Starting the Journey Over

In life we are going to have times that are painful and times that break us.  We are sometimes powerless to defend ourselves from the attacks that come.  We are faced with a decision at this point. How do we fight these attacks once they have happened? There are several ways we can fight.  We can fight silently.  Sometimes we do not need to speak our opposition to be heard.  Sometimes we need to let others fight for us.  We are given the right people in life at the right times.  Their words may be better received than our own.  Sometimes prayer is the only answer. No matter which route is right for the place you are at in life you also have a choice to rise above.  You can take the high road.  Why throw stones and act petty.  Take that road less traveled and don't take the bait.  When life or the people in it attack, you get to choose how you react.  Let's be honest though, our first reaction sometimes is not the one w...

There's a loaded statement.  Taking risks is scary, and it means having to step outside of your comfort zone.  Do you want to live a life where you know you gave it your all, or do you want to look back at your life and wonder what could have been?  Do you want to take charge and take the risk or go with the flow, waiting for life to happen to you? I say, why wait?  Jump in and take the risk!  If you are too afraid of failure to take the risk,  you have already failed.  And many times, you will fail before you succeed.  It's what you do with that failure that matters. Don't stay where it's comfortable, push yourself to do better and be better!  Great things happen when we allow ourselves to get a little uncomfortable in pursuit of our dreams.  Go take the risk and make those dreams a reality!

We grew up being taught to believe in fairy tales.  Most little girls wanted to be that princess in the beautiful dress with her Prince Charming.  But, what if fairy tales don't look the way we thought they should. I got married young and thought it was going to be the fairy tale life I had dreamt of.  Naive is what I was.  When your heart gets broken again and again by the relationship with the person who is supposed to be your partner, you completely lose yourself.  When you think it's going to be different this time, but then you find yourself crying yourself to sleep almost every night because nothing is different.  You still don't matter.  I felt like was screaming at the top of my lungs to just be seen, but I may as well have been invisible.  This was both of our fault.  I want to make sure that everyone knows it takes two to make a relationship fail.  I had this picture of what life was going to be, and it was nowhere near what ...

Growing up I had this picture of what success was supposed to look like.  It looked perfect, and I wanted that perfection.  Boy was I wrong.  I strived to have perfection in all I did.  I thought success meant being perfect.  Through a series of unfortunate events when I was in High School, I learned that perfect I was not.  I thought this meant that I was not successful and could not fully achieve success. I saw myself through tinted glasses.  I allowed the actions of others to cloud my view.  Perfect was not attainable.  It was never attainable.  That realization hurt me for a long time, but now I find it freeing.  I am flawed.  I am imperfect.  I am real.  And, I am successful.  I am also a failure.  That failure is what spurs me on to reach higher and work harder. I would rather be imperfect and fail than have a facade of perfection.  I have learned that what I used to think was success and was pe...

Have you ever sat there thinking that did not go well at all?  Your words failed you.  They failed to say what you meant, what you felt, what you thought.  Everything came out all wrong and jumbled.  And there you sit feeling lost and broken wondering how it could go so wrong.  Nothing came out right. I sit here thinking back over so many conversations gone wrong in life.  How do we fix what was said after?  Sometimes jumbled words can cause pain and heartache even when the intent was never meant to do that.  We can completely miss the mark sometimes. It takes being completely open and raw to show your true intent.  Now is not the time to hold back.  If your words have failed you, you need your heart to take over.  It's also time for action.  You can't just sit back, hoping your intended meaning will shine through the mess you've inadvertently made.  Do what it takes for your true heart and meaning to be heard. Words...

On a recent adventure in life, I encountered many disappearing roads.  When coming to the top of the climb on many ascents of a mountain road, the road appeared to disappear.  I couldn't tell where I was going to go once I reached the top.  It felt uncomfortable and disconcerting not knowing what was coming next. Life is often like that.  We feel that the road we are on just disappears.  There is no map to follow to tell us which way we go next.  We may know what we want out of life, but every time we try to get there, we fall off track.  There is a little glimpse of the path we are supposed to take and only a glimpse.  The unknown can be very scary, but it can hold so many great surprises.  We always fear what we don't know.  It's funny in a way because so many times there was nothing to fear. The twists, turns and unknowns of life often hold a lot of promise.  Stay the course even when you can't see the next step in the journey....

Life is busy and chaotic and crazy.  It's not going to slow down.  It's not going to get easier.  It is however easy to get caught up and get pulled along like your stuck in the current of a river.  We can be swept away and miss what is right before us. I used to complain that my life was busy.  I felt like I never got a moment to breath, to catch up.  My life felt out of control.  I let my life get out of control, and I was missing everything going on around me.  I had completely lost sight of what was important.  I was missing the beauty in the every day moments. It seemed like I was waiting for life to happen all while missing life going on right around me.  I was missing the opportunities in front of me, missing the beauty in the simple moments of life, letting chaos rule.  The funny thing is I was missing the beauty in the chaos. Life is chaotic.  Life is beautiful.  There is and can be beauty in that chaos.  ...

How many times do we hear this?  But, it's not fair...  Unfortunately, many times life isn't fair.  Life can happen to us or our loved ones.  We feel powerless to change the course of the negative path we find ourselves on at times.  We feel almost swept up in the rapids unable to get our footing.  I have been watching life around me lately, watching those I love.  So many of the people I hold dear are caught in different storms of life.  Some of the storms are things that can't be controlled and some can be. Viewing the storms around me got me thinking about the storms in my own life.  What do I do to get through the storms?  Do I run and hide, pretending if I do nothing it will just go away or do I stand up and fight.  Looking back over my life there was a time I just hid and prayed the storms would just go away or get better.  Hiding never seemed to get me anywhere but more stuck in the storm.  Watching those around m...

Ever have one of those moments that grabs hold of you and almost knocks the the wind right out.  I had a wake up call of sizable proportions this morning.  It was the good kind of wake up call.  There have been many things on my mind of late that I got confirmation of this morning.  When you get singled out in a crowd by a stranger, it can have quite the affect on you.  My heart has known for quite awhile what I am supposed to be doing, but my head has been a bit slow to catch up. I have been filled with a lot of doubt on what I know.  There was a dream placed in my heart a long time ago that I have not been living out because I have thought I'm not good enough.  Even though I believe in myself in most areas of my life, there are a couple I have not been doing so good at.  This morning, I was told to go over the top. I have been holding back, but that is something I can no longer do.  I need to push myself outside of my comfort zone to...

I had broken and found myself at the bottom.  It was here that I did some real deep thinking.  After all, I wasn't going anywhere too quickly.  I learned a very valuable lesson down there.  If you view yourself as broken, broken you will remain.  Everyone around me treated me like I was broken, many of them treating me like something was wrong with me.  It was hard for people to understand because they hadn't walked in my shoes, they hadn't experienced the pain and frustration and disappointment I felt when I looked at my life. I began to see myself as broken, and that's when I hit the bottom.  I saw myself through everyone else's eyes.  The more pity I saw, the more broken I became.  I started to believe what so many were projecting onto me and didn't realize that's what I was doing.  Here's the thing, you're only as broken as you allow yourself to be. It took someone very dear to me telling me to knock it off for me to snap out of ...

I got to thinking today.  There are so many people around me starting anew in different ways in their lives.  Some are starting new careers, going through a divorce, starting a new relationship or going back to school.  These can all be challenging and wonderful at the same time. Let's be honest there are some days you want to roar like a lion, but all you can do is whisper.  Your whole body hurts from the emotional roller coaster that can come with starting over in life.  These are the days you can only tiptoe instead of taking a leap.  It can feel like the wind has been knocked out of you, and you struggle to have a clear thought.  I know these days all too well as do many. It is on these tough days that you must connect, even surround yourself with your army.  Your army is the group of people who will love you through thick and thin.  The people who love you at your ugliest, maybe even love you more.  We need to lean on others to ...

I used to be afraid of failure.  In fact, I was terrified to fail.  I thought that if I didn't succeed at everything I set out to do, it was horrible.  This fear of failure kept me from achieving a lot of things I wanted to because if I just didn't do it, I couldn't fail at it.  My view of failure has changed immensely over the last couple years of my life.  Failure is only failure if you don't pick yourself back up and learn from it.  The concept of failing forward has become one I am learning from. There are moments as a mother that I have epic fails.  Unfortunately there's no manual for this one.  Amazingly my kids still love me and barely notice my shortcomings.  I have done a superman over the handle bars on my mountain bike, followed by extreme bruising, but I got back on the bike and finished the ride. Life is filled with failures.  It's part of growing and becoming who you are supposed to be.  How else do we come to know...

So many times I have started and stopped again.  I never really believed that I could achieve the goals I had set for myself.  I doubted that I could really be that person.  To be honest, many of my goals were about how I wanted to appear.  It was about having a certain look, being seen a certain way by the people in my life.  My goals were shallow and superficial because I was so concerned with being that person.  It was all a part of being lost.  I couldn't achieve my goals because they weren't true, they weren't real. My goals now are about being myself and becoming the person that I want to be.  I am not concerned with how others see me anymore.  I am the person I am, and not everyone is going to like.  It's ok to be who I really am.  I am the happiest I have been in my life.  There is no more performance.  My whys have changed.  My why is to be myself and to keep bettering myself, to keep finding myself.  ...

It's time to be the person you always knew was inside.  Maybe you got lost for awhile, and it's now time to find yourself.  Maybe you haven't realized how much of yourself is missing or why, but you know life isn't right.  I had lost myself, totally and completely. I had taken on an identity that I thought I was supposed to be, which wasn't a bad thing.  I was being a mother, a volunteer, and employee, but I forgot to be myself at the same time.  I lost sight of so many of the things I loved to do, write, paint, immerse myself in a good book.  I searched so long for what was missing inside.  I couldn't put my finer on it, couldn't understand why I felt so empty.  I poured myself into everything I did, and kept trying one new thing after the next, trying to fill that void, which I know sounds cliched, but there it is.  I was spiraling out of control and hadn't the slightest clue it was happening.  I kept sinking further and further. ...

Staring over in life is wonderful, yet complicated and messy.  I promise to be real and raw through this journey.  Some days hurt and are extremely difficult.  We can't control everything that goes on around us, and life can throw some major curve balls our way.  It can get messy.  Some days you feel defeated and broken. So here's my promise to you.  I will not sugar coat anything.  I will be blunt.  I will be honest about the good, the bad and the sometimes oh so ugly.  Life is tough enough when we are honest about it.  I learned that trying to be something and someone you are not is exhausting.  Trying to live to be the person everyone else thinks you should be will leave you with nothing left to give to yourself and your loved ones. I promise to be real.  This journey of starting life over is exciting and scary.  I know I am working towards the life I want, and I am becoming the person I want to be.  I no longe...

Many of us lose ourselves in the journey of life.  When we start over, it is a chance find who we really are.  What drives you?  What are you passionate about?  We go through life blindly, numb and forget who we are.  We stop doing the things we love for one reason or another.  We start to identify as a husband, wife, grandparent or see ourselves as our job.  Whatever you have come to see yourself as doesn't have to be who you are. It's time to get to know yourself again.  Try new things.  Find a workout routine or plan that you actually enjoy.  This may mean trying several activities until you discover one you look forward to and crave.  Find a new hobby or pick up one that you haven't done in  a long time.  Truly get to know yourself.  Try new foods.  This is a chance to be that person you know you are inside. Make a list of things you want to do or experience!  It's time to grab the bull by the horns ...

With your list of resolutions now turned goals in hand, it's time to begin.  You want this year to be different, so let's make it different.  Grab a notebook or run to the store to get one.  A three ring binder works great as well for this next part.  The dreaming was fun, and now it's time to get to work to make those dreams your reality. First thing to do is to sort through and prioritize your list of goals.  It's also about evaluating the goals for your plan.  Make sure the timing is right.  Sometimes there may be something we want, but we need to be patient with our timing and be honest with ourselves about it.  Once you have prioritized, it's time to pick your starting point.  Starting with something small can be a great place to start.  Give yourself a success to start out.  Each success you have, helps you to have more.  It will help get you going and build your confidence. I chose to start with my nutrition and leve...

Everywhere you look or listen...New Year, New You.  While it is a great time to start over or start something new, don't make resolutions.  Resolutions fail.  Set yourself up for success, not failure.  What do I need to do instead of make resolutions you may ask.  Make a plan.  Many of us have made many resolutions in the wake of a New Year and lost traction very quickly.  Making a list of things we want to accomplish simply isn't enough. That list of resolutions while it isn't enough, can be your springboard for making your plan.  Let's be honest resolutions can be fun to make.  It's exciting to think of taking charge of your life and making it shiny and new.  That's why gyms get packed every January, and many weight loss businesses run huge specials.  People want to be the best version of themselves, want to be successful and feel good when you look in the mirror and in your mind. So, go ahead and make a list of things you wan...