Brilliant One,

Here’s the link to the AUDIO of today’s Transformation Tuesday Newsletter. Enjoy!

At church, they say that praise precedes the victory.

This is a true story.

And you don’t have to ever have stepped foot inside a church to know it.

You know from experience.

Think about praise in the biggest, most expansive sense of the word.

Praise is an inner posture of perceiving and receiving what is good, what is beautiful, what is admirable or wonderful about a thing. Anything. Maybe lots of things.

To praise means to have thoughts and words of approval, words of affection, words of admiration always on the tip of your tongue. To be a frequent praiser means that appreciating the world around you and the beings in it is your default mode.

When you praise your children or your employees or your lover or your Source or your Uber driver or your dog or your planet, you are connected with the Divine Love that created all worlds—because that Love is all about approval, affection and admiration—and you are letting that Love course through you, flowing it onto whatever target you choose.

And here’s the real deal: when you are in praise mode, it doesn’t really matter if the target of your praise is perfect or flawless or “earning” your praise. It’s more like the people and things around you become an excuse for you to flow your love over and onto.

And you already know what happens when you praise. When you are in the posture of praise, you seem to just find more things to gush about. More wonderful things catch your attention. You notice and hear your own good ideas more easily, and you resist them much less.

You go with the flow more easily.

And then you do end up having more and more victories, small and large. In every area of your life.

You start seeing or reframing the littlest good things that happen as blessings, you praise them, and they snowball into even bigger blessings.

You expand. Literally. When you ramble and revel on and on about the little breaks and blessings that came your way, it just feels good. Physically. Your head lifts. Your chest opens. You feel like the world is safer. And your life starts feeling safer to live, wholeheartedly. Your capacity for life starts to expand.

You start to realize what has probably been one of my Top 5 Reframes of 2018 (full list next week): that every person, every circumstance, everyevent, everything is a golden link in the chain of your good.

Even the ones that seem troublesome. Even the ones that were unwanted. Even the ones you don’t know are doing things that will line up circumstances to benefit you, someday. Whether they know it or not.

When you praise, life gets way more easy and joyful even when shitty stuff happens, because you are patiently awaiting the good that might be at the end of the chain. So time feels less scarce. Your days feel less fraught.

Again, you can more easily go with the flow.

I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. And just the same, you know what happens when you do the opposite of praising: complaining.

When you spend a lot of your time in complaint, in grievance or participating in this week’s outrage cycle, your body literally takes the posture of constriction and your world starts to feel constricted, too.

Your shoulders slump. Your cortisol spikes. Your brow furrows. Your jaw clenches. You sleep fitfully. Your gut clenches. The world feels less safe.

The struggle feels more and more real, with every moment of complaining you join in on. With every moment, you tune yourself in to see evidence of more and more stuff that seems worth complaining about.

(SIDE NOTE: Behavioral economists call this confirmation bias, the human tendency to find evidence to support our conclusions about the world—regardless of what those conclusions are.)

When you complain, when you judge, and when you bond with others over your grievances, even if they are very highly justified, you flip your own struggle switch on…sometimes before you even start down the path you think will be so hard.

All complaining is judging. You can’t judge and create at the same time, because judging and grievance gunk up your inner pipeline of inspiration and creative power.

So when you are complaining and trying to be or do or have or create or build anything, everything seems super hard.

When you judge yourself or complain about yourself to yourself, this is even more true.

Self-judgment always kickstarts inner struggle because your Divine Inner Guidance never feels that way about you. That’s why self-judgment always feels so terrible: it’s at odds with the direction of Source, Spirit and Universal love.

You start expecting struggle, and the Universe delivers. Or rather, you turn your attention and focus away from the path of creativity and love that is always lighting up before you, and you focus on the hard stuff. The struggle might jive more with what you’ve been raised or learned to expect in life, so it feels more comfortable than praise and looking for help from realms you can’t even see with your physical eyes.

This is because, as I learned from one of my favorite teachers this year, Victoria Castle: We don’t get what we want. We get what we expect.

This all came to mind for me during my time here in Mexico. I’ve extended my stay for a couple of days to avoid the smoke at home. I’ve mostly stayed offline, a deep nervous system reset I try to do a couple of times per year.

A snapshot from birthday visit to Casa Azul, the Mexico City home of Frida Kahlo.

When I got back online yesterday, my email inbox was filled with a glut of messages from personal growth teachers about how there’s still 40+ days worth of hustle time left in 2018, and offering tips for how to have a “hustle-hard/no days off” end of the year.

Listen: it’s true that there’s plenty of time to live, love and create wholeheartedly this year. More importantly, there’s time to invite and receive and begin acting on our Divine Downloads, which allow us to access the leverage of inspired action.

But often, when we start imposing super intense time crunches and arbitrary short deadlines on ourselves, we instantly flip the spiritual struggle switch on. We start thinking we have to do it all ourselves, the hard way, and fast. We start thinking we have to make it happen, versus waiting to receive inspired ideas in Divine timing and acting when they come.

All of this is contrary to the expansion and freedom and joy we were made for. Also, inherent in these sorts of super-short timelines is a self-critical storyline that we haven’t done enough yet this year and won’t earn our right to thrive next year unless we “finish strong”.

That’s why most of us don’t hit “tight” self-imposed deadlines. Or if we do, it’s very un-fun. So not fun that our energy peters out and we change our minds about continuing to write the book or start the business or whatever. It’s kind of a setup.

But there is another way.

I invite you to do this reframe with me: Instead of trying to hustle hard to the end of the year, what can you stop doing during the last 42 days of 2018 that will create space and make your life feel more like freedom, growth and joy?

Can you complain a little less?

Can you judge yourself less often? Or less harshly?

Can you stop obeying the dictates of your Inner Critic and take little concrete steps to do what is calling you regardless of what your Inner Critic says?

Can you stop putting things off? Stop withholding your true thoughts and emotions and practice speaking up? Stop letting perfectionism keep you small?

Can you stop putting yourself under unnecessary time pressures?

Can you stop telling yourself the story that a catastrophe will happen if you don’t do All of the Things right this moment?

Can you give yourself the space and time to try stopping something this year, just for the next few weeks? Even just one thing. And just see what unfolds in that space, when you subtract even a little bit of the struggle.

Give yourself 30 minutes and freely write about what you might like to stop doing for the rest of the year. Don’t censor yourself. Don’t edit it. Misspellings and bullets and sentence fragments are perfectly fine. No one else ever has to see it. Just let it rip.

NOTE: Nothing I’ve written here about complaining should be construed as grounds for judging yourself. If you’re tempted to judge yourself for complaining or grievance, first realize that just seeing this pattern is Step One to releasing it. Then, try on this classic Louise Hay affirmation I’ve used for years—we use it all the time in the School of Upliftment: “I choose to see it as a treasure when I discover something new to release.”

Key word: choose.

Head up + heart out (arriba arriba),

TNN

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