How you keep creating your vision, even when you feel you can’t do more.

How you stay strong, healthy, happy, even when things seem stacked against you.

How you adapt to what is, but still stay true to who you are.

How you also allow yourself to not be strong or happy and sometimes perhaps also not healthy.

As I grew in my career, it dawned on me that was I was really paid to do was to simplify:

…Simplify a message so that more people could understand it.

…Simplify a strategy so that it was easier to achieve.

…Simplify a process so that it would serve people and not the other way around.

…Simplify a crisis so that we could deal with it one task at a time.

This month we have been keeping our focus on what it takes to create.

One word that landed with me some years ago, and keeps coming back to me now, is: “Commit.”

Commitment is not the only factor in successfully creating what we love. But for me, it has been the single thing lacking every time I have failed. Every single time.

What does it take to create a labour of love?

We have often heard that it takes “blood, sweat and tears” to create something that means a lot to us.

But, it occurred to me yesterday that blood, sweat and tears are all experienced by our physical body - and yet, so many of our creations never even make it to the physical realm because they remain ideas or desires in our minds.

What does it take to create a labour of love?

We have often heard that it takes “blood, sweat and tears” to create something that means a lot to us.

But, it occurred to me yesterday that blood, sweat and tears are all experienced by our physical body - and yet, so many of our creations never even make it to the physical realm because they remain ideas or desires in our minds.

One Foot in Front of the Other

“How will I get it all done?”, she asked.

“In one moment, and then another,” he smiled.

“There’s nothing more you can do now

Than to do now.

So do now, and do it well.”

When we work on bringing our dreams to life, even when we are doing what we love, there will be days when we might question our “Why?”.

“Why did I choose to go down this path?”

“Why didn’t I stay on the easy and familiar route?”

“Is it all worth it?”

“How am I going to create it?”

“What’s going to happen next?”

“Do I have what it takes?”

“Do I want this enough?”

Inspiration comes in all forms and at all times. (Sometimes in the middle of a stormy night when you’re already awake, and ideas and realisations find the space to calmly settle in your mind.)

Inspiration is a sense of possibility. That spark in us that something more is yet to be done, yet to be created, yet to come into existence.

And true inspiration always finds its way into action.

At some time or the other, we have all probably felt hurt by another person and what they said or did or didn’t do for us.

We feel emotionally hurt by other people when they fail to meet our expectations in some way.

Sounds simple enough, and perhaps it seems like a ‘fair equation’. If they disappoint us, if let us down with their words or behaviour, we surely deserve to feel hurt!

I have some sad news to share. This week we lost a loved one. Our beloved ‘Opa’, my husband’s grandfather, passed away in his sleep on Tuesday night.

He was a formidable man, but from the first moment I met him, it was as if he softened to me, and he filled my heart with so much love in turn…

Sending you a ‘holiday postcard’ from Fichtenwalde, Germany today!

had a very full day with 8 hours of training today, and yet I followed through on what I wanted to do for myself (snuck in during small chunks of time before work and during quick breaks), and these three beautiful experiences resulted…

Our fear self wants us to be safe and viable. And so it tells us to hide: to hide our heart until we are perfectly safe and perfectly assured of love and appreciation. To hide our gifts until the perfect moment with the perfect people. To hide our expression until we are perfectly wise and capable. To hide away from action until we have the perfect conditions and the perfect energy.

Today’s words of wisdom are very personal, from a man I greatly respect and admire, my grandfather.

When we spoke a couple of days ago, I shared with him that I am currently visiting my in-laws, and he was very happy to hear that we were all having a great time together as a family. He also shared these words of wisdom with me:

“Always give your love and respect, a person’s own behaviour is what leads them to receive love and respect.” – NK Walia

As we start a new week, new experiences naturally come our day. In fact, new information presents itself to us every day, and in every conversation.

Even if we feel like we have the ‘same conversation’ over and over again with someone or that we are not experiencing anything new in our jobs or our relationships or our lives, that is not true. This perception of ‘familiarity’ is a barrier created by our fear lens so that it can quickly catalogue things as ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’ and ‘defend’ us from the world.

Today’s Fearless food for thought is inspired by my new sister-in-law, who saw this quote on a T-shirt whilst on honeymoon and shared it with me.

You see, we don’t trust our power. We don’t trust the unique desires, abilities, gifts and expression that we each have, that make us who we are and allow us to create the life that we would love. We fear that expressing our greatness in the world will lead us to be shunned or attacked. Unconsciously we worry that we will lose something that we currently have if we rise into our true power:

Everything that we fear lies in our thoughts. 

When we worry about the future or concern ourselves with the past, we distract ourselves from the step we are meant to take NOW.

Instead of simply putting one foot in front of the other solidly, safely, securely, we allow our fear to speak even louder through our thoughts

Today, I wanted to share with you this quote from Plato’s works that have layers of depth and meaning for me:

“Love is simply the name of the desire and pursuit of the whole.”

(Plato, The Symposium)

Strong, loving relationships that hold us, support us and encourage us to thrive are what we seek, and what fuel our growth as human, social animals. And yet, most of us find ourselves in relationships (work or personal) where we either don’t feel truly loved and appreciated, or we feel that we are not free to fully express our own unique desires, creativity and exploration.

When we care about something or someone, at some point we worry.

We fear that we may not get what we need or that our dreams may not come to fruition, or that we may lose the love of the people we care about, or worse. And so we worry. And our worry tells us to go deeper into thinking about everything that could go wrong, it tells us to feel afraid and awful (even though the thing we worry about hasn’t actually happened), and it tells us to hold on to what is so that what we worry about never comes to pass (even though ‘what is’ is an uncomfortable and unhappy state of worry and fear).