Category Archives: Success

You Can’t be the CEO of Your Own Life if You’re Trying to be CEO of the World ~

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Who would you be if you weren’t taking care of everyone else?

This sense that we need to control the world is often referred to as co-dependence.  At least that’s what I’m told.

I’ve denied the co-dependent moniker my entire life. It just wasn’t me after all. I believe that people should live and let live. I’m turned on but the idea that we’re all doing the best we can with what we’ve got.

In theory.

In practice, I’ve been running around like some crazy air traffic controller – trying to direct all the lives in my orbit. What does that look like? Well, in my head, it’s a smooth stream of orchestration – war-gaming outcomes that will have the most positive effect on everyone else in my world, and by extension – the world at large.

For more than 40 years I’ve been trying to make someone I don’t even KNOW feel better about herself. I’ve been working hard to make everything okay for my birth-mom. Add to that my need to make my parents, siblings, friends, cousins, co-workers “okay” (whatever that is) and it because a pretty heavy bag to lug around.

The wild part is that I didn’t consciously accept this as my truth.

I’ve been spiritual journeying for a while now. I’ve been to the self-help section of the library and bookstore thousands of times. I’ve participated in the healing work and I’ve agreed to “Let Go and Let God.” So it didn’t enter my mind that I was on this control-freak mission to be the CEO of the world.

In the meantime, being CEO of my life took a back seat. So far back that if you asked me 3 months ago (as someone did) what made me happy, I’d look like a deer that was just asked to calculate Pi. I had no idea. the need to control things was disguised in my mind as my need to help others. You and I both know this is classic “healer penalty” stuff and I’d fallen right into the quicksand without a second thought.

That’s the thing about life – there’s always something new to learn if we’re able to get present.

Not being present is a great way to come up with excuses and duck out of our responsibility to ourselves.

I’m willing to keep up the journey to self-awareness and truth. Even when it knocks me for a loop. The thing is, whenever I clear this type of inner misunderstanding up – my outer world clears up too.

So I ask you – who would you be if you weren’t trying to be CEO of the World?

 

Do You Know How to Let Go of What Ails Ya?

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Ever have a run-in with someone that leaves you feeling cranky and unsettled?

That happened to me in the  hospital.

For the most part everyone I dealt with  was not only professional, but really likable. The nurses and techs knew that they were stellar at their jobs and they performed professionally and with a great attitude. I trusted them all implicitly and the entire stay was working it’s magic of healing.

Then, Louise (not her real name) arrived and rocked my boat.

Louise was one of the techs in charge of taking my vitals and dealing with other things like changing my IV.  Louise entered my room on full throttle – asking questions about the books I had in front of me, wanting to know who all the people were who were visiting and generally telling me all about her plans to create various businesses for herself.

It was exhausting and a true energy suck.

I have no doubt that Louise is a great human and that she meant well.  I was sick and frankly not in the mood for working to make her feel at ease. (In an earlier meditation during my stay, I made some peace with the idea that trying to make everyone else comfortable had contributed to my illness.)

I did my best to keep up with her patter but mostly just nodded as she cuffed me for a blood pressure reading and stuck a thermometer under my tongue.  My blood pressure was spiking.  She kept talking, telling me all about blood pressure and all that she knew about blood pressure and then asking me about starting a business.

I was exhausted when she left.

Later that night she arrived, with a bucket of gauze, needles and tape and announced she was going to change my IV. (I’d asked my nurse earlier about switching it out).

I’ll save you the details, but this process did not go well.

I was in pain and I was irritated.  I asked her to leave the IV as it was.

She left, frustrated.

I tried to sleep.

I was still irritated and angry about the whole situation.

I said a prayer asking for the peace I needed to release this situation.  I sent light and love as I did my best to mentally cut the cord that had me wrapped up in the frustration.

Still, I couldn’t sleep. I just couldn’t seem to let it go.

This went on for about 40 minutes when it finally occurred to me that the frustration would remain until I tuned into the lesson I was meant to learn.

So I focused on learning.

What could this situation with Louise possibly have to offer me?

“It’s about standing in your power.” said my Higher Self.

It made perfect sense.

Up until that moment I had dealt with healers of all ilks who were not only competent but confident in their contribution to my healing. They knew their stuff and they didn’t expect me to question their competency.  I trusted them implicitly to help me heal.

That’s what I’m supposed to do as a coach.  Stand in my power, knowing the stuff and being confident that what I offer is not only of value, but healing for those who come to me.

Lately though, I’d been like Louise, unsure of what I was doing or why and it was affecting my relationships with potential clients. I wasn’t standing in my power, I was trying to entertain and WOW and one-up, and prove myself.

The lesson for me was that I know what I know and I know how powerful the work is. That it stands for itself as it flows through me and I don’t need to do anything other than be fully present and competent and compassionate to make a difference in someone’s life.

Once I captured that lesson, I did another cord-cutting meditation.  Asking for peace for both Louise and myself and I let it go with light.

I slept easily after that and the next day when Louise was back on shift, things were much less tense.

Two really cool take aways came from that for me:

1) When there’s something you really are trying to release, but it won’t go away – go looking for the lesson

2) When you sign up to help others on their journey (spiritual, business, healing, etc.) do it confidently and from the place of love and joy. Stop worrying about proving yourself – it’s exhausting for everyone!

 

Acid Reflux and the Traditional “Fix”

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I haven’t been shy sharing bits of my story with Chron’s Disease here.

It’s an often frustrating disease because most people can’t even tell you’re sick.  Which is okay.  I don’t like walking around, looking like death warmed over.

I also don’t like feeling like I need special accommodations.  All in all having one of the silent diseases is okay.  I mean, if you have to be sick.

Still, one of the other challenges that seemed to accompany the Chron’s was severe heartburn and acid reflux.  Just five years ago I had no idea what that meant.  I mean, I’d feel uncomfortable if I ate too much spicy food in one sitting, but then it would be gone and forgotten.

Not so anymore.  Now I’m VERY familiar with the actual anguish that comes from something I thought was a silly exaggeration just a few years ago.  I know what it’s like to be driving down the road, white knuckled, because you are in so much pain.  Crappy.

My doctor  gastroenterologist(a specialist!)  recommended (as I’m sure many others do) that I get myself some of the over-the-counter acid reduction medicine.  I did.  When I read that the manufacturer recommended you don’t take the medicine for longer than two weeks, I called the doc and asked what she thought.  She told me to go ahead and keep taking it.

After a little more than a year of this routine I started to experience severe shortness of breath.  I mean, I lost 12 pounds and was breathless walking up a flight of stairs.  I actually dreaded taking my dogs out for walks because I felt guilty turning them around after 10 minutes because I was so winded.

alkalime

Recently, I found a supplement by my company, Young Living.  It’s called AlkaLime and it’s listed as a potential helper for things like acid reflux.  I’m no fan of daily pharmaceutical consumption, so I ordered the product and started using it.  They recommend you mix it up (it’s like a fast bubbling effervescent drink) and drink it about an hour before your meals.

After I started using this about once a day (I rarely know when I’m going to eat and usually it’s a question of “I’m hungry NOW,” so I wasn’t really following directions exactly) I started feeling better.  At first I was still taking the little brownish pill.

Eventually I got brave enough to leave the pill in the bottle and make it through the day.  I had no pain or reflux and I felt energetic.  After a week of no pills I realized I was no longer huffing and puffing going up and down stairs and I was actually looking forward to walking the dogs.

Now I don’t know for a fact that the over-the-counter pill was causing the shortness of breath – I’m leaping to a conclusion here.  My conclusion comes from the fact that the only thing I changed in that short period of time was the cessation of the pill.  I didn’t amend my diet (in fact, the holidays were in full swing, so my diet may have been “worse” than normal) and I didn’t hire a trainer, change my activity level or anything else.

I’m just really excited to be moving to a pill-free lifestyle.  I’m truly grateful for my health and the way it’s growing and I wanted to share with you.

What have you found that works/doesn’t work for your every day health challenges?

Prayer, Control and Letting Go

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Prayer and I have a long history.  You see, I was raised in a Catholic family.  Heck, before that I was born into a Catholic family and adopted through Catholic Charities.  That’s something that always stuck with me – that my biological mother wanted me to be raised Catholic.  For a long time, I thought that being a ‘good’ Catholic was the best way I could honor her.  It’s still a complicated issue for me, but I’m making my way through.

If you were raised Catholic, it was important to learn your prayers.  We had (I suspect they still do) prayers for everything.  Not just before meals, but when you wake, when you got sleep, when you sin, when you want to be forgiven and on and on.  Lucky for me I was pretty good at memorization (not any more – I cannot go to the grocery store without a list.)  This meant I would repeat prayers over and over, compulsively, in my mind whenever I felt stressed or worried.  You might wonder what a 5 year old has to worry about – I do too — but I can say with confidence that I was a worried little girl.

As I grew up and eventually ventured out on my own I started to doubt God.  I stopped praying, started reading philosophy and Ayn Rand and dark poetry.  I went through the typical “tough time” of most post-adolescents and decided to call them my “dark years.”  Of course, that was about the time that I decided that the key to my future was all on my shoulders.  That I had to make it or fail on my own.  I didn’t much believe in God, I downright despised Religion and I committed to a life of “Greed is Good.”  (ha, I almost wrote Greed is God, there.)

For the most part, I had success.

Some years were tougher than others and some relationships were more horrific than others.  However, overall, my life was rolling along in the pursuit of money, laughter, bad boys and good times.  I found it relatively simple to make my way through the ranks of corporate America and eventually started to believe that I deserved the success I was reaping.  In fact, I got a little cocky and decided to ignore anyone who had an opinion contrary to my own.  In some cases, I was downright snarky and disdainful.

Eventually all this “success” started to catch up to me.  I felt like I was working harder and harder to keep up an image that other people had of me and I was becoming convinced that there might be more to life than the trappings of success I’d worked really hard to gather (nice car, my dream house, successful husband, globe-trotting vacations).

That’s when things changed.

I went looking for some answers – to questions I didn’t really know how to articulate – and I found someone to read my hands.  From the moment she told me my life purpose I was scared and motivated.  To be honest, I was so ANTI-RELIGION that I’d lumped everything to do with God, Angels, Divine, The UNIVERSE into a black trash bag and tossed it out with the recycling years before.

Still the answer was clear – reconnecting and trusting the Divine in my life.

Over a long and winding road I’ve learned that the relationship I have with the Divine is my choice.  It was always my choice, and my choice had very little to do withe prayers I’d repeated as mantras so many years earlier.

I’ve heard it said that “prayer is when you talk to God, and that meditation is when God talks back,“ and I have to agree.  The meditation part was what was missing all those years ago.  Now that I’ve got a two-way communication system going – things are easier and happier in my life.

Still, I’ve learned that both prayer and meditation are about letting go.  I was told that you could pray for something or for someone.  To me, that meant that if I prayed for something or someone, that I would get what I asked for.  That’s where I got mucked up.  Praying for me is really about asking for the strength to let go.  I certainly have no problem sharing my thoughts with the Divine (I’m no less bossy with the Divine than I can be with my family), still I am learning every day that the Divine is a higher version of me.  That the Divine doesn’t have an agenda and that there are plans for me which I know nothing of, yet.

Now when I pray, I try to focus on letting go of my need to control an outcome – so that I can surrender to the wisdom that is much greater than myself.  That doesn’t make it easier, it just makes me more peaceful.  Surrender for me is not about throwing in the towel and deciding I have no obligation to live my life to the fullest, but I know for sure that the truest strength any of us can hope for is that which comes with complete surrender.

What’s your thought on prayer?  Has it changed since you were small?  I’d love to hear from you!