I started this writing challenge thinking I’d spend a lot of time cracking myself open, pulling out the blood and guts and carcasses of my old traumas, mucking them out publicly. I felt like I needed to do this to be more vulnerable and transparent about my journey, as so much of it has only ever been revealed in a relatively polished, “After” picture sort of way.

So I went there. And for the first few days, I spent a lot of time revealing old messes in a way that I thought would replicate the resonance, relatability and uplifting connectedness I’d experienced in one-on-one conversations about these subjects.

But then, naturally, I noticed my posts evolving in the direction my spirit and mind have over the last few years. I just wanted to write from my experience. And my experience is driven by this super woo-woo, cosmic principle that goes like this: “That was then, this is now.” My now experience is incredibly fun and delicious. It’s not a perfect life, in terms of circumstances, but it’s perfectly beautiful to live. And I’ve discovered how to let life unfold easily, and how to be in and savor the delectable moments and experiences of it with love and joy, even when things aren’t going the way I thought they would, because I know things are all working out for me.

So my posts naturally veered into that tone, the tone of my current life and experience.

I was talking with my coach about this this morning, just expressing how many things I worked on, nose-to-grindstone, for so many years were not the right things. And how so many of the best things in my life have been the things that came with ease, sometimes with effort and other times not, but they weren’t the hard things, was my point. And how I’ve learned to see “hard” as a flag that the thing is probably not the right thing. And how I’ve learned to even be grateful for that “hard” as guidance, and as necessary.

And she reminded me about science. About how contraction is necessary for expansion: think of your heart, as it beats. All your muscles, really, and how they work. About how our bodies contract in order to give birth to our young.

Even a seed must crack open and die in order for a seedling to emerge.

This is a brilliant principle, if you can catch and apply it to your world. There are really two premises built into what she was saying here which, if you accept them as true, can change the ease with which you experience life, eliminate fear and shift your experience from depleting to constantly, continually energizing:

1. That life grows, grows and expands, always. Things grow, markets grow, people do, too.
2. That contraction is required for expansion to occur.

If you accept both these premises, you can find incredible peace and energy in their combined meaning. Things will grow and expand, and generally in an upwards direction. But some contraction must happen, at seasons, between seasons of growth. If your investment accounts were looking down in 2008, but you’ve held onto them, you’re in good shape with those same investments now, in 2016.

This principle means you can be a reasonable, wise adult and take a peaceful, long-term view of your life. It means you can focus on setting a conscious, general idea of what you want to be about and create in your life, and then have a lot more ease and expectation and patience and peace as you do your work and see what options show up. It means you can say no to things without fear. It means you can release the depletion that results from being constantly worked up and wound up over The Drama of the Day and instead make it the Sport of the Day, and handle it like an expert, infinite game player.

This principle means you can sit rooted and grounded in your clarity and confidence that things are working out. And it means you’ll make better decisions, take the risks involved in being a fearless, wise communicator and experience life more abundantly, as a result.

Contraction must happen for expansion to occur. Science says so. Spirit does, too.

A teacher of mine once said that the advice we give others is actually the advice we most need ourselves.

This is always in the back of my mind when I share what I’ve learned or what I think with people who’ve asked for my advice. I try to think of it as though I am my own, amazing, free advisor, but that the sport of the day is to figure out which of my own issues the advice I’m giving at any given moment might apply to. And almost always, life presents me with a rich opportunity to apply it. 

The other day, I was doing the four-hour drive to see my parents, in Bakersfield. My family celebrates Thanksgiving a week in advance of the actual holiday, so I get to miss traffic and a few other folks and their spouses always get to see both sides of their families.  

While I was driving, a young relative of mine called, and we caught up while I was driving. She shared that she had a lot of anger with her parents for preparing her for a post-college world that no longer rewards education the way it once did, and for constantly pestering her about working several (great) part-job jobs, versus getting a “real” job and staying at it until pension-time, the way they did.

I shared with her from my experience as offspring that I think the issue is generational, and that it’s certainly not limited to her parents. My parents, too, worked the same jobs for 30 years, and have looked at my own career path with equal parts concern and awe. For their parents, success was just making ends meet. For her parents and mine, success was having a “good” job, ideally with a governmental entity or a large corporation, and staying at it long enough to get a pension. One of her parents and one of mine had actually made it to college, later in life, and managed to elevate beyond their own expectations, at their “good jobs”.

The incremental increase our parents hoped and worked to real-ize for us was that we would go to college and get great jobs, but ideally still with a government entity or big company, and ideally still with a pension. They simply could not have foreseen, I told her, the Great Recession and the devaluation of a basic college degree. They could not have foreseen that their daughters, she and I both, would go on to get master’s and doctorate level degrees, and then pursue something other than the traditional career path from those degrees. They could not have foreseen—and still don’t understand—the massive disruptions to what a “good job” is that have been driven by Silicon Valley, the Internet, the death of the pension and the gig economy.

She expressed frustration that her mother wouldn’t stop criticizing her path, even after she told her Mom in no uncertain terms that she wouldn’t choose a career like her mother’s, even if she did have the choice. To that, I told her that she should feel free to express herself, but also should know that her mother is not in a position to share her mental frames for “good job”. I told her that trying to control others’ behavior or allowing it to dictate our own emotional states is a losing battle. And I shared with her that she has lots of choices for how to handle this that she might find much more emotionally satisfying, including expressing her POV, minus the anger and vitriol, without the expectation that her mother will change her behavior. And also including just no longer having that same tired old script of a conversation with her mother.

I told her the developmental stage of disindividuation is only successful when we see and feel those boundaries, the distinctness of what we want and are as separate from what are parents want and are. I told her from that perspective, the system has worked, in her case. And in mine.

In fairness to her Mom, I told her I know from experience as a parent just how hard it is to stop giving unsolicited life advice to your children based on your own mental frames. Even when your own thinking no longer applies to your kids or their peers. I told her parents do this because we are concerned for our kids, and want the best for them and, because the only ways we can see the situation from is through our own lenses, our own mental frames, for what is good and right.

Shortly after she and I hung up, I pulled into my mother’s driveway. “Ah, so,” I thought. “Here’s the part where I’m going to have a bunch of ‘rich opportunities’ to take the advice I gave Henrietta (names/changed/protect/innocent/etc).”

But you know, a funny thing happened. Maybe because I was thinking this advice was really well-timed for myself, or maybe because that conversation with Henrietta had put me into parental compassion mode, my parents didn’t get to me on this trip. There were tiny seeds that could have caused friction, but I dealt with them in a bold, decisive way. I dealt with them with clarity, honesty and no expectation in the moment, based on what seemed right.

My Dad said some things I disagreed with, and I told him so, but gently and without any expectation that he would change. I explained why I disagreed and shared my own experiences that were the basis for my disagreement. I added a little dose of humor, without self-deprecation, just to lighten the mood. He respected my opinion and even agreed with me.

My Mother refused to do some things I’d have liked her to. And I just let it go, instantly. Her “important” and mine don’t have to be the same. When someone asked me about it later, I’d actually forgotten the incident had even happened.

I had some conversations that should have been challenging with my Dad, but approached them thinking about the advice I gave Henrietta. I didn’t just hit him with my opinion. I shared my appreciation for his journey and his sacrifices, and shared with him my 10,000 foot view of the situation, offering him the clarity of an outsider’s perspective. I asked him to have a little more compassion and generosity with himself in a hard situation, and encouraged him to make some choices that don’t jive with his mental frames for “good” and won’t be popular but are the right thing to do. I told him I’d back him up. And he could hear me.

This time, it was real that the advice I’d given was the advice I needed. But there was something bigger than this principle at work here. Something in the energetics of having released the desire to change the situation, of having accepted and allowed my parents to be who they are and need to be, and of remembering how many times wise adult Tara has made great choices in terms of engaging in non-mission-critical battles with my parents actually shifted the whole atmosphere around these relationships. It defused it entirely. People behaved better, way better, that normal.

And that felt good. It actually felt great.

Call me woo-woo if you want to, but during Thanksgiving, there was a moment when some of my relatives were getting into some stressful, turbulent, conversational topics. It was cranking up to be one of those conversations that gets gossipy and outraged, but goes nowhere. I dreaded it, because it would either suck me in or put me in a position to have to figure out how to be the wise adult Tara in the conversation. But a funny thing happened. Just at that moment, my 4-year-old cousin Bella popped up. She basically flew at me with open arms, yelling “COUSIN TARA!!!!!!” She marveled at how my hair was braided like her hair, and how we were basically the same because she’s 4 and I’m 41. We took a selfie. She asked me (to my horror) if I had Snapchat. She grabbed my phone and started voice searching for songs to dance to on YouTube. She insisted that we dance. She said “Let’s dance!” and I looked over at the crazy conversation people, looked back at her, and said “Ok! Let’s dance!” And so we danced.

Finally she yelled out—no joke, ya’ll—“I LOVE CHALLENGES!” Challenges, of all things. I almost said, “Hey, that’s my shtick!”, but I thought better of getting into that with a four year old. So instead, we made a whole bunch of videos of her “show,” wherein she introduces herself and tells viewers all about the “Princess Book Challenge” or the “Gymnastics Challenge.”

By the time she was done, and released me from my service (!), the crazy conversation I’d dreaded dealing with was naturally breaking up. It was over, and I didn’t have to engage or break it up. It was as though the decision to accept, allow and change my own behavior vs. trying to manage anyone else’s had gone ahead of me and paved the path for that trip with ease and calm, at least in my experience of the trip.

I share this in hopes that it reaches you before your own Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year’s or other holiday family gathering that might normally make you crazy. I dare you to try on this new possibility, the possibility of extending compassion and acceptance to the hard nuts to crack, in advance. There’s a very real possibility that doing so might shift the entire atmosphere from fraught to freedom.

P.S.: I issued a 30 Day Writing Challenge for Conscious Leaders a few weeks back, and over 150 brilliant souls signed up! I decided to take the Challenge right along with them, and it’s been a profound journey for many of us. Most people are journaling or free-writing every day, privately. I wrote this post on Day 21 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

“Perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor, the enemy of the people. It will keep you cramped and insane your whole life, and it is the main obstacle between you and a shitty first draft. I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.” ~Anne Lamott, in Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.

I’ve written before about the time Serena Williams messed me up. It wasn’t intentional. In fact, she had no idea that she was involved. One day I watched a video of her working out. I think it might have been this video. The day after I watched it, I was in the gym, at a performance boot camp. Kettle bell swings, box jumps and battling ropes, all of my favorite things. The thing is, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and once my braids were swinging around, there was a moment in which I met my own eye in the mirror and thought: I can go just as hard as Serena. So I went harder, and harder, and had an incredible workout. Pushed way past what I’d normally do. 

It was fantastic.

Until the next day. And the day after. And the day after that. Days later, I was still so sore that I couldn’t even rotate my trunk enough to look over my shoulder and parallel park. Thanks, Serena. 

I love this story, though, because it surfaces the difference between excellence and perfectionism. 

Perfect is the enemy of done. 

Perfect, in fact, is not real. Perfect is the enemy, period. 

Perfectionism is rigid, hard and creates shame most of the time, because almost all of the time, we will fall short of perfect. 

But excellence? Excellence is doing your best. Excellence is about pushing to the limits of your capacity, and then growing capacity. But excellence is not hard or rigid. It’s juicy and energized. It’s fun. 

In sport, we know that our minds give up and will tell us to stop way before our muscles are tapped out. And knowing this allows us to push harder, to know that our capacity is greater than it might feel like it is, when we’re in the midst of a crunch. 

In sport, we know that, ultimately, it’s all just a game. The stakes are not life and death. But we still take the game seriously. We train, we visualize, we practice and we pour ourselves into the game. But we have fun, too. We play the game, we don’t work it or grind it or dread it. 

We also know that one way to help keep our minds in the game, and to override the message to stop, is to see inspiring others, to hear and watch their stories, or even to hear them cheer us on. Excellence happens when others coach, inspire or keep us accountable. Perfectionism is often self-imposed, and often isolating. Excellence connects us. 

Excellence is inspired. One of my heroes is Daniel from the Bible, who was favored because of his devotion to God and also because “an excellent spirit was within him”. Inspiration means to be animated by the spirit of something, to literally breathe in a spirit. Daniel’s spirit of excellence emboldened him to hold himself to different, higher standards, with discipline and leadership, than the culture and community in which he lived, without critiquing or judging anyone else. Excellence is inspired and inspiring, and it keeps you running your own race, minding your own business, and being your best. 

Excellence was my workout, at crazy next levels, inspired by one of my other heroes, Serena. It was fun, exciting, juicy and alive in the moment. Years afterwards, I recall that workout as one of my favorites ever. (Side note: this was my #1 Favorite Workout Of All Time.)

Because excellence is about you doing your best, as I’ve matured, I’ve also realized that excellence involves all the self-care, nourishing and beauty that helps me operate at peak whatever I’m focused on: peak performance, peak prosperity, peak fun, peak joy, peak fun. Excellence requires knowing that “your best” will be different on different days. That it—that I—will ebb and flow. It requires rest. I developed and received more and more of my spirit of excellence when I learned that there are different seasons for different sorts of work: seasons for envisioning, for sowing, for cultivating and for harvesting, in every single area of life. Perfectionism drives us relentlessly to go harder, harder, harder. Excellence pulls out our long-term best, inspires us to build a beautiful vision, but with grace and with even some ease and softness around the journey it’ll take to get there, and the daily, weekly, monthly ebb and flow in the power, force and direction of our efforts to build it. 

In The Untethered Soul, Michael Singer coaches us through the process of learning to rewire our natural tendency to tense up and harden around emotional pain. When we learn to soften and allow it to pass through us, and allow past hurts and pain to come up and burn out, we gradually dissolve our touchy subjects, resolve unfinished business, and live into a place of freedom from emotional triggers and thorns. We learn to be unconditional in our love for life, love for people, exuberance and general joy. 

But being able to exist in a state of grounded exuberance, regardless of your external conditions, does not mean that you don’t address problems or challenges when they come up. Singer says that when you get untethered, instead, the challenges and issues that inevitably arise in your life don’t read as problems. They read as the sport of the day. Your sport of the day, your game for the day, becomes how to have that challenging conversation with an employee, or how to deal with the trouble your kid is stirring (/raises hand).

For me, the sport of the day is often how to translate my gut intuition into conversations and interactions that open new possibilities for transformation in my clients’ businesses, within their teams, or even with their customers.

The sport of the day is not always to fix or change conditions, and it’s never to fix or change other people. The game is how to be who you want to be and live into what you want to create, which sometimes requires being responsive to current realities without getting entangled or stuck in them. 

I’ve grown over time to go from seeing my past dysfunctional patterns are cringeworthy problems I wish I’d never had to seeing them as the sport of the day. So now, for example, when someone close to me starts stirring up drama, I note my wobble between enabling them and abandoning them, and I spot the opportunity as a treasure to play a new, lighter game: the game of finding that middle path for how we relate today. 

And I know—I’ve discovered—that the sport of the day, and my energy for playing it, is fresh and new every single day. You’re not bound or limited by the game you played yesterday anymore than the matches she’s lost have stopped Serena from soaring to victory the next day, or even later the same day. She’s no joke. And neither are yo.  

We don’t play the sport of the day with perfection, or with perfectionism. Because, at the risk of belaboring the point, perfect is not real. We can play it with excellence, though. And we can have fun doing it. When you learn to play the sport of the day and to play it with excellence, it’s so much fun that you’ll never want to go back to the time when perfect was your aim, even if you are too sore to parallel park the next day.  

P.S.: I issued a 30 Day Writing Challenge for Conscious Leaders a few weeks back, and over 150 brilliant souls signed up! I decided to take the Challenge right along with them, and it’s been a profound journey for many of us. Most people are journaling or free-writing every day, privately. But I wrote this post on Day 19 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

Marianne Williamson tells this great parable which she says is about recovering from “attraction to dangerous men.”

When you’re really ill, you don’t even know a snake when you see one. Once recovery begins, you see a snake and you know it’s a snake, but you still play with it. Once you’ve landed in true recovery zone, you see a snake, you know it’s a snake, and you cross to the other side of the road.

To my mind, this story actually applies to most personal growth, not just to love relationships. In particular, it applies to breaking dysfunctional patterns or cycles. It comes in handy when it comes to making the daily decisions we face as conscious leaders, of businesses, of teams and of our lives, which often includes facing similar forks in the road or fact patterns as we have before.

It is not an easy thing, to try to evolve in your personal consciousness, and to represent consciousness in the workplace and the business marketplace. To do so is to opt out of the universally assumed and accepted priorities and decision rules. This is what I love about Conscious Capitalism; that its pillars propose and argue for a new set of business decision rules, oriented around business that is profitable, but does not prioritize profit over people or planet.

The career and personal life of a Conscious Leader are also riddled with decision points. When we’re presented with different options in terms of career paths we could take, those that rank highest in title, power, position or profit might not be the most conscious ones. The decision that weighs in favor of balance or family might not be the “best” one for your career. The company with the elevated mission might not pay as much as the one that wants to sell more, sell more, sell more.

And we know this in our gut. Or, at the very least, we have the power to. The trouble is that other voices overshadow this sense we feel in our gut, sometimes internal voices, sometimes external or societal ones.

Nearly every week, I have at least one conversation with a Conscious Leader who has had a series of troubled career moves, and who also says at various points along their storyline that they knew or strongly suspected several of their past job situations would be doomed when they first met the company, met the CEO, learned about the business, or were offered the job. And they took it anyway. And they did it again. And they knew better then, too. But the money was incredible. Or the options were amazing. Or the career development was negligible, but the hours were great. And then they faced a similar choice, made it in the same way, and again, regretted it.

Over time, I’ve grown to be grateful that, like the woman in the parable, we get repeat opportunities to evolve and grow in our decision-making. As a Conscious Leaders and a conscious live-er of life, I’ve learned to count it as finding a treasure when I discover the pattern and have the thrill of releasing it.

But this line of thinking prompts one question, over and over again, as many times as you are presented with a career choice, a partner choice, a work-life balance conundrum, a hire or fire decision, or even a choice of romantic partners: what is the right decision rule? How do you make choices, if you opt out of using money or power as your guides? What are those guiding principles?

Some say to list out the pros and cons. That’s helpful, sometimes. But many times, the pros and cons just provide a vehicle for your brain’s spinning to make it onto the page. And other times, the strong gut sense of ‘no’ doesn’t show up in lists of quantifiable ‘cons’ in a large enough number to outrank the ‘pros’. But your gut is still correct.

How many times have your pros and cons list outcomes been wrong, and your gut been right? For me, many, many times. So, I no longer make my decisions based on lists of facts. I gather the facts, as a starting point. And then I add in my experience, my wisdom, life lessons learned and, most importantly, the soul-and-spirit level “hit” I get off of a person, place or project. Then, and only then, do I move forward.

Some people would call all of this, collectively, their “gut”.

Long ago, I’d have said I didn’t trust my gut. That my gut was largely ego, or my deep-seated emotional triggers being flicked, remnants of old trauma being sparked by things that had not. Or that my gut was coded for fear. And that’s sometimes true.

But lots of therapy, years of meditation, and even daily practices like Morning Pages have cultivated enough emotional groundedness that I now no longer suspect my gut. I operate in the free and clear, emotionally, for the most part. I’m tuned in. And I’m no longer operating based on  triggerd. This leaves me with the superpower of being able to tell the difference between “this situation is stirring up some old shit, and I am not bringing that old shit into this new day so I’mma let this burn out” and “gut says no, something is off here.”

And this superpower is extraordinarily helpful. I’d say it’s better than flying, because it allows me to flow and to soar with the creative power that comes with the alignment of intention, purpose, strategy and excellence. It also allows me to make decisions that are highly counterintuitive and seem crazy to other people, but have been proven time and time again to be right for me.

This superpower emboldens me to move forward in my life with ease and flow, even into kind of scary situations I don’t exactly know how I’ll handle, in advance. I can do this because I know that I’m tuned in, and I don’t operate in the fear that I’ll make a misstep. The other thing is, I know things are always working out for me, so even if the next thing isn’t “the” thing, it’s still a step toward whatever my thing is supposed to be. It’s all progress. It’s all preparation.

Even with my healed-up soul and my tuned-in gut, I still find it helpful to have a few different rubrics for making big life and leadership and career and love decisions, and there are a handful that have been both directive and possibility-unlocking for me over the past few years. I thought I’d share. Here are a few:

1. I believe the path of our deep desires is often the path closest to our calling. So I ask myself:
   • Which option puts me on a path to what I really want?
   • Do I really, deeply want to do this? Or do I think other people think I should do it?
   • Do I have a pattern of wanting to do this sort of thing, over years and years, but never indulging that desire, because I’m afraid or I don’t think it’s “respectable”?
   • Do I dread doing this, but think it’s the smart or responsible thing to do, so I often choose to do it anyway? Is the dread misalignment or is it Resistance?
2. One of my favorite teachers reminds me that it’s easy to know when a radio is tuned in and when it’s not, because of all that static and interference when it’s not tuned in. If we practice mindfulness and alignment, our emotions and feelings can be that same sort of tuner for our decisions. So I ask myself:
   • Does thinking about this option make me feel clear and tuned in, in my chest and my body?
   • When I visualize myself doing that project or in that job, do I like the way it looks on me?
   • Or does it, before I even decide to do it, make me feel confused, angry or resentful?
   • Do I envision scenes of disappointment?
3. Do I feel expanded and breathe more easily when I think about this option?
   • Does it open or shut down possibilities?
   • Would taking the option make me feel like I’m coming into myself more, or does it feel like playing small?
   • Or do I feel constricted and tight when I think about it?
   • Do I feel like I need to tense up, armor my heart or hold my breath when I think about it?
4. Does this affiliation or relationship move me in the direction of love, warmth and connection, or division and disconnection from others?
5. Does not taking this option remind me of any other times I’ve played small because I was afraid?
   • Do I think I’ll regret it?
   • Does this job feel like a shadow of what I really should be doing?
   • Does taking this option feel like giving in to Resistance to my higher calling or higher self?

In The Science of Being Great, Wallace Wattles gives greatness seekers this advice: “most important, you must have absolutely faith in your own perceptions of truth. Never act in haste or hurry; be deliberate in everything; wait until you feel that you know the true way. And when you do feel that you know the true way, be guided by your own faith though the entire world shall disagree with you.” These decision rules and questions help me be deliberate and act confidently, often against the tide of what others think I should do (or would think I should do, if I asked them!). I hope you find them to be of value as you journey toward what’s right for you.