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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.

Clarity is such a beautiful thing.   

Boundaries are wonderful. 

When people you love are choosing behaviour that isn’t acceptable to you, it’s ok to walk away and let them own it.  

Don’t defend.  

Don’t allow yourself to be drug into their drama.  

Just know this mess is not yours, and has no reflection on you.   

Crazy is as crazy does…and it’s always better to not be crazy.  Don’t you think?

The more we are able to connect with technology, the more we don’t have to gather in person.

But there is an energy and a feeling that you can’t recreate with a screen separating you. Under the right circumstances your bond and connection are a little deeper when you meet face to face and heart to heart.

Bond and connection are always programs running in the background, but there are ways you can help cultivate more.

If you are the hosting others, your role matters. You are the one setting the tone and creating the energetic space for the others. Open your heart and welcome your guest, smile largely when you see them, and find a way to show each one that you genuinely appreciate them being there. It matters.

Technology is an incredible way to connect with people who are physically too far away to meet face to face. We certainly need to use it for that, but nothing compares to close physical proximity.

Gather as often as you can and bring your best self.

Happy Easter.

Seth Godin talks a lot about making change happen. His thinking is always centred around 3 questions.

Who’s it for? What’s it for? What’s the change I’m trying to make?

When I first started learning from him I was resistant and couldn’t hear him. I didn’t believe change was possible. Each human is made up of a certain kind of fabric, and you can’t change the essence of who they are.

Change is really hard and most people can’t make a change within themselves. They are so strongly and unconsciously attached to old belief patterns, values, and stuck in their comfort zones they aren’t willing to do the work necessary to overcome them.

Expecting someone to change who they are is a recipe for disaster.

Following Seth Godin for long enough I learned you can make small but significant change. If change was never possible the world would not be improving.

We wouldn’t be driving cars, we would still be hand delivering our mail to the post office, and we wouldn’t carry computers in our pockets.

Our world has changed significantly in the last 15 years, and people have had to change to keep up with it. Seeing that was life changing for me.

This meant change was possible.

I’ve learned a lot since that realization, but knowing change is possible means knowing things will change, even change itself. I’m not sure making change happen is something that can be mastered, only constantly explored.

But you do need to have a vision and then you need to allow it to happen. Most of us stifle it.

Change is fragile. It breaks easy because there are a lot of moving parts and people involved. You don’t need everyone to accept it at first, but you do need a few. People who are enrolled and believe, or it won’t get wings.

Not everyone wants to be enrolled in your change journey, and in fact most people will try to stop you and put you back in the old box with the old rules in order to remain comfortable.

I’ve learned the power of trust and the damage it creates when there is broken trust. You need to keep your promises.

If you don’t have people you can trust you waste an extraordinary amount of time and energy chasing after them.

I’ve learned that if you follow an antiquated set of rules, you stifle the change. I believe if everything has to be handwritten, you don’t allow the change to happen.

And most importantly I’ve learned that you have to notice what was already working. Usually things are already moving the direction you want somewhere, it’s a lot easier to build on that than to uproot everything.

Sometimes we don’t have all of the skills we need in order to go where we want to but skills are easy to learn.

Believe in your ability.

Trust in the process.

And keep moving forward.

As Zig Ziglar said, “anything worth doing is worth doing poorly until you can do it better”.

Making change happen almost always starts poorly. But once you start, then you can build.

Rumi the poet says “As you live deeper in the heart, the mirror becomes clearer and cleaner”.  

It took me many hours of pondering this quote to figure out what it means to me.  

What I have discovered is, the more I dig into my childhood wounds and clear them, the easier it is becoming to see what is my issue, or someone else’s.  

I think this is what Rumi was referring to.   

For most of my life, I took everything so personally that I was one big walking open wound.   
People scared me, because I was so susceptible to being hurt by them.   

Most of the time now, I can see, even when under attack by someone else, whether I have done something which warrants their attack on me (and I have pretty much decided nothing we do ever warrants an attack) or whether the attack is a product of the other persons childhood wounds they haven’t cleared yet.  
This is a beautiful space to be in.  

When you don’t take things so personally, it becomes so much easier to love people when they are hurting, even if their hurts are showing up as an attack against you.   

It takes some work.  Some unbecoming of the person you are.  A whole bunch of truth telling, and self discovery.   But I am here as proof that it is so worth it.   As you grow into your new more authentic self, you spread love instead of fear.  And you begin walking the path to heaven on earth with a sparkly clean and clear mirror.    

You don’t get to move forward in life without the odd step backwards.  

Life is hard, it throws curveballs at us, gives us tough choices and our brain thinks everything is a matter of life or death.

I’m learning that the more you can minimize the step backwards, the better.  

A wise lady once told me that everyone hits the ditch now and then, the trick is to get out of the ditch as quickly as possible (the other trick is recognizing you’re even in the ditch in the first place).

So I’ve been paying attention to people who are moving forward and living a good life, and I’ve begun to pick up on the framework they follow.

1.   Self care – they look after their own well being because they know if they aren’t well they can’t do their great work in this world.  They get enough sleep, they take their vitamins (and probiotics), they find a way to continuously bring peace back into their life, and they drink lots of water.

2.   They are drama free – Drama is fear based and poisonous.  It slowly seeps into every area of your life without you realizing it.  The world is a beautiful place, but some people don’t see the beauty, all they see is fear.  They obsess about how they have been wronged or how someone else has been wronged, and how nobody is getting what they deserve. This type of thinking puts you into a spiral instead of forward motion.

3.   They don’t procrastinate – when something needs to be dealt with they handle it swiftly.  They don’t let it hang over their head, or sit on their shoulder and weigh them down.  They clear any clouds of doom and dread as quickly as they can so they can get back to doing work that matters.

4.   They practice humility – they never assume they know it all on their journey towards their goals and they are always seeking to improve.  When faced with a new challenge or a new experience they listen and ask lots of questions. They understand they are but a drop in the ocean of life (and always celebrate their wins no matter how small).

5.   They are generous – so very generous.  They love freely and give from their heart.  They give their time and attention to others who ask for it, they share their wisdom, they answer questions, and they give helpful and constructive feedback to encourage others to improve.  They use their money to make the world a better place.

6.   They don’t over extend themselves – they know their limits and they don’t put themselves or the people they love in jeopardy. They don’t risk what they don’t have, and they always have the time for the people most important to them.

7.   They follow rule #6 – The rule that says don’t take yourself so seriously.  They know it’s not worth getting upset over, it’s not worth calling names or getting in a flap over.   There are no other rules… just that one, and it saves the day over and over again.
This framework has become part of who they are.  Not something they do every once in a while. Their thoughts, beliefs and actions line up with each point in every choice they make.

They don’t sacrifice on any of them because when they do they know their odds of hitting the ditch again are that much higher.

If you want to attract someone into your life who is winning at life, these are good milestones to follow.

If you’ve been in the ditch and want to find your way out, these are a great place to start.

If you’re stuck, check to see which one of these 7 items you might be overlooking.

If you’re winning at life now…congratulations!  I hope to see you there soon 🙂

Ps. I’m building a course to help big hearted people live a whole hearted life.  If you would like more details as they become available, please sign up for my private email list below.  

On this day last year I sat down and wrote my first blog post.  

There were so many things that lead me to start blogging…I had stories to tell, I wanted to reach new people, I wanted to make new connections, I wanted to share the things I thought I understood, I wanted to have something in the world where I was able to say…. “here, this is me”.

I kept my blogs private except for a small group of friends.  

I wanted to be a deep thinker, so I wrote from that space… I’m not even sure now if they made any sense, I’m scared to go back and look.

Somewhere along the way I read the book The Love Warrior by Glennon Doyle Melton.  She started as a blogger and wrote the truth about everything, even the dark secrets that most people would judge her for.

She inspired me to write more bravely, and my blogs turned into self exploratory sessions.  I had to sit and think what was or had been driving me to make decisions and choices in my life, and face truths about who I am… the good the bad and the ugly and write about it honestly.  

Every time a new person would reach out to say they were following, they would bring up new insecurities in me and I would write about them.  

This journey has been quite incredible. 

I’m learning the immense power of words and the common threads connecting humanity… I have a few people in my circle who suspect I am writing about them when I’m not. 

I’m writing about me.  

I’m writing about things that touch me, things that hurt me, things that confuse me, and things that need to be healed.  

I’m learning that the things I used to think I understood when I started are irrelevant because everything is fluid and changing all of the time. 

I’m learning that the world doesn’t need any new information or deep thinkers, it. It needs more stories and more connections.

Through it all my wish is that my stories and my connections help others with their own stories and their connections … but if nothing else, I hope that someone who happens to relate to my stories knows they aren’t alone.  

The biggest honour and mystery to me is that people who follow my journey daily, the most humbling part is when someone thinks the words I’ve written were good enough to share.

And occasionally someone reaches out to let me know I’m not alone, it means the world to me.

Everyone who stops by to read plays a different role here and I love you all.

Thank you for the past year.

I could go on for days about horses and what they teach us. They are incredible and majestic, and when you learn to speak their language they will turn themselves inside out for you.

Because horses don’t communicate with words, they are keenly aware of our energy and body language. One of the more valuable real world lessons horses have taught me is how my energy affects others.

Horses reflect your energy directly back to you. When you are teaching a horse something, or working to get a job done with a horse, your progress will be minimal if you don’t understand that it is your role in the relationship sets the whole encounter up for success or failure.

In other words, it’s never the horses fault.

The simple fact that we want to blame them, says something about us… not the horse. This means radical self responsibility.

All living creatures are sensitive to our energy, but until we see that, and see the effect our energy has on others, we are wrecking balls in social settings, and completely clueless about it.

We think what’s going on inside of us is hidden and only affecting ‘us’.

I promise you that it’s not.

Our energy sets the tone of our voice, the ‘feel’ in the room, and it is contagious to other people. They feel it even if they can’t put words to it. It can make or break a connection, a confrontation, or a negotiation.

Learning how to get ‘big’ without emotion, to be direct and clear in your communication without dancing, to read when someone is trying but needs space to process are all nuanced skills that I’ve learned from working with horses.

And they matter.

There is no question that I am who I am today because I grew up on the back of a horse.

I recently delved into the black hole of Twitter.

Mostly I am less than thrilled with social media these days. I don’t spend very much time on any of it.

Twitter offers a whole new spectrum of really smart people that teach very succinctly.

I follow David Perell because he teaches writing. I am also subscribed to his weekly newsletter. (Speaking of which, are you on mine? I send it out every Tuesday. You can sign up in the black box at the top).

His Monday musing newsletter had a recipe for learning anything.

Watch One. Do One. Teach One.

First you observe how other people do the work. Then you do the work yourself. And finally you show someone else how to do what you just did.

Apparently this idea comes from surgical training, but I think its a great way to really understand any subject. This is partly why I write this blog, because I enjoy sharing and teaching what I have been learning, it benefits both you, and me.

And there are 100 other reasons.

You can’t do a good deed with a selfish intention and still call it good.

Your inside needs to be lined up with the outside. That’s what makes for a pure heart. People can feel the difference between a pure heart and a selfish intention.

The same goes for the people around you.

You don’t need to sell your soul to someone who has done you a favour when they are simultaneously stabbing you in the back.

And the truth is… if you do think you need their “favours” it’s probably time to work on your faith.

The universe supports you, and it sets you up for progress and growth and it helps you to become the person you want to be. It will take you places you can’t imagine.

But you have to have faith in the process and trust that it’s taking you somewhere better.

Or you will keep allowing that knife to stab you in the back and think you need that persons “favour”. You don’t need their favour, the universe will help you, you just need to move past your resistance.

We live in a first world country… but sometimes we forget. 

As Seth Godin pointed out, you can buy a can of beans for $0.75… if you are buying anything more than that, you are no longer price shopping.

Which means, you have choices.

Which also means you are living in abundance.

Nobody reading this is only eating beans.  So why then, do we sometimes fall into scarcity?

How can our glasses ever look half empty?

The good news is, scarcity is simply a mind set from the story you’re telling yourself.

It’s focusing on not enough money, not enough time, not enough resources, support or love.

If it shows up in one place, it’s going to infiltrate other areas of your life too.

Maybe it comes from comparing yourself to others, possibly it comes from comparing yourself to where you think you should be….always it’s rooted in fear.

I googled the antidote to fear and it came up with answers such as faith, presence, and action.

Faith means knowing it’s going to be ok and that the universe has your back.

Presence means to stay in the moment and check in with yourself to make sure you are ok (are there any sabre tooth tigers chasing you?)

Action might mean rebudgeting your finances, or your time, or your attitude.

The biggest cure for a scarcity mindset is constant appreciation of everything you already have.

Appreciating the abundance around you… it’s not hard to find.
It’s all in the story you sell yourself.

So tell yourself the truth, you are blessed to be living in these times.

And know that if it gets really bad, you can survive on 3 cans of beans per day (which is only $825 per year)… and even then you can still choose what kind and flavour.
PS.  I am building a course to teach big hearted people how to become whole hearted and fulfilled.  Sign up below to join my private email list and I will drop you a line when there are more details.  

Last year I listened to a clip from Jason Silva on Facebook. He said, “I am not who I think I am, I am not who you think I am. I am who I think you think I am.”

I disagreed with this so strongly when I heard it. I was a person who had been hiding who I am for so long, and was fighting the labels I had been given and accepted. I was constantly searching for my authentic self and how to express it that I couldn’t accept that might come from another’s point of view.

I disagreed so strongly that his words stuck with me so I could at the very least understand them and then prove them wrong.

So I’ve been paying attention to this for a while now, and I’m really beginning to think there is something to it.

Because I can’t see myself from the outside, I don’t know how I’m being perceived. I want to know if what I think I’m trying to accomplish or the message I’m trying to send is actually happening.

I am pleased when what I’m doing is working and I want to know if I haven’t got it right yet and still have some work to do.

I don’t always detect when something is out of alignment because sometimes I have told myself a story to justify it and I’m getting in my own way. Sometimes I need someone to tell me, “Jodi, this isn’t normal behaviour for that” or “Jodi, you won’t get where you want to go if you keep doing this”.

Other people are constantly reflecting back to us who we are.

As long as you are clear about what’s important to you and who you want to be…

As long as you are willing to accept their reflection as feedback, not as a negotiation tool of your self worth, then you can use their feedback as a guidepost to sorting out whether or not you are on track.

This is how I felt about competing. Winning for me was never about seeing other people lose. It was always a gauge for myself.

Because showing horses is a judged event, we paid for someone else’s opinion about how we compared to everyone else around us. It goes against almost everything I preach on a daily basis.

But it also gives you very good feedback on where you are personally at. When I was striving to win, but coming up short, it was constant feedback that I still had much more to learn.

When I started to win more frequently, it was feedback that said I was starting to really understand my job.

This is also how I feel about people in general. Since I took the marketing seminar I have seen a huge change in myself. I understand and empathize with other people on a deeper level than ever before.

I am finding that if I see treatment towards others or myself that I think is unjust or unfair, I am passionately speaking up against it. This is new behaviour for me, and I wouldn’t have recognized it if I didn’t have other people reflecting it back to me.

Without their mirror, we don’t know who we are.

We are nothing more than a fallen tree in the forest wondering if we even made a sound.

Other people matter, not for us to please, but for us to understand ourselves.

I’ve never been much of an April’s fools trickster.

I get that it’s all in good fun and it only last for a short time. I’ve chastised myself for being a stick in the mud and how I need to lighten up, but I have a story in my mind about April fools jokes that I can’t get over. It nags at me every April 1st.

I don’t like how Aprils fools tricks always make other people angry, or concerned, or frustrated in life.

My kids used to love playing tricks on each other, and I would try to grin and bear it, but I couldn’t wait for 12:00 to shut it down.

The whole gig is in direct contradiction to my values and mission of building trust, bringing the light, and leaving people in a better place than where you found them.

However, my sister has done some pretty genius April fools tricks. Her boys are little and they love it. When they went to bed last night they were begging her to fool them this morning.

She pretended to be the Easter bunny and filled their pink buckets with old socks, a rock, empty movie cases, a plastic spoon and she ate the ears off their bunnies.

I have been chuckling about it all morning and I can’t wait to see the video with their over dramatic reactions.

For those little boys I’ll make an exception to almost anything.

Love always wins.

Let’s do some real talk today.

Today, I’m going to tell you what its like to be me right now.

If you’ve been reading regularly you know enrolment into my very first online workshop is open right now.

This seems very easy from the outside… you take what you know and you teach it to others.

Simple right?  Yes.

But it takes a lot to of time to get out of your own way in order to do that.

I have this perfectionist thing that I have to constantly overcome and the responsibility that comes with being the facilitator of magic is very heavy… but its only heavy because my ego has been involved.

(Ego separates us from each other – in some cases it is helpful, in others it is paralyzing – I chose the paralyzing route)

I was offering this workshop, so in my mind I had to be the one who made the magic happen for my new students. I was telling a story about how I had to be impressive and I was so focused on myself that I was noticing I was losing connection to life, to my loved ones, and to the workshop I was creating (dang it ego! why you sneak up on me like this?)

Here is the truth.

Showing up is hard because it makes you face your demons.  It never gets easier because when it does get easier, you have a new goal and it starts all over again.

Sigh…

When I show up in the world in a new way, I have demons to face over and over again, and my inner voice starts to take over.

Can I somehow NOT take responsibility for my inner voice?  I would like someone else to blame for this ugliness that couldn’t possibly come from me…

This is what it was whispering in the background…

“Who do you think you are?”

“Do you even really know what you’re doing?”

“How are you going to do this?”

“Do you have enough to offer?”

And the real doozy…. “what if they don’t like you?”

Ugh… that inner voice is rough isn’t it?  And its sneaky because its quietly sabotaging me in the background.  Meanwhile I’m putting up this really brave face so you guys don’t lose faith in me while I’m struggling with my own faith in me…

It is a circus in my head.

So I returned to the basics.

Tony Robbins says the reason you are suffering is because you are focused on yourself.

This little piece of wisdom has saved me several times in my life when I was getting in my own way…  And it is saving me again.

Its important to me to be generous and to be of service.  I plan to leave a legacy behind that says I made a difference in this lifetime.  And I only offer my very best work – so when someone tells me that I’m focusing on myself instead of others – I turn it around quickly.

And when I stopped focusing on myself, I realized none of this is about me.

The work that I do, and the principals I believe in and teach are powerful.  I have chosen them, followed them, and recieved incredible results in my life because of them.

They can stand on their own.

I am just the messenger.  My job is to share this work from my view, with my experience, and the way I have internalized it.

I am not special, I am not a master, and I am not perfect.  And I never will be.

I can only be me, and that has to be enough because its all I’ve got.

But I do understand this work very well, and I whole heartedly believe that sharing it with others will change their lives.

I have lived it, I have watched others transform because of it, and I know it well.

Its not about me, but I have worked hard to learn it and get to where I am.

But I am still a student myself and practicing every day.

In this workshop I am just the messenger… and that’s all I need to be.

I have never read Stephen Covey. 

They use the 7 habits of happy kids in the elementary school my kids have attended (which was amazing) so I have some exposure to them, but I still have never read the book.   

I have never dug into the habits.  

Yesterday someone referenced the habit “seek first to understand, then to be understood” and this one really resonated with me.  

How many times do people try to help you without understanding you?

I took the kids to a chiropractor a few days ago.  

When I began to tell her about the problems my daughter was having with her wrist, she interrupted me and began to speak about how my daughters watch was too tight and it was causing all of the problems.  

1. We had just bought her the watch the week before, but she’s been having troubles with her wrist for at least 3 months.  

2. Her watch was tight.  She had tried to take it off when I started talking and as she pulled on it to unbuckle it, it slipped into a higher hole.  

Had she applied the Stephen Covey habit, and seeked first to understand our problem it likely would have changed her advice, and she wouldn’t have lost any credibility with me, or my kids… and maybe she could have helped.  

Instead she jumped to conclusions, never asked another question and fixed something that wasn’t the problem.  

By the way, the look on my daughter face was priceless as she politely listened to the lecture about having her watch too tight. 

How often do we all do this?

We think we know the answer/solution so we jump into a conversation wanting to help without understanding everything about the problem?

Seek first to understand… and then to be understood…and we will ALL benefit.  

Only 1 out of every 5 people love themselves.  

I don’t actually know if this is true, I just know I asked 5 different people this week and only 1 of them said yes.

When I asked them why, I got one answer that said because she was always told she wasn’t enough from the people in her life, and that’s become her narrative.  Another said, she didn’t feel like she was doing a good job at life.   Another wasn’t proud of all of her choices she had made and couldn’t forgive herself, and the final ones didn’t really want to be involved in this conversation.

I don’t love any one of these people less for any of these things.   As a matter of fact I might love each of them a little bit more.

If only people could see themselves the way we see them, maybe they could love themselves a little bit, or more.  

Today that is my wish.

If you are one of the four who can’t fully love yourself… then start small.  Look for something you can love about yourself.  

And if you can only find one thing, then love the heck out of it.   

I used to live on other people’s mountains.

I wanted to fix all of their problems for them, shoulder all of the responsibility, and do whatever I could for their happiness.

The problem with this was that when they were unhappy they would blame me for the parts of their life that I couldn’t help or couldn’t fix. Usually I took the blame because I wanted to fix their problems… and when things went badly it sent me into problem solving overdrive.

Can you see an unhealthy cycle happening?

Being single has helped me learn how to stay on my own mountain. I speak up when I see someone struggling and think have something to offer, then I get back to my journey and my life.

I’ve stopped running around trying to be the person I think everyone else wants me to be, and I’ve learned how to make the choices that line up with who I want to be.

I was reading about attachment styles a few weeks ago, I came across this quote:

“”Instead of thinking how you can change yourself in order to please your partner, as so many relationship books advise, think: Can this person provide what I need in order to be happy?” ― Amir Levine

This is a much healthier way to determine what is right in your life. It’s not just about your partner but it is also about the job you have, the friends you choose and the way you spend the majority of your time.

Does it provide what you need to be happy?

If it does provide what you need, and you already know it, then you’re lucky.

If it doesn’t provide what you need, and you genuinely know it doesn’t, then maybe it’s time for a change.

Your happiness matters.

A lot.

You aren’t likely to go without. The universe will provide for you in ways you can’t begin to imagine.

But…. beggars can’t be choosers.

So if you’re happy with free then you get what you get.

If you’re unsatisfied and want to choose you need to find a way to increase the value you bring to the world.

Then the world can return value to you and you can start to be more choosey and raise your standards