Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

One entrepreneurial woman’s journey to cease from self-sabotage and fitting into cliched stereotypes, reveals a new kind of power

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When we fail to define and claim our power, we unknowingly place our worth in the wrong hands and ultimately pay a significant price for it, losing ourselves as a result.

After having launched my startup media platform, SWAAY, as a novice in the world of entrepreneurship, I had finally reached the notoriously cutthroat fundraising phase of my new career. I was as bright-eyed and hopeful as any newcomer would be, but I had to look and play the part of a powerful woman if I wanted investors to take me and my business seriously. I had dressed for the part in my well-tailored pantsuit and embodied an air of power, confidence, and self-assurance, even though in reality, I was brimming with anxiety.

Looking back, I realize that the idealized vision of the powerful woman I wanted to be was a culmination of traits that I thought I needed to embody after having seen them so skillfully mastered by the women I held in such high regard.

However, it wasn’t until I began meeting with other ‘powerful’ people that I came to learn how flawed my relationship with power actually was.

One of the most notable incidents I can recall occurred while meeting with a successful investor and media industry veteran. While I was excited to deliver my pitch and discuss business as it pertained to the future of my company, I instead found myself on the receiving end of an onslaught of his inappropriate opinions and unsolicited advice.

“Honey, let me give you one piece of advice. Never mention your beauty pageant past. You’re a businesswoman now, and if you want to be taken seriously, you shouldn’t bring up your pageant history.”

Like many of us would be, I was in complete shock by his blatant disrespect—not to mention outdated perspective. But rather than leverage this moment to educate him on the significance pageantry has had in my story and in making me the businesswoman sitting before him, I gave his words the power to make me feel worthless.

Much like myself, so many women fall victim to limiting self-beliefs and imposter syndrome. We hand our power over to false allies who we believe to know better about our strengths than we do. More often than not, we misconstrue our own perception of power with pride, leading us to our inevitable downfall. As I came to this realization, I was tempted to sink further into self-pity and shame for having allowed myself to react this way, but instead I chose to reclaim my power and here is how you can do the same!

Take Accountability

Before you can begin healing your relationship with power, it’s important that you first hold yourself accountable by taking responsibility for your negative beliefs and actions. Consider what disempowering beliefs you succumb to the most and what situations are most triggering of these beliefs.

One way you can make the most out of this exercise is to write down the beliefs and actions that don’t benefit you and create a list of truths to counter them with. You can refer to that list later on if you ever find yourself falling back into old patterns. It takes courage to look, but revealing is healing.

Understand What Power Means to You

In order to understand what power means to you, a great first step is to set some time aside to explore what power has looked like to you in the past. Uncover the meaning it’s held for you. Think back to a time when you felt the most powerful and consider the following:

• What was the situation?
• Why did you feel powerful?
• What were the most prominent emotions that you felt at the time?

Now imagine what would make you feel powerful at your current stage of life by considering:

• What attributes would make you feel powerful?
• What does it look like to be powerful in your career/craft?
• What would you like to accomplish in order to feel more powerful?

For some women, power means having a high-level position, mastering a skill, achieving a goal or even showing up as a stronger, more confident person than you have been in the past. Explore your options and connect with both the physical and emotional elements of what power feels like to you.

Hone Your Internal Locus of Control

An internal locus of control can be defined as the belief that you control your own destiny as opposed to having your destiny pre-determined for you. When you hone and refine this internal belief, it becomes easier to operate in the world from a place of self-assurance, confidence and resounding clarity. Although your external circumstances may create limitations for what you can achieve, your internal locus of control will ultimately help you navigate around those roadblocks and remind you of your truth.

Here are some ways you can begin the process of becoming more internally focused:

Create a checklist: By creating a list of achievable goals you can work towards on a daily basis, you can build momentum towards achieving bigger goals.

Embrace independence: Learning to stand on your own is far more important than you may realize. Start by making decisions for yourself where you would normally ask for or listen to an outside opinion. While this in itself is a big step, an even bigger step is following through each time you make a decision. Each time you achieve this, you will increase your trust in your own judgment aligning with your internal compass—and making it easier to ignore external opinions and advice meant to sway you.

To be powerful is to connect to one’s inner truth in all of its facets. It isn’t about denying where we’ve come from, the roles we’ve played, even the missteps along the way. It has all played an important role to arriving here…empowered.

You may also enjoy reading The Architecture of Thought: Mind Over Matter is Real, but You Have to Believe it to See it, by Samantha Glorioso.

The post Power Play: Redefining Your Relationship to Power appeared first on BEST SELF.

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

How a pandemic, a public pool and an obsession with the British Royal family inspired one writer to claim her spot on the book shelves

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The trick is getting to the pool early enough to claim the best lane. I want the one with the long wire running lengthwise above the water, or else I’ll crash. Not like car crash crash, more like beginning backstroke crash — I need the visual aid of the wire above me to keep from hitting the hard plastic lane dividers. My backstroke resembles a drunk toddler careening from side to side unless I track the wire, and I jam more than one finger when I don’t get the right lane. So I’m diligent about lining up early, six feet from my fellow swimmer, so that when pool manager James calls out in his deep baritone, “Head on in, and remember, I love you all,” I make a beeline for one of the two lanes with the wire above it.

Pushing off the wall, I feel the whoosh of water behind my bright orange swim cap. At five meters out, I pass the horizontal wire with little blue flags running down the length, signaling my ascent into deeper water. From there I follow the vertical wire, strung above me like a tightrope. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack — I windmill my arms and remind myself to relax my shoulders. Soon the vertical wire is my only visual marker, a silhouette against the sky. At this point I have no reference for my progress, and my mind plays a trick on me. Despite my body straining and my heart pumping, the illusion makes me feel suspended in place, time and sound cease to exist. I’m travelling down the lane but feel like I’m swimming in place, my mind blissfully blank. Suddenly, the second set of flags appear over my head, signaling the approaching wall, and the world snaps back into focus with a sharp whoosh. Suddenly, my physical exertion matches my mind’s eye and I’m hyper aware of my breathing, my movement, my thoughts.

I took up swimming during the pandemic. With the gyms closed, my living room failing as a makeshift yoga studio, and my driveway a poor substitute for Zoom fitness classes, I started swimming laps. My neighborhood municipal pool stayed open during lockdown and gave everyone their own lane, which in crowded Los Angeles is a little slice of heaven. Besides the grocery store and the occasional can’t-put-it-off doctor’s appointment, the pool became one of the few places I ventured to during quarantine.

The last 400 days have felt like one long trip down the wire, without any markers, unable to judge any progress.

I stared at the wire, at the sky, but couldn’t figure out how far or how fast my life was moving. The days bleeding into each other, the dishes, my work desk crowding the living room, the halfhearted way I ask my daughter “how was school?” even though I knew Zoom classes suck. But then suddenly I would see a flag in my peripheral vision and feel a flush of progress. Like when I finished a draft of my first novel.

My obsession, at least since 2017, is the British Royal Family. I started following them like some people follow the Kardashians, mostly to divert my attention from the news and fractious political environment. The Crown on Netflix was my gateway drug. When Meghan Markle married Prince Harry in a storybook Windsor wedding in 2018, I was all in. Here was a bi-racial, American divorcee joining the family that invented the stiff upper lip. She was a breath of fresh air, no, a gust, the likes of which the world hasn’t seen since Diana. Could Harry, Meghan, William, and Kate live up to their new nickname “The Fab Four?”

Alas, no. Harry and Meghan’s break up with “The Firm” fascinated me. It became the inspiration for my forthcoming book.

In my fictionalized version of the very public Royal drama, the exiled Duke and Duchess are summoned back to London to find the missing heir, only to uncover shocking family secrets along the way. It’s juicy, it’s lavish, and it’s fun — and exactly what I needed to get through 2020.

As the COVID-19 pandemic bore down on me, on the world, I was consumed by anxiety and confusion. I woke up every morning at 6am with my mind racing. So instead of just lying there spinning, I wrapped myself in a warm housecoat, opened my laptop, and wrote pages, grateful for the quiet respite from my thoughts. My encyclopedic Royal knowledge was actually the foundation I needed to craft the world of my novel. I found an amazing book coach — I’m a former athlete who responds super well to coaching — and completed a first draft in twelve weeks. Since then, I’ve been revising, taking writing classes, and wondering when to call it done (never finished, just done).

I get my best ideas while swimming. Something about the pool puts me in the right headspace. There’s no phone buzzing, no email pinging, no family to look after. It’s just the water, my controlled breath, and deep thoughts. After each workout, I stand just outside the pool gates, dripping wet, furiously dictating voice memos into my phone, my swim ruminations becoming future pages.

The other day I gazed across the concrete pool deck, bare and charmless as only a city run facility can be. This sure doesn’t look like a place to find my creative spirit, I thought. But yet, I found inspiration in the little blue flags that fluttered above me like butterfly wings. I came to crave the sudden rush when I ceased to be weightless and lost, and instead feel catapulted forward by my own power. Late at night, when I’m writing in the makeshift office/pandemic school room off the garage, I often feel stuck. So, I close my eyes and transport myself back into the pool. I follow the wire and spot the flags, and my squeaky desk chair jolts forward as if powered by an unseen hand. That’s salvation. That’s my muse.

You may also enjoy reading Swimming for Strength, Injury Recover, Positivity and Overall Health, by Jane Sandwood

The post Finding My Lane: Pandemics, Pools and the Royal Family appeared first on BEST SELF.

A refreshing perspective from a seasoned ‘money guy’ who shares sound financial strategies for debt relief and vibrant living.

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Have you ever felt absolutely overwhelmed by the burden of debt? You are not alone. 

Debt is a pervasively significant stressor with household debt in the U.S. recently reaching record levels surpassing $14 trillion. 

And while managing and reducing financial stress is a core tenet of wellbeing, it can get overlooked in schedules laden with responsibilities, especially when remaining personal time has already been allocated to self-care activities like yoga classes, self-help books and happy thoughts. 

I wrote this piece as a pathway to reducing debt while prioritizing wellbeing to help you set your Best Self free with a holistic approach.

Whether you’re facing credit card balances, student loans, auto loans, or mortgages, monthly debt payments collectively impact almost everyone regardless of age and other socioeconomic factors. And when debt balances grow to a point where you’re barely managing to meet minimum monthly payment requirements, it can feel crushing for anyone from college graduates entering the workforce to senior citizens living on a fixed income.  

While society sometimes associates being in debt with extravagant lifestyles or irresponsible  consumerism, for many the path into debt is much more innocent. Unemployment, unforeseen medical expenses and financially assisting a family member or friend in need are a few circumstances that could lead even the most well-intentioned person into the monthly debt cycle. 

As for the rest of us, we’ve all made financial, professional or relationship decisions that we wish we could take back or at least handled differently. But here’s the thing…

Your debts do not define you.

What to do:

Pay yourself first. 

Of course, we’ll address an approach to tackling the financial impact of your debt, but let’s first focus on something much more important than monthly payments and statements. 

I’m referring to paying (valuing) you, the person, regardless of your current financial situation. 

How to do it: 

1. Make a list of any and all people that bring happiness into your life. Write down the friends who are empathetic listeners, those who have your back no matter what and the ones who make you laugh or are simply fun to be around. Plan a visit, meet for lunch, see a movie or simply catch up on a phone call. 
2. Make a second list of activities that YOU perceive as healthy for your mind and body. Walking in a nearby park or around your neighborhood. Lighting a scented candle and meditating. Listening to your favorite music and practicing conscious breathing. 
3. Make it definite. Schedule these activities in your calendar and start paying yourself first. Every Sunday, for each day of the following week, schedule at least one activity from your lists that you know will bring you happiness. Let it anchor your day. Whatever you face during the course of any day, that special time will be there for you. (NOTE: Your weekly planning day does not have to be Sunday as long as you commit to this exercise every week). 
4. Make it happen. Be 100% present during each of these daily activities. Don’t fold laundry during the phone chat with your friend on Tuesday evening. Resist the urge to check your smartphone for texts and emails while listening to music and practicing conscious breathing. Prioritize this time and give yourself permission to live in the moment. 

Remember this: Your relationships and experiences will define you much more than any debts or investments ever will. 

Show Me the Money

Yes, we still need to address the financial aspect of your debts, but now that you’ve first scheduled in self care you will be in a better position to manage your finances. Trust me.

What to do: 

Determine which of your non-mortgage debts charge the highest interest rates and prioritize first paying off the card with the highest annual percentage rate (APR), i.e. the card that charges the highest interest rate first. Perhaps it’s a credit card with a double-digit interest rate that you wish would forever disappear from your inbox each month. 

How to do it: 

Pay the minimum monthly payment on all cards and loans except for the card with the highest APR. All cash that is budgeted and available to pay beyond the minimum balances should be added to the minimum payment on the card with the highest APR.   

Illustrative example:

Aspen and Blaine have been best friends since high school and lead very similar financial lives. As a result, Aspen and Blaine have identical credit card rates, balances and minimum monthly payments as presented in the chart below. 

Credit Card Rate, Balance and Minimum Payment Summary – Aspen and Blaine 

Also, both Aspen and Blaine decided to pay a total of $500 each month toward their credit card balances ($150 more than their total $350 minimum monthly payment requirement) in order to pay off their balances faster. 

Up until this month Aspen and Blaine have both been equally allocating their additional $150 in payments above the minimums among their three cards ($50 extra toward each card) as follows: 

Credit Card Payments Summary (Last Month) – Aspen and Blaine 

This month, while Aspen and Blaine each continued to pay $500 in total toward their credit card balances, they allocated the amount to each card differently. This small adjustment will probably result in one person paying off their debts faster and paying less interest than the other. 

Aspen continued to equally allocate the additional $150 in payments above the minimums among the three cards ($50 extra toward each card) as follows: 

Credit Card Payments Summary (This Month) – Aspen

Blaine decided to allocate the entire additional $150 in payments above the minimum to Credit Card C (the highest rate card) and pay the minimum amount for Cards A and B as follows: 

Credit Card Payments Summary (This Month) – Blaine

Blaine’s approach to paying off her credit card balances is known as the Debt Avalanche Method. 

After paying off Credit Card C, Blaine will then allocate all extra debt repayment funds (the ‘Avalanche’ of repayment funds) to Credit Card B, the card with the next highest APR. And after Credit Card B is paid off, then the even larger ‘Avalanche’ will be directed solely on the final target: the remaining balance of Credit Card A. 

By first paying off cards with the highest rates, Blaine will probably pay off her credit card debt faster and pay less interest than Aspen without paying a dollar more than Aspen each month.  

Paying off Debts with ‘Hidden Cash’

It may be possible for you to add even more towards your next credit card balance payments by identifying overlooked sources of cash. And you can do this without significantly impacting your current lifestyle.   

Begin by harvesting cash from the low hanging fruit, i.e, expenses for products and services that you’re not using. These expenses may include one or more of the following: 

• Food items that often expire before you consume them. 
• Wasted energy (running lights, heat, A/C, music and TV in unoccupied rooms). 
• Gym memberships 
• Redundant or unused or subscriptions. Premium cable, Netflix, Hulu, and Disney +  

Simply review last month’s credit card and bank statements to determine if there are any credit card and debit charges for products or services which you rarely or never use. Cancel those product and service subscriptions immediately and apply the cash savings to your next credit card payment. 

Paying off Debts with ‘Money on the Table’

Also, don’t leave money on the table. Identify any ‘untapped’ assets and savings opportunities that could be converted to cash and applied directly or indirectly toward your credit card balances. 

• Gift cards: Keep track of expiration dates and balances and use gift cards to pay monthly expenses. 
• Uncashed checks: Cash all checks as soon as you receive them and immediately put your money to work for you by either paying down debt or depositing the cash in a high-yield savings account. 
• Discount codes and rebates for online purchases (Retailmenot.com, Honey, and Ebates.com): Before you click ‘pay now’ for an online purchase, check these and other discount sites for coupon codes and other offers. 

The initial objective is cutting waste, not needs and wants. And by making a few minor adjustments, you can make significant progress toward lessening your debt burden. 

Next Steps: Additional Income Streams

Once you’ve eliminated any recurring waste from your expenditures, you may want to further accelerate the debt reduction process. Look for extra ways that you can earn or save some extra money. Consider transforming a hobby into a revenue stream with a side hustle or part-time job.

The point is to generate extra money doing something that already interests you or brings you happiness. 

Give some honest thought to your finances each month, and determine how much you can pay above the minimum on your credit card balances. Commit to a number and add that amount to what you have been paying on the credit card with the highest APR (interest rate). Some months may be more challenging than others, but stay the course and you will see progress. And by taking the initiative, you’re living on your terms, responsibly addressing your finances and, most importantly, taking care of yourself. 

While tackling your debt is important, be careful not to give debt the power to postpone and distract you from regularly experiencing joy and contentment. By prioritizing and allocating time to self care and your key relationships, you will be on track to gain relief from financial stress and the freedom to be your Best Self.

You may also enjoy Podcast: Jim Brown | True Abundance: One Man’s Search for (Mindful Money) Meaning by Best Self Media

The post Breaking Free From The Debt Cycle appeared first on BEST SELF.

A visionary entrepreneur reveals his secret life weapon: journaling

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The visionary entrepreneurs, creators, and impact-makers I work with all connect around the idea that there are a tremendous amount of things any one of us can do. But just because we can do something, doesn’t necessarily mean we should. Does that sound familiar?

What is calling you — and is truly yours to do? Better yet, how do you unearth it?

The year 2020 is going to be a touchstone moment.

Perhaps you are already beginning to feel the pull of how this year will truly be different than the one you are leaving behind.

Perfect vision is 20/20, and achieving that clarity is possible through my favorite tool: journaling.

To some, a journal might seem like an assortment of blank pages bound together in a pretty book. But that blank canvas also holds the keys to something very special for all aspects of your life. And hold on, before you start with the excuses…it only needs to take you about 10–15 minutes per day to see results, impactful results.

In fact, peer-reviewed scientific evidence has shown that journaling actually improves your wellbeing and happiness. However, getting into the practice of journaling is not always easy.

Maybe you’ve tried journaling and stopped, or perhaps you’ve never done it because it seems so difficult and time consuming.

Trust me — it works. I’ve been doing it for years and believe it’s one of my secret weapons.

And that’s a big statement.

When I introduce the concept of journaling, the same objections and excuses always come up:

• What if somebody reads my journal?
• Can I really be fully honest in here?
• What do I write about?

First, you have to get out of your own head because your journal is just for you. If you are concerned about somebody else seeing it, get a small lockbox or even hide your journal.

Your journal is a place for getting deeper insights into what truly matters for you. One of the best ways is to ensure you make it a ‘practice’. Just one journal entry won’t cut it. You have to decide to make it a habit, but don’t make it too overwhelming — don’t set yourself up to fail. 

Journaling takes all those thoughts rolling around in our head — the ones that keep surfacing, being ignored and pushed back down, and resurfacing again, everything all jumbled together — and brings sense to them. Writing it down creates a beginning, middle, and end, an ability to see the whole picture — to see it all differently. It is your space to see the big picture, to work through and reassemble your thoughts, fears, beliefs and big ideas.

Think of it as an experiment. Experiments work because there’s a beginning and end. It’s simply something you are giving a go and trying on. Does this fit? Does this feel good? You can then decide if you want to add it to your life. Make it a large enough number of days to feel if it’s making a difference. Just give it some space to breathe and time to activate within you.

What should you write about?

The only thing you’ll need to do is get your pen moving. Typically, the topic I start writing about won’t be the same thing I end my page with.

2020 Journaling

Your journal is a sacred place to dig deeper into what your true intention is for 2020 and beyond.

To start, I’d recommend going out into nature someplace away from your office or home and into a setting that inspires you. Then open up your journal and simply take an entire full page to detail absolutely everything that is going well right now in your life or business. This will put you in a positive mood to begin envisioning your future.

Your next assignment is to take a compelling question and keep going deeper.

I will write my question on the top of a page on my journal and then continue writing more and more answers. Most times the first answers you get will be somewhat basic and won’t have much insight. Keep pushing yourself to come up with more distinctions and to go deeper. Don’t censor yourself either — just write. No one is grading you and it’s just for you.

Here are a couple questions to get you going for your 2020 Vision:

• What is my real work to be done here?
• What brings me the greatest joy, and how can I add more of that to my life?
• How can I more easily ask for exactly what my highest desire is right now?
• What does “effortless effort” look like in this situation?
• What would I do even if I knew it would fail?
• If I could see higher and further, what would I see for 2020?
• What is my greatest vision for 2020 and beyond?

As you are writing, you need to shut off the inner critic that sits on your shoulder, whispering negative feedback into your ear: Oh, that’s stupid. Who are you to get that? Why would that work?, etc.

You cannot creatively pour out your true heart’s desire and also edit yourself at the same time.

Just give yourself a break.

Now, once you have written out your answers, you’ll want to go even further with a technique I learned from my friend, innovation expert Bill Donius. You will be using your non-dominant hand to connect to even greater creativity, intuition, wholeness, dreams, and problem solving. Shake out your hands, and start writing again with your other hand. So, yep, that means if you are righthanded, you’ll use your left hand.

Don’t worry if you think writing with your other hand will be completely illegible — try it because I guarantee you there will be deeper, more insightful answers emerging. Every time I use this process, I’m astounded by the results.

I’ve been able to tap into answers that I never would have imagined and to have the confidence that I’m getting guidance from a more elevated self (some may say my ‘Best Self’[y1] , wink). It sounds a little weird — but it totally works.

The more you use your journal, the more it will become your personal tool for exploration and lighting your way for what’s next. This is a profound gift for unleashing your unlimited potential. My latest creation, The Cosmic Journal is designed to make you re-remember what is truly yours to do here. And sure, there’s no time like the threshold of a new year to start a journal…but the truth is, it doesn’t matter if it’s on the 1^st of January or the middle of June…just start. Simply write and witness what emerges. Journaling is your journey home.

The Cosmic Journal is a unique combination of a powerful oracle, wise sage, and friendly guide rolled into one. You can read it cover to cover or flip to a page at ‘random’ to see the perfect message awaiting you from the Universe, along with a writing prompt to nudge you to uncover your own answers. Learn more at CosmicJournal.com

You may also enjoy reading Practice You: Coming Home to Your Inner Self Through Journaling, by Elena Brower

The post 20/20: Achieving A Clear Life Vision Through Journaling appeared first on BEST SELF.

Money is perceived as something that can make us happy, but can your money be happy? Exploring the relationship and energy behind it all.

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It’s a scene many of us know all too well: There you are, dreading paying your bills because you’re worried there’s just not enough money. Maybe you’re scrimping and saving every month, doing your best to hold on until payday, hoping you’ll survive. Most of us have had moments like this, but what if money didn’t have to be a struggle? What if you could make peace with your money and experience it as a happy part of your life?

I am on a mission to create more peace and happiness around money for people just like you.

And what most people don’t realize is that how we feel about money and how we relate to it affects the flow of money in our lives.

Take a moment and imagine your best friend. Think about how you feel towards this person, and how they feel towards you. Think about the fun you have together, and the ways in which your relationship is a balance of give and take. You both support each other, and you both can lean on each other.

Now imagine it can be this way with money, too. Money can be your friend. You can give money and receive money, and all of it can be part of a happy relationship with money.

In order to get to this happy money relationship, though, you may first need to understand how you currently feel about money. If you carry a lot of stress and worry about it, you may be thinking of money as an adversary or a source of fear, not a friend.

Ready to find out how you are viewing money now? Try this exercise.

If Money Were a Person, Who Would It Be?

Imagine you are walking down the street and you meet the personification of money:

• What does this person look like?
• How are they dressed?
• How do they walk?

Now, imagine that this person speaks to you.

• What do they say?
• Are they kind or unkind? Friendly or rude? Engaging or dismissive?
• What other qualities do they have?
• Are they interested in talking to you and being around you?

In working with thousands of people all over the world, I have found that, for so many of them, money shows up as mean and unfriendly. And sometimes they find that money is just difficult for them to be with: unresponsive, disinterested, apathetic towards them.

For those who have not had good experiences with money, I am sorry that life’s been unfair. I am sorry that things weren’t easy in the past. But I can assure you that doesn’t mean your future is fixed or that you can’t turn your life around or change your feelings toward money. Money can be ‘bad’, but it can also be ‘good’ – very good in fact, depending upon the intention you assign to it and the energy you connect with it. It can also show up as welcoming and kind, especially if you start changing your energy towards it and treat it like a best friend.

Create a Happy Money Life

Ultimately, we all choose our approach to money, and to life. How? I believe it begins with gratitude. Instead of believing there is never enough, you begin thinking: I have all that I need, and I am so grateful for it all. I am grateful for the work I do, the food I eat, the car I drive, and all the money I make.

When money comes in, you say, “Thank you” or, as we saying Japan, “Arigato.” Even when money leaves you, you can say it again; grateful for how the money served you or what it is bringing to you now.

Whatever happens, you can say thank you – powerful words that will help you start to transform your relationship with money. The more you do this, the less stress you’ll have, and the more happiness will flow through you and your money. And you’ll begin to see, without much effort, how quickly the unhappy money in your wallet starts to grow and smile and transform into happy money.

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You can learn more about happy money and download Ken’s FREE, ‘7 Questions to Unlock The Flow of Unhappy Money’ over at his website.

You may also enjoy reading True Abundance: One Man’s Search for (Mindful Money) Meaning, by Jim Brown

The post Is Your Money Happy? A Refreshing Approach To Navigating Your Finances appeared first on BEST SELF.

A ‘money guy’ imparts a fresh perspective of finances — and reveals an interconnected roadmap to redefining ‘true abundance’  

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Money may be a cornerstone in your perpetually evolving financial plan, but to what extent is it an essential ingredient for living a rich and abundant life? And ultimately, can money buy you happiness? 

As you ponder these questions, you may find that rich is relative, happiness is subjective, and that money can facilitate abundance. But while our answers may be as diverse and unique as each individual in our global society, we can all begin by first stepping back and asking ourselves how we define ‘abundance’ — and how we keep score. 

What makes one feel abundant? Bank account or inner peace — can we have it all? I think so… and that’s not a pie-in-the-sky notion. But it requires some self-awareness, reflection and showing up for it all. Mindfulness is not just for yoga mats, it can also be implemented into our interactions with our finances. 

I’m a ‘money’ guy, but I’m also a man who knows that without self-care, family love and contentment — my bank account isn’t going to bail me out. 

True abundance is realizing joy from the quality of your experiences and relationships, regardless of how much money you earn or the wealth you accumulate. Money is simply a tool that can directly or indirectly impact the quality of those experiences and relationships, for better or worse. Merely pursuing money for the sake of accumulating more of it can be counterproductive and may actually be harmful to your health (e.g., stress) and relationships (e.g., neglecting key personal relationships by spending excessive time on work that you don’t perceive as meaningful and/or is not in alignment with your core values). 

Setting Up for Success

Once you’ve defined ‘abundance’ in the context of your experiences and relationships you can immediately start setting yourself up for success by harmonizing your money, your mindset and your values. 

Monthly Cash Flow: From a financial perspective, we live in a monthly society, so it’s important to establish a strong financial foundation for creating true abundance by generating more monthly cash flow than your monthly expenditures (living within your means). But how? 

Optimizing your most valuable cash flow producing asset… YOU

If you have a career or own a business, guess what your most valuable cash flow producing asset is? It is YOU. So, prioritizing and consistently investing in your intellectual growth, personal and professional networks, and health is vitally instrumental in creating sufficient cash flow and true abundance. Note: Proper sleep, nutrition and physical activity not only promote wellbeing, but also boost productivity! 

Aligning your expenditures with your values. 

Your bank statements and credit card statements are a reflection of your values from a financial perspective. You value your time, especially as your responsibilities expand. And unless you are living on passive income, you trade your time for money, even if you own a business and actively manage it. 

Spend some time each month reviewing your bank statements and credit card statements. Highlight any items of questionable value, especially if they are recurring monthly expenses for products and services that you rarely use, and consider cancelling them immediately. Bonus: this practice will also assist you in promptly identifying incorrect charges (e.g. duplicate billings) and fraudulent activity in your accounts.  

Even if you don’t want to look at your statements (for example, if you have debt or feel ashamed about how little you have) — shifting your practices can also help you shift your relationship with money in a favorable direction. Remember, not looking doesn’t shift anything in your life or your bank account. 

Financial Safety Nets  

Protect your most valuable cash flow producing asset (YOU). 

If you are unable to work, then you’re also unable to generate cash flow. One of the most effective ways to protect against this type of personal financial crisis is to have adequate disability insurance coverage. Policies vary regarding several factors, including: 

• Definition of disabled: e.g., unable to perform work in your chosen occupation vs. unable to perform work at any job.    
• Waiting period (amount of time before benefits begin). 
• Percentage of salary replaced (e.g., 60% of base salary). 
• Term of coverage (short-term policies typically pay up to one year whereas long-term policies may continue providing benefits until the disability ends or until retirement). 

Emergency Fund

Being able to tap into a cash reserve when unfavorable financial circumstances arise can mitigate the impact of financial and emotional stress (e.g., unemployment, home and auto repairs, medical expenses, and covering the waiting period for disability benefits). 

Bonus tip: Once you’ve accumulated enough cash to cover at least 6 months to one year of living expenses, consider allocating a portion of your emergency fund to take advantage of unforeseen opportunities!! I.e., an ‘Opportunity Fund’.

Minding Money Matters

Purposefully investing a portion of your monthly income in (a) your income producing abilities (e.g., expanding your professional skills with professional continuing education and attending conferences or launching a side hustle), and (b) your financial future (retirement plans). Regularly contributing to an employer-sponsored 401k plan or Individual Retirement Account (IRA) can help you save on taxes in the short term by deferring tax on a portion of your taxable wages and expediting the growth of your retirement assets by deferring taxes on investment income. 

Bonus Tips

Employer matching: Some employers match your 401k contributions up to a certain percentage of your salary (e.g., up to 6%). If your employer matches contributions to your 401k plan, then try to at least contribute enough to take advantage of the matching feature. It’s like receiving ‘free money’ toward your retirement. 

Index funds: These are mutual funds that track a benchmark like the S&P 500. The S&P 500 is a group of the 500 largest companies in the U.S. ranked by market capitalization (Shares Outstanding x Price per Share = Market Capitalization). 

Index funds are considered passive investing because they do not require investment analysis and stock picking skills to manage. By definition, these funds simply invest in stocks (or bonds) that make up the index that they track. Index funds also charge lower fees because they cost mutual fund companies less money to manage. 

And there’s more… index funds like the S&P 500 have historically generated higher returns than most actively managed mutual funds, whose objective is to outperform their respective index/benchmark. It’s like paying less for better results! 

Cognitive Biases: Being consciously aware of your core values and living in a way that respects those values can fast track your life toward ‘true abundance’. But even the most self-aware, well-intentioned person is susceptible to their cognitive biases including overconfidence bias and recency bias. 

Overconfidence Bias is the subjective perception that your knowledge, skills, judgment or abilities are greater than they truly (objectively) are. E.g., a study on overconfidence bias revealed that 93% of drivers claim to be above average. 

Left unchecked, overconfidence bias can cause you to make inaccurate evaluations and unfavorable decisions, especially for situations that require objectivity such as investing in the financial markets. E.g., you may practice at the elite level of your profession, but that level of professional excellence does not automatically translate into immediate expert proficiency investing in the financial markets. 

Develop a sharp awareness of your cognitive biases by noticing how these biases influence your thoughts, decisions and actions.

E.g., on a personal note, I sometimes catch myself being influenced by another cognitive bias, recency bias,while watching an episode of one of my favorite TV series including Billions and Game of Thrones. 

For the final season of Game of Thrones, HBO produced some episodes that were arguably on par with feature films in terms of writing and cinematography. As I watched these larger than life scenes play out in HD I’d notice myself exclaiming phrases like: “This is the best series ever!” and “The writers for this show are absolutely brilliant!” and “This is outstanding cinematography!!” 

Yet, a few weeks later I found myself making similar ‘best ever’ statements during the final episode of Billions, Season 4, especially as complex storylines intersected and lead to the ‘big reveal’: “That plot twist was awesome! These screenwriters are the best ever!!!”   

No harm done in the context of commenting on a TV series, but how could recency bias influence investing decisions when your hard-earned money is on the line? 

Recency Bias can cost you dearly if you make decisions involving significant long-term financial consequences based solely on recent circumstances, especially in markets in which you have little experience.  

Speculators who staked large portions of their assets on the rising Bitcoin trend in the autumn of 2017 experienced a reversal of fortune in 2018. After reaching all-time price highs near $20,000 in mid-December, Bitcoin prices began to decline in late December 2017 and continued on a downward trend to around $6,000 in 2018 and did not even rise above $10,000 (half the all-time price high) until the summer of 2019. 

By developing mindfulness in the context of your personal finances, prioritizing the care of your most valuable asset (you), and aligning your purchases with your values, you will gain confidence in managing your time and money in a way that serves your best interests. 

And as your confidence grows so will your belief that you can control your own destiny and gain the requisite resources for creating and experiencing true abundance throughout your journey. 

Buying Time

Due to the nature and location of our jobs, many of us generate income by exchanging most of our waking hours for a salary. As a result, commuting to and from work, time on the job, and addressing our other personal and professional responsibilities can leave little time for self-care and nurturing key relationships. 

But what if you could recover some of your valuable time by reversing the time-for-money paradigm? 

Specifically, you can use money to ‘buy time’ in little ways each week by delegating responsibilities like laundry, housekeeping, and dog walking. It’s like playing the role of CEO in running the business of you(i.e., your life). Successful business leaders ranging from small business owners to CEOs of major corporations leverage this principle every day. Even though they may be the ‘best suited’ to handle certain lower level tasks, they realize that it is not the best use of their time. So, they ‘buy time’ by hiring employees/independent contractors and investing in technology. Think about where you can buy back some time for yourself. 

When I was younger, I performed many tasks including landscaping, car washing and housekeeping. But now that I have significantly more family and professional responsibilities I decided that handling those tasks myself is simply not the best use of my time. Instead, I ‘buy time’ by delegating (paying someone to perform) those tasks and then allocate my ‘purchased time’ to relationships and experiences that I value. On a practical level, it also allows me to focus on areas where I can make more money and support others doing jobs that support me (actually both of us) — a win/win for all. 

Money can also cushion significant life transitions like career changes, parenting, or launching a business.

I saved and grew my investments during my 20’s to a point where I was able to pursue a career change (in health & wellness) in my early 30’s before returning to a career in finance. 

As you transition through various phases of your life, your definition and perception of ‘true abundance’ may evolve. Coincidentally, we live in a time where even money is evolving, from bills and coins, to digital currency to cryptocurrency. And while money will likely continue to have a place in our lives, keep in mind that it is merely a tool that has no intrinsic value — its value is only in what you exchange it for. 

As you pursue and experience ‘true abundance’, mindful money management can facilitate your ongoing journey of self-discovery, self-expression and meaningful connections. 

You may also enjoy reading How to Do What You Love and Make Money by Heather Nichols

The post True Abundance: One Man’s Search for (Mindful Money) Meaning appeared first on BEST SELF.

Once overweight and bullied, a Keto, fitness and supplement expert shares his journey of slaying emotional roadblocks and thriving

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Growing up in the small town of Lenox, Massachusetts, I lived in a single-income home, was the son of an enlisted Navy father, and felt like I was often on the outside looking in on the wealthy and beautiful elite. You see, Lenox was a suburban tourist destination in the Berkshires that wealthy New Yorkers would visit to listen to the symphony at Tanglewood, watch plays at BPAC (Berkshire Performing Arts Center), hike at Canyon Ranch, and eat dessert at Cheesecake Charlies. Lenox had an air of affluence… heck, our school name was even pretentious—the ‘Lenox Millionaires,’ and I kid you not, the Monopoly guy was the mascot. 

To make matters worse, I was always the ‘fat kid’.

I was pretty smart, but when it came to sports in gym class and at recess, I was usually picked last. Girls never passed me letters, exchanged looks with me, or whispered to other girls about asking me out; nope, they would whisper the types of things to each other that made them laugh. And, of course, the popular boys would join in. 

I remember waiting at the school bus stop, dreading what the day would bring and the cruel things they would say… ‘Fat ass,’ ‘You fat fuck,’ Sit down fat ass’.

Even teachers would point out my weight and laugh — encouraging, if not instigating the bullying.  

I felt ugly. I struggled to find any self-worth. I was not the alpha male like Glenn Hoff, who was exceptionally good at every sport. I was not the boy the girls were hoping to ask them to dance or to the movies — that was Ryan Thomas, the tall, handsome soccer star and salutatorian.  

One thing I had going for me was that I was funny. Maybe that was my way of coping and deflecting the bullying. I got good at making people laugh, but there was a cost: my means of humor was always self-deprecating. Learning to make fun of myself — before others could was — my way of surviving, and in a strange way, connecting.

Medication of Choice: Junk Food

Deep down, I lived with pain. I didn’t take drugs, watch porn, or drink alcohol to soothe the aching. Instead, just a kid trying to make it in the 80’s,

I self-medicated with soda, candy, chips, junk food, and video games.

You guessed it, this only made my struggles with my obesity worse, and any short-term relief was fleeting, as it compounded the depression.  

On top of that, I had acne. And when I say I struggled with my weight, let me make something clear: I wasn’t just fat, I had a large rear end —fat ass, as they called me. Scientifically, it’s known as a ‘gynoid fat distribution,’ a ‘pear’ shape that’s more common among females than males. But that was me. Skinny up top, disproportionately fat in the butt and legs — so much so, in fact, that my legs would rub together. And the short shorts they gave me for gym class… well, they took the laughing from snickers to uproariously hilarity. 

I also lived in a chaotic, broken home — my two older brothers ran away in their early teens. I needed my big brothers, but I struggled on… alone. Somehow, I managed to earn good grades — despite little confidence, crappy nutrition, and relentless bullying. 

Fast forward to 1994, where two years after finishing high school, I found myself sitting in the office of Dr. Daniel Johnson, my physician, in Boston. I was there to get my physical before starting my junior year at Babson College, a top-ranked business specialty school in the Boston area. 

Around that time, I had really begun to focus on getting healthier, and I had finally started losing some weight. I had been reading bodybuilding magazines, taking supplements, and trying to eat better. I was rambling on to Dr. Johnson about supplements I had been using and how helpful they had been. I was telling him how I was seeing the difference with this brand-new supplement, creatine, as well as whey protein isolate. I told him I believed that this industry will gain scientific rigor, grow tremendously, and someday, people will rely more on supplements and diet than medication.

The 20-80 Rule

Instead of scoffing and being dismissive like most doctors would have been, Dr. Johnson looked at me, square in the eye, and listened to me share my passion, and what he did next not only stunned me, it changed my life.  

He quietly turned away, grabbed a piece of paper, and drew a line on it with two hash marks on each end, one at 20 (my age at the time) and one at 80. He said,

“Why not be happy between here and here” (referring to the 60-year span between the ‘dash’). 

I was dumbfounded. Reeling. Emotions swirling. Did he just give me permission to pursue my dream, a dream I didn’t realize I truly had until he pointed it out? He could tell that I wasn’t as thrilled about the business school as I was about nutrition and supplements. 

Mind you, this was before Instagram, Facebook, or even MySpace. We’re talking before Tony Robbins got popular, or Oprah hit her prime. At that time, no one in my life or around me on any level was encouraging me to ‘chase my dreams’.

And yet, here I was, feeling both free and overwhelmed with excitement all at once — all because a seemingly random person told me one thing — that I could pursue my dream. That ‘insignificant’ thing radically changed my life path. 

If you take nothing else from this story, remember this: 

You, too, with just a couple words — or even a simple gesture — can forever change someone’s destiny.

Dr. Johnson changed mine that day, and for that, I am eternally grateful. 

Now, I live by the ‘20-80 Rule,’ and what I mean by that is that I am truly living ‘the dash,’ just like the famous Linda Ellis poem (about the meaning of the dash on one’s headstone). It’s really not about the years in life, but life in your years!

Formulating my Future

To become the best supplement formulator was the dream of this former overly fat-reared, bullied kid. What does that even mean you ask? I dreamt of creating the world’s most effective, cutting-edge, talked-about supplements that were not only rooted in good science, but more importantly, changed lives. Supplements that made you feel better, helped you gain more muscle, and actually helped you lose unwanted fat — real, life-changing results, not just hyped-up, empty promises. I had learned that supplements could help me save my own life, and down the road, I envisioned myself saving countless others.  

What is a formulator, you ask? One who creates. 

It’s an art that’s part chemistry and part visionary. It’s an extremely niche dream, as there are maybe a couple hundred people on the planet — maybe — who formulate supplements for a living.  

The odds are already slim, but of that couple of hundred, to be the best — number one — it’s kind of a pipe dream. I told people about my crazy vision, and nearly every one of them laughed or shook it off.

“Be real,” they would say. Or, “Just go get a real job and stop running from the real world.”  

For some reason, Dr. Johnson’s opinion and encouragement was all that mattered; it was all that I needed to pursue my dream. What he shared with me that day and the way he shared it made sense, and my brain and heart wouldn’t let go of it.

Darkness Creeps In… Again

The next step was making it happen. That meant going back to school to get my Master’s in Nutrition. How do I do this, I thought? My parents had moved from Massachusetts to North Carolina while I was at Babson. If I believed in this dream, I would have to fund it myself, achieve it myself, and be my own inspiration. My top choice was UNC-Chapel Hill — the best of the best.  

To be accepted there, I would first need two straight years of sciences as prerequisites, and that led me to UNC-Greensboro where I visited a guidance counselor, let’s call him Mr. Smith (Honestly, I blocked his name out, but not his face). I told him with unrepressed zeal about becoming a sports nutritionist, a dietitian, and a supplement formulator, and I told him the school I wanted to attend to facilitate this. 

Before I even finished saying Chapel Hill, he said, “You would need 26 credit hours of straight sciences a semester — with labs. This is not doable, especially for a business student. Why don’t you pick something more realistic? You’re not even that fit, if I am being honest.” 

Devastated and angry, I left his office. 

I spent that day spinning and wondering why… why does no one else but me and Dr. Johnson, who barely knew me, see it?

Worse than that, I felt like this was a ‘now or never’ situation, and I didn’t get approved for financial aid.  It felt like I was going back to being that fat kid (though I was in much better shape than I was years ago) who was being bullied and would be sick for the rest of my life.  

For two days straight, I contemplated suicide — my dreams shattered and out of reach.  Ironically, the dream of capsules and pills was how I thought this nightmare might end as well… but not supplements. Instead, I looked at bottles of Tylenol and Aspirin and thought, “I will just take all of this, wash it down with some Pepe Lopez tequila, and slip out of this increasingly difficult world.  No one will miss me.  I am the ‘fat-ass fuck’ with a stupid, ‘unrealistic’ dream’.  I was in a new city. No family. No friends. Certainly, no interested girlfriends. Alone. My dream crushed. I was dead inside.

Self-Talk Meets Real-Talk

Contemplating those misery-ending bottles and having the guidance counselor’s voice play over and over in my head made me feel empty, untalented, and worthless.  

Then, Dr. Johnson’s voice came roaring in like a torrential summer thunderstorm in North Carolina. He not only gave me permission to dream big in the first place, on that night, he unknowingly might have saved my life.  

Echoing in my head (and finally drowning out that wretched, pathetic guidance counselor) was Dr. Johnson’s encouraging voice, “Why not be happy between here and here?” Yes. I will try. I will do it.  If I fail, I will revisit this idea of ending my life, but I felt I had this turning point of ‘now or never’ meets ‘why not’. I said to myself (literally out loud): 

Maybe, just maybe I can actually be happy.  It’s a shot in the dark, but I could… maybe.

I got up, put the bottles down, and emerged a man reinvigorated. I had gotten my spark back, and now it was time to fan those flames.

The next morning, I went into the office at UNC-Greensboro, put the full semester’s tuition on my credit card, and I went ‘all in’ with a double class load. Here’s what stared me in the face: Chemistry 1 & 2, Biology 1 & 2, Human Biochemistry, Plant Biochemistry, Nutrition, Exercise Physiology, Genetics, Anatomy, and more. For most students these days, that’s two, three, or even four semesters’ worth. Prerequisite classes to get into Chapel Hill were lengthy. I not only needed to take them, I had to ace them.  

Two years later, in 1999, I finished at UNC-Greensboro with exemplary grades, kept up that course load, and got accepted into the school I had dreamed of as part of my path to becoming a nutritional biochemist. 

One person sparked the flames of the inferno that was to become the World’s Greatest Formulator, and on the other hand, one person had the potential to be a crushing tidal wave trying to douse even the smallest spark of passion. You don’t think there is power in the things you say to others and the way you say them? 

You don’t think there is power in the things you say to yourself? Think again.

In 2001, I had nearly wrapped up my master’s degree at UNC-Chapel Hill. I was almost a nutritional biochemist and Registered Dietitian; I had only two and a half months to go. I was getting offers to work in hospitals as the Chief Clinical Dietitian, a lofty position coming out of school.  Physically, I was consistently working out five days a week, and I looked lean and fit. I finally looked the part.  People respected me, and for the first time in my life, girls were attracted to me. Maybe I can do this was giving way to I did do this! 

I Nearly Died

You know what’s crazy? It seems every time I’ve had a taste of success or overcome an obstacle, life hit back — another hurdle, another test. This time, it was mononucleosis — better known as ‘mono’ — which is usually caused by the Epstein-Barr virus. And while many know mono as ‘the kissing disease’, what many people don’t know is that Epstein-Barr can play a role in the development of auto-immune disease, which was beginning to shut me down.  

My liver was swollen and pushing on my ribs. I slept 23 hours a day. My throat was swollen shut. I could only drink liquids. I felt like I was dying. I mean this by no exaggeration. Depression came back with a vengeance, and to be honest, I wasn’t sure I was going to make it.  Extreme fevers and shivering went on for days, then weeks. Although I’ve never gone through it myself, I suspect this is not too dissimilar to what it may feel like to go through extreme withdrawal. 

I was missing classes, but finishing my degree wasn’t my most pressing worry: I wasn’t sure I would even be alive another month. I couldn’t muster the energy to leave my apartment. I wasn’t eating a thing, and I was barely drinking.

The best I could do was get ‘online’ (by dial-up, believe it or not), and it’s a damn good thing I did. In my search for new ideas and solutions.

I began reading about a diet called the Ketogenic Diet. From what I read, it could help with auto-immune issues and inflammation…

…at least that was the word from some trailblazers on message boards. 

As I was able to begin eating some food, I decided to give this high-fat, very-low-carb approach a shot. I stopped buying processed foods — even the ‘healthy’ stuff, like ‘whole wheat’ breads, cereals, pastas, and the like — and kept to the outside ring of the grocery store where the whole, real food was.

Slowly, I started to regain strength, and with less than three weeks to go in the semester, my professors thankfully worked with me to help me stay on track. I finished up all my coursework and graduated. 

Despite that feather in my cap, the fatigue, muscle cramps, brain fog, and depression remained unbearable — as they would for the next two years.  

I continued to experiment with keto, on and off, from 2001-2003, and every time I strictly stuck to it, it seemed to help. As a matter of fact, as my body adapted and I became more active, I felt like I would see myself through all of this. 

As I was in ‘survival mode’ — I put my dream of formulating supplements on hold. 

While I was working fulltime in an uphill battle against chronic fatigue syndrome, brain fog, depression and fibromyalgia — the more I researched the ketogenic diet, nutritional ketosis, and ketone bodies — the more I became convinced that this was my solution to my health woes. I was turning the corner, and for once it seemed, the fans were flamed by the positive reinforcement around me. People who knew me online and in real life were inspired by my turnaround, and that was like a shot in the arm to me — creating greater drive and desire to get better so I could improve lives (including my own).

Advocate For Truth

I started getting back to my books, message boards, and research studies on dietary supplements, herbs, natural medicines, and tinctures. As I regained more and more strength, my evenings, weekends, and vacations would revolve around supplements.  

Having a dream gives you strength. Having purpose gives you the will to go on — tired or not. 

With my hospital and nursing home clinical practice experience, nutrition and biochemistry knowledge, personal struggles with weight which included an outright battle with autoimmunity — I felt empowered to serve others. Along those lines, I poured any ‘extra’ time into helping others on an anti-aging (LongeCity) message board as well as a board focused on sports and weight training (Bodybuilding.com).

I was an outspoken advocate for the truth, dispelling much of the marketing hype. I built up a reputation on the boards and started getting offers from reputable companies that appreciated my earnestness and knowledge. I had a Bachelor’s degree in Marketing and was accomplished in nutrition, so helping companies answer questions on their products, give advice to people trying to get healthier, and do product write-ups became a noteworthy ‘second career’.

I emerged as a significant player in the world of supplements as ‘ANDROGENIC’ (my message board name), which I chose because of the personal meaning it held: creating a better man. I was quickly becoming well-known throughout the industry. Of course, none of that paid much money, but that only fueled my desire to make this my primary job, as my reputation and respect grew in turn.

During that time, I also worked at two different GNCs and a place called Health Nutz in Monroe, North Carolina. I didn’t do it for the money — about $10 an hour — but rather, I loved looking at supplements, reading the labels, helping people understand them, and watching them achieve their goals when using them. 

Best of all, when those folks came back into the store, they only wanted to talk to me — to get my advice, my recommendations, my coaching. The response I was getting from the customers was powerful, and it was affirming. I was the go-to expert in the clinics and hospitals, online on the message boards, and in the retail shop. I was gaining momentum and positively impacting everything I touched because…

I had found the key to fulfillment: the marriage of passion and purpose. 

To level up my supplement and sports nutrition knowledge, I pursued and earned the prestigious CISSN (Certified Sports Nutritionist) credential through International Society of Sports Nutrition.

Doing the Right Thing

Things, however, weren’t all sunshine and rainbows. I was still experiencing nagging frustrations, particularly in hospitals and nursing homes, which are where I spent most of my ‘working hours’ as a Chief Clinical Dietitian. Despite being a Registered Dietitian (RD), Certified Sports Nutritionist (CISSN), and nutritional biochemist — who was an expert on food, nutrition, and supplements) — I could not order the diet or supplements I knew to be best per the research.

I was having to prescribe low-fat diets for people with heart disease, serve carbs all day long for type 2 diabetics, and on and on. If I didn’t follow Standard of Care (SOC), I could get sued, lose my license, lose my job, and be disgraced.  

We had auditors constantly combing through our notes and orders, and the pressure was real. I struggled with so much ambivalence — I knew I could do better; I knew I should do better. For example, the facilities often wanted to provide cheaper, low-quality protein — instead of a high-quality whey, which I would have chosen for people who were sarcopenic (losing muscle), infected, had pressure ulcers, and worse. 

I remember one conversation I had with the rounding physician where I wanted to put the residents on creatine to protect lean muscle mass. He said, “There’s no data on that. It’s not backed by science the way that medications are, which go through strict approval.” 

“There’s 500+ studies on creatine. 500! There’s a couple of studies on medications, and they’re often re-done several times just so they can show positive results and pass FDA scrutiny,” I refuted.  

Daily conversations and experiences like these made it clear that it was time to go out on my own so that I could make a greater impact, and more importantly, truly serve people. Little did I know that this epiphany was going to manifest within a week.

That Dream You’ve Had… It’s HERE… How Bad Do You Want It?

I was on a lunch break at a nursing home when I got a call on a hot and hazy North Carolina summer day while sitting in my car. On the other end of the phone, it was a recruiter, who said, “Shawn, I am looking to hire for this company in the Dallas area called Dymatize. They need a VP of R&D/Chief Science Officer there. Are you interested?” 

For me, this was like a small stage actor getting a call for the lead role in a Steven Spielberg movie! I said, Yes. Yes, sir. I am interested! 

Over the next three months, I went through nine rounds of interviews. I made it to the final round, and it was between me and a guy who had worked as a VP and C-level executive for companies like GNC and a slew of other massive supplement brands. On top of that, he was a published researcher, PhD, academic professor, had written book chapters, and had even been on TV. 

And then there was me — another guy who also worked at GNC… at a retail register. I fought for patients in the nursing home, and I was a hero on message boards, but I didn’t have his level of respect. It was a classic ‘David vs. Goliath’ matchup.

I finally got the call from my recruiter, who said, “Hey, Shawn, they decided to go with the other guy.” 

It made sense, given his resume — and I’ll be the first to say he was a rock star. Heck, I was in awe of him. Nevertheless, I felt dejected. There I was, so close to this incredible dream becoming a reality — the same dream my guidance counselor told me wasn’t ‘realistic’.

After a pause, the recruiter continued and boomed, “But I do have good news. They have a six-figure job waiting for you as Director of R&D, doing all of their formulations. This not only includes Dymatize’s products. They also private label for companies like Smoothie King, Advocare, GNC, and Vitamin Shoppe. Are you interested?” 

Shaking, both holding back tears and laughing, I boomed back, “Yes. Yes, I am. Let me talk to my wife about this.”

Did I tell you I got married? Shelley somehow stuck with me through the health issues and all the work — 50 hours/week in healthcare and another 30+ hours in GNC and small supplement companies doing marketing, answering questions, doing cited scientific write-ups, and so on. Five years into our marriage, I still hadn’t taken more than a weekend off and even that weekend was very, very rare — maybe once or twice a year. 

I was obsessive, but she understood. I sacrificed a great deal and so did she. She believed in me. 

She saw the man she loved go from his virtual deathbed with deep depression to a man with passion and purpose. I talked to her that evening and said, “Will you move from Charlotte to Dallas? I would probably have to work even harder than I am now. I need to prove myself in this industry.” 

And for the second time, Shelley said, “I do.” She gave me all the support I needed to take the next step in becoming a world class formulator.

This was it!

Dallas, Texas. 2011. I worked tirelessly at Dymatize. I’d come in at 7am and leave at 11pm. No one was going to outwork me. Why? THIS WAS IT. That’s why.  I would have been a fraud if I didn’t. This was the dream, yes, but it was just the beginning.

I became an Employee of the Year, got raises, and became an essential person in the executive meetings, driving all of the formulations and new directions of the products. In time, I became a fellow of the International Society of Sports Nutrition and an Editor of their academic journal, the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition (JISSN). I was now a published author (in academic text books and peer-reviewed journals), presented research at conferences, had award-winning, best-selling supplements on the very same shelves of the retail store I formerly worked in (GNC) and the website that helped build my reputation (Bodybuilding.com).  

Everything was going my way, and I was playing in my very own field of dreams, until once again another nightmare emerged.

About two years into my job at Dymatize, I became sick again — fatigue, brain fog, depression. The same nasty cast of characters, and I wasn’t sure why. I had strayed from my ‘clean eating’ and keto protocols for about a year because I was so busy with work and travel. Stress was my norm, and even though I was a dietitian and sports nutritionist, I’m sad to say that I lived off Subway subs, pizza, M&Ms, diet Coke, and a laundry list of processed, fast, junk foods that are typical of the standard American diet.

There was something different this time, however. As I explained to my doctor, “These headaches are new. I’ve never had these headaches. There’s a pressure on my eyes that I can’t deal with. I have insomnia that seems to be getting worse by the day — despite my fatigue. I have zero libido as well.”  

We ended up getting an MRI and some blood work, and my doctor said soberly, “Son, you’ve got a pituitary adenoma, specifically a prolactinoma. It’s a brain tumor.Even though it’s not cancerous, the pituitary is critical for your brain and your body. Furthermore, your testosterone is basically non-existent, and your estrogen is sky-high. I will be honest and tell you that even though it is not cancerous now, you have a higher likelihood of developing cancer in the future.”  

Mentally, emotionally, and physically, it was yet another all-too-familiar moment that left me reeling and feeling fatalistic. 

Hurdle After Hurdle

I cried. I felt like every time I achieved something — tasted success, overcame an obstacle — something was taken away.  

I decided to go on an extremely strict ketogenic diet, and I started eating Paleo (as it was being called) again — focusing solely on real, whole foods. I got back in the gym five days a week, and I took my medication. 

Slowly but surely, this recipe worked for me. I started to crawl back in to a livable 16-hour work day.  I was thinking better, the headaches subsided, and my sleep improved. The follow-up scans looked great, and for the past seven years have remained the same.

With my new-found momentum, my experience continued.  

I had the opportunity to join a scientific dream team, along with Dr. Tim Ziegenfuss and Dr. Hector Lopez, and together, we patented TeaCrine and Dynamine, two of the most well-known and studied branded energy ingredients on the market. They are in more than 400 products worldwide including pre-workouts, energy drinks, nootropics (brain boosters), and fat burners. Nearly 20 studies have been done showing they are safe and effective. It’s quite a legacy.

Further, natural supplements superstar, BioTrust Nutrition, sought me out. Co-founder Josh Bezoni said, “We want the best. I have one person on my list, and it’s you. You are the one!” Joel Marion, the other co-founder, called me “the LeBron James of supplements.” These men are worth hundreds of millions, and they sought me out.

I accepted and became their Chief Science Officer, leading R&D, Quality Control, Regulatory, and Branding for BioTrust, which went on to more than double in size and revenue. It was a wild ride for BioTrust, and along with a great team, I played a tremendous role in the rocket ship growth and disruption of the industry. 

This once laughed-at kid from Lenox, Massachusetts had achieved what was thought to be impossible and it felt good!

You CAN Change Lives

In 2017, I got a message on Facebook from a woman who said she’d been following me for years and loved the information I put out. I thanked her, yet I could sense there was more to the messaging than simply acknowledging my content and compassion.  

She proceeded to tell me she had been taken off chemotherapy and radiation by her oncologist, and she had six weeks to live with her glioblastoma multiforme (GBM), which is a deadly brain tumor, and in her case, it had taken over about 40-50% of her brain. 

She said, “I will be buried in the ground in a little over a month. Can you help me?” 

I told her, “I am not a doctor, while I cannot give you medical advice, I can tell you what I would do in your situation. But before doing anything, consult your physician first.” 

I told her a series of things I would do if I faced similar circumstances:  

• Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBOT)
• Strict Keto (no net carbs, cyclical or targeted)
• IV Vitamin C twice a week
• 16-8 Time-Restricted Feeding/Fasting (she was obese and was a junk-food junkie, just like I used to be) — This means 16-hour window not eating and 8 hour window to eat.
• Paleo (whole foods only, avoiding sugar, processed foods, and allergens)
• Supplements for inflammation, like CBD and curcumin
• Mitochondrial health supplements like CoQ10 and PQQ
• Things that further raise ketones like exogenous ketone supplements and C8 MCTs
• Creatine and active B-vitamins like methylcobalamin (active B12) and 5-Methyltetrahydrofolate (active folate) for methylation

She messaged me a few times telling me she told her doctor, but he didn’t seem to care too much — almost as if it was all superfluous. After all, none of it compared to drugs or radiation (in his mind).  

Well, six weeks later — she was the one laughing after she had her brain scanned again.

“Shawn… SHAWN… 80-90% reduction in my tumor… I am supposed to be buried in the ground, and I am living. I am ALIVE!” 

I knew what I knew was powerful, but wow. Seriously WOW! “So, at any point, did any doctor talk to you about keto or any of the things I mentioned,” I asked her. “No one ever mentioned any of it,” she replied, still exuding joy over simply being alive!

This was validation: Now more than ever, I was so sure of my purpose.

From Fat Ass to Badass

My home and lab are now countless shelves that have hundreds of supplements, bags of powders, oils, and various beakers and devices. 

I’ve been ‘biohacking’ myself for decades, which is the process of making changes to your lifestyle in order to ‘hack’ your body’s biology and feel your best. 

I use PEMF (pulsed electromagnetic fields), blue-light devices (in the morning), blue-light blockers (at night), NAD+ infusions, stem cells, supplements, medications, meditation, fitness and sleep trackers, and much more. It’s a story that I myself struggle to believe.  

Over 20 years ago, I dreamed it. Now I am driving teams that help supplement companies through rebranding acquisition in the supplement space (Kwired), creating novel ingredients with patents (World’s Greatest Ingredients and Ortho-Nutra), and formulating the best products in the world (Zone Halo Research).

I have presented at nearly 50 conferences, formulated 500 products, patented several ingredients, published research, written chapters in textbooks, been a guest expert on a weekly national radio for six years (One Life Radio), been a guest on more than 100 podcasts of some of the most elite shows in the country (e.g. Ben Greenfield), I’ve spoken in nearly every state as well as internationally in countries like Brazil, China, England, and more.  

I’ve been a worldwide advocate for keto for 20 years, and I’ve watched it go from, “Why aren’t you eating the bun?” to the most popular diet trend in the world. I am now known throughout the industry as the most elite name in supplements. I’ve been dubbed the ‘World’s Greatest Formulator’.

I did it. I really did it. I achieved that ‘unrealistic’ dream.  

I didn’t do it alone though. I had so much help from people who inspired me, both directly or indirectly. I modeled them, worked for them, was mentored by them, and teamed up with them. 

Hundreds of names could be listed here, but Dr. Rob Wildman, Dr. Hector Lopez, Dr. Tim Ziegenfuss, Dr. Jose Antonio, Dr. Jacob Wilson, Dr. Ryan Lowery, Michael Casid, Josh Bezoni, Joel Marion, Dr. Ralf Jaeger, Dr. Martin Purpura, Todd Tzeng, Ben Greenfield, Ben Pakulski, Kylin Liao, and Jaime-Lee Fraser are some of my mentors, employers, and business partners.  Lewis Howes, Aubrey Marcus, Chris Winfield, Jen Gottlieb and Brent Sutherland have taught me a great deal and inspired my path as well with high-level masterminds and accountability. My brothers, Russ and Randy, my mother and father, Bob and Donna get recognition and love on my journey. And of course, my wife, Shelley, who believed in me and supported me despite my seemingly irrational focus on being the ‘World’s Greatest Formulator’. 

Practically every day I am sent products from people wanting me to try or approve their ‘dream’ products. I’m not saying any of this for ego or self-promotion.  

I’m saying that unwavering desire and focus can make anything possible.

I continue, not only having achieved my dream, but far surpassing it. The dream is now evolving, as I do. From ‘fat ass’ to ‘badass’, I am proud of who I’ve become, and even more, the lives I’ve touched.

That said, thanks are in order. Thank you to the thousands of patients, customers, readers, listeners, and viewers who have supported me and let me educate and help them. Thank you to Don Miguel Ruiz for writing the incredibly impactful book The Four Agreements, which freed me from self-torment. Thank you to the guidance counselor who told me I couldn’t do it; seriously, it strengthened my resolve. Thank you to that one rogue doctor who took an extra minute to encourage me, and without a thought, provided me that one kind act, that one drawing… I would have never pursued my dream, much less achieved it. Lastly, I am grateful for the illnesses I have struggled with many times in my life. Each bout strengthened my resolve and will to battle. Without that, I would never have my passion, care like I do, or connect deeply with anyone else fighting their own battles. I am blessed and thank you to you for having read my story… and you’re now a part of it. 

You may also enjoy reading Adapt, Heal & Thrive: A Q&A with Dr. Chad Woodard by Bill Miles

The post Against All Odds: A Story of Triumph, Perseverance, Healing and Service appeared first on BEST SELF.

Doing less is the new creative clarity: a refreshingly candid take on motherhood, entrepreneurship and having it all (it’s possible!)

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I was very quickly nearing the end of the second trimester of my second pregnancy when I finally got my butt in the chair to write my second book. There’s nothing like the looming dual deadlines of a book contract and a birth to get one’s rear in gear.

When we look at someone who has a lot going on, like kids and a business or a job with a lot of different moving parts, we like to ask them, “How do you do it all?”

[Spoiler alert] My answer to this question is always simple: “I don’t.”

When it came to writing my second book, Do Less: A Revolutionary Approach to Time and Energy Management for Busy Moms, the premise of the book had to guide its creation. The whole thing would have lacked integrity if it hadn’t.

We each have a unique creative rhythm, so the first thing we need to do when saddling up on any creative endeavor is identify our rhythm and honor it.

Here’s what mine looks like: Get the book idea, write the outline, write the sample chapters, submit to publisher, sign contract, appear as though I’m doing nothing for about 10 months, and write the book in the last 1-2 months before the deadline.

The most important part of this process is the part where it looks like I’m doing nothing. This creative gestation period is critical for me. I know that it’s a critical part of the work, even though, technically speaking, nothing is produced during this time. 

I’ve learned to trust my long pause before I actually start. Rather than beat myself up for it, I embrace it and allow it to be. When I finally sit down to write, I know that the 9-10 months marinating were well spent because the words have a flavor they wouldn’t have had if I’d skipped the pause.

Next, if we want to get anything out into the world, we have to pull back on other areas of our life. We simply cannot do it all at the same time, so something’s gotta give.

If you want to get something done, like a book, decide what else can take a back seat. Can you minimize other projects at work? Can you cut out your evening TV? Can you wake up one hour earlier or ask your mother in-law to watch your kids on Saturdays? You have to claim the time from somewhere because it won’t happen by itself.

I knew I had 2 months to get the book done and there was very little wiggle room there, given the fact that I was also going to give birth soon after that.

We didn’t do any major promotions in our company while I was writing the book, and I spent 3 days at a hotel completely by myself so I could cross the finish line. I got a lot of help with my daughter, I didn’t try to win any awards with an impressively organized home, and I got takeout — a lot.

Whether you’re working on a film, a novel, an essay, getting a blog up and running, or curating an Instagram feed, here are some other tips for getting your creative project off the ground by doing less:  

1. Pay yourself first with your time

Figure out when you’re the most focused or feel the most creative during the day and see if you can schedule time to work on your project during those hours. I find I’m my most focused and inspired in the morning, so I don’t schedule meetings before 12pm and instead I devote the morning to the projects that matter the most to me.

2. Set boundaries

I committed to working a minimum of one hour a day on my book. Everyone in my household knew that was happening, 7 days a week. I requested that no one bother me during that time and I put my phone on airplane mode, closed all of my apps, shut my door, and got to work. 

Often the hardest boundaries to set are with ourselves.

Do whatever it takes to get the space you need to show up for yourself and your creativity. The boundaries with yourself and others are so worth it.

3. Show up

A lot of getting a project done is simply logging hours with your butt in your chair doing the work. I ended up throwing away entire chapters that were just kind of sucky. But writing those chapters made way for the not-sucky ones that came right after them. I don’t believe there’s any such thing as wasted output. It’s all part of the process and if you just keep showing up, you’ll get to the good stuff eventually.

4. Make it fun

To hold myself accountable, I recorded an Instagram story before and after each writing session to update my community on my word count. I had a total number of words in my contract, and each day I got closer and closer to my goal. I used this ‘nerdy glasses’ filter to report in, and it made the whole process much more fun. Plus it ensured that I didn’t take myself too seriously, which, at least for me, ensures that I stay in creative flow. You could have a ritual around a favorite beverage, some dark chocolate, or a dance break to begin or end your work time. Whatever you need to do to make it fun and feel good will be time and energy well spent!

Creative projects do not start and finish themselves.

In order to devote a part of ourselves to doing work we’re meant to do, we need to dial back in certain areas and set boundaries so we can claim the space, time, and energy for the work. Find your rhythm. Decide which areas of your life you can let slide a little bit while you get your project done. Schedule time at your optimal hours if possible. Set boundaries. Keep showing up and make it fun.

Before you know it, your project will be done and you won’t have burned yourself out in the process. Hallelujah! 

You may also enjoy reading Love The Work You’re With: The ‘Genius Habit’ that Will Shift Your Relationship Forever by Laura Garnett

The post Do Less, Have More: How to Complete a Creative Project Without Burning Out appeared first on BEST SELF.

The ‘genius habit’ — the missing link to loving work. How to implement one habit that can shift your relationship to work forever.

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Why is it so hard to love work? It’s confounding that we have 3d printers that are printing body parts to save lives, but that currently, according to Gallop, only 34% of Americans are engaged with work, which is the highest it’s ever been. While it’s encouraging that it’s rising, it still remains that 13% are actively disengaged and 53% are disengaged. That means that 66% of Americans are still not engaged with their work. Why is this? 

This is a question that has plagued me for years. It started with my own career crisis 10 years ago. I was working at Google in a job that was the worst fit I could ever imagine. I not only didn’t like work, but I didn’t like myself. I blamed the poor performance on my own inadequacies, rather than seeing the situation for what it really was — a job that I could never succeed in because it intrinsically didn’t match who I was or what I was great at. It took a year of struggle before I remotely began to understand that I needed to make a change. And yet, I felt deflated in the midst of this change.

When I allowed myself to envision something differently, I realized that I actually had big goals for my career.

I had just struggled to see how I could actualize them when everything seemed so directionless. This situation prompted me to start asking some big questions, such as…

What are the jobs that I am going to be great at? What is the impact on others that is most meaningful to me? How can I create the kind of success that I desire?

I took steps — I sought help through hiring coaches and reading every self-help and career book I could get my hands on and spent a year looking for answers anywhere I could find them. After that year, I came up with nothing. I digested tons of material and easily found copious answers to what created success. For example, finding work that was aligned with who you are, being so motivated that you would do your job for free or having high confidence. But I found very little information on ‘how’ to cultivate, find or develop any of these characteristics. 

I wanted to know in great detail what were the specific habits that I needed to learn in order to create a new experience at work. 

I ended up quitting Google and going to work for a start-up. Within a month, I realized I was in yet another job that was not a great fit for me. My struggle continued. This was in 2009. Within 9 months I was laid off and the start-up crumbled along with the rest of the world. It was at this point that I realized I had to solve my problem on my own. 

I needed to create a job that I loved from scratch. 

It’s been 10 years since I made that decision — and since I have created a body of work that is meant to help those who may be asking the same questions I was, or just want to take more ownership of their career, but don’t know ‘how.’ My methodology is all about the ‘how.’ My biggest pet peeve is to read a book — have your mind be blown by the ideas, but then feel helpless in knowing how to implement the changes in your life that you just read about.

This is why we run in circles — we don’t know how to bring the practice from the pages into our lives. 

This is where, ‘The Genius Habit’ comes in — and it’s my commitment to you that it will shift how you think about work (and life), forever.

For starters, I distilled all of the latest science of performance into 5 distinct principles that will help guide you in knowing what the MOST important behaviors are for success. There is a lot of information available about success, and it’s easy to get confused. Society also steers us in the wrong direction almost 100% of the time.

The 5 principles are:

Challenge: 

In order to be engaged at work, you must be challenged (in a good way). This is the intellectual component of great work. You need to be actively engaged and excited about the thinking or problem-solving that you’re doing. I help people understand what is most challenging to them by identifying their genius. Your genius is the thinking or problem-solving that you’re best at. Know this and you will never be bored again. 

Impact:

Intrinsic motivation is the only true motivation — which means it must come from within you. We often get hooked by extrinsic motivators like money, promotions, or praise, because we don’t know what intrinsically motivates us. This is essential. I help people identify their purpose, which is the impact on others that is most meaningful to you. I have found that the answer to your purpose lies in identifying your core emotional challenge. We have all wounds from our past, but the core emotional challenge is the biggest wound. If you identify this wound and then reverse it, i.e. your wound is not being heard — then it’s meaningful for you to help others find their voice, you have the key to endless fulfillment. 

Joy:

We all want joy at work, but are at the mercy of our brains. When we achieve a goal, we get a hit of dopamine which makes us think that we are happy when we are achieving. As common as this is, it’s not the path to joy. Joy comes from enjoying the process of your work, just as much or more than the achievement of your goals. Most of us are achievement junkies and just making a shift to enjoying the process versus the end point, can re-direct your work experience immediately.

Mindfulness:

We all know how meditation is great and mindfulness is now the new green juice of life. However, when it comes to your job and career, mindfulness is about paying attention to your own negative mental chatter and building your confidence muscle. In order to build your confidence, you need to be aware of how you’re depleting it with your negative mental chatter. Mindfulness is the key to getting to know yourself and becoming confident. Everyone is capable of being more confident. 

Perseverance:

Failures are an inevitable part of any career journey. How you handle failures, separates those that are successful from those who aren’t. You must tackle failures with curiosity and grit. Curiosity allows your mind to be open and grit insures you never give up. This principle forces you to analyze your failures, grow from them and start seeing them as positives, not negatives. Once you see failures as growth opportunities, the sky is the limit. 

‘The Genius Habit’ comes alive when you are able to track your progress on the above five principles. I created a tool called the Performance Tracker to help you do this. I like to think of it as a Fitbit for your performance. The tool will help you easily build self-awareness (which is very hard to do alone) and steadily build the habit of creating work you love week after week. This is accomplished because the tracker allows you to easily diagnose performance issues at the root. With that awareness, you can then proactively fix the things that are misaligned. Most often people struggle because they have no awareness of the root cause of their performance issues.

My promise is that once you learn ‘The Genius Habit’, having a job you don’t love becomes a choice versus feeling like you’re a victim of circumstance. What could be better than that? My newly published book, The Genius Habit: How One Habit Can Radically Change Your Work and Your Life will help you learn the one habit, that if adopted will give you the ‘how’ you’ve been looking for — the one to create work you love, forever. 

Maybe you’ll find your dream job on Jooble?

You may also enjoy reading Authenticity In the Workplace: Bringing Your Whole Self to Work by Fatime Banishoeib

The post Love The Work You’re With: The ‘Genius Habit’ that Will Shift Your Relationship Forever appeared first on BEST SELF.

An Interview with Leif Skogberg

By Bill Miles

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“The journey to create a sustainable world actually starts with individuals.“

—Leif Skogberg

Bill:                 I first met Leif Skogberg during an event this last year and was so impressed by his resounding commitment to sustainability — I had to sit down to chat with him for Best Self Magazine.

Leif is a whole systems designer, sustainability consultant, and a life purpose coach. He has nearly 20 years of experience in holistic living, leadership, and design. He helps his clients save money and achieve greater health, alignment, and resilience through integrated design.

Welcome Leif.

Leif:                Thank you, Bill, for having me!

Bill:                 I’d like to start out with exploring how you first connected to sustainability. What does that term even mean to you?

Leif:                Sustainability has become a loaded term today. It’s often used in different ways: to be sustainable financially or sustainable environmentally. But for me, I see sustainability as a holistic framework for how we create a better world in the future.

A lot of people talk about sustainability as not really being the goal anymore, because the thinking is that if we are ‘sustaining’ what we have right now, we’re still going down a bad path. We’ve already done so much destruction to the planet that we actually need to regenerate nature, we need to restore things, and then we can be sustainable once we’ve repaired the damage.

I think it’s important to understand that sustainability is a balance where we have to restore things to a point at which they’re worth sustaining. We’ve gone to the other end of the spectrum of really disrupting things. So there’s this degenerative and regenerative spectrum. Sustainability is in the middle. It’s that balance point.

Bill:                 You have an interesting story from your youth of how you got connected to this profound interest of yours. Can you share a little bit about that?

Leif:                I grew up as a child in a beekeeping family. So I was actually out in nature a lot, very connected with natural systems. But at the same time, I had a very rough childhood. My adolescent years were pretty challenging. I actually thought that the end of the world was coming before I even would graduate high school. My dad was one of the ‘end-of-days’ preppers, apocalypse-is-coming kind of people.

In my early teens, I was a bit self-destructive because I was being told we were self-destructing our planet. I participated in extreme sports. I partied a lot, did drugs and ultimately, that led me to a place of deep suffering and a profound rock-bottom.

I was considering committing suicide — in a very difficult emotional and physical place. Lots of physical injuries, lots of physical pain, as well as emotional and family pain from parents getting divorced and just seeing a lot of really challenging things as a child.

The turning point came whenI had this experience where I realized that I couldn’t blame anyone anymore for my pain and my suffering, because I was just giving away my power when I did that. I couldn’t get control of my life if I blamed anyone. So, I had this realization that if I wanted to have a future that was positive and healthy and wasn’t riddled with suffering — then I really had to choose wisely. And I had to find truth and understanding if I wanted to live a better life.

That awakening was the catalyst for me heading down a path of seeking and asking: How do I create a better world for myself? How do I become my best self and reduce suffering for myself in the future? And how do I bring that to the world?

Bill:                 I love that you realized that the world is not going to fix your problems; you have to fix your problems.

Leif:                Exactly.

Bill:                 So it’s a story of personal accountability.

Leif:                Yes. I was really angry with my dad and with what I had been told was this God who was going to end the world. I took out that anger on myself. I became self-destructive, because I felt powerless against these big authority figures that were destroying my life before I could even graduate high school.

So yes, it was this self-responsibility, and this threshold that I crossed of letting go of blame, forgiving my dad, forgiving whatever God there may be — forgiving myself for what I had done to my body and my life. That’s really what sparked a curiosity and an interest in sustainability a few years later.

Bill:                 You came to that realization at a pretty young age. I think that you had a certain calling to bring your talent forth and spend as much of your life going forward, influencing for good.

Leif:                It definitely happened for a reason. Ever since that time, I’ve felt very purposeful. As I inspire others from my journey, I become more inspired — and there’s many who continue to inspire me in a very deep way to live even more deeply into my truth.

Bill:                 Amen. As I understand it, your work is split — you have a personal side, where you help as a life-purpose coach for individuals, and then you have a business side, where you’re a sustainability consultant, helping businesses leave a better mark on the planet.

Leif:                That’s right. It is a split in the sense of how we see business in modern times. It’s been hard for people, even myself, to frame it and understand how it all fits together. Because if you are a healer or a life coach, that’s one niche and industry. And then if you’re an environmental and a sustainability activist, that’s a whole other direction. And then there’s a vast area in between. That’s my sweet spot bridging the two.

What I’ve realized is that the journey to create a sustainable world actually starts with individuals. We each need to understand how to be empowered, how to transform our own lives, how to grow, how to design our future, and how to create an innovative design for our life. And to believe in that vision, to believe in a positive future self or a positive future planet. And then to strategically take action to manifest that, to build and implement that design that we want for our life.

The patterns and principles of how to heal and become whole in one’s self are actually very similar to sustainability. Very related, and relevant, and connected to the garden of life.

In my own personal journey towards healing and truth, I started to see the patterns of how we become whole, how we integrate the various aspects of duality, of what people often talk about as the four or five elements — these different quadrants of our life and our existence.

I was seeing these patterns, as I started to study permaculture, sustainability, natural building, ecology, and horticulture — my degree is in Environmental Horticulture Science. I realized: It’s all the same. They’re connected.

And then a few spiritual teachers that came into my life were saying the same thing, that the water of our planet is polluted because the consciousness and the psyche and the emotions of humanity are polluted. And the minds of the collective conscious of humanity are influencing our environment and our world, and our culture is influencing our outer world. There is a symbiotic relationship.

Bill:                 It’s more than a metaphor. It’s actually an energetic synergy.

Leif:                That’s exactly right. As I started to see all these patterns, I wanted to create a model and understanding for myself that maybe I could even share with others about how they all connect. That’s what I created a few years ago. I call it ‘Appreculture Design’.

Bill:                 You say that, “Appreculture Design is a concept of designing and building an appropriate and appreciation-based world and culture. Henceforth ‘Appreculture’. It uses a simple garden-based framework for creating a sustainable world from the inside out.”

Leif:                Yes. There are these patterns of inner and outer landscapes. I couldn’t ignore the interdependence and the interconnection. As I started to explore them further, I realized there are many other people who have taught and spoken about this.

Rudolf Steiner was one of them. He taught widely on holistic healing, pedagogy and farming — and revealed all these different aspects of how we create balance and harmony in our reality.

The ecology of nature is made up of multiple systems: mineral, water, gas elements and energy — with cycles that flow through and drive the whole system.

The human body is very similar. You have the water, the liquids, both in the vascular system, as well as the lymphatic system that circulate and move nutrients around. And you have the gases and oxygenation — and it’s so important for all the cells to work properly. Then you also have the energy, that spark in our eyes that drives the whole system. We get that from directly absorbing the sun, and also from our food energy.

I’m not the first one to come up with these connections, but I’ve been starting to put them all together to create this easily understood, garden-based, nature-based framework for how we can systematically heal nature, culture, society, economic systems and the individual self that is at the center of it all.

Bill:                 While the idea is not new, perhaps it’s become more prevalent. People tend to live in the moment. They’re not necessarily future-tripping about how their activities are going to affect the world for our children and generations to come. But we’re now at a critical point where we need to think that way.

What can people, as individuals, do in a very tactical way to become more sustainable?

Leif:                To reiterate, they really can address these four spheres in their life. Focus on their personal self-care and their own health, by getting proper food intake, diet, and regular sleep — something I often find challenging, being married with two kids, demands of work, etc.

Getting enough sleep is vital and preferably synched with the cycles of nature. There’s a lot of science to back up that. And then getting exercise, meditating, not being too fiery and busy in the head, and keeping the energy systems in our body balanced and circulating properly.

Self-care is a critical part of creating a sustainable world. When people do that for themselves, not in a selfish or egoic materialistic way, but in a way where people are taking responsibility for themselves — it improves the collective.

And then from there, we can start to look at our financial sustainability, our economic health, and our personal life, which I really see as: What’s the outer purpose of our own individual life? How do we make a positive influence in the world? How do we follow our passion, live our dreams, and then monetize that so that we are reimbursed for what we’re giving in service to the betterment of people and the planet?

Bill:                 Ultimately if we can elevate our consciousness about our self-care, we’re better positioned to be aware of our greater impact. We can also be mindful of our more external practices, like where we spend our money, the businesses we choose to work with and purchase from.

Leif:                Very true. And ask ourselves, What are we investing in? Not only our own time and energy, but our finances as well. Everyone’s probably heard this now, but every time you buy something, you’re casting a vote.

I don’t buy non-organic dairy, or non-organic non-free-range meat, because I don’t think it’s good for my body, but I also don’t like voting for the opposite of my values. I like voting for healthy and responsible treatment of animals.

Bill:                 I also believe there’s an energy associated with food. Healthy plants and happy animals make for energetically positive food for us.

Leif:                There are systematic approaches that we can take with self-care practice, economic investments and sustainability — and by supporting companies that are responsible, and making it known. If you’re leaving a bank because of their practices, make it known why you’re leaving.

And then there are all the social, and cultural aspects of sustainability, where we have to get along. We have to be able to create peace between our loved ones and in our neighborhoods. We need skills to be able to speak with non-violent communication, to have compassion for people — to have empathy for them and their situation, to make room for their perspective.

It’s important to create peace and harmony and connection between humans, even if we totally disagree on something — to respect that perspective and opinion and to see it as something that you might learn from.

Bill:                 In general, when clients approach you, is this new for them? Or are they already of the framework, and what you’re providing is tactical direction?

Leif:                It’s a little bit of both. Usually they align with the vision, and they have a heartfelt intention to live in this kind of way — a desire to be the change they wish to see in the world. They’re interested in going green and taking care of the planet.

They want to understand how to facilitate a better relationship in a community or an eco-village. When people bring me in to help facilitate dialogs, team-building, difficult conversations, integrative design, there’s usually a direct need associated with it. Sometimes it’s diversifying their revenue streams on their property or their farm, or reducing their environmental impact and being more efficient with their utility costs.

I don’t try and dump this whole ‘big earth’ framework on them if that’s not their need. I just meet them where they’re at and help them address the issues at hand. And then I start to evolve the conversation. Have you considered doing some reflection and analysis of the culture in your organization? How do you create synergy and coherence and build a team of trust, and a team of people who are stoked to come to work because they’re working for this amazing organization? Usually there’s a specific gateway to start, and then it becomes a bigger conversation once that relationship evolves.

Bill:                 Do you get involved with school systems? Schools are not known for having a great carbon footprint. Some schools now have their own gardens, and they actually prepare school meals from their harvest, which is extraordinary. Others are still stuck with vending machines filled by Coca-Cola.

Leif:                It can be challenging with some schools. I started as an activist in Santa Barbara, California. I was attending university there and was a student organizer and activist at the Santa Barbara Community College. That direct, hands-on, organizing of teams across many different campaigns, and marketing different classes and initiatives was one of the greatest experiences and best teachers I ever had. I was working with a statewide group of students across California, and our goal was to transform the higher educational institutions to become the largest green enterprise in the state.

Bill:                 Very ambitious!

Leif:                And we were actually quite successful.

It was huge because we had students working at city colleges and California state universities. Combined, those systems had a tremendous buying power, a tremendous influence on policy, and of course, educating the future generations. We passed a number of policies on everything from zero-waste and transportation alternatives, to renewable energy, green buildings, and organic foods in the cafeterias. It was pretty comprehensive.

That was where I got lit up and really engaged in this greater conversation: Not only can we make change, but we can make change on a huge scale.

Bill:                 Any change that’s ever been made at a grand scale started with one person.

Leif:                That’s the essence of Appreculture. A lot of the sustainability models talk about ecology and society and economics. But where’s the individual in that whole model? They’re the ones making everything happen.

So, anyone working in sustainability in any way, whether it’s about personal health and awakening, or social or environmental issues — they’re making a choice to be a leader and to have a ripple effect on their surroundings. That’s what Gandhi and so many other amazing teachers did, and that’s what’s happened for me.

Bill:                 And anybody can do that just by starting with their own backyard. If you can be a change-maker for yourself and for your family, then you’ve done a heroic deed for the world.

Leif:                Exactly. We don’t have to take on the weight of changing all the spheres of our reality. We can pick one and focus on it.

And just because someone is working on a specific issue to make economics more sustainable, it doesn’t mean that they’re any more or less important than another who may be working on environmental sustainability or social issues.

They’re all a part of a whole — it’s important for us to understand that, support people to follow their passion, and connect it with this bigger world framework.

Bill:                 It’s worth noting, however, that economics is what really drives the whole machine. So, if you can tackle the problem through economics, you have the greatest chance of sustaining progress.

I happen to be a big believer in the power of business to impact social change. And I know that you are as well. In Best Self Magazine, we’re always uncovering new businesses and business models that have sustainability as a thread.

There’s a poignant line that you wrote: “Nature is our teacher, and our mirror for our collective consciousness.” I wanted you to touch on our connection to the natural world, something we often lose track of.

Leif:                It’s a big topic. There are many angles to look at it from — but ultimately, the natural world has always been a metaphor for our culture, our lives, and our religions. We were thrown from the Garden of Eden because of this original sin, doing something wrong. And then we have had this relationship for many thousands of years where we are no longer part and parcel of the Garden of Eden; we’re not stewards of it anymore.

This new story that’s emerging is referring to that as a time period in human evolution, a period of adolescence — where we had to psychologically separate ourselves from our creator. We had to separate ourselves from our parents, from Father Sky and Mother Earth and rebel — be a bit disruptive. Sort of like a teenage boy, in some ways. Not always the case, but I know I was that way (and I’m seeing it in my eleven-year-old now).

This new story is actually about being caretakers of the earth. We’re stewards of the garden, and we can have a regenerative impact. Our impact doesn’t have to be negative and destructive.

When we go out into nature it’s a healing experience in and of itself — the exercise, the sunshine, the fresh air. But if we walk in nature with intention and with question, we can be reflected some powerful teachings, whether it’s the patterns from a leaf, or an animal that has some deeper connection with us.

There’s much medicine in nature. I love taking groups on medicine walks in nature, little solo fasts on the land, where we just go out and we sit in ceremony and connect with the elements and the animals, and the plants. For some people it’s a bit too ‘woo-woo’, and for others it’s a wonderful, basic thing.

Bill:                 We’re not different from nature. We’re not intended to dominate it. We are inextricably part of it.

Leif:                When we go out and we connect with these elements, it awakens an ancient language within us — a way of connecting and communicating. It is us.

But as I was saying earlier, as we begin to awaken and blossom as a species, that is being simultaneously reflected in how we build buildings, how we design our infrastructure and our roads — and how well we care for the natural systems that are the foundation of all life.

Bill:                 I hope that the trend continues.

You did mention at one point that the future of business is about social responsibility, and that the profits will become secondary.

I would like to believe that. Yet, I’m a little too jaded to believe that the profits becoming secondary is actually going to happen. I think being profitable, while having a sustainable model is going to be the hybrid. A business must be profitable and must seek profits to continue to do what they do, however sustainably conscious it is.

Leif:                I agree and yet, from all I’ve heard from corporate directors, sustainability is smart business.

If you don’t have a sustainability department you’re declining. There’s been a huge awakening of how supply chains are dependent on natural systems. How the quality of our products is dependent upon people. How carbon emissions are creating an insecure environment for crops and foods, and materials and fibers — all the elements that big corporations rely on for production.

Bill:                 And that philosophy doesn’t always serve short-term profits, which is what shareholders in public companies are driven by.

Leif:                Yes, and that is the model that is going to have to shift.

Bill:                 All the new, hot emerging companies you hear about — Warby Parker and so forth — they’re all built on a sustainable model.

Leif:                Exactly. Consumers are now demanding it, just like with organic food and healthy products and healthy homes. More and more people — such as you and me and all of those listening to this — are demanding this kind of awareness in corporations. Corporations that don’t have sustainability programs are having a hard time recruiting millennials. They’re having a hard time getting people to fill their labor force.

People want to work for companies that do good. That’s what I mean about this shift to a purpose-driven economy, as opposed to solely profit-driven. People are wanting to work for and buy from companies that are having a meaningful impact, and not just, “Yeah, we donate to this charity,” but rather, it’s a part of their organizing principles.

Bill:                 I want to touch on B corporations, or ‘benefit corporations’. Would you explain briefly what that is, and why that’s a useful insignia, or certification for a customer to look for in a company they might purchase from?

Leif:                The B Corp model is great. I think it’s been around officially for five or six years. Several hundred companies have signed on. It’s basically a way of organizing your corporation and the bylaws of the company, to explicitly say that we are in business to benefit the planet and people.

There’s a systematic review process that everyone who holds the B Corp certification has to go through. Many classic, sustainability-minded companies jumped on the bandwagon right away.

Bill:                 Patagonia was the first one.

Leif:                Yes. They’re based out of Ventura, California; I worked with them a while back. Companies that are jumping on that bandwagon are seeing it increase their growth. Patagonia once created an ad for a holiday magazine that had the headline, “Don’t buy this jacket.”

Bill:                 It was a famous ad. The idea was, Do not buy this if you don’t need it. Because we don’t need another jacket going into landfill.

Leif:                And it worked. “Don’t buy this because you probably have enough.” Turns out, more people bought it than if they would have said, “You should really buy this because of x, y, and z.”

Bill:                 It also had a subliminal message that their products are built to last and not wind up in landfill. It was a brilliant ad.

Another example is when REI, an outdoor retailer, a few years ago on the day after Thanksgiving (the biggest shopping day of the year in the U.S), initiated their ‘opt-outside’ campaign. They actually closed every store — even online. When everybody else was flocking to the mall for their special Black Friday deals, REI said, “We’re going to shut the door. We want you guys to go outside instead.”

Leif:                That’s great.

Bill:                 They obviously lost some business in the short run on that, but they drew a whole lot of fans in the long-run…and we’re still talking about it.

Leif:                Absolutely. And it’s all about taking responsibility — responsibility for their self, for their organization and it’s trickledown. Again, it’s that individual entity making a decision that is then influencing economy and culture and the environment.

Bill:                 That’s the full circle of this conversation.

For me, this dialog gives me even greater hope for the world, because, although I see the problems, I also see a lot of possibility for solutions. And this planet is amazingly powerful at restoring itself when given an opportunity.

Leif:                Absolutely.

Bill:                 Where can people find you if they want to connect with you?

Leif:                To find out about all the different things that I offer, visit my main webpage. They can also follow me on Facebook and Instagram

The last thing I’ll say is, we all have to start on the journey of understanding sustainability — somewhere. Just start.

For me, it’s important that we don’t judge people for being ‘bad’ or un-sustainable. They just might not be educated. They might not be aware of the impact that they’re having. I think we need to be honest with people — and at the same time, compassionate and loving with them, and not be self-righteous, super-eco arrogant people.

Bill:                 That’s a great point. You want to inspire without judgment.

Leif:                Exactly. A big part of this Appreculture design framework — the appreciation piece — is appreciating everyone for who they are, where they’re at, and then coming to a conversation about sustainability and creating a better world by first appreciating them as a human being, as someone who has family and friends, and a product of their environment, whoever they are.

And then from that place, having curiosity around whether or not they are interested in becoming more integrated, aligned, coherent and sustainable with the direction that the future is going.

I found that in my activism work, as a student in college and then later as a consultant over the years, it’s especially important to approach people with a non-judgmental, compassionate mindset.

We all need to be educated about something. I may do something on occasions where someone who’s very eco-savvy might think, “How dare he use that straw at this restaurant?” I usually don’t use straws, but I might forget sometimes. We just need to see the humanity in each other.

Bill:                 …and always be a student.

Leif:                Absolutely. Always maintain that curiosity. If we lose curiosity in our fellow human beings, in our loved ones, and in how we can become a better person — then I think we lose a vitality and an innocence that is divine. It’s like a child’s light that we all hold onto as we grow older.

Bill:                 Thank you very much for joining in this conversation.

Leif:                Thank you and your whole team at Best Self Magazine for reaching out to people and having conversations like this one — and sharing knowledge and information.

The post Sustainability & Purpose: Living in Concert With Our Ecology and Humanity appeared first on BEST SELF.

The surprising ingredient for successful leadership is followship — and embracing this construct can optimize both your professional and personal life

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The construct of leadership is instilled in us at a young age — the coveted position at the head of the line. Accompanying it, is the leading myth that it is something appealing, a sign of worth, an absolute to aspire toward if we want to succeed in life. Leadership is constantly under the shining lights of our attention and dreams — perhaps our definition of it needs to be reconstructed.

Think, for example, of how many programs there are for leaders: future leaders, female leaders, agile leaders, you name it. Maybe you’ve heard of and even attended some. But I ask you, is there a program for ‘followers’? Have you ever heard anyone being proud of being considered a follower? Probably not.

So many of us get uncomfortable around the concept of ‘following’ — to the extent that we are even reluctant to follow our own desires, claim our dreams, heed our intuition. Why? Because we live in a productivity-driven, fast-paced world obsessed with ‘leading’ — or following someone else’s professional path. Where do you and your skills fit into this equation?

The modern day conundrum: In order to appear successful, one must LEAD…not follow, right?

The question then is: Can we really dare to lead others without being able to follow our own SELF?

Sometimes that means leaning in, in more ways than one.

I found myself reflecting on this topic when applying for a speaking engagement for a global conference. I looked back upon my own career path with its seemingly endless list of leadership programs attended. I remember leadership meetings created to discuss succession plans and to identify the company’s future leaders. Not once, can I recall anyone being identified as a follower and it being remotely associated with a compliment. Admittedly, I myself would have been offended had I received feedback identifying myself as a ‘follower’.

But I think we’ve got this all wrong — and I think we are doing ourselves and others a real disservice in doing so. We can’t all be leaders in this traditional sense, nor should we try. It’s essential to be flexible in our definitions of the word.

How would our approach to leadership change if we could consider ‘followship’ instead, as an integral part of becoming a more formidable leader? Followship being defined as possessing the ability to be both present and centered, following one’s purpose and aligning actions around it. When we do not follow our own self, we ultimately face the consequences of disconnection, lack of joy, we might even end up getting the coveted corner office and yet resent it, because we are no longer happy or able to discern “why” we are doing what we are doing. In other words, we lose ourselves in the process of becoming something that isn’t innately aligned with the core of who we are.

We lose the capacity to lead ourselves and others when we are not following ourselves. We lose the capacity to lead change because we have lost our North Star and can’t navigate the unknown sea of what we call the VUCA world the acronym for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity.

It is time we acknowledge that there is no separation between leadership and followship; they are the two sides of the same coin that present a fullness — a whole picture perspective.

We cannot be one without being the other if we want to be whole. The most revolutionary thought to keep in mind is that we each possess the essence of both leaders and followers — just as a coin is still a coin, regardless of which side we see.

Learning how to become a better leader requires embracing our inner follower. There are plenty of studies and articles on the skills and recipes to becoming a better leader.

As a counterbalance, here is mine for becoming a better follower:

• Be curious about yourself
• Listen to your deep desires and emotions
• Follow both your mind and heart in an act of inclusion of your whole humanity

When we fail to acknowledge the value and true meaning of following and leading, we fall into fragmentation, isolating a powerful part of ourselves that, in order to be compensated, leads to tyranny. There is a time and place for all things — a time to use certain tools and a time not to.

One sign of lacking an ability to follow can show up as resistance. To develop a stronger sense of followship I invite you to resist less, especially in a moment of conflict. During those moments, ask yourself:

How can I look deeper beyond the obvious elements of conflict, to better understand what the concerns, priorities and currencies of the other are?  

How can I focus on staying present and centered in the workplace?  

How can I stay supple and agile within my professional life, like flowing water over rocks?

The purpose for this is twofold. When we stop resisting (ourselves and others), we begin to notice more; we become more skillful in building trust in all that we come in contact with. When we withdraw (or aggress), when we do not listen and lose contact with our heart — how empty our chest feels?

The confusion, lack of clarity, and lack of grounding that comes when we lose touch and become unable to follow our own self are the enemies of leadership. Follow your heart back into your true leader.

This is my poetic gift for you from my book, The Whisper: Lyrical Conversation With The Multitudes:

Born with wings

I was born with wings to learn the difference between strength and softness

I learned strength

To fly I have to learn softness

You may also enjoy reading 4 Leadership Lessons from the (Surf) Board by Eric Kaufman

The post Followship: The Surprising Secret to High Impact Leadership appeared first on BEST SELF.

Releasing stigma and embracing the multiple professional and creative talents and ambitions of multipotentialites

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When I was just a bright-eyed youngster with out-of-control curls, I wanted to be EVERYTHING. A detective solving mysteries? Yes, please. A jet-setting musician? Oh yeah. A board game designer? OMG. A filmmaker? Gimme.

As I moved through my teens and into my twenties, a disturbing ‘fact’ began to sink in: I could only be one thing. I was going to have to choose.

And so, I chose. Well, I tried to choose.

I studied art for two years, went to film school and built a nice freelance web design side hustle. I even got a law degree! I threw myself into each new project or discipline with intense curiosity and passion and learned a great deal about it. Then, after a few years, I began to feel the itch: a sense of boredom that expanded until I couldn’t stand it any longer and had to move on.

I used to beat myself up about this ‘fatal flaw’ of mine. I worried that I would never find that holy grail: the thing I was meant to do with my life.

I worried that I was broken, afraid of commitment, doomed to be chronically unsatisfied, or worse: a jack-of-all-trades, master of none.

It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I began to question this narrative. I started considering the possibility that maybe my discomfort with making a lifelong commitment to a single discipline wasn’t so unusual, or so bad. If this was just a product of the way I was wired, I realized I had to find a way to stop fighting it and make it work for me instead.

I began to seek out other people who were interested in many things, especially those who were pursuing multiple fields professionally. I wanted to know these people — the intricacies of their minds, the connections between their different passions, and (importantly) how they made a living.

In 2010, I created a brand new website where I could share what I was learning with others. I called it Puttylike, because it’s for people like me, people who change shape and morph into new identities. We’re malleable, like putty. As more and more of us began to come out of the woodwork, I came to refer to our type as ‘multipotentialites’. Apparently, this was a Thing.

One of my most important findings has been that multipotentialites are some of the most creative, intelligent, and — yes — successful people on the planet.

They just structure their careers a little differently. Through my work at Puttylike, I met CEOs, engineers, artists, educators, and sometimes people who were all of these things (and more) at the same time!

It eventually dawned on me that there needed to be a book about this — not just a tome about the phenomenon of multipotentiality, but a practical guide. Multipotentialites needed something to help them design lives and careers that allowed them to do many things, in a real, sustainable way.

I decided to write that book. I surveyed thousands of people and conducted in-depth interviews with over 50 successful multipotentialites. It was fascinating. Even though everyone had radically different jobs, there were some significant commonalities in how they had built their careers and structured their work.

I’m hoping my new book How to Be Everything blows people’s minds (in a good way). I also hope it provides some much-needed guidance to those of us who feel like the traditional, linear path just isn’t the right fit.

You may also enjoy reading Poetry, Wonder and the Creative Mind, by Jeffrey Davis

The post How To Be Everything: The Triumph of The Multipotentialite appeared first on BEST SELF.

Overcome obstacles and achieve success by tapping into your Authentic Grit — the passionate pursuit of hard goals that inspires you to take positive risks and flourish

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Earlier in my life, I had the formula for finding success all wrong — and suffered greatly as a result. That is one of the reasons I now feel so compelled to work in the field of motivation, goals, happiness, and grit.

Through failure and an early-adulthood reboot, I learned how to do what was necessary to find the right goals and summon up the perseverance to achieve them. Along the way, I also developed grit. My experience taught me that grit is definitely not a quality reserved for the select few; it is available to anyone who wants something so badly that they won’t let anyone stop them until they’ve gone as far as they can, often achieving or coming close to that which they sought.

As a young girl in a privileged setting in the suburbs of Washington, DC, I was smart and talented according to IQ and other outward measures of success, traits that got me into the ‘right’ schools with the right bumper stickers. But between the emphasis on appearing perfect in my family and the increasing pressures to perform in a variety of academic and extracurricular areas, I ended up trying to protect myself from failure and the appearance of imperfection at all costs.

As a result, I took shortcuts, most notably with food. Instead of being disciplined and healthy in my habits and training, I became bulimic, a condition which was running rampant in my private school and my chosen sport of swimming.

As you may well know, bulimia is an eating disorder characterized by gorging on huge amounts of food followed by behaviors ranging from self-induced vomiting to laxative overdoses.

For seven years, I lived a life of overeating, lying, hiding, and never really paying the full price for my binges, all the while maintaining a passable exterior.

If I was persistent, it was only to make sure that my behavior remained secret and ongoing. Any attempts to stop or seek help were half-hearted, partly because there were no professionals who really knew how to ‘cure’ it, and partly because it felt like a hopeless situation with no end in sight.

I graduated from Harvard University in 1983, and one week later plunged right into marriage. I hit my last bottom when I realized that attaining magna cum laude from an Ivy League school and marrying the handsome man of my dreams wasn’t going to make me happy enough to overcome bulimia.

But in the depth of that misery in early 1984, I found the ingredients I needed to become a ‘paragon of grit’, as Angela Duckworth has kindly noted about my journey, which is chronicled in my TEDx talk, The Moments that Make Champions.

I decided I wanted to live more than I wanted to self-destruct, and that I’d do whatever it took to get better, and that I wasn’t going to stop until I found the right formula.

For the first time, I learned how to persevere through temptation, emotional swings, setbacks, relapses, interpersonal challenges, and life’s unending curveballs. I didn’t resort to anything mood-altering during hard times, including food, alcohol, and recreational drugs; instead, I found ways to just sit with the uncomfortable feelings that I’d always buried.

I shielded myself from people and places that weren’t aligned with my goal of full health, and although I had no specific end date in mind, I just got up every day, week after week, month after month, year after year, and finally decade after decade, and did whatever I needed to do to get better.

Although I didn’t have grit when I started on my journey, there’s no question that I have it now. Because I know that life is sweeter and richer because I chose a difficult road and didn’t quit until I reached a goal that mattered so much to me, I have a commitment to work with people on selecting and pursuing the goals that will light up their lives and help them to cultivate their own inner grit.

Grit starts with passion, and I embraced a passion for living, for finding happiness outside of trying to have a perfect body, and for giving back to others instead of trying to figure out how I could come out the sole winner.

“You can’t keep what you don’t give away” was the phrase I heard at my twelve-step group for compulsive eaters. If I had even one day of maintaining my abstinence from compulsive eating, I had something of value that could help someone else, which gave me purpose and humility. I firmly believed that if I’ve been able to develop grit, others can, too. I also believe that if I don’t “give it away” and help others, I won’t be able to “keep” what I’ve found and fully enjoy it.

I’ve even come up with a term that I use to describe the type of grit I think elicits the greatest results: Authentic Grit — the passionate pursuit of hard goals that awes and inspires others to become better people, flourish emotionally, take positive risks, and live their best lives.

Although authentic grit isn’t a magic wand and won’t solve all problems, I do think making it a priority is the right move for all of us. Too many of us are languishing because we are not shooting for the stars. We are settling for less than what we really want because we don’t have the inner resources and confidence in those resources to sit through sadness or physical pain when we need to. I see lives change in amazing ways when people summon up the willpower to persevere with hard goals. I see them create teams of supportive friendships and serve others with a passionate purpose. I also see regret and misery when people languish.

Here are 10 signs of Authentic Grit:

1. Positive relationships with others

The people who have the quality that makes such a positive difference pull us into their lives in positive ways. They are inclusive, not exclusive. They flourish in their relationships and build other people up. People with authentic grit foster teamwork and camaraderie. Authentic grit is magnetic; you want to associate yourself with someone who is passionate about something in life because you want to feel that way, too.

2. High hope

People with authentic grit are hopeful and optimistic. Although they may not always be correct about what they think they can do, their positive beliefs offer protective benefits. People with this outlook work longer and harder than others and are less likely to quit when challenged. A hopeful mind-set also allows people to generate more potential solutions for accomplishing their goals and makes them believe they can also carry out those solutions..

3. Humility

Authentic grit is also marked by humility, which never promotes itself but rather attracts others. This is the humility of heroism under fire — some selfless act that you don’t learn about until the person passes away. Authentic grit is strikingly devoid of narcissism and the need to be recognized for what one does. Quite the contrary — those with authentic grit know what matters, and don’t need anyone’s approval or praise, nor do they seek publicity to boost their confidence or self-esteem.

4. Self-confidence

Authentic grit is characterized by genuine confidence. People with authentic grit bet on themselves because they know they will have toxic regrets if they don’t give their goals everything they have. Their countenance can be unassuming, but they have a determined mind-set that is known to the people around them.

5. Givers, not takers

Authentic grit is also defined by being the right kind of giver. These men and women don’t give to their own detriment. They primarily surround themselves with those who share their mind-set but are not above mentoring others who lack focus or discipline. So while people with authentic grit are selfish with their time and energy when they have to be, it’s never just all about them because they know that other people matter.

6. Appropriate focus

Authentic grit is focused. People who have this quality aren’t dogged finishers in everything in life. They preserve their self-regulation for what really matters, and don’t waste time on everything that crosses their path. They narrow down what is meaningful to them and have no trouble finishing last in something else or being self-deprecating about something they are not good at.

7. Stubbornness

Authentically gritty people have a certain kind of stubbornness. They use it as a form of ‘alternate rebellion’ because it’s more effective than just being a disruptive troublemaker, a role that some of them have admitted to being before latching onto a focus that gave their lives purpose and meaning. Authentically gritty people can be obstinate, defiant, rebellious, and feisty, but they put that energy to good use when they need to dig deeper for positive goals.

8. Learn from failure

People with authentic grit have experienced disappointment in their goal pursuit, and as a result, they’ve had to learn how to handle defeat, integrate its lessons, and continue on their path.

9. Authenticity

People with authentic grit are comfortable in their own skin. When you meet them, you may not detect special airs, and they are as comfortable being with other people as they are being alone. When they do the difficult, deliberate work that usually accompanies long-term goals, they do it alone and without excuses. They are not perfectionists to such an extreme that they beat themselves up. They know when to have enough self-compassion and wisdom to step away, regroup, refocus, and then return to action.

10. Growth mindset

Finally, people with authentic grit have what is called a ‘growth mindset’ and not a ‘fixed mind-set’. People with a growth mind-set believe that hard work is the key to succeeding; their curiosity and willingness to take risks allows them to explore different approaches and be flexible in goal pursuit. Someone with a fixed mind-set believes that intelligence and talent are finite predictors of success and that getting a quick win is more important than working toward an important outcome.

If I could get grit, you can, too. It’s never too late to get started down the path that will take you exactly as far as you want.

Take the steps necessary to fill your life with authentic grit, and I promise you that you will not only never regret it, you’ll also have nothing but respect for yourself when you’re looking back and asking yourself what you did to make a difference while you could.

You may also enjoy reading Tracking Wonder: Finding Your Unique Value, by Jeffrey Davis

The post The Transformative Power of Grit: The Passionate Pursuit of Hard Goals appeared first on BEST SELF.

Applying principles of A Course In Miracles to the workplace

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When my first son was eighteen months old we had him tested for autism. He was slow on motor skills, had troubling sensory issues and, despite the fact that his playmates were already stringing together basic sentences, the only word he could muster was “Hi.” It was literally all he would say, over and over again, all day long.

“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Hi.”

Out of answers, eventually our pediatrician sent us to a psychologist who ran a number of tests.

Does he accept help solving puzzles?
Can he transition to new activities without clinging to the old ones?
Does he get overly upset if his toys are taken away?

There are few things more distressing than waiting helplessly on the sidelines for a diagnosis of your child.

And yet, after weeks of worrying, we were told that our son was going to be fine.

“He appears interested in developing relationships,” said the psychologist. “Children with autism struggle with interpersonal skills, and in extreme cases they fail to see the difference between a person and an object like a chair.”

As a career coach, this struck me as somewhat ironic since it rather fittingly described the majority of my clients’ issues at work. While I was obviously relieved that the appointment went well, I admit I left that day thinking about what a fascinating experiment it would be to give professionals the same kind of test in the workplace that my son had just received in this doctor’s office.

How do we collaborate on puzzles?
How do we transition to new experiences without clinging to old ones?
How do we react when our ‘toys’ are taken away?

It’s strange that the absence of meaningful interaction is considered a medical condition in children, but often viewed as a strength in adults. If you’ve ever been treated by a boss or coworker with no more consideration than the average office chair, then you know exactly what I’m talking about here.

To succeed in business requires the kind of ‘thick skin’ and ‘resolve’ that can often come across as emotionally neutered — and yet anything less, we are told, is ‘soft’.

What’s worse is that we actually believe it. This has led to work cultures where colleagues have a tendency to view each other less as human beings and more as objects along the path to a goal.

Thankfully, there has been a valiant effort to right the ship through the burgeoning field of emotional intelligence (or EQ for short), which is now considered as important as IQ when it comes to career success. In other words, to advance on the job, we have to be smart enough to get in the door, but — once we’re there — we then have to navigate the tricky interpersonal relationships that require a different set of skills.

Since the early 1990s when emotional intelligence started gaining traction in the realm of personal development, there has been a significant focus on the importance of developing EQ for ourselves; however, there hasn’t been much discussion about what happens beyond that. As such, when it comes to the attainment of wisdom at work, we are left to assume that EQ is, well, the end of the road.

But is it?

I certainly thought so — until I became a student of spirituality and the path of A Course in Miracles in particular. And what I’ve learned from my own practice is that there is a level beyond EQ — namely spiritual intelligence or SQ — that moves us from a place of interdependence to interbeing. Simply put, it’s not enough for me to be smart around you or work well with you — to reach a state of true spiritual intelligence I have to know that I AM you. This means knowing that, while we may have different bodies and different personalities that make us appear to be separate on the surface, underneath those things we share the exact same Source — and that’s what makes us One.

We are accustomed to a perspective of interbeing in our spiritual practices, but we often don’t know how to apply these concepts to our work. Accordingly, we make attempts to compartmentalize our “spiritual” selves and our “business” selves, which often leaves us lacking in both.

This is where A Course in Miracles comes in — and where we can use the Course’s wisdom to create a fuller picture of what it means to be successful that’s worth exploring. As someone who has spent the better part of the last three years translating the Course for the workplace, the most succinct way I can summarize the Course’s impact on your career is this: When you are no longer available for chaotic thinking, the chaos in your life falls away. While the effects of what the Course calls “miracle-minded thoughts” will be external, the cause is very much internal – and very much spiritual.

This is why I believe that spiritual intelligence (SQ) is the next frontier in success — a natural evolution from the foundation of how intelligent we are and how skillfully we can manage our emotions — to how adept we are at seeing beyond our physical sight. Bringing this perceptive to work means bringing more wisdom, more compassion, and a new depth to your being that others can’t help but notice – and want to follow.

You may also enjoy reading Interview: Marianne Williamson | A Return To Love And Consciousness with Kristen Noel

The post Spiritual Intelligence: Your New Career Superpower appeared first on BEST SELF.

An entrepreneur’s journey to reclaim the holidays (and self)

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December 25, 2015. The house smelled of fresh pine. There was a slight ‘chill’ in the air, according to SoCal weather standards. And I felt the nostalgia that I have felt every Christmas for the last 20+ years since I discovered Santa didn’t exist.

My family celebrates Christmas, and I was raised with all the religious beliefs about the holiday and with the understanding that Christmas should be about spending quality time with family and friends. Christmas should be about love, gratitude, and celebration. Throw in some turkey, a glazed ham, and a few simple gifts, and that was Christmas. And it was perfect.

Christmas shouldn’t be spent working on your laptop.

Shouldn’t involve checking your mobile phone. Shouldn’t include stressing about your work deadlines. But that was my Christmas 2015.

I remember vividly almost one year ago the look on my parents’ face when they arrived at my house that Christmas Day to pick up my husband and me to carpool to his family’s home for dinner. My family likes to dress up for the holidays, so when they discovered that I was dressed down — in my pajamas, to be clear — they were less than thrilled.

I explained to them that I was working on some important client deliverables. I’m a management consultant for a global firm, and I work with Fortune 500 clients. Management consultants typically work 60-80 hours per week. The job’s not for the faint of heart. But what you sacrifice in sleep, you make up for in the amount of and speed at which you gain business knowledge and experience by solving some of the toughest strategic problems for the world’s leading companies.

As I was explaining to my parents why I needed to work on Christmas, I started to have an out-of-body experience — listening to and judging the words that were coming out of my mouth. I wasn’t buying my own argument, and I was beginning to get frustrated with myself.

It was Christmas… What was I doing?

I told my parents and husband that I would meet up them as soon as I wrapped up my work and got dressed. As I watched them leave with disappointed expressions, close the front door, and back out of the driveway, I felt more alone than ever. I had always been surrounded by a ton of family and friends on Christmas. It was never a quiet holiday. It was festive and loud and filled with laughter and holiday music.

The quiet hurt. Despite my typical stoic, stiff-upper-lip, no-nonsense attitude, I crumbled into a mess of tears as I sat at the kitchen table, entered the password on my laptop, and resumed my work.

In that moment of isolation, sorrow, and self-pity, I made a promise to myself: I would never work on Christmas and disappoint my family like that. Never. Ever. Again.

As a woman who likes to take action right away (read: yesterday) and becomes unstoppable (read: obsessively persistent) when she puts her mind to something, I decided in my drive alone that I needed a game plan to take back Christmas. It didn’t take much musing during that drive along Sunset Boulevard to Santa Monica for me to recognize that the best way to determine how I would spend future holidays would depend on my having full control of my time — both personally and professionally. I was going to need to make some big changes in 2016. If I wanted to take back Christmas, I would need to establish some professional autonomy. I decided that I would dedicate 2016 to launching my own business.

The idea of running my own business had always excited me. And after having focused my career on helping other businesses and organizations become great, I would make my own business great in the new year. I had earned my business stripes with a decade and a half of experience. I had worked across a number of industries and disciplines, such as Management Consulting, Media & Entertainment, Social Impact, Philanthropy, Education, Health & Wellbeing. I had experiences in a variety of organizations, including startups, nonprofits, and large corporations. I had developed expertise in a number of areas, such as Strategy, Operations, Innovation, Marketing, Brand Development, Digital Strategy, Strategic Partnerships, Client & Stakeholder Relationships, Project Management, and Business Development. I had the academic cred with a Master of Communication Management from USC and an MBA from UCLA.

I had the business background. But I needed the business idea.

I decided, what better way to help develop a business idea than to learn from entrepreneurs who’d done it themselves? So I began to interview women entrepreneurs. I was learning a lot. And I wanted to share this entrepreneurial wisdom with the world. I launched my website, The Opportunista, to feature my interviews with women entrepreneurs who were dedicated to creating their own opportunities to live their best lives. [Editor’s note: Though the author has subsequently taken down The Opportunista, this beautiful message remains timeless… and has led her to other pursuits.]

I decided that to differentiate The Opportunista, I would develop a platform built by the women who created it: Each Opportunista would nominate her Opportunista to build a genuinely supportive community of female entrepreneurs. More recently, I’ve begun to document my journey of building my business in real time so that women understand what it takes to create a company — even while working a demanding full-time job.

More motivated than ever, I’m now building The Opportunista into a media and education platform by combining my business background and my interviews with women entrepreneurs to create actionable plans so that aspiring entrepreneurs can apply these lessons to build their own businesses. I’m on a quest to demystify entrepreneurship to make it approachable and relatable so that women have the knowledge and tools to create their own companies and shape the lives they want to lead.

The Opportunista’s been up and running for a few months. I’ve featured interviews with about 45 entrepreneurs on the site, have another 30 in the pipeline, and I’m excited for all the directions I’m taking the platform — videos, podcasts, events, e-courses.

It’s a whole lot, especially with a full-time job, but ask anyone who’s ever worked with me and they’ll tell you — I get things done.

As I finish writing this, it’s dawned on me that Christmas 2016 is around the corner. This year has been my toughest professional year, but it’s also been the most rewarding. There’s nothing more thrilling than building something that you can call your own. There’s no better feeling than knowing in your heart and in your gut that you’re working toward building something that matters.

I’ll admit that this year has also been challenging on a personal level. Juggling the full-time gig with the side hustle hasn’t left me with much time for sleep. Delirium is often my new normal, and I know this has to change. The Opportunista is about living your best life — sleep must be part of the equation. I’m working on it.

Another thing that I desperately need to figure out is how to prevent all of my personal relationships, specifically my marriage and my friendships, from disappearing as I build my business. While I recognize that I need to work on this, I’m not certain when I will fully commit to improving my MIA behavior.

While there are mega challenges and responsibilities that come with entrepreneurship, the cons diminish in comparison to the pros — the freedom and sense of accomplishment that comes with living your life on your terms.

There’s something about this entrepreneurial journey that’s become bigger than myself.

Yes, I hope to leave my mark and my legacy, but my greatest hope is to help other women ultimately leave theirs.

So this year, Christmas won’t be like the last.

This year, I’ll be dressing up in a show-stopper cocktail dress. This year, I’ll be carpooling with my folks down Sunset Boulevard. This year, I’ll be loading my plate with turkey and glazed ham—neither of which I like much, but it’s tradition and they taste better that way.

This year, I’ll be spending Christmas the way I want to spend it — with no deadline in sight.

This year, I’ll be happy to have launched The Opportunista.

This year, I’m taking back Christmas.

You may also enjoy reading An Entrepreneur Who Says She Will, And Does by Anne Perry

The post Taking Back Christmas: An Entrepreneur’s Journey appeared first on BEST SELF.

Setting up teenagers for success through financial empowerment

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I’ve been going into the public schools for the past few years teaching teenagers about money. Ever since my children reached their teen years, in talking with other parents, it dawned on me that most of us missed out on learning the basics about money. Interestingly enough, though schools now focus on science and technology, they fall woefully short preparing students for financial independence after high school. In my work helping adults heal their relationship with money, I often hear complaints about how they were never taught to save or the dangers of credit card abuse. In today’s highly competitive and volatile world, I am determined to see this change.

Let’s face it, money is a very touchy subject for most people, often more challenging to talk about than sex.

And like our parents, most of us send our teenagers off to college without any lessons on saving or investing. And though the subject is critical to their success as adults, a discussion about whether to have a credit card, open a retirement account and when to begin a systematic investment plan often lead to yawns and eye-rolling. I am passionate about shifting this pattern and have worked very hard to create engaging, experiential workshops for teens old enough to receive working papers.

Recognizing their built-in resistance, I begin each workshop asking thought-provoking questions. I start by asking them to reflect on their earliest memories of money.

• What did they hear their parents talking about or in some instances, arguing over?
• What does money mean to them?
• Did they grow up feeling like there was never enough, or did they have everything they needed and then some?

Just when I begin to see the wheels turning, I send them into break-out sessions where they share their memories one-on-one. We then come back together for group sharing afterwards and this is when it gets really interesting. It never fails, that as one student shares his personal story, others nod in recognition and often relief. Yet, it’s also fascinating to watch as confusion and bewilderment set in when they listen to overwhelming differences in their peer’s childhood experiences. A few examples of early memories sound like these:

“My brother and I had chores to do for allowance yet there was always an excuse when it came time to get paid.”

Or

“Whenever my mother and father argued, she would run to the mall with me and go on a shopping spree!”

These distinctly different kinds of messages set the stage for teens to examine their own personal belief systems and how their earliest memories influence their present day attitudes about money. By listening to others’ candid reflections, they have a chance to compare their own stories. Once these long held beliefs are identified and understood, they allow for healthier financial foundations and ultimate decisions. After this exercise, teenagers are much more receptive to move onto the basics of Financial Health 101:

Working, Saving & Investing

I am a big proponent of teenagers working while in high school. Once they begin earning money, they understand the value in making their hard earned money work for them. I encourage each of them to set aside 25% of their paycheck for long-term investment. Once they’ve accumulated $2500, they can begin investing in no load index funds such as Vanguard, Fidelity or T Rowe Price. I explain that unlike other mutual funds, no load index funds do not have up-front sales charges ranging from 1-5%. In addition, this type of fund offers low operating expenses and diversification so that close to 100% of every dollar invested stays in their account.

Consistent Contribution

We talk about the importance of consistency. I encourage teens to invest on a monthly basis to take advantage of dollar cost averaging. Dollar cost averaging is an investment technique of buying a fixed dollar amount on a regular basis, regardless of the share price. When prices are low, a greater number of shares are purchased despite the drop in value. Then when prices are high, fewer shares are purchased while the value of the underlying investment has risen. It has been proved time and again, that an investor who uses this strategy will outperform someone who tries to time their purchases and sell-offs based on the market’s performance.

Avoiding credit card traps, pitfalls and other fiscal realities

I then conclude our talk with the subject of credit cards. Many adults I work with are unaware of the cost of carrying credit card balances. People assume that if they make the minimum payment each month, they are in good graces with the bank holding the card as well as the credit rating services. I begin by explaining the Rule of 72, a simple formula to determine how long an investment will take to double at a fixed rate of interest. By dividing an interest rate into 72, investors get an idea of the number of years it takes to double their money. With today’s money market accounts paying less than 2%, it would take approximately 36 years for their money to double. Next, I explain that most banks charge upwards of 20% on unpaid credit card balances. When they do the math, they are shocked to learn that banks are doubling their money on unpaid credit card balances every 3.5 years! This discrepancy hits them straight between the eyes. From there, I simply conclude that credit cards are a great tool to build credit when used for purchases only when they have the same amount or more in their bank account to pay the balance in full each month. This approach helps curb impulsive purchases and unconscious spending.

Imagine how different their adult lives could be if every student were required to learn the basics I’ve outline above?

Better yet, imagine how different you, the reader’s financial picture would be today had someone explained these concepts when you were a teenager?  Don’t we owe it to our children to have candid conversations about money now? Sending our teens out into this consumer driven world without the benefit of a solid financial foundation leaves them susceptible to all kinds of expensive mistakes that could easily be avoided.

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

Henry David Thoreau

You may also enjoy reading True Abundance: One Man’s Search for (Mindful Money) Meaning by Jim Brown

The post Money Talk: Teaching Teens Financial Responsibility appeared first on BEST SELF.

How would you live… if you only had 6 months?

—

What if a doctor told you that you only had 6 months to live?

6 months to love?

6 months to make those deep dormant dreams a reality?

6 months to spend living and laughing with your most cherished tribe members, devour your favorite foods, listen to your favorite music, read your favorite books or watch all your favorite shows stacked up on the DVR?

6 months to travel to all the places you have always wanted to visit?

6 months to see all the people you’ve been wanting to see and hug?

How would you spend those theoretical last days? Who would be there beside you? Who would you want beside you? What would you tolerate now? Who would you forgive?

Flashback to 3 ½ years ago: I found myself behind a cluttered desk that represented 15 years of devotion to the corporate dream, or should I say — someone else’s dream. I was completely unable to feel a cell in my body that represented who I was. I had lost myself for the ‘almighty dollar’.

Weary of the role I played helping ‘the corporate man’ build an empire at the expense of good people, I laid my head on my desk and began to cry. This went on to invoke a full-on panic attack, which further required breathing into a bag for several minutes to compose myself. I was beginning to get the message.

Crying behind a closed door had become the norm for me at work during the prior year. Day after day, I tolerated an emotionally toxic work environment filled with berating directions from a boss half my age. Daily affirmations of my incompetence had me fearing I was dispensable at any moment, even though I had given my heart and soul to my job. I endured this for the sake of a paycheck and sense of security. Some call them golden handcuffs. A healthy paycheck is a difficult thing to leave behind. So are co-workers you care about and love.

I watched the looks of concern as my co-workers contended with their own issues of integrity about it and as I sat in my office that pivotal day, a voice out of nowhere spoke to me in a way that I could no longer ignore. Although I had been hearing and disregarding it for months, on this day it spoke… rather loudly. The Universe is persistent that way.

“Cathy, if you only had 6 months to live — would you be living this way?”

It was a spontaneous, even guttural — “Hell No.”

Through the tears, I took to social media (which had become my private solace of outreach) and posted on Twitter, as if to proclaim to the world that enough was enough.

“I don’t know how I am going to live………. #IonlyknowhowImnotgoingtolive”

While I had declared that this was the day I was going to change it all, the reality is that I spent most of my time juggling the busyness of everyday life, motherhood and work. I was just trying to survive. Stress was at an all-time high, my cholesterol was through the roof, I had gained 20 lbs., and verbal abuse was peaking in my every day at work.

Emotional abuse plays funny games with your psyche. You live in a constant state of nervousness, hoping that you won’t say the wrong thing, or do the wrong thing. Hoping that you won’t be the one to ‘set things off’. You build a wall of self-protection around you, which allows you to tune out the truth of what is actually happening to you. In the workplace this doubles because, as in my case, I had gift-wrapped every bit of my self-worth around the three-letter title I held.

Yet, my self-worth was actually crumbling before my eyes and every piece of my inner spirit was becoming more and more foreign. However, in between it all, I journaled — I wrote to heal and had no idea that a book was being born.

Saddled with this awareness, for months I grappled to discern between the polarity of what I knew felt right and paralyzing fear of the unknown. I spent a great deal of my time in turmoil, teetering between the integrity of who I was and the paycheck that was the core of how I identified my survival. I also internally knew that if I planned on living another day — denial was no longer an option. Then I did something I had spent weeks fearing:

I spoke up.

I stood up and declared to all involved, including myself, that I was done tolerating work place abuse on any and all levels.

My broken down, hiding-under-the-rock, muddied spirit had endured the worst conditions, yet the power of my inner spirit, the 1 ounce of the real me left, climbed to the top of my heart and declared, “Enough.”

As a result — the very next day I was fired. I spent the next 6 months on the couch feeling betrayed, confused and numb, nursing pain pills as a coping mechanism for my wounded back and psyche, in complete fear of what the future held. I felt like a self-medicated zombie.

Enter professional help with a mind-body therapist. It was within his trusted hands that he gently walked me back to life. Years of silently tolerating the workplace abuse led to a debilitating diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). At first, I was completely unaware of any damage inside. Loud noises would startle me. In crowds of people, I became overwhelmed and a ringing in my ears would overshadow regular life noise. If I heard angry words, or witnessed people even in healthy arguments, I was triggered and went into fight or flight mode, looking for any way to escape.

As I started to educate myself on the ‘illness’, I began to see that when caught in dysfunctional and stressful situations and relationships, we cannot see the damage until we are on the other side of the situation. It consumes our rational mind in those moments as we silently fight for the way out.

One of the first steps was being instructed to do something for myself every day for two hours that brought me joy. Self-joy. I started to seek joy with a vengeance, and in these moments I met myself for what felt like the first time.

I was then introduced to the concept of “post-traumatic growth” by studying the work of Davidji, an internationally recognized expert on meditation, stress and trauma. His work guides us through daily meditation to support turning our traumas into something beneficial. In other words — it’s a recipe for making lemonade. I read Eckhart Tolle until I absorbed every beat of his drum on how to be in the present moment with our thoughts, and our actions. And I read, and I read, and I read.

The “Six Months to Live” project was in full force after those thirty days, as once you feel joy, I believe you are wired to follow it. You also create a space for other things to come in. I found joy in writing and began to feverishly document each week of discovering who I was again. Hello Cathy, nice to see you again. I began to place more emphasis on what and who was important, than going out and finding another job. I started to uncover my deepest regrets and where I had reacted with rage and resentment — where my deepest sources of unhappiness existed. I uncovered the emotions that were blocking me from living a life not in accordance with feelings of happiness and joy.

I found the importance in finding gratitude for the little things in life that we rush past and take for granted.

I realized how important my tribe (family) was to me — how I would feel if I lost them. I held onto the knowledge that life could change in an instant. I processed where I was hanging onto things that didn’t serve me and I learned to let them go. I embraced change. I got bolder. I took chances and I said yes to every event, spiritual arena, education and fun I could get my hands on with a feverish desire to live life RIGHT NOW and no longer be inhibited by the fear of an unknown tomorrow.

I got a life coach and together we peeled back the layers of me to uncover the life I had been striving for. I found peace in my heart. I found warmth and compassion for others. I discovered self-worth. I found joy in inspiring others. I began living each week as if it was my last and recognizing what was truly important to me.

And then, I self-published a book about the whole process. This book is my glass of lemonade. Six Months To Live: Making Each Day Matter, is my journey back from ‘Corporate America’ to me. I learned how to incorporate ‘life’ into living and how to relish feeling aliveness in each moment of each day. I learned how to smile again.

Although perhaps a controversial title to some, Six Months To Live is not a book about dying, but rather one about living.

It is about uncovering how to live your life in alignment with who you really are. It is an internal discovery of the questions we should all be asking ourselves. I recently filmed a video in Santa Monica, California where I brought out a white board and wrote on it “What would you do if you only had 6 months to live?”

The response was light and contemplative until a woman walked up to me and told me she had just been given a prognosis of 3 months to live. She was here in California to partake in a clinical study for the aggressive cancer invading her body. Speechless, I feared that I had somehow insulted her by posing this ‘theoretical’ question.

I shared my fear with her and she immediately responded by saying something that I will never forget. “No, not insulting at all. Everyone should be asking themselves this question, because when faced with the reality that your life can be taken from you — you live it very differently.” Then she leaned in and hugged me, longer than you might usually hug a stranger, as if it was our last hug. I can still feel that embrace. From that moment on I hugged everyone differently, with a knowing it may be our last hug — with the gratitude of the present moment.

Ask yourself, if you only had 6 months to live, what and who would matter to you now? When we stray from ourselves repeatedly for years — the distance grows cavernous and with that, small pieces of our essence fade away and die. In the honesty of those answers, you will uncover and reconnect to your true self.

And I promise, it’s a game-changer.

You may also enjoy Interview: Kris Carr | Crazy Sexy Awakening with Kristen Noel

The post Making Each Day Matter appeared first on BEST SELF.

4 leadership lessons that surfing can teach about unlocking your potential and power as a leader

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I’m that surfer that good surfers can’t stand because I’m a wave-top traffic hazard. After 25 years in San Diego, I’m still a novice surfer because it’s way harder than it looks, and besides I’ve spent most of my free time scuba diving below the water.

But surfing is a seductive challenge; it looks effortless but is quite demanding, seems simple but requires remarkable coordination, and sounds like fun but consumes major energy. Oh, yeah, I’ve also just described the role of a leader. Surfing, like leading, forces me to become intimately aware of my skill, attitude, and limiting beliefs. While I’m a poor surfer, I am a deeply seasoned Leadership Consultant for the past 17 years, and I’m going to share four lessons leaders should know in order to harness the power and opportunity of their role.

1. Discipline is NOT a dirty word

I’m nervous, uncertain, and doubtful while I surf: about my abilities, other surfers, ocean conditions, and marine life (darn you, Steven Spielberg…). It’s that anxiety, in fact, that turns to joy and excitement when my discipline pays off and I finally catch a wave at the right angle and speed.

Discipline (which originates from disciple — a learner), has become unfortunately associated with punishment.

But a surfer without discipline can’t get any better, and a leader without discipline can’t evolve. Rather than constricting, think about discipline as the growth and development that forms competitive advantage — learning, innovation, agility, and adaptability. Discipline isn’t a burden, it’s your internal focus on the process of making powerful and forward-focused decisions.

2. Attuning to Dynamic Power

I feel the power of the roiling ocean beneath me and know that I can only respond to the wave — not control it. I have to align with the surging pressure of the swell and ignore thoughts of past mistakes or future successes (I could show you my scars from distracted moments). I have to make rapid choices in the water — leaning forward to align and accelerate, leaning back when I’m too far ahead, or swaying left or right to go with the roll of the wave.

Your belief that leadership capacity emanates from individual intelligence, charisma, or connections is a limiting one.

Your leadership power builds when you connect with the dynamic power of people, possibilities, and plans.

Leading and surfing require high-risk decisions in a low-data environment, and work out well when you practice responsiveness, attentiveness, and openness.

Narcissists believe that power is a personal treasure that flows from them. Real, viable power, however, comes when your individual contributions connect with the energy of a team that’s focused on accomplishing a worthwhile goal. When you embrace the reality that power is more than personal attributes, you’ll tap into a renewable source for your resolve, creativity, and success.

3. The Edge of the Swell

My shoulders and biceps burn and ache as I paddle hard and fast, again and again, to get to the front edge of the swell (which I miss more than catch) — if I miss the edge I get stuck in a bobbing pattern, not surfing. Movement and speed are at the edge of the swell, and I get there by investing energy and effort.

Leaders who accomplish admirable financial or social results learned to paddle hard toward the edge of the wave — the edge of their comfort zone, really. Your comfort zone is a mental and emotional boundary that delineates an imaginary edge to your leadership, and the energy and effort required to expand that boundary feels like burn and ache. Your untapped power and opportunity lie beyond this edge, and you have to work through your unconscious and rehearsed patterns and limiting habits to become more empowered.

Because our ego mind is programmed to safety and pattern repetition, we get to tap possibility through perseverance.

To create new possibilities for you and your people you challenge your old habits of thought, speech, or behavior. New achievements require new ability, resources, application, and deliverables, all of which are beyond your comfort zone.

4. Focus and Intent

I’m still surprised that the intense focus of surfing is also deeply relaxing. When I set my intent on a swell, I lock into a series of rapid-fire decisions in order to catch the edge, get on my feet, and respond to the wave. The wave-top is an unforgiving and uncaring liquid wall, and standing on it calls for focus and intent in the moment-to-moment series of real-time choices. When I nail it I feel excitement and a sense of flow — a spiritual high and transcendent experience of oneness.

Leadership flows from focus and intent. So where is your focus and what is your desirable outcome and vision? Your ability to respond and align is meaningful in the context of a forward-looking point of reference.

This is the root of your discipline – asking yourself, “Is this choice I’m about to make taking me closer to or further away from my goal?”

When you make deliberate choices toward your intent not only do you demonstrate discipline, you also cultivate flow and energize your path of success.

I’m keeping my day job, for sure, but I’m still seduced by the siren call of the surf. The essential lesson of leadership effectiveness is also the essential nature of surfing – paradox. When you embrace the nuances of grayscale over the comfort of black and white, when you effectively combine discipline of intention and spontaneity of execution, you will smoothly and powerfully surf toward better decisions, deeper connections, and greater results.

View the author’s TEDx talk:

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Manifesting  goals and dreams requires a mindset of thinking big — beyond your limiting beliefs — and supporting that with bold action

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While I can’t pinpoint the first time I heard the word “scrappy,” I do recall becoming aware of the idea, the feeling of it, the notion of doing something to stand out from other people going after the same opportunities I wanted. It was 1988, and I had just graduated from college and was beginning to launch my career. Differentiating myself from other hopeful, prepared, hardworking candidates with solid résumés was something I knew was vitally important for my success. The challenge was that I didn’t have contacts, a network, or an Ivy League degree to gain access to the people who could help me, and it seemed as though I was getting screened out of prospective jobs before getting a shot. That feeling was frustrating and discouraging. I felt there had to be a better way.

The advice I heard most often was to “be patient,” and that if I paid my dues and kept “working at it,” I would gain enough experience through the “school of hard knocks” to learn how to “get the job done.”

That was exactly the opposite of what I wanted to hear. I was determined to get there faster, smarter, and with class and style.

Not knowing how to make that happen, I was looking for clues. Then one ordinary Friday night at the movies with friends, everything shifted. We were watching the Oliver Stone film Wall Street, and a specific sequence of scenes provided just what I needed: it changed my perspective and opened the door to this notion of getting “scrappy.”

Bud Fox, an ambitious young stockbroker portrayed by Charlie Sheen, was trying to build his portfolio of clients, and Gordon Gekko, a powerful corporate raider played by Michael Douglas, was a “dream prospect” but also a seemingly impossible person to reach. To get a shot, Bud decided to do something to stand out from his competitors. He called Gordon Gekko’s office every day for fifty-nine days in a row and crafted a plan to visit Gekko on his birthday to present him with a box of his favorite type of rare cigars. Gekko was impressed with Bud’s daring effort and granted him an interview. It was creative, a little costly, bold and scrappy. It earned Bud Fox a few minutes with the key decision maker he’d been seeking.

The whole plan — the homework, the cigars, and the effort to bond with Gordon Gekko’s assistant — got Bud Fox in the door. He got his shot, and I got the lesson.

Over the years, I have gone back to Bud Fox’s scrappy moment as motivation to get past a challenge, and it still works for me. My snapshot reference to Wall Street is not about the archetypal portrayal of 1980s excess — it was merely the trigger that set in motion my own efforts to be a “scrapper” and get scrappy for the first time. Bud Fox was the example I needed, and the film inspired me to take some definitive action — so I did.

Now, more than twenty-five years later, nothing has really changed.

Sure, the landscape is different, and I have more contacts, but I still get scrappy to break through barriers, meet challenges, and find solutions. It is a vital piece of every professional challenge I face.

Sometimes I have to employ a detailed strategy or plan to connect with the right people to get where I want to go. Other times developing a plan isn’t possible and I simply have to ‘punt’. Ultimately, I have developed a checklist of sorts, allowing for flexibility in various circumstances.

We all have dreams, wishes, and hopes for the future — a desire to accomplish certain things in our lives. We all experience challenging situations that make us say, “Okay, now what?” We hope someday we will get a break and it will magically happen (whatever your “it” is, right?). As time goes by, we may find ourselves so deeply entrenched in daily life that our dreams can get pushed aside. We realize they don’t come easily. Sometimes, even when we do get a shot at a dream, it feels like the odds are stacked against us. The competition is tough and we know it! So sometimes we postpone our efforts — or maybe even self-select out.

Maybe you’re standing at a crossroads or have encountered a roadblock. Maybe you just aren’t sure what’s next. I wrote this book as the result of my feeling that way too. Under these same circumstances, when I’m stuck, I look to those inspiring individuals who have what I call a “scrappy mindset” or “scrappers.”

A scrapper is a person who is a fighter or serious competitor, especially one always ready or eager for a bout or contest.

Think in terms of the best lightweight scrapper in boxing. Let’s not take this literally — you don’t need to be overly aggressive and get in a scuffle. I’m speaking to the spirit of the word. To simply call their scrappy successes miracles or lucky breaks would suggest it is not possible to replicate their methods, but the good news is you can. Scrappers don’t just think about what could be — they execute a scrappy effort and make things happen.

Through the years, I have followed their lead and attempted to break through barriers, find a window when I can’t go through the front door, and beat the odds. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But it always feels better to do something and shake things up a bit. Even when a plan fails to work, it creates new avenues of thought and other pathways that push things forward.

Even if the chances of being seen, heard, discovered, or selected for a specific opportunity seem slim, when you get the chance, how do you make it count? How do you make yourself stand out? How do you get noticed in a positive way? Simple. You apply resourceful and creative inspiration to your situation and give yourself the edge. You work smarter and get scrappy!

Anyone can be scrappy. It’s a choice to play big, or at least big for you. It’s what you do when you’re all in and ready to put your tush on the line.

[Reprinted from Scrappy: A Little Book about Choosing to Play Big by Terri Sjodin with permission of Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright (c) Terri L. Sjodin, 2016.]

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Michelle Long champions localism, local economies and values-driven enterprise as keys to a strong economy

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It’s the second time in a month that I have the pleasure of being in the audience as Michelle Long, Executive Director of BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies), delivers the Keynote Speech. It is the second time that she closes her address with raw, unrehearsed emotion and real, honest tears as she implores us to keep love and humanity in our business practices. Before her, is a sea of entrepreneurs, small-business owners, innovators, artists, farmers, alternative healers, artisans, community activists and notable movers and shakers in the worlds of localism, slow money and slow food. It is clear she is moved by her ability to engage and influence a group of people who have the potential to enact positive change. Her gratitude and slight surprise, as if she’s caught off guard by her own power, is charming. Every pair of eyeballs is riveted at the podium, where a petite, brown-haired, bright-faced woman with a wide smile has just brought her audience to their feet.

How does she do it? Michelle possesses a rare combination of passion and humility that is endearing to everyone she meets. She comes from a place of authenticity that projects a deep and profound understanding of the inner workings of humanity — a place at which the rest of us can only strive to arrive.

She does this magical thing where she asks “What if…” questions to get your imagination going, and instantly you are with her as you envision a better world together.

Asking such questions is a tried and true practice for Michelle Long. By asking “What if…” and then imagining the possibilities, Michelle has been able to create and follow a professional path that aligns with her mission to make a difference. A mission that has been the driving force behind her life’s work.

I recently had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Michelle. A day earlier, she had received a standing ovation (and countless hugs) for her keynote speech at a fundraising event for ReThink Local, the BALLE network in New York’s Hudson Valley, for which I was the start-up Outreach Director, and now serve on the Advisory Board. After spending 5 years working in the realm of localism, I view Michelle Long as a personal hero; she’s a true rock star of the new economy, with legions of loyal followers. I felt honored to spend quality time with her, and started my interview by asking her how she got involved with localism.

When Michelle was an MBA student in the ‘90s, she co-founded World2Market, a values-based ecommerce enterprise as a way to enable folks to meet the people behind the products they purchased online. She asked herself, “What if you could see and have a relationship with the people that created the products you bought, enabling you to fully understand how that company’s decisions and policies impacted women/children/the planet? You could then make purchasing choices based on that information, and support those products that had favorable practices aligned with your values.” What is now commonly known as social enterprise — organizations that apply commercial strategies to maximize improvements in human and environmental well-being — was not on most people’s radar when Michelle was starting her company.

She was quite ahead of the times, and her innovative approach to business garnered high praise and significant investment from the venture capital world. As Michelle explains, “It didn’t lead to lots of sales, but we did get lots of attention.” Her company was rewarded with splashy covers on The Wall Street Journal, features on CNN and other news outlets, as well as the notable honor of having then President Bill Clinton make his first ecommerce purchase on her site. However, Michelle quickly saw that her efforts were slow to make significant change with the world issues that she valued.

It became clear to her that local commerce, vs. a global internet company, would be better positioned to connect with customers, and would make for more engaged relationships that ultimately would affect more of the mission-based change Michelle was seeking.

So she closed up shop and started asking more “What if” questions.

At first, Michelle thought she would move somewhere in the world to a small community and make a difference there, but quickly changed her mind. In her modest, self-deprecating style, Michelle asked herself, “Wait, who do I think I am? I don’t even know any other languages!” So she shifted gears and took a look around her community in Washington State, and decided to make a difference in her own backyard. She asked, “What if businesses came together to address what’s happening here at home and focused on what our own community cared about? What if our values could be baked into our businesses and we’d help each other do this?” Michelle hit a nerve. Better, she hit the nail on the head, and found there was a hunger for just such a thing. So she started an organization called Sustainable Connections in Bellingham WA, and set about creating what NPR would eventually dub, the “epicenter of a new economic model.”

At the same time, the first national coalition of values-led businesses called the Social Venture Network was struggling with a common dilemma. Young, socially conscious businesses would take investment dollars they thought they needed to grow bigger to compete head on with business as usual. But in order to pay the investment back, they would potentially have to go public, or even sell their company, often losing the original mission in the process. To combat this, some business leaders within SVN began to identify a need for businesses to stay rooted in a place, be committed to that place, and to be supported by other businesses in that place, all trying to do the same thing. They asked their own “What if…” question:

“What if we had a network of local networks, connected all across the nation, working together, sharing best practices and focusing on local growth and prosperity?”

When Michelle Long was introduced to members of the SVN Board, including Judy Wicks (known as the Mother of Localism), she knew just how to help them with their big vision to create a global network of community networks, and Michelle was put in place as Executive Director of BALLE. She has been in that position for the past 15 years, except for a six-year period when she gave birth to and began to raise her daughter, focusing on making her local network a model during that time. Recently, Michelle helped usher in a leadership shift at BALLE to become a Trio, and Michelle is now one of three leaders. From their website, “The Trio model ensures that our leaders are in distinct and complementary right roles, while operating from consensus to hold the whole, together.” Pam Chaloult runs Operations from the Oakland, CA based headquarters where she heads up the staff, Christine Ageton directs Programming and Strategy, and Michelle is the Vision–Keeper with focus on Outreach.

When I interviewed Michelle, she was in the process of touring individual communities of businesses that share BALLE values (there are now hundreds in north America), and pitching in any way that would best serve the needs of each organization. This includes giving keynote speeches, sitting on expert panels, doing meet-and-greets, and hosting fundraisers. Wherever she goes, she brings along a positive message that includes disseminating hard data (Spoiler alert – Localism is proven effective!), introducing useful parables and spreading stories that matter, and basically serving as a vocal, upbeat ambassador for the localism movement.

Localism is defined on the BALLE website as being “about building communities that are more healthy and sustainable — backed by local economies that are stronger and more resilient. It means we use regional resources to meet our needs – reconnecting eaters with farmers, investors with entrepreneurs, and business owners with the communities and natural places on which they depend. It recognizes that not one of us can do it alone and that we’re all better off, when we’re all better off.” The demonstrated benefits of a vibrant local economy include more wealth and jobs per capita, and greater personal accountability for the health and well-being of the natural and human communities of which we are a part. In her role as BALLE spokesperson, Michelle aims to spread the word on the benefits of taking this place-based approach in the New Economy.

The ‘Taking it to the People’ tour (I called it that in our interview and Michelle liked the ring of it) marks a significant shift from many years of having an Annual BALLE Conference where one or two members of each network would come together for a few days, meet representatives from other networks, and then go back home to share what they learned. “Instead of focusing our energy on one event in one place, this year we’ll be exploring new ways of reaching, connecting, and nourishing local economy leaders and allies in their places.” Although Michelle admits that she always had a “game-changing blast” at the conferences, she values the opportunity to meet so many more people involved in the networks and to immerse herself in the culture and practices that make each network unique.

There has been another significant shift in the BALLE organization, and this one is near and dear to Michelle’s heart. Originally BALLE was set up with a Membership model, or a “pay-to-play” construct. Together, members hoisted the flag of localism and raised awareness about the struggling economy and the challenges facing local businesses. As Michelle tells it, “We were saying, ‘Hey, there’s a problem, but imagine what we can accomplish if we all worked together.’” However, as BALLE grew, their members, like the founders, were mainly white, middle-class businesses whose owners came together to localize their purchasing, to collaborate to make more of what their communities needed, and to use their businesses as a force for community good.

This, Michelle says, was “not the fullness of what needed to happen in order for BALLE to enact significant change toward healthy, equitable local economies.”

We are told by Maggie Anderson, author of Our Black Year, that in her community, ‘buying local’ would be buying from business owners who pulled bars over their shop windows at night and then drove home to their own communities. Without prioritizing a level playing field and expanding ownership and wealth creation in communities of color and places of persistent poverty, we would never see real change. She and the other BALLE leaders decided to identify and follow those who were innovating most in places where the economy had worked the least. These measures included changing the core role of BALLE itself. Michelle describes it as, “We changed from being ‘Consultants’ who guided one form of network along the same path of start-up to development, to becoming more ‘Connectors and Conduits of Information’. We are not the ‘experts’ on everything that works – but we do see the patterns and can align people and communities with resources, tools, and connections.” So, in order to gain broader and deeper engagement, BALLE has shifted their model to one of all-access, and created initiatives which support their goal of creating local economies that work for all.

Two initiatives of which Michelle is most proud are the Local Economy Fellowship Program and the new Well-Being in Business Lab. When asked what the significant takeaways were from each program, Michelle says,

Through the Local Economy Fellowship Program, we learned that there are lots of models that can advance localism, in addition to the network model on which BALLE was originally set up to teach. Examples include micro-enterprise, technical assistance groups, food hubs, social justice organizations, local investment clubs, place-based impact investing and more. We have identified ‘Fellows’ who represent the direction we believe we need to go as a nation and a planet. Each are connecting community networks and working to bring more accountability, personal relationships and compassion to business. We have now identified, connected and nourished leaders from more than 100 communities, and we are telling their stories so that others can see a path forward.

When asked about the purpose behind the Well-Being in Business Lab, Michelle says, “We swim in an invisible sea — we are all a part of a history of oppression and extractive economies – and it is basically embodied in each of us as unconscious behavior. We have to purposefully build awareness of, and transform these habits, if we are actually going to move past our fear, past scarcity, and past the impulse to build bigger walls between each other.” The Well-Being in Business Lab is a profound initiative focused on cultivating connection in business leaders. It is based on the latest in scientific research from the Greater Good Science Center, which finds that regardless of demographics, humans’ well-being derives primarily from four scenarios:

1. When we feel connected to our self and our purpose.
2. When we feel connected to each other.
3. When we feel connected in reverence to the larger natural world.
4. When we are being generous.

When asked about the takeaways from this program, Michelle shares that it is just getting started, but a growing number of communities and organizations are joining with BALLE to start their meetings, workdays, retreats, etc., with connection exercises and ‘parables’ — real business stories that are meant to light up our imagination. BALLE provides these and increasingly, communities are coming up with their own. Michelle says, “The world is facing unprecedented challenge — in many ways it is going to get harder. With that knowledge, we see it as our right and even our responsibility to practice and imagine the world that we want so we are better able to innovate from this place in our work, and in our society.” She explains that companies such as Eileen Fisher, and organizations like Etsy.org and Social Venture Institute have already adopted this practice into their culture. “It’s about doing business in a different way — one that takes into account our common humanity,” Michelle explains.

For some, this new way of thinking shatters time-honored, traditional business tenets. Michelle riffs off a list of these as she makes her voice sound deeper and more restricted: “’Business as Usual’, ‘Bigger is better’, ‘Every man for himself’, ’Top of the Pile’, ‘Compete at all costs’, ‘Single bottom line’, ‘What’s in it for me?’” Michelle believes that these old ways of thinking destroy what’s precious on this planet. Naysayers of the localist movement come from a place of fear, and believe that you need to have a cutthroat mentality to succeed and be profitable. But the good news, as Michelle is touring the country to share, is that there is now real, hard data to support just the opposite.

Michelle explains, “After 10-15 years of localist practices in the new economy, there is now research that offers the proof — localism works.

Harvard Business Review, Economic Development Quarterly and other publications are spreading the word that there is indeed a direct correlation between the most jobs and the most wealth for the most people, and the density and diversity of local ownership per place. So, if you want more jobs and more wealth for more people, focus on local ownership. It’s that simple.”

Another critical data point has to do with job creation. Michelle refers to a Small Business Administration study that has researched job creation over the past decade and found that “all net job creation came from businesses with fewer than 20 employees. We are talking about microbusinesses! Despite all the economic development dollars and tax breaks going to big corporations, it is the small businesses that are doing the work of actually growing the economy.”

Finally, Michelle reveals that there is now evidence that when a community welcomes immigrants, their economy grows. “It’s true,” she says, “when a community brings in immigrants, more businesses are started and average incomes rises for everyone.“ For many folks, this information flies in the face of what they think they know to be the case.

As our interview comes to a close, I ask Michelle if she believes it’s our “civic duty” to engage in and support our local communities. I offer to her that I bring house guests out to the shops and restaurants in my town (Woodstock, NY) whenever they visit, infusing my local economy with outside dollars. I also volunteer for local nonprofits, and do my best to support local, independent enterprises over the big box stores, because I want to live where my neighbors share in prosperity. (Clearly I think it is one’s duty.) In a way that is very endearing, she answers me by quoting Abe Lincoln: “I like to see a man proud of the place in which he lives. I like to see a man live so that his place will be proud of him. ” Closing with a parable — true Michelle Long style.

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The post What if? | Localism & Social Enterprise — Michelle Long On The Keys to a Strong Economy appeared first on BEST SELF.

Money shame impacts nearly everyone; redesigning our relationship with money opens the doors for greater peace and prosperity

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It all started with shame, for me.

It was the shame of holding my first student loan bill in my hands, shocked by those mute, unforgiving numbers. How on earth can I pay this, every single month?! I should be farther ahead, by now. How can I possibly earn the money I want, while having the life and career I want?

It was the shame of not knowing how to “do” all this money stuff. Bank statements would arrive in the mail and I’d shrug, tossing them straight into the blue recycling bin. (What do people even do with those?) Surely, money was too ho-hum, too complicated, and too mundane for an African dancing, somatic psychotherapist-in-training, authentic movement gal like me, right? (And yet, the not-knowing nagged at me, making me feel less-than and unsettled, more often than I admitted.)

More precisely, it was the shame of feeling like I would never be able to figure out money…

Because I was “bad at math.” Because my parents had never sat me down and had clear, loving money talks with me. Because I had grown up with all the paradoxes and unspoken rules of the middle class. Because being spiritual and creative meant being bad with money (obviously). And because I couldn’t yet dream up a career that served others, made the world better, drew on my superpowers, and earned me a comfortable living.

And perhaps most of all: it was the shame of never speaking about money. Hear no money, see no money, speak no money. Not in my middle class upbringing (even though money was the elephant in the room during countless arguments and stressful decisions). Not even in my incredible, somatic psychology graduate program, where we could talk about sex, drugs, God, and everything under and beyond the sun — money simply wasn’t talked about.

If you put shame in a petri dish, it needs three ingredients to grow exponentially: secrecy, silence, and judgment.

Brené Brown

In the years since I first had that hot flush of money shame, holding that student loan bill, I have learned: I’m not alone. Far, far from it.

In my well-researched opinion: we all carry money shame. It’s an equal opportunity affliction, affecting women and men, gay and straight, trustfunders and struggling students, finance geeks and numberphobes.

It doesn’t matter how good at math you are. It doesn’t matter how responsible and “on it” you are. It doesn’t matter what economic class you were born into or if you never held a frightening student loan bill in your hands.

It doesn’t even matter how much or how little money you have in the bank — we all carry some sort of money shame.

In my work as a Financial Therapist, I have talked about money shame with people who earn under $20K per year and people who earn well over $1M per year. Every single one of them carried some sort of money shame. But it can shapeshift into many different forms:

• That hot flush in your cheeks when your uncle asks over Thanksgiving dinner, “Wait, you’re still working at that job?! Why aren’t you at a higher level, yet?”
• That dreamy, queasy, numb feeling you get in the checkout line, worried your card will get declined.
• That desert in your mouth when your prospective new client asks what your rates are … and you panic. Am I worth it?!
• When you give your sweetie the coldest of shoulders when the mortgage payment is due, acting out your family’s dynamic of guilt, silence, and twisted communication about money.
• In those vicious things you say to yourself the month before Tax Day, because you feel so confused, so scared, and so alone.

Money shame is all of these things, and more. And if we ever hope to break its chains, we must break the taboo… and talk about it. And to do that? We have to feel it.

That’s right: the only way out of money shame…is through it. We have to get brave and patient enough to drop in and really feel what’s going on, inside ourselves. Yes, it’s scary. But it’s a radical act of self-love. And it starts with a 60-second practice I call The Body Check-In.

The Antidote to Money Shame: The Body Check-In.

Pause. Listen. Notice:

. . . body sensations
. . . emotions
. . . the state of your breath
. . . any thoughts that are passing through your mind.

Gather data. Info. Clues. These are the keys that open your access deeper into your money relationship.

Be open and curious. Let yourself get in there, into your body, into your Money Shame. Pull it apart.

Name some of its tentacles.

Add more doses of compassion and curiosity.

Move it to the side. See it next to you: “Hello money story/money pattern/money shame. Who are you? What do you have to say?”

Breathe. Add another dollop of compassion, and two more teaspoons of curiosity. Breathe.

Repeat, repeat, repeat. Before, during, and after… everything. In every possible moment. In tough times, when you’re triggered, when you’re stressed, when you’re simply feeling ‘off’:

• In the grocery store.
• In the parking lot of the mall.
• When you are going online to look at your balances.
• When you are going to your mailbox to get your bills.
• When you are reviewing your income and expenses at the end of the month.
• As you are about to have a money conversation with your loved one, your parents, your client, your children, your business partner.

…and so many more itty bitty money interactions throughout your day.

The Body Check-In is extraordinarily simple — and extraordinarily difficult. It’s my favorite tool because of its simplicity, elegance, and profound power to uncover your money story and open you to so much more.

And, it is utterly life changing and supportive. Pinky swear.

So, whatever happened to my money shame?

I learned that even an African dancing, somatic psychotherapist-in-training gal like me could “do” money. I learned that my creativity and spirituality weren’t actually detriments to money work — but crucial ingredients, my own “secret sauce” that transformed money from icky drudgery to a life-affirming, empowering self-care practice.

We can bring all of our smarts, creativity, spirituality, and personality to our money work. In fact, we must.

I learned that honoring my special gifts (my “superpowers”) actually helped me break through money ceiling after money ceiling… until finally, I created a sustainable business model that shared my gifts with the world.

I got brave and learned a bookkeeping system — and learned that, lo and behold, that half of my brain associated with numbers actually did work! (Yours does, too. I promise.)

I learned that we don’t have to do all this money stuff alone… and sometimes, asking for help (and truly receiving it) is what the strongest, smartest people do.

I learned that I could forgive my father, forgive my culture, and forgive myself… forging more compassionate and true bonds than ever between those I love (including my dear son), through honest, vulnerable money talks.

I learned that money is one of life’s gardens: when we tend to it, with love and patience (and homeopathic doses of dark chocolate), it bears fruit for everyone in our lives.

Most importantly, I learned that our “money work” is never done. It continues to grow and evolve, right along with us, for a lifetime. Money shame will always arise, in subtle moments or before scary leaps… but by practicing The Body Check-In regularly, we notice this shame, rumble with it, and emerge more centered and connected to ourselves than before.

Here’s to your money journey, then… wherever you are, along it.

Here’s to taking those brave baby steps.

Here’s to drenching yourself with more compassion and patience than you thought possible.

Here’s to un-shaming, layer by layer, moment by moment.

Here’s to all you are capable of (which is so much more than what money shame tells you).

And here’s to treating money shame, itself as a sacred portal: into the empowerment, confidence, peace of mind, and joy you’re really craving.

All of this… this is how to heal money shame.

It is the journey of a lifetime. And it starts right here, right now, with your next, precious breath.

Check out this 8 minute audio recording of Bari discussing money shame and her ‘body check-in’.

You may also enjoy reading True Abundance: One Man’s Search for (Mindful Money) Meaning by Jim Brown

The post Money Shame | Redesigning Your Relationship With Money appeared first on BEST SELF.

A Q&A with Eric Giuliani, who left an unfulfilling job to pursue a life-long passion for travel

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Getting lost will help you find yourself

~ Eric Giuliani

Eric Giuliani left an unfulfilling career 18 months ago for a life of travel, circumnavigating the globe and documenting his journey through photographs, film, and writing [follow at traveltall.com]. Finally living vibrantly, we catch up with Eric in Phuket for a reality check on his dramatic shift.

Questions by Carter Miles

In Episode 1, you mentioned “hitting rock bottom.” What was this like for you?

Rock bottom was the realization that my boring job and routine will never change unless I decide to take ownership for putting myself in that position. I realized that I needed to stand up and do something about the lack of love in my life (and I don’t mean relationships). I hated what I was doing.

I was living Einstein’s definition of insanity, which is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. The rock bottom feeling would always hit me the most as I would drive to work and sit in my car for a few minutes before getting out. That time alone, knowing that the next 8 hours were going to be awful, was always the low point for me. My buddy and I called that the “car sit.” It’s when you sit and drag out the last few sips of coffee, send a few more text messages and then listen to one more song on the radio, because you don’t want to get of your car to face the day.

How did you cope with the life you were living?

I think on paper my life was great; I had a well-paying job with flexible hours and all the modern amenities of a young professional living in Miami Beach. So it was a bit confusing for me, because I had all the things most people would strive for. There wasn’t much to cope with in that sense, almost like ‘ignorance is bliss.’ I didn’t know what I didn’t know. But when I really got down to it and started to tap into myself and who I wanted to be, the thing I had to cope with the most was the lack of creativity in my life. Everyday was a carbon copy of the one before it, and in that realization was a spark that demanded change. A creative force was churning inside me and I had to stifle it every day until finally, it began to force its way out.

Did you have a distinct moment when you decided, now’s the time to change? 

About 5 years ago, I took a leave of absence from my job and flew around the world to see the places I’d always dreamt of. I spent all my money and I only had 90 days for the journey, but it was such an eye-opening experience that when I returned from that trip, I knew that I needed to figure out a way to get back to that vibrant way of living.

What classes/information did you seek out before embarking on your travels?

Since I had no background in photography, filmmaking, writing or website design, I needed to learn everything, which was overwhelming. So I broke them down into simple, easy-to-manage categories. I wrote down the steps I needed to learn and then checked them off as I moved my way through them — that really helped me mentally in the sense that it was like, Okay, here is step one, just do that today. Step one for photography, for example, was simply learning about how to buy a camera. Then I registered at our community college for classes in photography and writing and attended free photography workshops at my local camera store. I enrolled in online writing and filmmaking classes at Matador U and watched thousands of Youtube videos. I took a website design workshop to learn how to build and maintain my own site. I also read several self-help books in order to really work on my thought process — that began to expand my limited view of what my life could be.

To practice photography, I would get up every morning before sunrise, walk to the beach with my camera and film things as the sun was coming up. Afterwards, I would workout on the beach and then go to work. After I finished one job around 3pm, I would go to a second job until about 7pm. People always say they don’t have enough time or money to do what I’m doing and that was the case for me as well, so I had to find more time and more money. But during that time alone, early in the morning with the sand and the sun, I could visualize this life coming into being — and this is why I believe it is all working out now.

Why start in Africa, and more specifically South Africa?

I wanted to start at the southern tip of Africa and work my way up. I figured Africa would be the hardest continent to cross, so I wanted to do that first — because I knew that if I could make it across Africa, the rest of the world would be easier — or so I thought… LOL! As it turned out, getting stuck in Siberia in the middle of winter rivaled some of the hardest parts of Africa.

Describe how you felt on the plane to South Africa?

It’s funny, I wrote a chapter about missing the only flight on this journey and thinking, If I can’t even make the flight out of Florida, then how on earth am I going to make it around the globe? It was a mad scramble to rebook and race to another airport to make my connection at JFK; so to be honest, I was just happy to have made the flight at all — I didn’t really have time to reflect upon or to prepare for what was in store.

Who is the girl that you travelled with halfway up Africa?

I don’t want to say her name, because she asked me not to, but she has been a central figure in my life and some of the chapters I’ve written along the way. I guess you could call her my “girlfriend,” although we don’t use labels like that. She is a really special human being and I’ve never met anyone like her. It’s hard to change your life, and she was there for many of my growing pains. She picked me up many times when I was down. And even though we are no longer traveling together, and don’t speak as often as I would like, she is still very much in my life and at the end of the day, I would do anything for her — and I believe she would do the same for me.

What essentials do you carry in your backpack?

I try to travel as light as humanly possible. I have just a few pairs of shorts, two pairs of jeans, one pair of sneakers, about 8 t-shirts and some workout clothes. Other than that, I just have a small backpack for my camera and tripod. My iPhone, Macbook and Canon 7d camera are the most essential things I carry besides my passport. I’m always looking for ways to get rid of things and downsize, even though I don’t have much to begin with. I see people traveling with these monstrous backpacks and just shake my head.

Were there ever moments along the journey where you literally asked yourself, Am I nuts? Do you ever question yourself along the way?

I question myself everyday; I wonder where my next creative idea will come from and if I’ll then be able to carry it out. Now I question myself less and less, but it also comes in waves; some weeks I don’t question myself as much but then others… it’s like my mind is relentless.

What words would you share with someone reading this, sitting in a cubicle, feeling unfulfilled and passionless?

You’re there because you put yourself there. And the only way out is to get yourself out.  At the end of the day, we are where we are because of the choices we have made. I hated my job more than anyone, but I’m grateful for that now, because that is what pushed me to learn all these new skills and change my life. Even when times are bad, I know that I’ve created those bad times. Once I took ownership for not just the good I created in my life, but also the bad, my whole perspective on what is possible in this life changed.

Do you ever get lonely, or break down emotionally?

I recently started getting lonely; it took about a year of traveling to feel lonely for the first time, which happened to be around the holidays. I was crossing Russia and China at the time and no one spoke English, so it was difficult to communicate. On top of all that, it was freezing cold — and I hate the cold. This is also when I had a bit of an emotional breakdown, because I had asked the girl I had been traveling with in Africa to meet me in Beijing, which was not far from her location at the time; when she said no and decided to fly back to Miami instead, that really hurt.

Do you have any moments where all doubt/insecurity is momentarily suspended?

I have a lot of those moments. I feel super-human at times and when I get into that groove, that’s really the reason why I am doing this — that feeling is better than anything else. If I could bottle it, I’d be financially secure. But on the flip side, there are many times each day when I question and doubt my self and my work. It’s a constant battle in my mind and I have to coach and train myself to rise above my doubts and to push on, no matter what.

Do you have any music or literature to keep you motivated on your journey?

When I travelled around the world 5 years ago, I ready about 10 books that really changed my life. This time I don’t seem to be reading as much, but my favorite is The Alchemist. I also read a lot of Eckhart Tolle and Dr. Wayne Dyer-type books, because they help keep me inspired and focused. I like the way Elizabeth Gilbert writes as well, so I am a big fan of her work. And I like The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron.

What relationships have persisted throughout your travels?

The one with myself, and with God, which to me can be one and the same — not that I’m God, but that God lives inside all of us. At the end of the day, this all boils down to, How well do I want to get to know my true self and Do I really have a burning desire to do that?

How have your travels changed your perception of human nature and culture?

I think the news is often not telling the whole story, which is why I made one episode about all the dangers along my route in Africa. However, if I traveled based on the U.S. Department of State website, I would have not visited about 75% of the places I did. People have been nice, helpful and kind to me everywhere I’ve traveled. I’ve spent time learning about other religions and beliefs and that has really opened up my mind to views that are not necessarily my own.

Do you believe that life has a purpose?

I believe that the purpose of life is the purpose you give it. I don’t believe in the limitations of circumstances, but rather that anyone can do anything they want at any point in their life. There are people from disadvantaged backgrounds from all over the world that are living their dream, so what excuse do I have?  We can learn any skill we want and in turn, we can create any future we like.

Do you have any last message to depart our readers with?

I want to thank everyone that has joined my journey on social media, the comments, ‘likes’ and emails I get — during some tough times, they really makes all the difference for me.

You may also enjoy reading The Hidden Bias | Challenging Cultural Biases through Travel, by Fateme Banishoeib

The post Travel Tall | Heeding A Passion For Travel appeared first on BEST SELF.

Turning a fashion and beauty passion blog into a thriving purpose-driven business

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To most people, the phrase ‘living large’ has a positive, hopeful connotation. For those of us considered plus-size, it triggers painful memories.

I was bullied my entire adolescent, teen and young adult life. Classmates, teachers and co-workers referred to me as ‘big’. While I loved fashion, mentors told me I would never be thin enough to work in the fashion industry. After years battling eating disorders, there came a time in my life when I realized I had to be okay with being me — whatever size I was or would be.

I had to learn to respect myself before I could expect others to respect me, and all that I represent.

Over time, with conscious effort, I learned to let go of the things I loathed about my appearance and now embrace and love the things I once considered flaws. I created Girl With Curves (a blog, now renamed www.TaneshaAwasthi.com) to share my story and to help bridge the gap between the average, everyday woman and the celebrities our society idolizes. Today I have a following of almost 2 million women who entrust me to help them gain the level of confidence I’ve been able to achieve through my own journey to self-love.

As even the makers of Barbie have finally come to understand, the average woman is not a size zero. I am one of the 55% of women in America who are size 14 or larger. And here’s the paradox: Despite being part of the majority, my ‘plus size’ body is radically underrepresented in fashion and media. When I first started blogging I didn’t consider myself plus-size; I was curvy. But as time went on, I embraced this label in order to show women that we can’t be defined by our size or by a label. All we can be is ourselves, regardless of size, weight, race, or age.

People are people and we are all uniquely beautiful.

As an international fashion and beauty influencer, my goal is to change the narrow, idealistic view of beauty the media has ingrained in the public, generation after generation. I’d like to see plus-brands execute fashion at the same level of professionalism, quality and care that conventional size brands do. I think there’s a major disconnect between the consumer and the brand. As consumers, plus-size women want and need variety. We want amazing options, we want trendy, but we also want flattering and everything else a smaller girl wants.

When I am asked for my advice about what to wear, my answer is simple: wear what you love, regardless of fashion rules and anyone’s opinion, because when you’re wearing something you feel amazing in, your confidence radiates from within. Also, find what truly works for your body type and rock it! If you have a small waist and large hips, work with what you have and dress in a way you feel comfortable — either flaunting it or being more modest.

Personal style is just that; it’s personal and every woman should wear what makes her feel great.

Since embarking on my career in fashion, I have helped bridge the gap between the straight and plus-size industries. I have accomplished things beyond my wildest dreams: I’ve been on a billboard in Times Square, collaborated with brands I’ve admired since I was a teenager, and been featured in every major fashion publication in the world.

But of all my accomplishments, what I am most proud of is knowing that my work is helping women to change their perspective of the fashion industry and shift their perception of beauty — and ultimately helping them to shift their perspective on themselves and their self-worth.

To all you women out there, regardless of your size, my message is this: Be kind, be yourself and be a role model for others to be the same.

You may also enjoy reading Could You Love Your Body, Really? | Shifting your Body Identity by Peggy Farah

The post Girl With Curves | A Passion Blog Becomes A Mission-Driven Business appeared first on BEST SELF.

I didn’t know I was an entrepreneur, I just knew I wanted to love my career…

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As a little girl I used to imagine myself as an adult. I imagined life as a marine biologist, swimming with whales and befriending dolphins. I saw myself as a psychologist with my own private practice in Santa Barbara. I smiled at the thought of writing advertisements for a hip company in Manhattan (with sassy heels and power suit to go with my fancy corner office… obviously!).

A career could be so cool, right?

The Big Hoax

But here I was, years out of college, settled into full-time job as an executive assistant at a nonprofit organization for $12 an hour, wondering, “Is this it?”

This is why I studied hard to get good grades in school? This is why I took on a mountain of student-loan debt? This is why I’ve continued to do the “responsible” thing — so I could spend the majority of my waking life at a job that I feel lukewarm about at best? So I could wriggle myself into a box of a job description that’s two sizes too small, and the leftover scraps at the end of the day are where my life squeezes into the picture?

I started to wonder if this whole 9-to-5, give-your-life-away-in-exchange-for-a-paycheck, hamster-wheel rigmarole was, well, a hoax.

         hoax |hōks|

         noun: a humorous or malicious deception

There had to be another way to do this thing.

I had to believe that a career could be more of a playground than a prison… one where we get to make up our own rules. Play with whom we want to play with. Create our own game from scratch. Invent our life around what brings us joy.

Doesn’t it just make sense to design our work around our greatest gifts and our truest self-expression? Wouldn’t we naturally contribute what we’re great at and make a difference in the world doing what we do best? Wouldn’t we just be better people?

Yes! A career could be SO cool!

Bankruptcy and Birds

And so I leapt. I up and quit my job to start my own energy-healing practice. Only problem is, when it came to business, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I got an office and some clients, but it wasn’t enough. I started falling behind on bills, which turned into falling behind on mortgage payments. I was steadily sinking toward bankruptcy and foreclosure.

I remember one particular day when I was at the lowest point of my low. I was walking to the café around the corner, counting my change to see if I could afford a cup of coffee and trying to ignore my ringing cell phone, which I knew was a bill collector.

It was one of those something-has-got-to-give moments.

All I wanted was to be able to do what I was uniquely good at — what I enjoyed — and to be able to support myself in return. Was that too much to ask?

Tears started burning the inside of my eyes and suddenly, in this desperate moment, I became totally present. I felt my feet as they hit the concrete with each step. I felt the sun on my face. I looked up and saw a couple birds flying overhead in the bright blue sky. And, it occurred to me…

The birds weren’t stressed out. They were just existing. Maybe that’s what’s natural. What if life were actually… simple? What if this life I’ve carved out for myself, with all the obstacles and struggle, was just… invented?

My day with the birds marked a turning point in reality as I knew it. Subtle and yet galaxy-shifting all at once. Because I made a decision that day to rewrite the script of my life. To invent my experience as I wanted it to be.

In the coming years I broke through into a new reality I had only suspected was possible. I’ve run my business from the beaches of Belize, islands off the coast of Panama, and while vagabonding around the U.S. in a motorhome. I’ve broken through to new income levels I had always assumed were for other people, not little ol’ me. As founder of the digital magazine Business Heroine, I’ve created whatever projects struck my fancy including producing a magazine, creating trainings for rising entrepreneurs, and speaking around the country.

Business Heroine was not listed in the job postings section on Craigslist, that’s for sure. So I just made it up. Every bit of it! And now it’s real. It elevates humanity, it generates abundance, and it is FUN. The best part? I show up as ME and that is my career.

Ummm, YEP, a career can be way cool.

Purpose-driven, freedom-infused, joy-activating business IS real. And the access point is soul.

Five Types of Freedom

Whenever I lead workshops, I ask the audience members why they want to have their own business and, while expressed in various ways, the same themes inevitably emerge in their answers:

• Financial Freedom — To ditch the world of trading your time for a paycheck and generate financial abundance that supports your desired lifestyle
• Time Freedom — To have spaciousness and flexibility of schedule so that your calendar is dedicated to life and love, more than it is to work
• Location Freedom — To be able to run your business from anywhere in the world, whether it’s a Tahitian island, a Tibetan mountain top, or the comfort of your own home
• Brain Freedom — To operate within your daily life in the way that works best for you, so that you can move in flow with your thinking style, strengths, and natural tendencies
• Soul Freedom — To be who you are here on the planet to be, to share your gifts generously, and to make a difference in the way in which you are uniquely designed to do

Can I get an amen? The desire for each of these freedoms is what led me into entrepreneurship, too.

What I’ve discovered over the years, in witnessing my own experience and the experiences of Business Heroines I’ve met all around the world, is that the last freedom on the list — Soul Freedom — trumps the others.

After all, money is fantastic and yet we all know it doesn’t buy happiness. Time grows stale if it’s not put to good use…

Travel and adventure can eventually become rote if there is no bigger purpose. How many times have we heard stories of people who had tons of worldly success yet were secretly unhappy?

Soul, on the other hand.

When you are fully aligned with your purpose on the planet — completely on fire for your mission — it is impossible to be miserable. When you are serving the people who were born to receive what you were born to offer, work doesn’t feel like “work” at all. It just feels like being yourself.

That’s what’s natural. Like the birds.

Say YES to Your Soul

Is it always easy? Of course not.

Designing a life and business around your unique calling takes courage — exposing yourself to the elements and baring your most precious art to other people’s opinions. It takes faith and trust in yourself to make decisions based on desire versus should and the net will appear when you leap. Indeed, soul-fueled business is not for the faint of heart. It’s for the strong of heart.

The definition of a Business Heroine (and also our tagline) is an “entrepreneur who says she will, and does.”

Yes she faces obstacles, doubts, and her fair share of fears. But she says yes to her destiny and she does it anyway.

Because there comes a day when you identify more with the BIG YOU that you are growing into rather than the shoes-too-small version of yourself you settled for in the past. There comes a day when the pain of settling for less hurts worse than the fear of surrendering to the abyss of the unknown. A day when you care more about your mission and service to the world than you do about staying safe and comfy in your own harbor.

There comes a day when you are done letting yourself down. Pretending to be less than you know you are is no longer an option. Because, soul-fueled one, you are here change the world, and entrepreneurship is your tool for doing just that.

Let your soul fuel you.

To learn more about Business Heroine and Anne’s courses and workshops, visit businessheroinemagazine.com or click the banner image below for your free subscription:

You may also enjoy Podcast: Jim Brown | True Abundance: One Man’s Search for (Mindful Money) Meaning by Best Self Magazine

The post An Entrepreneur Who Says She Will, And Does appeared first on BEST SELF.

When we move from me-centric to we-centric activity, the distinction between business and soul starts to blur

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The word “soul” is being used more frequently and it’s easy to see why. We are all seeking a better quality lifestyle and a better way of conducting life and business — perhaps blurring the separation between the two.

Soul is consciousness and there are two kinds of stages that exist within each of us, one that is original, “soul-awareness,” and the other that is learned, “body-awareness,” which is a more limited interpretation of ourselves.

When we are being true, the quality of expression that emanates from this place is kind, pure, peaceful, wise, and generous. In body awareness, we think from a position of what is in it for me, giving rise to ego, attachment, and greed. These forces begin to play a dominant role in the results we witness from our choices.

Imagine a corporate workplace as a collection of individuals who conduct business from the consciousness of their souls. I believe when we talk about the “soul” of business, we are referring to the qualities or virtues we bring into our work, style, ethics, and means of producing. This is from the very same space in which I show up within myself. Qualities such as respect, trust, appreciation, truth, and humility will arise from a soul who is walking in truth. Contrary to that, limitations of the ego, attachment, unhealthy competition, and fear arise from body-awareness — the mentality of what’s in it for me? Since little can be created or sustained from a place of body-awareness, many corporations and governments are now struggling to stay afloat because this mentality has taken root as the normal state of affairs. Disassociation from soul-awareness is a dead-end street.

Instead of the common reaction to a problem of looking outside of ourselves and blaming others, perhaps a new soul-business model would have us look inward first, and honestly reflect upon our contribution to the whole.

When we check in with ourselves, we can objectively observe if we are part of the problem or part of the solution. It is through awareness that we authentically relate to ourselves and others.

Currently, we are witnessing an expansion of meditation, yoga, and mindfulness in the workplace, which is signaling us to fix something at a deeper level than merely having a high-level consultant offering strategic business advice. The fix we are in need of is more on a soul level. Celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Arianna Huffington, the staff at Google, and those from all genres of business are bringing more soul-awareness into their workplaces. There is a need for the soul to feel safe, clear, creative, and courageous in the spaces in which people are expected to produce effective results. Some of the most successful inventors and leaders have failed many times until a moment of stillness met a moment of wisdom.

It is quite simple. If a corporation, workplace, or family cannot find their joy or calling within their fortress of work or home, then the soul needs attention. It is never where you are that matters the most; it is the state of consciousness that you are in that makes the difference. When we bring soul-awareness to business, it is with the best intent to bring qualities and virtues to a space where all thrive and flourish. When I the soul rise, you rise is the soul’s way of doing business.

Listen to a special “Letting Go” Meditation

Website | Facebook | Twitter | American Meditating Radio Show

Get the new album, Off the Grid, Into the Heart, on iTunes

You may also enjoy Interview: Reid Tracy | The Business of the Soul with Kristen Noel

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Matt Stinchcomb, a founder of Etsy, inspires us with his mission of shaping future enlightened businesses

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Matt Stinchcomb sounds and looks like the kind of guy who is more likely to be playing in an indie rock band than running a foundation whose goal is to revolutionize the whole concept of business education as we know it. That may be, in part, because he was in a post-punk garage band before he left to cofound the online company Etsy, which enables people to sell their handmade crafts and goods to buyers worldwide. Starting almost exactly a decade ago, Etsy now has over a million sellers and its recent IPO raised 267 million dollars — three million of which they have invested in the foundation that Stinchcomb now heads, called Etsy.org. According to its surprisingly barebones website, the foundation aims to teach the art of business to up-and-coming entrepreneurs and, in the process, help “to reimagine commerce in ways that build a more fulfilling and lasting world.”

From lead guitarist to marketing director of a small online startup to head of a foundation sounds like an incongruous learning curve, but it turns out to be organically connected — in a rock and roll kind of way. “It’s so funny where life takes you,” Stinchcomb says by phone from his office in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, just six blocks from where he lives with his wife and two young children.

“If somebody had told me years ago that my job would now be trying to build a business school, I would’ve thought they were insane. And I would’ve wanted to beat myself up. Business school? What a loser!”

He laughs easily, as if the path he’s followed makes some kind of sense after all. Before he helped found Etsy, Stinchcomb played guitar and sang in French Kicks, an indie rock band formed with friends from the Washington, D.C., area where he grew up influenced by the local hardcore music scene. (Now, having just turned 40, he says, he admires mainly the “old white guys — Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Tom Waits.”)

After earning a degree in art history from Oberlin College, he moved to Brooklyn with two of his bandmates, but with little money and a ton of student loan debt. On his first night in New York he went to a bar, where he ran into a woman he knew from high school. “Her boyfriend worked on something called a website,” Stinchcomb says. “I knew only roughly what that meant.”

In the early years of the first dot-com boom, the do-it-yourself ethic and entrepreneurial spirit allowed Stinchcomb to work on the Internet by day while touring and recording with French Kicks (“it was the least bad name we could think of”) until the band became successful enough to let him quit his day job. In his spare time he learned how to screen-print T-shirts and posters for the band by reading online tutorials; other musicians liked his work and suddenly, with no formal training, he had a business. In the spirit of most startups, he learned on the fly what amounted to “a whole set of business skills, including a lot about the toxic chemicals that are used — and I tried to find alternatives.”

As the dot-com world was taking shape in Silicon Valley, what came to be known as the “maker” movement was underway in Brooklyn, where Stinchcomb met Rob Kalin, whose college major in the classics seemed to be as unrelated to a business career as Matt’s degree in art history. But one thing they shared was a love of making things by hand. In a talk at the Schumacher Center for a New Economics last year, Stinchcomb said of Kalin that “he could take beautiful photographs, he could do woodworking, he could do all sorts of things, and that’s how Etsy came about.”

“It was unlike your typical company,” Matt says now. “We would play guitar a lot, because Rob was learning to play and he wanted me to show him certain things.” Once Etsy got up and running, Matt was put in charge of marketing — which seemed like an odd choice until he saw what it required. “Really what I did was go on tour again, travel from town to town and meet with groups of Etsy sellers. I never stopped being on tour. I just started staying in hotel rooms instead of crashing on people’s floors.”

Given the open-ended statement on the Etsy.org site, I ask Matt how he would describe the foundation’s stated mission. “To truly reimagine commerce is going to require a shift in consciousness,” he says. “We have to fundamentally reimagine our whole belief systems and value systems, and come up with new definitions of what success is, of what a return is. And not just in terms of financial forms of capital, but also natural capital, spiritual capital. We know that if we’re just optimizing for maximum capital return, that’s not sustainable. Our world will collapse if we continue to do that. It will take the end of capitalism on some level to build the world that we want to build.”

Not exactly what Wall Street wants to hear, maybe, but Stinchcomb is in it for the long haul. “That’s a lofty ambition and aspiration that’s not going to happen overnight,” he acknowledges. “The science would suggest that it’s going to change one way or another. I’m not naïve [enough] to think that it’s going to be easy to do. But I do see more and more examples of people who are reimagining commerce and business, and viewing success in different ways. And that’s where Etsy.org comes in.

We want to find those entrepreneurs who want to reimagine the purpose of business and what success looks like — and invest in them in the form of education and community, and connect them to financial capital people.

How can we do everything we can to help them be successful?”

One way is what he likes to call “weird business.”

“I don’t want business as usual. Part of reimagining commerce is reimagining business education, taking it away from the abstract to the experiential by having them start a real business. How do we help people develop businesses that don’t perpetuate so much of what’s awful about these systems? There’s the Buckminster Fuller idea that you don’t create change by fighting the existing reality; you build new systems that render the old ones obsolete. That’s how I was thinking, but a friend of mine provided a more nuanced idea that I think is much better.”

His friend suggested that he consider the Tappan Zee Bridge, which spans one of the two widest stretches of the Hudson River and is nearly five miles long. The current bridge, completed in 1955, was intended to carry less than one-third its present load, and to last only 50 years. The new bridge is planned to last at least 100 years — but the construction plan, already underway, calls for the new bridge to be built alongside the old one. “On some level that’s the new economy,” Matt says. “That’s the new system that we have to build. In the meantime, the cars are still going over the old one. But once they transition to the new bridge, the old one’s going to become bike lanes and walking paths. We have to improve the old with the new.” [http://www.newnybridge.com/about/ ]

That will take time, which may be in short supply. Stinchcomb cites one of his favorite thinkers, Jeremy Rikin, who wrote in The Third Industrial Revolution that every time there’s a big shift in the culture there’s also usually a communications revolution. “And the Internet provides that now,” Matt says. “On one level I feel like a real Luddite and I’m always trying to be less connected, always trying to get rid of technology in my life. But on another level, it’s technology that will allow us to spread ideas and organize quickly enough to address pressing crises like climate change — where we don’t have 200 years for the evolution of thought to come around. We’ve got, like, 10 years, five years — maybe minus 20 years!”

The current business model in the U.S., from venture capital to business schools, is geared toward fast growth and getting as big as possible. Stinchcomb wants the new foundation to move in the other direction.

“This is a tool that we want to give to small business owners to manage their businesses everywhere,” he says. “That is the new paradigm — lateral distributed networks rather than big concentrations of power. We don’t want to create a small number of very big businesses that are going to have a ton of influence on the world. We want to create a very big number of small local businesses that are going to take the time have a relationship — a handmade relationship — with their communities. To know the people, to know the place, to go deep on the place.

“We’re calling our business incubators regenerators. The idea is to bring a cohort of around 15 people together to go through the program where they’re based, and build businesses that will regenerate those specific local economies.” Going town to town and region to region, the plan is to develop a viable model for building these regenerators, then create online courses built around video.

“We want to go where any group can form their own DIY business school in which every student becomes a teacher. In the traditional world, teachers have to have a Ph.D. in business, but we have to make it more about people who are doing it or have done it, rather than people who have only written about it or studied it. I don’t mean to say that there’s something wrong with that, but we want to develop more direct ways of learning based on real experiences.”

Challenging the standard model of Harvard Business School, the foundation would rely on teachers with little or no academic credentials but plenty of hard-earned street cred. “A lot of the business education I got,” Stinchcomb says, “came from screwing up a bunch of times, or figuring things out as I go, or trusting my intuition. All of those things kind of pieced together are a great business education.”

As I dig a little deeper into Matt’s creative process, he reveals a spiritual underpinning to the whole endeavor.

“I’m interested in contemplative practice, and in particular Zen Buddhism, which has probably been the best teacher that I’ve had for business,” he says. “Not being so attached to things. Cultivating a beginner’s mind, the ability to listen deeply to others, empathy — these are all things that are incredible skills for business, but they’re not the stuff that’s taught in business school.”

Although he wasn’t raised with any sort of spiritual practice, Stinchcomb started getting interested in Zen in 2009, first by reading books, including Shunryu Suzuki’s classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. He now follows a regular meditation practice but, he says, “It’s more than just a mindfulness piece. I think that the teachings of the Buddha himself are so spot-on, that needs to be a part of it too, and I just want to study that more. I want to find my sangha —a regular community that I can be a part of.”

And he connects all that with his views about business. “I would say that the spiritual practice coincided with the time I was learning about economics, and they’re completely intertwined at this point. The school is about the wedding of personal development, systems thinking, and business skills.” The list of guest lecturers and teachers for the pilot program includes iconic activists and innovators such as Bernie Glassman, the aerospace engineer-turned-Zen Monk who now leads Bearing Witness Retreats worldwide; Judy Wicks, of White Dog Café fame, who put the concept of “local living economies” on the map; Alex Wright, a leading user interface researcher for Etsy, Harvard and Adobe; among a growing list of others.

As for the Etsy.org program, however, he doesn’t want to be prescriptive and say that anyone needs to be a Zen Buddhist or anything else.

“What we think is important is contemplative practice or leading an examined life, taking the time for reflection in order to develop the capacity to expand your compassionate consciousness to include your community.”

One day while watching the Space Show in the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, he heard the Planetarium’s director, Neil deGrasse Tyson, “talking about how everything is made up of the same stuff as stars,” and the pieces began to fall into place. Citing other books he had read, including Rifkin’s The Empathic Civilization and Fritjof Capra’s The Systems View of Life, Matt sums up his vision this way: “It’s that we are all one. As Rifkin says in his book, we’re wired for empathy. If you’re just optimizing for yourself at the expense of others, you’re actually hurting yourself. And that’s when a shift of consciousness comes into play, especially when it comes to business.”

Again, though, Stinchcomb is concerned that the shift isn’t happening fast enough. “The public school system is still set up from the industrial age, from a time when they were preparing people to be on an assembly line,” he says. “That’s part of what we’re trying to counter right now.”

At the same time, he knows that things have moved pretty fast in his own life. “It felt like such a big change to go from being in a band in my 20s and touring around and having a lot of fun, to having a desk job and building a company in my 30s. Now at 40 I’m leaving that again to do another startup, which is a huge challenge. And it’s the first time I’m in charge. Now here’s my chance to execute my vision for the world — and let’s see if I can do it! I have no idea what I’m doing and that’s wonderful, because I have a real beginner’s mind. That’s really exciting.”

PeterOcchiogrosso.com

[Editor’s note: Etsy has since renamed Etsy.org to The Good Work Institute to better reflect their mission]

You may also enjoy Jazz & Spirituality | The Mindful Music of Jack DeJohnette by Peter Occhiogrosso

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Steven Culbertson, president and CEO of Youth Service America, explains why youth leadership is essential social change and global transformation

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The world has to offer today’s youth something better.
 –President Barack Obama

Whether you are considering the recent events in America’s cities, or those across the globe in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, young people’s voices are crying out to be heard.
A youth development “reformation” has been unfolding quietly under our noses for years, giving a proper burial to the Victorian concept that children are to be seen and not heard.

Today, more youth programs treat young people as assets and resources, as opposed to recipients, victims, or problems to be fixed. More youth are now at the leadership tables, just as we began to include women in previous generations, sharing their concerns and their suggestions for a better world. And they are volunteering at record rates, more than any generation in history.

But the world’s current events, especially poverty and terrorism, are shining a big spotlight on our slow pace of reform.

Every organization is taught to know its competition, and YSA (Youth Service America, of which the author is CEO) knows of several of ours: ISIS, al Qaeda, Boko Haram, Shining Path, Real Irish Republican Army, FARC, and more than 50 other terrorist organizations on the State Department list.

These groups recognize what kings and conquerors have known for millennia: young people make very effective warriors for achieving their ends.

YSA’s beliefs are the same worldwide: Children and youth, ages 5-25, are making their communities and the world healthier, smarter, safer, cleaner, greener, fairer, and kinder.

At YSA, we constantly say, “If you don’t have a youth strategy, you don’t have a strategy at all.” Fifteen years into the new century, many people still don’t understand why.

4 critical reasons why we must engage young people as soon as possible:

1. There are more young people on the planet than at any time in human history. Half the world’s population is under 25 years old; 40 percent is under 19. In a nutshell, we are outnumbered, but this gives me hope, since young people are always at the center of social progress. Yes, the youth bubble is on our side.
2. Young people are biologically wired for the three critical assets that lead to social improvement: novelty, risk, and peer authority. It’s no coincidence that UPS, Microsoft, Apple, HP, Bristol-Myers, and Dell were all started by teenagers on bicycles and in garages and dormitories. Brain science confirms the unique power of young people to see new things and then take the risks to bring them to the rest of us. Because young people listen to each other more than they listen to adults, they also bring their entire generation along with them. Yes, biology is on our side.
3. Every parent knows the intrinsic value of starting early, whether it’s reading, computation, music, sports, or the arts. What you learn and do in childhood will stay with you the rest of your life. In the same way, there is a deep connection between youth service and lifelong service and even philanthropy. Yes, childhood is on our side.
4. The world’s problems today are extremely complex and interrelated, driven by competing political, social, and economic forces. Climate change and humanity’s role are now backed by irrefutable science, and clean water, the essence of all life, is in scarce supply in many parts of the world. Simply put, we cannot afford for young people to grow up before they learn about and help solve our biggest challenges. No, time is not on our side.

At YSA, we believe in youth changing the world. Working with partners around the globe, we help young people find their voice, take action, and make an impact on vital community issues. Young people have always been at the center of social change, and we ignore their potential to reshape the world at our peril. If we in the civilized, law-abiding society do not engage them, someone else certainly will.

You may also enjoy this article on Youth Activism | Are You There? Messages From Our Future by Shea Ki

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Surviving the Hillsborough tragedy at the FA Cup in England as a boy of 16, Chris Arnold founded World Merit to develop and empower young global leaders

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April 15^th 1989 ended the lives of 96 people at a stadium in the UK; it also irreversibly influenced the lives of thousands, including me. I was at the semifinal of the FA Cup, a huge football (soccer) match in England. A series of errors by officials led to a tragedy inside the stadium, leaving so many people dead in the enclosure I was in. We were crushed because fans had been let into the stadium through the ”exit” gates and subsequently allowed into a tunnel leading to the already full terrace where I stood. It was a day that simply became known as ”Hillsborough.“ Ninety-six people between the ages of 10 and 67 died; brothers and sisters, friends and fathers. This is the day I first understood that life is short.

Like all those involved, my flashbacks and memories are many. For me the hardest memory, the one that often comes back to shake me, is that of a man who pleaded with me to give him space before he fell unconscious, pressed into my side, sliding slowly down beneath the mass of merging bodies.

We were trapped in a cage built to keep people from gaining access to a soccer pitch. As the crushing crowd moved me to just three or four bodies back from the fence at the front, a place where I thought everyone would be dead, I am still struck with shock and anger at what I saw.

Looking past the heads, past the pain, and past the vomit in the hair of people pressed against that front fence, I could see photographers snapping us, clicking away as we fought for breath and survival. Whatever they might say about their professional need to do their job, there was an essential need and room for them to help; rather, they took photos of us dying. There is no doubt that those people on the other side of a fence could have tried to save us, could have tried to get the emergency gates open, tried to pull on the fence to tear it down, but providing content for the following days newspapers was their focus. They simply had to choose — drop the camera and save a life or turn their backs on those in need for a “shot.” This is the day I understood that priorities aren’t as obvious as they should be — people and the planet, and then profit, should be the order.

The stewards did not immediately respond by opening the inadequate gates in the front fence. Instead they meekly waited for an order and followed bureaucracy while people’s breathing had stopped. There was a loss of basic common sense. Police were reluctant to help any of those who, with sheer survival instinct, had scrambled to the top of the molten crowd; when the first wave of people crawled on their knees across shoulders and heads to escape over the spiked fence, they were pushed back in.

I learnt about survival instinct and self-preservation that day.

A father, who had lost his son comforted me, a 16-year-old stranger, and I learnt about true kindness. My dad thought he had lost me in that crush — his face and shock showed me what losing a child might mean to someone, something I only fully appreciate years later now that I have my own sons.

Hillsborough also taught me that people, even senior officials, will lie to deflect blame and responsibility.

I learned that when trapped in a lie, these same people will allow it to escalate and perpetuate to such an extent that thousands of lives are destroyed, a city’s good name is smeared, and that justice is something that bereaved families are forced to fight for over a quarter of a century. The lie was told by Chief Superintendent David Duckenfield, the senior police officer in charge at the stadium: he said that fans had forced the exit gates open when it had actually been a police directive. That lie snowballed and suddenly, three days later, on the front page of Britain’s biggest tabloid newspaper, the fans were suddenly being deemed a drunken mob. Under the headline, “THE TRUTH,” we were accused of pickpocketing the dead (our brothers and sisters), of urinating on the police, of beating up the police while they tried to resuscitate people (our brothers and sisters). I was there and this was a terrible lie that upset me even more than the events of the day itself. This was an attack.

It took over 20 years for the British government to order the release of the documents from the disaster. Although I knew the truth, it was still a devastating shock to find that hundreds of police and witness statements had been materially altered to remove any criticisms of officials. The coverup has led to the longest public inquiry in British legal history, something that is still ongoing and difficult to bear.

So is this day my inspiration? In many ways yes — with the accelerated learning I accrued on that day, I was left with an insight that would stay with me as I work to make a positive impact.

The vigour, resolve and dignity that the families of the deceased have shown while fighting for the truth, makes me feel incredibly proud and determined to more consistently be the best version of myself.

The ‘Justice For The 96’ campaign is a source of great inspiration to me, and I feel a real gratitude to those who devoted decades to it. However, the energy from Hillsborough was entirely destructive for me until another truly pivotal day of my life happened six months after the disaster.

I was late for school, again — showing up on time just didn’t seem important. I was attended a poorly performing school and my city was filled with unemployment and suffering, as it was in the harsh recession of the late ‘80s. My cynicism and mistrust of authority was high, my confidence for a good future low. I walked up the stairs into the student room of the college, with no real thought or care. Mary Wilson, my English teacher, was waiting for me. After pushing me into an office she proceeded to redirect me and as far as I’m concerned, save my life.

In this most pivotal day she made sure I understood my responsibility to reach my full potential. She sharply pointed out that I knew many others who did not have that opportunity.

She forced me to think how to make the most of a life I was lucky to have.

She wrote a life plan alongside me that I actually did stick to for 25 years. A plan that led to my building a global perspective through travel and through finding incredible role models; a plan that led me to the founding of a group of youth-centric businesses, and ultimately, to the building of the most fulfilling and beautiful undertaking I’ve ever known and been part of — World Merit.

World Merit is an organization which connects young citizens around the world, each of whom is looking to fight collaboratively for positive change. We are addressing low social mobility, low confidence, and low aspirations in youth. Behind the scenes, I would tell you that my personal aim is for World Merit to be a ”Mary Wilson” on a vast scale — to make sure that as many people as possible reach their potential and that they connect to use their talents for the betterment of the world. We are a growing movement of 100,000 and have a target of one million members by the end of 2016. Malala Yousafzai, Sir Ken Robinson, and other astonishingly brilliant people are supporting World Merit and our mission to empower, uplift, and revitalize global youth, the inheritors of our world.

I would never have had the chance to become my ”best self” without Hillsborough and the insights drawn from terrible days. I would never have had the chance to become my ”best self” without an attentive and strong teacher and the plan we crafted all those years ago. Life is short, life can be unfair, so start fighting for it to be better, fight for justice and equity, and continue that fight every day. Take your inspiration from every single moment. You are lucky to breathe, so go on, take a deep breath, and start moving purposefully toward reaching your potential. Start fighting with every breath for people and the planet. Oh, and if you can, be a “Mary Wilson” for somebody.

World Merit Manifesto

It is not for us to relax or slow, nor stop nor drop to weakened knee, when faced by odious inequality. Not for us the mourning of dated dreams that mock and rebuke the last nights of life. Nor for us a cowering retreat from menacing medieval traditions or simplistic mistaken doctrines that render many unable. No, no, my friends, for us it is the opportunity to strive for goals, to meet aspiration with full and unhindered determination. It is for us to see all potential unshackled, to ensure those with ambition are released from inequity or insecurity. It is for us to lead those of merit to others and see that together they reach their fullest height. We will fight those who dare challenge our right to endeavor. We will rise as a community of citizens to meet global issues, including those that grow to daunt others. We will work for a world of merit, and we will achieve.

~Chris Arnold, founder of World Merit

Learn more at worldmerit.org

You may also enjoy At War…With Myself: A Soldier’s Story of Spiritual Survival by Stacy Bare

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(Hu)man’s best friend and sometimes our greatest teachers, how animals help us tune into our inner power and sensitivities

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When I was eight years old, my mother suffered an aneurism and died suddenly. My father had a hush-hush way of dealing with it: If we didn’t talk about it, we could pretend it never happened. Fawn, my sweet little Pekingese, took care of me emotionally. She became my surrogate mother, all 10 pounds of her. She had the patience of a saint and allowed me to bury my head in her fur and cry.

The days were long and lonely after my mother’s passing. I spent many an hour with Fawn. The house had an empty feeling to it, and Fawn helped to fill the void. After school, she and I used to lie on the floor in the living room, basking in the late-afternoon sun. Recalling it, I can still feel the warmth of the sun on my skin, her musky smell, the wetness of her small flat nose when I leaned in to kiss it. I used to scoop her up in my arms to get a bit closer to her. I knew she missed my mother too.

The summer following my mother’s death, my older sister Kathy, Fawn, and I were shipped off to my grandparents’ farm on the rolling grassy plains of northwestern Nebraska. It was a very different life from the one in suburban New Jersey, and I loved it. Something resonated deeply within me; something was gently awakening.

The Animal Communicator

The pain of my mother’s passing was still very heavy in my heart. During that summer I would teach myself what I now understand to be the basics of energy balancing and animal communication. Though I wasn’t aware of exactly what I was doing then, I made the discovery that I had energy in my hands. I could soothe wild barn kittens by gently holding them in my hands. The kittens would be so nervous and skittish until my hands started to heat up. I would whisper to them and send them the message that I was helping them, sending them love from my heart to theirs. They seemed to listen. I didn’t know that what I was doing was any different than how other people “talked” to their animals. We communicated without words. Their nervous bodies would soon relax and then they would begin to purr.

I could get my grandfather’s farm dog to play with me by beaming my hands at him. For me, this was just a playful game. I didn’t see this as a gift or practice. I did know that watching the animals and sending energy to them helped relax them and it helped them to trust me.

Around that time, I started to have vivid dreams that very often came true. Sometimes I dreamt about my friends and their families, and my dreams were extremely accurate. I was a natural at any sixth-sense endeavor. As a child, I didn’t have a choice whether or not to be intuitive. It was just who I was, the strongest part of my nature.

I was always uncontrollably drawn to animals that were hurt or suffering. I always felt compelled to put my hands on them.

No matter how nervous they were, I could calm them down. I knew I was making a difference, and if felt right and good in my heart to be able to help. It always calmed me too.

As a kid I didn’t know where I was going with my “special gifts,” but I knew I was a little different from most of the other kids. It wasn’t always easy but it did help to make me strong. All I wanted was to be able to share my hands with every animal I met. I wasn’t sure where it would take me, but it was my passion, my calling.

We spent three summers in the wilds of Nebraska on my grandparents’ farm. Those summers shaped the course of my life. My love and respect for all animals saved me from loneliness and an uncertain future. The animals bestowed upon me invaluable gifts. They taught me to communicate from my heart and to trust my intuition. What started with Fawn helping to heal me ultimately evolved my gift of healing and awakened my mission to serve.

I started volunteering at a local animal shelter when I was 12. I had never known what happened to pets that were sick or what happened to the animals that didn’t get adopted. I learned quickly; the things I witnessed were inhumane and indelibly imprinted upon me.

That place was a living hell for the animals, filled with fear and anxiety. It was a small shelter and there was no room for holding dogs to assess them and find out what they needed. Many healthy and sick dogs, cats, kittens and bunnies died in fear in crowded gas chambers, some fighting to their deaths. I swore then that someday I would help animals in need. I didn’t know how, I just knew I had to make a difference. As a 12-year- old, I witnessed cruel practices that I will never forget, practices that are still happening today in shelters all around our “civilized” country.

Today, I am living my dream come true. I have worked with thousands of animals helping to give them a voice through animal communication and easing their pain with the energy in my hands.

I have helped dogs, cats, bunnies, horses, and myriad other critters in all stages of life. I have eased the burden of transition for dying animals, making it a peaceful passing with an abundance of love. I have nursed ailing animals back to health.

These days I continue to talk with animals all over the country, through long-distance communication. My dreams continue to develop as I continue to grow with them. I teach everyone I work with simple skills that help them to hear their animals’ inner voices. I teach them to support their four-legged family members by using the energy in their own hands. I have traveled all over the country teaching what I now call “CinergE,” my life’s work.

I am in the process of developing a CinergE program for animal shelters. I have seen so many animals transform, blossoming into the perfect pets after working with me. Each time this happens I give thanks for never giving up on my dreams. No matter what the popular opinion has been, I have persevered and continued on my somewhat unconventional path.

Recently I saw a little rescue dog that was afraid of life. I put my hands on him and tuned into his worries.

He was very frightened, but he didn’t resist or fight me. He shivered and stared up at me with concerned eyes.

Next we went for a confidence-building walk. He was terrified of being outside; it was chaotic and frightening for him. I sat down on the ground next to him and he told me that in his previous home he had never seen the light of day. He lived in a basement with many other fearful dogs with a single overhead light bulb. There were noises that scared him that could be heard through the floor above.

I reached over and he didn’t move. He looked at me with sad eyes and I let the energy flow. He snuggled up next to me. I assured him he was now safe. I called his family over to us and handed them his leash. The little dog was transformed and no longer afraid, now behaving like a regular well-adjusted dog. He even peed outside. He had never done this outside of his yard. Every time I got close to him he would jump up on my legs and give me a kiss. I taught his people how to continue to work with him and they were thrilled. Healing is a process for all of us, a reciprocal process — one that beautifully works both ways.

I will spend the rest of my life reaching out to people to help me make a difference in the lives of our animal family members, no matter how great or small. I made a promise to myself and I continue to keep it, 46 years later.

Learn more at CindyBrody.com

You may also enjoy reading Saving Sadie: Loving A Dog With Special Needs…and Paying It Forward by Joal Derse

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A process for discovering your ‘elixir’ — your signature best self — that special value that only you can add to the world

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Business as usual can make us cynical about doing business at all. Think Enron and nefarious mortgage loans. Think of cut-throat competition the way that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is attributed as saying: “…Amazon should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.” Think “management by stress” and “bottom line efficiency” in which human beings are over-worked and under-valued. Think marketing as manipulation.

In the early-21st century, there remain countless signs of business as usual, but a growing band of us across the globe are determined to do business as unusual for the greater good.

It’s a world where we each — especially us misfits with quirks, hidden talents, and mosaic backgrounds — can come home by doing business as art.

My Homeward Bound Journey

Business as usual was my frame of business for a long time. A poet in a Texan’s body, I resisted business as a young man and went to Austin to cultivate a pseudo-Marxist anti-capitalist stance. In my framing during the ’80s and ’90s, business equaled greed, and marketing equaled manipulation. A self-imposed ascetic, I devoted my twenties to writing, teaching, and voluntary simplicity.

Then yoga screwed up my life in beautiful ways. Restless, open-hearted, and newly married by my early 30s, I had traveled one summer from Texas to the Zen Mountain Monastery outside of Woodstock, New York, for a residency. The previous month I had spent at Woodstock’s Byrdcliffe Artist-in-Residency to finish a book proposal for my agent about yoga & the writing life. Within a few days of arriving at the monastery, I found a few allies and my place there in hauling blue stones, mowing the vast meadow, starving my hungry ego. Among the mountains and in the occasional forays into Woodstock, I also sensed a comfort and camaraderie I rarely felt in the “Big D [Dallas].”

One afternoon, I stood among the monastery’s cemetery housed in evergreens. Suddenly and without why, I heard and felt “home” whisper inside me. Having grown up in a family of islands, I did not know then that home was even something I ached for.

Within two months, this fifth-generation Texan moved his and his wife’s things to a tiny cottage in Woodstock to write, teach yoga, and venture onward. I sent notes to my writer friends: “Some places have a village idiot. Woodstock is a village of idiots. For the first time, I feel right at home.”

At the time, what I felt to be home was a place where my peculiar sensitivities and my desire for a meaningful life could be accepted.

It turns out, that was only part of the story and only the beginning of what I would discover about journeying home.

Fast-forward 30 years later from that anti-capitalist stance, and this poet with grad school training in philosophical hermeneutics (don’t ask) heads up a thriving business with a robust team that builds business artists and helps businesses grow with integrity.

My experience has borne out fundamental truths: We each have a signature elixir — something of distinct value that perhaps only we each can deliver to our respective people. Why only you? Why signature? Why distinct? Because only you have the core inner personality that lets you elevate people a certain way. Because only you have the lived heritage that has allowed you to build specific skills and talents through trial and fire.

Only you and what you create and deliver resonates with a certain core group of people.

Whether you are an artist or CEO, a thought leader or conversation starter, when you own your medicine and own the story you must tell, you inevitably feel as if you’re homeward bound, returning to your people with a message and medicine they ache for.

My saying this now with sure-footed confidence would sound unrecognizable to that earnest 20-something poet or to the 30-something shaggy barefoot writer-yogi. But being unrecognizable to your former self and even to the people who once knew you, it turns out, is part of the journey home in this new world.

The Terror, the Wonder

The path to discovering and delivering your elixir with integrity can be terrifying.

In the twelve years since I moved to Woodstock, my first marriage dissolved, a lightning bolt sent a fire roaring through my study and decimated the farmhouse my second wife and I had bought, debilitating Lyme Disease has visited me four times, two little girls have arrived, and my father has died.

I was cracked open and my heart expanded in concentric rings. It’s not the collections of suffering and hardship alone, though, that make us formidable and distinct.

It’s how we habitually contend with those hardships, solve difficult problems certain ways, and build up a specific skill set that we bring forward to our endeavors over the years that distinguishes us.

It’s in part, learning how to draw from that heritage that helps you create, own, and deliver your elixir.

But the very act of owning your medicine in public — of standing up and out and saying that you have something of value to contribute — feels like risky business. You might rather just do your work, write your book, create your encaustic canvases, make your films, serve your clients and students, and “be done” with the rest of the world.

I understand that stance. But I also often imagine Jonas Salk toiling in his laboratory after World War II when polio was wiping out tens of thousands of Americans. By chance and wit and compassion, he became determined to discover a vaccine. Tens of thousands of tests and heaps of criticism later, he succeeded. An introvert, the last thing Salk wanted was for his image to land on the cover of Time Magazine. But it did. And Salk went on to found the revolutionary inter-disciplinary Salk Institute.

Now imagine if he did all of that work but didn’t tell the right people who could help him spread that vaccine. Imagine if he discovered that vaccine but out of fear of drawing a lot of attention to himself or out of fear of being viewed as vain he closed his lab door, kept his mouth shut, and went back to work on his next experiment. And then imagine him ten years later growing resentful because no one knew of the great work he’s doing.

Sound familiar?

Because here’s the deal: When you live the quest, you come home not only to your best self but more to a village of sorts, to other people who ache for the elixir your core self has discovered or created or is co-creating with them.

When you witness your impact, you’re buoyed to engage and serve more.

If you feel the least bit trepidatious about venturing forward with an idea that you know will bring you home to your true self and will bring relief or elevation to other people, know that for many of us wanting to do business as unusual that this challenge is in part what we’ve signed on for.

The remarkable thing is you do not have to meet these challenges alone.

Your Core Ally

My way of life in these middle years is to track wonder. That does not mean I’m naive or wish upon stars or float around Never-Never Land. An unflinching inner skeptic keeps my ear to the ground to follow wonder’s tracks as an unapologetic grown-up well acquainted with rings of fire.

Wonder, simply put, is not kid’s stuff. Tracking wonder is radically grown-up stuff for those who want to journey homeward. Why?

Because more than any other cognitive or emotional experience, wonder cracks you open to possibility.

When you stand a little astonished at the way sun slides on a sidewalk or at the way you’ve changed in twenty years, you receive that reality without asking anything in return. The openness of wonder helps you get clear about why you do what you do, face challenges with less angst, and not grasp at outcome. Wonder is a core ally.

Tracking Wonder also is the name of the consultancy I founded several years ago. My team and I have built business artists in a variety of fields, people who are ready to own their signature elixir and to challenge business as usual. People who are ready to do their best work in the world and to muster the skill set and hone the craft necessary to captivate and elevate other people in books, brands, and intentional lives.

Admittedly, each day I am a little astonished and a lot humbled.

Your Signature Best Self

To do our best work in the world we each can bring forward a signature part of our respective best self. What we call “best self” has become increasingly more clear to me since the long-ago days when I closed my Woodstock yoga classes with “The best in me reaching out to the best in you.”

When in my twenties, I was immersed in the ideas of Jung and of Jungian thinker James Hillman to try to understand and act on what I now call our signature best self. I suspect this signature best self is part of our biology, our environment, and something called mind and habit that has contributed to some nugget within each of us. Hillman calls it “the soul’s code,” an acorn of sorts he says we are each born with that supersedes nature and nurture.

Whatever you want to call it, something does distinguish how we each individually create and elevate other people — signature best self to signature best self.

The Greeks called it the “daimon,” a kind of guardian that does not protect our ego in a cozy comfort zone but instead a guardian that protects what is best within each of us that must be acknowledged, fortified, and brought out so that we each might flourish in the world.

The daimon is contradictory and paradoxical. It speaks in the language of metaphor and symbol. Try to live your life by ignoring the daimon’s yearning and signature way of being expressed, and it will act out.

You can call that acting out a mid-life crisis, but I think that phrase cheapens our experience. Instead, in those middle decades — sometimes starting in our twenties — these moments of deep fertile confusion are opportunities to keep living our quest that we might come a little closer to arriving home.

To glimpse your daimon, your core guide, consider how you uniquely think about situations or solve problems. List your intellectual and creative obsessions — and own them as potential elixir ingredients instead of as simple peculiarities. What do you know more about than many other people whom you know? What special combination of interests, experiences, and skills makes you “you” — and how can you bring those distinctions forward?

Salve Your Patch of the Planet

The beautiful thing: Your core guide has medicine — creative, intellectual, business, spiritual — to serve and salve a patch of the planet.

Your patch of the planet is your imaginable and deeply felt audience with whom you identify and empathize. They are in part the audience that your best self comes home to. They’re the patrons or students, the 40-60-year-old seekers, the mid-managers with an ache in their heart, or the 20-something leaders whom you genuinely want to captivate and elevate. Imagine their daily lives, listen to them, speak to them, engage them, and bring them up to a better place.

My heroes embrace and bring forward their signature best selves in ways that reach their patch of the planet.

There is the former college administrator who owned her heritage and signature self to leap and launch the Women of Wonder Circle for women who want to move out of their sexual abuse into a more empowered, beautiful life.

There is the former art curator and Natalie Goldberg protege who owned her heritage and signature elixir to lead the conversation of The Creative Mix for bold who are mixing things up in art and life.

There is the VP of Marketing for a corporation who owned his heritage and medicine to lead the conversation on inter-generational leadership to build up Millennials who can lead on purpose.

There are countless other people, too, who are my homeward bound heroes.

It’s not easy work. These heroes don’t want to take a tour but to live the quest.

And here’s another surprise for this once-reclusive writer:

DIT beats DIY. Do it together.

Suspicious of group-think and overly attached to our own “originality,” we creatives often wear the DIY badge with honor. Maybe to a fault. Soldiering on in a DIY culture — especially when the digital revolution seems to suggest that an artist or writer or entrepreneur can and should be able to do everything on his or her own — is, in a word, exhausting.

And not ultimately as impactful.

When your core guide and core self is fully recognized and engaged with other people also bringing out their core self in a mutually beneficial way, then you might taste what Aristotle calls eu-daimon-ia. Your daimon, your core guide, flourishes not in isolated flow but in optimal engagement. The pursuit of eudaimonia translates loosely in English to “the pursuit of happiness.” It is a collective happiness for the greater good.

The pursuit of eudaimonia may be the lifelong journey toward our home. Together.

Home might be the way mind feels wrapped in skin that fits just right. A place where best self and rebellious self are embraced and held. A place where your quirks are potential strengths; your peculiarities, potential badges of honor; your oddities, potential medicine.

After all, we long to belong. When we reach the middle of our lives, we want to feel at home in the world we inhabit, create in, and engage.

We want a way of life and of right livelihood, a way of making things and of making a difference that brings out the best in us and those around us.

The road to that kind of home is usually circuitous if not a little treacherous, but there’s really no better path I have found to feeling utterly, wildly alive.

P.S. Need a compass? I created this Compass of Wonder PDF expressly to help business artists like you navigate your way home to doing business as art.

Learn more about Jeffrey Davis’ work at trackingwonder.com.

You may also enjoy Poetry, Wonder and the Creative Mind. by Jeffrey Davis

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4 former supermodels reflect on how their experience has inspired their purpose-driven lives

—

Lights, camera, action! Despite the presumed glamour, the modeling experience wasn’t all paparazzi strobes flashing, champagne, and Project Runway episodes. It took a team of highly experienced professionals to bring our images to life and no, we didn’t look remotely close to that when we woke up in the morning. Fantasy versus reality, with some blurred lines in between. Yes, the world has changed in tremendous ways for me and my supermodel peers included in this piece, but on the deepest core level, the most basic tenets of what we all desired / desire remain a constant – we want to be happy and we want to feel good and comfortable in our own skin.

The world is fascinated by beauty, and perhaps it always will be. I had this idea to assemble some superheroes from my past modeling days to share a snapshot of their stories. Today, one of my favorite things to do is to speak to groups of young women. I lure them in with images pulled from fashion magazines, but leave them with the real sauce – the advice and guidance I wish I had received at their age. This piece was inspired by a provocative question often posed: What would you say now to your fifteen-year-old self, if you could go back in time? And I would dare to add: What would you desire for her?

I crossed paths with each of models in this piece (Lisa Kauffman, Nadine Hennelly, Eileen Cavanaugh Haber, and Kersti Bowser) at some point during my own modeling career, in some place in the world or somewhere within the pages of glossy magazines. I even lived with Lisa in Paris for a brief time. Gathering their stories was reminiscent of recollecting stories of my own. We shared a unique experience with many intersecting similarities, peppered with our own individual seasonings. Reconnecting with these lovelies after so many years has been profoundly inspiring to me. Celebrating their voices is empowering for the younger generations of women, whether or not they are pursuing a career in modeling.

There are threads of commonality weaving throughout the human experience, the journey from adolescence to adulthood, and the path to claiming our real purpose and power in the world.

Desire is a funny thing: powerful and simultaneously fleeting. As children we believe we have superpowers, that we can leap tall buildings with a single bound and manifest achieve anything we desire. Then along the way, we allow the outside forces of the world to dull down that magic as our soul is slowly eroded, one sparkle at a time. Reflecting upon your own path from stardust to here, what would you like to tell that younger version of yourself?

Superpower Soundbites:

LISA: Connect to your inner strength – what others think of you, especially in adolescence, should not affect your future endeavors. Be flexible. Soak it all up – learn languages, see the world, make friendships, save money.

NADINE: Pay attention to what you see and what you feel from the world around you. Don’t be in a rush. Enjoy the ride – ask questions – don’t take anything for granted. See yourself from within. Be happy; life is short and beautiful. Sock money away in the bank!

EILEEN: Everything you need is within. You are worthy of everything you desire. Stand up for yourself; don’t give your power away. You can be powerful and graceful at the same time.

KERSTI: Be kind to yourself. Love yourself. See your inner beauty – you are worthy and loved. You can do/be anything you want to be. Reach within and know that this is the source of true validation.

We were mere adolescents thrown into an adult world of high-stakes business and opportunity, with relatively little to no experience, guidance, or positive role models. That said, in an industry at the time predominantly run by men (some of them lecherous and abusive), Lisa credits the stewardship of her female New York City agent, Pauline Bernatchez, as a great mentor. This was a boy’s club in which female role models were few and far between. There was nothing glamorous about the on-the-job-training aspect of this path, and we had yet to discover or begin to understand our commoditization and/or the complicated relationships that would unfold with our inner selves, our bodies, and the industry folk around us. This was our job — we were a product and this was all we knew. Many of us had never had any other job. Thus this was our journey from there to here. Fasten your seatbelts, please.

We came from different places, different backgrounds, and different experiences, but we came together in the place of modeling, aka Hard Knocks 101. Flying on planes across the world by ourselves at a young age, in a world without the Internet, mobile phones, social media, and constant connectivity, we were thrown into the survival-of-the-fittest modeling pool. We had all been discovered in one way or another. The story wasn’t so unique, but I don’t think any of us truly understood the gravity of what was to come. Kersti and I both grew up on the outskirts of New York City, but anyone who knows New York will tell you that stepping foot into Manhattan was like entering a whole new stratosphere; the boroughs didn’t count. Commuting to school on the subway, Kersti was discovered by the editor of Seventeen magazine, and the rest was cover-girl history for her. As a side note, at that time of pre-electronic media, Seventeen magazine was the Holy Grail to a teenage girl, a hit of media morphine. I still remember waiting for it to arrive in the mailbox.

New York modeling agents deployed streams of girls to Paris and Milan during summer breaks from school, to see who would cut it, what cream would rise to the surface — we were expendable commodities. We all recall those first flights, feeling cautiously exhilarated, the smell of Gitane cigarettes in the air of Charles de Gaulle airport upon landing in Paris. We weren’t in Kansas anymore. Nadine arrived a naïve young girl from Montreal, only to be greeted by no one. As she stood alone (in more ways than one), a stewardess helped her make a call to her modeling agency, whereupon she was abruptly informed that the driver coming to get her was running about an hour late. At least she spoke French. Using my best high school language skills, I managed to navigate my way through customs and to a taxi to the 17th arrondisement of Paris, clenching a little slip of paper with an address written on it. Bonjour, Paris!

And while throughout the years of our lives, having soothed our regrets, our heartaches, and our experiences, we are all very clear about one thing: we were availed of an extraordinary opportunity that opened our eyes to the world at large and shaped the women we have become.

These are the pieces and parts that came together to inform the whole. “I believe modeling saved my life in many ways,” said Kersti. We would all agree that we were forced to grow up very quickly, and as Kersti continued, “It gave me a sense of power, a self-reliance” – an invaluable tool to acquire. In many ways it cracked us open to being more conscious of the world. Coming from all quadrants of the globe, as Lisa put it, “We became citizens of the world,” and for this we were blessed.

We each went on to become mothers (interestingly, predominantly giving birth to boys, aside from Eileen, who has two daughters, one of whom is currently following in her modeling footsteps — talk about full circle!). Lisa, the mother of two teenage boys, is now “mother” and mentor to young models as director of LK Model Management in Calgary – walking the walk and talking the talk. What better person to groom a next-generation model than one who walked in her shoes (and down runways around the world, I might add)?

The modeling world bred competitiveness and tried to negate one of the greatest potential opportunities – connection. It wasn’t as if those in charge could prevent friendships from being made (and many old ones still exist), but the pervasive theme, particularly among manipulative Parisian agents, was to incite a sense of competition among us. As Lisa points out, “It was probably to protect themselves from being outed for their emotional / physical abuses and manipulation.” From a very young age, we were pitted against one another to compete rather than to be mighty comrades. There certainly were some lost opportunities in which we could have learned the value of celebrating each other and creating deep connections.

We can’t change our experiences, we can’t change the choices we made, but we can forgive our younger selves for making choices we may not make today, and we can be the voices of wisdom going forward. Kersti admits that, while she doesn’t like standing in a place of “regret,” she was upset with herself at a point for not having been more in charge of her world back in the heyday, a sentiment with which I completely concur.

The Exterior / Body Complex

We came of age in a non-retouching era, aside from covers and campaigns, and thus we fell victim to a highly scrutinizing industry and were often taught to be intensely critical of ourselves. Today virtually EVERYTHING that appears in the media is retouched. Comparison, the thief of joy, was ever present for all of us. Eileen recounts an experience at the beginning of her career, where she was standing awkwardly with her long, lanky body in a bathing suit her mother bought her, next to glamazon Cindy Crawford — self-confidence buzzkill alert! In the words of Nadine, “I always felt I wasn’t that pretty. I spent most of my career picking apart my body. And though today my body doesn’t even come close to looking anything like it did then, I am so grateful to my body for being the vessel of my soul – for allowing me to give birth and experience the passion of life, love, art, motherhood, food, touch, perfume, hugs.”

The driver sent to retrieve Nadine and another model from the airport that first day she arrived in Paris stopped to get them something to eat on the way into the city. As they languished over buttered baguettes and hot chocolate, the bemused driver remarked how they should enjoy it while they could, as it would be the last time they would eat like this. Upon arrival at Nadine’s agency, they were placed on a scale and out came the measuring tapes to document that their measurements were “intact.” When I arrived at my agency, I learned of the infamous “thigh test.” We were told to stand before our agent with our legs together — if our thighs touched, we needed to lose weight and fast — no one was going to provide us with any healthy options on how to best go about achieving that. Lose weight – those were the marching orders! Needless to say, this became the breeding ground for a complex relationship with our bodies and our perceptions, often brutally dissected by others and ultimately by ourselves.

It was in Paris that I learned to pick apart my own youthful body. It would be many years before I could see the truth.

Kersti also brings up a good point – as models, we felt washed up and old by our early 20s. We became adept at being overly critical of ourselves, especially our external selves. Talk about missing the moment: “Today at age 50, I’d kill for that body and skin I had then.” As Eileen put it, “At 22 years old, I was lost and had no idea what to do next. I started my spiritual journey much younger than most people.”

The Game / Spiritual Complex

Eileen shared a snapshot of her LOL good old Midwestern naiveté. Upon her arrival in Paris she recalled being confronted by the revelation of the “game” of modeling, one she refused to play. She quickly got the memo that by dressing sexy and dating photographers and wealthy playboys, one could fast-track themselves to plum modeling gigs. She subsequently spent many nights at home — an unwilling and often lonely non-participant.

Nothing was for free, and fame came with a price tag. As Kersti described her experience, “I was exposed to a dark side where extremes were commonplace, such as between drugs and eschewed value systems, but I was also exposed to wonderful groundbreaking individuals who were out there making a difference in the world.” Such was the yin yang of the modeling experience.

We pieced it together as best we could, traipsing along without proper guidance or mentorship. Fame, fortune, and glamour aside, we craved stability and something “normal.” For us that often translated to a life no longer lived out of a suitcase in hotels; rather we craved the stability of family, and as Kersti recalls, a more “approachable, low-maintenance lifestyle.”

The Biz / Financial Complex

As Nadine has pointed out, today by virtue of how the world has changed, many models are in charge of their own destinies. Often bypassing their agents, they understand their own branding. Everyone, including every celebrity and every sports figure, is their own brand. Back in the day, before the proliferation of electronic media, we knew nothing of brands. We just represented them. We were the face of something, but not of ourselves. Today models possess much more business savvy. I think we can all agree that we could have been a bit more responsible with our finances. Luckily, the advice that Lisa‘s NYC agent gave her sunk in and positioned her to be able to retire early and provide for herself and her family, in particular, to care for her young son diagnosed with cerebral palsy. The harsh reality, however, is that she was in the minority in that department. Kersti recalled, “We were self-taught. We didn’t have the same access to information that is available today. Models were rarely considered businesswomen.”

Most of us arrived in Europe by virtue of agency “advances,” which in essence meant that the agency forwarded a plane ticket, provided an apartment, and then began collecting their money, plus some, once we started working. There was a lot of creative accounting going on, specifically with respect to agent commissions and taxes. We were paying taxes in countries we weren’t legally working in. Curious. But, in line with our inexperience, we went on about our merry ways, not rocking the financial boat. Ultimately, the models who fared the best in the financial arena were the ones who had parents holding the purse strings. I knew a girl whose vigilant mother controlled all of her money and invested it into real estate — she was set for life by the end of her career, at least financially.

The world will continue to evolve and hindsight will always be 20/20, but what can we do with our experiences to transform them into tools of empowerment?

It is our responsibility to ourselves and the world we live in, to use our powers for good, to tap into our inner superheroes and to follow our heart’s desire. Because when we live authentically and on purpose with our life’s mission, when we impart wisdom to our youth, and when we connect to one another, we shift the world.

Have you found your way back to those superpowers of your own?

Where They Are Now

Lisa Kauffman — The first model from Canada to grace the cover of British Vogue has not only gone from supermodel to super mentor as Director of LK Model Management, she also gets behind the camera with her models. “By being the first one to take their photos, I can pass along my knowledge to the new generation and make them more at ease in front of the camera.” A new brand of modeling is in town; the LK site refreshingly states, “Discovering beauty one role model at a time.” Lisa lives in Calgary with her family.

Nadine Hennelly — Inspiration in action, Nadine Hennelly has transformed the life experience of her travels and studies around the world into a manifestation of art. She is a successful portrait and fine art photographer with her own studio/gallery and has also recently returned to the stage, performing in local theater and film productions. Nadine and her wonderful 10-year-old son reside in Montreal. Her work can be seen by visiting her website at http://www.nadinehennelly.ca

Kersti Bowser — Producer, chef, owner of Gourmet Butterfly Media, a-food-in-media production company, CIA (the Culinary Institute of America)-trained, single mother, and woman-hear-me-roar extraordinaire, Kersti has come full circle connecting to her lifelong passion of expressing love through food. Its roots run deep into her childhood in the mountains of Sweden and intersect with a love of all things French cooking, transforming her into a model with a Julia Child palette. She has taken her experience in front of the camera and turned it into a career of behind-the-scenes food styling. She is the in-demand magic behind just about every household-name chef you know, among them Padma Lakshmi, Tom Colicchio, Rocco DiSpirito, Rachel Ray, and Bobby Flay, to name a few. Her work regularly appears on TV shows such as “The View,” and with celebrity cooks, most recently Gwyneth Paltrow. While building her media empire, she aspires to return to the CIA to teach food styling to others. She resides with her teenage son. To find out more about Kersti, you can connect with her on Facebook.

Eileen Cavanaugh Haber — Eileen can’t restrain herself from making all things around her more beautiful, both physically and spiritually. Her quest for deeper awakening has ignited monumental transformation in her journey. Currently residing with her family in Santa Barbara, California, she is transitioning from her roles as full-time mother and successful interior decorator to writer, her passion-filled purpose. It is her greatest desire to help others to connect to their deepest calling and purpose. Her inspirations can be found on her blog, goddessgrotto.wordpress.com

You may also enjoy reading Leap Of Faith | 10 Essential Tips For Shifting Your Life by Eileen Haber

The post Supermodels | Superpowers appeared first on BEST SELF.

“Living through what I couldn’t possibly imagine ever getting past, I realized that I have what it takes to traverse any fear…

—

I was at the San Diego airport, waiting to board my plane home after having produced Hay House’s first “I Can Do It At Sea” cruise. It was April 12, 2008 — one of those dates in my life that I’ll never forget, the kind that lives in infamy forever.

I looked at my phone and noticed a voicemail that came in while I was going through security. As I listened, the tone of my husband’s voice literally made my knees buckle. The next thing I knew, I was collapsed on the carpet at the gate while everyone else began boarding the plane around me. My body was both burning and frozen as I listened to this man I had been married to for nearly eighteen years. The tone of his voice was crushing, and the words were pure threat.

“I read your journals. You’d better get your ass home — there’s hell to pay.”

All I could think was that I had more than seventy journals. Which parts had he read?

To this day, I have no recollection of getting on the plane or flying or even listening to the multiple voicemails he left for me while I was in the air. I didn’t answer his calls while I was in the car on my way home from the airport.

I felt like I was in an earthquake. Only instead of the ground, it was the life I had built that was crumbling beneath my feet.

After the plane landed in Denver, I drove straight to Boulder, where I live. But I didn’t go home. Instead, I went to the St. Julien Hotel, got a room, and left my bags there. Then I walked the two blocks to my apartment — and my husband. I was in a daze, but I can still vividly remember what it was like to stand at the base of the stairs, my heart pounding out of my chest, wondering how I was going to make it up the three flights to my front door.

He’d heard me coming and was waiting just inside the door. He held up four of my journals and announced that he was going to make copies of certain pages and send them to my parents, my sister, my friends, and my coworkers. He looked forward to seeing what they thought of me, once they knew the real me.

“Never let anyone see you sweat” had been my motto for as long as I could remember. I was so afraid of his threat to expose me, of letting anyone see my imperfections. No one knows how to push your buttons harder than someone you’ve been married to for eighteen years.

When I first met my husband, it as was if he introduced himself to me by saying, “Hi, I am broken.” And I replied “Great. I am Super Woman. I will fix you.”

Our core wounds were a match made in heaven. He was charming and tall and gorgeous and sweet and swept me off my feet with his sense of adventure. I made sure everyone thought we were the perfect couple with everything going for us. But as the marriage progressed and the patterns of enmeshment became more ingrained, I found myself sublimating all my own desires for his — and somewhere along the way I forgot to live my own life.

I was very busy managing the perceptions of others and projecting an image of perfection to the world. It was far more important to me that everyone thought my life was perfect and that I was happy, than that I actually be happy.

For a long time I believed that happiness and fun were just for other people.

So, there I was, looking at my husband of eighteen years threatening me with my most sacred writing.

The sting in my mouth was the bitter taste of a marriage crashing.

The truth is that our relationship had been slowly falling apart for quite some time. I’d chosen to stay in denial so deeply that it had taken something this monumental to wake me up. Suddenly, I was faced with what to do when the life I’m living no longer fits on the foundation where it’s settled? And, how do I find the courage to make a dramatic change? Because my foundation wasn’t just rocked — it was obliterated.

I had a choice: I could stay numb and go back to sleep, or I could face my fears and embrace change. I could stand still, or I could get ready for the greatest jump of my life.

Hourglass: a last love poem

written on the morning I finally filed for divorce

i loved you

as much as i could

as long as i could

hard as i could

hard as it was

steadily holding on

to the small piece of maybe

that was finally destroyed

i have done all i can

we came together

in our respective corners

at the bottom of an hourglass

with our own strengths

our own wounds

marriage is to be found

in the voyage

through the tiny neck

of this timepiece

crossing up and over

to the opposite quadrants

those qualities of the other

missing in ourselves

are to be absorbed

for each to become whole

my love

hard as we tried

we simply did not make it

through the passage

the wounds too deep

the rage too loud

the voice too silent

and though i love you

i cannot be

married to you

i lost myself

in the giving of everything

to you

i now know

heartbreak in one

is a pain

unable to be healed

by the other

we can only

heal ourselves

for months

i have been nowhere

and everywhere

wheeling my home behind me

into the havens of others

now i need to land safely

inside the space of my own

i was starving to death

before hunger finally saved my life

waking me to desire

and now you are free

from the wanting more

than i could give

and i will love you

beyond the wound

Marriage was a long time to be away from myself… and so the journey began.

It was a little over two years from the fateful day my husband read my journals to the day I filed for divorce. Leaving my marriage was the hardest thing I have ever done. It was as if I was jumping off a cliff in hopes of saving my life, without really knowing what — if anything — would catch me.

But somehow, the ground appeared beneath my feet as I landed. And what’s more, the most miraculous things began to occur. Doors opened. Unforeseen opportunities presented themselves. I not only survived, I thrived.

It wasn’t always pretty, and it wasn’t always easy. But it was so deeply worth it.

That two-year period prior to the jump was filled with pain, fear, and wonderful growth — learning that gave birth to the transformative process I offer in my book Jump … And Your Life Will Appear.

As the Event Director for Hay House from November 2002 to August 2014 — leaving my “day job” is another massive jump I’ve just taken! — I was lucky enough to travel around the world, and become quite close to, some of the greatest minds of our time in the fields of self-help, inspiration, motivation and wellness. I’d had a front row seat and a backstage pass for over a decade, and while I’d absorbed their teachings by osmosis, they wouldn’t be able to really resonate with me until I was in a crisis of my own and able to open myself up fully, really willing to reveal myself and ask for help from the people who I had always been there to serve.

When my marriage came crashing down, I relied on their teachings to make it through.

A couple of them even used me as a spiritual guinea pig, trying out self-empowerment experiments on me.

It was a terrifying experience for me to peel back the layers and expose my vulnerability, because I had so much invested in this identity, in my perfectionism, in being the one getting the gold star — so much invested in believing I would find internal value from external reward. When I was finally willing to go to those people to ask for help, I would discover that they were there for me fiercely, just waiting to rally around me. And with their support I eventually gained the courage to find and use my own voice.

All their attention, love, and wisdom eventually led me to undertake my own journey toward helping others. I immersed myself in my dear friend and mentor Debbie Ford’s shadow work and eventually became a Certified Integrative Coach after a yearlong rigorous and transformational training through her Institute. I wrote my first book, Writing for My Life — a compilation of poetry, a kind of poetic memoir — as I was leaving my marriage and finding my own voice.

Since I started speaking at Hay House’s I Can Do It! conferences and Writer’s Workshops over the past few years — in addition to producing them — more and more opportunities emerged. And my coaching practice is thriving.

But all of those changes are simply outward signs of a transformation that happened inside of me. Since my divorce, I have become — thankfully — more myself than I ever thought I could be. I have learned who I am by living life for me, in alignment with my own truth and desire, instead of in response to someone or something else.

I’ve become familiar with the stranger I had been living with for forty-five years: The real Nancy Levin — the woman I’d always been, underneath the masks I had been wearing for so long.

And you know what? I really, really like her.

My story is the culmination of my experience, the chronicle of what I learned along the way, the process I took to let go and leap in order to live my own life. Please overlay your own marriage, or relationship, or career, or home, or anyone or anything that you’ve held on to so tightly in your life that it’s as if you made a “til death do us part” vow. While I lived it, I felt my way through, but later, specific steps that I had taken began to surface in my consciousness. It became clear through working with my clients in my coaching practice, that I had a powerful roadmap others could follow if they adapted my route to their own circumstances.

In my case, of course, the jump involved a divorce, but for my clients it has worked with any kind of change — whether you want to switch jobs or careers, move to a different part of the world, set boundaries with someone in your life (no matter who it is), do something new that you’ve hesitated to try, increase your capacity for self-love, or simply move out of fear into profound courage and love. Whatever you want to change, wherever you want to jump, this process is here to support you.

Are you hiding in your life? Have you been called to make changes that you’ve been too afraid to make? Here’s an “inch-by-inch” guide to give you the courage and faith you need to feel supported as you jump into your new and better life.

It’s time to clear the path ahead and move toward letting go and leaping with these 10 steps:

• Step 1: Admit to yourself what you already know.
• Step 2: Tell the truth to someone safe.
• Step 3: Imagine yourself free.
• Step 4: Make one different choice.
• Step 5: Set your new boundaries.
• Step 6: Ask for help.
• Step 7: Honor your resistance.
• Step 8: Jump!
• Step 9: The Graceful Exit.
• Step 10: Say Yes… and then say it again… and again.

The irony is that all of the people who I was so busy trying to please (and most afraid of being vulnerable with, being myself with, and asking for help from) were the very people who were there to support me in rebuilding my self-esteem, self-love and forgiveness, once I finally let down my guard.

I realize now that if I was able to leave my marriage — and not only survive, but truly thrive on the other side of my greatest fear — then I can do anything.

Living through what I couldn’t possibly imagine ever getting past, I realized that I have what it takes to traverse any fear.

Once I discovered internally what I had been seeking externally, I learned that my needs come first. Period. And that the only way to have true deep loving connection is to stand fully revealed. All love begins with self-love and we live in the sweet spot when my vulnerability meets yours.

Almost daily, I give gratitude that he did read those journals and that I did finally leave because I can’t even imagine still hiding in my old life of constantly abandoning myself for the sake of another.

So at some point it started to occur to me that, while I thought I was just getting divorced, I was in fact rebuilding my relationship with myself. I was learning how to have a voice, instead of checking in with him or checking out. Every choice we make is either in service of the future we most desire, or sabotaging it. So most of all, I was finally most committed to honoring and claiming my own desire.

And now the next leap of faith — leaving my “day job,” wouldn’t even have been a glimmer in my eye, let alone a reality, had I not taken that first all-important step, allowing it to catapult me into the unknown. The woman I am today has everything to do with saying yes to uncertainty, and fully accepting my hand in orchestrating all the relationships, events and circumstances in my life in order to extract the wisdom I specifically came into this lifetime to learn. Leaving my marriage was a conscious decision to no longer live in reaction to anyone or anything else, to take the plunge into living on my own terms, finally honoring my own desires. A massive lesson I am eternally grateful for.

Leaving my position at Hay House bears a different gift. Trust me, the journey to quitting my dream job hasn’t been easy. This decision has also been two years in the making!

The idea was just a scary little spark back in August 2012 when, on a walk in Melbourne, Australia, my close friend — and President/CEO of Hay House — Reid Tracy said to me, “It’s not about your indispensability at work. It’s about your irreplaceability as a human.” Woah. He was right. It’s about who I am, not what I do. I had been living in a long-running story that everyone loved me because of what I did for them.

Immersing myself in the truth that people love me simply because I am me — that each of us are loved because of our own singular exquisite brilliance — was a complete game-changer.

I finally clearly saw the way I had been running myself ragged using all my people-pleasing and perfectionism as the currency with which I was buying love and attention. And then I stopped. And I was still loved. Actually, I was loved even more than before, because I had surrendered to the genuine flow, instead of my old pattern of chasing. It was a revelation.

Having spent the last few years in deep inquiry, excavating my interior landscape, I’ve discovered that honoring my authenticity and vulnerability by saying yes to what I most desire, while welcoming all the unforeseen gifts, opportunities and surprises as well, is a profound act of self-love.

All of this gives me the courage to answer the call and say yes to fully immersing myself in coaching, writing, speaking, teaching — serving from front-and-center now, instead of backstage.

I am profoundly grateful to the magnificent souls I have drawn into my life who always hold me at my highest and reflect my bright shining light back to me, especially when I need to be reminded of it the most.

I know I am not alone. I am supported and blessed as I now step out to take my place and claim my space in the world. As me. And I now know that’s enough and all I need to be.

The last words that my dear friend and mentor, the late Debbie Ford, ever said to me were: “Go live your life. Don’t work yourself to death. I love you, babydoll.”

I echo her words: Live your life—the one you were meant to live. Take a deep breath and dive into the future you most desire.

NancyLevin.com

You may also enjoy Podcast: Matt Kahn | Transformation & Collaboration: Redefining The Law of Attraction by Best Self Magazine

The post My own jump… inch by inch appeared first on BEST SELF.

Infinite Creativity: The story of an apprenticeship turned friendship that taught me a powerful lesson

—

In high school I’d learned how fulfilling it was to make my own opportunities, and I assumed I’d be able to do the same in college. But college didn’t turn out to be all I’d envisioned.

On the side, I got a job moving heavy boxes in an old mansion on Beacon Hill for the publisher Little, Brown and Company. I carried boxes of books from the attic of the mansion down to the lobby. It was the mid-nineties, and the publisher’s art department was transitioning from spray glue to Photoshop. They even had an old Photostat machine in its own little darkroom — a huge and expensive machine that did the same job as a ninety-nine-dollar scanner. I knew my way around a Mac, and designing book jackets looked like fun.

So one day, when the entire art department went out to lunch, I snooped around until I found a transmittal sheet for a book that listed the title, subtitle, author, and a brief summary of what the editorial department wanted for the jacket. The book was Midnight Riders: The Story of the Allman Brothers Band, by Scott Freeman. I sat down at one of the workstations and created a book cover for it. On a dark background, I put “Midnight Riders” in tall, green type. Then I found a picture of the band, also very dark, that looked good below the title. When I was done, I printed it out, matted it, and slipped it in with the other cover designs headed to the sales and editorial departments in the New York office for approval. Then I went back to moving boxes.

Two days later, when the art director came back from presenting designs in New York, he asked, “Who designed this cover?” I told him I had. He said, “You? The box kid?”

I explained that I knew computers, and that I was attending college on a scholarship for the arts. He offered me a full-time job as a designer on the spot. The New York office had picked my jacket to use on the book. Looking back, it wasn’t very good, but they chose it.

I was being offered an honest-to-goodness full-time job. Should I take it? College so far had been a disappointment. And here I was being handed an opportunity to work directly with the art director, who would turn out to be a master. The way I saw it, people went to college in order to be qualified to get a job like the one I was being offered. Basically, I was skipping three grades. Besides, I’d learn more here, doing what I wanted to do, than drifting anonymously through college. So I dropped out of college to work at Little, Brown, one of the best decisions of my life.

I’m not advocating dropping out. I could have entered college with more focus in the first place, or I could have tried to change my experience when I got there. But taking a job that I’d won through my initiative was another way of controlling my destiny. This, as I see it, was an example of manufacturing my own opportunities.

This is why starting a lacrosse team, producing a play, launching your own company, or actively building the company you work for is all more creatively fulfilling and potentially lucrative than simply doing what is expected of you.

Believing in yourself, the genius you, means you have confidence in your ideas before they even exist. In order to have a vision for a business, or for your own potential, you must allocate space for that vision. I want to play on a sports team. I didn’t make it on a team. How can I reconcile these truths? I don’t like my job, but I love this one tiny piece of it, so how can I do that instead?

Real opportunities in the world aren’t listed on job boards, and they don’t pop up in your inbox with the subject line: Great Opportunity Could Be Yours. Inventing your dream is the first and biggest step toward making it come true.

Once you realize this simple truth, a whole new world of possibilities opens up in front of you.

On my first official day of work as a designer at Little, Brown, I walked into the art director’s office, and he silently beckoned me over to his desk. Without speaking or turning around, he reached his left hand over his right shoulder and plucked a book from the shelf. Like a Jedi Master, he never took his eyes off me. The book he had selected was a Pantone color swatch book, and it must have been the one he wanted, because he started looking through it. I stood quietly and watched as he slowly flipped through pages and pages of colors. Finally, he stopped in the range of the light browns and tans. He found what he wanted and tore out one of the little perforated swatches. He put it down on his desk, placed one finger on it, and wordlessly slid the chocolate-colored swatch slowly toward me. He then stated drily, “That’s how I take my coffee.”

Oh my God. I dropped out of college for this. I gave up an awesome free-ride scholarship. And now I have to go to Dunkin’ Donuts and ask the lady if she can do the coffee.

In three seconds, all those thoughts went through my head. As I was considering how to replicate that color at the local café with just the right amount of cream, the art director burst into laughter. “I’m kidding! What kind of asshole do you think I am?” And so began my apprenticeship in graphic design and my introduction to a new way of thinking. The art director, Steve Snider, and I worked side by side for over two years.

Book cover design teaches you that for any one project, there are infinite approaches.

There were several factors at play in jacket design. A jacket had to satisfy us, the designers, artistically. It also had to please the author and the editorial department by doing justice to the content. It had to appeal to Sales and Marketing in terms of grabbing attention, and positioning and promoting the book. Sometimes designers were frustrated when their work was turned down by one department or the other. “Idiots. Fools,” they’d mutter, storming around the office. “This is a brilliant design.” And maybe it was. But our colleagues in Sales and Editorial had experience in their jobs, and I learned from Steve to assume that their concerns were legitimate.

Steve told me that once, for a biography of Ralph Lauren, he’d had a brilliant idea. He wanted to put out six different jackets, each in a solid, preppy color with the Polo logo in the upper left in a contrasting color. That would be it. Ralph Lauren’s photo might be on the back. It would have been so iconic. But Editorial nixed it. So that was that. Steve was still proud of the idea, but he understood that his opinion wasn’t the be-all and end-all.

For a book called The Total Package, by Thomas Hine, which deconstructed the world of product packaging, I took a little cardboard box of powdered pudding. I opened it up, ungluing the seams, and flattened it out. I made a jacket that mimicked the deconstructed box, with its registration lines and that little rainbow where they test the ink colors. I was really proud of the final product. But, instead, they used an elegant black-and-white jacket with product shapes on it. My jacket wasn’t used, but the work wasn’t wasted. I put it in my portfolio. I still thought it was cool.

Steve taught me that having a cover turned down wasn’t a problem. It was an opportunity. My job wasn’t only to be an artist, creating work that pleased me. The challenge was to come up with a design that I loved and that Sales and Editorial thought was perfect. That was the true goal.

“Your goals should be bigger than your ego,” Steve used to tell me.

When I satisfied every department, only then would I have really succeeded in nailing a cover.

When Steve and I were stuck, we’d try to inspire ourselves. We’d take a precut matte frame and hold it up against different things around the office. Would the wood grain of a credenza make a good background? How about the blue sky outside? (Steve Snider would later use a blue sky with white clouds as the background for David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.)

Sometimes there were restrictions that limited our options. We’d be told, “For this book, you have to use this photo. It was taken by the editor’s sister. It’s nonnegotiable.” And the art would suck. I’d say, “Great, gimme that one.” Then I’d turn the art sideways and blow it up eight hundred percent. Now it was cool. There was always another way to go. My creativity wasn’t limited to five designs per book, or any other number. There was always another potential cover. I quickly learned not to care about the hard work that had been wasted. I didn’t take rejection personally. My creativity was limitless. I wanted to come up with another idea. I got a million of these, I thought. I could do this all day long! It was a matter of attitude.

Graphic design is an excellent preparation for any profession because it teaches you that for any one problem, there are infinite potential solutions.

Too often we hesitate to stray from our first idea, or from what we already know. But the solution isn’t necessarily what is in front of us, or what has worked in the past. For example, if we cling to fossil fuels as the best and only energy source, we’re doomed. My introduction to design challenged me to take a new approach today, and every day after.

Creativity is a renewable resource. Challenge yourself every day. Be as creative as you like, as often as you want, because you can never run out.

Experience and curiosity drive us to make unexpected, offbeat connections. It is these nonlinear steps that often lead to the greatest work.

Steve became my mentor. He drove me in to work every morning, and we became friends, playing tennis together on weekends. He was more than thirty years older than me, but we were a good match: I didn’t have a dad growing up; he had two daughters, and he’d always wanted a son. Eventually he started bringing me with him to present covers to the New York office. On the way, I’d ask him a million questions, not just about design, but about life. How did you know when to propose to your wife? How much money did you ask for at your first job?

Asking questions is free. Do it!

With Steve’s encouragement and confidence in me, I left Little, Brown to start a freelance business doing book design. It was the late nineties, so it was inevitable that I would soon expand my services to include website design. Every new business then included website design. I could have started a dry- cleaning service, and the sign would have read alterations/website design. When my friends graduated college and decided to form a web company, I was already designing and building websites. We started Xanga, one of the first social blogging networks together. Learning design with Steve set me on the path that led me where I am today.

Editor’s note: This article is an excerpt from Biz Stone’s latest book, Things a Little Bird Told Me, which he wrote after leaving the helm at Twitter, the company he co-founded (he has since returned). Recently, Biz expressed his vibrant creativity through his ideation and direction of a short film, Evermore, based on Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven, in collaboration with Ron Howard and Canon’s Project Imagination.

View the film, Evermore, written by Biz Stone and directed by Ron Howard

You may also enjoy reading The Wall | Exploring Urban Media Through Photography, by Steve Snider

The post Infinite Creativity | Twitter’s Co-Founder On the Creative Mind appeared first on BEST SELF.

Co-creating a Conscious Business taps into a primal desire for freedom

—

You never really know someone until you go into business with them. There’s something about having money on the line that makes things get real, quick. If there are unspoken, conflicting desires or intentions, they will bubble to the surface quickly. But even beyond that, going into business with a partner (romantic or otherwise) inevitably leads to a clash of values, ideals, and vision at one point or another, testing friendships, relationships, and even the business itself if things get too intense. I should know. I have gone into business with friends only to have both the business and friendship explode in fiery, impassioned theatrics shortly thereafter. Turns out we weren’t as like-minded as we thought. And as you might imagine, this can be especially precarious when doing so with a loved one or someone you are in a relationship with, so why jeopardize it over business?

For me, there was no other choice. When Meghan and I, romantically involved for nearly six years at the time, decided to launch Conscious Lifestyle magazine in early 2013, we came together under a shared vision of something great-something we believed would change the world. And for me, vision is everything. I am fiercely independent (although that’s softening a bit as I grow older and wiser), so to work closely with me, someone must share my vision. And Meghan did-and not in a patronizing, rah-rah cheerleader way as so often can be the case in a relationship, but in a mature, inspired way that could actually work not just in theory but in the muddy trenches of a self-funded startup project of passion. Anybody not totally committed-not fueled by a deep-seated desire to do something great and bigger than themselves-would get chewed up and spit out quickly-myself included-if they didn’t truly believe in the cause. Heart, soul, stamina, unavoidable growth, forays far outside our comfort zones, and a fair amount of risk and investment of personal funds would be required for this venture. Not for the faint-hearted.

To be honest, we jumped in and invested in the spur of the moment, riding a wave of excitement, passion, and desire, not really knowing what we were getting ourselves into.

As always with a new business, it’s at least two to four times more work than anticipated, and everything looks very different now from what we had initially envisioned. There have been fights and emotional outbursts, disagreements, and divergence of vision, along with the feeling of not being heard, inherent in the ever-shifting dynamics of any relationship. But these things, so challenging and frustrating in the moment, can be our greatest teachers (in hindsight mostly, because in the moment things can get a bit, shall we say, visceral…). Although we have our moments, we are wise enough to understand that it is less about the specifics of who is right or wrong, but rather more about what we ultimately learn from the experience-what wisdom and growth ultimately bloom from the seeds of conflict.

Reading the above you might assume that it is indeed a rocky road going into business with a loved one, but in all honesty, the above scenarios make up less than 10 percent of our interactions. The vast majority of what we do is inspired, purpose-driven, and in total alignment… otherwise it could never work. In every sense we share a vision and that’s why it works, or at least that’s how it seems on the surface.

But what is a vision, really? First it is perhaps an image or a thought or an idea. But when developed and nurtured, it eventually becomes a desire to create something that does not yet exist in the world. And for us, Conscious Lifestyle magazine serves as an outlet for one of our highest desires-to have a positive impact in the world and to give people powerful, practical tools for rapidly transforming their lives. And in its most crystallized form, it stems from a desire to give people the tools to heal themselves, to expand and grow, because in order to change the world, we must first embody that change — as within, so without.

And it is that desire, I realize as I sit here writing this, that gives us the wherewithal, inspiration, and drive to transcend whatever challenges and quarrels might come up for us as we navigate the often often-shifting path of co-creating a business and a relationship simultaneously.

Because after all, desire is a primal energy — at least as I experience it.

It is fuel for the actualization of our dreams into physical reality. When fully expressed there is little that can get it in its way and not be transformed or transcended. And, and that includes our relationship.

On the surface, our magazine may seem like a way to have an impact and make a living doing something we love, but a a deeper look reveals that it is much more than that. As I reflect on what is really motivating us, I can’t escape the realization that it all comes back to desire. As entrepreneurs (and humans), we desire freedom. We desire meaning. We desire self-expression. We desire abundance. We desire connection. We desire community. The magazine gives us all of this in spades. And when viewed through that lens, it suddenly doesn’t seem like the naive, risky decision I’d initially made it out to be. It seems more like our intuition recognizing very clearly that this would be a way to more fully meet our desires. And when you dig a little deeper, what are desires but the cries of the soul for what we truly need to thrive? Through that lens, it suddenly seems like the best decision in the world, which is a gentle reminder that perhaps our desires are far wiser than we often realize.

[Editor’s note: As we were launching Best Self, I discovered Conscious Lifestyle. Noting its superb content and design in a similar space as our magazine, I set out to meet Justin, clear across the country, to learn what makes him tick. East meets West in the spirit of comrades, not competitors. ~Bill Miles]

consciouslifestylemag.com

You may also enjoy Interview: Reid Tracy | The Business of the Soul with Kristen Noel

The post Reflections On Birthing A Conscious Business appeared first on BEST SELF.

Creating and maintaining a business and marriage together requires appreciating what each other likes (and doesn’t like), as well as embracing disparate skill sets

—

It is true that the spiritual journey is an individual process. It’s true that the masculine and feminine unite within you, and that the merging of the river and ocean happens internally. However, the most powerful instrument for realizing this internal union is relationships. The greatest challenge for the human being at this current stage of evolution is to learn how to relate in a peaceful and loving way. This should be your main spiritual practice.

~ Sri Prem Baba

When I spoke with Kevin Gianni about the humble beginnings of blending love and business with his wife Annmarie, he said it all really crystalized for them in the RV. They began working together within nine months of meeting 10 years ago, and shortly after that they created Renegade Health — www.RenegadeHealth.com — an online portal for natural health topics featuring daily inspiration, health tips, and multiple weekly articles and videos, including The Renegade Health Show. “We spent two and a half years driving around the United States and Canada in a big, old RV — appropriately named The Kale Whale. It was the American Dream with a healthy spin. Our mission was to get out into the community to find out what was really working for people and what wasn’t. We learned a lot and spoke to thousands of people in over 50 cities and towns in both countries.”

In those RV parks – filled to the brim with couples of older generations — they came to understand a few of the key foundations of conscious and mindful relating.

There’s an unspoken rule out there that the men drive the RVs – actually, they don’t even let the women behind the wheel.

And when it comes to parking, oh boy, all hell breaks loose. The woman who has never driven a rig this big and cumbersome is still somehow supposed to guide her man as he backs up into the spot. She’s doing what she thinks makes sense and he is yelling at her that she has no idea what she’s doing. Surely you’ve witnessed this phenomenon or maybe even played a part in it.

But after day one of that fiasco, Kevin and Annmarie decided to do it differently. Kevin taught Annmarie to drive the RV so she would have a visceral relationship to it, and since he already did, he could easily support her parking. When they pulled into the RV park that evening, a crowd formed around Kevin, floored to see the role reversals while telling him he was crazy and basically betting against Annmarie being able to back it up into the spot, even with his direction…and she nailed it!

Learning the importance of communication — truly the cornerstone of mindful relating — along with valuing each other’s strengths and weaknesses, set the stage for the lifestyle they consciously created. As they moved forward with Renegade Health and then the launch in 2009 of Annmarie Gianni Skin Care — www.AnnmarieGianni.com — her line of products emphasizing  a clean skin-care experience using natural, organic and wildcrafted ingredients, they realized they couldn’t push each other to do things that they don’t want to do.

In a revolutionary way, they began defining their roles by what they actually like to do. Weaving this simple and effective distinction into their team-building philosophy as well, they now employ 12 people who only do what they like to do, radically reducing reluctance and resentment.

Kevin and Annmarie’s collaborative efforts have expanded even further now that they have children, and all the business lessons they learned along the way — including negotiating and delegating — have prepared them for parenting.

“Nothing brings you into the immediacy of the present moment more than kids.”

So now — while balancing business, babies, and marriage — carving out space and time for self-resourcing when life is so enmeshed is more elusive than ever. Kevin says he’s learned to appreciate time where he can find it, most notably his 22-minute walk each way between home and the office, a plane flight, running, and cooking. He says he still has to remind Annmarie to take time for herself. She’s getting much better at flexing that muscle and leaving the mom gene at home for a while.

Time apart is a crucial ingredient in their recipe. Kevin heads out each day to the office where he can work within the confines of a specified space and time, while Annmarie stays home. Even in the RV they worked in “different rooms.”

What’s their biggest source of stress? Last-minute decisions. Kevin is spontaneous and can hop on a plane at a moment’s notice. Annmarie likes to see things scheduled on a calendar. Kevin’s recent embrace of planning — they just mapped out the whole year for the first time ever — has him experiencing it as a blessing instead of an annoyance. And, he still feels free.

When I asked Kevin how they handle conflict, he said that even since the RV days they employ a secret weapon about 70 percent of the time that has served them well over the years. If they’re in an argument, one of them says, “Hey, can we reset the day?” and then they instantly allow the argument to end. He said that afterward they’re often hard pressed to remember what they were fighting about to begin with. “Can you believe the power that a fake reset button has?!”

In the midst of pulling back from the daily operations of Renegade Health in order to fully support and continue growing Annmarie Gianni Skin Care – not to mention promotion of his next book Kale and Coffee: A Renegade’s Guide to Health, Happiness, and Longevity being released by Hay House this summer — I asked him to reflect on relationship as spiritual practice.

He says for him it’s all about humility. “The more humble I can be, the more forgiving, the more empathy I can bring to listening, this is my practice.”

And perhaps it’s the practice of us all. When we embody mindfulness from this place, we are free to relate to others in a peaceful and loving way.

In my own personal life experience, as well as in my work with my coaching clients, the emphasis is on conscious communication, which begins with self-awareness as the portal for compassionate connection. True intimacy with another is found only by immersion in self-love first. For so many of us this goes against everything we’ve been taught, thinking that love comes from the outside in. But I am here to tell you that love is an inside job. Self-love is the number-one key to unlocking your limitless possibilities. So before you invite another soul in, fall in love with yourself first.

mindfulness… is a request

a poem by nancy levin

mindfulness

is a request

to retire auto-pilot

to invite inquiry around

what’s truly alive

inside in each moment

allowing attention to

swell and land

igniting authentic movement

sometimes

i still find it

so confronting to listen

closely for my desire

as it rises

still so easy for it

to be blocked out by

what someone else needs

we who are used to

abandoning ourselves

for the sake of another

or avoiding feeling

by any sort of

sublimation

it takes longer to listen

to the voice reminding us

that it’s only when we finally

honor all parts of ourselves

with permission to attend to

our fullness

that we will be available

for mindful union

i know we all want

to be heard seen felt met

yet in conflict

may we remember

that staying in connection

is more important

than being right

sometimes

i believe

loving in disconnection

is truly the most sacred practice

and all the time

i am certain

that self-love

is at the root

nourishing my heart

to meet yours

You may also enjoy Interview: Nancy Levin | #Worthy with Kristen Noel

The post Business and Marriage | The Mindful Relating of Kevin and Annmarie Gianni appeared first on BEST SELF.

Three artistically driven individuals share the creative passion which fuels their soul

—

When I say artist I mean the one who is building things — some with a brush – some with a shovel – some choose a pen.

~ Jackson Pollock

When we connect to our passion – our god-given talents and gifts — there’s no denying its energy – it is palpable. You know when you are in it and you know when you are in the presence of it. It emerges in endless forms – via a paintbrush or through prose, a rock sculpture or a collage. Creativity is an energy flow, a mindful connection to an inner voice that desires to be heard. When we tap into the very things that make our souls sing, the world becomes a more beautiful place.

It’s everywhere – my friend Renaud has made an art form out of gardening. He simply cannot help it, it is a form of active meditation, a beautiful thing to witness. By transforming an unwieldy, untended property into an enchanted forest, he demonstrates how creativity is magical stardust. I didn’t have to look far to gather the three creative alchemists featured in this piece; each has captivated me in their own way (and I’m certain I am not the only one).

When I asked Damien Delisio, Lori Anne McMahon, and Lucia Reale-Vogt to describe their “creative zone” in one word, it wasn’t surprising how synchronistic their responses were: Lori – Blissful, Damien – Peaceful, Lucia – Joy. Clearly they each connect to something transformative via their creations, a conduit to their higher selves.

Damien DeLisio

Skilled builder by trade, rock sculptor by calling. Damien DeLisio grew up in the mountains surrounded by streams and rocks, always curiously attracted to them. With a dog that needed regular walking and a bit of an unsettled broken heart, he found the nearby stream soothed his anxiety and awoke a dormant playfulness. It became a ritual. Each day he found himself creating, challenging himself to balance the most unexpected shaped and sized stones. “Balancing these stones was helping me to find a balance within myself.” He began photographing them and writing poems to accompany them — he also grew possessive of them. When a sculpture was knocked down, he felt angry. It wasn’t until he came upon friends one afternoon streamside, who asked him to demonstrate how he did it – how he found the balancing sweet spot — that he realized two profound things. First, there was no ownership in nature, and second, in the moment of grace when he struck the magical balance, he literally experienced a physical sensation throughout his being. His friend, bearing witness to this experience, agreed, stating, “I call that a spiritual orgasm.” There amidst a pile of rocks, Damien, a modern-day Renaissance man, aligns himself, feels a deep spiritual connection, and partners with nature to create art.

Tap image to view gallery:

Lori Anne McMahon

Impulsive and whimsical, Lore Anne McMahon is a visual storyteller and a wanderer. Most recently captivated by the epic landscapes of Ireland, she moved with her family to the Irish countryside – it is there her prolific creativity rolls like the green hillsides. Life is a doodle in motion for her, captured in her ever-present notebook – she combines mediums and dreamlike images, bringing them to life with childlike enthusiasm. “Stories are woven in my work to visually speak ideas.” After years of successful work building brands and businesses for others, she was driven to open her own art and design studio. Daydreaming out of the window of her first art studio at the cherry trees, she was inspired to name her business Cherry Pie Studio. Her fanciful designs appear on funky items in various gift shops. Art is what she does. It is what she has always done. The venue may change, the modality may shift, but the spirit of creativity pulses throughout her very being. She makes magic from a snapshot – because this is jut how she sees life. “My mind, body, and soul feel connected and dreamlike when I am working visually.” And luckily, we are along for the ride, to indulge our visual senses.

Tap image to view gallery:

Lucia Reale-Vogt

Textile design by day, crafting by life. Lucia Reale-Vogt is commonly referred to as the “Martha Stewart of Woodstock,” and while that comparison bears gravitas, Lucia and her creative gifts, quite frankly, stand in a league of their own. Immensely talented, she creates visual beauty from literally everything she touches (I’m talking bricks, rocks, and old discarded chairs) and somehow turns each project into an art form. Married to photographer Franco Vogt, theirs is a life of creative collaboration in action. I would venture to even say her crafting table is her church – a place where she connects to her deepest, most creative, and beautiful self. It is where she finds HAPPY. “Creativity for me is a way of life.” It is no surprise that she has recently (after much nudging from supporters) rolled out a new website and business – I create. Just check it out and you will instantly see what I mean. She simply exudes creative inspiration. Oh – and if I didn’t mention this before, her heart is the size of Texas, an unstoppable combination.

Tap image to view gallery:

Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.

~ Thomas Merton

 

You may also enjoy reading A Stella Was Born | Illustrator Charles Benton by Kristen Noel

The post Blissful, Peaceful, Joy | 3 Stories of Creative Passion appeared first on BEST SELF.

Designer-turned-photographer Steve Snider explores the urban media of layered and distressed walls

—

As a designer I have always viewed the world in terms of graphic compositions. I can’t prevent my mind from framing whatever I see: shapes, colors, patterns, textures, content, and how they juxtapose. My eye seeks out the beauty hidden in the ordinary things that surround us every day. Wabi-sabi, the quintessential Japanese aesthetic, is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete, things modest and humble, things unconventional. This is most true for me in the torn and tattered billboards, which seem indigenous to cities around the world. I have always been drawn to their aged and weathered surfaces.

I began photographing walls many years ago, mostly on trips when I would have a camera with me. But at home I never liked lugging the camera around, so even though I would see many walls I loved, I never went back to shoot them. And then a couple of years ago something miraculous happened: the iPhone. Suddenly this little device I could carry in my pocket allowed me the freedom to be spontaneous; I could stop anywhere, get as many shots as I wanted and see them instantly! And then a second thing happened: Instagram, an app that is a platform for sharing photographs. I began posting images at [my handle] “stevesnidernyc” and calling them #todayswall. I found myself anxious to leave my desk at lunchtime and anticipating time out of the office to wander around looking for subject matter. This became my new passion, something that had always been within me, and as the response on Instagram began to grow, I realized I wanted to devote myself to it full time. So I retired from the world of publishing to pursue a dream I never even realized I had.

Hunting and discovering great walls is my new job. When I’m taking photographs, I find myself lost in the moment – and when I look through them, I enter a place I can only describe as “the zone.” I love discovering the pleasing composition in the chaos and I like to think that the way I crop my images is what sets my work apart from that of similar photographers. I’ve been lucky in my career of designing book jackets to have done my share of bestsellers and iconic covers. I’m proud of my accomplishments. And I’m grateful to have worked with many famous and brilliant writers, photographers, and illustrators, but I always wondered in the back of my mind if I was doing important work. With my wall art, I somehow feel I am. I’m making a record of our times. Though many people who see it don’t “get it,” or don’t like it, that’s OK with me, because I feel art should be controversial. And ultimately I’m creating it for myself. It fulfills me, and at 71 that’s a good thing to feel.

Follow Steve’s work on Instagram http://instagram.com/stevesnidernyc

You may also enjoy Photographer 2 Photographer: Michael Tischler by Bill Miles

The post The Wall | Exploring Urban Media Through Photography appeared first on BEST SELF.

Cindy Joseph, makeup artist-turned-supermodel at age 50, spearheads a rapidly growing pro-age movement

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Mirror, Mirror on the wall. Cindy Joseph has spent the majority of her professional life both behind and in front of the camera, as a make-up artist and now as a model, speaker and CEO & creator of BOOM — the 1st PRO-Age cosmetic line. Let’s be clear, if you look like Cindy — it’s easy to embrace aging. That said, her sparkly, refreshing and candid spirit will captivate you, luring you right on into her pro-age revolution — provoking us all to take stock of our own attitudes. She has lent her voice to shining the spotlight on our collective mindset with regards to the negative anti-aging messages we live amidst. As champion and cheerleader, she encourages us to shift our perception and preconceived notions regarding the subject — to embrace the “NOW” of our lives. Who gets to decide when we are over the hill? And when did we stop celebrating birthdays with the same fervor we did as children? Prodding us to recreate a new legacy for our children to navigate through all the stages of their lives and flip the graphs on their side…

She simply leaves us with the reminder that, “Aging is a just another word for living.”

Watch Cindy’s video message below created specifically for BEST SELF. I guarantee you won’t be able to resist. Then check our her cosmetic line – BOOM by Cindy Joseph

You may also enjoy Interview: Dr. Christiane Northrup & Kate Northrup | The New Conversation with Kristen Noel

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Taking down fear requires persistent attention — but yields unimaginable rewards

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Does fear ever leave us alone?  Do we ever outgrow it? Does it ever tire of dancing on our souls? Not mine. Mine is f@!#ing relentless.

Every move I make, path I decide to venture down, every change, decision or choice… Boom! There it is — mocking me — calling me out. Sliding up next to me and wrapping its arm around me like the creepy uncle we avoid at a family reunion.

Do you recognize this fear that I am speaking of? As soon as you get crazy inspired to do something big in life, something that excites you, something that calls to you and makes your heart flutter… it shows up. Dark. Powerful. Familiar. Heavy. Poking at every weak spot in your psyche. And so damn real, it feels like it’s in the room with you sitting right on your lap, weighing you down.

Why should I get to have, be or do anything that I want? Do I really deserve all of this? Who do I think I am?

As soon as I contemplate taking a “leap of faith” and changing the direction of my life, endless mind-chatter ignites.  It leaps boldly into the fear zone of my consciousness.

In the spirit of transparency, let me state that I crave safety. My soul aches for a life-is-good, all-is-well, kumbaya feeling. Yet, this platform of security I yearn for has eluded me. It is always just out of reach — minus the tiny pockets of calm. I look up and ask the Universe, is the joke over yet? Enough with the character building!

Flashback… I was living my life, raising two kids, working at one “job” to develop another — my coaching career. I fluctuated between inspired and numb on a daily basis. Nothing was dreadfully wrong and yet nothing felt ecstatically right. Ever felt comfortably numb?

The one constant was my daily prayer. During meditation I prayed that my best and highest path would show up in my life.  I know I am on this planet for a purpose. I pray to remind myself of this too. I believe in all things fun. But more than that, I want to live a life that contributes to others, to the world.

A few years ago the course of my life/career was thrown off track by a hurricane-force financial disaster. This is not my beautiful life. This is not my beautiful car. Letting the days go by. (All 80’s peeps know what I am talking about…) But I digress…

My emotional resume: Scared. Unsure. Single Mom of a tween and a teen. Floating at the mercy of the tide.

Guess who is knocking on the door? Creepy Uncle Fear! Waving a hand-written invite to my personalized pity party, we sit down together for a deep, tête-a-tête about what a failure I am. No negative detail goes unaddressed. Every possible thing that ever went wrong is under the spotlight. Fear has invited its best friends: judgment, insecurity, unworthiness…all working in tandem to see how small I can feel. Fear pointed out to me, This “living your dreams” bullshit is just that. It ain’t gonna happen. Look how it all worked out for you, Jenna. Get real and get back in your cubical! I got small and allowed fear to take up residency.

I spent years being “practical.” I worked. I paid my bills, barely. I got through each day. I told myself that being responsible was the new inspired. Living ‘on purpose’ was a phrase that made me cringe each time I glanced at Oprah’s magazine covers. It was a message I taught my coaching clients, but one that I was not practicing myself. I was living life as a full-blown hypocrite. I taught others to go for it! Live their dreams!  Burn the boat!  Squeeze every bit of juice out of life!  I believed it was available to them.

What was I doing wrong? What about me?

I whipped up a great story around why I was living as a sell-out. I made excuses, lived in denial and did everything necessary to get through each day doing a job for which I felt no passion and had no connection. What did I get then, you ask? A paycheck. The every-two-weeks paycheck. Stable. Steady. Safe. I operated from a place of fear.

My soul was dying a slow death, all in the name of safety.

During this period I stayed connected to my yoga and meditation practice. In that space, my world of endless possibilities still existed. It is where I connected to my higher self. In that space I still knew my life had purpose. When I had the courage to leap, even an inch forward, the stars aligned for the purpose of bringing my life to a higher state. People and opportunities entered my life with synchronistic beauty.

And Jenna lived happily ever after…

Oh snap. Wouldn’t a fairytale ending be sweet? “No bueno!” yelled Uncle Fear. Fear jumped right on in and called forth all sorts of new anxieties to stop me in my tracks, whispering things about losing paychecks, losing security, being ungrateful, acting irresponsibly and on and on it went. I was standing on the cliff, knowing it was time to jump. Anyone who has ever considered life a ‘personal growth’ journey knows that these are the big moments. When opportunity arrives, we do one of two things — take it or don’t. It was jump or settle. (Can you feel my heart breaking as I type that dirty word…’settle’?). Could I settle into ‘settle’? — it was a slow death in my mind.

I made a choice and I jumped. Today is a Brave New World because I took the leap.

Looking back I can tell you this, I have no regrets. I did what I did. I took care of my family. I built amazing relationships. I learned new professional skills. I gained business knowledge that will serve me well going forward. Friends who had given me professional opportunity, revealed themselves as family when they acknowledged that my happiness was more important than the “bottom line” of their business. Everything had served a purpose. It all prepared me for my life’s exciting next leap!

After deciding to go for it, my fear watched me from the cliff’s edge and I could hear his loud words, “You’re an idiot!  This is such a stupid move! So irresponsible!” Now, as I move forward, as I engage, as I re-connect with the world that I know and love, a world where everything is possible and anything can be fun, these self-defeating theories fade into the distance, losing their grip upon me. Mind you, my creepy uncle has not gone completely — he can return, uninvitingly knocking at the door, but he no longer lives with me.

Behind the door that opened for me, there are 10,000 of the most amazing, generous and successful people I have ever known in my new Isagenix family! I am living a beautiful, fun, fulfilling life.  I love my life and I love sharing what I do — helping others take their leap toward their best life.

A leap of faith is exactly that. No one can leap for us. No one can push us. No one can decide for us if it’s the right leap for us. Deep down you know.

Deciding and committing and leaping is how we change our lives.

Deciding and committing and leaping is how we change the world.

Deciding and committing and leaping is the hardest damn thing, yet makes life worth living.

It’s now. Today. We are here for such a short amount of time and no one gets a guarantee of when the party’s over. There is no such thing as failure. There are choices that don’t work out and lead us to different choices. We are a glorious work-in-progress. My point is this… go for it! Tell your creepy uncle to take a long walk off of a short pier. Surround yourself with people who are leaping! When opportunity knocks… answer! Hold a space in your life for things to work out beautifully. Consider joy an option!

The next time you have to decide whether to jump with faith, think of this… and know that I am pushing you with love!

Come to the edge, he said.  They said, we are afraid. Come to the edge, he said. They came.  He pushed them…and they flew.  

~ Guillaume Apollinaire 

You may also enjoy reading Leap Of Faith by Eileen Haber

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Leading with your values allows locally owned, independent businesses to connect with their customers to drive economic health and prosperity

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Everyone has values!

If we think our politics are divided, so are our purchasing behaviors.

A substantial amount of research depicts customers buying motivations, globally and especially here in the US.

The top-line numbers go something like this: 60% are all about the discount. The 60-percenters want cheap! They don’t care about service or a nice buying experience, nor do they care about product quality. If it breaks next month that’s OK; they will throw it away and buy another — remember, it was cheap. These are your Walmart and Amazon shoppers.

If you are reading this particular publication, I am guessing you don’t resonate with the previous paragraph. Don’t despair.

The other 40% shop based on their values.

These are the folks driving the localism and triple bottom line (equal emphasis on people, planet and prosperity) business movements. They will pay extra for fresh local tasty food (clearly not McDonald’s). This why a couple with young children will cancel their cable TV to be able to afford to buy locally produced yogurt for their kids and their health. These 40-percenters are willing to pay a premium for those items that inspire their values. Now let’s be clear, everybody likes a good deal! Yet, there is a huge difference between someone who buys Patagonia organic cotton T-shirts on sale, and someone who goes to the Dollar store to get 3 T-shirts for $5.

My friend Raphael Bemporad, co-founder of the branding agency BBMG, has conducted numerous studies on buying behavior. Their research suggests that people follow a fairly consistent path in their conscious purchasing trends. They call it In Me, On Me, Around Me. People generally first start making enlightened health-based choices, eating more organic foods, for example (In Me). When they see the value which that brings to their lives, the next step for them is usually On Me choices such as shampoo, makeup, etc. Finally, the folks that make it to the Around Me stage may choose to drive a Prius, install solar panels on their house and so on.

This matters to you, whether you are a shopper or a seller.

Locally owned, independent businesses cannot compete on price. With their limited sales volumes, low margins equate to death. This is why many communities have completely lost their locally owned, independent business base. These communities no longer have a distinct identity, they no longer have good jobs and they no longer produce middle class wealth. The movie “The High Cost of Low Prices” is right on.

If you are a buyer, yes, enjoy a good deal when it comes your way.

Remember, however, that if you value a vibrant community with diversity of choice that include quality products, services and experiences, that economic health is not free.

Let’s talk values.

You may not have a name for it, but just about everyone on the planet is in touch with the idea or feeling that we are in some sort of global, or universal transition, I cannot name an industry, institution or organization of any kind that is not feeling the effects.

In my opinion, the frequently reported decline in American exceptionalism, noted across many statistical lists including social mobility, income inequality, and healthcare cost versus benefits, can be traced to one word — community. We have become so focused on our fear of not getting what “we” need and want, and I mean this on the whole spectrum of Maslow’s hierarchy, that “we” can’t get past ourselves to engage in those positive outcomes that can only result from collaboration with others. In a word, community.

The business community I am describing has a minor identity crisis since we, as a collective group, can’t seem to settle on the best adjectives to describe us: Socially responsible business, green business, social enterprise, conscious capitalism, triple bottom line, and localist are all in use. The adjectives may vary, but these businesses bring real substance to solving local and global challenges.

As a business owner, it’s time to get in touch with your own deepest-held values.

With over 7 billion people on the planet (soon to be 9 billion) and with 28 million businesses in the United States, how do we get noticed? Chances are, no matter how unique you are (and I believe you are), there are many other folks who do what you do.

In the 1960’s, Mad Men ruled business communications and informed our culture through their mass communications (can you say television). The Norm for every male (sorry ladies, you have always mattered, but not in this example) was a starched, plain white shirt. The idea was to be offensive to no one and acceptable to everyone. The problem became apparent after three or four decades of workers feigned vanilla on the outside, while inside, they were peanut-bubblegum-coffee swirl. The stress of conformity was, and still is, literally killing us.

Successful businesses that are smaller in scale cannot be all things to all people.

Find your like-minded tribe of values-aligned customers. Focus on their needs and ignore the rest.

In all of this insanity who gets noticed? First and foremost it is those who have the courage and confidence to be their true authentic self. I am not suggesting this is easy. It it were, everyone would be doing it. Most of us have some sort of old programing that brings out our fear more than our true self. People (read customers) are drawn to those who fully put themselves out there. Once you work through your fear, I promise you will feel more joy and happiness, more community and yes, more prosperity.

Authenticity, at its core, is about transparency. This puts fear deep into the heart of your big-business competitors.

You have heard of green washing (companies that advertise how “green” they are) and now local washing, like large national retail chains that have each store carrying a small number of local products, so they can advertise their “commitment” to the local community. Big companies want and need to operate in the shadows to continue to make the big profits they do. They don’t want the public to know what is in their concoctions. They don’t want the manner in which they treat their employees to air on the evening news. They don’t want their carbon footprint discussed on talk shows. I know it’s scary, but as a local business, you can be transparent and your community will appreciate you for it.

So, in addition to doing the hard work of getting in touch with your own values, it’s time to understand on a deep level what your community values. When you can closely align your values with theirs, everybody wins. What are their values? Ask them! In-person inquiries or online surveys are easy and free; or, perhaps you can hold a contest to see which cause you should support. The possibilities are endless, as are the virtues of connecting. I can say without hesitation that the big companies I am forced to do business with (think cable and energy monopolies) have long-ago forgone regarding me as a human being in favor of seeing me as a vendor ID number.

Remembering that your customers are human beings is an easy, but vital step in creating a community, or tribe, that demonstrates mutual respect and caring as part of its unofficial mission.

Another way to communicate your values is with third party certifications. It can be confusing, as there are over 400 product certifications. I am fairly certain most people are aware of the labels USDA Certified Organic, Certified Fair Trade, or countless others. The challenge is that some certifications are quite relevant and stringent, while others are little more than marketing hyperbole.

Wouldn’t it be great if a simpler system existed? Wouldn’t it be great if we could confidently buy from good companies, not just companies with good marketing? We can!

Enter the B Corporation, a designation that shows the world a company’s equal commitment to social responsibility and profit. Globally, there is a community of over 1000 Certified B Corporations, and that number continues to grow. Some famous brands include Patagonia, Seventh Generation and Ben & Jerry’s, but my micro-company, On Belay Business Advisors Inc., is certified too; here is the link to my actual score.

Why settle for a product when you can get the whole company?

In the case of certified B Corps, all aspects of the company are evaluated…

Their products or service, their governance, their treatment of employees, their relationship with their community, and their impact on the environment.

Certification involves rising standards (which keep getting more demanding), and independent audits require you to prove that you walk your talk — that you are what you say you are. Being certified is a great way to communicate your values to customers and to have a far more meaningful conversation, which leads to a deeper relationship, which leads to happier customers and a more prosperous business.

It is my hope you are now feeling better about your own values and how important they are to the successful ROI of your business. And remember, engaging your customer is easier and more effective if you are part of a community of like-minded businesses. Our cultural image of John Wayne alone on Main Street, taking on the world by himself, may be beginning to fade in favor of effective collaborations.

A key take-away for all of us: Every time you spend money, you are voting for the kind of world you want. Vote wisely, with your deepest-held values in mind.

You may also enjoy reading True Abundance: One Man’s Search for (Mindful Money) Meaning by Jim Brown

The post The ROI (Return on Investment) of Your Values appeared first on BEST SELF.