Be Inspired

Reflecting back: 8:00am, December 10, 2004

I had been pushing for three hours. My husband had gone off to do laundry - his nerves were shot from the labor. I was sitting in the birthing tub in Clara's nursery, my head hanging over the side and I was crying.

"I can't do this. It's too much. It hurts. I've been pushing too long. What if something is wrong? Why won't she come out? What's wrong with me?" I was tired, scared and in pain and I was telling my midwife through tears all the reasons why I wasn't up to the task.

She listened and then, she said what I needed to hear.

She lovingly picked up my chin and looked me straight in the eye. Full of knowing and strength and steely feminine power she said exactly what I needed to hear:

"This is not the most difficult thing you will do for your daughter - not by a long shot. You can do this."

Three hours into the labor, she woke me up. Reminded me of who I am. I promised her another thirty minutes of all I had to give. I got out of...

When we are fully ourselves, there is no competition.

I went to business school and I know all about competition and differentiation... blah, blah, blah.

All of that stuff leads people to believe that you "have to" do things a certain way to succeed.  I simply don't agree. Competition is a convenient lie that stokes the destructive fire of scarcity and not-enoughness. It is not true. 

Competition only exists if you aren't being who you are meant to be.

When our purpose, our gifts and talents, our true desires, and our actions are all in alignment - when we've burned off all the crap about who we "should" be or what we "can't" do or what we "have to" believe, the diamond of who we are shines brightly and we can't help but meet with our vision of success.

Our family, our circumstances, everything - everything conspires to help us express our purpose in exactly the way we are meant to express it.  I believe we all make agreements with the Universe before we are born....

You are brilliant.

I mean, amazing.  There are things that you do that no one else can do like you do (YOU know what they are).  No matter how you feel about it, it's true.

You tuck your brilliance away for a variety of reasons.

So you don't make other people feel bad about themselves. Or, so people will like you and won't leave you. Or, to be modest - a good girl.  Or whatever your reason is. At it's core, when we don't own our value - it's an omission of the truth.

A lie we tell ourselves, that erodes our sense of worth.

It's so much easier to trot out the places we are seemingly broken and the countless ways we fall down or fail - to apologize endlessly for being human, to use it as an excuse to forget how utterly and completely magical and powerful we really, truly are.

I remember distinctly the first time I did it. 

I had entered a science fair in second grade and I did a completely bad-ass 3-D research project on great white sharks.  It was awesome (I...

Today, I am a woman who invests.

This is an evolution, a journey for me. And it is far richer and goes much deeper than just money in an investment account (though that's pretty exciting to me, too).

It was hard for me to conceptualize investing actual dollars until I learned how to invest in other key ways.

I had to learn how to stop simply spending and learn how to start investing - in all areas of my life.

Spending vs. Investing

Spending money {time, energy, love... anything, really} is recognized by its connection to a feeling of lack and scarcity. It has nothing to do with what's actually available - it feels like a drain (or like nothing at all). Often unconscious and steeped in the energy of *should*, spending takes away from the balance of our lives and adds nothing. Not because it couldn't, but because we cannot receive the gifts of our spending when we are out in the future or lost in the past.

vs.

Investing money {time, energy, love... again, anything} is recognized by...