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Some hard questions about ease (& one easy one): The Ampersand Series
What if you could have it be easy? What if ease was the norm and not the exception? What if hard is the road you’ve chosen because it’s been the path deemed the most valuable? What if it STILL had value without the blood, the sweat and the tears? What if ease could be cultivated? What would happen if you decided that what comes next will come easily? What if you could trust that?
In acknowledgment of hard
Oh honey, oh honey. I know…there are some times that it’s just plain hard. Change takes time, effort and patience. And your desire’s hungry NOW.
I also know that wrapped up in the “if it’s not hard, it’s not valuable” thing are some ancestral, lineal stories of hardship and strife that are baked right into your bones.
And truly, believe me when I say that there are some times when the backache of hard work feels gooooooood. It feels good to roll up the sleeves, to dig in the hard-packed dirt. To love the hard into softness. Like you’ve done for generations.
&
Is your entire life intended to be spent in the dirt? Are your muscles intended to scream from effort all.the.time?
What about those times when the road of ease rose up to meet you. Was that a fluke? Or a culmination of conscious choices you made…possibly divinely guided? Isn’t your life ACTUALLY trying to show you that it can be a whole lot sweeter and easier?
Oh. That.
What if your default setting to every exhilarating new opportunity wasn’t “this is gonna be so hard”, but rather “this is gonna be exquisite…now how can this be easy too?”
Notice what opens up, what strands of recollection show up, pointing you to how much you’ve already done and know; faces of friends, colleagues waiting to offer support, help or counsel; or quite simply, an alternate, more gracefully sloping route to there.
So, right here, right now.
Look at the decision, the project, the program, the opportunity and ask yourself: “How can this be easier?”
Then, choose that.
Easy. xo TG
PS - Gold star challenge: now substitute “easy” in the q’s above with “fun”, “pleasurable” and “delicious”. Now you're getting there.
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Why The Ampersand Series? - As a Libran Life Coach, I’m pre-programmed to see both sides…of everything. This can be an annoying trait to my nearest and dearest who just want to vent to me, but it is a massive service to my clients. So much of my writing touches on polarity. This & That.
Enter The Ampersand Series. Blog posts that shine a light on both sides:: Effort & Surrender. Limits & Limitlessness. Easy & Hard. An invocation to find our own places of discernment between the extremes. To love our ampersands.
Check out my free training on the 5 Shifts Our Clients Use to Overcome the Imposter Complex and Grow their Income and their Impact
Where I pull back the curtain on five shifts to start raising voices, rates, and hands all while being the kind, congruent, and authentic leader I know you to be.
Ready or not: Expansion, eclipses and throwing your limitations into the volcano of your desires.
"Come to the edge,” he said. They said, “We are afraid.” "Come to the edge,” he said. They came. He pushed them. And they flew. - Apollinaire
My father tells the story of how he learned to swim in this way.
Long ago in Karlsruhe, Germany, he was a 6-year old tagging along with his big brother on a date. They had ridden their bikes to the Rheine River and my uncle was big-talking to his sweetheart about his swimming prowess. (Neither my father nor my uncle knew how to swim at this point, though my father really wanted to learn). My Dad called him out on it, to which my embarrassed uncle responded with brute big brother energy. He ripped the tire off of his bike, wound it around my father a couple of times, blew the air back into it with his hand pump and chucked him into the river.
(Sidebar: I ought to be horrified by this, but I’ve known this story my whole life and can only ever see it through the animated filter of Bugs Bunny.)
He floated, of course. Bobbing alongside my uncle and his nonplussed girlfriend. And, pretty soon, his arms and legs caught on.
Ready or not, he learned to swim that day.
Last week’s full lunar eclipse had the same effect on me. I feel like I was walking along and someone hurled me into frigid waters.
I bobbed along in shocked disorientation for a while, then my arms and legs caught on and I began to swim.
Maybe you felt it too. Think back to last week. Did any world-changing epiphanies douse your reality? Did you feel the rug come out from under you? Are you rethinking EVERYTHING you’re doing in a current venture? Are your rethinking EVERYTHING…period?
Yes, yes. That may well be the effect of the eclipse. You’re in excellent company. And now that the dust has settled (for now), you may be grappling with what next. Like, what to actually DO about it.
I have seen what is next for me in my business. And it is huge, and bright. And try as I might, I cannot unsee it.
(And why might I try to unsee it? Because the brilliance is blinding. Same reason we always try to dim the light.)
But it’s here. Because although I feel like I got chucked into the Rheine unexpectedly, I’ve been yearning for this expansion, dreaming of it, praying for it, conjuring it.
And, ready or not, it’s here. And it’s hungry.
So this past week I’ve been feeding it a steady diet of my limitations. For every “I can’t” and “I don’t know how” that has shown up (and there have been plenty), I’ve been hurling them into the gaping mouth of the volcano of my desires. (The ensuing lava flares and fire fountain I envision are Bugs Bunny calibre.) In with the limitations go old habits, beliefs and stories. It’s not always this easy. Except when it is.
And then I breathe into the space that just created.
If you’re on the precipice of your desires, whether you’ve thoughtfully and carefully navigated your way there, or you’ve been thrust into them by cosmic intervention, trust that your legs and arms will carry you. You will learn to swim. But to actualize your expansion, you will need to lighten your load.
Ready or not, there are many more eclipses on the horizon.
Check out my free training on the 5 Shifts Our Clients Use to Overcome the Imposter Complex and Grow their Income and their Impact
Where I pull back the curtain on five shifts to start raising voices, rates, and hands all while being the kind, congruent, and authentic leader I know you to be.
TGtv Episode 7 - Healthy & Happy wishes for my 10-year old girl
Our baby girl turns TEN today (April 12th). Oh my. Oh my. This is the first birthday of hers that I remember (VIVIDLY) my very own. (Though the pink parasol that I received on my fifth birthday is still pretty fresh in my mind.)
It felt momentous...mostly the double-digit thing. But it wasn’t with excitement that I met it. More like a sense of dread. It felt like a short step from ten to teenager…that fraught time of hormones, and rage, and serious conversations, and heavy makeup and brooding music and hairspray. It didn’t feel like freedom…it felt like the beginnings of becoming someone I didn’t want to be.
It was the first of many reminders that whether I wanted it to or not, time moved on. Whether or not ANY us were ready for it.
I’m watching these teeny bouts of melancholy play out in my girl too, trying hard to be with her where SHE is. I see in her the dawning recognition that the world around her, right and wrong, is becoming hers to start to own. The injustices, the unfairness, the wrongs to be righted. It’s no wonder that the world of Littlest Pet Shop still calls her back.
Inevitably, I’m thinking back to her previous birthdays. Her ninth. Her eighth. And her seventh. It’s her seventh birthday that I want to share with you.
Yes.
Run my dear, from anything that may not strengthen your precious budding wings. - Hafiz
Yes. Yes.
So, will you play along? Will you help her to witness the power of her wishes? Will you consider what YOU can do today to be happier and healthier? And will you share that here in the comments or via Facebook, Twitter or Instagram with the hashtag #HealthyHappy10?
Knowing that you’re doing what you can to be healthier and happier will make her tenth birthday extra magical.
Thank you. Thank you.
In three months…
We’re three months into 2014. It’s a fascinating amount of time, ‘three months’, isn’t it? In some ways, it feels like an eternity. In other ways, a wink (or a slap, depending on your perspective.)
Consider that in three months:
Your hair will have grown an inch and a half, totally changing the look of your face. You could change three habits. Consecutively. You could wish upon three full moons. (Or three new moons.) You could master a headstand in farrrrr less time. You could go from planting a patch of okra to harvesting it. You could replace 36,000 Incandescent Light Bulbs preventing the usage of 24,000 barrels of oil. Your newborn baby can go from looking like an adorable bologna loaf to a smiling cooing Gerber baby. You could miss the bus, meet the ONE and move in with them. You will enjoy 12 Friday nights. A spawn will become a tadpole will become a frog. Or an egg will become a butterfly. Danielle wrote The Fire Starter Sessions. (Which hit #1 in three bestseller categories on Amazon, brought in about a half a million and is now in paperback.) You could launch the program of your dreams. Spring will become summer.
A lot can happen in three months. Or not much…especially if you keep waiting for the perfect time.
So the question I have is: where do you want to be in three months? Well, ACTUALLY, the real question is: where do you want to be in a year? Because what’s set into motion in the next three months IS the first wave upon which the next wave will be built. And so on. (Which is good news. On all fronts. You don’t have to do it all right now AND your actions WILL STILL yield the big results…but note the key word: “action”.)
Check out my free training on the 5 Shifts Our Clients Use to Overcome the Imposter Complex and Grow their Income and their Impact
Where I pull back the curtain on five shifts to start raising voices, rates, and hands all while being the kind, congruent, and authentic leader I know you to be.
Taking your place in someone else's grief
A couple of months after Kurt Cobain died, I came across an op-ed piece too far gone to retrieve that has stayed with me since. The editor noted that most articles he read about Kurt’s suicide began with some variation of:
I met Kurt when…I first heard Kurt’s music when…When I learned about Kurt’s death, I…
He was trying to point to the self-serving quality that presents itself when tragedy erupts. The way we want to get in on the drama. Take our place in the fray. It was a dark and dismal commentary on the human condition…vultures and buzzards feasting on the carnage of crisis. And a perspective that resonated and has stayed with me.
But I read something last year that has softened that somewhat. We all experience a myriad of emotions when learn of tragedy. And we need to put it somewhere. WHERE we put it…that’s the key.*
An article by Susan Silk and Barry Goldman called “How not to say the wrong thing” was widely and frequently shared on social media last April. (My dear friend Lauren Bacon turned me onto it and also wrote an incredibly helpful post on this same topic). The popularity of Silk and Goldman's article can be attributed to the fact that it demystifies the thing that paralyzes us when faced with someone else’s grief, trauma, loss or sadness, which is: HOW NOT TO SAY THE WRONG THING.
You see, Silk came up with a genius technique (called the Ring Theory) to help people discern what role they ought to play in someone else’s crisis.
It’s like this. Draw a circle and write the name of the person who is GOING THROUGH the trauma. The person who just lost a loved one. The one who’s just been diagnosed. This is about THEM.
Then draw a circle around that person, including the name of their immediate support (partner, best friend), and then another circle naming the next level of support (kids, friends, neighbours). Draw as many circles as you need to until you get to your “station” as it relates to that person.
The rules are simple. Your job is to comfort the person in the circle smaller than yours. If you have any sadness, worry, concerns, grief, rage, you are only to share it with someone in a circle larger than your own (their job is to comfort YOU).
Comfort IN, dump OUT, Silk says.
Beautifully elegant. And we need to know how to offer comfort.
How to comfort IN
Some of us are born with this ability. Most of us need to learn it. I've had to learn it. Messily. Ever messily. And here’s what I now know.
Comfort looks like safety
Imagine that the person you are trying to comfort is paddling in a small boat on turbulent waters. You are on the safe shores of the riverbank. And you have a long, sturdy rope and a super strong grip. You have two choices. You can try to swim out into the whitecaps and get in the boat with them OR you can throw them a line. (Hint: throw them the line).
Allow them to go through their own experience and process, safe in the knowledge that you are holding the lifeline, nice and secure.
Comfort looks like presence
You being there, holding the rope, not fixing, not placating, not reframing, not comparing, not lessening, not philosophizing, not rationalizing, not spiritualizing, not justifying, THAT’S presence. Presence doesn’t have the perfect words. It doesn’t need to. Allow them to find their own words and meaning.
Just BE there. Hold the person and their pain and grief and suffering in the light. If they want space, they will ask for it. And you will not need to make up that you’ve done something wrong. Presence allows for sands to shift.
Comfort looks like soup
Or pad thai. Or a shoveled walkway. Or a trip to the library with their kid.
What you can’t say in words, you can say in gestures. They will be appreciated, more than you may ever know.
How to dump OUT
Oh my Darling. I’m sorry if you’re in a ring smaller than someone else, then you are in it. You are in this crisis. Yes. I am truly sorry.
Ask for what you need. You are not a burden.
Keep asking as your needs shift and change. What you needed when the crisis was burning and the pain was acute will transmute as it becomes more chronic.
You have an unlimited store of karmic asks saved up. Ask. Ask. Ask. And ask some more.
Be as specific as your grief will allow. If you don’t know what you need, ask for help discerning your asks. Truly.
There are concentric rings of care around you, unseen, but there. Waiting for your ask.
The truth is this: none of us escapes grief, loss, and sorrow. Knowing how to be with each others’ tears softens the hardest places of our beings.
Will you please share in the comments what you know about comforting and being comforted? It helps.
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* I can't help but wonder if the writers speaking to the impact of Kurt’s suicide were inadvertently following this model… voicing their outrage to readers further removed from the epicenter of the crisis. Dumping OUT. And if frankly, that's what most writing it about. Still pondering...
Check out my free training on the 5 Shifts Our Clients Use to Overcome the Imposter Complex and Grow their Income and their Impact
Where I pull back the curtain on five shifts to start raising voices, rates, and hands all while being the kind, congruent, and authentic leader I know you to be.
It’s an illusion that you're in this all on your own.
You know the lesson that you are here to teach? The one you keep learning, relearning, and learning once more?
“We teach best what we most need to learn.” – Richard Bach
That lesson, for me, is:: “It’s an illusion that you're in this all on your own.” Time and time again, I hear myself say it to my clients. It showed up in this Cue Card last April.
It’s an illusion that you’re in this all on your own
In fact, it’s the very premise of my Board of Your Life offering.
Because IT’S TRUE. Just about everything I have ever, EVER created was made better or smarter, more easily, more pleasurably, more joyfully when I’ve done it in community. When I haven’t tried to muddle through on my own. When I’ve sought counsel. When I’ve invited support. When I GOT OVER the fact that it didn’t make me seem weak or less independent or LESS THAN because I wanted help holding all that I was trying to create. We all do.
I am surrounded by a stunning flock, to be sure. But it wasn’t something that just happened because I got lucky (though I am indeed, very very lucky). I’ve cultivated relationships. I’ve tended and tendered. I've helped and I've asked for help.
So when it came time to getting the word about the Step into Your Starring Role program in a wider and broader way, I knew that I would be required to ask for help again. And, I resisted. Because, once again, I bought into the illusion that I'm in this on my own.
Why? For all the same reasons my clients resist, my colleagues resist, YOU resist.
1) We don’t want to be a burden. 2) We are fiercely independent.
Let's unpack that.
We don’t want to be a burden.
Of COURSE we don’t want to be a burden. Nobody wants to be a burden. But when you make an ask of someone, ensuring that it is reasonable, specific, brief, respectful and CLEAR (oh please, let it be clear), then it rests in the hands of the person you’ve asked. They can say yes, if the ask aligns with their time, energy, interest, ability and capacity and they can say no if it doesn’t.
Remember though, that if you’re asking for something that is close to your heart and meaningful, then you’re asking someone who knows that to be true and wants it for you as well. Deeply. In fact, if you’re swinging out with your magnificence in any way, I know that they are thrilled for you. Because it’s an illusion that you are keeping all of that brilliance to yourself.
Others want to play a part. (If their time, energy, interest, ability and capacity allows).
Need a reminder? Just think back to any time someone you deeply cared for needed your help. Did you consider them a burden? Unlikely. You probably discerned if and how you were able to support them, and accordingly said yes, no or made a counter-offer.
You ask, and they answer. It’s a beautiful thing.
We are fiercely independent
Like the toddler who discovers he can stack his blocks all.by.himself, we want to feel free of anyone else’s control. We want to make our own decisions. We don’t want to be beholden.
I came across this yesterday::
"thing is... you need enough ego to act when everyone else says it's impossible, and enough humility to know that once you've made it happen, it wasn't about you." - Jonathan Fields
It’s rarely ever about you. That’s a sort of good news/bad news thing. Forces beyond you, WELL beyond you, are at play. You’ve felt it every time you’ve been lifted by an unseen hand. Angels. Devas. Luck. Stars. Serendipity. Whether you’ve named it or not, you have had those moments when you’ve felt that the universe in conspiring WITH you. It’s called pronoia and it’s the opposite of paranoia. And it’s heeding the call of your ego…which is very very good (in spite of the bad rap the “ego” gets.)
So yeah, it’s an illusion that you're in this all on your own. Because you’re NEVER all on your own.
May as well lean back into the glorious people in your life who want to see you thrive.
Which is what I did.
When there were aspects of the program launch that I didn’t want to do, or scared me, I asked for help. When I needed help spreading word wide and far about the program, I asked.
The support has been swift, stunning and humbling and so very appreciated with much, MUCH more coming over the next two weeks. There have been tweets, likes, shares. Every last one sweet like a kiss.
And these gifts of heart:
Erin, Amy, and Tania let me share their Step into Your Starring Role experience.
Tara Gentile took the lead in conceptualizing and creating the stunning sales page and has been a steadfast partner, friend, and collaborator, for whom I am deeply grateful.
Jen Louden and I had a fabulous conversation about the imposter complex and the pain of waiting.
Lauren Bacon wrote a post heralding this program and my work with the imposter complex that brought tears to my eyes (and included one of the most heartfelt disclosures about affiliate partnerships that I’ve seen.)
Chris Francoeur (brilliant coach, former participant, and I’m excited to share, the ASSISTANT for the program) spoke of the life-changing and EXPANSIVE impact of the program.
Ronna Detrick and I spoke about the spotlight, shining and what the soul wants. So good.
Erin Giles reminds you about the game-changing work you're up to in the world. And how Step into Your Starring Role helped her with hers.
Jackie Dumaine and I spoke about asteya and how NOT stepping into your starring role is actually a form of stealing as part of her Yoga Code Free Virtual Conference (our conversation is live TODAY).
And TOMORROW, brilliant light Annika Martins and I are doing a live call about Stepping Into Your Spiritual Authority. Being the star of your spiritual life - the queen of the castle of your heart. If you've been hiding or minimizing your spiritual beliefs (WHATEVER they may be) in order to make other people feel comfortable or to avoid judgement, this call is for you. Click HERE to sign up.
Yeah. It’s an illusion that I have to go this alone. It’s an illusion that YOU have to go this alone. (Tweet)
So…just ask. You’ll just may find the road traveled will better, smarter, easier, more pleasurable and far, FAR more joyful. In fact, you may even find yourself utterly blown away by the number of people who really want to see YOU step into your starring role.
Check out my free training on the 5 Shifts Our Clients Use to Overcome the Imposter Complex and Grow their Income and their Impact
Where I pull back the curtain on five shifts to start raising voices, rates, and hands all while being the kind, congruent, and authentic leader I know you to be.