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“Within the body you are wearing, now inside the bones and beating in the heart,
lives the one you have been searching for but you must stop running away and shake hands, the meeting doesn’t happen without your presence . . .” ~ Robert Hall

Devote a Day to Love

I am often surprised when I hear that someone is opposed to celebrating Valentine’s Day, birthdays or whatever celebration popular culture deems ‘this is the day for…’. I understand the push back at commercialism, the ache for simplicity and authenticity. And yet, days with built-in reminders to honour the loves in our lives are still beautiful opportunities. Use those days to be creative, to make your love visible in not only what you give but in your very way of being.

One of the most beautiful books on loving I know is one by Thich Nhat Hanh called, “True Love: A Practice for Awakening the Heart”. It is a small book packed full of accessible wisdom that you can take immediately into your life. The first time I read this book, I consumed it in entirety while having a bath. I have since re-read it many times over the years when deep connection has felt illusive. It is a book that serves as a gentle reminder that love begins with the self and that simple practices are sometimes the truest.

Simple, Loving Meditation Practices

Here is one such practice from the book above that might help bridge a formal meditation practice (if you have one) or to begin a practice of Everyday Mindfulness:

When looking at your beloved, for example, you could breathe in – and say in your mind to yourself, ‘I see you,’ and then as you breathe out – you might say again in your mind to yourself. ‘and I am glad for it.’

You could do this when you look at the sunrise, the snow falling, the wind’s movement through the trees, your child sleeping.

Here is another practice from a different book also written by Thich Nhat Hanh called, “Planting Seeds: Practicing Mindfulness with Children”. It is a practice we did as a family when my daughter was quite small and the memory of it still fills me with so much love. Commit to this with anyone you wish to cultivate a deeper connection with. It is a Three-Breath Hugging Meditation:

Begin standing opposite to someone you love and make eye contact and smile. Slowly embrace and on the first inhalation become aware of your breath and say in your mind, ‘I am so grateful I am alive’. Then breathe out. Take your second inhalation and direct your attention to the breath of the person in your arms and say in your mind, “I am so grateful that you are alive’. Then breathe out. Take your third inhalation and say in your mind, ‘I am so grateful to hold you in my arms.’

What Would Valentine’s Day (or any day!) be Without Chocolate? Without Poetry?

Here is a tried and true recipe to make (it says in the recipe that extra chocolate is optional which prompts the question: Is extra chocolate ever ‘optional’?).

I have also selected a couple of poems that you might give to your love this Valentine’s Day:

What She Could Not Tell Him ~ Denise Levertov

I wanted to know all the bones of your spine, all the pores of your skin, tendrils of body hair. To let all of my skin, my hands, ankles, shoulders, breasts, even my shadow, be forever imprinted with whatever of you is forever unknown to me. To cradle your sleep.

Women Who Sleep Outdoors ~ John B. Lee

It seems in the primordial menses of natural night that women who sleep outdoors attend to lunar rhythms as their moon-drawn darkness weeps away from the womb like crimson cloth woven to flow in the slow tidings of heaven’s loom and from the fallopial ache to where meanwhile the vulva swells like the bivalves of a breathing sea life comes away as a half-completed seed under the black sky’s brilliant fecundity of stars as those radiant maps set out the seasons of desire in design.

And how might I place this human heart this velvet clock this soul-sad calendar born beating at the clavicle like a gentle knocking of waves for I am a fathering creature and cannot comprehend circumference or why by that stone’s reflected light those liquid gravities have no equal anima in me. And yet I am completed by the sleeper’s satellite. However long I live I’ll draw one luminous circle from within and love one woman forever.

And finally, one last quote and so much LOVE from me to you, beautiful one, who is reading this…

“Your task is not to seek love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” ~ Rumi

Having hope is optimism that something desirable will come to fruition. We often think of having hope as a really positive thing. If you want to find an inspirational quote about how to get through difficulty, hope is a word you will bump up against again and again.

What if losing hope, or at least using it, was a more helpful concept?

If you think about it, when you feel hopeful, your desire is just out of reach. When you are ‘hoping’ you are not ‘in the experience of’. Your eye is on the prize in the future. What happens to the tiny miracles unfolding right in front of you? What happens to the opportunities to act in the present when you are invested in hope’s promise for a specific outcome in the future? Are you willing to be complicit with taking the power out of the present moment?

I was asked this week to write something about hope. I initially thought of how optimistic I feel about spring. I always do; the new green, fresh earthy smell, longer days and knowing summer is on the way. I am particularly hopeful with what spring may bring with it this year; renewed freedom and the in-person gatherings I ache for. This is how I planned to write about hope. I then also started to think about how hopeful I was last March too for the same reason.

Gratefully, hope isn’t all I’ve had to sustain me since the spring of 2020; it would have worn very thin by now. I think sometimes this is the advice we are given when things are difficult, “have hope.” The thing is, hope doesn’t keep the person you love alive, it doesn’t get you your job back, or the relationship back. It doesn’t move you into the body you hope for or fill a gaping space of loneliness. Just like motivation isn’t enough to turn your goals into reality….hope isn’t enough to pull you through difficulty. To achieve anything requires a commitment to small steps. It is during those moments when you are present that add up to the hours, days, months and years that you have truly lived. Hope, like goals, help when the reality of the present moment is difficult but so too does acting in the moment and to being alive to the pain of the present in order to heal. Openness to exactly ‘what is’ in your life is an opportunity to let joy walk into the room with you right alongside whatever else you are dealing with.

Hope is overrated but I also believe it is inherently human and undeniably beautiful.

Hope can be a life raft but without a paddle, you’ll just float around. What if every time you feel hope’s pull toward the future, you use it as a signpost for where you intend to go but also as a reminder to steady yourself right where you are so that you make the choice, see the beauty, say the words, listen, taste and touch with your whole heart. Make where you are and who you are enough. Then, start paddling.

This past year I have been thinking a great deal about the importance of self-care. If basic needs like adequate food, shelter and physical safety are secured, what is it that we owe to ourselves and how does that impact others?

In my twenties, I attended my first Yoga Teacher Training Program and it gave me a taste of what it was like to make yoga and meditation part of my life. Initially, the physical part was the only thing I could really integrate on a fairly regular basis. The rest of my life was still a circus with most minutes of the day accounted for across the various jobs and roles I’d willingly taken on. I made a habit of placing myself last on a very long to-do list. Practicing yoga and later daily meditation, only made it on my list because I perceived it as a means to being more through the accomplishment of doing more. Messaging around taking care of myself was very mixed up with words like not-enough, indulgent, lazy and very notably this word: selfish.

Is Self-Care Selfish?

According to the Oxford dictionary selfish is defined as “…lacking consideration for others; concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure.”

Let’s take the very first part…”lacking consideration for others,” and be open to the possibility that self-care like adequate sleep, exercise and a healthy diet may be the steadiest path to altruism and further that even the second part of that definition, “concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure,” may also be false when your intention is aligned with helping others and being the force of good in the world. The very practice of filling your own cup could be the very thing that allows you to have anything and everything to give to the world.

My second yoga teacher training program in my thirties was a residential program in rural Mexico. I camped and lived a yoga lifestyle that checked all the self-care boxes that I had never before made a priority. For a full month I slept well, I practised yoga asana for multiple hours a day and we ate simple, unprocessed and healthy food. There were fewer external distractions (no cell service, access to the internet or television), messaging was very positive; we sang, chanted and discussed yoga philosophy. Living in nature, regular meditation and the dynamics of being in community, provided an abundance of self-reflection on destructive story-telling alongside tangible experiences of the unique magic that each of us are capable of. It was a beautiful month.

Then…I went back to my hectic life where none of these values of self-care were supported, never mind celebrated. My time away was both a valuable gift and an experience in what seemed like an unattainable idealism for the real world. I did want to continue filling my cup but I also had responsibilities, bills to pay, dysfunctional relationships to navigate and goals I was excited about meeting. Was self-care a want? Or was it something crucial? If giving back was something I thought was important how much (if anything) was I required to give to myself first?

Decide for Yourself

When you consider self-care, can you get on-board with the basics? Can you see that if you did get eight hours of sleep each night, drank enough water, ate whole-foods including plenty of greens, exercised and spent some time in nature, that you would be starting with a fuller cup each day? If these are not current priorities, take a moment to imagine a life that includes them. How might you be available to others in meaningful ways? How might your willingness to help others increase if you weren’t exhausted, depleted and solely running on caffeine, sugar or alcohol? How might the world benefit from you investing in you?

Recall that second part of the definition of selfish, “concerned chiefly with one’s own personal profit or pleasure.” Imagine your cup full of adequate sleep, healthy food, exercise and so on and now add things like: choosing to be with people each day who bring you joy, making laughter a priority, participating in activities that stimulate your mind and both challenge and nurture your body, using acts of kindness as activism, and regularly getting lost in activities because it makes your heart truly happy. Imagine now, how you might contribute to the world when your cup isn’t just full, it is spilling over. Is pleasure selfish then? Are using your talents to secure financial wealth selfish when you leverage opportunities to lift others up, when you support projects that empower, when you have more time and energy available to find creative solutions?

Hasn’t the pandemic been a year-long illustration of how self-care directly results in taking care of others? Keeping yourself healthy contributes to the greater good. Placing value on self-care is a gradual dawning of understanding that our interdependence is crucial for a healthier world. The practice of filling your own cup is the very thing that might allow you to have anything and everything to give to the world.

“Instead of worrying about what you cannot control, shift your energy to what you can create.” 
― Roy T. Bennett

When I was in my twenties I went on a big solo adventure. I started in Fiji, then went to New Zealand and finally to Australia. I spent roughly a month in each place and had the absolute time of my life.

Planning for my trip was a different matter though. I was so full of worry I almost didn’t go. I convinced myself I would never return alive. I was quite certain I was going to die in all kinds of ways that I imagined in excruciating detail. There was a big snowstorm the day of my flight and I secretly hoped I’d be granted one more day at home so I could say a proper ‘goodbye forever’ to everyone I loved (yes, it was all very dramatic). Once I got on the plane, surprisingly, my worry dropped like a stone. And even when I did all kinds of crazy things that would have made any casual observer worry for my safe return, I remained steady, capable and took each moment and each day as it came.

Parenting has been a similar journey. I almost missed out on being a mom because I worried about all kinds of things; mostly that I wasn’t ready, that I hadn’t done enough work on myself to take on raising a child. Since my daughter’s birth, I have worried over so many decisions that I coped with through excessive reading, researching, making endless lists and joining various parent-child groups. There have been some unexpected twists but mostly it has been the adventure of a lifetime. Once I am ‘in it’ whatever the worry was simply becomes insignificant and I recognize that there was no sense in worrying to begin with.

This week for my writing group we were asked to write a poem about the hands of someone we know. The poem that spilled from this prompt has that old stamp of worry all over it and that tells me that I am about to enter a phase where I have a choice: I can exhaust my energy with worry or I can drop the stone now and recognize that I can choose to shift my energy into a continual connection with my daughter, one moment and one day at a time.

What kind of role does worry play in your life? How does it catapult you into story-telling and drama? How does it exhaust your energy reserves? How can you recognize it and shift into moment by moment awareness instead?

“In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.” ~ Buddha

On Sunday our beautiful cat Grace died. She was such a bright light in our house. She had a sweet, dainty face, a big voice and an even bigger attitude. She trained us very well in the almost 16 years we have shared a house.

She was an early bird like me and we did pretty much the same things together most mornings. Grace liked to be fed around four a.m. followed by a specific brushing routine (just her head, chops and spine to the end of her tail). Some mornings she would tolerate (barely) if I slept in until five. She would meow and hit her paws against the half french doors near her food dish to announce she was ready for me to come to the kitchen or she would announce herself in the bedroom with loud meows and start knocking things over on purpose. Sometimes if I went into the bathroom first or poured a glass of water before getting her food in her dish, I’d receive a nip on the calf as if to say, ‘umm, the food is what we do first.’ She was big on bossy but also big on a routine that required she snuggled into my legs and purr on my meditation cushion with me after she’d eaten and been brushed.

This week there is a huge gap in my mornings. I miss her. I can feel my clinging to how things have been.

On the weekend, she transitioned from acting ‘off’ to being very ill. Overnight on Saturday she was hardly moving. I was up with her like I have been up with my daughter when she hasn’t felt well. I slept little but later felt guilty that I slept at all knowing it was the last opportunity I had to make sure she felt loved. In the final hours, before we took her for emergency vet care, I began to realize we would likely have to let her go. I loved her. I love her. Letting go is difficult.

Death can be a wonderful teacher. I am aware of how much I have felt inclined to deny the present by replaying the past. I am sadly aware that future mornings will be different. I am aware that love exists in the present and physical presence of a beloved isn’t a requirement.

Death is also a wonderful teacher because the conversations at my house the last few days have been so valuable. I have watched my own words about guilt over not doing enough be received by my daughter and realized that is not the role model I want to be. We are all enough because we do our best in the moment with the information, skills and resources we have. ‘Not enough’ doesn’t live in the present moment and can be destructive when we drag it into the future. As a family, we have spoken about the permanence of physical death and the choices we have: to live in gratitude that we shared our lives with another being, to be with grief when it arises without pushing away opportunities for joy.

The death of anything in your life (broken relationships, roles you have played that are no longer required, a job you have lost or a dream unfulfilled) brings with it incredible opportunities for looking inward at your relationship with yourself. Practice with yourself to love, to live gently and to let go. This can only happen in the present moment.

Where do you spend most of your time? If your gaze is stuck in the memories of the past or projected into the future, you are missing the sunshine right outside your window? You are missing the opportunities to truly live and to become someone else’s sunshine so they might find enough warmth to look inward too.

“In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.” ~ Buddha

“‘It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” ~ Margery Williams Bianco, The Velveteen Rabbit

I used to teach yoga classes at a local Montessori pre-school. The kids were between the ages of three to five years old. There were lots of things I loved about doing this: high energy and silliness was a requirement, the kids were fun and always made me laugh so much and they also were constantly teaching me what it means to be authentic and how early many of us are trained to be someone other than who we are.

Are you a people-pleaser?

Acting ‘nice’ is generally rewarded. If you become adept at pleasing others you are likely to create more social connections than those who constantly rock the boat. Nice is nice to be around but nice also has a not-so-nice side. Nice can stand in the way of acting in accordance to your values. Nice can render you immobile when action is best for all involved. Nice can stand in the way of healthy behaviours and growth. ‘Nice’ is also not the same thing as being kind or being honest. Acting nice often comes at the cost of being authentic; aligning what you do with who you are.

Speak Your Truth: Is it true? Is it Kind? Is it Necessary?

In certain circles, ‘speaking your truth’ has become a common phrase. It is often used as a counter behaviour to all the over-the-top people-pleasing. I have struggled with regarding this as a useful practice. I have sat around more than my share of healing circles where ‘speaking your truth’ was anything but healing. Instead it seemed more like a green light for poor behaviour; a way to cling to old stories, an excuse for being in judgement of others and the world, a way of talking the talk without walking it. How can that possibly serve anyone well?

Here’s what I have come to believe: speaking your truth is part of the path toward authenticity and becomes particularly valuable when grounded using the wisdom of the sensations in your body. Get in the habit of using sensations in your body as your sounding board. When you do or say something, how does it feel? Your body doesn’t lie. Does it feel true? Kind? Necessary? Does your body retract when you gossip or ignore your own needs? Pay attention. How does it feel when you honestly sing someone’s praises and support their dreams? How does it feel when you do the same for yourself? Does your body sing and bloom too?

Try it for yourself. Speak and live your truth to become real. Alienating yourself from yourself has repercussions. Start now. Practice your way into an authentic life that you love. I’m trying my best to walk that path too.

“Sometimes the greatest miracle is being able to face exactly where you’re at and say: This is where I am, no running, no hiding. There is gold for me here and I intend to find it, no matter what.” ~ Unknown

When I was pregnant there was a certain point about mid-way through the pregnancy that for some reason a light went off for me and I actually recall thinking with alarm, “I’m really doing this.” There was no U-turn that I could see ahead which was absolutely okay but still it was a moment of really knowing ‘there is no going back’, no running or hiding. I was becoming a mother and that was for life.

What happens though when you still can make the U-turn but know it isn’t in your best interest?

The pull of the past or a draw toward a better future is so seductive sometimes that we might forget that power is always in the present moment. It isn’t necessarily easy but it is possible to make a plan for where you are headed by using your past experiences as a guide while you consciously act from exactly where you are.

Figure out small ways to flex your muscle of presence. Maybe it is through more formal practices like yoga and meditation but maybe it’s not. Your practice might be to actively listen when your spouse speaks. It might be to resist the pull of checking email during certain times of the day with no exceptions. It might be to wash the dishes with the intention of being there for every movement. It might be to watch your breath one minute for every hour of your work day.

The want-to-be-present that lives inside your daily practice will ebb and flow. Do it anyway. Some days there will be gold. Other days you’ll act like a baby about it. Sometimes I will catch the voice inside my head negotiating out of the last ten minutes of meditation or while I’m doing a standing yoga series I’m enjoying my inner voice might already be opting out of inversions or backbends. Decide on the practice and then live up to it AND actually be there for it.

Maybe then, when it comes to the bigger things; the disappointments, the heart breaks, the devastating losses, maybe then you will have the courage and tenacity to stay the course even when all you long to do is make a U-turn.

“Busyness is the greatest distraction from living, as we coast through our lives day after day, showing up for our obligations but mostly being absent from ourselves, mistaking the doing for being.” ~ Maria Popova

During the first lockdown last spring I found myself moving between what I would describe as intense restlessness and lots of doing alongside a grateful (albeit sometimes reluctant) awareness of being. Time suddenly appeared more on my side than ever before. There was no travel time anywhere, my husband also began working from home and helped more often with weekday meals, I didn’t have lunches to make, appointments to meet or yoga classes to lead. There were no pick-ups or drop-offs for my daughter, nor were there weekends away, dinner parties, lunch dates or lots of extra kids at my house crafting, eating and making their presence known by the joy and mess they left behind.

Still there were many days, especially at the beginning, that were a blur. I wasn’t present for all of the moments that added up to each day because I was ‘busy’. A new schedule emerged that in many ways mirrored the previous version; I maintained ‘busy’ but presence and leisure time were still an unobtainable luxury.

With the second lockdown, this has settled upon me. Again. I really thought I had a better handle on my busyness with the last round of pandemic lockdown training.

How does the pandemic or life in general allow you to reflect upon using ‘busy’ as: 1) a badge of honour, 2) an excuse, 3) a way to hide.

Busy as a Badge of Honour

Does busy for you mean that saying no is a missed opportunity for accomplishment instead of a chance to create a healthy life balance? Does staying busy create forgetfulness that at best is inconvenient for maintaining a highly scheduled life and at worst is hurtful to those around you when you fail to show up for them? Are you proud of being busy even amidst the fallout of having not a minute to spare? Do you ask the question, “Are you busy?” as words that could be replaced for, “Are things going well?” Do you feel successful when you juggle more things than most or when an additional impossible ‘yes’ becomes a checkmark on your to-do list? Check-in honestly about your relationship with busy. Is it really serving you and getting you closer to an authentic life? Busy is not a badge of honour. It is a choice with consequences of how much of your life is actually lived as it happens.

Busy as an Excuse for “Why Not”

If you are too busy you sometimes don’t have time to write the letter, to support the cause, to call the friend who talks for hours, to figure out the plumbing issue, the relationship issue, to finish the novel, to clean out the junk drawer, to determine what you could beneficially contribute to the lives of others. ‘Too busy’ defers action to another time but it often also distorts the hierarchy of your core values. What is really important to you? What are you missing when you keep your schedule and your mind cluttered? Is it a valid reason to not pay attention to your life? Wouldn’t you be more compelled to act if you were acutely aware of your own loneliness, your poor filing system, your leaky roof that needed to be replaced five years ago, or of your consistent sources of joy and fulfillment? If you aren’t spending much time in the present moment there will always be plenty of reasons for why not to act because after all you have too much to do to spend any time being who you are.

Busy as a Way to Hide From Connection

How do you hide? Do you overeat, disappear into your screen, gossip, gamble, clean, worry, complain, obsess over your health/the past/the future, excessively plan/exercise/drink, or do you use work commitments to keep yourself from yourself and those you share your life with?

What if your brand of busy is full of virtuous endeavours? What if you have no time to ‘be’ because of all your helpful ‘doing’? Does a lack of connection matter when you dedicate your life to helping others?

Who does it hurt when you choose to use distraction to avoid being with whatever ‘is’ in your life?

Having a positive impact on the world around you is important. Of course it is. And yet…Numbing out, regardless of how you do it, is cheating yourself (and others) from your life truly lived. When hiding deprives you of connection with who you are and with those around you, aren’t you a shadow of who you could be? Aren’t you a flicker of light in the world when you could be the sun?

Presence is everything.

“Consciousness is always drawn to the most distracting object: the bumped toe, the loud noise, or the hurting heart.” ~ Michael A. Singer

If change is a part of life, why are some changes so difficult?

According to Michael Singer in his book, The Untethered Soul, we can look at difficulty through the example of having a thorn in our skin. We can spend our whole lives protecting ourselves from the pain of the thorn when it gets bumped or we can decide to remove it.

This sounds reasonable and simple enough but what does that really look like in daily life? What happens when someone you love brushes against the thorn in your skin?

Let’s assume you recognize a disturbance and your consciousness is drawn there because someone you love expresses an idea about money that you don’t agree with and you have a story you tell yourself around this idea so that the mere mention of it bumps against your thorn painfully. If you are capable of letting it go, it ends there. You won’t draw other people into your personal drama around the thorn. You won’t put energy into protecting your thorn either. If you have allowed yourself to feel the disturbance before letting it go, the thorn starts to work its way out of your skin. Maybe not all at once, but little by little the sensitivity lessens and the thorn comes closer to the surface.

What happens when you let your consciousness move toward the disturbance and then reside there? You give away your peace and the chance to let it go. You also give away your opportunity to grow as a person when you become the disturbance instead of the watcher of the disturbance. This fallout often isn’t pretty…The one you love temporarily becomes your adversary so you can defend your position. What was once beautiful looks ugly or what felt possible becomes insurmountable. The world is the same but your consciousness has shifted and your perspective becomes obscured by the pain of your thorn that is pushed in even deeper.

Questions worth considering:

Do you want to use the life you have left protecting all of your inner thorns? Or do you want to lean into the discomfort and remove them? Practising presence is a practical approach amidst difficulty and a necessary tool for embracing change and welcoming growth.

“And what is it to work with love? …

It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit…

~ Kahlil Gibran

This first week of 2021 I have been reflecting on what I want the rest of the year to look and feel like. I want all my strivings and efforts to be work that is love made visible. It is a tall order but what is the beginning of the year for, other than to embrace possibility?

I bought a 2021 goal tracking book in November. It is beautiful…it is full of inspiring quotes and has ribbons to mark pages. I have sat with it on my lap quite a bit since my purchase but I actually haven’t written a single thing in it. I saddled my sister with the matching book and she is feeling the same way; like there is this looming and monumental task ahead that she feels obliged to complete.

Here is what I have set in motion instead. I’ve gone back to my tried and true goal setting/vision for the future stuff with a few added intentions of using the fancy book to stay on track. Look out 2021, I’m taking the reins.

Are you a goal setter? Do you want to be? Do you want to chart your course or tweak how you move through the coming year?

Here’s a process to follow…see if all (or parts) of it resonate for you:

Figure out what your top nine core values are and then rate them from 1-9 with 1-3 being the absolute most important filters (also read the word ‘filters’ as motivators) for all your goal categories. I think it is important to see/understand your landscape of nine core values but work with the top three for goal setting. When there is more than three, I think it’s hard to stay focused. If you want a list of core values to work from try this link.

Goal categories (add or subtract what feels right for you): Financial, Career/Business/School, Relationships, Free-Time, Family-Time, Health and Appearance, Personal Growth, Making a Difference.

Normally, I make a vision board for the year using images I am drawn to and I allow the process to be more intuitive. I like working this way. I am often surprised to see what materializes from my efforts. I also separately set yearly goals. This week, I decided to shake things up for 2021; I am making my vision board a visual representation of my structured goals. I know, I’m a wild woman 😉

So here’s a tangible example…let’s say your top three core values are: Health, Security and Freedom. Use these values to develop your goals under the goal categories. Images you could look for to create your vision board in the Financial Category would be an image for financial health, another for financial security, and one more for financial freedom. In the Career/Business Category it would be career health, career security and career freedom. In the Relationship Category it would be relationship health, relationship security, relationship freedom and so on for each category. Your vision board and yearly goals would look very different if the core values were: Adventure, Fun and Creativity. It would be the same exercise using the same goal categories but the results wouldn’t be anywhere near the same as the first example. You might enjoy adventures and be creative but if your core values are more in-line with health, security and freedom, you would be missing the motivational piece to go after your goals with your whole heart. How else can we make our love visible if our heart isn’t in it?

Use your core values as the spring board to develop your goals to create direction for the year that feels razor sharp and innately satisfying.

Next steps:

1. Once you create your vision board, look at it every single day.
2. Use a calendar or journal to track small, daily, actionable steps toward the goals that speak directly to your values.

Let me know how the process goes for you. Keep it simple (no fancy journals necessary). And most importantly, just begin.