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I remember a friend of mine telling me once that she thought people who went to post secondary school had a larger and more sophisticated vocabulary.

I didn’t go to post secondary, so this was interesting to me. I asked her to explain. She said they read more and are therefore exposed to better words and they speak differently.

This conversation was almost 20 years ago and I still remember it.

She was the first one to bring my attention to it, and now almost everyday I am surprised about how our language affects our lives.

The language we choose says something about who we are. It will tell us more about you that what type of shoes you wear. When I realized this I was much more careful about the words I chose. They are a direct reflection of me, if I wanted to be classy, I needed to choose classy words.

There have been so many times I’ve felt something deeply and strongly inside of me, but didn’t have the words to explain it. Being vulnerable is one thing, but trying to find the correct words to get to the heart of how I’m feeling is a whole other thing.

The #metoo movement makes a huge statement and says so much with just two words attached together. When we find powerful words, we can give them a meaning that tells a story of a thousand words.

Every word we speak carries an energy with it. Other people’s words will get inside of you and talk to you long after they are gone. The same is true of your words. If you want to have a positive impact it’s important to choose every word carefully.

Several years after my conversation with my friend, I heard Maya Angelou speak about words. I will leave you with a short video of her talking about words. She has the language to explain the importance, and I’ve learned from experience that what she says is true.

Every word matters.

https://youtu.be/rl0qRuzKVIQ

Just for today…

Decide to participate in life.

We get stuck in ruts, we exhaust ourselves doing the same things over and over. We think we know what we like, and we stick to it. But the excitement, challenges, and great stories happen outside of our comfort zone.

There are people all over the place trying to make things happen, and trying to share something with you. There are opportunities around several corners.

When you see something happening that’s new or interesting, consider joining in.

Find new opportunities to take part in, sign up for things you’ve never done.

You could help a brother out by jumping in with both feet into a pre-planned activity.

After all… life’s made for participating, you just have to try to survive.

I expect it’s because it’s the fear putting us into fight or flight right now that makes everything feel like it is heightened.

You may not fully realize it but whatever you were concerned with before the pandemic hasn’t changed. Your narrative and triggers are still the same… you just might be blaming it on the pandemic now.

And because all things are heightened, the same problems you had before, now seem very big.

As we are going to start the week again tomorrow I thought it might be a good time to remind you that no matter what your problems are, you are larger than them.

Don’t let yourself feel small. You are not small

There is a power inside of you that is able to overcome anything that life puts inside of you, your job is to tap into your power and rise.

My trainer in the gym used to tell me, “the easiest workout was the one you did yesterday.” He got a lot of great results with my body, but my mind struggled because I wasn’t able to mentally propel myself by feeling the wins. I never felt like I was getting stronger.

He achieved some really great results with my physique, but I only appreciated them in hindsight when I looked at the pictures. Even though my body had never been that lean or muscular in my life, I didn’t notice or appreciate it at the time.

This has always been a bit of a puzzle for me, his knowledge of the human body was so far superior to mine that he could tell we were winning, but I never felt like I was.

When we borrow someone’s knowledge to help us achieve a goal, we need to make sure we have our own checks and balances built in. It builds longevity in us, but it also keeps us motivated.

Growth and progression are highly motivating, but we are responsible for finding a way to recognize it in ourselves. Paying attention to and celebrating the nuance about what you can do now but couldn’t do before is important. Without it we will never see greatness within ourselves even if we are surpassing our goals and expectations.

I believe in humans.

When you look at where we have come from, it’s rally quite incredible what we have accomplished.

Not only have we built cities and airplanes and rockets, but we have had to discover, plan, and build each component that makes up everything.

We started with sticks and stones and quite frankly what we have done with that is nothing short of incredible.

It wasn’t one or ten or one thousand humans who have built this world. It is all of us.

When I started to see the world as a project for the human race, it changed me. That’s when I decided to play a part.

Our contribution matters.

We don’t have to build this world alone, and in fact we shouldn’t try. But we definitely should take part in the project. All we have to do is turn our attention towards building, contributing, and creating.

We are very fortunate that we can choose the role we play in this project.

What contribution are you making?

My heart has been closed for renovations the last few years which has been completely necessary.

I haven’t reopened it yet, but I have been exploring what it might look like if it did…I wasn’t putting a lot of energy into it, but it’s definitely been floating around in my consciousness.

In Gabrielle Bernstein’s book, The Universe Has Your Back, she talks about little prayers/mantras to speak to the Universe, which I loved and have adopted, so my mantra lately has been “please lovingly turn me into the person I need to be for what’s coming next”.  (The lovingly part is important because the universe has no judgement and will answer in ways that don’t always feel like love – I learned this the hard way).

I have been so focused on my blog and the course I’m building lately, I expected this mantra to find a way to help me with the parts I’ve been working on there.

I must have that part more under control than what’s going on with my heart because out of the blue, a boyfriend from my life 20 years ago shows up bringing me all kinds of stories and messages about who I used to be… the part of me I had forgotten about and disconnected from.

It was like I was in “The Christmas Carol” and getting a “loving” visit from the ghost of Christmas past.

Not all of the stories shed me in a very nice light, and even the ones that did were hard to hear because I had left so much of myself behind.

Just like Ebenezer Scrooge I was reassessing who I was in the past.   

As I have processed the many conversations we have now had, I found myself swimming around in pools of regret.

Regret for the things I said, the choices I made, and the paths I chose that led me so far away from who I was back then.

Unlike Scrooge, I didn’t get the “Ghost of Christmas’s to Come” visit me the next night so that I could easily change my ways.

Regret is not somewhere I like to hang out, so when I realized this was what I was feeling, I took another piece of advice from Gabrielle Bernstein’s book and asked myself, “what would it look like if regret were fun?”

The answer didn’t come to me right away and I became busy with other things and forgot about it.

A few hours later, I went to the grocery store.  For those of you who are friends with me on Facebook, you would have seen this post.

The next 3 hours were the most fun I have ever had on Facebook.

The 77 comments on that post were my friends/family laughing at the stories and sharing their stories and “fashion faux-pas” of their own.

I laughed until I cried, and then I laughed some more. I was so wound up from it I could barely sleep that night.  I love so much when people come together like that (but I especially love it when they are my people).

The next day as I was still giggling about the stories, I realized that was the answer to my question.  

That is what regret looks like when it’s fun… it doesn’t feel bad at all.

There are 2 morales to this story.

The first is that the Universe does have your back (thank you Gabrielle Bernstein), and it is constantly answering you so be careful what you are asking for.

The second is that if we stop taking ourselves so seriously, moments that could be seen as regret (like wearing your pants inside out to the grocery store) can instead become some of our favourite memories❤️.

Nobody wants to be around a complainer, so I mostly kept my complaining about my life to myself.  

I thought I had to take the good with the bad…some elements of life were almost always good, and some elements were almost always bad. I thought that was the balance.  

But trying to turn the bad around, I gave up so many parts of myself for everyone else that I felt lonely, incomplete, and unhappy.

I could turn my attitude around with gratitude, but that still didn’t change the parts that were bad… they were right there in my face, larger than life all of the time, and I strongly opposed them. 
The part I didn’t understand while I was in the middle of it, was that taking the good with the bad isn’t supposed to be like that.  

Life is supposed to be good and sometimes there are hiccups and bad things happen.  
You take a 2 week holiday and end up sick for 2 days, or you drive a great car that breaks down for a few weeks.  Maybe your amazing partner gets sick or hurt and you have to pull their weight for a while, you love your job but have to take an assignment that isn’t your favourite.

I think this is what the general scheme of life should look like.   

Sometime people reject you, betray you, lie to you, or leave you and it hurts… but if it’s a hiccup to an otherwise great life… then you have to take the bad with the good.  

That is very different than what I had going on.  

When there was a part of my life that was almost always bad for me, it detracted from the good.  It overshadowed so many of the great moments and lots of times I would miss them altogether because the bad parts took too much of my attention.
I felt trapped which put me in victim mode.  I had lost my power to live life the way I wanted and there was always an undertone of darkness. 

I didn’t know the difference while I was living it, but a compromise in one area affects every area.

I am now so blessed to love the life I’m in.  Instead of the overshadow on good things, I have enough light to brighten up the hiccups.  

This is a good place to be.

My son has been doing Science for summer school.  He just finished all of his assignments.  It’s a 4 month course squeezed into just under a month.  It’s been intense.  

On top of that he’s been either working full time or taking a summer welding course.

It’s a lot for a 15 year old, he hasn’t gotten a break like most kids his age.

He’s been exhausted and in bed by 9:00 pm.

But his future self will thank him for it.

His future self will get to take mechanics in the first semester of school next year.

His future self will have some money to buy a truck when he turns 16.

His future self will be done school a month before most of the other kids next year.

His future self will be Australia while everyone else is writing finals.

What can you do that your future self will thank you for?

How can you make life a little easier for your future self?

What book can you read?

What boundary can you set?

What job can you tackle?

What phonecall can you make?

What step can you take that your future self will be pleased about?

Your future self will appreciate you, so let’s go!

I used to think that I could compartmentalize life.

Most people would get my utmost respect and attention except for maybe one or two that I didn’t like.

I would generally love most people, unless they pushed my buttons and then I would withhold love from them.

I would typically invest myself into a job and put 110% effort towards it, except for the ones I didn’t want and then I might half ass my way through it.

I would maintain a certain standard for how I wanted to live, except for some areas.

It was a really bad habit.

I read an article a long time ago (I don’t have the link to it anymore), and it told me that if you accept things that bother you in one area of life, it leaks into other areas of life.

For example, if you have a crooked picture on the wall and it bothers you but you leave it the way it is even though you are bothered by it, your acceptance muscle of things that bother you atrophies.

In other words, when something bothers you in another area of your life, you can easily allow it because you haven’t kept that muscle strong by being consistent with disallowing things that pick at you.

So I applied it to my life.

This one little exercise has now morphed into consistency throughout my whole life, and allowed me to fine tune who I am and who I want to be.

When something isn’t lining up with my values, but I am still doing it, I can feel it deteriorating all areas of my life.

I still try to compartmentalize things without realizing it, but the discord becomes unbearable.

It was a small thing that made a huge difference in my life.

I’ve learned that if you care about it, it needs to be a standard that is upheld everywhere and always.

Before Oprah started her 1994 season she read Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukov.

In that book she learned about the power of intention, up until that point she had produced some trash TV that showed the lesser side of humanity.  Once she read Gary’s book she decided to use her platform as a force for good.

This originally caused a dip in her ratings from 13 million viewers to 9 million viewers.  That is a pretty substantial drop.

But Oprah had stopped living in the low vibration of competing for numbers.  She had moved on to a bigger purpose.  She was now living with intention and was going to make the world a better place.

Over 200 talk shows came and went during the time the Oprah show was on air.

Being a force for good matters.

Living with intention matters.

Not letting other people’s agenda, your current results, the ratings, FOMO (fear of missing out), or anything that is based in scarcity, steer you away from what you’re trying to do.

Just for today think about how you can apply this to your life.

What is your intention?

How can you be a force for good?

What can you decide to do that you won’t stray from no matter what results you are getting?

I used to think the answer to life was controlling the people around me.
It seemed easier to control someone else’s behaviour than to look inside and heal my own pain. 

Sometimes that looked like me being bossy and telling someone what to do, or not do differently.  

Sometimes it looked like staying quiet in order to stop someone else’s over reaction.

Usually it was blaming others for how I felt inside. 

If I didn’t like feeling left out… I was mad at someone for not including me. 

If I didn’t feel important…it was someone else’s fault for putting me at the bottom of their priority list.  

If I didn’t feel supported… it was someone else’s fault for not helping me.  

If I didn’t feel loved…it was someone else’s fault for neglecting me.  

It took me a long time to figure out that nobody is responsible for how I’m feeling inside, except me.  

The bad feelings weren’t coming because of anyone else, they were there to alert me of a place that needed attention from me.  

I had to learn to fill up my own love tank.  

I had to learn how to look inside myself, to ask hard questions and find the answers for why I was feeling the way I was.  

It took me a long time to find compassion for myself and my inability to be perfect.  

I had to work hard to forgive myself for my shortcomings.  

As I did, I stopped feeling like I needed to control everything.

I am able to allow life to unfold around me, and the weight of having to keep track of every angle has been lifted knowing I am capable of managing my emotional pain.

I turned on Super Soul Sunday yesterday and listened as Wes Moore talked.

He was talking about the difference between your job and your work. He said, “your work is where your passion overlaps with what the world needs most”.

It really struck me and it took me down several different tangents.

I wondered if passion is a feeling that people don’t recognize.

I wondered if people confuse passion with a dopamine hit or an addiction.

I also wondered if people think that finding their passion means finding something outside of themselves.

Then I wondered what the world needs most.

At the end of the day I decided that if you recognize “passion” for what it truly is, which is the things that light you up, and you use that to make the world a better place – then by Wes Moore’s definition you have found your work.

And your work then would be to bring as much of you to the world.

Just for today, think about how you can bring more of yourself to do your work in the world.

What can you do to make the world a better place? Because that’s what the world needs isn’t it? It just needs to be better and better and better.

Because the better it gets, the better it gets.

It seems like it would be wasteful of your time here if you didn’t at least try to see what you were made for.

If you bounced around looking for someone else’s approval, or letting someone else tell you what you are capable of – and never truly realized it for yourself.

Realizing your potential is one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself.

Your potential to love is limitless.

Your potential to succeed is limitless.

Your potential to change the world is limitless.

Your potential to make things better is unbounded.

But if you don’t set out to find out – you will never know.

You have such a great power within you, and you were made for more.

Maybe its worth the time to see what you are capable of.

“What comes out of a persons mouth says more about them than it does about you.”

My mom taught me this a few years back, but it has taken all of those years to grasp it and apply it consistently in conversation.

This one simple piece of knowledge can completely shift your perception of a conversation with someone else and it can also give you great insight into your own worldview.

One of my love languages is positive affirmation.

This means I feel totally loved when I get compliments, and totally unloved when I receive an insult or criticism.  

When I finally realized this little bit of gold information about myself, I was able to see why my self-doubt quotient is so high, and why I had been a people pleaser… I was begging for their approval in order to get compliments to feel loved.

Understanding that what comes out of a persons mouth isn’t about you, but it is about them, will allow you to stop taking what they say personally, to stop making everything about you, and to get insight into who the other person is.
It will keep you from getting emotionally charged.

It takes the sting out of insults and the fun out of compliments (note…I personally choose to allow compliments to be about me because who can ever get enough love compliments).

When someone calls you selfish, phony, greedy, happy, or loving… it really isn’t about you at all. It’s about how they perceive what you’re doing through their lens.

I used to only translate the stingers (insults) in a conversation back to who the other person is in order to stop myself from reeling into a space of unlovable-ness, but I’m realizing now that practically every single word that comes out of their mouth… is about them.

Listening to someone speak, or processing a conversation from this angle, really helps you to understand who someone is, what their fears are, what they believe about themselves, and what their true priorities are.

And it takes the focus off of you, which is always good.

“The reason you’re suffering is because you’re focused on yourself.” – Tony Robbins

A friend of mine texted me yesterday to say he kissed a girl the night before and thinks he might have a new girlfriend.

That was great news because he’s been dating and playing around with online dating (which is pretty much an awful way to get to know someone).

Because this is an area I have put a lot of thought into over the last few years, My response was a philosophical deep dive (on text) about relationships, sex and what it all means to me and why I’m single.

I’m such a nerd sometimes.

Wouldn’t it have been nice if I could have put aside my philosophy and just been happy for him?

It wasn’t even that long ago I wrote about Stephen Coveys Habit.  

A girlfriend of mine told me she struggles with this also.

She has built an online course before and her experience wasn’t fulfilling for her.  She loves what she’s doing now and wants me to be a part of it.

But I want to build a course because I have some great stuff I want to share.

She wants to support me but thinks I’m crazy.

Life is funny.

It’s hard to put aside what we know and what we have experienced in order to allow others the space to walk their own journey.

It’s what makes the world go around.

At then end of the text conversation I apologized for my nerdy philosophical deep dive, and he said we really should go for coffee to compare relationship notes.

Maybe he has something he wants to say too but can’t keep up to my ninja texting skills.

“I would rather have one small weird moment of real connection than hours of polite conversation.” – Sweatpants and Coffee Facebook page 

Thanks to Newtons Law… For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction… 

Barbara Brown Taylor talks about freezing the frames… I loved this concept.  

If something good happens, there is always something bad to go along with it… Where you freeze the frame, is where your focus lies, and therein your perception of what happened of whether it is good or bad.    

You win the lottery *freeze frame* that is good. 

The tax man shows up *freeze frame* that is bad.  

You give some money towards something you believe in *freeze frame* that is good.  

Everybody else thinks you should give your money to them *freeze frame* that is bad.  

As life and situations unfold, there is a duality between good and bad, keeping everything in balance.  

Freeze the frames on the good times. 

I love to be outside.  

My favourite is when it’s quiet and still.   

It’s a feeling you can’t always find and don’t feel in the busy day to day of life.  

When I find myself in the still, I stop and connect to it.  

It is one of the most fulfilling and expansive feelings.   

If you are priviledged enough to spend most of your time in nature, you probably automatically know this feeling.  

But if you are part of the hustle bustle of life, notice when it’s peace and calm outside…. And then connect to it.  

Feel the stillness inside of you and match it to the stillness outside.   

You will love the feeling, I promise.   Even if it’s only for a minute.