Tag Archives: find

What do you REALLY want?

I often study Napoleon Hill’s work.

He wrote Think and Grow Rich and The 15 Laws of Success. Most of today’s self-help industry is based on Hill’s work in the early 1900’s. Although it looks like it is tied to money as a form of success, Hill really speaks to attaining your desires, whatever they may be.

One aspect of Hill’s work that I love is his revelation that of the 16,000 people he studied the successful ones (only 5% of the total people studied) all were doing what they loved!

How amazing is that?

My work, whether coaching women in business or personal areas, always starts with going deep into the question, “What do you really want?” For years, I could not even begin to answer that question, even about the most mundane things like what restaurant to go to. Why? Because my radar was tuned so strongly to my environment, keeping everyone else happy, and doing what others wanted as my means of getting ahead that I had lost touch with looking inside to find any answers—even those.

You, too, might be struggling to define what you really want. Without having a definite purpose or aim your life probably feels lackluster. Many women go through life like a ship without a rudder because they spent so many years helping others achieve their goals—spouses, children, even bosses.

If you have reached the point where you no longer have children at home, or you want to change your work but don’t quite know how then now is the time to invest in you and find your passion and create a plan to live it.

Carol Hagar and I create women’s retreats throughout the year to help women find their strength and live from it. Our beginning of the year retreats are always amazing because our focus as a culture is always keen on creating plans and making changes at this time of year.

I invite you to join us this year, as we bring together a group of kindred sisters and explore true nature of our inner wishes and find the means of expressing them in our world. We will meet near Austin, Texas, on Saturday, January 31st. If you cannot make it in person, we will have a live training online later in February. However, if you attend live you will get the added benefit of connecting with other women who can hold your intention in their hearts as you move forward into creating 2015 to be your best year thus far.

What are you excited about?

“What are you most excited about right now?”  What a great conversation starter!  This article by Kate Northrup really highlights my mantra–do what you love, be passionate about what you do, find goals that inspire you and every thing else will fall into place.

Give yourself permission to create a beautiful vegetable garden feeling as good about it as running a multi-million dollar business. And give other women permission to do the same every opportunity you get.  Reminding each other that we are valuable in the small things we do, not just in our public successes helps us stay out of overwhelmed and under-inspired lives. My favorite thing Kate wrote is:

“THE ACT OF PASSIONATE CREATION ITSELF IS WHAT GIVES AN ENDEAVOR MERIT — NOT ITS VALUE IN THE MARKETPLACE.”

We women have been running the race to prove we are worthy of equal pay, equal opportunities and equal respect for so long we have forgotten to check in with ourselves and make sure we are doing what we love.

Really take in what this says.  “The act of passionate creation…”  When was the last time you did this?  The more often you create with passion, the more alive you will feel.  Guaranteed.  “…is what gives an endeavor merit”  Not what other people think.  Not how much you get paid for it. Not whether anyone else acknowledges it at all.  Nothing in the outer world can give value to or take value away from your passionate creations.  They have intrinsic value because you created them with passion.

What are you excited about, today?

Your New Life Awaits — Part 1

I read a statistic today that 93% of women are depressed or despondent towards there future!  I don’t know how they calculated this or if it is a gross exaggeration of the actual study; but ladies, even if we cut the number in half something is terribly wrong here!

Depression and despondency come from a lack of passion and joy in our days and weeks and months as they pass by.  They come from feeling trapped in a place, a job or a relationship that does not feed our soul.  They come from a life not lived–but merely endured or survived.

Most of us have moments of both joy and depression.  The question is in where are we most of the time?  Do our moments of joy kindly spice an otherwise dull existence just enough to keep us there?  Or do our moments of depression and despondency come when we occasionally forget to take care of ourselves and exhaustion sets in?  The first is a prescription for trouble.  The second is a wakeup call to recalibrate our priorities.

Many of us in the first scenario of joyful moments feeding us just enough to keep us stuck happen because we have created our own prison.  Before you put up your defenses and your story–stay with me.  Reflect on your own passage to your current life.  Most of us at some point or another choose to follow a certain “path” of how we project our womanhood to the world.  Whether it is because we were rejecting who our mothers were or because we followed their tradition does not matter.  How we got here–whether we saw power in this path or because we ran from the reaction people had to us when we attempted another path, or something in our history–no longer matters.  

What matters is what path we choose today.  Does it empower us to feel alive, or have we carved away huge parts of our feminine soul in order to “be” the role we have assumed.   Next time we will look at some generalized paths women are taking, how they affect us, and how we can break free from our own imposed prison if we find ourselves less than fully enthusiastic when we awake each day.

For the Good of the Tribe

Our world will be healed, our lifestyles will be sustainable, our communities will thrive and our relationships will be enlivening only when the feminine is valued, nurtured and has a voice.

Although this blog speaks to women, eventually strong women leads to men and women valuing the feminine in each of us.  And this is where balance can be found.  Since the 1960’s women have developed and honored our own masculine traits.  It was a difficult and bold change from our foremothers.  We now have both power and influence in our world in many ways.

Yet, we journeyed here at a severe cost to our internal feminine compass.  It is incumbent upon women in this new era to raise our feminine while continuing to honor and develop our own masculine.  It is essential we find our voice in ways that encourage the masculine in our men, rather than demean them.  Balancing our own masculine and feminine natures – and requiring the men we choose relationships with to do the same – will create new co-empowered relationships in our homes, communities, work places and government.    In her book Mutant Down Under, Marlo Morgan asked the aboriginal wise woman/grandmother which was more important in their culture – men’s work or women’s work?  It took multiple translations back and forth before the grandmother replied, “I understand her words, but her question does not make sense.  Both men and women’s work is essential for the survival of the tribe.” 

Look at our school systems, our health care system, our economy, the environment and our government.   The survival of our tribe is at stake!

We must start with our inner world.  And it will come as no surprise that the quickest way to find your inner roadmap (its joys, its detours and potholes) is to raise a child.  For women having our daughters enter adolescence can be a loud wake up call to our own unprocessed issues about being a woman.

The survival of our human tribe depends on women learning to influence the fabric of our culture from our deep inner feminine wisdom.  We must walk away from the trance of our culture and remember our place in the circle of life.  We must remember our worth, so we speak our truth and inspire ourselves and our men to bold acts of integrity and soul filled businesses, governments, and economies.  It is within our grasp.