Brilliant One:

Some days, I feel like a stand-up comic practicing a bit.

I tell the same stories to different people, something we humans do to make meaning out of the events of our lives and to connect with one another in the process. Sometimes, I optimize these stories for laughs.

Other times I mess with the stories, optimizing them for mindset shifting effect. I watch how they land, emphasize this point to him or share that silly detail to her, titrating the whole thing for an optimal level of impact. These days, this is a big part of my work. Stories can be incredibly transformational. If you tell them right, they are more powerful teaching tools than any list of bullet points will ever be.

But I can reflect on a time in my life when I frequently told the same story over and over with a singular intention in mind: the desire to feel understood.

On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel like the people around you understand you and your experience—especially when you’ve had something happen that was intense for you, but might not be fully appreciated by those around you. It’s also tempting to want to feel understood when you’ve done something you know won’t be popular or easily comprehended by those around you, but you had what you felt was good reason.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I still share the thoughts underlying my big decisions with my vendors, partners, loved ones and teammates. Mostly I do this to enrich our collaboration. When they know how I thought about a question or arrived at its answer—especially when my decisions are surprising or counterintuitive—it boosts our ability to work and play together with aligned focus and intention.

Also, I can’t always see every angle or consider every input on an issue. Sharing what’s happening behind the scenes of my thinking allows the geniuses I live and work with to help me see things I would otherwise have missed. And that levels all of us up.

But here’s the real deal: one of my top priorities when I free-write every morning is to offload anything that feels like a grudge or grievance. (If I let them grow, they almost always turn into creative blocks. So I dump them on the page and leave them there.) About a year ago, I noticed a pattern: when I tracked these baby grudges to their root, almost all of them started when I felt misunderstood. This is especially true for this fact pattern:

• I have a conversation with someone where they say something about what I must be thinking or feeling
• They’re wrong about my thoughts or feelings
• The context is so trivial it doesn’t make sense for me to try to correct them, or I do correct them and they still don’t seem to get it
• I’m irritated
• The next day, I’m still irritated
• I write it out.

If you know me, you know that I practice the fine art of MYOB (minding my own bizness). And it is not my business to persuade, cajole or manipulate anyone else into understanding me. That’s why, along my personal growth journey, I’ve chosen instead to practice releasing the need to feel understood.

Follow me here:

1. Taking things personally is the #1 source of drama between humans.
2. Being able to move through life independently of the opinions of other people is the #1 liberation lever from that drama.
3. When you expect others to understand you and they don’t, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll take that personally and get in your feelings/what the kids might call ‘butthurt’.
4. No one—not even the people who love you unconditionally—can fully understand you 100% of the time, even if they try very hard. Because no one else is you. No one else has the exact mix of experiences, beliefs and talents you do. No one has the relationship with your Inner Being, Source and spirit that you do. No one has your intuition or your calling. No one has learned exactly what you’ve learned about life.

So when you’re seeking to be understood, you’re asking someone to do the impossible. And you’re setting yourself up for unnecessary interpersonal drama and dissatisfaction.

And in the effort to feel understood, you may find yourself practicing the energy of a struggle story. (This is the opposite of the energy you want to dwell in if you want to feel good.) Very few of our unwanted emotions truly arise from things that happened in the past. They arise from our continued rehearsing and regurgitating of those experiences and feelings.

When you try to “fix” someone’s misunderstanding of you, you may actually feel good about your decision but want others to *get* why you made it. To that end, you have to share all the things that happened to you when you were a kid or earlier in your career that you’re trying to avoid repeating with your decision. In other cases, you might actually feel bad even though others think you should feel good. But you want to feel justified in feeling bad, so you pull out your struggle portfolio and start showing-and-telling.

Real talk: all of us love to feel held, heard, seen and understood. We all do. But I want to open up the possibility that you can feel held, heard and seen by people in your life, even when they do not fully understand you or the reasons why you do the things you do. In fact, you can feel and be approved of and loved by people who activelydisagree with your decisions. Don’t believe me? Think about the times you extend affection and approval to others, even when you don’t 100% understand or agree with them.

The desire to feel understood is often just a pretext for the need for approval or the need to be right. Both of these are just different ways of asking permission to make the moves and steps and decisions you want to make. And if you’re waiting on approval, validation or permission, you’re watering down the edge you have access to: the pure power that comes from moving forward in life based on the Infinite Intelligence that flows through you in the form of inspiration and resonance.

Three things happen when you stop seeking to be understood, and release the inner roadblock of feeling misunderstood:

1. You begin to move through life much more freely and easily.
2. Your interpersonal drama decreases.
3. Your joy and speed of personal expansion increases.

Oh and one more big thing: your relationships get better. All of them. Way better.

See, when you practice your way out of needing to feel understood all the time, you do everyone around you a massive favor: you take them off the hook for your feelings. This feels weird at first, especially if you have a history of being an approval seeker or an achievement junkie.

But over time, you learn to take great care of the most important relationships in your life: the relationship between you and you (which is the same as your relationship with your Source).

Over time, you learn how to feel good regardless of whether you feel misunderstood or not. And you learn skills for returning to that good feeling whenever you want to or need to. You learn how to build on that momentum, over time, so you can go from scattershot moments of feeling good to a regular state of feeling great.

In addition to this being a beautiful way to live, does two more things:

1. It gives you access to your highest brain centers, so you operate more and more frequently on the frequencies of creativity, clarity and excellence. And
2. It lets everyone in your life off the hook for the impossible task of making you feel good.

I’m going to repeat this one for emphasis: when you practice operating independently of others’ approval, disapproval and UNDERSTANDING, you let them off the hook for the impossible task of making you feel good.

In this way, you become unconditionally powerful, loving and excellent at whatever it is you choose to use your powers to do on any given day/week/month/lifetime.

This takes the fraughtness out of relationships. It takes the pressure off. It means that when you get together with others for the purpose of living, playing or working on something, that‘s your focus. You don’t have to focus on all the politics and played out scripts. You don’t have to spend time and energy tending to someone’s triggers or withholding your own secrets out of fear. You don’t have to tippy-toe around the laundry list of touchy subjects that cause so many relationships to be so. freaking. exhausting.

Instead, your relationships will swivel to focus on the adventures you can have together, the lives you can create together—the fun you can have together. The ways in which you can support and lift each other up or help each other evolve and grow, even through the unwanted experiences of life, even when shit gets real.

And that’s when relationships go from depleting to life-giving. From draining to thrive-inducing. That’s when you stop having to obsessively police your boundaries with people, because healthy boundaries just become part of who you are and how you live, naturally. That’s when you learn that you’re not here just to give love or find love or receive love, but to be love, in all circumstances, to all people. Even your boss. Even your employees. Even your crazy uncle. Even your ex. (Yeah, I said it.)

Because that’s who you are: love. Unconditional, unadulterated, and apologetic, whether the people around you understand you or not.

P.S.: Is it possible to become totally free of the desire to be understood? Maybe so, maybe not. But you can certainly release a lot of that desire to be understood. And when you do, you’ll recoup a massive amount of life force. I can vouch.

P.P.S.: Last night, I sat in a completely full theater watching Won’t You Be My Neighbor, the new documentary on Mr. Rogers’ life and work. This movie will down-regulate your nervous system and immerse you in the profound goodness of a man on a clear mission of care, love and upliftment. What you may not know is that Mr. Rogers was a fierce warrior in his own way for lovingkindness and social justice, and that he wielded his platform to that end, for decades.

Before last night, I had cried at one movie in my lifetime, ever. I was crying at minute 5 of this film. The guy next to me, who had his motorcycle helmet in his lap the whole time, was crying by about minute 3. It’s pure and enchanting. Go see it.

Head up + heart out,

TNN

Sign up for my Transformation Tuesday newsletter, here: http://www.taranicholle.com/transformation-tuesday

Brilliant One,

I was onstage at a conference last week with a few other CEOs. During a lightning round of get-to-know-you questions, we were asked:

“Do you ask permission or beg forgiveness?”

The other 3 said: “beg forgiveness”.

I said: “neither”.

To be fair to the moderator, he didn’t create this whole permission vs. forgiveness thing. Computing pioneer Grace Hooper (aka Amazing Grace) is widely cited as first having said: “It’s better to get forgiveness than permission.“

And I used to agree. Because forgiveness > permission is a rule for moving forward and getting things done, rather than inviting momentum-stopping objections from the peanut gallery.

And I’m all about that.

In an organization, the forgiveness > permission rule invites team members to do what they think is right and to do it imperfectly, which puts the team in position to gather the intelligence of how things go and make adjustments accordingly.

So sure, if I have to choose one or the other, I’d choose forgiveness over permission all day, erryday.

But I don’t have to choose between these two. I choose neither.

Now, before I explain, let me make some important caveats:

Caveat #1: I’m not saying I don’t collaborate or get my team’s feedback before I make a move.

When appropriate, I do.

But I stopped asking for permission a long time ago. And way before I had the authority to call the shots at work. I’m not talking about going rogue, or saying that junior employees should be setting company strategy unilaterally.

But here’s the truth: making bold moves and making the business case for my proposals and pitches is exactly how I got the authority to call the shots in the first place, way before I worked for myself. Because that’s what leadership is: being willing to put yourself and your ideas out there, boldly and unapologetically. Being willing to take intellectual and creative risks when they are well-calculated to drive The Big Goal.

And making career and life moves without waiting for someone else to say it was okay, to give me the money or give me the greenlight?

That’s how I came to work for myself.

Caveat #2: I’m not saying I don’t acknowledge when things aren’t working, or that I don’t apologize interpersonally when appropriate, because I do.

But letting forgiveness into this decision-making equation assumes that if you do something and don’t get the results you wanted, you’ve done something to apologize for.

And that’s just not true, in business or in life. In fact, “unapologetic” is actually a theme word of mine, a gift from one of my teachers. And real talk: I know a whole lot of brilliant beings, conscious leaders and creators, who would dial their impact up by 10X if they stopped apologizing so flipping much.

Stick with me here: most of us conscious leader types know by now that it’s a spiritual drain and losing battle to seek the approval of other people. We get that, even if we haven’t totally released our people-pleasing, approval-addict tendencies.

A smaller number of us have gotten that, but still dread others’ disapproval. For us, the Second Agreement, to take nothing personally, is good goal. Because to take nothing personally you must cultivate an independence of the opinion of others. And once you get a taste of the freedom to move and speak freely in life that comes from that independence, it reinforces itself. You get more and more independent. More and more free, more and more bold, less and less repressed.

I can already anticipate the natural next question: if it is really possible to operate independently of the opinions of other people (and it is), then what is the right way to make decisions?

If you’re not making your decisions based on others’ opinions, your only option is to get a clear internal rudder:

• to get clear on your long term vision and purpose,
• to develop a solid relationship with your own internal guidance system and
• to develop a whole-life operating system for how you know when to make which moves, how to receive and interpret the results, and how to stay in forward motion from there.

I want to offer you three specific strategies for developing your own clear, internal decision rudder:

1. Develop a daily writing practice. My testimony: if you have room in your life for only one daily habit, it should be daily free-writing.

Doing a brain dump every day—in writing—is the single most powerful creativity, spirituality, innovation and leadership ritual I know.

When you journal or do morning pages or free-writing—whatever you choose to call it—over time, you become clear on your own purpose. You are able to clearly download the deep wisdom within you and hear the answers to the questions before you.

Your thoughts get clearer. You solve problems with less and less effort. You connect dots more easily, and your timing gets better. You become better and better at spotting opportunities, because you regularly return to the calm, clear state of receptivity to inspiration.

If that’s not enough, this might be: a daily writing practice gives you a place to go every day of your life to deposit your dramas, grudges and resentments, so you can leave all of that drama on the page. You become more resilient and less stressed, less anxious. I won’t cite all the studies, but you can Google it or just trust me: it’s science.

You might think you don’t have time to do this. And it does take some time; somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes a day. But I dare you to get up a little early or get off the internet a little earlier than normal before bed, and redirect that time to trying out free-writing for 30 days.

Once you see how much less time you spend agonizing over decisions, asking for permission, dithering and hesitating before you act, you’ll realize that you really don’t have time not to do this practice.

2. Lean Life Methodology. If you’re familiar with Lean methodology for business, the idea here is to do the same thing in all of your decision-making. Ditch the delusion that you can optimize every decision for perfection. Instead, get still, listen to your inner guidance system and make the next step that feels expansive, that feels directionally right.

[Here’s a YouTube video I filmed on the concept of Lean Life Methodology.]

As you see the results unfold, use them to double-down on your current course of action or to course-correct.

This way, the only results you can get are not good or bad, not success or failure. They are wanted and unwanted. But the real beauty is that the unwanted results are often the most powerful in terms of helping you get clear on what you do really want. Once you see this over and over again, you’ll come to appreciate and even welcome them, too.

The other learning you have, when you do this consistently, is that almost none of the catastrophic future scenarios that come to mind when you envision making a bold move ever come to pass—even if you make the move and don’t get the result you wanted. Catastrophes are much fewer and farther between than our lizard brains let us think.

This is how you learn to make bold moves and transitions, without the paralysis, without the indecision. And it applies whether we’re talking about deciding whether to start dating again, whether to propose a potentially game-changing marketing strategy, whether to give a talk about which you’re nervous or whether to pitch the corporate customer of your dreams.

So many of you have shared how helpful Mel Robbins’ 5-second rule is for this. She says: when you’re hesitating before an action or task you really need to do, you just count backwards from 5 and DO IT on 1. Don’t wait for motivation. Don’t wait for inspiration. Don’t put it in the calendar. Don’t wait until the “right time”.

I’ll add: and whatever you do, don’t ask for permission.

3. Consonance, resonance and dissonance. In music, consonance is the harmony of two nearby notes. They sound pretty. Consonance is like asking permission: everyone agrees, and it’s nice. Well, sometimes it’s nice, but it can also be predictable (meaning: boring). And if the musician’s objective is to create something original, edgy or powerfully evocative, consonance can render the piece ineffective.

Enter resonance. Resonance is that deep, inner expansion, the swell you feel in your body and in your spirit from the vibration of wonderful music. Musical resonance is pretty much the same feeling as the resonance, the feeling of solid expansion, the feeling of YES-ness, that sparks deep inside when you know something is the right thing to do, or at least the right thing to try.

Even if others won’t necessarily understand, approve or agree.

Asking permission and anticipating the need to beg forgiveness: these both seem like terrible starting blocks for decision making.

But resonance is a solid place from which to make a decision, especially if you have clarity of objectives, clarity of heart, purity of motives and clarity of vision.

In fact, resonance is the ideal place from which to make your business and life decisions. Especially if others don’t understand, approve or agree.

But here’s the part people forget: when a musician wants to evoke emotion, they don’t turn to either consonance or resonance. They turn to dissonance, because the conflicting notes, the disharmony, evokes tension. It creates a strong emotional reaction, a clear emotional response.

Dissonance does the exact same thing in our lives. When we get unwanted results or unwanted emotions, that contrast creates clarity. And that clarity is so valuable, there’s no need to ever apologize for it.

NOTE: I recently had the deep pleasure of talking with my homegirl Meghna Majmudar, Head of Marketing for Wisdom Labs, on the Wise@Work podcast. We discussed a number of angles on the grail quest for a healthier, wealthier and wiser life. We also explored what it looks like when you invite employees to bring 100% of themselves—including their souls and spirituality—with them when they come to work.

You’re invited to join our high energy mind meld moment by listening, here.

Head up + heart out,

TNN

Sign up for my Transformation Tuesday newsletter, here: http://www.taranicholle.com/transformation-tuesday

Brilliant One:

Over the years, I’ve learned that I create most joyfully and flow-fully with this kind of cadence:

1. I go deeper into my daily morning ritual and flow practices, or even into Monk Mode
2. When inspiration strikes, I turn it into inspired action, fast
3. I pour myself empty onto the page or into the spreadsheet
4. Then, I take a sacred pause and tap back into more inspiration: I distract myself from the project and get out into nature, eat delicious things and put my body in beautiful places (including on the bike and in the gym – movement is key).

And I reup my inspiration stores by immersing myself in the art, process and products of other creative beings. In step 4, I often find myself inhaling books about writing, listening to musicians unpack their composition process and watching films about filmmaking.

And so it came to pass that on a plane a little while back, I took a couple of hours to watch the new HBO documentary, Spielberg.

This time, what caught my ear was less about Spielberg’s creative process and more about yours and mine. Spielberg was one of those young savant types. He was an Honors student in the school of 1970’s Hollywood. He had “so much potential”. (Sound like anyone you know?) As a very young man, he sought out and scored some Very Big Opportunities to do Very Big Things.

Things like: Jaws.

At twenty-seven years old, Spielberg was able to write his own ticket. And here’s what he wrote: he wanted realism and he wanted a big old shark. He wanted a $4 million budget and 55 days to shoot the film. And he got all of the above.

He got a six-figure, animatronic sharkbot that turned out to be a hot mess, with a dimpled smile that was adorable, not menacing. Oh yeah: and it sank.

He got the greenlight to shoot one of the first Hollywood movies to be filmed in the actual ocean, which turned out to be a complete sh!tshow of unpredictable lighting, tumultuous weather and near-death accidents. MULTIPLE near-death accidents.

He went way over budget. Like, double. And he went even more over time. Like, triple.

He missed the planned launch date, in the middle of the Christmas blockbuster season. Instead, they launched the movie at the start of summer, when most films bombed.

And you know what happened in the end. Jaws did a’ight. $60M in the first month. First film to hit $100M ever. I’m not overstating this, but that film created the summer blockbuster archetype. No big deal.

All of this from a film whose maker, Mr. Spielberg himself, has since said: “Jaws should never have been made—it was an impossible effort.”

Ok, so back to you and me. What was my big takeaway? Not that geniuses are those who envision and do super hard things, though they often are. Not that geniuses who persist win in the end, though they often do.

What hit me like a ton of bricks was that geniuses make one big mistake very consistently: they underestimate the resources it will take to create their big, beautiful, transformational thing.

We do this because we came to this planet with our spiritual DNA wired for envisioning and creating, but with our human senses fixated on the hard facts of what is real and before us right now. That gap between our vision of the future and our right-now reality can feel very, very uncomfortable. We desperately want to close that gap fast, so we underestimate the time it’ll take.

We do this because our culture has sold us a bill of nonsense about overnight successes and Instagram stars, when even those people will tell you that “overnight” takes about 4 or 5 years.

We do this because we have a penchant for uplifting, for being changemakers and for leading the change. And we have an urgent desire to see the desired change come to pass.

So we underestimate how long it’ll take. And how much it’ll cost.

We do this because we love building things and building upon the things we’ve built. We just want to build more and more. And in order to stay in that inspired creative cycle we mentally overlook some of the real-life time-sucks we’ll likely encounter along the way. This is why literally every startup in the valley has the pattern of postponing launches, releases and updates at least a time or three before they ship.

If you often make the error of starting a big project, realizing that you have underestimated what it’ll take, then figuring it out and finishing it anyway, that *might* mean you’re a creative genius. It certainly does not mean that you’re terrible at your work or that you’ll never ever ever be able to bring your full vision to life. Go easy on yourself and give yourself credit for being scrappy, while you work on getting better at scoping your work in the future.

On a practical note, you might want to take a long, honest look at whether you’re giving your projects the time, money, energetic and even human resources they really, truly need to thrive. If you’d like to feel less of that angst and agitation of feeling under the gun or behind the 8-ball or whatever other positional metaphor you want to use for feeling time pressured, then you might want to borrow a tactic from the accounting world and just add a factor of 25% or 50% to all of your time or money estimates, whichever you tend to come in too low on.

If you run a team or work with vendors, invite them to reality-check you on the time or money it’ll take to do what needs doing. I very literally surround myself with people who are very comfortable pushing back and revising estimates when I’m overly aggressive. You can practice your way out of this tendency, at least when it comes to projects that might blow up or cause problems for other teams if they go over budget.

On another practical note, if your to-do list is chronically frustrating because you could never possibly get even half of it done, try this tactic that works for me: I only allow myself five things on the list every day. Period. That’s it. And I put all five of them, including an hour or so for email, on the calendar.

But let’s set practicalities aside for a moment. So many brilliant beings and leaders turn their habit of underestimating resources into an internal sad song or self-defeating storyline about how behind they are in life and how afraid they are that if they don’t cross their big dream project off the list sometime super soon, they may never get it done before they die.

And that just ain’t right. We are not here to cross things off some big list in the sky to be worthy of our place on the planet (or elsewhere, for that matter). We are here for the joy and the expansion that happens in the process of creating. When creators and leaders and uplifters at any stage of their careers harshly judge themselves, what happens is not more creating, but less. The struggle feels even more real. The internal harshness constricts the flow of creativity and inspiration. We begin to dread and hate the activities and projects and work and customers we once loved so much. We shrink down because BIG feels undoable, given the chronic resource shortage we’ve practiced into our wiring.

Catch this principle: no one truly thrives at an endeavor they despise doing. This is how so many born uplifters lose the joy of life. It’s how so many find themselves in great jobs with brilliant titles making tons of money, yet dreading getting out of bed in the morning, already feeling behind.

Today I’m here to urge you to replace any level of self-judgment, frustration, self-criticism or shame spiraling about your habit of thinking you can create your big dreams faster than you really can with this reframe: maybe this pattern just means you’re an actual creative genius. And creative geniuses have some little twitches and glitches, this being one of them. If the worst thing you do is underestimate time and money needed, that’s fixable. You are not a bad person, a wrong person, a failure or a dilettante. In fact, this pattern is also a sign of a big vision and a big bias for action, both of which are precious and to be nurtured, not grounds for self-flagellation.

In other words: YOU ARE GIVING ME (and all the rest of us) LIFE. You’re on the right track. Lift your head up and your heart out, and keep moving forward—even if it feels like it’s taking so much longer than you’d like.

And one more thing: when it comes to time and money, we’re prone to underestimating how much we will need. But when it comes to two other resources, we consistently underestimate how much we already have:

1. Our own greatness, ability and readiness to do even the things we’ve never done before, and
2. The reservoir of Infinite Intelligence that is always flowing through us and to us, if we let it

So when you are scoping your next project or roadmapping the next month or six of your work, life or creative projects, don’t just crank up your time-needed and money-needed estimates by 25 or 50%. Dial up (a) your estimates of your own brilliance and (b) your willingness to trust that you’ll know exactly what you need exactly when you need it. Twenty-five or 50% will do.

Note: I am BEYOND delighted to be sharing the stage with some of the foremost transformation teachers and leaders of our time— including the rev angel Kyodo williams, Marianne Williamson, Glennon Doyle, Mark Hyman, Paul Hawken and Alicia Silverstone—at the first-ever Wanderlust Wellspring gathering in Palm Springs this October.

Trust: it’ll be next level. Join me: https://wanderlust.com/wellspring/

Head up + heart out,

TNN

Sign up for my Transformation Tuesday newsletter, here: http://www.taranicholle.com/transformation-tuesday

Friends,

I grew up in an upper middle class family. But like most well-intentioned, upwardly mobile Moms and Pops, my parents never wanted us to forget where they had come from. They never wanted us to take what we had for granted.

Which translated to: they never wanted us to feel too prosperous. That felt dangerous. And my parents were most certainly not alone. Our culture loves to spread the storyline that if you feel too comfortable, too secure, too well-provided for, you’re bad. Smug. Too big for your britches and tempting fate. Something bad might happen. You might lose your motivation to Be All That You Can Be.

So, while we never wanted for anything, we were constantly reminded that someday, we *might*. It could happen. And it probably would, if we didn’t get all A’s, keep the house impeccable, and start retirement planning circa kindergarten.

Of course, my parents were doing the best they could with what they had, what they’d been taught and what they believed to be true.

But I’ve had a total reversal of perspective on this subject. I’ve realized that the people who have plenty but live in an internal landscape of scarcity are not the most generative or successful people. The opposite can be true. The scarcity storyline pervades their entire worldview, and the anxiety it creates shuts down their highest brain functioning, their highest creativity. It shuts off their ability to take even reasonable career risks and steps toward their dreams.

I’ve seen scarcity called a trance, and it is. It is a pervasive, unspoken feeling that there’s never enough, or that you’re not enough or that you must be vigilant or you’ll run out of fill-in-the-blank. Scarcity is a constant fear—at times low-grade, at other times overwhelming— and anxiety about the sufficiency of your world.

It might seem like scarcity is the same as being on your toes or having an edge or being responsible, but it’s not. Scarcity frequently triggers self-sabotage. Scarcity shuts down our ability to receive the love, the help, the resources, the entrepreneurial ideas, the energy, the creative inspiration that is trying to flow to each and every one of us, all the time. Scarcity stops us from speaking up and asking for what we need. And it also stops us from speaking up and offering our gifts and talents fully to the world.

Scarcity ties in neatly and insidiously with the trance of unworthiness, causing some of us to never be able to relax all the way, because we feel we must be acting, doing, producing, constantly, both to earn our place on the planet and to stave off catastrophe.

Even more insidiously, the energy of “never enough” or “must protect what I have” gets us stuck holding onto all manner of things: old ways of being, jobs and relationships that no longer work, physical possessions and patterns that keep our talent in, our souls limited and our potential forever unfulfilled.

Don’t get me wrong: scarcity is not for suckers. Some of the best and brightest leaders, parents, marketers, entrepreneurs, and creatives I know feel scarcity the most. (a) They hold themselves to very high standards, (b) they are perpetually bearing new ideas, and (c) they want to get them all done in what feels like very limited time. In the context of cultural and family conditioning that has taught so many of us that there’s never enough time/money/energy and that we’re only ok if we get all the things done, these conditions can snowball into High-Functioning Scarcity Syndrome (HFSS). (And, yes: I did just make that acronym up).

So. What do you do about that?

First, you note it and name it. (Briefly.) You can’t shift anything—including scarcity—by judging yourself for feeling it or pushing hard against it. When I’m feeling anxious about time or resources, I wave hello to my old pal scarcity and invite her to sit next to me on the couch for a moment. She gets to be heard for about 10 seconds or so, which prevents her from grabbing the steering wheel and taking me with her. But she doesn’t get to call any shots or type any addresses into Google Maps, if you know what I mean. And she doesn’t get to be the leading lady of my conversations for the next 3 years, either.

Once the scarcity voice in your head knows she’s being heard, she’ll settle down a bit and, if you ask really nicely, stop hijacking you.

Then you can start to shift scarcity with your words, gradually rewiring old, lackful beliefs. First step here is to stop verbally rehearsing and rehashing complaints. Stop talking about not having enough time or money, or about how busy or unproductive you are. This can be challenging when you’re also trying to practice boundaries and say no, but it’s doable with a little advance rehearsing.

I’ve gotten pretty good at simply saying: “I’d love to, but I’m in Monk Mode until X. Thanks for the invite!”, or “My life is very full right now.” (vs. I’m soooo busy argh). I’m also getting better at managing the expectations of my loved ones when I know I have an intense work cycle coming up and might need some solo introvert recharge time.

Catch this principle: use the power of your words wisely and in the direction of abundance versus scarcity. Stop talking about how real the struggle is. Instead, affirm what is true about the abundance of your life and experience on this planet. VERBALLY, out loud, appreciate whatever you can see or feel that is abundant. The leaves on the tree. The comfort of your bed. The plenty in your fridge or closet. The abundance of ideas and opportunities you have. The beauty you’ve been blessed to see in your lifetime. The love you receive and the love yiou give.

In adding the power of your words to that truth and in spending more of your time and energy dwelling in that place of abundance, that’s what will grow in your experience.

This last few weeks, I’ve started to see the beautiful flip side of what I had been feeling as time scarcity: the truth that my life is abundant with interesting projects and partners and beings I love, and the truths that there is so much fun to have and so many things to create and play with. The truth that when I was young, and wanted nothing more than engaging work and a beautiful life of adventure, I planted seeds that are now constantly bearing joyous fruit: that’s my truth.

So, just like a farmer, I must now be deliberate and intentional in deciding how to till these rows (meaning, who and what to pour my time and energy into). But also just like a farmer, I have all the time in the world. Because there’s no reason to rush. When this season is over, another will come.

If divine timing is real (and it is), then things come together when they are supposed to and not a second sooner.

If you catch that principle and get it down in your spirit, scarcity begins to dissolve in its wake.

You can also shift scarcity with your actions. You can create an intentional vacuum and invite in exactly what you need. Or you can simply shift your actions to relish with satisfaction what you do have and eagerly envision what you’d like more of, versus perseverating on what you don’t have at the moment and wish you did.

Recently, I was feeling scarce about time and sheer human resources: I needed help in some very specific functional areas of my business. In my daily writing this thought process <“I need help”> quickly shifted to <“help is on the way. . .”>, which then veered into <“what do I have in abundance that I can revel in, to tune myself into the feeling of plenty”>.

When I asked myself/my journal “what do I have in abundance?” one answer came through loud and clear: PEOPLE. Relationships. I know many thousands of brilliant people. Right away, I reached out to one or two who I knew had the skills I needed. But before I could even reach out to more, the just-right people started showing up. Emailing about how they were newly available. Asking for a call and then giving me the precise insight I needed that moment. Emailing with fresh interest in helping out on exactly the subject I was calling in support on.

And you can also shift scarcity by adopting some rules of thumb on the subjects about which you feel the most scarce, whatever they are for you.

Here’s one I borrowed from a friend:

A few years back, I decided to start traveling the world in earnest. Having had my kids very young, I was pushing 40 before travel became a high priority. As I was mapping out a world tour for part of my 18-month 40th birthday celebration, I sought input from well-traveled friends on what to cover, what to see and what to do, where.

One of the young geniuses on my team at the time was this bright light named Brandi. Brandi shared her world travel rule with me, and it was very counterintuitive. She had grown up with a hard-working single Mom and had also come by her ability to travel honestly, appreciating every single trip. Nonetheless, “I always assume I can come back,” Brandi said. “That way, you relax and see what you can reasonably see in the time you have. But the pressure is off. So you take the time to savor the moments of your trip instead of trying to cross items off a checklist. You’ll experience the place more deeply that way versus trying to ‘see all the things’ (most of which you can see online anytime you want).”

I’ve made this rule my own. When I travel, I plan my trip on the assumption I can come back anytime I want. Truthfully, I may or may not ever make it back to the place. But that’s up to me. Occasionally I repeat some of my favorite destinations. But other times, I go, fall in love and haven’t gone back (yet), in awareness of how overflowing with beautiful places this world is. I do go back because I love it and am eager for more, or I don’t go back because I’m satisfied with my experience there and eager for the beauty that beckons from elsewhere.

Either way, deleting the scarcity from my trip planning has caused me to take really different, vastly more delightful trips than I would have otherwise. Instead of the hustle through what some website says you “must see”, I’ve had dozens of delectable, only-partly-planned-in-advance trips around this planet with 50-mile bike rides, impromptu concerts, day-long neighborhood walks and yes, scads of historic and natural wonders.

If and when I feel like I need more from a place, I do what I need to do to stay longer or go back.

Here’s your prompt for writing or contemplation today:

What have you been feeling is scarce?

Time? Energy? Ideas? Words?

Money?

Health? Love?

How will today be different if you practice the thought that you will have access to *exactly* as much of that precious resource as you ever need, whenever you need it?

How might you feel differently every day of your life if you decided to practice that thought?

I invite you to try practicing this thought, even if just for the day. See what shifts.

Head up + heart out,

TNN

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