Here’s a prompt for reflection, conversation or your journal today: What situation or subject in your right-now business or life can you squeeze some joy and satisfaction out of… or some clarity and wisdom out of… even though you’ve been judging it as “broken” because it’s not where you want it to be?

Here’s some context…

At Londyn’s school, there’s a wonderful teacher… a woman six feet tall who was a scientist before she started this work. 

Regularly, I walk in and the kids will be dismantling a broken fan someone brought from home to see if they can make it work again.

Sometimes they “fix” these things. 

But always they delight, bliss out and pass many joyful hours doing Miscellaneous Toddler Collaborations in the fun of taking the so-called broken thing apart. 

And that’s the point of school. That’s the point of life. The joy in the process. Not the outcome of the process.

So yesterday, when I showed Londyn that the last typewriter ribbon on her Smith-Corona Electric was broken and we’d have to order another, I heard it as a spiritual mic-drop when she replied: 

“That’s okay, Mama! I like broken things!”

And continued joyfully clicking and clacking away…while jogging in place. (I call it cardio-typing.)

Just SATISFIED.

Power bucket FULL.

That’s what happens when you learn to appreciate what is … simply because it is…. without judging it as bad, wrong or other than it should be. 

That’s what happens when you let yourself have the experience you’re having, and learn to be satisfied and eager for more at the same time.

That’s what happens when you decide to bloom right exactly where you’re planted, even though you don’t know what’s coming next, you haven’t written the book yet or started the business yet, or hit the business goals you have yet. 

To Londyn, “broken” isn’t even a negative. It’s a descriptor of something she can use and delight in differently than she would if it were in a different condition, stage or state. Nothing more, nothing less, no judgement, no turbulence.

See, your Inner Critic will tell you that you can’t indulge in expensive workout clothes until you earn the right by losing weight first. Because your weight is broken, or you’re broken until you lose that weight.

Your Inner Critic will have you holding your literal, physical breath and restricting everything from calories to money from yourself unless and until you hit some arbitrary “success” goal. 

Your Inner Critic will have you placing all kinds of conditions on your ability to live with a prevailing sense of ease unless and until you: 

• Find your mate
• Start the business
• Make a certain amount of money, or
• Lose 10 pounds.

Your Inner Critic will tell you that life will be perfect someday when some thing happens…. which is the same as saying life is broken now. 

And if you buy into this lie, you will live in chronic, low-grade conflict with your Wise Inner Being, who knows that you are already perfect, whole and complete. As you are.

Who knows that there’s nothing broken about you.

If you buy into that lie of your Inner Critic that things are broken now and you can’t relax until theyre fixed, not only will that “perfect” someday never come (because your Inner Critic will always find something to judge), you’ll miss out on the perfection that you are, the joy that life is trying to serve you and the perfection that you are constantly becoming as you molt and shift and shape and grow, every single day.

So don’t buy into it. 

You are not broken now. 

Your life is not broken now. 

Your business is not broken now.

You are the sculptor and the masterpiece-in-progress.

And the sculptor doesn’t judge the masterpiece-in-progress for being in progress. 

I don’t know about you but I’m stealing Londyn’s line for the rest of the week.

Whatever happens, I’m making it my mission to like the so-called broken things, including the areas of my life and my business that aren’t quite where I want them to be yet. 

I’m making it my mission to find joy and satisfaction and wisdom and power and even joy in whatever is…. however things are and however things look in this moment.

And I’m making it my mission to feel the satisfaction, the relief and the power of radically accepting the “in progress” things how they are right now… I”m making it my mission to let that satisfaction snowball and infect more and more of the moments of my life. 

Will you take up this mission with me? 

I hope so.

Head up + heart out,

Tara-Nicholle Kirke, MA, Esq.
The Inner Critic Coach™️
Founder + CEO of SoulTour

@taranicholle on FB | TW | IG | LI

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