hard and earned a good reputation, but that excitement, that fulfillment was always just out of my reach.

    I would let it go saying, it’ll come later, but as I checked off the boxes of life’s to-do list—degree, job, marriage, kids—I wasn’t feeling anything like I thought I would.

    The feeling that something was off fueled a restlessness that I mistook for motivation. I poured myself into school and then work, but not necessarily out of excitement. I think a part of me still believed that if you weren’t happy, you just weren’t working hard enough at it.

    What confused me about it all was that my life was good. I had a beautiful, growing family, a stable job, and a safe, comfortable house. I mean, I was buying organic milk to pour on my cereal. That’s a privilege.

    So, if nothing was “wrong,” why didn’t it feel right?

    I’d scold myself for not being more grateful, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I didn’t feel the way I wanted.

    Then, one ordinary day, while squeezing in another email during my lunch hour, a little thought snapped me out of it.

    “You’re missing the point, Leslie.”

    Time stopped just long enough for me to notice my racing heart.

    Maybe you’ve had these epiphanies, where you’re amazed by your own wisdom and you feel so incredibly clear and awake. Maybe it was during a life-changing event, or maybe, like me, it was during an everyday moment, like buying toothpaste or feeding the cats.

    The immediate effect wasn’t anything extreme. There was no out of body experience, no inexplicable knowledge of the universe. Just an ordinary little thought that led to another ordinary little thought.

    What if living an extraordinary life isn’t about the details?

    Every now and then, I’d pull out a list I made that day and add a thought or two to it.

    The point is…

    Overflowing.

    Seeing more magic.

    Doing what you love.

    Being happy.

    Being present.

    Feeling bright, brave, and brilliant.

    Waking up and appreciating the mountains.

    My children knowing how much they are loved.

    Gratefully receiving everything I have.

    Letting myself unfold.

    Alignment, not approval.

    Trusting the wisdom of my own heart.

    A hundred percent up to me.

    And in a gradual, ordinary kind of way, I figured it out. That feeling I wanted wasn’t an outcome. It wasn’t something that would happen “when.” It wasn’t in the details at all. It’s your feelings, moment to moment, that make your life extraordinary.

    There is no committee keeping score and waiting to grant permission to begin. There’s just us, the people we care about, our corner of the world, and those little moments. And we have a choice in what we do with them.

    That feeling that something was wrong wasn’t about my reputation or my checklist. It was about my awareness of the miracles right in front of me and my willingness to take conscious, meaningful steps that felt extraordinary to take.

    Since that day, my life has changed dramatically.

    We live in the same house, we shop at the same store, I have the same job, but now, I’m also one of those people who is curious about everything. Who loses themselves in creative projects just because. Who creates art, writes poetry, and self-publishes books. I’ve become one of those people who sees even the most ordinary moment at Whole Foods on a Wednesday afternoon as extraordinary.

    How did I do it? I simply let myself begin right where I was.

    You may have a completely different version of extraordinary, and that’s what’s so perfect. How to live an extraordinary life is entirely up to you—it’s your life, after all. The action itself isn’t as important as the intent behind it.

    As long as your intent is to make something in your world just a little better, to learn something just a little deeper, to try something you’re just a little curious about, it’s foolproof. You could institute pizza Saturdays or travel the world, saving endangered species. Both are extraordinary.

    If you’re not sure where to begin, here are a few things to try. They changed the world for me.

    1. Be tenacious in your appreciation and optimism.

    First, slow down and look around. Then, appreciate anything and everything you possibly can. Thank the sun, thank the water, thank the air you breathe. Look out for the funny thing that happened on your way to work, beautiful sunsets, and acts of human kindness. Even when everyone around you wants to complain about the boss, be the one who notices that it’s such a nice day.

    When I talked about my day, I used to begin with something that went wrong. Then, I gave myself one tiny challenge: lead with gratitude. I made a point of starting conversations with something positive as often as I could, which meant I had to start looking for those positive things and remembering to bring them up. I discovered so much beauty around me with this one simple switch.

    2. Define your extraordinary.

    What do you want to see in this lifetime? What do you want to learn? How do you want to feel while you’re living your life?

    I’d thought about these things before, of course, but they would quickly get taken over by something more serious. I didn’t want to waste time. My attitude changed when I decided that feeling curious, engaged, and alive was more important than being productive.

    I began setting intentions for the week. I’d write down an idea that excited me, a feeling I wanted to nurture, and something I wanted to learn or create. Then, I gave myself small, meaningful challenges that fit with those intentions. Carrying a composition book with me quickly led to filling that composition book, and then another and another.

    3. Make friends with your body.

    Your body was made for living, so live in it. Use it in a life-affirming way. Don’t just feed it, nourish it. Let it move, let it sweat, let it pump its blood, laugh, cry, and feel. Stretch into it and savor its senses. Rest it when it’s tired, heal it when it’s hurting, love it even when you want to change it, and thank it. And when it has something to tell you, lean in and really listen.

    I used to treat my body like it had no purpose. I didn’t nourish it, I overworked its muscles, and I constantly tried to remodel it.

    It wasn’t until I started paying attention to how I feel now that I asked myself, is this how you would treat a child or an animal in your care?

    My answer was an emphatic NO.

    4. Lose yourself in curiosity and creativity.

    Follow the fun and let yourself overflow. Take on a ridiculous project just because it lights you up, even if it’s silly, you’re “too old,” or it’s “wasting time.” Let it be messy. Let it change directions. And let it fail spectacularly. The outcome isn’t as important as the process of it.

    I practice this by painting with my children. They are experts at following curiosity and creativity. While I’m painstakingly sketching a dog or a flower, they’re creating imaginary animals in underwater kingdoms and then covering the entire thing in handprints when the inspiration strikes.

    Every time, I shake my head with a smile—this is supposed to be fun, remember?

    5. Be of service in a way that’s meaningful to you.

    Share something. Create something. Teach something. Go where you are masterful and add value to the world in any way that’s accessible to you. Feed the hummingbirds, pick up litter, volunteer in your community. Big or small, it doesn’t matter; it’s the meaning behind it that makes all the difference.

    I started by cultivating the kind of presence I wanted to have in my own life. I wanted to feel present at home, for one, so I reduced the expectations I put on myself. The house may be messier, but our weekend adventures at the park are nothing short of extraordinary.

    If you’ve ever wanted to feel differently in your life, take one little, ordinary step. And then another. Let your feelings guide you. Your extraordinary life is waiting for you on the other side.

  • How Embracing a Good Enough Life Gave Me the Life of My Dreams

    How Embracing a Good Enough Life Gave Me the Life of My Dreams

    “Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.” ~Eckart Tolle

    It was perfect. Well, almost.

    I was doing the work I love, with someone I love, my two boys were thriving, and we seemed to finally be on the road to retirement. What could possibly be wrong with this picture?

    A lot, apparently.

    I was waking up worried and unsatisfied. Always feeling like life was missing something, like I was missing something, not doing enough, asking: How can my business be better? What will my kids do next year? Is my partner gaining weight? Did I run yesterday?

    Anxiety crept into my mind and contracted my body before I had a chance to get ahead of it. It was an unease that something just wasn’t quite right. And if it was, then it wouldn’t be for long.

    I knew enough about neuroscience and anxiety to know what was happening.

    Negative thoughts are a protective pattern that come from scanning our environment for potential threats.

    Our ancestors were wired this way to survive, thankfully, and we are probably in the first generation that can even talk about the word “abundance,” at least in this part of the world. The intergenerational trauma of feeling unsafe is in the recent past and runs deep in our DNA, especially for women.

    But even armed with all the knowledge of trauma and all the best practices of breathing, meditation, and yoga, there was still a missing link.

    My worries seemed trivial given the war that was raging in the world. It seemed self-indulgent to want more, to even consider that this was not enough. Even when it felt enough, it was because all the factors were lining up in that moment, but it felt precarious, like a house of cards—even though I knew it wasn’t.

    All the self-help books promised I could “reach for my dreams” and “have my best life ever” if I only changed my habits and my mindset and lived like I thought all the people around me were.

    In fact, I was so busy working on my life that I felt exhausted and still felt like I wasn’t doing or giving enough. Even when deciding what charity to donate to, to help those in need, I felt like I had to choose the “right” one!

    It was through my work with people in chronic pain that one day something shifted. I was teaching about the difference between acceptance and giving up in the search for a cure, and I said something like “It’s not so much what you are doing but how you are doing it.”

    Doing something from a place of pressure and intensity, with a worry about making a mistake or not getting it right, creates fear. Fear creates more fear in the end, and it creates pain.

    My inner perfectionist gasped and took a step back. She was outed.

    Not only did I see how my inner perfectionist had been running the show, I knew that if I wanted to negotiate with her, I was going to have to come from a different energy other than “getting this right.”

    She had helped me; she had worked so hard to stay on top of everything and got me through some tough times.

    She had guilted me when I felt like a bad mother, a bad friend, a less-than therapist, or a mediocre spouse and showed me all the ways I could be better. She even lent her expertise to my family, telling them how they should behave, what they should eat and not eat, and how they should conduct their lives.

    This was sometimes done directly, but she also worked coercively behind the scenes through people-pleasing, manipulation, and other passive-aggressive behaviors.

    She was based in fear and shame as a trauma response, learned early on in my childhood years, that told me my authentic self was clearly not good enough. So I employed her services to keep me safe, help me fit in at school, get good marks, and be an all around “good girl” on the outside. But the inner pressure of a perfectionist is unbearable and soon morphed into an eating disorder when life felt out of control.

    Many of us live in a nasty triangle that can be difficult to see and even more difficult to disrupt. It goes: shame-inner critic-perfection, and it balances itself precariously inside our mind and body leaving its imprint of “not good enough” to guide our lives.

    This is compounded by a culture that primes us to feel like we’re not okay and there is always something to buy, change, or fix, because it is not normal to just be okay.

    Even though my trauma happened decades ago, the vestiges remained. I could not quite relax into my life without something or someone, mostly myself, feeling “not quite good enough.” I also found this same core belief to be at the root of many if not all of my clients’ struggles with anxiety, depression, and chronic pain.

    It was the constant feeling of being here but wanting to be… somewhere or someone else. A knee-jerk resistance to life or an inability to truly sink into all life has to offer without finding fault or a hiccup somewhere. Or worse, thinking that I had to earn my worth by doing more and being more, and all without effort!

    Not. Good. Enough.

    Not good enough for what? For whom? This is an unanswerable question because it is a lie. But it is one thing to know that and another to let my inner perfectionist know I was safe now and she could take a backseat because, well, I’m good enough.

    I thought about the times I felt free and at peace.

    I thought about the people I knew whose lives had the biggest impact on me.

    I had a chat with my future self twenty years from now about the qualities she had, how she moved, and what she valued.

    And it came down to a word: simplicity.

    Here is where I had to tread carefully. My inner perfectionist would make finding simplicity very, very complicated and approach it with an all-in attitude, as she did everything: live in a tiny house, two chairs, two sets of cutlery, and a bed.

    No, there had to be another way, an easier way.

    It turns out, it was the easiest way possible: Embrace what is here now.

    What if everything was good enough, just as it is, in this moment? What if I was good enough, just as I am, in this moment? What if my body, my health, my relationships, all the ways I tried, were just good enough?

    It felt radical, revolutionary. It felt like I was disrupting all my programming about what it means to live a good life. It was not the energy of giving up or rationalizing that I didn’t deserve more and I should settle for less. It wasn’t even the energy of gratitude or appreciating what I have and how privileged I am.

    It was the opposite.

    Embracing my life as good enough busted the myth of inferiority and superiority that tells us some people are more or less worthy than others. It let me relax into the fact that we are all doing the best we can with what we know at that moment. If I was good enough, then others were too.

    It busted the myth of needing more and being more, because I didn’t have anything to prove to anyone. It also busted the myth that if I truly accepted my life as it is, I would just lie down on the couch and never get up. Again, the opposite happened.

    Energy was freed up for more of what I love, not what I should do. Worry and struggle were replaced with self-forgiveness.

    Embracing my life as good enough gave me the doorway I needed to a quality of life I couldn’t imagine.

    I realized I was good enough to show up just as I am.

    I realized I was good enough to set boundaries around what and who aligned with me.

    I realized I could write, speak, and create in a messy, fun, good enough way.

    I realized I was good enough to rest.

    I realized I was good enough to embrace my own wants, needs, and desires.

    I realized I was already good enough for pleasure right here and now in a million ways I couldn’t see before.

    I realized my life was not about being better, improved, fixed… it was about being who I am, and that was enough.

    I realized I could work less and make more money.

    I realized my body was a remarkable organism that was to be loved and held, not manipulated.

    I realized that every decision I made was right for me because it was good enough.

    I realized that struggle was never meant to be my life, but giving, loving, and contributing were.

    I realized I was already good enough to live a life of joy, comfort, and ease.

    One of the most beautiful parts of this is looking in my children’s eyes and knowing that they, too, are so perfectly good enough just as they are. They don’t need to prove their worth to anyone.

    Embracing my good enough life has allowed me to enter my life, just as I am, and has turned “good enough” into “how good can it get?” It gave me the safety I needed to “do what I can, with what I have, where I am” (Theodore Roosevelt).

    Can you imagine a world where everyone knew they were just good enough? Where we all lived life from a place of forgiveness, grace, and compassion for ourselves?

    What are you already good enough for that life is just waiting to give you?

  • Living a Meaningful Life: What Will Your Loved Ones Find When You Die?

    Living a Meaningful Life: What Will Your Loved Ones Find When You Die?

    “At the end of life, at the end of YOUR life, what essence emerges? What have you filled the world with? In remembering you, what words will others choose?” ~Amy Rosenthal

    Most people believe sorting through a loved one’s belongings after death provides closure. For me, it provided an existential crisis.

    After glancing at the angry sky in my father’s driveway for what seemed like hours, I mustered up the courage to crack open the door to the kitchen. The eerie silence stopped me in my tracks. Wasn’t he cooking up a storm in this cluttered kitchen just a few days ago?

    I started with the mounds of clothes and cuddled them gently before pitching them. The sweet aroma of his fiery cologne still lingered. The air smelled just like him.

    My father’s belongings served as physical reminders of how he spent his time on Earth. Some of my favorites included:

    A weathered yellow newspaper clipping of his parents. Cherished family photos, with him grinning ear to ear. A collection of homemade cookbooks. Framed quotes such as Mi casa es su casa. A prestigious Pottery Barn leather chair, distressed by puppy claw marks. Nostalgic t-shirts from the early 90’s.

    Chipped and heavily-used Williams-Sonoma platters. An entertainment center that mimicked a NASA operation center, with 70’s CDs left in the queue. Invitations to neighborhood block parties. An embroidered apron which read “World’s Best Grill Master” paired with still fresh barbeque sauce stains.

    Homemade recipe cards with quirky quotes like “It’s good because it’s cooked on wood.” An entire closet of camping gear. Leftover birthday celebration goodies. Glazed pottery from local North Carolinian artists. Entertaining sports memorabilia on full display. And a tender card from me:

    Dear Dad,

    You’re the best dad ever! I hope you have a birthday filled with tasty BBQ, blaring seventies music, and a pepperoncini pepper to start the day off right. Thank you for being there for me. You are my hero. I can’t wait to celebrate with you this weekend!

    My father collected items that brought him joy, and, clearly shared them with others.

    While you may not know him, or think you have anything to do with him, you do.

    You will be him one day. We will all be him one day. At some point, someone will rummage through our drawers. Scary, isn’t it?

    Weeks later after organizing his possessions, I returned to my lavish apartment with cloudy judgment. As soon as I arrived, I dropped my luggage near the door and waltzed into my closet. The items that once made me proud, made me nauseous. If someone rummaged through my keepsakes, they would find:

    A closet full of color-coordinated designer brand clothes. Scratched CDs listing my favorite nineties bands. An entire drawer filled with vibrant, unused makeup. A high-end collection of David Yurman rings, necklaces, and bracelets. Wrinkled Nordstrom receipts. An assortment of gently used designer handbags. And, pictures of fair-weather friends scattered throughout.

    Do you know what they all had in common? Me.

    ME! ME! ME!

    Comparing my life to my father’s led to a life-changing decision. Should I continue to splurge on meaningless items or start completely over?

    After a moment of contemplation, my life mirrored a blank slate. Products related to “keeping up with the Jones’s” were no longer my jam. Instead, my money was reserved for incredible moments that produced long-term joy and warm memories.

    My new spending habits derived from the following financial values:

    • Seek experiences that make me feel alive.
    • Purchase life-changing products.
    • Invest in creative hobbies that I’m proud of.
    • Provide others with joyous moments.
    • Initiate celebratory activities.
    • Make financial decisions out of love.

    With a little trial and error, I traded in frivolous shoulder bags for top-rated camping gear. Saturday shopping days transformed into baking Sundays. And most importantly, I went from feeling not enough to experiencing fulfillment.

    Twelve years later, I’m happy to share that I continue to evaluate my purchases using a “Will this make a good memory?” lens. In retrospect, mending my financial habits was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.

    Why? I’m no longer impressed by status. I prefer art, learning, and the outdoors over any invitation to shopping. In return, my life is filled with purpose, meaning, and long-term satisfaction.

    What I know for sure is that most commodities on their own overpromise and underdeliver, unless we intentionally create an evocative memory with them. Materialistic purchases provide us with fleeting moments of happiness. On the contrary, curating beautiful moments with others delivers long-term joy.

    While you won’t find many luxurious products in my house now, you will find:

    A four-person picnic backpack for sunny days at a park. Bird feeders galore. A fine assortment of tea to share with others. Homemade bath bombs for birthdays. Color-coordinated self-improvement books. Aromatic sea salt exfoliants that replicate a spa experience. Cheery holiday decorations.

    An assortment of various vision boards and bucket lists. Seasonal candles galore. A bathroom drawer filled with citrus soaps, shampoo, and lotions for overnight guests. A collection of homemade scrapbooks featuring beloveds.

    An emerald green trekking hiking backpack for outdoorsy adventures. Crinkled Aquarium tickets. Handwritten family cookbooks. Seeds for a blooming garden. Hygge and cozy themed library nooks. A bright blue hybrid bike, for nomadic quests. A closet full of board games. And my most prized possession of all, a sentimental card from my darling father, John:

    Happy Graduation, Britti!

    I am proud of who you are and proud to be your dad. I like how you hold your head high. You are becoming a beautiful young woman and fun to be around. You have taught me things. You are so important to me. I treasure our time together and will always be here for you! It’s not always easy, but, you have a lot of love around you. I hope that life keeps blessing you. Keep spreading your wings and following your dreams!

    Love, Dad

    The real question is, when someone organizes your belongings, what will they find?

  • How the Deathbed Meditation Can Bring You Clarity, Purpose, and Joy

    How the Deathbed Meditation Can Bring You Clarity, Purpose, and Joy

    “Death may be the greatest of all human blessings.” ~Socrates

    There’s a lot of beauty and value in positive, light-and-love approaches to mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being.

    But I challenge you to go a little deeper and to face something we’re all going to experience eventually:

    Death.

    I know this may sound macabre, bizarre, or downright unappealing. But hear me out!

    There is a certain power and beauty in consciously visualizing and meditating on one’s death.

    What could be more awakening and more revealing than putting your current self into the perspective of your dying self—into your last few moments?

    Such a precious practice helps to bring a stunning clarity and crystalline focus to everything going on in your life.

    Indeed, what is referred to as the “deathbed meditation” helps you to:

    • Figure out what is most important to you
    • Let go of old pains and hurts
    • Focus on what brings you joy
    • Find your true life path
    • Uncover your hidden gifts

    As humans, we tend to live our lives as though they will never end. From one day to the next we live in a kind of autopilot mode where we take everything (and everyone) for granted.

    The deathbed meditation is a powerful practice you can incorporate into your life whenever you feel lost, stranded, stuck, out of focus, or simply aimless.

    My Experience With the Deathbed Meditation

    I’ve always been someone who desperately needs a strong purpose in life.

    But something happened last year that tossed me into a dark existential crisis where I questioned (1) what my place in the world really was, (2) why old wounds were rising to the surface, and (3) why I felt so lost—despite having a strong self-care and spiritual practice.

    With the advent of COVID-19 and the retriggering of old traumas, I felt empty inside.

    You know that feeling of falling and not having anything to catch you? That’s how I felt.

    Witnessing the suffering in the world and in my own circle of family members, I realized something major: “I could die tomorrow.”

    I realized this isn’t a groundbreaking thought; we all have it at some point (I know I have). But in that moment it felt like a lightbulb went off in my head—I suddenly realized that the key to finding the answers to life was to contemplate something so few people dare to approach: death.

    The answers I received from that subsequent deathbed meditation have guided my life, reawoken my purpose, and fuelled me with vision ever since.

    How to Practice the Deathbed Meditation

    Doing the deathbed meditation is an act of radical self-love. There, I said it!

    Why radical? The deathbed meditation is radical because it’s rarely mentioned or practiced by anyone (that I’m aware of) due to its intimidating nature.

    But let me assure you that the answers you can potentially find are so soul-nourishing, so meaningful, so profound, that you will be overjoyed that you courageously took this step.

    Before you embark on this inner journey, please ensure you have a neutral mind—we don’t want minds that are feeling down or frazzled or unhappy for any reason (that will bias your discoveries).

    When you’re ready, let’s begin:

    1. Focus on feeling safe and relaxed.

    Before you begin your deathbed meditation, find a space in your house that feels cozy. You might like to place a blanket over you and a pillow behind your head for extra comfort. Draw the blinds or curtains and ensure the atmosphere is dark.

    It’s important that you feel safe and relaxed so that your heart and mind can open up and gain the most from the meditation.

    Place a blindfold, sleep mask, or cloth over your eyes so that you can’t see anything. Then take some gentle, natural, grounding breaths and settle yourself.

    2. Find some funereal music (optional).

    Some people prefer their meditations to be totally silent, but if you’d like to set the mood, find some funereal music (or music that would be played at a funeral) to prepare your mind for the scene.

    Again, do whatever makes you feel most safe and comfortable. If you prefer total silence, that’s okay too.

    3. Visualize yourself on your deathbed, surrounded by loved ones.

    In your mind’s eye, imagine that you only have a few minutes (or hours) left to live. You feel comforted and at peace with your loved ones surrounding you.

    What kind of room are you in? What kind of bed or seat supports you? Focus on some kinesthetic details to help enrich the visualization.

    4. Ask yourself, “What was I most happy to have done in life?”

    Take some moments to reflect on this crucial question: What were you most happy to have done in your life? Let images and scenes play out in your mind for as long as needed.

    This powerful question will help you to hone in on what truly matters in your current life. If you’re struggling with making an important decision or finding a life direction, this simple question could be the key to unlocking deep truths residing within you.

    5. Ask yourself, “What did I regret not doing?”

    Regret is a natural part of life, yet many of us shy away from it, trying to sweep it under the rug. To avoid accumulating too much regret, ask this simple question within your deathbed meditation: What did you regret not doing?

    Let any thoughts, images, memories, or scenes run through your mind’s eye. Take special note of them.

    6. Ask yourself, “What is the most important thing in life to me, above all else?”

    Values are what guide our lives, and yet we are often totally unaware of them. By asking the question, “What is the most important thing in life to me, above all else?” we come to understand, truly understand, what we value deep down.

    Take a few moments in your deathbed meditation to contemplate this question, letting it sink into the recesses of your mind, heart, and soul. The answer you discover can have the potential of shifting, expanding, and empowering your entire life.

    7. Thank your loved ones and end the meditation.

    Once you’re done asking all or some of the above questions, smile warmly to your loved ones and thank them for their presence in your life. Then, when you’re ready, return to the room you’re in, get up very slowly, and do a big stretch.

    You might also like to drink some water to ‘emotionally digest’ your experience.

    —

    The deathbed meditation has been one of the most powerful tools in my life for getting straight to the heart of what I most love, cherish, value, and need.

    After all, what else can put things in perspective other than our own mortality?

    If you’re feeling confused, lost, or in need of direction, I highly recommend that you try this unique meditation at least once. You might be surprised by how intensely transformational such a practice can be!

  • How I’m Honoring My Values Even Though I Have Conflicting Priorities

    How I’m Honoring My Values Even Though I Have Conflicting Priorities

    “No matter what kind of stuff you tell the world, or tell yourself, your actions reveal your real values. Your actions show you what you actually want.” ~Derek Sivers

    I need to be a productivity rockstar if I stand a chance of accomplishing everything important to me.

    There’s a book I want to write, a course I want to create, and a chance to work with an award-winning author that has given me endless projects I want to pursue.

    These are exciting, but they’re creating a ton of anxiety in my life.

    Why?

    Because they’re at odds with being the kind of dad I want to be.

    Time is your most valuable resource as an entrepreneur.

    Time is also your most valuable resource as a present, attentive, and loving parent.

    When I look at the progress I’m making on my work projects, I can’t help but feel like a failure at the end of the week.

    It feels like I’m slacking.

    It feels like I’m being lazy.

    I’ve worked my ass off to get to this point, and now I’m letting it slip through my fingers.

    But what’s most important to me?

    My daughter, Willow.

    It’s a harsh realization to wrestle with because I find my work meaningful. My work gives me purpose. I don’t have some bullshit job I don’t care about anymore. I wake up feeling like I have something to offer the world. That feels light years away from the guy who didn’t care if he lived or died in his twenties.

    I’m not failing to get things done because I’m lazy. I say this, but holy hell, is it ever hard for me to internalize. I feel like a failure for not making progress on opportunities I would have killed for a few years ago.

    Except I’m not experiencing failure, am I?

    I’m experiencing what it means to battle with the beast that is priorities.

    I might not be crushing it as an entrepreneur, but I’m damn proud of the dad I am.

    And even though I feel like I “should” be doing more with my business, it’s not predictive of what I’ll be able to do in the future.

    Willow won’t be a kid forever.

    Whenever I read a particular Cherokee proverb, it stings with the bite of a rattlesnake because it serves as a reminder of what steals my happiness: “Don’t let yesterday eat up too much of today.” It speaks to where I find myself when I drift back into feeling like I’ll never be productive again.

    Whenever I start thinking about what I was able to accomplish in the past and how little it feels like I’ve done since becoming a father, it reminds me that my priorities are different now. But it’s also bringing about a shift in what I think it means to accomplish something with my day.

    Every day we go in and out of emotions based on the thoughts consuming us. Focusing on what we can’t do creates hopelessness; when we focus on what we can do, it creates motivation and a sense that the world is full of possibility. This is why our emotions are such a rollercoaster.

    It wasn’t until I noticed that I was putting entrepreneurship and being a dad at odds that I recognized I was the one creating the painful emotions I was struggling with.

    The better I can learn to manage my fears rather than react to what scares me, the better I can handle these moments when I feel feel like I’m a failure.

    My fear is justified. It makes sense that I’m fearful that I won’t be able to support my family if the business disappears.

    But is the fear based on fact? Not at all.

    All of my clients have expressed that they love working with me. The author I mentioned before said one of the things she admires about me most is my willingness to live true to my values.

    It’s okay to be fearful. It’s a natural part of life that keeps us alive. But if we don’t bring awareness to our fearful thought patterns, they will continue to haunt us.

    If I don’t admit that I have competing priorities, I can’t possibly expect to experience peace of mind in either area of my life. And calmness is the elixir that makes me a creative, innovative entrepreneur and a present and engaged dad. A far cry from the stress case focused on expectations and outcomes, putting me in a position to base my worth on how busy I am.

    We’re all farmers in the business of planting seeds. The more pressure we put on growth, the less we’ll see development because we’ll be too anxious to do anything effectively—and we also won’t enjoy any of it. We’ll be so busy worrying about our wants for the future that it will be impossible to appreciate what we have in the present.

    It’s a life-changing approach for work and an even more powerful way to parent when we remove the pressure of outcomes tied to a timeline. The results you experience in either area are far less important than the commitment to fully showing up, aligned with what you value. Then we’re not racing and stressing but creating a sustainable approach that honors all the things that give us a meaningful life.

  • Free Webinar: Starting a New Business (for the Spiritually Minded)

    Free Webinar: Starting a New Business (for the Spiritually Minded)

    Click here to register for a free webinar around launching and growing your business.

    Hi friends!

    Over the years I’ve received countless emails from people asking for advice to help them start a heart-led business, as I’ve done with Tiny Buddha. Many of you have expressed frustration with your jobs—the constant grind, the low pay; for some, a toxic work culture—and a desire to do something more fulfilling with your time.

    I get it. I’m someone who needs to feel a sense of purpose with my work, and I never felt I was made for a 9-5; I’ve always wanted more control over my time.

    I think most of us want to enjoy the freedom and unlimited earning potential that come from being our own boss, while making a meaningful contribution that makes a positive difference in the world.

    But it can be a little daunting to go out on your own. You might have no idea what steps to take, or where to start, and that makes the entrepreneurial road seem mystifying and daunting. But it doesn’t have to be.

    Tiny Buddha sponsor Michael Gallagher, the founder and creator of the Master Peace Box, is leading a free webinar designed to walk you through the steps to start and scale your first profitable business. He created a course, Confidently Launch, after feeling the frustration of spending too many years learning the startup ropes, and now he’s giving away some of that information for free.

    His webinar will take place on Sunday, May 15th, at 11 a.m. PDT. There’s limited space available, so register here for free to reserve your spot. Don’t worry if you can’t make the live event; all registrants will have recording access.

    This webinar is perfect for:

    • Healers or practitioners wanting to find new ways to monetize their skills
    • People with an idea for a product or service who just don’t know where to start
    • Anyone intrigued by the idea of starting something (even if they have no idea what!)
    • Early-stage entrepreneurs or “side-hustlers” who’ve taken that first step and just need a little guidance on how to grow their projects

    Michael’s course walks you through everything from how to find and test an idea (using specific tech tools and tried techniques) to formalizing a business, and it explores how to drive growth using sixteen-plus different customer acquisition strategies.

    The free webinar will be a crash course of sorts, providing you with actionable items and insights to demystify the entrepreneur experience.

    “I questioned myself every step of the way, which only detracted from my available energy source for the project,” says Michael. “If I had known some of this stuff sooner, I could’ve avoided years of ‘figuring it out’ and actually worked on growth.” Michael felt he had to make this information available.

    Launching a business can be a profoundly spiritual experience. If we focus our efforts on something that’s deeply meaningful and authentic to us personally, it becomes a small expression of our soul. It allows us to dream of something of value to the world, grow through the process of bringing it to life, and watch our creation positively impact other people. And that process is a little easier (and more fun) when we have a roadmap to help guide us along the way.

    If you are feeling called to express yourself in this way, sign up for the free webinar here. I wish you all the success in the world with your new business—whatever that means for you!

  • Why You Should Stop Looking for Your Purpose and What to Do Instead

    Why You Should Stop Looking for Your Purpose and What to Do Instead

    “The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” ~Pablo Picasso

    Twenty years is a long time when you know you’re meant to be doing something, but you don’t quite know what it is or how to go about doing it.

    To cut a two-decade story very short, I found the seeds of my purpose when volunteering in a hospital playroom with pediatric cancer patients in Romania one summer when I was twenty years old. And, though I have made many an attempt over the years, I am only now beginning to truly live the purpose I’ve felt a fire for these past two decades.

    Purpose anxiety is a common twenty-first century affliction. 

    So many of us today seem to struggle with this quest of finding our purpose. And then there’s the other side of that search; when you actually find what it is you’re here to do, how do you go about living it? And if you feel called to do something that feels so much bigger than yourself, how do you go about living up to that vision?

    I have struggled with both the before and after of finding my purpose. In the end, it took one small change to terminate my two-decade to-and-fro, and to finally start living my purpose  Though it might seem such an insignificant detail, what kept me stuck for so long was the word purpose.

    Purpose is just a seven-letter word, but it has a huge emotional charge.

    Purpose conjures up so many ideas, ideals, shoulds, and fantasies before you even start to consider what yours is. The pressure is on from the get-go. And this pressure isn’t conducive to finding it.

    The other thing about the word purpose is that it seems to live outside oneself—like something lost that you have to find. Another commonly used word for purpose is calling. It has the exact same effect. It’s like something is out there somewhere, guiding you to it, and you have to go on a search to find it.

    What finally set me free was changing the word purpose to another.

    I clearly remember the moment when I made this change in vocabulary and it all just clicked. I was, maybe quite cliché, looking out onto the horizon while walking along the beach and at the same time wrestling with my purpose-related demons.

    That day I seemed to see deeper than ever before into my patterns of self-sabotage and self-doubt, my fear of failure, and what failing would mean to my self-worth. And I remembered something I had heard recently about coming at life from the perspective of what we can give instead of what we can get from it.

    I realized that the dark clouds of fear and doubt had made me lose sight of the reason I was on this path in the first place. And I knew I had to get back to my purpose roots—to get back to just giving.

    The simple word swap was from purpose to gift.

    From that very moment I stopped chasing my purpose and started focusing on giving my gift.  With such a profound change in my attitude and action from such a simple change in terminology, I started reflecting on how powerful each word was and what shifts in perspective came from the switch.

    Here are three lessons I have learned from replacing the word purpose with gift.

    1. You finally end that external treasure hunt.

    When you change “What’s my purpose?” to “What’s my gift to share with others?”, the magnitude of the question diminishes. Your gifts live within you. You don’t have to look elsewhere to find them.

    So it no longer feels like a treasure hunt with no tools; instead, it becomes a realization that a purpose isn’t a mystical calling that visits us one day in a beam of light. It is quite simply a path of giving our gifts to the world.

    2. You realize that you don’t need to live just one true purpose.

    The trap of looking for our purpose is that we assume it’s just one big treasure chest that we are on a voyage for.

    When I made this subtle change in vocabulary, I suddenly saw that not only did I know what my gift was, but I realized that I had multiple gifts that I wanted to share (including writing). When we look at it as sharing our gifts, we realize that there are so many ways we can live purposefully, and that it can all be part of our purposeful journey through life. So the anxiety of “but is this my true calling?” diminishes.

    3. Those feelings of self-doubt or fear around doing something bigger than yourself break away.

    Over those twenty years my purpose had taken on a life of its own. If fact, you could say that living my purpose had become my purpose! I had built it up so much in my mind that, in the end, it felt an almost impossibility to make come true. I can’t tell you the number of times I froze at the first hurdle for fear of not living up to the 4D vision I had in my head. I felt incapable of bringing my purpose to life.

    But the day I flipped purpose on its head and started seeing it as merely sharing my gift with others, I instantly knew that I was so very capable of that. And the fear, self-doubt, cold feet, and self-sabotaging all just seemed to fade.

    So for anyone reading this who identifies as a purpose-seeker, I invite you to try being a gift-giver instead.

    Because after all, the point of purpose is to live it, not look for it.

    What gifts do you have to share with the world?

  • Searching for Purpose? 5 Ways to Embrace Not Knowing What You Want

    Searching for Purpose? 5 Ways to Embrace Not Knowing What You Want

    “Omnipotence is not knowing how everything is done; it’s just doing it.” ~Alan Watts

    We sometimes hear of remarkable people who just knew what they wanted to become from a young age. I, however, was not one of them.

    When I was about eight years old, I told my cousin that I wanted to become a scientist. Looking back, I find that pronouncement baffling since I wasn’t particularly interested in science at the time. What I did love doing, though, was making art.

    My interest in art eventually led me to study graphic design. I thought that design would be a perfect fit since I’m creative and logical. But at a certain point, I realized that while design made some sense logically, it didn’t feel right to me.

    I wondered, how could I have put so much time and effort into something I didn’t enjoy doing? It was only much later that I recognized my error: I believed that I had to have everything figured out completely.

    Embracing Not-Knowing

    What do you do when you realize what you worked so hard to attain isn’t what you want anymore? In this situation, many feelings may come up. I felt despair, fear, anger, resentment, sadness, hopelessness, and desperation.

    These powerful emotions can overwhelm us and bring us into a state of paralysis. I remember wanting to pivot, but seeing numerous obstacles before me. If I make a drastic change now, I will have to start from zero, I thought.

    I believe those thoughts and emotions stem from putting too much emphasis on the need to know. In the book The Overweight Brain, Lois Holzman, Ph.D., describes how our obsession with knowing “constrains creativity and risk-taking, keeps us and our dreams and ideas small, and stops us from continuing to grow and learn new things.”

    As Holzman explains, infants don’t know much of anything. However, they grow tremendously in a relatively short period. They can develop this way by “not-knowing growing,” which one does through play.

    Learning to Play Again

    Let’s think for a moment. When you play a game, do you want to know what will happen next? If you did, then the game wouldn’t be any fun—there would be no point in playing it.

    After working for seven years in my full-time job, I ended up quitting with nothing lined up and no idea of what to do next. Leaving your day job like this isn’t something I would suggest to everyone. But for me, it felt like the best thing to do at the time.

    Taking a risk like that was exhilarating. I felt like a newborn child, free to explore the world and its possibilities again.

    Before I made that decision, I used to sit in my office thinking, once I figure out what I want to do, I’ll be able to take some action. But I didn’t need to figure anything out. I just needed to begin by exploring.

    As I tried many new things, I gained insight into who I was becoming. By interacting with the world with openness and curiosity, I found the clarity I needed to create my life with purpose.

    Five Ways to Embrace Not-Knowing

    So, how do you start embracing not-knowing to realize your true potential? Here are five ways for you to consider.

    1. Question your situation.

    Notice the assumptions you’re making about what is and isn’t possible. Like a child, be curious about what opportunities are already available at this moment. Instead of thinking, “Things can’t change because (some reason),” ask yourself: “I wonder what would happen if I said this… looked that way… went over there… tried this and that…?”

    2. Take tiny risks.

    You don’t have to quit your job to find a sense of purpose. Once you’ve identified the possibilities by questioning your situation, see what would happen if you did something different.

    For example, if you’re passionate about diversity, inclusion, and belonging, how can you contribute to supporting that in your current role, or even outside your job? Perhaps you can spark a conversation about it with a few people. Because the risk is low, you may feel a rush of excitement from breaking your regular pattern.

    3. Alchemize the experiences you’ve gained.

    If you lose interest in something you worked hard for, realize that it wasn’t all for naught. Think instead, “Okay, so this is how I feel about it right now. How can I transmute this thing by combining it with other elements to produce something new and life-affirming?”

    For example, I already had design and writing skills. I also had an interest in anthropology, psychology, learning, and human development. So, I tried to combine my existing skills with my interest in learning and human development to become an instructional designer. That pivot eventually led me to join a team in designing an online course that teaches intercultural skills to internationally trained professionals.

    4. Give an improv performance.

    If you’re a person who feels the need to plan everything, see if you can give an improv performance of a different version of yourself. For example, you can perform the version of yourself that finds the unknown exciting. Go out and walk like that version of you, speak like that version of you, listen like that version of you, eat like that version of you.

    If it helps, imagine that you are an actor in a movie scene.

    5. Do something unexpected.

    Do you have a routine that you follow? What if you broke out of that routine for one day? Choose a day when you have no plans and do something that would surprise people who know you well. Maybe you will end up having a conversation with a total stranger and make a new friend.

    Final Thoughts

    From my journey, I’ve learned that not knowing what we want isn’t a sign that something’s wrong. It’s an invitation to walk the path of self-discovery. The journey is not a straight line—there are twists and turns, and sometimes we find ourselves at crossroads.

    Remember that we are constantly in a state of becoming. We can shape each instance of our life by choosing to stay open, be curious, and explore the world with a sense of child-like wonder, which releases us from the confines of the mind.

    Living this way, we give ourselves the space to grow into our true potential.

  • No, You Don’t Have to Work Harder: The Truth About Finding Success

    No, You Don’t Have to Work Harder: The Truth About Finding Success

    “Ease is the sign of grace in everything.” ~Marty Rubin

    Work harder. Never give up. Believe in yourself. Get out of bed earlier. Shout self-affirmations in the mirror. Adapt the habits of “highly successful” people…

    How many times have we heard those things? In award speeches, articles, self-help books… All those who have made it seem to imply this: If you just work hard enough, long enough and believe in yourself, you will be successful.

    But, like…will you though?

    I can’t disagree entirely. It’s not that these things don’t contribute to success. They can. But they get way more credit than they should, overshadowing some just as, if not more, valuable ingredients.

    You see, all these golden nuggets have one major flaw: sample bias. A lot of successful people might subscribe to the idea that hard work equals success because they like to believe that they are where they are because they earned their place.

    It’s nice to think that everyone gets what they deserve, after all. But that does mean all this well-meant wisdom completely ignores the part of the Venn diagram containing those who are just as good and worked just as hard but aren’t successful. What are their thoughts? Obviously, we don’t know, because we don’t hear much from those who don’t make it.

    But you’re in luck! Because I have experienced spectacular failure in one career path as well as found some success in another. I know people that have made it as well as people that haven’t gotten to where they hoped they would. And after spending decades on this planet overthinking, overanalyzing, philosophizing, and most of all failing epically I have discerned that, in the end, there’s one real tip for success that lies at the foundation of it all…

    Ease.

    What?

    Yes. Ease. In perhaps a cruel trick of the universe, I’ve found that the things that come easier to us are the things we can find most success in.

    I have seen it with actor, writer, make-up artist, and filmmaking friends. I have seen it with different friends pursuing the same thing where one found success and the other less so. I have experienced—and dear Lord felt—it in my own life.

    The cruelest of it all is that we can’t fake ease. We can tell ourselves that we’re cool and we’re chill and it’s all easy, but if we don’t deep down also believe—nay, know—this to be true, it still won’t work. Perhaps cruel is not the right word. It just is.

    However, there are some things you can do. Things that not only help you find success but perhaps most importantly help you pursue it in a healthier, saner way. Things that help keep you a happy person.

    So, here goes…

    Find Something You’re Actually Great At

    Stupidly obvious yet deceivingly hard: Pick something you’re actually really good at. It’s hard because the things we’re good at and the things we want to pursue aren’t always aligned. On top of that it’s not always easy to be honest with yourself about what you’re naturally good at. But there are clear signs when you’ve found your talent:

    People will tell you. People other than friends or family will compliment your skills or tell you to pursue it professionally. And you just know; you have that feeling you understand something implicitly. Like it’s your thing.

    And when you first start to endeavor things, you get all these encouraging signals. This is something that’s beautifully described in Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist, but I’ll give you a more down-to-Earth tale: my own humble life experience.

    Once upon a time I wanted to be an actress and spent over ten years seriously pursuing an acting career. But it was always a struggle. There was always a lot of negative energy around it. Nobody ever said, “Wow, you were so good!” after a play. No acting teacher ever said, “You’ve got talent.” I never felt like I had a deep, intrinsic connection to acting.

    I wasn’t bad, I was just average. Sometimes less than that. Sometimes more. But acting was tangled up with my true, eternal love for film so it was hard to cast it aside. And as I was fully into the “never quit” and “just work harder” mindset I continued on…

    And on…

    And on…

    In contrast, my writing and specifically my directing career started off disgustingly easy. Not just in contrast with my own flailing attempts at an acting career but in contrast as well to peers in my new field.

    Now I’m not saying I didn’t work hard, or I didn’t encounter obstacles.

    I spent countless late nights and weekends writing and developing and learning on top of working a full-time job and have wanted to curl up in bed and cry all day on plenty of occasions. But the difference is that these obstacles, rejections, and heartbreaks were balanced with wins. The work paid off every once in a while. It flowed naturally. I just had to keep swimming. In a wild, rocky river, yes. But not upstream.

    I know this is a tough sell as a “tip” because it’s not really something you can do too much about.

    In this world of life-is-what-you-make-it and you-can-do-anything-you-set-your-mind-to thinking we have trouble accepting that sometimes, some things are inalienable truths. Such as that we may not be that amazing at the thing we want to do.

    But it’s better to accept it and find something you are good at, because yes, you can put in those 10,000 hours, and yes, hard work does beat talent. But having to outwork others with talent puts a lot of strain on something—which is the antithesis of ease. And things that are strained or surrounded by negative energy have a hard time taking off, unless they’re coupled with confidence, which brings us to the next tip:

    Find Something You’re Confident in

    Confidence breathes ease into all things. If you’re confident, you might not even have to be that good at the thing you’re pursuing. Confidence helps you relax and focus on the task. Confidence helps you enjoy the task. And confidence can convince people you’re the person for the job—whether that’s justified or not.

    Okay, it does depend somewhat on what you’re pursuing of course: convincing someone you’re the best abstract sculptor is perhaps easier than convincing someone you’re the best at, say, Olympic sprinting. However, most things aren’t—or can’t—be measured as precisely as Olympic runs. Consequently, even a decent but confident theoretical physicist might still be more successful at securing research grants than an amazing but insecure one.

    It’s a bit of an Emperor’s new clothes thing. In this world of constant change, grey areas, and uncertainties, we like to believe those who claim to have answers. Those who can give us a sense of security in this chaotic world. And confident people implicitly promise us those things.

    Confidence plus great skill is the best combination of course, but not a necessary one. You see, among the confident people are another overshadowed part of the aforementioned Venn diagram. Opposite those talented, hard workers who haven’t found success is a group of not-that-talented, not-that-hard-working folks who have found success.

    Of course, confidence does need to be backed up by something. Something like a bare minimum of skill, a ton of privilege, or both… Confidence can make up for a lot but not for everything, not long-term. See Exhibit A: Elizabeth Holmes. (Google her if you don’t know her story!)

    Find Something That Sparks Joy

    In the words of the great philosopher Marie Kondo: find something that sparks joy.

    This is important for various reasons. Pursuing something for reals—no matter how good or confident you are—is going to lead to moments of rejection and failure. Of self-doubt and heartbreak. The only way you’re going to get through all that and persist, until the end, is if the thing you’re doing brings you such joy that you can’t let go of it. That you’d keep doing it even if you didn’t find success in it.

    Joy enables you to enjoy the journey instead of only being focused on the results, and consequently creates lightness and ease. Joy is infectious and attracts people, which helps create more opportunities. And perhaps most importantly, joy makes you happier.

    Don’t get me wrong, I know many people are willing to put up with and tolerate lots of heartbreak and rejection without much joy or encouragement in between, all in the hopes of making it one day—a day that will make all that pain and suffering worthwhile. I was one of these people for years. It’s the whole #thehustle and #thegrind mindset.

    But here’s the thing: First of all, it squeezes all the ease and flow out of things, making the chance of success slim regardless. But most of all, if basically you’re willing to let something in your life treat you like an abusive partner, you have to wonder if perhaps there’s something more going on. Something more than passion, perseverance, and ambition.

    Which ties into the following…

    Disentangle Your Goals from Your Identity

    I consider my passion for writing and directing a huge part of who I am and a huge part of my life. It occupies most of my waking hours, my imagination, and a lot of my conversations. It’s how I spend my days and pay for my rent. It’s how I built character. How I grew as a human being. However, don’t bring yourself down or build yourself up by equating your value with the culmination of your accomplishments. Don’t make your dreams your entire identity.

    If you’re the aforementioned type who just goes and goes and goes no matter the heartbreak and absence of joy and happiness, there might be some identity entanglement. Some veiled other reason you’re pursuing your goal. Something unconscious igniting your admirable persistence. A need for validation perhaps. Or healing. Or the belief that achieving your goals will solve all life’s other problems.

    I’ve seen this with a lot of aspiring (and successful!) artists and experienced it myself as well. It’s almost always caused by something rooted in childhood trauma and therefore is absolutely not something you should chastise yourself for. But it is a good idea to check in with yourself. Who are you without your ambitions? There’s so much more. Your creativity, your humor, your empathy, your karaoke skills, your gorgeous hair, or I don’t know: your knowledge of Mesolithic birds.

    Your goals and dreams are way too fragile to be the foundation of your identity and way too out of your control. Even if you do find success while all entangled, it will only turn out to be a heartbreaking disillusion, and rather than solving your underlying issues they will instead grow at the same rate of your success. So, while you may feel as though your raison d’être is your dream, as though your goals are you, try to put it in perspective. It can be BIG. But it can’t be everything.

    Create a Full Life

    While the first few tips were perhaps of the harder kind—the ones genetics and deeply-rooted cognitions partially dictate for you—there is one easier thing you can do to create, well, ease (one shot for every time I mention “ease!”): Create a full life.

    By “full” I don’t mean clog up your schedule 24/7. I mean make your life fun, whatever “fun” means to you. Live. Sign up for pastry chef courses, hang with friends, build furniture, make love, learn Jiu jitsu, draw, join a sports team, read all the Proust volumes, meet new people, travel, love-live-laugh, etc.

    Dreams get more space to breathe and become less strained when they become less important in our head. Not unimportant, but less important. Because we’re busy with being a parent or competing in a grill-master competition or whatever. Other interests and pursuits take off the pressure, make us realize we’re more than our goals, and help us enjoy the task at hand.

    Define Success for Yourself

    Last but definitely not least. I was once told this by an actress who had been told it by a teacher: Before you do anything, define what success means to you. Is making a living off of creating fairy jewelry on Etsy enough, or do you need to become the world’s biggest supplier of fairy jewelry and have three mansions on three continents? One is not better than the other, though it might take longer.

    It’s important to think about what success looks like to you because if you don’t, you may always continue reaching for that next bar. You may lie on your deathbed alone clamoring for the things yet to be achieved, completely blind to those you have. Okay, dramatic, but you get the point.

    You may forget to realize and congratulate yourself on the success you already accomplished. On the wins along the way. You may forget to relax and find some feeling of contentedness. And if that’s not the ultimate goal of success, what is?

    All About Ease

    So I’ve been rambling about how it seems a degree of ease is key to finding success, but what is it about ease? What is this cruel trick of the universe that somehow lets us find more success in things that come easier—whether by function of our confidence, talent, joy or by them simply being less important to us? I don’t claim to know why this is. I’m a mere mortal who after two years of the pandemic still can’t remember to bring a face mask everywhere. But I do have some theories.

    I believe the role of ease in success is a little bit like our relationships with people. Wanting and needing a lot from people (even if they want to give it) suffocates them. It surrounds all our interactions with a tense and negative energy that leaves the other person little space to give and please us on their own terms. The weight of our expectations crush their freedom and spontaneous generosity and eventually their willingness to be in a relationship with us at all. Even if we give everything we have.

    Especially if we give everything we have.

    Healthy relationships are give and take. Constant unprompted giving without anything in return alerts people that there’s a disconnect from reality. That perhaps you’re not engaged with the actual person in the relationship but only with what they mean to you. What you want them to be. They’ll escape either because the burden of carrying everything is too big or treat us increasingly worse in the hopes we’ll do the escaping ourselves. The latter was the case with my acting “career.”

    I think it’s the same with goals and dreams. When we cling to our goals and desperately need things from them, we strangle them.

    A clogged fountain cannot flow. Finding ease lessens the strain, injects positive energy, and gives whatever you’re pursuing room to breathe. And goals need positive energy and room to breathe to be successful. They need room to breathe to find different ways—including unexpected ones—to help us succeed and need positive energy to attract people to create these ways.

    I know all this all sounds very spiritual and vague for someone who opened with science and sample bias. But hey, all science once started out as esoteric endeavors that were considered philosophy at best, so… In absence of proper science to describe these things we should be able to freely theorize in perhaps more mystical terms.

    What is your take on all this? Have I forgotten an important tip? Do you have experiences that affirm my hypotheses? Or ones that debunk it? I’d love to hear.

  • How My Dad’s Advice to Let Someone Else Shine Created My Fear of Success

    How My Dad’s Advice to Let Someone Else Shine Created My Fear of Success

    “Sometimes what you’re most afraid of doing is the very thing that will set you free.” ~Robert Tew

    Everyone has fears. It is not an emotion that is only for a chosen few. One’s fear may seem irrational to the outside world, but I guarantee to that person it is debilitating. So much so, that it shapes their perspective and how they see the world. My fear is of success.

    I know what you’re thinking. “That doesn’t make sense at all. Who doesn’t want to be successful?” Well, let me explain what I mean.

    You see, I am an introvert, so I don’t really want to draw attention to myself at all. My “success” is a personal gain, not a flashy show of pride to the world.

    I wasn’t quite sure where this fear of success began until this year when I was talking to my wife. Our discussions brought up a memory that I am sure started this fear.

    When I was twelve years old, I loved basketball. It was my all-time favorite sport. You had to be good individually but also as a team.

    Being introverted, I had to work hard at the latter, but it was a challenge I was willing to take on because I loved the game so much. I practiced all day every day. My grandma even brought me a basketball hoop to put in her driveway so I could practice. (This was a big deal because she loved her yard and thought the hoop made it look less appealing.)

    Nonetheless, I got good and made the basketball team. So now I could work more on the team aspect.

    One day I was at my cousin’s house, and we were playing basketball. A teammate lived across the street. After my game with my cousin, she came over and challenged me to a game one on one. I agreed

    As we were playing, I noticed she became more intense and aggressive. I didn’t pay much attention to it and just kept playing. When I won the game, I went toward her to say, “nice game.”

    She threw the ball at me and ran toward her house crying. I was so confused. My dad saw and made me go with him to her house, where she was sitting on the porch.

    He asked her what was wrong. She said, “Why does she have to be so good? She always wins. I’m not even a starter because of her.”

    My dad pulled me to the side and said, “You don’t have to be good all the time. Why don’t you let her win sometimes?” 

    I remember being confused. My twelve-year-old mind couldn’t understand why my dad would want me to lessen myself so that someone else could achieve, even though I worked hard. But he was my dad, and she was crying.

    Later, I found out that the girl was the niece of my dad’s future wife. I guess he was trying to impress her. But that’s a story for a different blog.

    From that time on I questioned the results of my success. If I succeeded would people be upset? Would I be taking someone else’s spot? Would this person hate me? Should I not try my best?

    This fear of success became a big deal in my twenties. At that time, I decided to make good on a goal I set for myself when I was in high school—to become a poet like Maya Angelou and Nicki Giovanni and a writer like John Grisham.

    At that time, I was working at a tutoring center, and there was this nice older gentleman name GW. He always saw me writing in my journal, and one day he invited me to an open poetry mic night that he held on Fridays in a barn.

    I didn’t think much of it. When I went home, I looked up the guy and learned that he was a famous poet. So, I decided to take him up on his offer to attend.

    It was great, everyone was kind and just wanted to share their work. After a couple of visits as a spectator, GW asked me when I was going to share my work. The thought was scary for me.

    It took so much for me to even attend. I told him I was just enjoying being there. He then said something that I hold on to even to this day.

    He said, “When you are a writer you have to become two people: the author Nesha and the regular Nesha. The regular Nesha can be afraid and introverted. But the author Nesha needs to be strong, confident, and want success, not fear it.”

    He then told me he was going to feature me as the poet of the night, where I would do a set of my poems for fifteen minutes for everyone. I reluctantly agreed.

    It took so much for me not to cancel. I had to constantly tell myself, “This is author Nesha.” I had to work on being in a room where all the attention was on me. It was a lot, but I’m glad I did it

    This fear of success is tough to deal with, especially as I continue to pursue my writing career.  I feel as though I have multiple personalities. “Author Nesha” wants success. I want to be a famous writer with people reading my books.

    “Regular Nesha” is introverted and just wants to write because I love it. “Regular Nesha” is afraid. I am afraid that I will get successful, and everyone will criticize my art that I worked so hard on.

    Will people say I shouldn’t be where I am because I am not good enough? Will I be taking someone’s spot? Will people want to meet me, touch me, speak to me?

    This fear of success has also morphed a bit into social anxiety. When I do open mics (which is rare because of my fears) I need to have my wife by my side.

    I remember one time I did an open mic, and as I was speaking, I noticed this woman crying and staring intently at me. My mind began to swirl with so many questions. Why is she staring at me? Does she think my work is bad? Will she want to talk to me?

    When I was done, I walked to my seat near my wife. The woman came and sat behind us. She touched my shoulder, which brought fear to my heart. I turned around. She was still crying.

    She said, “Your words brought me so much joy. I am crying because I recently lost my mom and your poem reminded me of her.” It was happening! Someone was talking to me!

    All I could think was, this is going to spiral into a full-blown conversation. All I could muster up was “I’m glad you liked the poem, and I’m sorry for your loss.”

    That night was difficult and exhilarating. Difficult because so many people came up to me and wanted to talk and shake my hand, and I was so afraid and had so many thoughts flying through my head. Exhilarating because OH MY GOD! People liked me!

    This battle between “Author Nesha” and “Regular Nesha” is something I deal with daily. Not only in my pursuit of being a writer but in other aspects of my life.

    I am an English teacher by day. In my staff meetings, I’m afraid to share my ideas because what if I succeed and some people like them? Will they expect me to always have good ideas? What if others are upset at me or think less of me because of my ideas?

    But then again, I want to share my thoughts because I worked hard on them and feel like they are worthy to be shared.

    I know you’re thinking, how do you survive? Well, first, I had to acknowledge that what my dad did when I was twelve was not right. He may have thought he was doing the right thing, but he should never have told me to dim my light so someone else could shine.

    Second, I try to do things out of my comfort zone. For example, in my staff meeting we were discussing how to improve student motivation. Usually, I don’t speak, but I pushed myself to share what I do in my class, and they loved it.

    Of course, I couldn’t help but question If they really loved it, or if someone was upset about my idea, but I pushed those thoughts aside and focused on what I can actually see and hear.

    Finally, success is relative. My idea of success may not be someone else’s idea of success, and that’s okay. By learning these things, I can now follow through on things that scare “Regular Nesha,” and that is me facing my fear of success.

  • How Following Someone Else’s Path Can Lead to Depression

    How Following Someone Else’s Path Can Lead to Depression

    “Your anger? It’s telling you where you feel powerless. Your anxiety? It’s telling you that something in your life is off balance. Your fear? It’s telling you what you care about. Your apathy? It’s telling you where you’re overextended and burnt out. Your feelings aren’t random, they are messengers. And if you want to get anywhere, you need to be able to let them speak to you and tell you what you really need.” ~Brianna Wiest

    Overcoming depression was one of the hardest yet most rewarding experiences of my life. I didn’t understand it when I first started struggling at eighteen, so I let years go by, accepting my state and letting life pass me by, following what I was told was the right path. Listening to my peers and family on career, relationships, money matters, and keeping up with the world. But my illness only grew stronger.

    Later, as I deconstructed social systems and economies through my academic studies in political science—which really meant exploring human nature and society values—I began to make connections to my environment and my upbringing. It gave me the foundation to question everything I was accepting “as is.”

    I slowly began to pull apart my life, moral by moral, value by value, questioning not only my peers but also my family’s interpretation of life.

    I was not very liked, but nevertheless, I became inquisitive. Every time I felt triggered, I went back to the drawing board to reconstruct another lesson. I decided to live my life as an experiment. Over time, I learned four valuable lessons about overcoming my depression, which I will share with you here:

    1. De-construct what you were taught and build your life around your own values and morals.

    As children, we learn what other people teach us is right. This can make it challenging to identify and build our lives around what we believe is right for us personally.

    When I was younger, there was a certain path I was told to take because the path I wanted to follow was difficult. I know that my family did not want to see me get hurt. But as I became my own person, I struggled to make sense of things because my experiences differed from how others had experienced their own life.

    I felt alone with no one to relate to. Then I realized that my values and morals had been passed onto me, and they did not fit with what I actually wanted. My morals and values had been shaped by thoughts, opinions, and experiences of my parents, family, and friends. I had to de-construct what all of this meant for me and recreate these guidelines for myself.

    Depression is a cry for help. As famously stated by Jim Carrey, it is your body telling you, “f*ck you, I don’t want to be this character anymore.”

    I realized that all my experiences were incorrectly matched with my actual values and morals, and hence my personality was not authentic, it was simply how I molded myself according to my surroundings.

    We each have our own version of the “good life.” For some, it means getting a fancy nine-to-five job, getting married, and “settling down.” For some, it means travel, eat, repeat. I realized early on I was following someone else’s idea of the “good life” instead of my own.

    2. Don’t live someone else’s plot and story, write your own one day at a time.

    It took years for me to realize that I was not living my life, I was trying to live a perceived notion of what I thought life “should be.” I was always forcing experiences to fit into this box of what life was supposed to be so I could justify them.

    It is like writing an academic argumentative paper. You try to find primary sources that align with your viewpoint and argument so you can use them as references. The problem was that my references (what I was taught to value) did not align with my argument or viewpoint (what I actually wanted).

    So of course, I hit depression. My life made no sense. It was a hard break on a highway with oncoming traffic.

    Human beings are afraid of uncertainty. We are afraid of not knowing where life will take us, not having direction. It is easier to follow a route with directions. It’s difficult to just take your car, hit the road, and hope for the best.

    I decided to hit the road, literally. I would go on long drives with no destination. Living in Alberta, Canada, the Rockies were nearby, so I would pack my bags and just drive, until I found a place I wanted to stop at. I would reach the British Columbia border and realize I’d been driving for hours. But because I had no destination, the drive was enjoyable, it was therapeutic. Imagine if we all lived our lives this way.

    Because we want to make sure we have our retirement plans figured out, to not end up hungry and broke, we spend all our lives trying to create a life that we will enjoy eventually, without enjoying our current life.

    There was a time in human history when it was necessary to live in survival mode, but that time is not now. I won’t argue that money doesn’t buy happiness, because I definitely needed gas money. But, while we create a plan to make money, support ourselves, and save for retirement, we need to enjoy the moments—because our story is always unfolding right now.

    3. Don’t wait until you become who you want to be to love yourself.

    I used to believe that I needed to become a certain version of myself before I could approve of who I was. Before I was worthy of love, I needed to become someone first.

    I thought I would love myself more if I was smarter. So I became smarter, I got two degrees, but I still felt less than. Then I thought if I became a model, I would feel proud of who I was. So I became a model, but I never came around to loving myself even though I was encouraged externally. Then I thought that if only I had a nice job and more money, I would love myself. So I got a nice job and made more money, but it did not cure my disease.

    No matter who I was or what I tried to be, I kept pushing the prize further and further away. I just would not let myself “make it.”

    I finally looked back at my collection of prizes and recognized how insignificant they all were. No wonder I wasn’t impressed with myself. The point was not to become a certain person so I could love myself, the point was to love myself enough to do and be what I want. To respect myself enough to only reach for prizes that are meaningful to me.

    My collection should be an extension of myself, I am not an extension of them. I define what my accomplishments, character, and life look like, I am not defined by those things.

    I realized that to truly love yourself means to respect yourself. Respect and love yourself just as you are right now as you evolve into who you can be.

    When you give yourself that unconditional respect and love, you tend to move toward things that align with you.

    I moved toward a career in public service. I moved toward writing. I moved toward taking things slowly and enjoying my days. I also became a morning person. I can proudly say this is me and I love myself, even as I evolve further.

    4. Live life with purpose and meaning.

    It is so easy to follow a straight path, doing whatever is expected of you. But to dig deep to find a path that feels right for you provides a high that even drugs can’t replace.

    It does not matter whether you choose to be a humanitarian, a writer, or give up capitalism to become a monk. What matters is that you build a life that suits your personality and aligns with your own morals and values.

    Meaning gives us all a life worth living.

    Human beings are emotional creatures, far more so than other species, hence our life must be ruled by purpose, or we will feel dead inside. Regardless of your profession, make time to do things that excite you and give you a sense of purpose.

    To have purpose and meaning in your life you don’t need to do huge things like leading a nation or moving across the world to be a doctor without borders. Those are noble and great things. But purpose and meaning are personal to you.

    Somebody I know once asked a representative of the United Nations how to get a job with them because they wanted to make a difference in the world. She answered, rather than trying to save the world by being in the UN, do things that make you feel you’re making an impact even if it is just in your local area. We can apply that to our everyday lives.

    Purpose can simply mean you choose to live your principles as a kind person, to others and to yourself by not engaging in negative self-talk. It could also mean building genuine relationships instead of trying to fit into crowds that are clearly not meant for you.

    Staying true to yourself is living life with purpose, and you never know, you might just end up at the United Nations anyway.

  • Want to Change Your Life? Draw the “You” You Want to Be

    Want to Change Your Life? Draw the “You” You Want to Be

    “You are not too old and it is not too late.” ~Unknown

    In less than a month, I’ll be hitting a major “milestone” birthday. I quit my full-time job six months ago, ending a twenty-plus year career in education, and have spent time thinking about what I want the next chapter of my life to look like. I found myself thinking back to a drawing exercise I did a few years ago that has made such an impact on my being willing to make major changes in my life.

    Entering my mid-forties, I had come to a point where something just felt “off.” I wasn’t sleeping well, often waking at 3am with anxiety about real or imagined catastrophes. I was often stressed and short-tempered. I was gaining weight and my health wasn’t in the top-notch condition the way it had always been. I felt directionless and unmotivated, but wasn’t sure what I would rather be doing.

    I recalled a TED talk I had seen in which Patti Dobrowolski discussed the power of “drawing your future.” While the concept seemed a little silly to me at first, I decided to give it a go one evening while journaling.

    The end result is a poorly drawn stick figure of myself in lotus position (which I can’t actually do) and a few notes in the margins. My goal was to draw and describe myself nine years in the future. What kind of “older woman” did I want to be? What were my activities? Had I conquered anything that currently plagued me?

    The stick figure I drew has salt-and-pepper hair, as she no longer feels any need to waste her time and money trying to look younger. She instead proudly wears her silvers as a testament to her experience.

    She is a vegetarian…maybe even vegan. She practices yoga and meditation daily…possibly is a yoga instructor. She rarely, if ever, drinks alcohol. She owns her own business, makes a six-figure salary, and has a healthy nest egg for retirement.

    Most importantly, she is completely at peace with herself and her place in the world.

    That fifty-five-year-old stick figure was so far removed from the forty-six-year-old me who drew her.

    I was still spending exorbitant amounts of money every eight weeks coloring my hair. I was an omnivore though eating meat disgusted me more than I cared to admit. I practiced yoga every now and then, but not seriously, and I never meditated. While I never identified as an “alcoholic,” my drinking went far beyond the recommended single four-ounce glass of wine per day. I did not own my own business, but rather was in a job that wasn’t going anywhere.

    Here’s what I found amazing. Within weeks of drawing that picture, I stopped eating meat. Within just a few months, I had cut out dairy and eggs as well. Six months later, I dyed my hair for the last time. I do at least a few sun salutations every morning. Most recently, I stopped drinking alcohol and said “good-bye” to that dead-end job.

    The biggest change was the confidence to make all of these decisions and to realize there is a thrilling and fulfilling future awaiting me.

    I still haven’t accomplished everything that stick figure has. My nest egg is growing, but I still have a way to go before I consider myself comfortably “financially independent.” I don’t yet own my own business, and I’m still working on trying to meditate more regularly. But having this vision of the future has helped me to set manageable goals about what’s important to me.

    None of this has been done easily. It has required vast amounts of reading, educating myself, learning new recipes, and discovering that kombucha or a shrub in a fancy glass makes me just as happy (actually more so) than a glass of champagne.

    I’m blown away by how inspiring that little stick figure has been and how the simple exercise of drawing my future helped me to get clarity about what I want out of life.

    Research shows that the odds of anyone making a change in their life are nine to one. If you want to beat those odds, according to Dobrowolski, you need to see your ideal future, believe it’s possible, and then ask and train your brain to help you bring it to life.

    That’s why a picture can be so powerful. When we draw, we utilize our creativity and imagination. This gets us away from our inner critic which often runs the show and tries to keep us safe from harm.

    Once we have our picture, we’re able to close our eyes and connect the dots from the present to the future, factoring in all our life experiences and imagining the steps that would help us get from A to B.

    If you’re struggling to picture your next steps in life, consider watching Dobrowolski’s video. She encourages you to first draw your current state—with complete honesty— and your desired new reality. Add color to the new vision to make it pop. Make it something that draws you in and gets you excited. Then outline steps to take that will make your new reality possible. You may be surprised at the clarity that transpires! Draw the “you” you want to be.

  • How I Stopped Procrastinating and Started Creating the Life of My Dreams

    How I Stopped Procrastinating and Started Creating the Life of My Dreams

    “Better to do something imperfectly than to do nothing flawlessly.” ~Robert H. Schuller

    Here’s a confession: I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was thirteen years old when I first discovered the magic of words.

    Here’s another: It was only at the ripe old age of twenty-six that I could truthfully call myself a writer.

    Why did it take me so long?

    I often think about that. Even today, when people ask me about my writing, I struggle to say that I am a writer. I am both proud and horrified, and I constantly wonder, what will I tell these strangers if I fail?

    It doesn’t begin like that, of course. As a teenager or as a child, the confidence you have in yourself is unnerving. For instance, I remember reading Agatha Christie and thinking, I could do that. Talk about confidence!

    Then, of course, comes the growing up bit. Being surrounded by comparisons, either by parents or teachers or peers, chips away at this faith in yourself. And there are discouraging comments, with their implications…

    “No one’s ever done this before” (so how will you?)
    “Most turn into failed writers” (as will you)
    “What do you want to write? Oh that? How will you earn a living with it?” (You will NOT)

    It was this kind of thinking that distanced me from my dream for a long time. I grew up in an environment where being financially independent was highly valued, and I just didn’t see how writing could help me achieve the same.

    Years went by, and I hardly wrote. There was the occasional poem, or a short fictional piece, but never anything substantial such as long posts or stories. It seemed I had all but given up, focusing instead on a steady, sensible career in engineering.

    Engineering was so far away from the pages that I never gave writing a second thought. I knew something was missing in my life, but I just didn’t know what!

    And then, something wonderful happened.

    Restless, I moved to a marketing career. Not only marketing but digital marketing. Here my first job was for a technology business, handling their blog, writing daily.

    Suddenly, I was back to my childhood dream. I was writing, editing, researching, and while I still had no answers to how I could sustain it, and what lay ahead, I knew one thing.

    I was enjoying it, even if nothing ever came of it.

    That was over five years ago, and since then I’ve taken step after step in the direction of my dreams.

    Here’s what I learnt:

    1. Don’t overthink it.

    If you’re anything like me, you probably spend a lot of time researching before actually starting anything. It starts with good intentions (to look before you leap), but before you know it, you have spent days and days on research without writing anything.

    I looked up everything: How to become a blogger? What should a writer look out for? Top five things new writers should know, etc.

    But ultimately, the only way to get writing was to write. And there was no way around it. In fact, if I had skipped overthinking it and just gone with the flow, I wouldn’t have ended up in what turned out to be a big waste of my time and energy.

    2. Detach your identity.

    For a long time, I didn’t pick up the pen because I was scared to try. You see. if I tried and it didn’t work out, I would become that failed writer.

    Without trying, I at least had the dream of being a talented, wonderful writer, albeit one that never wrote anything. It went on for some years, until I realized that time was passing without a single word from me.

    And each year that went by meant lesser time for me to be any kind of writer. And that scared me more than any of the reasons holding me back!

    I told myself, I will write. Now that doesn’t make me any kind of writer, it just makes me a person who writes. Who I am and what I have achieved isn’t defined AT ALL by my writing.

    With this statement, I detached my identity from the task, taking off the pressure and letting myself simply…write.

    3. Permit yourself to suck.

    The idea of what kind of writer I should be and how my style should evolve kept me off my desk for a while. Every article I researched felt wrong and when I did write, I never seemed to like the output.

    The problem? I was too wrapped up in who I should become and what should be said instead of being okay with mediocrity.

    It was only after multiple attempts that I realized that I sucked because I had hardly any experience. BUT that I could become better.

    All I had to do was accept that I sucked and work hard.

    Only by giving myself the approval to write poorly did I finally allow progress in my work.

    4. Block out the negative.

    Imagine you’ve finally gotten off the couch when a negative friend comes around. Oh, this? They say it will NEVER work. What if this friend comes around routinely?

    This friend can be an actual person, or it can be your own stressed, scared mind, throwing up objections and fears at you.

    In my case, it was my anxiety-riddled brain, torturing me with “You’re not good at this” thoughts. Just like with a toxic friendship though, you have to shut this narrative down.

    I did it simply—every time I started getting a thought like this, I would:

    a) Either distract myself OR
    b) Say “NO!” and cut it off before it took hold of me.

    Eventually, these thoughts become fewer and fewer until they stopped bothering me too often. Similarly, steer clear of negative friends who are likely to make you feel bad about your dream. It’s your dream—you must guard it with your life!

    5. Let go.

    A popular quote by Arthur Ashe reads:

    “Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.”

    The most important tip of all? Don’t worry about what you cannot control. If you’ve done basic research (not too much) and taken the time to make up your mind, act.

    There will always be things outside your power—the future is not something you can foresee. The only thing you can control is your sincere effort, so jump in!

  • No One Starts Off at Their Best – Why We Need to Keep Going Anyway

    No One Starts Off at Their Best – Why We Need to Keep Going Anyway

    “Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not.” ~Pablo Picasso

    This article is about the day I realized Picasso wasn’t born Picasso.

    If you’re already opening Google to find what his name was at birth, I’ll save you the typing and tell you here…

    He was born Pablo Ruiz Picasso. (His baptized name is wayyyy longer, but you get the point.)

    Okay, so he was always a Picasso.

    But he wasn’t always the Picasso.

    Let me explain by rewinding a few years back…

    I was in Spain for one of my best friend’s weddings, and I decided to spend an extra couple of weeks exploring the country.

    Of course, exploring the narrow winding streets and cultural history of Barcelona was high on my priority list (as well as eating endless tapas and indulging in delicious goblets of the most refreshing gin drinks to ever hit my lips haha).

    So many of the Great Creatives originated from Spain or left their mark in this beautifully complex country in one way or another.

    Put simply, I was in Heaven.

    I still remember the day I stepped foot in the Picasso Museum. With much anticipation I made my way up the stairs, one step at a time, until I was finally beginning my stroll down Picasso Memory Lane.

    Let me tell you… It was NOT what I was expecting.

    Confusion hit me first.

    “Wait, what? THIS is Picasso? Am I in the wrong place? Am I supposed to think these are incredible works of art?”

    Along with confusion, I was questioning my previous knowledge and what I thought I knew of this famous artist.

    I’m no art buff, but I’d like to think I know a thing or two about a thing or two.

    I weaved in and out of many more rooms, continuing to feel confused, kind of let down, and like there might be something wrong with me and my memory.

    I walked into the next room, almost feeling bored but trying to put on a super interested face by slightly tilting my head and nodding slowly as I took everything in.

    Then BOOM.

    There it was.

    The classic Picasso style we all know. The famous cube-like strokes and surrealistic images he was known for.

    I remember standing there in complete awe. It was a jaw-dropping moment for me, but it wasn’t because of the famous art I was staring at.

    It was because of all the not-so-famous art I had wandered past to get here.

    That’s when it hit me.

    PICASSO wasn’t born Picasso.

    He didn’t come out of the womb a world-famous painter, forging the way into a new era of art. He worked for it. Every. Single. Day.

    He was dedicated to his art.

    He was dedicated to the process, to the doing, to the journey of becoming the artist we all know today.

    In that instant, my perspective on the previous rooms and walls of art suddenly changed. I now saw those previous works of art as badges of honor. Of hours upon hours of self-exploration… Learning new techniques, putting images to thoughts, feelings, experiences, and words.

    Those paintings were a testament to his will and dedication not only to his art, but to himself.

    He didn’t give up just because he wasn’t acknowledged or celebrated right away.

    In fact, there were almost as many years of his work not being put on a pedestal as there were of his glory years.

    As a self-proclaimed perfectionist who has been afraid of “getting it wrong” or not being “good enough,” I’m letting go of the need to get it right.

    Yup, I’m doing it right now as I type. Eeks!

    This is a pivotal moment for me.

    I’ve realized I’ll never have the opportunity to “get it right” if I’m not willing to be okay with “getting it wrong.”

    And let’s be honest, the whole concept of “getting it right” is something that we all need to throw out the door ASAP.

    Let the “getting it wrong” begin and cheers to all of the ugly badges of honor I’ll create along the way.

    I’m realizing more than ever that like art, the exploration of self and quite simply, just living our lives, should be focused on what fuels our souls, what makes our heart sing, what makes us feel good, what makes us glow from the inside out—not how we’ll be received.

    Focusing on what feels good and true for us should be our number one priority.

    Of course, life comes with challenges, and there will always be tough times we need to wade through, but just imagine how much easier it would be to move through these times if we stayed committed to doing what brings us joy while we figure out the rest?

    This is what I think Picasso did.

    No matter what he was experiencing, he took paint to brush and brush to paper. It was his exploration, his self-expression, his therapy.

    He was the painter of his life, and he never stopped painting.

    I’m moving forward with a re-ignited, deepened knowing that while I may not be a painter, I am still the painter or rather, the creator, of my life.

    I get to paint the next picture, and there’s something very liberating and exciting about this.

    So, my question to you is simple….

    What’s the next picture you want to paint? And what would you try if you stopped worrying about doing your best work and simply followed your heart

  • Are You Sick of Waiting, Wanting, and Wishing for a Better Life?

    Are You Sick of Waiting, Wanting, and Wishing for a Better Life?

    “Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another.” ~Walter Elliott

    I often find myself impatient with the pace of my progress. Waiting for my life to move forward can sometimes feel like I’m watching paint dry.

    There are so many moments when we feel like our life is at a standstill. This is generally where I double down with my intensity. I hit it with everything I can. The crash comes soon after from the inevitable violent collision of my mind, body, and spirit as they’re pushed beyond their limits.

    The idea of having to wait for anything is a first-world problem. The thought that your cat’s costume might not arrive in time for Halloween is enough to bring some people to tears. Just thinking of Mr. Whiskers having to go out as a plain ol’ cat is a bloody crime.

    And that’s waiting for a cat costume.

    What about that book you wish would just write itself?

    What about that scale that still shows you being forty pounds heavier than you want to be?

    What about that bank account that still isn’t bigger than your credit card bill?

    These are not things we want to wait for. We want the juice without the squeeze.

    We’ve grown so impatient with the idea of waiting for results that we act like moving slowly is a poison to progress. We default to believing the antidote is a shot of intensity straight to the veins. But all that gives us is further frustration, anger, guilt that we’re not doing enough, and the feeling that we need to push harder.

    It’s such a horrible way to approach life. Especially since the only finish line comes when you take your final breath. And I don’t know about you, but I’m in no rush to get there early.

    It’s exhausting even thinking about that period of my life when I wanted to write a book, lose forty pounds, and stop feeling broke. Not a day would pass when I wouldn’t be consumed by feelings of doubt and hopelessness. I should have been pushing out diamonds with the amount of pressure I was putting on myself.

    That struggle led to a life-changing aha moment for me. I realized that there are two ways to approach making progress. You can hit it hard with intensity. Or you can set a long-term aim with consistency.

    Which of these do you think is sustainable for making progress?

    Think back to the children’s story of the tortoise versus the hare. These are lessons worth revisiting for their simple and profound principles on approaching life.

    We all overestimate what we can accomplish in a day, but we underestimate what we can accomplish in a year with steady momentum.

    How do you write a book? By establishing a daily writing habit.

    How do you lose forty pounds? By moving your body every day and eating less than you burn.

    How do you get out of debt? By making a daily choice to spend less than you earn (and invest the difference).

    You’re not going to write a book in a day, but there’s a damn good chance you’ll have one in a year.

    You’re not going to lose forty pounds in a day, but you could in a year.

    You won’t get out of debt in a day, but you’ll set a trajectory for wealth creation that lasts the rest of your life.

    How different could your life be a year from now if you committed to something that’s important to you?

    Sit with that idea for a moment. Soak it in.

    What would it feel like to hold that book in your hands?

    What would it feel like to look at that scale and see the number you want to see?

    What would it feel like to be debt-free and investing in your future?

    I’m serious. Feel it. Wait till you get goosebumps.

    That is peace of mind, relief, and a sense of fulfillment tied up in a bow on Christmas morning. That is the realization that you can have almost anything you want in your life if you stay disciplined with your priorities. That is the power of consistent daily habits.

    There’s a saying about hope not being a strategy for change. I do believe hope is a beautiful emotion. But I’ve seen myself get stuck for years waiting, wanting, and wishing for a better life. Hope didn’t give me a way out because it left me at the mercy of my current circumstances.

    Writer Lu Xun said, “Hope is like a road in the country; there was never a road, but when many people walk on it, the road comes into existence.”

    This is the power of action and putting one foot in front of the other.

    Every action you take is a vote toward the person you want to be. The more we align the things we do on a daily basis with the person we want to become, the more fulfillment we feel in the little things that get us there.

    What do you wish you could change if only it didn’t feel so hard? And what could it mean for your life if every day you prioritized this change and did one small thing to work toward it?

    Make the decision to commit to a simple daily habit that reflects the person you want to be and the life you want to live. When you do this, you’re deciding to take back control of your life. You’re deciding to give yourself a better future. You’re deciding that you matter.

  • Living Without a Grand Purpose: Why I Find Meaning in the Little Things

    Living Without a Grand Purpose: Why I Find Meaning in the Little Things

    “Ironically enough, when you make peace with the fact that the purpose of life is not happiness, but rather experience and growth, happiness comes as a natural byproduct. When you are not seeking it as the objective, it will find its way to you.” ~Unknown

    I have always enjoyed helping others. Ever since I can remember, my empathic nature has led me to feel what others are feeling and to try and assist them to the best of my ability. Serving others has always been a point of pride for me.

    I have built my entire life around the idea that my life serves a greater purpose in the universal machine. My suffering and the life experiences I’ve had are leading me toward a grand destination, where I can look back and finally make sense of everything that’s happened and feel fulfilled. I’ve held this belief for so long and internalized this message so deeply that to think of any alternatives seems insane.

    Can I share a secret with you? I am terrified that I might be wrong about all of it. Maybe my life didn’t align to fulfill some sense of greater purpose. Maybe my experiences, good and bad, held no other significance other than to propel me forward into the unknown.

    Nothing I have ever set out to do has worked out in the way I imagined it would. And now I am in my thirties, and I have no idea what I’m doing. What do you do when you have no sense of direction or purpose? Why has the universe left me this way? I’d like to share my story with you…

    I joined the Air Force in my early twenties to get away from my small town. The military paid for my education, and I was able to start a career while I was young. I wasn’t excited about my career field in the slightest though. I was a communications officer, and I hated computers.

    I wanted to connect with people and help them. I also wanted to assist my faith group in sponsoring the first Pagan chaplain in the Department of Defense. I asked the universe for guidance, and I received what I thought was an unequivocal ‘yes.’ So, I attended seminary and trained to become an ordained minister.

    Fast forward several years, and my health changes after I give birth to my son. I can no longer serve on active duty, so I decide to change goals to become a chaplain for the Department of Veteran’s Affairs. I serve two years in two separate VA hospitals as a student chaplain; supporting people in crisis, teaching groups, learning about mental health care, and serving veterans of all walks of life. I apply to many chaplain jobs within the VA, and none of them work out.

    My family and I relocate several times. I apply to chaplain jobs wherever we go, and nothing works out. It is now two years after I finished my time at the VA hospitals. I ask the universe for guidance again, completely stumped as to why my efforts to be a chaplain have not panned out despite my best efforts.

    I hear about life coaching, and research acquiring a life coaching certification. The skills are similar to what a chaplain does, and if I start my own business, I can focus on a specific population to serve. In my time at the hospitals, I have realized I connect with and love helping veterans. I create my own coaching business aimed at helping veterans with trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

    A year goes by. I have attended business seminars, marketing classes, hired my own coach as a mentor, and created all of my social media accounts and a website. I put out content and throw myself into networking with non-profits and influential people. I end up with one paying client and I am burnt out emotionally and professionally after nine months of consistent effort.

    My emotional health starts to deteriorate. I feel dejected, useless, and I feel like a failure. I am so good at helping people when given the chance, but it feels like the universe is conspiring against me. In other words, I have internalized the notion that my self-worth is dependent on what I can do for others rather than my inherent worth.

    Where did this come from? Why do I feel this way? I sit down and unpack this. I realize after some reflection that my tendencies to want to help everyone else is deeply rooted in the idea that I am not worthy. Many times throughout my life I was unwanted and abandoned (I have a history of abuse), and that sets up a shame spiral within me that I have perpetuated by my need to feel loved and wanted.

    I feel if I am not serving some purpose, or giving to others in some way, then I am not fulfilling my duty in life and I am worth nothing. How many of us can relate to these feelings? And what can we do about them?

    I had a heart-to-heart with my friend about this, and she made me realize several things. How do we truly know what the purpose of our life is? How do we know we weren’t meant to be kind to one person, or to step in at the right time to say something and then our lives are complete to be enjoyed till the end of our days? Do we really know what life is about, or is it a complex web of experiences and feelings with no designated plan?

    I’ve given thought to these questions, and I find comfort in the answers I find in the little things: Coffee in the morning on my back porch. Helping my son with his homework. Cooking a nutritious meal for my family. Having a conversation with a friend when they are in need of support.

    I have to be intentional about not letting my mind wander to the “what if?” and “am I doing enough?” narratives in my head and take each day as it comes with what I can do in the now.

    I am slowly warming up to the realization that my worth is not dependent on what I do for people. My only responsibility is to live my life to the best of my ability, with experiences and personal growth being my primary focus. I don’t actually know if my life has a grand purpose, and for now that is okay. I find meaning in the little things.

  • FREE Online Event for Women: Get Unstuck, Find Passion & Purpose

    FREE Online Event for Women: Get Unstuck, Find Passion & Purpose

    Do you ever feel like you’re not doing even a fraction of what you could be doing with your life? I’m guessing we’ve all felt like that since the start of the pandemic. But did you feel like that before—like you have gifts to share and passions to explore, but you just don’t know how, or where to start?

    Or maybe you want to believe you have gifts, but you question yourself. You dismiss your potential. And as a result, you hold yourself back.

    I suspect most people struggle with these feelings at one point or another.

    I felt this way before starting Tiny Buddha—when I worked a series of unfulfilling jobs and settled into a comfortable sense of invisibility in the world. Wanting to hide because I felt inferior while secretly dreaming of being seen. Doing things that didn’t matter, feeling like I didn’t matter either, wishing I could get unstuck.

    And I’ve struggled again in recent years, as I’ve tried to evolve and explore my creative potential and jutted up against block after block. It’s not easy put yourself out there, especially if you’re not even sure what you want, or what you can do.

    With this in mind, I’m always on the lookout for tools and resources that can help us get out of our own way so we can connect with our passions and turn them into purpose. That’s what draws me to Dr. Claire Zammit’s work.

    A world-renowned female empowerment mentor, Claire has helped more than 500,000 women make a positive impact by doing what they love.

    In her FREE Unlock Your Feminine Power seminar, she shares a revolutionary process for getting unstuck and creating a life of connection, creativity, contribution, wellness, and authentic success.

    Though at one point she speaks to the idea of trusting in a higher power, and she talks about our potential as our “destiny”—two ideas that don’t resonate with me personally—I found myself nodding my head through most of the seminar.

    Based on her groundbreaking doctoral research and twenty-plus years helping millions of women achieve extraordinary results, she shares a proven, three-step approach for making the most of our lives.

    In this FREE online training session, you’ll discover how to:

    -Shatter the #1 invisible barrier blocking smart, talented women from fully realizing their potential

    -Determine which key area of your life, such as relationships, health, prosperity, or purpose, is best for you to focus on right now

    -Set an intention that creates a “chain reaction” of extraordinary results in ALL areas of your life

    -Release the limiting beliefs that hold women back, that are also the root cause of self-doubt and feeling invisible, isolated, or not good enough

    -Activate your “Feminine Navigation System” so you can intuitively and confidently make powerful decisions and become resilient in response to challenges

    -Find the support, resources, and opportunities you need to thrive

    -Free yourself from the isolation and loneliness far too many women experience and step into connection with a global community of “Power Partners”

    At the end you’ll learn about a comprehensive program that can help you apply the teachings shared, but the seminar itself is both empowering and eye-opening—and it’s absolutely free to tune in.

    If you’re anything like me, you might find it hard to prioritize your own wants, needs, and interests—both because time is often hard to come by and because you’re many things to many other people. But I’ve learned that the world needs us to share our gifts. And we can only make a difference for other people if we first do something different for ourselves.

    If you’re excited about new possibilities and ready for change, sign up for the FREE Unlock Your Feminine Power seminar here.

    I hope this helps you get out of your own way and become the person you want to be!

  • When the Pursuit of Happiness Makes You Unhappy: Why I Stopped Chasing My Dream

    When the Pursuit of Happiness Makes You Unhappy: Why I Stopped Chasing My Dream

    “We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” ~Joseph Campbell

    From as far back as I can remember, I was enchanted with music. One of my earliest memories is of circling a record player while listening to a 45 rpm of Simon & Garfunkel’s “Mrs. Robinson.” I made my public singing debut in the third grade, performing Kenny Rogers’ mega-hit “The Gambler.” I sang it a cappella at a school assembly, even though I technically didn’t know all the words.

    At home, I devoured my dad’s records and tapes (pop, show tunes, classical, “oldies”), and started building my own collection at the age of nine (early ‘80s Top 40, and hard rock). For fun, I made up my own bits and pieces of songs and wrote the lyrics down in a notebook.

    After much begging, I finally got my hands on a guitar at the age of thirteen and began lessons. Having discovered The Beatles a year or so before, music became nothing short of an all-out obsession. I practiced relentlessly, paying for my lessons with a job I took at a local record store at the ripe young age of fourteen (I was in there so often they eventually hired me), and within a couple of years began my first serious attempts at songwriting.

    My musical heroes provided such joy, comfort, catharsis, and inspiration during my teenage years that it was only natural for me to emulate them and develop an overwhelming desire to have a music career of my own. Performing for my peers in social situations tended to generate lots of positive attention, which fed my already ravenous appetite to succeed that much more.

    Music also became, for me, a way to mitigate the typical insecurities that come with being a young person.

    In college, I would habitually wander around the dorm with my guitar and offer spontaneous concerts for anyone who would listen. It was a great way to test out new material and connect with others, and few things in life gave me as much pleasure as singing and playing.

    I recall a coffeehouse gig I played on campus that received such a positive response, there was simply no turning back. Being so appreciated for doing something I already loved to do was a euphoric high, so I sought out performing opportunities—formal and informal—even more compulsively.

    Somewhere along the line, music and entertaining became not just my passion, but the thing that made me feel worthwhile. The guitar was like a superpower—with it, I could be wonderful. Without it, I was insignificant.

    After college, I moved to Nashville—a mecca for songwriters of all stripes—and dove headfirst into the music scene. I lived frugally, worked whatever day jobs I needed to, and spent the bulk of my energy on making music and attempting to get a career off the ground.

    I wrote new songs, performed at writer’s nights all over town, and befriended and sometimes shared living quarters with like-minded musicians.

    I recorded a studio demo that was rejected or ignored by seventy-five different record companies. But to me, these rejections were simply part of the dues-paying process and made me feel a spiritual kinship with my heroes, all of whom endured similar trials on their way to eventual success.

    My closest songwriter friends and I became our own mutual-admiration-and-inspiration society, and helped each other endure the slings and arrows that are par for the course pursuing a career within something as notoriously difficult and fickle as the music industry.

    One Sunday morning, I received a call from a DJ who hosted a show on my favorite local radio station, Lightning 100. “What are you doing this evening?” he asked.

    Apparently, he liked the demo I had sent him.

    To my amazement, that same day I found myself on the 30th floor of the L&C Tower in downtown Nashville with a king-of-the-world view of the city, being interviewed live on the air. The DJ played two of the three songs on my demo over the airwaves during my visit. I shouted gleefully in the car afterward and headed straight over to my closest friends’ apartment (they had been listening from home) to share my giddy excitement with them.

    Without record company backing or interest, I ended up financing and overseeing the recording and production of a full-blown studio album myself, while working full-time.

    Once the album was complete, I started my own small label to release it, and quit my day job so I could focus full-time on working feverishly to get it heard. I became a one-man record company (and manager and booking agent, to boot), operating out of my bedroom and sending copies of my finished CD (this was the ‘90s) to radio stations, newspapers, and colleges nationwide. I followed up with them by phone (this was still the ‘90s) in the hopes of securing airplay, reviews, and gigs.

    I contacted hundreds of colleges and universities—mostly on the east coast where the concentration was highest—to book my own tour.

    The idea was to play as many gigs as humanly possible at schools large and small, driving myself from one to the next, selling CDs, and building up a mailing list along the way. This would allow me to eke out a living doing what I loved, in the hopes of gaining greater exposure, building a fan base, and ultimately establishing a bona fide career as a musician/performer.

    It was an incredibly exciting time, but also stressful and intense. I did get some airplay on radio stations around the country, and received some reviews of the CD, but not many. I was racking up debt, working obsessively, and putting everything on the line to make my dream a reality. On the practical side, I figured that whatever attention the CD did or did not attract, I would experience life on the road and most likely at least break even, financially speaking.

    After months of relentlessly following up with the 182 schools that gave me the green light to send my promotional materials, things were looking increasingly bleak. My points of contact frequently changed hands (and were often students in unpaid roles), and promising deals fell apart.

    When all was said and done, I ended up with a single, solitary booking to show for all my efforts. One. This would be the extent of my “tour.”

    What I had not anticipated, aside from such dismal results, was the toll this would take on me. I was exhausted in every way imaginable: physically, financially, emotionally, creatively. Most significant, though, was the toll on my spirit. I had believed that if I just worked hard enough, I would succeed, on at least a modest level. These results suggested otherwise.

    I never expected, regardless of the rejections I had accumulated, to ever stop trying, as this was the only thing I wanted to do with my life. But now it seemed I had no choice. I could barely get out of bed.

    I soon learned that even though I had dutifully kept up with my share of the rent, the housemate I was renting from had apparently not been paying the landlord! A notice I found showed that we were many months delinquent and faced potential eviction at any moment. I needed to find a new place to live. And a new job. All of which would have been a nuisance but doable, had I been my normal self. Alas, I was not. I was a wreck.

    On a phone call with my mom, she said, “Why don’t you just come home?”

    In what was perhaps the biggest testament to my desperate state, I could not come up with a better option. I moved back into my childhood home—for me, the ultimate concession of defeat.

    I had completely lost my way, my direction, my purpose, my drive. A huge part of my self-worth had been tied up in my success—both artistically and commercially—as a musician. I had defined myself by this identity and pursuit. What was I, who was I, without it?

    Though I struggled greatly with accepting it, I found that I had no more energy, zero, to invest in my dream. The immediate task at hand was climbing out of depression. And debt.

    It took a couple of years before I felt the urge to re-engage with life in ways that reflected my natural enthusiasm. Even then, the desire to resume the pursuit of a music career was gone. But once I started to regain a degree of emotional and financial stability (a boring office job helped this cause tremendously), I took some tentative steps in new directions. I enrolled in a few adult education classes, including an acting class that was quite fun and led to trying my hand at some community theater.

    Hiking had been a key factor in my recovery, so I joined the Delaware Valley Chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club and began hiking with groups of other folks rather than just going out in nature by myself. This led to being invited on my first-ever backpacking trip, which proved to be life-changing and sparked an even greater love of the outdoors.

    Feeling better, and finally regaining a sense of possibility for myself, I moved out to California and did a lot more exploring, both inwardly and outwardly.

    In the twenty-plus years since, I have done things I never imagined I would do, broadening my palette of interests and life experiences in ways that no doubt would have completely surprised my younger self. I also met an incredible partner and got married.

    In other words: I made a life for myself, and became a much happier person, despite never having realized my dream of being a professional musician, nor of even having achieved any notable career success in some other domain.

    Though I abandoned my pursuit of music as a livelihood, I never stopped loving music.

    Over the years I have performed in a variety of settings, sometimes for pay but more often just for the love of it.

    I have shared my passion for music with numerous guitar students, played for hospital patients as a music volunteer, been an enthusiastic small venue concertgoer and fan of ever more artists and styles, continued developing my own skills on guitar and even began taking classical piano lessons.

    I will never stop loving music. The difference is that I finally learned to love myself, regardless of any success in the outer world of the music business or lack thereof.

    We all, to varying degrees, seek external approval, appreciation, recognition, and validation from others, and it can be momentarily pleasurable to receive these things. Being dependent upon them, however, (not to mention addicted to them!) is a recipe for persistent unhappiness.

    The Buddha teaches that all our suffering stems from attachment. While it is perfectly normal and human to desire things, our desires are endless and never satiated for long.

    If we make our own happiness or sense of self-worth dependent upon things going a certain way, then we are signing up for misery. The more tightly we cling to our notions of what should be, it seems, the more profound the misery.

    The good news, as I have learned, is that life is so large that it does not need to conform to our meager ideas about what can make us contented, happy, or fulfilled. It is large enough to contain our most crushing disappointments and still make room for us to experience meaningful and satisfying lives, often via things we never would have expected nor could have anticipated.

    My twenty-something self would likely not have believed it, but I lovingly send this message to him anyway through space and time: It is possible to be happy and live a fulfilling life even if your biggest dream fails to come true. Hang in there! I love you.