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

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

Friends,

If you tune yourself to the frequency of answers, you can find wisdom anywhere.

Saturday was the last day of my first 90-day book writing boot camp. As I was preparing my final words for my brilliant students, I was studying various perspectives on the subject of clarity, curious to see what the great philosophers had written on the subject.

I came across a quote from the modern thinker and sports ball savant Venus Williams. It didn’t seem on topic at first, but I read through anyhow. She’d been asked how it feels when she’s playing a great game and it begins to rain, stopping momentum and forcing her to sit on the bench.

Counterintuitively, she said: “Rain is good for me. I feel like I achieve clarity, actually, when it rains. The longer I have to sit and wait, the clearer my game becomes to me.”

I was instantly reminded of the bull in its querencia, the bullfighters’ wisdom that if you let a bull take a pause, get out of reactive mode and recalibrate, it taps back into its natural strength and power. It does what it was made to do, and will run through anything in its path. It becomes unstoppable.

But I was also reminded of so many conversations I’ve had with my friends and students, the people I think of as “impatient uplifters”: ambitious and successful in their day jobs, seeking to live conscious lives and lift others up, yet always feeling like they’re behind, like they’ve not yet hit their stride in life. Like they’ve not yet made enough money to leave their corporate job or shadow career.

Those who are doing their life’s work, often feel they’ve not yet figured out how to be as successful or play as big a game as they were put here to be or play. Because life got in the way. Or their childhood wiring gets in the way. Or they’re good at one piece of the puzzle, but they’ve never quite gotten (or made) the break or the traction they seek.

So they feel behind. Sidelined. Benched.

I’ve been there myself, despite having had an all-hit career. And that’s precisely why this quote was so meaningful to me. Because I’ve been there, yes, but that was then and this is now. Now I have crystal clarity. I can see how every single shadow career, every seemingly more than good-enough-but-not-quite-right career path, every job I disliked and even the ones I loved, every personal crisis, drama and trauma, every obstacle and delay was really another moment (or season) on the bench.

Each moment was good for me. In each season, I achieved greater and greater clarity. Because I had to wait, my “game”, my long-term vision and my immediate next steps, are now completely clear to me.

So if you’re feeling behind, or like life has sidelined you over and over again, take heart.

And take a sacred pause.

That pause might be for a moment, or an evening. It might be for a week or a season. But take the time to stop doing and achieving and “getting things done”. Just be. Even for one evening.

‘Be’ with the feeling of behind. You don’t have to push against that feeling, or spring into making some action plan because you feel like doing something, anything, will make you feel ok. Yes, sometimes clarity comes by taking one step toward what feels like it might be resonant and expansive, and seeing what happens. But you don’t have to earn your place on this planet by doing. Sometimes, the best plan of action when you’re not clear what to do next is to take a pause and let those feelings of behind, anxious, scarce – whatever – sit right next to you on the bench.

When you stop trying to do things to outrun those feelings, you recoup the energy you’ve been putting into that struggle.

And with that energy, you can do loads of things. Way high up on the list of uses for that energy: allow what you’ve learned to integrate. Whether your recent season (or whole life) has been characterized by wanted experiences and emotions, unwanted experiences or both, catch this principle: there’s a life adventure to be had in allowing your experiences to clarify your game for you.

And catch this principle, too: the unwanted experiences often hold more power to clarify your game, to clarify what you do want, than the walk-in-the park parts of your life.

So, you might be feeling like you’re behind. Like you expected to be “further” by this point in your life, or like you’re not all the way grown up yet (even though you’re plenty grown).

Or maybe you feel like the twists and turns of life keep getting in the way of you walking fully into your calling?

Take some refuge in the community, the collective of impatient, ambitious uplifters, almost all of whom have felt this way at one time or another. I’ve known industry leaders, people millionaires many times over who still say they feel ‘behind’.

Channel your inner bull: take a pause, stop reacting, recalibrate and tap back into your natural strength and power.

Then, channel your inner Venus and remember: you’ve just been getting clearer on your game.

That’s how you’ll become unstoppable, in divine timing. Because that’s what you are.

NOTE #1: I’m currently building a course on how to make bold career transitions successfully and soulfully. If you’ve been thinking about making a career move and you have a question you’d like me to answer, just hit reply and send it my way. Thanks in advance!

NOTE #2: I’m teaching a series of four, LIVE 90-minute transformational business and marketing classes on Creative Live on May 24th:

• How to Build and Market Products that Change People’s Lives
• Rethink Your Content Marketing Strategy
• Rethink What you Sell and Who you Serve
• Build a Customer Journey Map that Drives Engagement

There are a few ways you can participate:

• You can stream the classes live, for free, on May 24th. Use the links above to register for access.
• You can buy access to watch them on-demand anytime you want at the same links.
• If you happen to be in the Bay Area, you can apply to be part of the live studio audience! The audience will get breakfast and lunch that day, plus free access to the class (both during and after broadcast). (And of course, you get to be there in person, ask questions, and be a part of the course!)

Apply to be part of the live audience, here:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfRahOe738s6CvZ76dkBzKbgMcRfw3Owfpiq8EKFUQV4AOm-Q/viewform

Head up + heart out,

TNN

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

Friend-o-mine:

I recently saw the film director David Lynch give a talk about meditation. (He creates renowned bizarro flicks, including Twin Peaks and Eraserhead.) During the Q+A, a Lynch film fanboy got up. This guy couldn’t care less about meditation. His favorite director was in the house, and he’d been given a mic, so he gushed with gusto.

“David, I love your work. You’re my favorite director and Mullholland Drive is my favorite film. My brother and I watch it over and over. But we have a question about this one part. We disagree on what’s really happening in it.”

Homeboy proceeded to set forth the nature of the fraternal dispute.

David let him finish. Then he answered, saying something to this effect:

“Thank you so much. I’m glad you like the movies. I was done creating Mulholland Drive when I finished editing it. Now it’s your turn to interpret the movie as you like.”

Takeaway: Require your audience to co-create with you as they engage with your creations.

The next day, I went to see the radiant Erykah Badu perform. She did a shout-out for “all the 90’s babies in the house”. After their uproar died down, she elaborated. “Listen. I wrote this song when I was pregnant with my own 90’s baby, and I wrote it specifically for you who were born in the 90s. I’ve been waiting TWENTY YEARS for you to be emotionally and intellectually ready to understand this song. I’m so glad it’s time.”

Takeaway: Trust your audience to receive exactly what they need from your work, all in divine timing.

Here’s the last one: I just got back from a delightful trip to Spain. We started in Barcelona, took the train to Figueres to visit the Dalí’s museum, and then made a final stop in Madrid. In Barcelona, of course, we immersed ourselves in the work of the City’s cherished son, Antoni Gaudí. We stayed next door to La Pedrera, had an architect walk us around town for a few hours and teach us about his work, and of course, visited Sagrada Familia.

Gaudí was exceptional in (at least) one important way: he eschewed straight lines as man-made and, thus, necessarily inferior to the God-made curves and lines of nature. So his buildings are swooping, soaring, colorful, curvy devotional works of art: including and especially Sagrada Familia.

If you’ve been to Barcelona or even have ever talked to someone who has, you know the headline about Sagrada Familia: construction began in 1882 and construction continues today. Current eta for completion is 2026 (no typo).

Gaudí’s unusual style rendered it impossible for his projects to be built strictly from blueprints. Instead, he built miniature-scale plaster models, and his assistants constructed the buildings from that. As he began work on Sagrada Familia, only completing a couple of corners in his lifetime, he moved into the church full-time and spent his last few years feverishly working on models for the project.

Catch this: He didn’t even aim to complete the building. His sole mission and focus was to communicate his vision by completing the models so someone else (or many someones) could complete the building.

What struck me was the clarity of Gaudí’s vision and the purity of his motivation, his total devotion to providing a grand place of worship for everyone, rich and poor (not the norm at the time), knowing full well he could never live to see the day of its completion. In the basement of the basilica, we found this quote I loved. He said: “It is not a disappointment that I will not be able to finish the Temple. I will grow old, but others will come after me. This will make it even more grandiose.”

Takeaway: You can’t build anything grand by yourself. Learn to love that. Get good at collaborating, communicate the vision clearly to your co-creators and trust your team to create something more grandiose than you ever could on your own.

Here’s the deal: Those of us who feel called to do transformational work, to lead transformational businesses or market transformational products, can get very hung up in fretting about what the audience will think, whether they’ll love it or hate it, and how on earth we’ll ever get it all done.

But I found a massive chunk of fresh creative power when I got to the place where I stopped fretting about audience reactions and started creating what I feel inspired to and what feels alive for me while I’m creating it. When I feel engaged and alive while I’m creating something or giving a talk, my audience will feel that, too. It happens over and over again.

On the other hand, worrying too much about how something will be received before I write it or say it has a chilling effect. It stops the flow. It’s like trying to edit something as you write it. Your brain can’t work in flow mode and edit mode at the same time. And worrying about the audience reaction to something while you’re creating that thing is like asking for editing input from hypothetical folks in the future.

It’ll pinch you right off from your internal pipeline of inspiration.

Our job as creators and leaders is to stay in that place of feeling engaged, create what feels alive, edit and shape that with wisdom, experience and judgment, and then put it out into the world and continue to shape it with the collaboration of the audience.

Like many of you, my art is my business. I create because I am called to. I create to express myself fully and freely. And I create with the objective to uplift, engage and spark wanted change for my readers, customers and clients. Passive content consumption does not transform people’s lives; content + action + connection does. So I create content and experiences that spark people into action and connection in their real, everyday lives.

So you can see why La Badu’s, Dir. Lynch’s and Sr. Gaudí’s comments prompted me to think about business and marketing and even my team through a fresh lens. I’m moving into a season of program-design and product-building at SoulTour having made a big shift.

Instead of trying to solve so-called business “problems” or overcoming “challenges”, we’re answering these questions:

• What if we trusted our audiences to co-create with us, in the way they activate our content in their own lives?
• What if we trusted in the universal law that everything is always working out for the expansion of ourselves and of humanity?
• What if we applied that to the way we interact with our customers and our audiences?
• What if we trusted that the right customers will come to our work at the right time, and would engage with it in a way that would ultimately work out for their good and ours?

What if we created what feels alive and resonant, after having studied and immersed ourselves in our customers’ journeys and listening to their hopes, dreams, wants and needs?

• What if we then put it out to them, in an highly valuable, but imperfect, state?
• And then, what if we took the feedback we like as a green light to invest more and do more of that, and the feedback we don’t like so much as course correction, instruction about what to do less of
• What if we viewed our audiences, customers and employees as co-creators or collaborators, instead of as the tough nuts to crack we so often envision them to be?

The shift to viewing your audience, customers and team as co-creators and collaborators does a number of things. It shifts the whole energy of your business, for one. Things get more light and playful. Possibilities expand. Innovation becomes the order of the day. It feels more like answering questions than solving problems.

It also shifts the whole energy of marketing, in particular.

It makes it less fraught, less life or death, less win or lose. It turns every piece of marketing, every marketing message into an invitation to your prospective co-creators.

And there are two essential components of an invitation.

An invitation is, first and foremost, a summons. This creative summons, the business and marketing kind of summons, tells your audience your presence is requested by a certain someone, at a certain time, in a certain place.

But an invitation is also a welcome: a preview of the delightful thing you’ve written or created or built for your audience. It’s the message that look, I created this beautiful thing for you. Just for you. I’ve lit the fire, plated your favorite food, turned on your favorite music and when you get here, you’lllove it.

Catch this principle: When you write something and put it out into the world, start your podcast or blog, create an MVP version of your product, or market whatever your work is to market, you are doing nothing more fearsome than sending out an invitation to co-creation. You’re beaconing out a signal to the readers, listeners, watchers, audience members, customers and even partners, employees and investors who will want to play this game of business and life with you, to co-create with you.

The overarching lesson of The Badu, Dir. Lynch and Señor Gaudí is not only to trust your creative process, but to trust the co-creative process. You’ll create with more ease and joy, and you’ll create more grandiose, more impactful, more beautiful things that way.

Head up + heart out,

TNN

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

Good morning Friends,

In the last few weeks, I’ve had a handful of different people ask me the same exact question:

Q: How did you get so prolific?

Q: How do you write so much and have it be good?

Q: How are you so insanely productive?

Reflecting on this, I realized that I’d given a different answer every time.

A: I meditate every day. And I practice free-writing. I call these my flow practices. They open my pipeline for inspiration, which I’ve learned to turn into inspired action immediately.

A: I’ve cultivated something I call Monk Mode, and I take vows, cloister up and create sacred space for my deepest, most important work when it beckons.

A: I get help. And I hire well. Even when I’m “hiring” volunteers.

A: I’ve systematically unrepressed myself, gotten clarity as to my personal purpose and focus and crafted an entire lifestyle that supports who I really am and why I’m on this planet.

And I wasn’t even done. There are a handful of skills and beliefs and actions—which I think of collectively as ‘practices’—that have really flipped the ‘prolific’ switch on for me over the years.

I thought I’d share them under this umbrella of Practices of the Prolific. And they’re not just for writers. They work anytime you want to turn your thoughts into things.

Here’s the first one I want to share. I call it IMPERFECTIONISM.

I have a solid, internal spirit of excellence. I want the things I create to be beautiful and impactful. Excellence is doing your very best, whatever that is on a given day, in a way that constantly expands your capacity to create.

Excellence is expansion.

But excellence is not perfection.

When it comes to creating a book, film, organization, community, family or life you love, “spirit of excellence” can slippery slope its way into “perfectionism.”

And that’s not good. Because perfectionism stops you before you ever start. Perfectionism shrinks down the exact boldness it takes to create new things: the boldness that is the essence of creativity and innovation.

Awhile back, between books, I started reading about writing. And I came across Anne Lamott’s book, “Bird by bird,” in which she urges writers to dive into the process of creating something she calls an SRD: a shi!$y rough draft.

When I started writing to write a SRD instead of trying to write a brilliant masterpiece, the whole game changed. The prolific switch flipped to ‘on’. Because when you’re aiming to write something great, you unintentionally activate an unholy trinity of blocks fueled by perfectionism: Inner Editor, Inner Critic and Inner Censor. If you allow these energies to take over, they’ll have you writing a single sentence, then agonizing, rewriting and ruminating over that sentence. You can lose a whole day (or week) that way.

But when you aim to write an SRD, the whole point is for the writing to be bad. So you turn off Inner Editor. Deactivate Inner Critic. Tell Inner Censor you’ll see her later. And then something incredible happens. You realize that there really is a pipeline of infinite intelligence trying to flow through you and to you at all times. It has all the energy and every idea you’ll ever want or need. And it’s already in you.

But you can pinch yourself off from the pipeline with fear, grudges, self-criticism and (you guessed it) perfectionism.

When you aim to write an SRD, you give yourself permission to write something bad. And then you had better buckle up, because the pipeline opens up and inspiration flows in.

Catch this principle: your brain cannot work in flow mode and edit mode at the same time. Everything great that was ever written was essentially written in flow mode. Then the brilliant, final piece was sculpted and edited out of that. That’s the beauty of the SRD. It allows you to have the voluminous output AND the blissful experience of creating in flow mode. It’s harnesses the incredible leverage of inspired action.

You can come back around and edit later. That’s how it comes to be that the SRD is the prerequisite of basically everything great.

Then there’s the matter of practice. Practice hours come as a happy accident of writing in uncensored, unedited flow mode. And they trigger another happy accident in turn: you get good. Over time, your SRDs start to be way, way less shitty, so to speak. They might even start to become good. And then great. This makes the dreaded chore of editing way less burdensome, with time.

That said, if you write to create an SRD, you might learn to love the entire creative process—including the editing—instead of just holding your breath through the whole thing to get to the beautifully polished final draft. You might start to feel that writing helps you process your world and manage your own chemistry. And that editing what you write is the final fun of sculpting the clay of your own creation.

And surprise: this ain’t just about writing. It’s about creating ANYTHING. There’s even a version of the concept of the SRD that applies for business and especially for tech businesses: the MVP or minimum viable product. [I wrote more about that in this video on what I call Lean Life Methodology.]

For the past few months I’ve really been focused on Lean Startup and Lean Life Methodology, as I’m working to get SoulTour fully up and running. I’ve been practicing being ok with rolling out bits and pieces of the vision, exposing them to the market and using customer feedback to build the launch-ready version.

Reid Hoffman (VC and founder of LinkedIn) has become the Anne Lamott of my entrepreneurial journey, by way of this quote:

“If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

I use this standard all the time to give myself permission to put things out the door that are great, but not perfect. Because if I wait for perfect, I’ll have waited too long to learn what I need to know to make the next right move. And I’ll have underserved my audience, who is requesting things I can deliver now in an excellent, but imperfect, way.

On the other hand, when I just begin and launch the imperfect thing, I get crystal clear on what to create next. I see what works and what doesn’t, I see how the audience responds, I see how I feel about it once it’s in the world, and I get a level of clarity about the next step to take that I’d have never had just sitting in a room soul-searching for concrete, granular action items.

For me, the concepts of the SRD and MVP far transcend my writing and my business. Now it’s an overarching lens for my whole life. I’ve rebranded it IMPERFECTIONISM. As I move through the world and through the timeline of my life, I make it my goal to create beautiful, impactful, imperfect things.

I’ll throw the gathering at my house while the backyard is overgrown. I’ll launch a limited version of the ad campaign before the product is fully built, so I can connect with the customers that are drawn to it and learn how best to serve them. I’ll film a video at my desk with my phone, instead of in the studio with a production crew.

Now mind you, I still embody a spirit of excellence. So the content will be .

But I’d rather write an inspired book every year than a perfect book every 10.

Because perfect, as the saying goes, is the enemy of done. And that makes it the enemy of people like us.

SoulTour in the news: I’m on the tail end of my mostly unplugged Europe > East Coast vacation, so imagine my surprise when SoulTour was covered by Forbes!

Much has changed since I gave this interview months back, but the upshot is still right: we’re on a mission to help you care for your soul and live with freedom, growth and joy. Enjoy!

Forbes: How A Spirituality Startup Is Solving Silicon Valley’s Religious Apathy

Head up + heart out,

TNN

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

Good morning, friend.

I’m in Spain this week, so I’ll be brief.

Pues, corto. Porque cuando en España…

One of my go-to morning meditations goes as follows:

Today is the day I pronounce as my day of greatest appreciation.
Today is the day I pronounce as my day of greatest awareness.
Today is the day I pronounce as my day of greatest emotional awareness and emotional response to my awareness.
Today I am pronouncing myself a liver of unconditional love:
Unconditional clarity, unconditional alignment, unconditional attunement.
Today I am tuned in, tapped in, turned on to who I really am.
Today I intend, to the best of my ability, to fulfill myself as I am meant to be fulfilled.
Today I will look for reasons to feel good, and I will find them.
And if I stumble upon something that doesn’t feel so good I will revel in the perfection of my guidance system.
And I will make the adjustment today.

—Esther Hicks

POD: Your guidance system

Do you trust in the perfection of your internal guidance system?

Do you follow what it tells you to do?

Think of a time when you did or did not follow your internal guidance system. What’d you learn?

Head up + heart out,

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