[New Year, New You] Day 20: How to Take Up More Space
Life is either expanding and improving, or declining. There are no flat lines in life until we’re dead. As soon as things are flat and unchanged, they are beginning to decline and fall apart. Since the time you came into the world, you’ve been accumulating wisdom and experience. As your body grew, you gained strength and physical ability. It’s perfectly acceptable to assume that with new wisdom and experience life should improve–things should get better and you should become more competent.
A well-known and almost overused quote by Marianne Williamson comes to mind, though I’d like to take it a bit further than most do and offer an explanation for why this quote may be true:
“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us.”
-Marianne Williamson
How You Tied Yourself Down
When you were young, chances are good you acted without hesitation. You weren’t afraid to speak your mind, run out of the house without worrying about how you looked, and you would confidently declare your wildest dreams as certainties for your future. Then, under some of the unkind pressures of life, you may have started to question yourself a little more. You may have come to believe that you were too loud, too ugly, too messy, or too stupid, or have found some other disqualifying features with compromised your ability to think big and believe in yourself.
The more you started to doubt yourself, the more likely you would have been willing to compromise your personal integrity by deciding that someone else’s ideas or opinions were more important than yours, or that someone else knew more than you.
That’s when it started to go downhill.
As much as the blows of life can kick a girl down, the person MOST responsible for silencing you and making you smaller over the years, has been you! You doubted yourself, fell into agreement with some kind of idea that you weren’t _(insert whatever the heck you bought into here)__ enough and then began to act accordingly.
Confusion is the Problem, Not You
Out of confusion, we create problems. Then, having created problems, we feel like crap and look for ways to hold ourselves back. We begin to withdraw from life. We start to settle for “good enough” and “the way things are” and stop making goals or trying to reach for them. We agree that life can be less than we expect and accept it as that. We create illness, failures and other “reasons” to take ourselves out of the game.
And while it’s true we all cause harm and act in error out of our confusions, it is a far greater threat to life that we restrain ourselves and avoid acting and influencing life altogether. You are alive, so you’re meant to act, contribute and influence life to the best of your ability. You can be expected to fail and make mistakes in the process. (How could you not with all the pressures we’ve got pushing down upon you!) But failure is how you learn and improve. It’s a vital and valuable part of the game of life. If you let your mistakes hold you back, you’re making the biggest mistake of all.
In every area of your life, it is far better that you err on bumbling and fumbling about in failure through action, than that you withhold yourself and choke the flow of life with your silence and inaction. The faster you learn this lesson, the speedier your progress will be and the better life will go for us all!
Set Goals, Dream Big, Get Back in the Game
Life is in constant motion and the pressures appear to come in on us from all sides. As I explained in the accompanying podcast to this blog, it’s as if an overwhelming amount of inflowing information has got us stuck in a sort of paralyzed state, afraid to take up space and communicate. But all you have to do to get back in the game, to feel alive like you did when you were a child, is communicate–reach out, reach up, and make brave steps to speak your mind without needing to be liked or approved or accepted.
You can look to the past for information to understand how things have lead to where you are now, but don’t keep so much attention tied on past failures that you forget each moment is a brand, new chance to start again–to clear the slate and step up to meet the bigger, brighter, bolder, better part of you.
“With no clear picture of how you wish your life to be, how on earth are you going to live it? What is your Primary Aim? Where is the script to make your dreams come true? What is the first step to take and how do you measure your progress? How far have you gone and how close are you to getting to your goals?”
-Michael Gerber
You are the picture-taker, dream-maker and spiritual firecracker for your life, and you really are the one steering your ship. Without clear goals, dreams, objectives and a vision for your future, you’ll feel much more like a cog in the wheel–stuck in a rut and going through the motions, rather than feeling actively, enthusiastically engaged in the game of life.
You signed up for this 21-Day Challenge and hopefully there was some part of it, or some message along the way that made you feel a little more like sticking your teeth into life. You can re-listen to the calls every month, if it helps, or stay tuned as I’m sure we’ll have a lot more challenges and butt-kicking community programs we do together.
Your most valuable resource in life is your attention and where you put it. The past is already behind you, but the future is yours to create.
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
-Mark Twain
You can access the podcast which accompanies this blog here.