What’s holding you back?

Everyone has something holding them back. Keeping them from reaching their goals. It might be an inability to lose weight. To get into a relationship or to keep one. To commit. To be faithful. To go for that promotion. To go for that dream job even though it pays less. To break out on your own. To break the mold. To come out. To confess. To wipe the slate clean. To forgive someone.

What’s holding you back? And why are you letting it?

We do, or don’t do, many things because of fear. Fear that you are not good enough.  Fear that you might fail. Fear that if you take a chance, you’ll fall flat on your face and have to hear “I told you so.” Fear of change in general, even if we don’t like where we are.

We operate based on misconceptions and false beliefs. We believe we are not deserving of better. Or that love is for someone else. Or that only the lucky get rich. Or get the girl. Or get the guy.

Life takes courage. Courage to break through those fear-based thoughts to realize our potential. We ALL have potential. We all can REALIZE that potential. It takes guts, it takes heart, and it takes moxie – the “ability to face difficulty with spirit and courage.” That’s what it takes to be who we are supposed to be. That’s what it takes to realize our full potential.

Look at the fear-based decisions in your life. Look at what they have done to you, where they have gotten you. If you are not happy, if you are not where you want to be, break through the fear. Find the courage to take what you want out of life and make it the life you want. Life is too short to spend the end of it regretting what you didn’t do…and realizing that your fear-based decisions were all the wrong ones.

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What would you do for free?

What would you do for free?

If you had a nonstop source of income that you didn’t have to work for, what would you do with your time? In other words…what is your passion? Many people work at jobs they don’t like or don’t love and spend their passion pursuing an avocation. They can’t wait to get off work so they can do what they REALLY want to do. But why must that be? If your heart tells you to do something else, that’s what you should be doing. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

A good friend recently told me that “currents of favor” start to flow for you when you align yourself with your passion, and she’s exactly right. I have seen this and I have lived it. When you are on the right path, the people, resources, and information you need magically seem to come your way, sometimes almost effortlessly. It’s an amazing thing to witness, even more amazing to experience. But that’s how you know you are on the right path. That’s the confirmation, in case you have any doubt.

You may also experience synchronous events. I recently decided to resign my position as an editor to break out on my own as a freelance writer. As I was mulling this over, I felt compelled to contact a friend I hadn’t talk to in a while. I emailed him, and he emailed back that he was just thinking about me that morning, and thinking that he could see me working as a freelance writer! He had no idea at all that I had been contemplating making that change, and we had never talked about it. But that was confirmation for me that I was making the right decision. I haven’t looked back since.

You see, I would write for free. There is nothing else I would rather do than write. It’s my passion. I tell my son (who is twelve) that when he grows up, he can be whatever he wants to be in life — but that he should ask himself what he would do for free. And that’s what he should do for a living, because that’s his passion. It does give one pause for reflection.

Change can be scary, but when you follow your passion, the Universe aligns to make it happen.  As my friend said, the Universe won’t fail you. And she is right. It certainly hasn’t failed me yet.

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Keep moving forward

If you have not seen the move “Meet the Robinsons,” I highly recommend it. It is not just a kids’ movie. Every time I see it, I am amazed at all the life lessons it holds. 

The movie is about an orphan boy (who happens to be a budding inventor) in search of a family. At first he is searching for the mother who left him as a baby at the orphanage, but later he realizes that he should not look to the past to find his family, but to the future. 

This movie teaches us that we must be ourselves and be appreciated for who we are, on our own terms. That trying to change to please others and “fit in” isn’t necessarily in our best interest. That sometimes life is hard while it prepares us for our best destiny, but that the preparation is necessary. That we must be patient while we’re waiting for good things to come to us. That things happen when the timing is right. That we must be open to new possibilities and opportunities and seize them when they are in front of us. That small acts of kindness and compassion may have ripple effects we can’t even imagine.

The movie’s motto is “keep moving forward.” This in itself carries many meanings, but for me, it means we shouldn’t let ourselves become stuck in our lives or worse, give up. We need to keep progressing toward whatever it is we desire. And if we already have what we want, then we can want something more and progress toward that. Or, we can give back and make the world a better place by humanitarian efforts. The key is to “keep moving forward.” We humans are all about expanding our horizons. If we as a people were ever content with where we were at, we wouldn’t be where we are today. We would still be in the Dark Ages.

Not everyone may get all this from this movie. But I did. Movies, songs, poems…they speak to people differently. You get what you need from them. You see what you see. If you watch the movie and don’t see these things in it, so be it…it’s still entertaining. But it may make you think. And it may make you look for deeper meaning in other media.

There are messages everywhere if we take the time to view the world with our hearts. And you may find them in the most unlikely places.

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Our dreams are telling us something

Lately I’ve been dreaming about spiders. More correctly, spiders attacking me. You know, where they fly through the air on a web at you, and somehow you can’t avoid them. In fact, I woke up with one of those little tiny “dream screams” as I was trying to get the spider off me. I think this dream is telling me to clean my basement, though I can’t be sure. It could also be telling me to get rid of the cobwebs of the past in my life. I do tend to carry the past around…not consciously, but in the form of accumulated clutter. I’m not a pack rat by any means. In fact, I’ve been in my current house eleven years, but I don’t have much more stuff than I had when I moved in. But I save paper. You never know when you might want to refer back to that piece of paper, I guess is my unconscious thinking. And, once in a while I’m right, but usually I never look at most of my files of papers. I hate paper clutter, yet I feel it all has to be accumulated and filed.

Why? I’m not really sure. But my dream at least is making me think about it. How nice it would be to just ditch all these stacks of papers that surround me and have a clean desk. And yet, when I have a clean desk, I seem to have an uncluttered mind — a mind devoid of inspiration, that is. When my desk is cluttered, somehow that gets the creative juices flowing, because I have projects going. Somehow, it helps me think, and it inspires me. Don’t ask me how that works, but it does. It’s the same way at work. My desk at work is cluttered, but I think best that way. Go figure.

So I guess the point here is that we have to do what’s right for us, even if it is not the norm or what is necessarily expected of us.

Now, back to my nightmare. I still think it means I have to clean my basement. But I also think I need to declutter – somewhat – and stop holding onto the past. All in good time.

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