Four percent. 

That’s all I ask of you. 

That every day you seek to move 4% closer to doing the thing that scares you the most, which is usually the same as the thing you would find the most deeply fulfilling, exhilarating and liberating… if you could do it.

Let me tell you about a conversation I had with one of my favorite coaching students the other day. 

She has a calling on her life. A calling for greatness. She is an uplifter to the core, and trails a cloud of genius around her. 

She’s got a wildly successful career that is lucrative and high-status, but less than fulfilling. 

And together, we’re starting to invite a clear vision for her next season to drop in. 

We were talking about what it might look like for her to hop off the treadmill of checking the boxes of what society says is a successful life and realign her life with who she really is and what she really cares about, in a way that integrates her spiritual and entrepreneurial journeys. 

And she had a golden thread of an inspired idea drop in. It was the kind of thing we call a Divine Download: a gorgeous vision for what she’d like to create and how it might look.

So I asked her this question: What feels like the natural next step to you? 

She got thoughtful and said, as the smart ones often do: 

Well, let me break it down into a 100 point action plan for the next 5 years… 

I’ll need to do this and do that and choose this and oh my goodness I have to build that and figure this out and do that, too, and fly there and probably shop for the exact linens and then 2,300 other things.

And I was like ok cool cool cool…. 

But I didn’t ask you all that. 

I only want to know what FEELS like the single, natural next step.

Because I’ve worked in the transformation business for about 25 years, y’all. 

And I’ve been a human being for 45. 

So I know this: Those detailed, logical, linear, step-by-step action plans for years out in the future almost never work. 

Because that’s not how your brain works.

That’s not how your spirit works, either.

And that’s definitely not how life works. 

Life never goes according to those plans. 

Anytime you get attached to your action plans and timelines, you feed your Inner Critic. The troubleshooting is fodder for fear: fear something will go wrong, fear of not being able to predict your outcomes with certainty, fear that you’ve missed one step so you’ve already screwed it up, or fear that you’ll miss one step or twenty or only do something partially instead of all the way.

So I almost never want you to start down the path to your most inspired idea by laying out a super detailed, granular, long-term 100-point action plan. 

Especially in the earliest stages of your dreams, I never want you to think the long-term action plan all the way through with your mind. 

Instead, I want you to tune in — listen within — to what FEELS like the natural next step. 

And take that. 

And then do the same tomorrow. 

What I’m about to say may seem counterintuitive, but just hear me out: Having a harsh Inner Critic doesn’t always show up as having low self-esteem or low-achieving in life. 

The most successful people I work with often have the most dominant Inner Critic, but it shows up in a very different way. 

Among smart, successful people, the Inner Critic often shows up as a spiritual emergency brake that stops you from getting off the treadmill of a culturally approved life. So you can be very high-performing and powerful at things that don’t matter that much to you, but feel like you hit a wall of hesitation, delay, mixed mind and Resistance any time you try to step out of that corporate life and into a soulful life outside of the box. 

One way the Inner Critic does this is by pretending to be the voice of reason and logic, setting you up for self-sabotage with uninspiring action plans and unsustainable goals when it comes to your soul-level callings and dreams. Against that backdrop, the shadow life of checking off boxes feels much safer and simpler. 

So you just keep doing that, checking off boxes, day in and day out.

That’s why when you get those Divine Downloads, those beautiful inspired ideas that feel so exhilarating for a moment, you may have a habitual arc that looks like:

1. Get big, beautiful idea for how life can be different
2. Have a honeymoon period with your dream
3. Start thinking about all the action items it would take for you to be/do/have/create/learn that dream and start feeling the bigness, start imagining how difficult it will be
4. Start troubleshooting all the things that could go wrong if you step into your dream, and feel the inner shackles start encircling your heart
5. Visualize yourself being vulnerable and feel your spiritual emergency brakes activate
6. Feel your inspiration and self-respect dwindle
7. Feel sad and wonder why you can’t seem to get it together
8. Go get busy doing housework or work work for a dopamine hit of worthiness, to remind yourself that you are a competent person and maybe get some external validation from someone who appreciates that work.

So, if you have a big inspired idea or dream or unique, electric vision for your life, my challenge to you is this:

Don’t plan it all out.

You wanna stack the decks in favor of your dreams???

Don’t plan them all the way out.

Not yet.

I know you think that doing so makes you a good, rational, responsible grown-up.

I know you think doing that kind of action plan is a prerequisite for making your dream come true.

But it’s exactly the opposite. 

So today, I just want you to tune into your inner awareness about what feels like the natural next step.

Identify that. 

Find a version of that step that feels just 4% more challenging than anything you’ve ever done before. 

And just take that step. 

Maybe today’s 4% step poses a challenge to your comfort zone around being vulnerable and visible.

Maybe tomorrow’s natural next step challenges you to be 4% more organized than normal.

Maybe the next natural next step challenges you to be 4% more free in your self-expression than normal, speaking up for yourself, saying what you mean, asking for what you need.

Just 4%.

Because 4% isn’t scary enough to give your Inner Critic the hook of “that’s super risky are you out of your mind????” or “you’re being totally irresponsible and your children will starve. Get it together.” 

4% doesn’t feed your Inner Critic.

And here’s the happy side effect of challenging yourself to focus 4% more on your dreams than on your fears every day. At a glance, it seems like 4% x 25 days would have you double your capacity roughly once a month.

But that’s bad math. You have to think of it like compounding interest. Because if you grow your capacity to fulfill yourself 4% today, then tomorrow you don’t start back over with 100%. Tomorrow you start with 104% of the capacity with which you started and grow that by an additional 4%. 

So, if you grow your capacity to do your dreams by 4% every day, your capacity grows by over 1 million percent in one year’s time.

And that’s how you become free.

And that leaves you, in one year, with a 1 million percent higher threshold for the scariness of challenges you can face before you set off your Inner Critic. 

That leaves you with 1 million percent more inner peace, more of your inner landscape, that you can explore hand-in-hand with your Inner Being – your True Self – the voice of the Divine that speaks to you within you… instead of having your mental airwaves dominated by that loud, fear-spouting Inner Critic. 

Spiritually speaking, 4% is the precise incremental difficulty that results in: your natural next step. It keeps your dreams from feeling so scary that the fear feeds your Inner Critic. 

Neurobiologically, 4% harder than your current capacity puts you in a flow state sweet spot. 

Neurobiologically, 4% is just challenging enough for you to get into blissful creation mode, lose track of time and become joyfully absorbed in the desirable difficulty of your challenge without your brain flipping its internal struggle switch on and tapping out of the project entirely. 

And here’s another beautiful thing about 4%: It’s just enough of a step to put the higher powers and forces of this Universe on notice of your commitment. 

It’s enough to spark the assisting forces that are all around you all the time, so that they know you’re open and willing to move forward, meaning you are open and willing to receive their help.

And as a result, when you take a 4% step you can rest assured that help is on the way. Always and in all ways. Ways that will surprise, please and delight you.

Four percent is enough to activate Divine Order and Divine Timing, which are real and always in your favor. Four percent tells Divine Order and Divine Timing to start weaving their golden threads together into a magic carpet of momentum beneath you that adds to your energy, adds to your focus.

(By the way: That’s why stepping into your callings is actually energizing as you go, not depleting.)

Four percent is just enough to start re-educating your spirit that you actually can trust yourself, trust your ideas and trust that everything is always working out for you. 

Four percent starts to re-train your fearful holding patterns and break their pull.

Four percent will trigger momentum in your brain, in your mind and in your soul, but also in your relationships and in your ability to see opportunities all around you that you couldn’t see before.  

The right doors begin to open. 

The wrong ones start to close.

The path of possibility lights up before you.

Your co-creators show up and raise their hands. 

Four percent teams you up with the creative power that formed all worlds, and wants to flow through you, too.

I don’t care whether your inspired idea is to move to Spain, to write a book that forever changes its readers, to unschool your kids or to leave your job and start a profitable, influential,  transformational business…

Know this today:

You are poised and powerful.

Your True, Sacred Self is timeless and tireless.

You are radiant and magnetic to wonderful things.

They now begin to flow to you by grace, over calm seas, in perfect ways.

Get open.

Get receptive.

Get willing. 

Stop overthinking it. 

Just take what feels like the natural, next step… 4% beyond your current comfort zone. 

And with that step, climb up onto your magic carpet of momentum.

I’ll see you there.

Head up + heart out,

The Inner Critic Coach™

Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq.
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

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Every decision you make is just an experiment.

All of them. 

Ain’t nobody out here in these streets handing out promises that if you wait until you think you’re perfectly ready to shoot your shot, you’ll get an A+ for preparedness and everything will work out exactly according to your plans.

That’s not how life works. 

In fact, it actually works the other way around. 

Haven’t you heard the saying “you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take”?

Haven’t you heard the saying: “Woman plans, God laughs”?

I’m sure you have. And I also know that these are the kinds of sayings you can know must be true in your mind, intellectually, and still feel like you’ll vomit or die if you even think about trying to live by them.

So I’m here today to offer you some tricks to living this ‘shackles off’, radically liberated, ‘let the chips fall where they may because it’s all an experiment anyway’ kind of life.

The first trick is to just take the natural next step. 

If you have an idea that feels really big to you, don’t try to plan everything all the way out. That’s the fastest way to overthinking, overhwhelm-ment, to creating false prerequisites and flipping your struggle switch on. 

It’s also the fastest way to suck all the inspiration out of your big, beautiful, uniquely YOU idea. 

It’s the fastest way to talk yourself out of taking even the first step. 

You win if you take one step. Even if that step is as small as researching something, making a call, changing your bio on LinkedIn.

The next trick is to notice how you feel when you daydream about the various options before you. If you have an idea that just feels like liberation in your spirit? If one option feels expansive in your chest, even if it seems ridiculous, logically speaking? If one of your choices feels like awe and wonder and exhilaration and expansion and enthusiasm? 

Pick that one. Because the things you do that feel like that are always a link in the golden chain of your highest good. This is true whether they work out the way your thinking mind would deem “successful” or not.

Because the Divine Mind — the infinite intelligence that runs the show in this Universe — is speaking to you and through you all the time. 

And the Divine Mind speaks within you, to you in the form of your soul’s callings and intuitions and nudges and hunches of Inner Guidance, and those shackles OFF feelings and those brilliant golden threads of inspired ideas. 

And the Divine Mind knows more than your intellectual thinking mind will ever know. 

Catch this principle: Your Inner Guidance knows 100% of the things your human, intellectual mind knows, plus plus plus plus plus.

Oh and catch this principle, too: the Divine Order is neither logical nor linear. 

I have worked mightily in my life, I did all the things. I got the grad degree, I went to law school I had a great plan. I worked the plan.

And it did work.

But the best things that happened in my career, the best things that have happened in my life, I didn’t plan any of that.

It was not a logical or linear process to get to those many many hundreds of thousands of peak realities and experiences that I’ve been blessed with.

Because the Divine Order is neither logical nor linear. 

So don’t limit it to what is logical and linear or understandable to your intellectual human thinking mind.

Because your thinking mind might lay out an action plan that goes from A to B to C and step-by-step on to Z.

You put a time frame on it. And you will start telling yourself that you are behind if you don’t accomplish, achieve, hustle and make it happen by that timeline.

But the Divine Mind will take you from A to B to F, back to B a couple times, and then fast forward you on to Z and beyond. 

To where you can’t even imagine where the Divine Mind will take you. 

Not only can you not even imagine the destination of the Divine Mind, the Divine Mind will light up all these brilliant steps before you and line up all these opportunities and co-creators for you, step by step. Sometimes it will accelerate you. Sometimes it will delay you. 

But all of the time it will benefit you.

And you stand to miss that benefit and those opportunities and those co-creators if you’re too fixated on what you think the action plan should be or what the timeline should look like.

Woman plans, God laughs. You dig? 

Seriously, your Inner Critic is the voice that says you’re falling behind, that says you should be an overnight success already, that says you’re getting too old to ever really make it. 

Your Inner Critic is the voice that says “hurry up!” “what’s taking so long”, “you need to set tighter timelines” “be more productive”. 

And in that way, your Inner Critic is the enemy of Divine Order and Divine Timing.

Because if you listen to the time scarcity lies of your Inner Critic, you’ll rush through your action plan and you’ll miss all the brilliant serendipities and wonderful perfect place-perfect time alignments that will surprise and delight you when you tap out of the race against the clock. 

Oh and the other trick to living this shackles off, liberated, inspired, self-actualized life… the trick to making decisions about what to do next and the trick to break your inner stalemates about those decisions… the trick is to zoom out, zoom out more… zoom waaaay out.

Because if you zoom out from yourself in this moment, just for a minute – most of the time I’m going to ask you to live in day-tight compartments, but in this particular issue, when you’re facing a decision and if feels like a stalemate – you’ll see that nothing in life is guaranteed, not even the results of playing small and what seems like “safe”. 

If you zoom out from your current goals, you can look back and see how many of the glorious realities of your current day life came to you by grace and in surprising ways you could never have planned or even imagined. 

And if you zoom out from this moment to the stretch of your whole life, you’ll see that very, very few decisions you’ve ever struggled with in the past now warrant more than a mention in a paragraph in the book of your life, not even the ones you agonized over at the time.

And if you zoom from this moment out to the 300,000 years of human evolution, you’ll see that there’s no decision you can make in your life today that will read as “total catastrophe” through that lens.

And maybe that allows you to give yourself a little bit of a break.

Every decision you make is just an experiment. 

But if you have a strong Inner Critic, it may be telling you that you are courting disaster if you do any of the things you dream of doing that feel like exposure or vulnerability.

Because your Inner Critic is generally a protective mental pattern. It’s trying to protect you from whatever you’re afraid of, often whatever your family of origin deemed the Very Worst Thing to be or experience. 

It’s trying to protect you from looking stupid.

It’s trying to protect you from making mistakes. 

It’s trying to protect you from being fat, poor, ugly, ignored, insignificant. 

It’s not doing a great job of protecting you, to be clear. It’s a bit of a bumbler, is the truth. But it’s trying. 

And in its trying, your Inner Critic is definitely protecting you from being, doing, having and creating the things you’ve always wanted.

It’s also protecting you from learning what you need to learn to become who your Inner Wise Being is trying to become. 

And it’s definitely protecting you from freedom, growth and joy.

I don’t even think you want to be protected from those things.

How it works is your Inner Critic will either immobilize you entirely or cause you to live in an eternal state of hypervigilant delay, perfectionism, busywork, planning and procrastinating, and always working on something but never quite ready to do your own personal dreams and soul-deep callings. 

Because if you pull the trigger… if you go all-in? 

You could fail. 

…And then what? 

But here’s what your Inner Critic is missing…the fundamental truth that all your decisions are experiments. 

Including and especially the decision not to make a decision. 

Perpetual delay is a decision. Inaction is a decision. And when you make that decision habitually, you wire your spirit and your neurobiology into a template where incompletion, unfulfillment, dissatisfaction and disappointment all feel like normal.

Hiding your light is a decision.

Holding yourself back is a decision and, as such, it’s an experiment. 

Haven’t you run that experiment enough to see how it plays out?  

Taking a natural next step that feels scary or untethering but also exhilarating? That’s a decision and an experiment, too. 

What I find in coaching very smart, very successful people is that most people who habitually make the decision to stop hiding their light and start taking the natural, next step toward fulfilling their deepest desires — they almost all have the same experimental “result” regardless of whether the step they take technically succeeds or fails.

The “natural next step” experiment produces a wave of worthiness, self-respect, and the feeling of inner peace because you’re no longer fighting yourself, shoving parts of yourself down, resisting your own ideas and battling your Inner Genius.

Taking the natural next step and letting the chips fall is an experiment that produces a few other results, too. 

It opens the door to a little magic. 

It issues an invitation to good luck and good fortune. 

It breaks the curse of habitual indecision and delay.

It rewrites and rewires the template of disappointment, unfulfillment, and dissatisfaction.

It opens the door to the assisting forces of this Universe that are on pause until you reactivate and reanimate them by taking that step forward and running that experiment. 

It somehow broadcasts a signal of “I’m ready!” to other people and events that all unknowingly show up to co-create with you, in the zone of genius you stepped into when you got that bright idea in the first place and decided to move forward.

So, if this first month of 2021 finds you facing any decisions that feel difficult at all, my advice to you is this: 

Zoom out.

Get quiet. 

Feel for “shackles off”.

Choose that.

Take what feels like the inspired, natural next step. Don’t try to figure out a 5-year-action plan, unless that happens to be the inspired, natural next step.

Then take the natural next step after that.

Run the experiment. 

Let the chips fall.

Feel the wave of worthiness.

Watch what lights up.

Head up + heart out,

The Inner Critic Coach™

Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq.
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

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Feeling untethered by the news in Wild, Wild Washington? 

I have a few reminders that might serve you well in this season.

Remember that contraction always precedes expansion.

And remember that we asked for expansion. 

This is the contraction that always comes first. 

Remember that we asked for change. 

We requested a revolution in the old ways, the old systems, the old power institutions. 

Remember that the powers that currently be were built on foundations and pillars of patriarchy, white supremacy, a toxic, extractive flavor of capitalism and a corrupt system of so-called religious authority that is warped and unrelated to the true Divine Power of All that Is, Source, Spirit, God, Infinite Intelligence, the Great Giver, the Creative Power that formed all worlds and the Limitless Love that applies to every single hair on your head.

Remember that the expiration clock is ticking on those rotten institutions.

Their time is up.

Remember that we requested an evolution. 

This is what evolution looks like. 

Old power structures always kick and flail before they die so new ones can be born. 

So anytime you’re feeling untethered by the news, I want you to remember all these things.

And anytime you’re feeling untethered by the news, I invite you to come out of the headlines, and back into your own life. 

Come back into your skin.

Your reptilian brain wants to alert you that there is danger-danger-danger so you stay contracted in fight, flight and fear.

Your mammalian brain wants to bond with others in the outrage and in the struggle, despite that it feels really shitty and pulls you out of your purpose and your callings. 

Your human brain and your limitless soul are desperate for you to get back into the realm of your own sacred contracts so you can put your considerable genius to bear on the problems of human evolution that you came here, to Planet Earth, to help solve. 

I want you to remember one more thing during this time. 

I want you to remember that your nervous system was not wired to take in all the mayhem and bad things that happen to anyone anywhere in the world at all times, 24/7.

But your technologies are feeding your nervous system exactly that.

They are feeding your fear. 

I invite you to use this season to practice sovereignty, and make your technology your servant, not your master. Whatever that looks like for you. 

If you feel guilty or like a bad citizen at the mere thought of averting your eyes, I’d like to remind you that you’re no help to anyone, anywhere, on any subject if you’re curled up, contracted in fear, depleted and doom scrolling the news all day.

If you feel like reclaiming your sovereignty to live beyond the fear industrial complex is abdicating your civic duty, let me assure you that you don’t need fear to get motivated to play your role in human evolution.

Your fear is not making you a better citizen of the world. It’s actually narrowing your view on what you can actually do to play your role in a more beautiful world, and immobilizing you from doing it. 

Whatever you can do with fear you can do much more brilliantly, fluidly, creatively and powerfully without it. 

You don’t need fear.

You just need a little space and time to hear what you are being inspired to do in this season…and to answer that  calling — those callings— when they come. 

As you sit with all these things, please keep in mind the following: 

• The sun set last night and rose this morning and you didn’t do anything to help make that happen.
• Your heart has continued to beat every day and night for decades now, with zero input from you. 
• And your lungs breathed life into you 22,000 times in the last 24 hours, again, without any work on your part.

Don’t get it twisted. Every one of these things is a miracle on an order of magnitude greater than every single event that has ever been reported on any news site ever. 

Here’s what sovereignty looks like: If it feels right and energizing to you to be immersed in the energy of these current events, go for it. The next season of your personal callings might be born out of these events.

But if you’re watching out of compulsion and you want to break the hold that current events have on your time and your emotions, I hereby issue you an invitation to come out of the headlines and back into your own life.

Come back into your own life.

Come back into your own skin.

Come back to your own callings.

Stop holding your breath and waiting to unpause your life until something changes in Washington or until your kids grow up or until you hit your income goal or until you lose 10 pounds.

Your life is now. 

So, please, I implore you: Come back into your life. 

And when you get there, remember what my teacher Clarissa Pinkola Estés said: that the single most radical, powerful, transformational thing you can do in troubled times is to stand up and show your soul. 

Because “soul on deck shines like gold in dark times.”

Head up + heart out,

The Inner Critic Coach™

P.S.: Related — my last Instagram post.

Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq.
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

Sign up to receive Transformation Tuesday in your inbox, here.

That’s what Abigail, my right-hand woman, said about me the other day. Just those two words:

“Laser energy.”

I told her that I’ve started getting up at 3 am again, when it feels like the atmosphere — the literal, physical air around me  —  turns to this sort of creative ambrosia and the relative stillness of my mind puts me in maximum receptive mode. This is what the yoga scriptures called Brahmamuhurta, or Creator’s Hour: a time of day when the Creator showers those who want them with Divine Downloads of inspired ideas, hunches and golden threads of inspiration, small and large. 

During Creator’s Hour, you can sit still and see your natural next steps toward whatever you deem important just light up before you. And you can receive the energy to take those next steps. 

But almost no one is up at that time. 

(If you have a harsh Inner Critic, she might be telling you right now something like SEE, I TOLD YOU TO STOP DRINKING WINE AT NIGHT AND GET TO BED EARLIER UGH YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG AGAIN. Tell your Inner Critic thanks for that input, duly noted, you appreciate it, and you’re going to continue reading your favorite newsletter now without the need to compare or judge yourself, because Tara says harsh self-criticism always backfires and Tara also says that you can trust your Inner Intelligence to help you get exactly what you need out of this message, exactly when you need it. Eat the meat and leave the bones. Carry on.)

See, as quiet as it’s kept, your brain and body take much longer to wake all the way up than almost anyone gives them time to. 

After twenty years in the transformation business, I’ve learned a lot about the normal wake up experience. 

Most people wake up with a scarcity story on their mind that goes like this: “I didn’t get enough sleep.” And many wake up with a dread story, too: “I don’t want to do whatever it is I’ve got slated to do today.” 

And many, many people wake up and resume the same energy they had when they went to sleep the prior night. That feeling of Zerissenheit, the German word for feeling torn to pieces by all the demands, projects and tasks of the day, feeling stressed about being here and now while already thinking ahead to the hundreds of other things you’ll need to do that day.

And so they linger in bed for as long as humanly possible, trying to eke out a few more moments of avoidance, then sort of jolt themselves up, hurl their bodies out of bed and start caffeinating in an effort to shake off the fog and brace themselves for the coming day and its coming onslaughts. 

Neurobiologists call this mentally foggy segment of time after you wake up sleep inertia. And it’s not a couple of minutes, it’s more like 30 minutes, neurobiologically speaking.

And the “fix” for it is not caffeine… it’s time. 

The fix is time. 30 minutes your brain wakes up, you just need time. 

And the fix for that dread story of “I don’t want to do this day” is sovereignty. The fix for that is pruning your calendar ruthlessly. Getting better and better every day at removing the things you dread and also giving yourself more, longer, uninterrupted stretches of time to do the things that bring you delight or put you in the flow. 

The fix is time. To give yourself time.

And the fix for that scarcity story of “I didn’t get enough sleep” is getting to bed earlier, investing in a bedtime wind-down routine that feels like a gift you give yourself every night, setting some boundaries with yourself. Limiting the empty calorie screen time in which you indulge at night not from a place of harsh self discipline, but from a place of lavishing yourself with sleep and with… time. 

The fix is time. 

And the fix for Zerissenheit is to take a sacred pause, to reclaim your energy and attention from the hundreds of demands that will come later on, to stop reacting and to replenish yourself, tapping into that natural well of energy you have within (whether you know it or not).

The fix is time. 

I’m not saying you have to get up at 3 am. But I do. And when I do, I don’t hurl myself straightaway into the day. I don’t start making myself available to other people and their emotions first thing. 

I make myself a huge cup of green tea. I light candles all around. I sit. I just sit still for a while, often with the sound of the rain playing on my white noise app, and I just be. 

Then I freely write, getting all the thoughts and ideas and grievances of yesterday and concerns of today on the page. Sometimes that brain dump just snowballs into notes for my team, for the book, or even just answers to a question I’d been pondering.

Then I pray and do some declarations. And then I turn on my chakras with a little micro-yoga practice, The Five Tibetans, or some agility and mobility work. (If that got too woo for you, just think: new age calisthenics.)

By then my brain is ON. I write for a while, the book or the curriculum for my new program, or I work on a Transformation Tuesday. 

And then I work out.

And then my day in the external world begins, usually with Londyn springing out of her room and yelling, “TA-DAAAAAAAAAAAAA! I’M AWAKE!! IS IT WAKE UP TIME???” 

And fast forward… then my day ends around 8 or 8:30, with a bath and bedtime. Because: 3 am. wake time requires an early bedtime too.

But before I do all of that, I just sit and I just be in that brain fog state for a while, knowing that because I have this luxurious stretch of time to myself before I start writing, and because I have that luxurious stretch of writing time to myself before I start working… my sleep inertia transforms into a gift, not a problem to be fixed. 

With time, your so-called sleep inertia transforms into the gift of a quieter mind, so you can feel your natural next steps light up. 

It’s the gift of being in receptive mode, which reminds you that there’s magic and assistance available to you. 

It’s the gift of being fully alert for a good long stretch and getting to put that energy into what I care about before you open yourself to other people’s priorities.

It’s the gift of being able to hear my Divine Downloads in high clarity.

It’s the gift of being able to spend some time adjusting my frequency, getting in alignment with whatever I’ve chosen to focus on that day. Removing the energy of “I have to” and remembering why “I chose to”. Resetting and realigning those choices, if I need to because something feels “shackles on” or my callings are calling me to a different allocation of time and energy today.

It’s the gift of hearing and seeing what needs hearing and seeing. Of seeing dots connect that you can’t see while you’re in hustle and bustle mode. Some days, I have an epiphany or download about what I want to create next or what’s not in alignment, and it comes so fast and complete during my sitting or free-writing that it’s in my team’s inbox before I even get on the bike at 5 am. 

It’s the gift of some time in flow mode every single day, without being interrupted. 

It’s the gift of waking up eager to start the day, even on those days when I have to do things I would rather not. It’s the gift of being able to feel when that’s happening a little too often for my liking. It’s the gift of feeling the “shackles on” and being able to explore that, having the time to pour yourself and your thoughts onto the page, so you can see what feels constricting. Where you can explore your patterns. Where you can slow down your feeling > reaction loops and insert a pause of mindful, intentional decision making.

It’s the gift of the space and self-compassion to have made a detailed action plan and then feel how it’s not in alignment with what you really, truly care about the very most, so you replace it with 3 simple, important priorities for your entire year. 

It’s the gift of letting yourself feel the unwanted emotions, letting yourself distill what they want to communicate with you, and resetting in a natural, resting place of trust and knowing that everything is always working out for you, before you start doing and acting and performing and producing and perfecting for the day. 

It’s the gift of grounding. Getting to center. It’s the gift of breath. Quiet.

I think of it as countering all the scarcity messages I’ve ever received by lavishing myself with the gift of time. 

For me, the quality of life boost I get out of my early AM wake-time and practice is extreme.  It’s the most restful thing I do, even more restful than sleep itself. The flow it allows me to live in, regularly creating my ideas without blocks or stuckness… it’s joyful and intrinsically motivating, psychologically.

But it’s also deeply spiritual: It’s when I reset and stop reacting. It’s when I reconnect with my own natural strength and power, and with All That Is. With God. It’s when I explore my own shadows and open my soul and replenish it and integrate what I’ve learned more deeply, into who I’m becoming. 

It’s when I see the hidden hijinks of my own Inner Critic, and get intentional about breaking the pull of my patterns. 

It’s my inner retreat, and I get to take it every day of my life, anywhere I am in the world. 

And it’s how I get to this place of laser energy that I’m in right now, over and over again: Focused on what matters the most. Focused on aligning to that and resourcing that. Focused on putting things in their rightful place on the priorities list, because there’s always that creep of urgent things trying to knock the important stuff off the top of the list. Focused on delegating more effectively or taking less important things off the list altogether and letting that be okay, too.

I’m challenging you this week to get curious about this: Do you give yourself and your soul-deep priorities (not just your work priorities or household duties) the gift of time? 

What is your Inner Critic saying about why this delectable, lavish gift of time isn’t really available to you, personally? 

What does your Inner Naysayer think when you think about going to bed earlier or, if you’re a night owl, turning off the devices so you can just be? 

What might be possible for you, if you did? And I don’t just mean what stuff could you get done. 

I mean how would you feel? Self-respect? Self-compassion? Awake? More alive?

Yeah, probably all of those.

Head up + heart out,

The Inner Critic Coach™

Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq.
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

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Here’s what I learned this year:

We’re all dying anyway. 

Despite all the self-protection we think we’re doing when we hide our light and hold ourselves back. 

Perfectionism will not save you. 

Waiting until you’re ready won’t, either.

We’re all dying. 

It’s the only thing guaranteed about living.

And if the death of this beautiful, meat-covered skeleton made of stardust that is your body, if that death is a given then that death on its own, cannot be the tragic part. 

The tragedy is the unlived life. The tragedy is that you survive the pandemic and hide from your own genius out of fear. The tragedy is if you spend the next years or decades living some societally-approved shadow of the life you really want.

Self-consciousness and self-sabotage. Hesitation and procrastination. Wondering what they’ll think. Marrying our struggle portfolios. Fondling the faux-catastrophe of “well, if I speak up in the meeting I could look super dumb,” so you say nothing at all. Continuing to over-give and let resentment and exhaustion take up all the energy you could otherwise pour into the callings of your soul.

That’s tragic. 

Because all that self-limiting usually comes from a storyline that says: “If I go all in, or if I dare to get after whatever my heart really desires, Something Very Bad could happen.”

Almost all of our Inner Critic talk and self-limiting comes from a protective place. 

The occasional terror and prevailing beauty of 2020 was in remembering that this world and these bodies are not our permanent homes. 

Don’t get me wrong. I have not become one of those “life is short” people.

Because you are eternal. Your soul is eternal. And so are all the elements of your body: the carbon, the nitrogen. They’re not making any more of that stuff. Matter just shifts form.

Your soul never dies and your matter never dies…so you can never really die.

But in case you were in danger of getting it twisted, 2020 was here to remind you: The current form of YOU is only here for a season.

And we came here to play the creation game, because the singular advantage we have while we’re here in these human bodies for this season is to think thoughts and have ideas about how we want the world to be or our lives to be… to think thoughts about things that don’t currently exist, and then to cause those things to exist.

That’s the power of playing the creation game.

The tragedy is not playing the creation game because we think our perfectionism, procrastination, self-criticism and self-limiting is protecting us from dying, when (not to beat a dead horse) dying isn’t even the tragedy.

The tragedy is hiding our light, holding ourselves back or telling ourselves the story that we’re not doing it right, whatever it is. 

The tragedy is to continue telling ourselves self-critical stories that feel shitty and fables of limitations that do not exist.

You may think that these stories of your Inner Critic are keeping you responsible, keeping you safe or keeping you alive, but nope! YOU ARE DYING ANYWAY. 

Maybe not for another 100 years, but the day will come. 

I invite you to opt-out of the tragedy of hiding your light.

You get to outgrow the need to participate in that. 

2021 seems like as good a year as any to let the old ways you held yourself back dissolve and dissipate. 

I know that’s what I’m doing. 

In fact, here are some of my intentions for the segment of time we’ve deemed 2021. 

I invite you to borrow any of them that feel resonant for you. 

Click here for Tara’s 2021 Intentions.

Head up + heart out,

The Inner Critic Coach™

Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq.
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

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I intend for 2021 to be a year of maximum illumination. 

Maximum shining my own light. 

Maximum shining light into my shadows.

I intend to judge myself less this year.

I intend to achieve less this year through hard effort and create more through intentional alignment.

I intend to align more. 

I intend to leverage more.  

I intend to real-ize more and be less productive and more fruitful at the same time.

I intend to be the Maestra of an orchestra of beautiful ideas and brilliant beings and delectable moments and transformational creations. 

I intend to allow more creation to flow through me.

I intend for Divine Order to be established in every space that is mine, in every relationship of my life, in every cell of my body, in every corner of my homes and my heart and my mind and my soul. 

I intend to inhabit every breath and every moment and every square centimeter of my life more fully this year than I ever have before.

In 2021, I intend to let the flow and my work and my relationships and my play be maximum easy. 

I intend to let the flow flow more than ever before, without inserting my own doubt, disbelief, discomfort or thought dis-ease into that flow. 

I intend to search out and find conversations and ideas and ways of being and people, collaborators, co-creators that feel like resonance and harmony and just so damn good. 

I intend to fulfill my desires, my dreams and my sacred potentials as I was created to do, in graceful, wonderful ways.

I intend to watch all things perfectly unfold and work out for me in Divine Timing, as they always do. 

I intend to be a radiator of love, success and abundance and a magnet for all of the above and an aligner with all of those, too, in perfect ways.

I intend to fulfill my sacred contracts this year the way I was created to do.

In the year to come, I intend to receive and allow and align like I’ve never received, allowed or aligned before and that’s saying something, because I’ve gotten really good at all of those things. 

This year I intend to receive the flow of Infinite Intelligence and to continue growing in my knowing that the One Mind — the Intelligence that programmed my organs and my cells, and the oceans and the seasons — is in me.

I now receive all wisdom and knowledge and insight… every impulse, instinct and intelligence that I need to be what I came here to be, to have what I came here to have, to learn what I came here to learn, to do what I came here to do and to create the experiences and blessings and impact and abundance I came here to create. 

This year, I intend to insert a sacred pause of breath and heart beat anytime things get a little crunchy or out of alignment, like maybe 3 times or a thousand times a day, depending on the day.

During these sacred pauses, I will turn the love I have for babies and puppies and the people I love the most inward, onto myself. 

I will take the opportunity of each and every one of these sacred pauses to recognize that every thought I think feels real, but the ones that feel the worst are almost never true. 

This year I intend to insert a sacred pause between the impulse of a desire and the knee jerk patterning I’ve learned that causes me to play the smaller game, hide my light at all or hold myself back at all.

This year I will break the pull of those patterns, starting with inserting these sacred pauses.

I intend to open my eyes wide to see those patterns this year in ways I’ve never seen them before and with absolutely zero judgment because there’s no need to judge the process or the path.

This year, I will see the delay my own self-limiting has created for what it is: beneficial. All my delays that have ever happened, ever, are right now adding to my wisdom, snowballing my clarity, benefitting me right now as we speak and creating all manner of golden chains of events through which Divine Order is working, right now, to line up a beautiful, grace-riddled journey into my highest good.

(Side note: Your delays benefit you, my friend. Not just in the end. Right now.)

This year, I will open my heart wide to receive my golden thread downloads of inspired ideas, hunches, callings and Inner Intelligence when they come, and I’ll take a sacred pause before I give into the old pattern of refusing those callings. 

This year, I will keep my heart open to receive both the downloads and the energy to act on them. 

And starting today, I open my mind, my eyes and my arms wide to receive everything Source, this Universe and this life has for me: all the success, all the joy, all the abundance, all the adoration, all the support, all the connection, all the creative power, all the ease, and all the beauty. 

This year, and starting right now, I intend to see with newfound, high-def clarity all of these components of my Divine Inheritance as they flow to me in an avalanche of abundance, over calm seas, under grace, in perfect, surprising and delight-sparking ways. 

Right now, in this moment, I set down my struggle portfolio.

I now put down those bags. 

I thank every jot and tittle of every struggle story contained therein for who they have helped me become. 

But I leave them here now.

And I go free.

All is well in my world.

Head up + heart out,

The Inner Critic Coach™

Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq.
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

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Around this time in 2017, I clicked on this headline: Guy Hides Camera in Bucket of Water To See Who Comes to Drink, and Result Doesn’t Disappoint.

And I was soon mesmerized.

I wanted to share it with you this week because it’s deeply soothing, and I think we could all use a little moment of peace right now. 

The link opened a video. This video had been filmed by a sustainable living group in Southwest Texas. And the premise was basic: they literally hid a camera in a bucket of water.

The opening shot features some bees, testing out the water. A notch-eared desert bunny peers in and takes a sip. Then some roosters come. And some lovely little birds perch on the edge then flit out of view. A rangy horse ambles up for a drink. And so does a steer: cartoonish and regal, at the same time, longhorns all out.

All of this life, all of these goings-on, all of these beings doing what they do… we see them all. We see them through the water clearly, but also with a tiny little constant, shimmery wave. 

We see how each is curious and feels worthy of indulging their curiosity, without explaining themselves to anyone. 

We see how each is thirsty and feels worthy of this water without having to proving they’re worthy. 

We see how they play… just because.  

We see how they all somehow just follow the Inner Intelligence that says “Look in the bucket. You’ll find what you need there”, without texting their friends for advice or posting on Facebook to ask what everyone else thinks about it.

Every time I watch this video, I think about the magnetic force of this bucket. Someone had the impulse to put water in a bucket and set this little gift out in the desert. Then they added a camera, trusting and knowing that something interesting—something worth watching—would find its way there.

And it did.

During this week of gift giving and receiving around the world, I want to ask you to take your mind off your to do list, your shopping list and turn your attention inward

I want you to take an inventory and make another list: a list of your own God-given, inborn gifts.

When are you water in a desert? What are your unique gifts, talents and personality traits? The ones that make you a magnet to other people, interesting events and… life itself?

Jot them down or hit reply as soon as they come to mind. Don’t give your Inner Critic a chance to chime in. Give it the week off.

Head up + heart out,

The Inner Critic Coach™

Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq.
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

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Last week I shared a few reasons you might be enthralled with the Netflix series, The Queen’s Gambit. 

Then I had one of those weeks where I received the same message over and over again, starting with another on-screen (and real life) Queen. It all began with a fascinating scene from Season 4 of The Crown. The scene depicts the 21st birthday speech that real-life, then-Princess Elizabeth delivered from the British royal family’s 1947 tour of South Africa. There’s a lot that’s historically interesting in the speech about the evolution of the monarchy and the death of an empire.

But one line stuck with me and I just had to look the real version up and watch it on YouTube. The 21-year-old woman, whose father would soon die prematurely, leaving her Queen, said: 

“I declare before you all that my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” 

A few days later, something in my inbox caught my eye. “Why hasn’t the Queen retired?” Quora’s top-rated answer pointed to this exact same line of this exact same speech. 

She made a commitment seventy-three years ago. And she will keep it. Theeee end.

This concept of commitment came to me once more as I was reading our Book of the Month in my Mastery program. The book is called Conscious Luck, and it’s like a breath of fresh genius from a favorite author of mine, Gay Hendricks, and co-author Carol Kline. 

Right in the first chapter, Hendricks tells the story of a relationship in which he realized that he’d been having the same argument script with his mate for five years.

He writes: 

“I stepped back from the process and wondered: Why would I engage in a pattern like this? Why would I create the same basic argument over and over again for years? Given all the experiences I could be having as a human being, why have I kept repeating the pattern of lying and being lied to, being criticized and criticizing, blaming and being blamed, and thinking of myself as a victim?”

Then in a rush of realization, I got the answer: These things kept happening because I was committed to being criticized, committed to being betrayed, committed to arguing and lying. I was more committed to my established pattern than I was to having a great relationship. The commitments were obviously unconscious….

The moment I realized what my commitment was, I felt a huge shift inside. I wasn’t a hapless victim of my circumstances, I was the powerful creator of those circumstances!” 

He goes on: “The very act of becoming aware of our unconscious commitments is an enormous first step in taking ownership of our results in life. It loosens the negative grip of our old patterns and allows us to begin practicing new, conscious habits of behavior. It swings wide the door to claiming our power so we can create the life we truly want.”

As I read this, and connected the dots between my reading and the Queen’s words that had captivated me earlier in the week, I sat down with my journal and wrote out the question: 

What are my commitments? 

As I continued doing what I do this time of year, which is to metabolize 2020 and envision 2021, I kept coming back to that question:

What are my unconscious commitments?

As I identified areas of my life and my work where I’m not getting the results I want (yet), I asked myself again:

What have I been committed to? What commitments have I outgrown?

And as I started “writing the vision and making it plain”, as the Scripture says, so that my team, my vendors, my partners, my students, my clients and all my future collaborators may see and understand it with crystal clarity, I sat with the question still: 

What fresh commitments am I making right now? 

Your commitments — conscious and unconscious — are creating the results you’re seeing in your life, especially when it comes to the areas where you feel like you dwell daily in your zone of genius, which is the same as your zone of freedom, wholeness, meaning and self-actualized fulfillment.

Your commitments — conscious and especially the unconscious ones — are creating the results you’re seeing in your life, especially when it comes to your self-limiting beliefs and worldviews, your self-sabotage, your blocks and your inner glass ceilings, all those thoughts you think and stories you tell yourself that cause you to hold yourself back.

My life’s work — my commitment —  is to help you reverse the repression that began so long ago, all the conditioning that causes you to hide your light or hold yourself back from anything ever. 

That’s the same thing as saying my mission is for you to reclaim sovereignty over your life and your experience of it. 

Every time you break the pull of your patterns by even 1%, you get a little bit of sovereignty back.

Every time you take 1% or 5% or 10% more ownership of your results in life, you get a little closer to wholeness, joy, and liberation. 

So in the interest of shedding even a tiny, onion-skin thin layer of whatever old self-critical, scarcity-based, fearful mindset programming bugs have you in their thrall, I challenge you today to ask yourself this question and to do it without even an iota of self-judgment or self-criticism: 
 
What are your commitments?

What commitments are you ready to release? 

What is ONE unconscious commitment you can now see that has created unwanted results in your life? 

What would happen if that commitment was no longer important to you? 

How would that feel? 

What would be possible for you? 

What one commitment will you retire as 2020 comes to a close? 

What gift of a commitment will you give yourself now, as we onramp into 2021?

If this one is tough for you, here are some thought starters: 

• What fears have you been committed to? 
• What self-limiting stories have you been committed to telling? 
• What painful, self-punishing interpretations of your childhood or your past have you been committed to, maybe for years?
• Are you committed to self-soothing through consuming (wine, TV, Facebook, online shopping)?
• Are you more committed to not rocking the boat than to saying what is true?
• Did you make a commitment as a child to look for others’ approval as your green light? 
• Did you commit years ago to never outshine someone? 
• Are you committed to your few extra pounds? 
• Do you have a commitment to self-deprecation, or to bonding with others in low vibration, petty complaining? 

Remember what Carl Jung said: Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will rule your life and you will call it fate.

What unconscious commitment are you ready to make conscious, so you can get your life back?

Hit reply and let me know what comes up for you.

Head up + heart out,

The Inner Critic Coach™

P.S.: I predict that at least one of these 3 things is taking place in your mind right now:

• Your struggle switch flipped on when you read the word “commitment”, because that sounds like setting a goal where you fail if you don’t get a 100% perfect score. 
• You started telling yourself that you’ve tried and failed at dozens of commitments before.
• You started thinking “Well, Tara’s super disciplined, so she can just decide what her commitments are gonna be. But I can’t just do that! It’s not that easy.”

That’s your Inner Critic at work.

Listen: YOU are beautifully unique. But your Inner Critic is wildly unoriginal. It’s been telling the same damn stories for decades. I’ve worked with tens of thousands of people on their Inner Critic problem, and I will tell you that almost everyone you know could put their habitual self-limiting or self-critical thoughts into one of just 7 primary categories.

I’ve been keeping track. 

So here’s my advice: Don’t get ahead of yourself. For now, just identify one commitment you want to set down and another you’d like to make. Next week, I’ll tell you how I know you can do it, and we’ll talk about next steps.

Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq.
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

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The new Netflix miniseries The Queen’s Gambit is a bona fide cultural phenomenon. 

If you haven’t seen the show, chances are you will soon. To make a long story short, The Queen’s Gambit is the story of an orphaned young girl, Beth Harmon, who learns how to play chess from the orphanage’s janitor. As she comes of age, she also ascends to the very top of the world of competitive chess and becomes a self-sufficient, if troubled, woman along the way. 

It is styled and acted to perfection. I devoured it in a few hours on the treadmill. 

And apparently, I’m not the only one: 

So here’s the question: Why do we love it so damn much? 

1. We’ve had no superhero films this year (#becausecovid). If you love a good old-fashioned hero’s journey, and you feel that soul-level resonance with the call to adventure, quests and the victorious return arc of that genre, the story of Beth Harmon does it all very nicely. 

I’ve long felt that superhero films are this culture’s way of talking about God. Through them, the masses get a taste of transcendence, meaning, immortality, higher and nobler values, but also the dark shadows and forces of humanity. 

This year, we got a lot of real-world superheroes, like the front-line medical workers and the grocery cashiers and the delivery people… and John Lewis and Chadwick Boseman and New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and voting rights activist Stacey Abrams. 

All of these people have caused this year to be a special moment in our generation, in terms of the way hero stories influence us and influence humanity.

Because as much as I love them, mass-market superhero films turn these meaningful, eternal topics into licensed characters, cheaply commoditizing transcendence and demoting these noble concepts to a two-hour block of so-called fantasy and child’s play. 

Without the films and with all these real-life heroics, this was the year we realized that the transformational acts and arcs that move human evolution forward are lived out every day by real people in real life, mostly in ways that will never make the news. 

These people inspire us to be better humans. And these stories — fictional or not — inspire us to create better worlds. The Queen’s Gambit might have just made you want to dress better. But it might have made you want to live in a world where men support and cultivate the genius they see in women, and inspired you to give some thought as to how you might help create that world. And it might have also beckoned to the genius within you to stop hiding and come out into the world.

2. The story itself was a supernatural force that demanded to be told… and didn’t stop until it was. If you’ve ever read Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert, you’ll recall her talking about how some creative projects have an almost supernatural force of their own and will hunt down creators who are receptive, compliant and willing to serve as conduits. 

For example, Gilbert tells how she herself had an inspired idea for a novel, then put the project on hold. Years later, another author published a nearly identical storyline to the one Gilbert had been writing, with shockingly similar specifics. Given that there was no earthly way the writer who ended up publishing the book could have known about Gilbert’s incomplete draft, it was as though the story itself was a supernatural force and would not stop until it found a writer who was willing to write it.

The Queen’s Gambit — the story itself — was similarly relentless in becoming a Netflix series. The story came out in novel form almost 40 years ago. Around 2007 it was being adapted for film as the directorial debut of Heath Ledger. After his suicide, the project stalled out. But the story was relentless, and ultimately found its way to the masses via Netflix, during the pandemic, at a moment of peak hunger for a smart, stylish story about a woman unleashing her unique personality and genius.

Everyone I’ve ever coached had some kind of creation that was trying to come through them. I personally find great peace in knowing that if we stop resisting, these great things will come through us. And if we don’t, we needn’t worry: They will come to life. And another inspiration will come to us and through us, all in Divine Order and Timing.

3. You’re a Ruler. Archetypes are ancient patterns of human psyche, emotion, and behavior that you can see over and over again in myths, stories, and real life throughout human history. Carl Jung listed 12 primary Archetypes, and you’re probably familiar with many of them as literary tropes, like Ruler, Lover, Rebel and Hero.

For example, when psychologists talk about your Inner Child, we’re talking about the child archetype within you. 

We all have some of all the Archetypes within us. And we all also have dominant Archetypes, Archetypes that influence us very little, and even Archetypes we suppress and repress for various reasons. 

We find resonance with characters in sacred stories, fiction, and history who share our archetypes. And we can often download incredible insight for our own, real lives from studying fictional characters and historical figures who share our dominant Archetypes or who typify the Archetypes we need to dial up and embrace in the context of a problem or situation we’re facing at the moment.

For example, if you are a born Alchemist, you might love Harry Potter. 

If you have a dominant Inner Child, you might love Peter Pan.

And if the Ruler archetype runs strong in your Divine Inner Coding, as it does in mine, you might naturally gravitate toward programs like The Crown and The Queen’s Gambit. 

Beth is not literal royalty. But she becomes the figurative Queen of her art. And like many Queen characters, she overcomes repressive influences, she learns to harness the power of her “court” and she ultimately builds her own empire by bringing her unique spirit and gifts fully online.

And she also struggles (spoiler alert). She struggles with fear, self-doubt, addiction, the death of her birth mother and, later, her adoptive mother.

Stories are powerful tools for our personal development and spiritual journeys. Very few of us are taught, specifically, how to distill and integrate wisdom from our daily lives and longer life arcs and the collective unconscious, so that we can rediscover the power we came here with. We were never taught how to do inner work. 

One way to do it is to use stories. We can learn from the characters’ struggles and triumphs, and use that wisdom to fulfill our dreams and actualize our potentials.

Archetypes are one specific tool you can use to do your inner work with stories. You can learn about the Archetypes. You can interview them. You can dial them up or down as needed. You can even “study” your Archetypes by getting intentional about watching and reading about characters you relate to or want to be more like. 

That’s why the sacred texts of all the holy traditions are 90% story and 10% directives. Because stories activate the generations of wisdom contained in the Archetypes, and help us access it for our everyday problems and dreams and lives. 

So yeah. Those are a few reasons why you might love The Queen’s Gambit. 

(And the fashion doesn’t hurt, either.) 

Head up + heart out,

The Inner Critic Coach™

P.S.: If you want to discover your own Archetypes and learn how to work with them, take my FREE Sacred Archetypes Quiz, here. 

The Sacred Money Archetypes are framed as helping you understand why you do what you do when it comes to money, business and career.

But the way you do money is the way you do everything.

So when you take the quiz, you’ll find insight and wisdom into your own inner workings on any topic. Try it and see.

Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq.
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

Sign up to receive Transformation Tuesday in your inbox, here.

Some days, I ask Londyn the question parents love to ask toddlers: Do you know how much I love you?

And some days, she just says: YEP. And goes on about her toddler business.

But other days, she gives me the answer I taught her: YOU LOVE ME MAXIMUM.

I stole that from something my friend Artie taught me about parenting. He says parents need to sit their kids down, repeatedly throughout childhood, and tell them 3 things: 

• I love you maximum.
• There’s nothing you can do to get more love from me.
• There’s nothing you can do to lose my love, either.

These three things stop parenting from being a 20-year task with the goal of spitting out performing, conforming, productive cogs in the wheel. 

And I assure you: In the next season of humanity on Planet Earth, the last thing you’ll want the next generation of children to be is performing, conforming producers. (More on that later.)

What you will want them to be is self-sovereign. 

You’ll want them to know themselves and their unique genius.

You’ll want them to feel skillful in navigating their lives and a world that changes at warp-speed.

You will want them to possess mastery-level skills over their own minds, bodies, emotions, thoughts and actions.

You will want them to feel free. To feel whole. To feel deeply connected to All That Is. To feel deep joy, spiritual well-being and spiritual maturity.

But here’s the deal: You can’t really bring somebody an experience you’re not having. 

So before you can help the next generation experience maximum love, your first job is to reparent yourself by giving yourself maximum love. 

Love that cannot be lost.

Love that cannot be earned through performance, because… it’s already maximum.

Step one is to let your parents — however wondrous or terrible they were  — off the hook. 

Grieve what you’ve gotta grieve and mourn what you’ve gotta mourn for Little You.

Then Big You can take the wheel and become what my teacher Dave Richo calls your own “inner nurturant parent.”

Start loving yourself maximum.

Learn what unconditional love really means.

Stop forcing yourself to perform, conform or produce.

**Take a beat here. Read the last sentence again.**

Now read it one more time:

Stop forcing yourself to perform, conform or produce.

Begin the transformation of your Inner Critic via the application of radical self-cherishing.

Can you notice the times when you’re equating your work, productivity or output with your self-worth? The clue is that when you’re not able to be uber-focused because life or your kids get in the way, you start to panic, feel untethered or fear that something catastrophic will happen. Then look in the mirror, smile at that old habit you’ve outgrown and shift spiritual gears. 

Can you create a discipline that anytime things get hard, scary or grindy, the first thing you do is drink a glass of water and take a sacred pause? 

This happened to me yesterday. It was my son’s 20th day in the hospital. I’d been working on adoption paperwork and reviewing nanny profiles and handling medical stuff since 4 am, with just a little break to meditate, work out and get Londyn to daycare. I needed to be in thirteen places at once. I was bone tired… maybe the tiredest I’d ever been. And I found myself texting my bff that I was sure some really bad things would happen if I took a 30 minute nap. 

That was my signal.

I stepped away from the phone.

I closed my eyes and got a glass of water. 

I laid out a packet of bone broth, a packet of Vitamin C, an enormous glass of water and a cup of tea. 

I took a deep breath and said to myself: “Tara, my love. You are pure power. But you’re not THAT powerful.” 

The world will not crumble if you take a half hour nap and take some time for yourself.

I made one phone call to just triple-check that the world really wouldn’t crumble.

And then I set all my nourishing elixirs on the lip of my bathtub, ran a bath, put a meditation on in my headphones and took a bath as I drank first the water, then the broth, then the vitamins, then the tea.

And then I took a nap.

At 11:30 am. 

When I had thirteen places I needed to be, and a hundred things I needed to be doing. 

By 11:40, I was already feeling immense appreciation for 11:30 Tara.

A day later, I’m still feeling Maximum Love from 11:30 yesterday Tara. 

Because 11:30 Tara — who decided to get into the bath and stop playing the superhero game  —  was the new version of the (beloved) old me.  And 11:30 Tara demonstrated the progress we’ve made by recognizing the superhero myth I was telling myself.

And by opting out of that old savior/martyr/depletion story.

And by taking a bath. And getting nourished. And taking a nap. And resourcing myself to be fully present and powered ON for the rest of the day.

So, I just tell you this story as a sort of invitation to get curious about how you can contribute to human evolution by reparenting yourself on a platform of Maximum Love. 

And the next time you get scared, frustrated, overwhelmed or just tired, take a sacred pause, meet your own eyes in the mirror and say these 4 words:

I love you maximum.

Head up + heart out,

The Inner Critic Coach™

Tara-Nicholle Nelson, MA, Esq.
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

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