Category Archives: Health + Life

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How I Learned to Act My Age [30 Day Writing Challenge, Day 7]

I’ve been desperate to be 40 years old since I was 9. My parents co-owned a racquet club back then, and it gave me life to get to do step and dance aerobics with the 40-ish chicks at the club. This was the 80’s, Jane Fonda was in full effect, and so were leotards, white tights and even whiter high-top Reeboks.

I, of course, could only wistfully dream of being able to work out in such incredible gear on a daily basis. (And no, it does not escape me that this is still one of my favorite parts of what I do every day, if you swap out the tights for lululemon capris and swap out the step for a spin bike.)

Anyhow, I was always a precocious child. And always an entrepreneur. My Mom tells how I tried to sell my newborn brother in the grocery store. And how I charged my preschool teachers $1 to watch the other kids during naptime (because Lord knows I was not interested in naps or in other children) so they could run to the corner store next door.

I was actually named Valedictorian of my kindergarten, which is not even a thing that should exist. Of course, I didn’t perceive this as undue pressure at the time, even though I was five and shouldn’t have had a say in the matter. I actually saw my kindergarten teacher a few years back, while visiting family in my hometown. She walked right up to me and said, “TARA-NICHOLLE BEASLEY.  It’s me, Mrs. Sowers! I’ll never forget. You were 4 years old and you asked me how to spell the word s-o-p-h-i-s-t-i-c-a-t-e-d. You look exactly the same.”

I even remember actually praying for a life fast forward button, when I was little. In part, I was motivated to get out of some painfully repressive circumstances at home. And in part, I was motivated to learn how to do it right, to figure out how to do a family right, to create the warmth and acceptance and affection I didn’t feel at home. I wanted to figure out how to do that and have that, and I couldn’t wait any longer.

So, I basically made my own fast forward button. I got married when I was 16, to a man who came with an infant son already in tow, and had a son of my own when I was 17. When I said I wanted to fast forward, I wasn’t messing around. The thing is, you can’t heal emotional wounds and fix spiritual problems by bolting a bunch of new facts and people and conditions on top of the old wounds and hurts. Of course, you don’t know this when you’re 16 years old. (Of course, you don’t know much when you’re 16 years old.)

Anyhow, this craving for age didn’t end there. I married two men much older than me. I worked as a probation officer during grad school, and learned to dress like a much older woman to be taken seriously. Pantsuits all day, erryday. I did the same when I was a lawyer. I learned to like old lady-style things. I even painted my houses in the same two-toned color scheme, every time I moved: toasted almond (taupe) on the walls, Swiss coffee (white) on the ceilings and mouldings. Done and done.

I hung out with women who were a lot older than me, but were badasses and gorgeous and so vital, because I felt like they were teaching me how to outpace life. I developed a storyline about how I planned to live until I’m 250, and be cute and work out and eat kale and parent pugs until I was at least 249, after which time I would let it all hang out. And I looked forward to every birthday because it was getting me closer, somehow, to what I saw as a respectable age. In retrospect, maybe I thought that there was some magic age number at which you just figured things all out, and things weren’t so painful anymore.

But then one day, the shit hit the fan. The edifices I’d built in my life on top of a cracked foundation began to crumble. At one point, all that was left was me—that cracked foundation. Slowly, I started to excavate the foundation and rebuild it, fixing the cracks. I had to rehab the structure of my soul, then make some space available for an injection of spirit. I started rebuilding my life and my family with emotional integrity. And while I was working on all of this was when my therapist said to me: “You know, it’s never too late to have a great childhood.” And I took her up on that offer.

I started to dance. And play. And sing. And gravitated toward other, wounded, healing, beautiful souls who had also learned to cherish hard work and sacrifice and discipline and excellence and music and deep connection and friendship and travel and play and reading and art and such. I made some incredible friends in the unrepressed, well-parented, 4-year-old girl set. I especially liked the little girls who wore crazy things I’d never worn at that age, like rainboots with a lacy church dress and a unicorn hoodie.

Then one day, in therapy, I was on a little rampage and my therapist said, “wait, what did you just say?”  And I said, “Lookie here, world, I’m 40 years old and I just have this freedom to not have to do thus and so anymore.” And she said, “Tara, how old are you?” Me: “36.” Her: “I need you to do something for me.” Me: “Anything, of course.” And the she said, “I need you to be the age you actually are. No more fast forwards.”

As the kids would say, BAM.

Since that time, I’ve been trying out what it’s like to be the age I actually am. And it turns out to matter. It’s been part of my experience of learning to respect the seasons of life, the necessary beginnings and necessary endings, and learning to joy trip through the process of becoming versus holding my breath until I am a certain way or have a certain thing or have achieved a certain achievement or milestone.

I still hang out with a bunch of badasses, but they’re incredible people of all ages, from 6 to 60, and beyond. I still consume an extraordinary amount of kale, and I know that I’ll open a pug retirement home when I turn 80 and need a new project.

But I’m also delighted to have been 40 this past year, and to be turning 41 this weekend. It’s been quite lovely, really, this learning to act my age. It’s a beautiful gift to be able to look around my life everyday and realize, hey, I really like it here. And now.

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 7 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

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Adulting: Choosing What Defines Us [30 Day Writing Challenge, Day 5]

I have this weird thing about eating at certain buffets, where just looking at them makes me never want to eat again. Something about big piles of food seems like a trough to me. And it triggers the reverse effect on my hunger. My strategy in these situations generally is to locate a piece of fish and make a pile of dark greens on my plate then quickly remove myself from the vicinity of All That Food. Blargh.

As I think of it, it might be an aversion I worked up during my first official job ever, as a hostess at the Sizzler: Buffet Court PTSD.

This is absurd, as I hope is obvious. But it’s a microcosm of something we do all the time, allowing a life event or experience to plant triggers in our operating systems, so that we always cringe when we see that kind of car or shut entirely down when we meet a certain kind of person.

This is very normal. It’s the extreme version of learning, but it’s a deeper sort of learning, it’s almost like a spiritual encoding that happens. And taken to great extremes, we can find ourselves defined by a single life event or something someone said to us 40 years ago. This is natural, and maybe even normal, but it can also be very painful, dysfunctional and limiting.

I know it’s normal, because when I meet new people (which I do nearly every day at work), I generally share my own story, then I ask them flat out to tell me their life story. It’s really a Rorschach of sorts, to see how people interpret that question, and where they take it, whether they go general or specific, the overall tone and whether they take a career story or personal story or combined approach. The way we tell our general story drops clues to how we define ourselves, I think. Another set of clues is in the stories we tell about our histories and our lives, over and over again.

I tell the story of my family migrating to California around 50 years ago, with some regularity. I tell it to explain why I am uninterested and uninitiated in the ways of the South and, to a lesser extent, the East Coast.

I tell the story of going from Honors Student to teen Mom and then, to college/grad school/law school, all the time. I tell it to express my gratitude for a life of miracles, and to share how I know God is real.

On the personal side, I tell the story of how I heard a Tony Robbins CD about the Power of Identity and then lost 60 pounds, twenty years ago, at least a few times a year. I share it to help people know that I’m a contrarian. That I don’t always do things the way others do. That my health has played a central role in my life for a long time. And that I am a woman of change, action, power and growth.

I tell the story of my 86-year-old grandmother and her three sisters, all Black women from Texarkana, Texas, all of whom have college or nursing school degrees, as often as I can. I tell this so they know that #blackgirlmagic is real. But I also tell this so people understand that I come from a matriarchal lineage, and to explain why I was damn near 40-years-old before I realized that other people saw being Black and a woman as a disadvantage, while I grew up with the explicit and implicit understanding that being a Black girl meant you could do anything. Literally, anything. Circumstances are irrelevant.

These things, I tell, because they define or, at the very least, depict major components of who I am.

But there are other stories I’ve allowed to define me, too, at various times in my life. Stories of repression. Stories of emotional chaos, allowed to spiral and embed for years and years. Even stories of multi-generational beliefs that were both blessing and curse. And it’s been interesting to see how, as I develop and heal out of some of these patterns, I find myself telling those stories much less frequently. But I do want to share one with you, now.

My grandmother is a force of nature and supernatural spirit. Her father was an alcoholic, and her mother was a saint. After her mother died very young, my grandmother helped her three sisters get educated, then got her own degree, while raising her own four children alone. Her own alcoholic husband had long since left her for the West Coast, and my grandmother gradually migrated from the South (Texarkana), to the Midwest (Omaha), to the Southwest (Clovis, New Mexico) and finally landed in Bakersfield, California, right around fifty years ago. She and my Dad still live there, to this day.

My grandfather and grandmother had not, until that time, been officially divorced, but he had moved on to a series of other women, somehow also winding up in Bakersfield. Because their lives were so separate, my grandmother was shocked and dismayed when she went to buy a house and was advised that California was something new to her, something called a Community Property state. That meant that all the debts my grandfather had run up and reneged on actually belonged to her, too. Which meant that for her to buy the home for her children she’d worked and saved for, she’d first have to pay or make arrangements to pay all of his bad debt. She was able to figure it out, but it was heartbreaking. And she did eventually divorce him.

But the scar of that heartbreak long remained. My whole childhood, my sweet, piano-playing, hymn-singing grandmother dove joyfully into her duties to teach me How to Live a Good Life. She taught me how to love God, how to clean house, how to prioritize school above all, how to balance a checkbook, and how to churn butter (I’m not joking). She also taught me never to rely on a man to support myself or my children. Never to have children unless I was 100% certain I could support them on my own. She was remarkably free of bitterness about it, but she was exceedingly clear and insistent on this point.

And I took the message. In fact, I took it and ran with it. Somehow, her message mixed in with my perfectionism, my own ambition and my own Daddy issues, and showed up in my spirit as an extreme, dysfunctional over-self-reliance. So I attracted in people at the level of my own bullshit, as one does. I married men who had no capacity to be full partners in my life. And I created a life in which there wasn’t much room for deep partnership and interdependence, because I didn’t believe, deep in my spirit, that I could really have those things.

And at some point, after my spiritual teachers and coaches and therapists helped me see that I’d allowed this childhood message to define a whole area of my life, I couldn’t un-see it. I thanked my family for cultivating my independence and raising me to be an unlimited being, because I am that. I honor and will always be independent and impactful. But I also had to release the isolating extremes I’d taken on.

I put an end to the patterns that kept me isolated and unsupported by being extreme and dysfunctional in my over-self-reliance, slowly, slowly, slowly. I started to spend a lot of time with my friends who were in beautiful partnerships, who’d built healthy families and who had created long, loving, two-way relationships. I wanted to experience that model and what it looks like everyday, up close.  

I’ve talked with lots of people who define themselves by a thing that happened to them 30 years ago, or something their Mom used to always tell them—even a thing their Mom used to say about herself or, especially, her body. I know people who define themselves by a past failure, a family death, or a victory. I know people whose self-definition is heavily painted by their geography or profession, or the fact that no one in their family has ever been educated/happy/healthy/sober.

Often, we take on an extreme commitment to our defining family or personal history dysfunction. But it can be just as unwise to define ourselves in aversion or opposition to our long-gone experiences, like I do with the Buffet Court. Exhibit B: I wear some version of the same outfit every single day. I do it because it’s comfortable and beautiful and removes so much decision-making from my day. But it also helps that my “uniform” strategy makes my Mom a little crazy. 😀

We’re all in the process of working this stuff out, some more intentionally and effortfully than others.I’ve learned that we have a lot more choice about how we define ourselves than we think. We truly do have the power to decide and shape and rewire who we are, even though our past programming might be encoded at a level of depth that seems permanent and inescapable. It can seem like as much a part of us as the shape of our eyes or the size of our feet.

We get to pick the elements of our past that are expansive or contract us, that spark joy and pride and possibility, or that revert to the sometimes comfortable, limiting storylines we’ve always heard and by now, have started to tell ourselves.

And we also get to pick our todays and tomorrows, and we get to exercise intention about how we define ourselves every single day. “That was then, this is now” means something. And it doesn’t mean you disrespect your family’s trials and tribulations or the people who raised you, to keep what serves you and release or discard what no longer does. That’s what I call wisdom, and what the Interwebs call “adulting”.

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 5 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

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Demolition Woman [30 Day Writing Challenge, Day 4]

My therapist once told me that it’s never too late to have a great childhood. I took her up on this, and promptly set about releasing the old traumas and outdated life operating systems I’d acquired over the course of my literal, chronological childhood. And I made it the sport of the day to dive into my not-too-late new childhood, rewiring my emotional habits and my life with a new sense of joy, play and lightness.

I redecorated my house to suit my 9-year-old self (see photo), started having a bunch of adventures around the world, and re-taught myself the curiosity, enthusiasm, wonder and trust of a well-parented kidlet.

Recently, my cousin posted a photo on Facebook that brought my not-so-great chronological childhood to mind. She currently lives on the same street I grew up on, maybe 15 houses down from my childhood home. That home was the site of great, great pain and devastating emotional wounding to me, as a young girl. It was the place where I experienced the most traumatic events of my life, the ones I had only really been able to acknowledge, integrate and release twenty years later, after years of therapy and a general commitment to healing every area of my life. 

The photo my cousin posted was a stark one. It was a photo of her current home which, until recently, stood in the midst of an upper-middle-class subdivision of similar two-story, 80’s construction homes. My childhood home was one of them. But in this photo, her home stood alone, amidst a vast expanse of well-manicured dirt. After decades of threatening to do so, the State of California had surprised nearly everyone in town, and moved forward with plans to raze the neighborhood and run a freeway through it. My cousin was one of the last people in the area to move, and so ended up living in a home that remained standing while those around it were completely erased off the face of the earth, one-by-one.

On a whim, I shot her a message on Facebook. After asking her whether my old house was still standing, and hearing that it was indeed, I asked her to go take a quick photo of it and send it to me, which she did, a couple of hours later.

I sat and considered the little square on my screen for a moment. It took me a moment to recognize it as my house. The paint job was different, the lawn was brown, the roofline was saggy in the middle. It was clearly suffering from the absence of constant grooming by my meticulous, Marine father. To be fair, I’m certain its owners had permanently deferred maintaining the place once they realized it had a date with the wrecking ball.

Maybe it was this shabbiness, or maybe just my adulthood and tons of trauma release therapy, but the place also just didn’t seem scary to me anymore. It didn’t seem loaded, at all. It seemed a little sad, actually. Like, I was sad for the house, for all that it had witness over the years, versus being sad for myself. Of course, I knew what the house, as a non-sentient ‘being’, could never know, which is that it had no more than a few weeks to exist. Demolition was unavoidable, and imminent.

The few moments after my cousin zapped the photo of my old house to me across the Webs were each coded with an emotion. Moment 1: wow, the house looks bad. Moment 2: hm, I don’t feel as bad as I thought I would. Moment 3: poor, sad house. It has no idea what’s about to happen. It’s dying and doesn’t know it.

Then in that fourth moment, it really dawned on me: the house was being demolished. The site of my deepest trauma, of the worst moments of my life, was about to be completely obliterated off the face of the planet. Gone. Fini.

Except, actually, not fini. Instead of fini, my beloved State of California was actually going to run a freeway through it. As a lifelong Californian, I have always had a strange love of freeways, those strangely gorgeous wonders of geography and engineering that allow us to traverse vast expanses of our obscenely un-walkable state in unnatural ways and at unnatural speeds. My personal Ground Zero was going to be erased, then replaced with the ultimate symbol of forward motion, freedom and activity.

YES.

So, I went on about my morning, saying a little prayer of gratitude for the lessons I’d learned from my pain, and for the person it helped create me to be. I affirmed that there was nothing more for me to glean from that stuff, and bid the pain of that part of my life, the pain that had been symbolized by that house, a final farewell. I went on about my day, getting a cup of tea and getting dressed to walk the mongrels.

As I got ready, I noticed some construction noise in front of my house. It was like heavy, heavy drilling, odd for so early in the morning. I walked out onto the front porch, and saw that the entire freeway frontage road near my house had been blocked and studded with cones overnight. A massive sign messaged that the freeway entrance was closed temporarily to repave the road and install a protected bike lane, and that traffic was being redirected to another entrance.

But that’s not where the noise was coming from. Immediately in front of my house, some guys were drilling into the sidewalk, installing a bright orange ‘Detour’ sign. They saw me and waved hello. I smiled, waved back and walked back inside, shaking my head and laughing to myself as I went.

detour

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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 4 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

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Simple food—and people—rules [30 Day Writing Challenge, Day 3]

I love simple food rules. One of my favorites comes from culinary anthropologist and author, Michael Pollan: “Eat real food. Mostly plants. Not too much.” But I have my own, too. A number of them, which now that I think of it, might actually defeat the purpose of simplicity. Anyhow, here’s one decision rule I have about food. I require the food items I eat to fit one of the following items:

  1. It must be filling
  2. It must be nutritious, or
  3. It must be truly, intensely delectable.


But no one food item needs to be all of these things. This is how I come to have a daily diet that consists 90% of hemp protein powder, avocado, eggs, kale smoothies, french fries and a collagen drink my friend Alice tasted, then immediately deemed “wet dog soup.”

My food rules work for me.

And they came to mind this morning when I met with an old friend I’ll keep nameless unless and until he tells me it’s okay to do otherwise. He and I worked together at the best company ever. He’s a super smart dude and one of those generally wonderful human beings you’re glad to know type folks.

My food rules came to mind when my friend told me how he thinks about companies. He said, when we worked together we had the complete trifecta: a product we loved, a mission we were on fire about, and a CEO and team we were devoted to. But after looking at and talking to literally dozens of companies, I’ve realized what my Most Important Criterion is: for me, if the CEO and team are smart and coachable and engaged, that’s good enough for me. I can help with or be okay with the rest.

This, I found fascinating. It was like simple food rules, but for work and leadership and, really, for people. Part of the reason I found it fascinating was that I’ve been doing a lot of work recently with my coach to rehabilitate some of my dysfunctional and, frankly, inaccurate, long-held beliefs about men and relationships. After spotting and calling me out on some of these deep-down, beliefs, we actually put together an affirmation: that there are abundant caring, capable, dependable men who are attracted to and available to me.

Three simple rules.

Sounds great, right? The problem is that I quickly corrupted this affirmation, tacking on a bunch of other criteria. I thought, hmmm, I have met and know a bunch of guys who are caring, capable and dependable, who are attracted to and available to me, but I’m not really into them. So I need to narrow this down a bit more. Be more specific. So I bolted a bunch of criteria onto this affirmation, and it became:

There are abundant sexy (to me), caring, capable, dependable, trustworthy, active men who are attracted to and available to me.

It has come to my attention that this is just too many things. It’s a little like in leadership, when you see companies try to focus on six things a year, and they end up focusing on nothing. A couple of my friends even mentioned it: hey, that’s too many things to be looking for. You’ve gotta decide which 3 things are really critical to you. That’s all you can really ask someone to be.

This required some emotional and intellectual rigor. And in the process of meeting people, trying relationships on and feeling into what I’m really attracted to, in both friends and romantic partners, I realized something: that I had been creating this laundry list of things by thinking about what I didn’t have or what didn’t work in previous relationships, then listing the opposite of those traits as what I really wanted.

Once I had that insight, it hit me like a bolt of lightning that I was doing it all wrong. not the way to create what you want, to get clear on what you don’t want and move to the opposite of that. Sometime the contrast between what you don’t want clarifies what you want, but more often, it keeps you stuck in the energy of struggle and scarcity. It keeps you stuck in a focus on what doesn’t work.

After years of practice, I’ve now (mostly) released the stressful approach of focusing on what I don’t want. I was only really able to do this after I cultivated the skills of setting good boundaries, speaking my own truth in every situation and identifying red flags that signal a person or relationship is not right for me.

But it still took some emotional discipline to listen to that still, small voice in my spirit closely enough to identify just three characteristics I consistently find attractive. These are the three things I feel so strongly about that I am willing to put a stake in the ground around them, when it comes to deciding who to partner up with, date, hang out with and share a life with. Here are the three I selected.

I want to be in relationship with people who are intentional.

I want to be in relationships with people who are caring.

And I want to be in relationships with people who are resilient.

Intentional carries a connotation of integrity to me. Intentional people are principled and purpose-driven. They are thoughtful and deep. They are active, and take actions with deliberation. They don’t let life happen to them. They move through the world with clarity, wisdom and consciousness, even if they shift the direction of that motion in different seasons of their lives.

Caring people just give a shit. They are engaged and listen, but also are willing to pour themselves into the specific people and causes and projects and work and play that trigger their personal or spiritual mental frames for “Things I care about.” They don’t act bored or like they’re too cool for school about everything. When something is important to them, they act or feel or engage with bold enthusiasm, love and even joy. With care. They think about how their actions or inactions impact others, and they factor that into their calculus of how to act and be in the world.

Resilient people carry a testimony about how they got from the deep, dark nights of the soul to the beautiful vibrance of today. Part of that testimony is the faith that they can handle what may come. I love resilient people because of the triumph of spirit they represent, and because things happen in life, so it’s really game-changing to know that the people in your life have your back and won’t flip out when shit gets real, because they’ve already been there and lived to tell the tale. Resilient people also have a glow of brilliant perspective about them. They don’t major in the minors, because ain’t nobody got time for that when you’ve been on death’s door or lived in misery and came back or got out. And they do major in the majors, like loving the people in their lives and having adventures, and making bold life decisions in the direction of their highest purpose and joy, because they count every day as the precious blessing it is.

Maybe one day I’ll get it down to one. One simple people rule I send out into the vortex and connect with people around. For now, I’ll stick with these three. And I’ll work on developing tolerance and communications skills and appreciation for the varying ways humanity shows up in the form of individual people.

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 3 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

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The Tao of Pugs: Life Lessons from Canine Royalty [30 Day Writing Challenge, Day 2]

Psychologists say that neurons that fire together wire together. They call this neuroplasticity, a recent scientific observation that we create new neural connections based on learning and behavior and habit throughout our whole lives.

The positive psychologists have built something on top of this finding they call self-directed neuroplasticity. This means that not only do neurons that fire together wire together, but that we can actually choose which new neural circuits we create by mindfully selecting what we focus on, what behaviors we engage in and what habits we form.

There is a lot of wisdom out there in the world about how to do this. But sometimes, when your wiring is really off, or when most people around you have the same faulty or outdated wiring as you do, the most helpful thing in the world is to actually see someone in your real, everyday life model a new (to you), graceful, powerful circuit.

And sometimes, like, let’s say, if you’re me, one inspirational model of setting the bar high for life and the people you let in your life, is the model presented by your dogs.

I mean, listen. I have a high bar for myself. Always have. I’ve had an inborn spirit of excellence, which was reinforced and encoded into permanence by my dear old Dad.

In fact, my standards for myself have sometimes been too high. But I haven’t always had super high standards for the people I let into my life. And I haven’t always been good at setting boundaries for my loved ones. This took a lot of rewiring, and my dogs were my model.

“The girls,” as they’re known all over Oakland and the blogosphere, refers collectively to my dogs Aiko and Sumiko. They are ½ Pug and ½ Japanese Chin, and were intentionally bred as a so-called “designer dog” mix by a Bay Area breeder. The breeder sold all the other pups in their litter, but because Aiko and Miko each had an umbilical hernia, the breeder surrendered them at 6 weeks old to the San Francisco SPCA. Which is where I found them, and immediately changed their pound puppy names (Mugsy and Bugsy, Lord have mercy SMH so hard) to something more fitting of their station.

The rest is history.

Speaking of history, for you to understand how my dogs because my gurus, you must first understand the history of their breed. Pugs were specifically bred to be the lapdogs of the Chinese Imperial family. Tragically, they were bred not to be able to walk too far from the laps they were supposed to warm, as the palaces in which they lived were vast and easy to get lost in. So Pugs were bred to have short legs and to resemble the Lion Dogs, aka Fu Dogs, of ancient Chinese myth, which is how they come to have such very short nasal passages. (Side note: This is why most Pugs can barely breathe. Fortunately, the girls have longer legs and are leaner than the average pug, given their mixed-breeding. Side note 2: This is why mutts are great.)

Because Pugs couldn’t go far, each Pug in the palace was historically assigned their own, dedicated eunuch. When the dog wanted something, their wishes quickly became the eunuch’s command.

So, in just the same way as shepherd-breed dogs still need something to herd even if they live in Manhattan, Aiko and Miko still require an extraordinarily high level of customer service, just like their Pug ancestors would have had in the Imperial Palace. Even though Aiko and Miko live in Oakland.

And for the most part, they get it. They get it at home, where I’m trained to feed them at precisely 6 am and 6 pm. Even my son knows what to do. When he walks in for a visit, they run up, he kisses them each on both cheeks, then they walk off. When I get out of the shower, they show up, lick my knees and peace out. On College Avenue, where we walk every morning, they know which people have treats waiting for them. I’ve decided the human brain has a neuron triggered by pugs, because so many people flat-out love them, for no reason at all.

But also, these two get extraordinary customer service because they require it. When Miko wants to be picked up, she walks up to you and lies down. You know what to do. Even people who’ve never met her, somehow know exactly what she wants them to do. And when Miko gets too much attention, Aiko walks up and just nudges her out of the way, somehow ensuring that the hand you were just using to pet Miko lands neatly on her little head.

When they hear a treat bag-sounding noise, they sit on their little butts, as taught, with the expectation that you see them seated and will deliver. As you’ve been trained to do.

They are clear on what they want, in their own minds. And they clearly communicate what they want and need. But here’s the thing: they don’t freak out when they don’t get it. Nor do they get existential or destructive or irate when they don’t get it.

They will let you know. They will speak up themselves and ask for what they want and need. They will howl a little bit or paw at you if they want to be picked up. They will howl a lot if it’s time to eat. But if they don’t get what they want, and it’s not a dire need, they will either walk away and either get over it, fast, or walk away and find it elsewhere. They will find someone else willing to perform to the customer service standards to which they are accustomed.

It’s in their royal lineage. They were bred for this, to know what they deserve and are entitled to, purely by virtue of being who they are. Not because they deserve more than anyone else or are better than anyone else. Just because they are.

So, this is one of the lessons I’ve learned from these precious little mongrels of mine, one of the things they’ve modeled for me. The truth is that we all have a royal lineage. We are all children of God, the Creator of the Universe. That means everything is our inheritance: peace, joy, health, love, prosperity, enthusiasm. Everything. Not because we’re better than anyone else, and not because we deserve it more than anyone else. Because it’s our inheritance. All of ours.

But we forget this sometimes. And we take so much less from the world, from the people around us. And we think this is normal, for a few reasons.

Some of us think it’s normal, because we grew up with very human, mostly good enough parents. And they model for us that we shouldn’t make so much noise or ask for so much, or we should learn to put up with things that really, we shouldn’t. You get what you get and you don’t get upset, they tell us, sometimes about things that actually warrant upset. Our loving parents do this because they, too, were taught this. They, too, believed the lie that there’s only so much to go around, and that something bad will happen if you make too much noise.

Or our well-intentioned, perfectly flawed parents themselves modeled dysfunctional relationships. Dysfunctional relating. They didn’t show us how to set boundaries, so we didn’t see it and we didn’t learn it. This, too, they do because they had their own emotional wounds, or never saw healthy relationships modeled themselves.

But you know, they really were good enough as parents. Good enough that we now can take the opportunity to heal, to be more deliberate, and to rewire these circuits intentionally.

Or sometimes, we think it’s normal to require less of the world, and the people around us, because our culture has normalized the broken and dysfunctional. Have you ever tried to find a love song to listen to that’s not about heartbreak and betrayal or addiction and codependency? Nope. Because healthy interdependence, true partnership, mutual love and respect, careful stewardship of another’s precious soul, the hard work of building a life together? These things are boring, compared with the fireworks of lyrics like “I hate you so much right now.”

A friend once brought her little dog-traumatized boy, about 4 years old, to my house to meet the girls. She hoped the exposure to my very mellow mongrels would help him get comfortable around dogs again. It worked. Thirty minutes into the visit, he was sitting in their bed with them, hugging and squeezing them, and trying to sit on them. He crossed boundaries, for real.

And their response was brilliant and instructive. They didn’t snap at him, bite or even bark. They didn’t go through all kinds of gyrations and dramatics to try to get him to change or act right. But they didn’t take it either. They both just got up and walked away. And they kept walking away every time he tried it. He had to learn that they would only tolerate certain behavior if he wanted to hang out with them. And he did.

There’s one more big life lesson I’ve learned from these precious sugar plums of mine, and it isn’t about the standards to which they hold people, or the standard for behavior they tolerate. It’s about the standards, the conditions if you will, they put on their own happiness.

Exhibit A: The girls in their happy place

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Exhibit B: The girls when they’re calm and just got treats

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Exhibit C: The girls when they want something

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Do you notice anything? These dogs have achieved pro-level equanamity. They feel emotion. They respond to situations, as needed. But they don’t allow the situation to determine their overall state. And they don’t allow situations to cause them to act outside of their normal, regal selves. They are nonplussed, in virtually every situation. Exceptions being squirrels and peanut butter.

They trust and know they will be provided for, and they are. They expect great things, and they get them. They require high thread-count linens and grain-free, Omega-3 fatty acid balanced dog food with raw freeze dried bits, and that’s exactly what comes to them. And if by chance circumstances aren’t precisely to their liking, they stay steady and know that things are always working out for them. And that’s exactly what happens.

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 2 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

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Beautiful, Living Ruins [30 Day Writing Challenge, Day 1]

I spend a lot of time in gyms and fitness studios: dance, yoga and especially spin. Some of my best friends are people I met spinning and burpee-ing. It’s not at all uncommon for me to walk into a studio and run into 7 people I know and love coming out of a class.

As we go to kiss and hug each other in greeting, unspoken protocol is for the sweaty person to issue a disclaimer: “Ugh. I smell bad!” or “I’m so sweaty!”

This is so common that I’ve practiced something like a standup comedy bit, which I say in reply. “I like my people sweaty,” I always say.

It always gets a chuckle. But real talk is: I actually do like my people sweaty. I respect the sweat. I respect the people who wear the sweat. I love them for being the type of person who come in, day and and day out, after a long day at work, and doing what it takes to make the sweat happen. So when I say, “I like my people sweaty,” what I mean is “Hey, girl. I see how hard you’re working every day. I love and respect you for it. You are my kind of person. Don’t let my diva tendencies fool you. Kissing you is more important to me than not getting sweaty.”

I’ve noticed recently that there’s another kind of person I tend to like: people who are vital and alive and happy, and who have also been through traumas and nightmares that would make your blood curdle. People who are, the psychologists would say, seriously resilient.

This is a pattern in my relationships that I’ve noticed very recently. I had met a few people over the past year with whom I really connected. And they all shared a theme. I’d sit down and talk with them on first meeting, and just get a hit that said: “Hmm. I really like this chick. She is cool. We are vibing. She’s got an energy that feels great to me.”

Then, an hour into the meeting, each of these people entrusted me with a story of something they’d gone through. Two of them had been on their deathbeds, recently. Like, the kale that is currently in my vegetable beds was in already in those vegetable beds while these people across the table from me were fighting for their lives. And as I harvest the leaves today, they sit on the spin bike, or take meetings with me, or travel the world with me.

Two more had been through intense betrayals in their marriages, followed by rejection and just plain meanness and mayhem.

Another shared with me the day-in and day-out horrors of caring for an aging husband as he leaves us, slipping into incoherence and incontinence, all while she also raises their children and working a full time job. Still another shared a mental health diagnosis from decades ago, notwithstanding which he’s built an incredibly rich, healthy, love-filled, fulfilled life.

And these people are out here, in the world, after the event they thought would do them entirely in. They are living and thriving. Loving people and loving life.

I used to think it was coincidence that I met so many people like this. Now I know the truth, which is that there are medical miracles and spiritual triumphs happening all around us all the time. Miracles that we have no idea are taking place unless and until we take a moment to connect with people, deeply.

I also know the truth that like attracts like. And that one of my special talents is helping people feel safe and uplifted as they share kind of scary stuff they’ve been through. As a result, in the same way that a biased researcher will make sure they find what they’re looking for, I tend to find these dark nights of the soul the people I meet have been through. And survived. And thrived in spite of. And been developed by.

Calling this a talent is not the right word, though. It’s more like what it says in the Bible, that deep calls unto deep.

Because I’ve been through some stuff, too. It may be all cashmere cardis, pugs, metallic sandals and acquired startups at my house now. But the foundation of that life is my soul. And this soul, my soul, was honed in the fire of my brother’s 25-year prison sentence, a gut-wrenching custody drama, two divorces, near-bankruptcy, teenaged motherhood and a series of childhood traumas and abuses.

Marianne Williamson, writing of romantic relationships, once said something that stuck with me ever since. She said that we attract people in at the level of our own bullshit. This is the truest story ever told.

So it’s been fascinating and frankly, delightful, to observe the leveling up of the people I attract into my life, over time. I see it as evidence of my own growth. It’s not that the people I used to attract in were terrible and the people in my life now are perfect. It’s more that the people I used to attract in and get and stay in very close relationship with were married to and desperately holding onto their wounds, their dysfunctions and their struggles.

My second husband flat-out broke it down for me once. He said, “Tara, the thing about you is that you’re a fixer. The problem is, that quality about you attracts people who need fixing. Including me. You have to watch out for that.”

Listen, all of God’s children have issues. And, to give myself a little credit where it’s due, I definitely meet my old type of person still, on occasion. But Wise Adult Tara makes Wise Adult Decisions about not getting involved with them. And she certainly watches for red flags that her fixing tendencies are being triggered. Wise Adult Tara has a rule and mantra about this: “I do not intervene between people and the natural consequences of their behavior.” This is a helpful, helpful rule. You are welcome to borrow it. 😀

But the people who come into my life regularly these days? I think of them as gorgeous, vital, thriving ruins. Walking phoenixes. People who should have been out for the count, for real for real, as the kids would say. And who rejected that. Who were victorious. Who have chosen to be victors, not victims.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Croatia the last couple of years. I’m sure I’ll write much more about that in future posts. It’s the most gorgeous place on earth, really. But when people ask me for the #1 reason I love it there, I tell them: it’s the living ruins.

In the coastal Croatian town of Split, 1700 years ago the Roman Emperor Diocletian built his retirement palace out of limestone, a few football fields long. And it’s still there, in roughly the same dimensions as it always was. But here’s the rub: in Split and elsewhere in Croatia, these “ruins” are vibrant and alive. Unlike anywhere else, where the ruins reek of decay and the sadness of long dead civilizations, the Croatians somehow got it into their minds that it was okay to build their downtowns right inside these ruins.

So Diocletian’s Palace is a limestone ruin that you can get a tour guide to walk you through, just like at the Coliseum in Rome. But in the Palace, you can also eat at a restaurant inside it, run your hand over the back of the 3rd century Sphinxes Diocletian left lying about, or lounge about on the steps in the evenings and sing along to old Prince songs with the locals. People live in apartments inside the Palace, work in banks in the Palace, go to the movies in the palace and worship in churches in the Palace.

These people have turned this structure, which should by all accounts and customs be a dead, destroyed ruin, into a thriving, vital center of life. A vital ruin. Just like the people I love and am proud to be attracting into my world. Just like me.

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 1 (!) of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

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Monk Mode: How and Why I Gave Up the State of Distractedness for Lent

I sweat a lot. After 20+ years of working out 5 or more days a week, my body detects nearly any degree of temperature increase as a signal of an impending workout. This makes for lots of interestingly sweaty moments.

As a result, on top of my yoga mat, I use an absorbent rug to give my hands some traction. The rug I’m using these days has a bunch of non-stick material in the spots where your hands and feet most commonly go, in the form of mantras and phrases from the lululemon manifesto.

Most of them are nice little notes with reminders to sweat (on it!), breathe and eat lots of veg.

But one, in particular, has been on my mind a lot recently, and it goes a little something like this:
“that which matters the most should never give way to that which matters the least.”

A number of you have reached out to ask what I’m working on. What’s shareable at this point is that I’m writing a book and ramping up to launch a business. Yes, at the same time.

But when Lent rolled around a few weeks back, I was in the midst of interviewing candidates for the community farm I helm the Board of, attending family weddings, facilitating a Retreat, and hosting an Alice in Wonderland themed birthday party at my home for a dear friend. I was meeting with sometimes 2 or 3 other entrepreneurs, colleagues and investors every day of the workweek.

I calculated that I was fielding an average of 6 invitations for meetings, every single day, and this doesn’t even include the never-ending flow of brunch invites. So much brunch is happening, guys. So much brunch.

All marvelous things. But, despite having recently quit the best job ever, I was busy. Too busy, even, to decide what to give up for Lent. I Googled what Lent is really for. It’s supposed to turn our focus back toward God (the most important thing), purify us, and prepare us for celebrating Easter. I decided that giving up food or Facebook or something wouldn’t really fit the bill, for me – I don’t really struggle with them. I’d actually sort of decided that I was too busy to figure this out, and was just going to honor Easter which a big brunch and keep it moving.

After a 6-day run at breakneck intensity, in which I got no writing done, I was on the yoga mat, de-chaosing my nervous system to onramp back into writing.I looked down, saw those words, and it became crystal clear that there was something I needed to give up for Lent this year: distractedness.

I know that phrasing is awkward, but it is also precisely accurate. At 40 years old, I know by now that you can’t actually give up distraction. There’s lots you can do to manage incoming distractions, but life happens, people you love will need you, and trying to stop the world from turning and events from happening is a little like trying to stop the ocean from creating new waves.

It’s a losing battle.

What you do have control of—utter control of, actually—is the way you allow your mental state, your calendar and your priorities to respond to the incoming flow of distractions.

I realized that I had allowed my mental state to shift from flow and focused creation mode to meeting mode or executive mode, which is what I’m wired for. Normally, taking meetings and nurturing relationships are the cornerstones of my career. But taking all those meetings during this critical, micro-season for my book and my business was keeping me from the creation projects that must happen right now for the longer-term vision to come to life.

Ultimately, I decided to give up the state of distractedness from my mission-critical creation projects for Lent. Here are the exact steps I took:

1. I created a decision rubric. I worked through a detailed outline and strategic action plan for the book and my company launch, and created a decision rule: for 60 days (a long Lent, certainly), my decision rule for whether I’ll take a meeting is based on whether it furthers the book (including its marketing and promotions) or the launch of the business.

Meeting with prospective clients, it might surprise you, does not fall into the “meetings I’ll take” side of the rubric. That’s a lot of what I’d been doing, and I’ve found that most prospective clients are urgent enough that it’s difficult to extract from the conversation, and that most of the great prospective clients for my business are so engaged that one conversation snowballs into 5 meetings and then poof! a week of writing is gone. I spent the first few days still taking meetings that had long been calendared, but am now well into the delirium of uninterrupted, deep work and thought time.

2. I communicated it directly, unabashedly and consistently. Where I live and work, things get done, built, created, started via relationship, conversation and action. My bias is toward yes, toward connecting and toward action. I’ve long cultivated that. And people know it, which is why the calls and emails come in.

I love that about myself, and my circle.

I got some help from my team in clearing everything I could from my calendar. And I also simply started fielding incoming meeting requests – even some from friends! – with some version of this:

Hey – I would love to connect soon. Here’s the deal. I’m in Monk Mode1 right now, working on my book and business. You know I love to connect with people, and I was finding that it was really distracting me from the things I need to get done right now. Do you mind if I reach back out in April or May to set something up? Thanks so much for understanding!

I’ve gotten maybe one response that gave away some irritation. I’ve gotten about 2 dozen that have expressed some form of admiration, appreciation or even flat-out jealousy. So far, verbatim, I’ve gotten: “I love that!”, “I admire that”, “I admire your directness”, “I want to do Monk Mode!!”, and so on.

It is a luxury to be able to focus most of your time and bandwidth on the projects you’ve always wanted to work on. Giving up distractedness is a mindset management move, not only a time management move. If you feel like you’d love to do Monk Mode, but could never get that much control over your own time, I’d challenge you to look at your calendar, look at what you do with your unbooked moments and get real about how you could devote more of your mental bandwidth to the projects or people you say you care about.

3. I observed my internal resistance without judgment. My nervous system is wired for a fast pace and for a lot of interpersonal interaction. So I definitely have experienced some internal resistance to Monk Mode, as luxurious as it really is. This mostly comes up in the following forms:

  • saying yes to invitations and projects, especially exciting ones
  • falling prey to calendar creep, that thing where you agree to do one 30-minute call and end up booking 6 hours of meetings that day, and
  • fantasizing about elaborate mental or logistical “prerequisites” to going into Monk Mode, like thinking about going away to my favorite retreat Ranch.

I’ve been treating these things the same way you’d treat your wayward mind during meditation: noticing the drift, and softly releasing it. This is a course of constant course-correction. I’m not even really tempted to be harsh with myself on this point, because (a) harshness with self never got anyone anywhere, and (b) it’s precisely my normal nervous system wiring that makes me an effective leader and entrepreneur and marketer and speaker and thinker.

This is just a season in which I can’t give way to that tendency to run on a constantly booked calendar. I’m allowing myself to down-regulate on my nervous system’s own natural timetable, just constantly reminding myself to say no, to keep the calendar clear, and to enjoy this experience.

Here’s what has happened in my world since going into Monk Mode: compounding energy, clarity and creativity. When I went into Monk Mode it was a lot like that financial strategy of paying yourself first, but with my time and my energy. And in the same way paying yourself first creates compounding interest on top of interest over time, I found myself finding new stores of energy, getting clear on things that had been foggy, then even clearer on more things, fast, and finding creative solutions to challenges that had been long stuck in my mental parking lot of issues to work out.

Flow has become my friend. Productivity, too. I’ve made about as much progress on my two important projects in the last 14 days as I had in the first 6 weeks of the year.

The projects I’m working on will bring to the fullest expression and impact the work I was put on this planet to do. I know that. They are the most important thing. So giving up distractedness from those projects for Lent seems more appropriate, in many ways, than giving up, Facebook or, well, all of those brunches.

TL; DR: Going into Monk Mode will churn up all sorts of creativity, energy, productivity and flow for your most important projects. Don’t let your most important things give way to anything else.

1. Hat tip to Jim Collins – I borrowed the phrase “Monk Mode” from a passing comment he made in the intro to Good to Great.

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How to Have a Post-Traumatic Breakthrough

There are only two kinds of people in this world: those who have been through a life-changing traumatic experience, and those who will go through one in the future. If you are a living, human being, you will experience sickness, deaths of loved ones, accidents, and all manner of ups and downs someday.

Mark Epstein calls this The Trauma of Everyday Life.

Ask the happiest, most well-adjusted, most successful or most alive person you know—that friend or mentor who seems to have it all together, who seems to sail through life.

Ask them if they’ve ever had a traumatic experience.

You might be surprised. You’ll hear stories of being orphaned, diseases, divorces, bankruptcies, car accidents and natural disasters. You might even hear stories far beyond the “everyday” traumas we all experience: stories of child abuse, violence, war and genocide.

Of course, if you ask the most dysfunctional, disgruntled, misanthropic person you know about their experience of trauma earlier in life, they’ll have similar stories.

So what makes the difference? How can you experience post-traumatic breakthroughs instead of hardening your heart, spirit and life around your traumas?

Some say the key is to experiencing post-traumatic growth is to tell a new story about your trauma. I agree that this is the first step of the process, but I believe it’s only the first step.

I’ve learned that post-traumatic breakthroughs happen when we allow the experience to make us into something new, something different than we were before. Something much less perfect, much more real, more nuanced, stronger and more sensitive. Something which has new capabilities and beauty, less fear and frivolity.

There is tons of precedent for this trauma-sparked transformation in art and in science:

  • There’s the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which broken pieces of pottery are rejoined with gold, creating in pieces more cherished than the originals ever were.
  • There are self-healed quartz crystals. After being damaged in the ground, these gems grow hundreds of new crystals over the damaged area, creating wild new inner landscapes, complexity and brilliance.
  • Then there’s David Bowie, whose magically wonky eyes were not actually different in color. His pal George Underwood punched him in the eye when they were teens. From that day forward, Bowie’s right pupil was paralyzed in the open condition, making it look like one eye was blue, and the other black. Early on, Bowie later recounted, he felt embarrassed at the imperfection. But later in life, he thanked his childhood friend and lifelong collaborator for the injury and the career-enhancing “mystique” his imperfect, asymmetrical look created.

I’ve found three common threads in basically every post-traumatic breakthrough story I’ve heard (or lived). For good measure, I’ll phrase them in terms of what you must do if you want to engineer your own post-traumatic breakthrough.

1. Reframe the situation, and tell a new story. I recently read a blog post where the writer took great issue with the sentiment that things happen for a reason. He railed at this concept, on grounds that it makes the victims of life’s terrible, traumatic events feel guilty or somehow at fault when they can’t find that meaning.

And he’s right: really bad things happen to good people all the time. It’s not their fault if they can’t find any meaning to make out of it. But there’s nothing wrong with seeking meaning or perspective out of bad things that happen in your life. Why limit your life to just having bad things happen and feeling terrible about it, if you are open to finding inner development or new perspectives instead?

Martha Beck has an exercise where she asks readers to think of their most cherished experiences or favorite things in life, and then reflect back on how they came to have them – including at least one “bad” thing that happened along the journey.

This “reframing” is a skill we can cultivate and use anytime we want, after any trauma, small scale or large.

Two of my dear friends lost their parents – one her mother, the other her father – in very traumatic early-life experiences. They are two of the best wives and mothers I know, and I know their families agree with that.

Coincidental? Maybe. But I know that my friends cherish their children and relish the moments of their lives with a lighthearted, reverent gusto I’ve rarely seen, even among other great parents I know. They live their lives along a narrative of joy, delight and engagement with their children. This, in the wake of circumstances that could easily and justifiably have cemented around mourning and devastation.

I’m not suggesting that every trauma is just as easy to recover from as every other trauma, or that if someone doesn’t have a breakthrough that’s their fault or they’re doing it wrong. Everyone has a path and a process, and sometimes it’s not pretty – sometimes it never gets pretty. But if you are open to – or committed to – finding or creating a post-traumatic breakthrough, you must search for new meaning in the old trauma story.

2. Be transformed. I watched a film recently in which someone who had witnessed a friend’s murder expressed what many of us feel after even much “lesser” traumas, wondering aloud if she would ever be the same person she was before.

The answer is no. Experiencing the end of the world as you know it equals experiencing the end of the you you once were.

When it comes to finding or creating post-traumatic breakthroughs, the single most important element of the new story you seek to live out is the character you cast for yourself in in that story. Specifically: will your role be defined as the person to whom this terrible thing happened? e.g.,: Orphan. Sick. Loser of jobs. Loser – period. Bankrupt. Divorced.

Or, in this new story, will the traumatic experience be a factual circumstance, a contextual element, that is helpful in understanding the character you have become, will become, are becoming, are now?

e.g.,: Mom of the Year, influenced by having lost her mother early on. Visionary leader of your own company or life, after recovering from years of victimization, losing jobs or co-dependency. Lover of life and of people, powered by compassion, after deep healing from a childhood of disconnection and abuse. Responsible money manager, lessons learned from the recession and subsequent fallout.

To get to your post-traumatic breakthrough, you must pick a path: who do you want to be?

3. Practice your new identity. This is not magical thinking. Okay, maybe a little bit – there is some willful magic in deciding you will not be defined by something that could very well have been the end of you, literally or otherwise. After the magic, though, comes the work. Whether the trauma you’re healing from is a life disaster you had a hand in creating, or some heinous act of humanity, going from trauma to breakthrough requires work.

The power of surrendering to the transformational power of trauma, and naming your new character in the new, breakthrough story of your life, is that implicit in this story is clear guidance and direction as to what you need to do. Character and story necessarily imply context, landscape, ability. What skills and capabilities will you need to become this character? What resources and relationships will you need?

That work could be internal: therapy, meditation, belief rehabilitation, and the like. It could be developing interpersonal skills to manage your grief, overcome your struggles with confidence or survive broken family dynamics. It could be external: a change of place, learning how to do something new professionally, creating powerful, healthy relationships with mentors or supportive friends.

The real power of claiming a new character in your new, post-traumatic story is that it points you to the who/what/where/why of your breakthrough, so that you can begin to create the capabilities and context for it to come to life.

Closing Caveats.

My final caveat is that you might find this identity shift to be very hard, or very scary. This is normal – it takes courage to release elements of the way you’ve always seen or described yourself, even though they may be dysfunctional or limiting. When you pick an identity different from what you’re currently living into, you will be forced to take some behaviors and even conversations that you have engaged with for decades off the table.

No matter how justified your grievance may be, if you keep telling that old story, you’ll block your breakthrough.

In no way does it diminish or minimize the traumas of your life to seek meaning. Neither does it disrespect what you’ve been through to recast your traumas as circumstances—context that adds layers of beauty, nuance, sadness and strength to your fully glorious, fully powerful being.

This is true whether your personal trauma is a lifetime of criticism from the people you love, or a wartime experience of death and destruction.

One of our most powerful capabilities as humans is that we can search the darkest nooks and crannies somehow extract something good, something useful, something meaningful or beautiful. Practice conducting this search in the wake of your own traumas, and what you’ll find one day is a new version of your beautifully broken self.

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3 Things That Happen to Your Life When You Stop Taking Things Personally

I have a deep relationship with Serena Williams. The fact that this relationship exists entirely in my head is neither here nor there. One time, I watched a video of her working out right before I went to a high intensity interval training session. Watching myself in the mirror the whole class, I couldn’t help but feel like my workout looked just like her workout. I ended up so sore I couldn’t parallel park for a week.

source: si.com

With that context, it should come as no surprise that I’m a little obsessed with the Sports Illustrated cover that recently came out commemorating Serena’s selection as the 2015 Sportsperson of the Year. Beyond the fact that it’s gorgeous and that I have a full-time seat on Team Serena, there’s something I love about her declaration of victory after a playing season that, by all accounts, was mixed. So much success, mashed up with injury, media tomfoolery and that painful loss.

Life is always, only that: wins and losses, mixed together. Interpretation, the way we choose to reverse engineer our personal stories, is everything. I recently produced a retreat attended by successful professional women, all of whom hold enviable job titles. When I asked them to tell me their career stories, many of them chose to retell their timelines in a way that disproportionately emphasized their losses, spinning their stories through the lens of personal failures, emotional wounds, bad breaks and times they made bad decisions.

Not only did my retreat friends recall negative events much more intensely, they also tended to take “bad” things and losses very personally. Seeing so much of this style of interpretation come up at the retreat inspired me to share The Four Agreements – four beliefs author Don Miguel Ruiz suggests we adopt to release an enormous amount of suffering and live happier, bolder, more grounded lives.

While all four agreements are worthy of attention, the Second Agreement is a big one: Don’t take anything personally.

Whatever happens around you, don’t take it personally… Nothing other people do is because of you. It is because of themselves. All people live in their own dream, in their own mind; they are in a completely different world from the one we live in. When we take something personally, we make the assumption that they know what is in our world, and we try to impose our world on their world.

This brings us back to Ms. Williams. You can argue about whether she is the Greatest Athlete of All Time, if you’d like, but one thing you can’t dispute is that she is a stellar model for what happens to your life when you stop taking things personally.

Practicing not taking things personally is a challenge, but the upside of rewiring the way you see almost everything others do as being about them (vs. you) is enormous. Let’s use Serena’s recent life and interviews as Exhibit A. Here are just a few of the changes you can expect to see in your life when you stop taking things personally:

1. You become the ruler of your own belief system. See, when you take the things other people say personally, you hand over control of the steering wheel of your emotions and your life to another person: another person who is human, flawed, and dealing with their own emotional wounds and flawed belief systems.

When she announced her return to the Indian Wells tournament, after 15 years of boycotting the event where she and her sister were the victim of racial insults as teens, she wrote in an essay in Time: “There are some who say I should never go back. There are others who say I should’ve returned years ago. I’m just following my heart on this one.”

And when journalists asked her about the pressure to win Slam after Slam, she replied with a clear, internal compass, respectfully declining to take that pressure on as her own. The New Yorker quoted her before the Open as saying, “That’s the beauty of my career. I don’t need to do anything at all. Everything I do from this day forward is a bonus. Actually, from yesterday. It doesn’t matter. Everything for me is just extra.”

When you stop taking things personally, you become the sovereign ruler of your emotions and your actions – regardless of what others think or expect of you. If you can take it to expert level, you can be the boss of yourself and your life – regardless of external pressures or circumstances.

2. You learn who you really are, and what you’re really about. When you don’t take other people’s opinions, actions and words about you personally, you will slowly but surely learn what you really care about, what you want to do, what makes you happy and unhappy, and what your own vision for your life is. You give up the outdated storylines from your family, friends, coworkers, even your childhood that explain why you are a certain way or have never been able to overcome a certain thing, and those limitations disappear. You develop an independent moral compass and vision for your life, and your decisions become clearer, faster. You’ll live more boldly, and make moves that work for you and your personal value system, with much less regret.

Serena is clear on why she does what she does:

She plays for the love of the game: “I’m fortunate to be at a point in my career where I have nothing to prove. I’m still as driven as ever, but the ride is a little easier. I play for the love of the game.”

She plays for the next generation: ‘‘‘I play for me,’’ Serena told me, ‘‘but I also play and represent something much greater than me. I embrace that. I love that. I want that.’’’

She returned to Indian Wells driven by faith and forgiveness: “I was brought up to forgive people,” Serena says, “and I felt that I wasn’t doing what I was taught.”

And she’s equally clear on what she’s not motivated by, even though everyone around her might expect her to be. ‘‘You don’t understand me,’’ Serena responded to a New York Times reporter’s inquiry about how badly she wanted the 22 Grand Slam milestone. ‘‘I’m just about winning. It’s not about getting 22 Grand Slams.”

When you stop taking things personally, you get to write your own story. If someone else wants to tell a story about you, you either correct them or let them have their own story about you. But you don’t internalize it or take it on – you become impervious to their story, their poison, their issues.

3. You connect MORE deeply with others, not less. When I shared the Second Agreement with my friends at the retreat, one woman raised her hand and asked a fair question: “What about the good things? When people say nice, loving things to me, if I don’t take those things personally, won’t it impair my relationships?”

I believe it’s almost more important that you don’t take the positive things people say and do to you personally than the critical things they send your way. Why? Because the positive things other people say still come from a place of their dreams, beliefs, goals and agreements. Allowing them to be in control of your emotions, even your positive emotions, is still putting your emotional state into someone else’s hands.

When you practice understanding that nothing anyone else says or does is actually about you, you begin to have more compassion for the wounds that people who say or do unkind things toward you are experiencing. You become more able to connect with people from a place of mutual love, respect and a commitment to engaging in relationships that reflect the friend, lover, family member and professional you want to be in this life vs. coming from a place of quid pro quo, caretaking, obligation and name-calling. Relationships built on that foundation are deep, strong and healthy.

In talking about her relationship with one-time #1 rival and bff Serena Williams, Caroline Wozniacki told Vogue that following her broken engagement, “She wasn’t pitying me, like a lot of people were. I mean, it’s not like anyone died. I was in shock, but she was really helpful because she had been through it before. She didn’t sugarcoat it, and she didn’t look down on me. She was really there for me when I needed her the most, and that’s why I think our friendship is so strong now.”

Taking things personally is a massive limitation. It gradually erodes at your clarity and your boldness until you force your life into this little shape that no one else will find objectionable. Release the tendency to take things personally. Doing so is transformative, and will put you back on the throne of your emotions and your actions. Ask Queen Serena.

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Why I Just Quit the Best Job I Ever Had

The day we announced that MyFitnessPal had been acquired by Under Armour was the day the headhunters started calling. “We’re looking for a CMO who loves dogs,” the first recruiter said, “and your name came up.” After expressing how impressed I was with her bizarrely specific (and accurate) database fields, I turned her away – and have politely declined the advances of dozens of her colleagues since.

Truth is, I was not then and am not now in the market for a new job. But I wasn’t in the market for a job when I took the role of VP of Marketing for MyFitnessPal, either. I somehow ended up with the Actual Best Job in the World anyway.

And last week was my last week in it.

About two weeks ago, I sent out a note to all hands announcing that I had decided to leave my job as the VP of Marketing for MyFitnessPal and Under Armour Connected Fitness. I’ve spent most of the time since processing the event with people, sharing some insights into my decision process when asked. Many were fascinated by my decision. I, in turn, was fascinated by the recurring themes I spotted in their reactions.

Early on, it became clear that these conversations would be a Rorschach test of sorts, surfacing how the other party thinks and feels about work and career. One person began celebrating what he called my “retirement.” Another said, “I was able to quit a job I hated once, and it was awesome.” (Fantastic, I said, but that wasn’t my situation.) Yet another person clapped me on the back and proclaimed my “freedom” from a bondage which was a part of her conception of work, but not mine.

The conception of work as bondage actually came up a lot Some of the wealthiest people I know, people who can never even spend all the money they have, confessed to being desperately jealous of my move and “wishing” they could do the same. They shared how trapped they felt by what it would look like if they made a move, or by old, outdated pinkie swears to stay in situations that no longer serve them. It was a little tragic.

But that was their story. Not mine.

The Actual Best Job Ever. My job was delightful and liberating, the vast majority of the time. I was able to build a marketing team and programs from scratch where none had existed before, hiring some of my best friends to create what I believe is one of the smartest, leanest, most creative and most productive marketing teams in tech. We were able to collaborate deeply across the company, with Product, Engineering, Biz Dev, International, even Operations, to do amazing feats like:

  • growing from 45 million users to over 100 million in 18 months
  • growing a blog from launch to over 10 million uniques a month, and
  • driving a 22% increase in user engagement just from content marketing (with a heavy dollop of product and engineering).

In less than two years, we went from an $18 million first round of funding to being acquired for a smidge under half a billion dollars. Bringing 100% of myself to work was valued, requested and honored, from both above and below on the org chart. I evolved as a leader, as an executive, as a marketer and as a thinker. My job sent me to beautiful places to learn and contribute to deeply engaging projects: New York, Copenhagen, and the South of France – twice. We had a deep allowance for monthly fitness classes, which I still somehow exceeded every month. We had beautiful, beautiful catered lunches every day in a lovely San Francisco office nine miles from my home.

My team sent me pug gifs regularly. Pug gifs, ya’ll.

pugs-kissing

Exhibit A.

Post-MyFitnessPal, my belief in the goodness of people is deeper and more unshakable than before. I witnessed  an amazing team of people who could work anywhere in Silicon Valley coalesce around a singular mission to make it easier to live a healthy life. And I was able to participate at the earliest stages of forming executive team, designing a company culture, and scaling a business strategy that is both successful and transformational in its beneficial impact on humanity.

So what happened?

What happened was exactly what was supposed to happen. Seasons change. Startups exit. (If they’re doing it right.) The organization and its culture have continued to evolve. The brief – the problems the business exists to solve – is evolving.

As they do. As they should.

The Power of Purpose. When I took this job, I had my own business. I loved my business, and my clients – in fact, MyFitnessPal was one of them. I ultimately made the decision to shutter my business and take this job because I was crystal clear on my purpose in the world, which is to use business a force for healing, expanding and driving transformation in the lives of as many people as possible. This job allowed me to live and work “on purpose” in a big way, for a season, and taking it was one of the best decisions I have ever made.

But as formative and definitive a role as this one was in my life, my career, my head and my heart, my career and work identity is tied to my purpose, not to any given job or project or company. Having a clear understanding of my purpose has given me a detection system that alerts me to when a given season of my career is complete, and a divining rod that points with clarity to what steps to take, what opportunities to explore, what projects to work on and what people to work with next. My original plan was to stay at MyFitnessPal until we had an exit – IPO or acquisition – and that has happened. My job here is done, and my purpose detection system is pointing me in a different direction. It might sound reductive, but it’s really as simple as that.

My career-long commitment to staying clear on my purpose and staying committed to doing work that is “on purpose” has helped me navigate with confidence and flow through a series of career moves that seemed bizarre to other people, but felt like the just-right thing to do at the time. And each of the moves I’ve made since getting and staying on purpose has proved to be consistently onward and upward in terms of impact, prosperity and success – by nearly all reasonable objective and personal metrics.

(Don’t take my word for it – take a look at my story in this Huffington Post piece, and see for yourself.)

Making Myself Available for More Miracles. If you clicked through, you know what I know, which is that my career – my whole life, really – has been a series of miracles. I’ve built businesses and brands and teams with and for the best of them. The actual best. For that journey, for those blessed, miraculous opportunities and for the internal and external resources that came together for me to be able to live them out, I am deeply grateful.

But I’m also reminded of the Bible story where Jesus turned water into wine. The very first thing he did was demand that someone bring him empty vessels, because the miraculous can’t be done where there’s no room for it.

My personal career pattern has been to start working to build out my own vision, then  consistently get distracted and derailed by these beautiful, blessed opportunities to work on other people’s dreams. Now that my “brief” at MyFitnessPal is complete, my purpose navigation system has alerted me that it’s time to build out my own vision – my own dream. It’s time to become an available vessel. So that’s what I’m doing.

As always happens, making myself available has already opened up literally dozens of “on purpose” possibilities. I’m writing a book. I’m developing a think tank and consortium of businesses, entrepreneurs and marketers who serve The Transformational Consumer, across verticals and industries, so we can innovate and collaborate more powerfully and more profitably. I’m producing a series of transformational workshops, conferences, retreats and experiences. More to come – on all of that.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up the one theme almost every person I discussed this move with brought up: fear. “Aren’t you afraid of – fill in the blank with [leaving money on the table] [missing out on the next phase] [not taking another job while the offers are flooding in], etc. and so forth?” Money is an important instrument for making things happen in this world. But money is one of those things that is a fantastic servant, and a terrible master. It’s dangerous to climb into the bottomless pit of “never enough”. Using money as the primary driver for your career moves, vs. purpose or impact or even team, is a path down which many unfulfilled folks have walked. I reject that path.

There’s always some fear and some nervousness that comes with taking a bold new path or “daring greatly,” as Brene Brown might call it. But I’ve had a lot of experiences, at this point in my life where I stepped out there, took a very well-calculated risk, and it worked out exceedingly beyond what I might ever have imagined.  My experience has been that the more I’ve closed the gap between my work and my purpose, the more successful my endeavors have been – financially and in every other way.

In Liz Gilbert’s latest book, Big Magic, she recalls having the realization that fear and creativity tend to show up hand in hand. Gilbert shares a note she wrote to fear, informing the emotion that it is allowed to come on this adventure of a creative life journey that she’s embarking upon. But then she quickly puts fear on notice that it never gets to read the roadmap, never gets to navigate, never gets to make a decision about where to go or what to do – it just gets to come along for the ride.

For me, purpose is the driving force behind the courage to step out and do what I believe I’m here for, and the force that sweetly, but firmly, sets fear in the way back seat on my life’s adventure. Steven Covey said it well: “You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, non-apologetically—to say ‘no’ to other things. And the way to do that is by having a bigger ‘yes’ burning inside.”

NOTE: Want to stay up on what I’m working on? Join my mailing list at www.taranicholle.com – just enter your name and email into the signup form at the top of this page!

NOTE #2: My next adventure is the Strategic Sabbatical, November 3rd through 7th in Napa Valley. I regularly follow this week-long retreat strategy to ground myself and create flow when I’m in transition or kicking off new business or creative projects.

lt will de-chaos your nervous system, induce clarity as as to your purpose and plan, and trigger breakthroughs, action and momentum on the career transitions or business projects you care about the most. Interested? Come with: http://strategicsabbatical.com/