“Competition” can be helpful when it is inspiration, yet not when it comes from a win-lose paradigm.

You are building a life. A unique life that has never been built and will never be built again. Not in this lifetime or any other. When you build your life and support others in building theirs, inspiring one another along the way to keep growing, everyone wins.

What if there wasn’t anyone or anything to compete with? What would you give yourself permission to focus on and create? What if you made choices today based on that?

Nothing is more inspiring than hearing from others about what they want in life, if they are willing to share authentically.

If you are looking to discover what you want, ask others what they want. Not so you can copy their dreams and desires, but so you can feel the energy of possibility. It is also valuable to see the blocks that come up for others about what they want, because we tend to be much more generous with others than with ourselves. We can see that someone else’s concerns, fears, and doubts could be easily overcome, yet it’s always harder to see that with ourselves. Feeling how powerful and deserving someone else is will remind you of how powerful and deserving you are.

That said, people often don’t know what they want because they haven’t given themselves permission to see. You can be the gentle encourager that helps someone see something new, while also helping yourself see something new.

What if seeing someone else’s dream could help you see yours?

Decide you deserve the best, and don’t settle.

Yes, this comes from your standards for what you tolerate in your relationships and what you receive, yet what you receive directly correlates with what you give.

If you give one hundred percent clarity, love, authenticity, and power, everything else in your life that is not that will inevitably fall away. And of course, this is terrifying because we have built our lives around things that are less than the best. However, if we are truly willing to receive what we deserve, we must be willing to let go of what is old and outdated.

Who would you be, and what boats would you be willing to let rock if you decided you were no longer settling?

One thing you can be sure of, if you are willing to be, is that you will discover a way, and that way will be full of surprises.

When we don’t know, our tendency can be to worry, which, of course, causes resistance to the process. However, we aren’t supposed to already know. If we surrender to this truth, we can truly enjoy and have fun in the process. The wisdom we need right now is always right here. That is the way it works. We will always know what we need to know when we need to know it. How exciting and supportive is that?

Where is it time to remember that you aren’t supposed to know, and that you are supposed to let yourself be surprised as you discover?

Challenging yourself means challenging your beliefs.

If you find yourself in a challenging season or moment, you are being asked to release the limitations of an old belief or paradigm and expand into a new one.

Would you be willing to take an upgrade by letting your old beliefs break and letting the new ones emerge?

Maybe it wasn’t that you were wrong; maybe it’s just that there’s a new and better way for you now.

Maybe you were doing the absolute best you could with the skills you had. What if you flipped the paradigm from owning where you were wrong in the past to enjoying growing right now? If you want the culture to change when it comes to allowing ourselves to evolve, it can start with you.

Where is it time to celebrate yourself for growing instead of beating your past self up for being wrong?

This might be the most important skill to cultivate.

What if you started from a place of faith while you allowed yourself to move into that scary, new, uncomfortable thing? What if you knew that all the nerves, sensations, and thoughts you are experiencing are completely normal and required for the blessings that are coming as a result of your courage?

Push yourself to do the challenging thing, yet relax while you do it. It isn’t supposed to be perfect or even good. Yet, it will be powerful.

What if you could relax while pushing yourself?

To make a change that feels out of our comfort zone, we must choose to identify as someone who can make that change. If we want to have a courageous conversation, yet we haven’t done a lot of that in the past, we must change the way we relate to ourselves, see ourselves, speak about ourselves, and create ourselves to be a bold, courageous communicator.

Sometimes, we can dread the day ahead if it feels confronting to our current identity. If we want more power and ease, we can envision who we want to become by the end of the day and relate to ourselves as that version now.

What if the new only feels uncomfortable for your old identity, and not your emerging one?

Magic is using unseen forces to make the unexpected happen.

So much of what shapes our experience every day is unseen. Yet we allow these forces to remain largely unexamined and unchosen, which can make life feel like the opposite of magic: mundane.

The magical news about magic is that we do, in fact, have a choice about the unseen forces we create with. If we choose love, kindness, connection, curiosity, joy, and the like as what we create from, even when we don’t want to or feel like it, then we make magic happen. In fact, it feels even more magical for everyone when we don’t feel like it.

What if you believed in magic because you experienced yourself creating it every day?

You are free to choose your purpose in any moment. When you are writing an email, let that be your purpose if you are choosing to do it and it is worth your time. When you are with someone you love, let loving them be your purpose. If there is something else that is a higher priority, go do it.

In this moment, you have powerful energy to give. Choose what you want to give it to and let everything else go. Worrying about the email when you are with the person you love will take you out of your purpose. Worrying about the person you love when writing your email will take you out of your purpose.

Your life is made up of a string of moments. The only way to live a purposeful life is to do so now.

What if you boldly let go of worry and live right now? Where would your energy want to go, and what would it be capable of?

Sometimes, the best way to heal our relationship with something is to expand beyond our belief that it is broken or should be another way.

At its core, healing is about becoming whole again, and you already are whole. Maybe your expansion lives in remembering that in your already inherent wholeness, you have the choice to no longer let that old thing be a problem that limits you anymore. Healing is wonderful and essential, except when you don’t realize it’s already happened.

Where is it time for you to expand beyond what you have been trying to fix?

The most important part of letting go isn’t about other people, places, or things. It is about letting go of who we have been. Relating to ourselves as who we were yesterday, or even earlier today, limits our freedom. If we are not present, our old identity will keep choosing the same priorities, patterns, and schedule, and then wonder why nothing is changing.

The past is like salt on a meal. A little brings wisdom, context, and flavor. Too much overpowers our ability to taste what is here now. We have a choice over how much we use, and more often than not, a little goes a very long way.

We can rely on the wisdom of our past experiences without allowing that version of us to lead who we are becoming.

Where is the old version of you still creating your current life, and how is that blocking you from what you want?

Just because you are having a doubtful, mean, fearful, or frustrating thought doesn’t mean the moment itself is hard, or that you are even having a hard time. There is just something you are believing or giving your energy to that is causing you to suffer.

What if there wasn’t something wrong just because your mind said there was? What if, on the contrary, it’s all perfect and we are missing it?

When you make a change you have been resisting making, you may feel an initial surge of regret, not even from making the change, but from not making it sooner. After taking a “leap,” you will likely discover that the action itself was not as big of a deal as your fear made it out to be.

However, the “shoulds” your mind feeds you about timing are completely fabricated and keep you from stepping into the new version of yourself that knows how to expand beyond your old habits and ways of perceiving time and success. The only moment that matters is right now, not what you “should” or “should not” have done before this moment.

What might become possible if, the moment you noticed yourself judging your timing, you instead used that energy to take another high-quality action that represents the new version of yourself?

When we resist our next step, we feel heavy and stuck. However, momentum is one choice away.

Use the heaviness and the stuckness to ground you in the moment and take one action. That action will remove the resistance, and you will see the next step, and then the next step, and then the next step. Soon, you will be somewhere you couldn’t see when you were letting resistance be a wall instead of a grounding force.

What if you let yourself be comforted by the momentum waiting on the other side of resistance?

This is a loving reminder that anytime you find yourself in comparison, it is an invitation to shift into inspiration.

Something about that person or thing inspires you, which is why it brings up uncomfortable body sensations within you. When we get real about what inspires us, a part of us gets called up and into growth, which will, of course, trigger a protection response from our lower selves. Simply cultivating this awareness is beautiful, because comparison holds no truth, yet inspiration calls for the very truth within us.

What old, unhelpful thought or belief might it be time to leave behind so you can be carried by inspiration?

Being “selfish,” as we all know it, means acting like a victim or martyr, chasing instant gratification, manipulating, or taking what belongs to someone else. This way of being comes from not listening to ourselves and ultimately undermines our happiness, even though we believe it will give us what we want.

However, if we truly want to take care of ourselves, our responsibility is to elevate our standards around what energy we allow to move through us. When we feel the pull to play small, we have the opportunity to be kind, generous, grateful, clear, and of service to what is most important in the moment.

What if, as we moved throughout our days, we engaged with others at a higher frequency not because we “should,” but because it was how we took care of ourselves?

What if you did it for you?

Is so you can be a grounded presence for others. This is the way we are designed.

Imagine a world where we each took responsibility for, and supported one another in, taking care of all dimensions of ourselves so we could be clear and grounded for one another. Our bodies, minds, and spirits do jot require a lot to be cared for, yet what they do require only happens with intentionality.

How can you take ownership of this possibility in your tiny corner of the world today?

You don’t need more confidence, you need to allow more courage.

The thing about courage is that it doesn’t feel like bravery, it feels like fear. That’s why it’s something you need to allow. We resist it.

Courage is an uprising of energy already within you that you need to learn to tolerate and let flow through you. It is on the other side of the action associated with courage that confidence expands.

What if you didn’t wait to feel confident, and allowed yourself to experience courage instead?

As you practice being who you want to be, you are essentially expanding your nervous system’s capacity to handle things that have historically triggered it into a stress response.

That means to expand into that next expression of You, you must spend some time dancing the line, which means that sometimes you will fail to meet your aspirations, yet learning from that “failure” is exactly how you grow.

Loving yourself through this learning, while remaning committed a to never-ending, non-linear contraction and expansion is how you guarantee you will grow.

What if you loved yourself, especially at the edges?