How often do you feel overwhelmed with tasks? Anxiety? Other people’s demands? Your dreams and goals? There must be TOO much of something.

Usually it’s decisions

On top of decision we already have, we also have the pressure to make the RIGHT decisions. If we remove the pressure to make good decision and instead make aligned decisions by way of being crystal clear on who you want to become to live your truest life, we reduce the overwhelm by a lot. So let’s talk about when we feel overwhelmed.

Usually you have too much of saying yes to rules, obligations and expectations from other people; habit of saying yes, people are used to you doing all the things and saying yes so saying no or delegating feels impossible. This is a large commitment to independence instead of interdependence - this prevents assistance, support, collaboration, partnership, co-creation for solutions and division of labor which is one the best ways to deepen a relationship.

Anxiety -...

Thanking people for these behaviors reinforce the perfectionism patterns that put people on the fast track to burnout. Shifting what we express gratitude for is crucial to break the cycle.

Gratitude becomes stagnant 

For years so many of us have been told that gratitude is a beneficial practice for our emotional, mental, spiritual and even physical well-being. And in my own experience, and research, gratitude has been the bridge from anxiety, grief, chronic stress to a more regular peaceful, joy-filled and meaningful, purposeful day to day life. But after a while of writing our gratitude down in our journals, making a mental note of what we are grateful for, it becomes stagnant. The beginner’s practice plateaus and the impact of the gratitude we feel is stunted. So I started asking “what if we activated our gratitude beyond the pages of our notebooks or our running mental list and passed it onto the thousands of people over our lifetime who have contributed in...

Where is the line between a positive attitude and dodging real life with a toxic positive mindset? One will set you in motion for abundance, the other will block all you are meant to have.

What does being positive mean

How have we turned what was intended to be a powerful option for maintaining a healthy attitude into a toxic pattern that actually limits our abundance and creates challenges in the moment and long term? Positivity is the practice of being or tendency to be positive or optimistic in attitude; a good, affirmative, or constructive quality or attribute. Being positive and having an optimistic attitude means you have faith that on the other side of the challenge, the obstacle or the hardship you’ll be okay, it will all be okay. It’s the confidence that whatever feels hard or intimidating or even impossible is temporary and will dissipate in it’s level of difficulty.

It’s the knowing that further down the road this thing, big or small, could...

One of the most challenging things of being a driven, ambitious woman with chronic illness is consistency on anything. Consistency for a perfectionist is another nail in the coffin.

Perfectionism patterns

In full disclosure, consistency, as I knew it then, was difficult for me even before I got sick because I over extended myself and overcommitted regularly so it was impossible to keep any ball in the air consistently. But when I got sick it became very obvious to me that my intention to be consistent, heeding the advice I had been given from every mentor in my life, was fueling the perfectionism thought patterns and symptoms that led to more anxiety, self doubt, and the fear that I would fail. I interpreted Consistency as “every day” or “every time” and as a perfectionist, when I have a human moment and I am not that thing, do that action, have that experience, it meant I was failing at the perfect execution of consistency.

We hear that consistency is the...

Vulnerability - This word is definitely a trigger for anyone operating from perfectionism patterns. It’s the thing we avoid because by simply leaning into it, we are unsafe, available for criticism and others will see that we have flaws, challenges, emotions and tender spots in our human experience.

Vulnerable: open to moral attack, criticism 

So many perfectionists struggle to express gratitude in many of their relationships. So many of us have relationship structures that are based on codependency, narcissism or extreme independence. None of these models are going to invite someone to feel grateful and express gratitude easily, effortlessly and frequently. It can feel like knowingly walking into a fiery building every time. Do you remember the last time you received a compliment from a stranger? Someone told you that you had a nice smile, they liked your jacket, your work was well done? What did it trigger in you? Did you feel shy or nervous or...

All Relationships have expectations and rules - mostly unspoken and even more often we don’t realize we have them. These rules aren’t malicious - we have habits and patterns in relationships because as humans it makes sense that over time, there are predictable behaviors from one another.

Surrendering your autonomy

Loyalty to someone other than yourself is breeding ground for inauthenticity and for surrendering your autonomy. Loyalty from others as a core value says that no matter what you need, being their support, on their side, in their lane is the priority. This means ignoring your own inner voice, your independent and individual needs. Autonomy is, by definition, the the quality or state of being self-governing especially. It is the ability to make your own decisions about your own person. It’s the freedom to decide what happens to you, with you and around you physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

Autonomy is the antithesis of codependency...

Acknowledging your co-creators throughout your life opens the doors for more collaborative efforts, less loneliness and exponential impact and abundance. Your Independence is blocking your abundance.

Forgetting and Denying Co-Creators 

Consider the people you have seen in the last 24 hours in person and virtually.  How many actual human beings do you estimate you have crossed paths with? How many different people have you scrolled through on social media platforms? How many daily life experiences have you engaged in that required someone you have never met to 

initiate? There are literally hundreds, in some circumstances, thousands of people who contributed in large and small ways to produce each of our individual experiences every day. Everything we experience has a person behind it, someone showed up to work, play, invent, converse, exchange ideas. 

Over the course of our lives, we have benefited from trillions of...

Clarify that loyalty to anything outside yourself is likely going to compromise you at some point. Being loyal to your own core values, your truest and highest self is the most effective long term strategy for health, happiness and fulfillment.

What do I really want to say?

Loyalty to anyone outside of yourself is going to create resentment, lost time and inauthenticity. For many years I was loyal to the rules and expectations of my family. The rules of marriage, the rules I understood about parenting and the rules of the company I worked for. Loyalty was something people could rely on mm for.  But the more I slowed down, the easier it was to hear my internal wisdom speaking to me. The more I listened to what I wanted and needed the harder it was to fulfill my obligation to be loyal to a system of beliefs that started to not make any sense to me. 

And after working with 1000s of women over the last 18 years, Loyalty is one of the biggest lies we have been told about how to...

What would happen if we stopped hoarding our gratitude in our private journals? What stops us from activating our gratitude? This is a life changing conversation.

This experience

On July 16, 2009 my son’s father, my former husband, died unexpectedly in a
motorcycle accident. This experience, this loss, highlighted for me the many reasons to
express gratitude with urgency and with a whole heart. Despite the intense grief, fear,
sadness and many other emotions we experience when someone’s life story ends without our permission, I was incredibly grateful that I had continuously shared my gratitude with him for his presence in my life. Many of us know someone, if not you yourself, who has deep regret for not acting on the gratitude in their hearts.

The pain of a lost opportunity to express love and appreciation has completely altered the path of many people’s lives. I will venture to guess that you could easily name a dozen people that if they died tomorrow, you would...

We all crave peace, ease and a sense of purpose that fills us up and energizes us. And what we actually have oftentimes is a day-to-day experience of reacting and responding to the world around us and being on call for the other shoe to drop.

We have no idea who we are.

We have no idea what we want or how to feel peace and ease, most of us have a hard time even remembering when we felt that ease or that peace. We start looking at what’s wrong with us because we've tried to fix this a bunch of times, right? You've probably tried to put boundaries in place. You've probably incorporated some health and wellbeing practices and still you're not feeling okay. And so what we have to do first is acknowledge that perfectionism is more than just wanting things to be perfect and acknowledge that for the last several decades of your life, in order for you to feel safe enough to exist you've had to do these other things. Your energy and your attention has been placed somewhere else rather...