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...

Gratitude sounds like: I love you, I appreciate you, I see you, I hear you, I feel you, I celebrate you, I recognize you, etc. Gratitude is bigger than Thank You.

How it started

A few years ago I found myself bed-bound, lost both of my businesses and my husband was working multiple jobs while also taking care of me and our two elementary age children. It was a dark rock bottom as I was diagnosed with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis and told I’d be lucky if I didn’t get worse. I was in bed 20-22 hours a day, couldn’t tolerate light or sound most days and it was devastating to reflect back on my life at 37 and realize I might be done truly living.  While In bed, in between sessions of researching how I could heal myself, I discovered that the reason my body was struggling so much was because I had spent the majority of my adult life following the rules, trying to meet expectations and fulfilling obligations I had learned from the world around me. Responding and...

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...

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...

Let’s continue the journey to release and unleash the gratitude hoarded in our hearts and our journals to amplify and affirm the impact people have on each other’s lives. Taking a closer look at what stops us from sharing it, we are going to look at the rules we have in how we share gratitude. 

 After receiving a dismal prognosis on Nov 11, 2017

I started asking different questions. This curiosity started a few years prior when I first became symptomatic. Having surrendered, finally, to my body’s begging to rest, I found myself seeking answers for all aspects of life. I had been teaching and preaching gratitude within our team and my community well before I started the journey to writing a book about gratitude. But as I was lying in bed, cataloguing all the ways my life was positively impacted by the people in my journey, I realized how few knew it. And by my count, I had done a pretty good job reflecting back and sending messages of gratitude to the...

Productivity is the lie we've been told about how we're supposed to function. It's a performative based version of perfectionism. It's one of the legs of perfectionism that we have adopted into our lives that make us think that we're not actively doing something that qualifies as productive.

That we should feel guilty and shame

And that we should start doing more, doing more is the lie that we've been told. Doing more in terms of your relationships, doing more in terms of your health, doing more across the board is what we have been taught and then agreed to that we are here to do more. It doesn't matter what it is, just stay busy so that you're not being lazy. Procrastination is what we deem as laziness as well. But lazy is not a thing. Lazy has this negative connotation because it is the antithesis of productivity. Productivity is how perfectionists measure their day's success. A lot of us think at the end of the day, that if you weren’t productive that means I had a good...

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...

A lot of us grew up with the mindset that you have to set a goal. You go achieve it, move on to the next thing. The problem with that is if you are over-focused and you have tunnel vision for achieving a specific goal, there becomes a never ending cycle of trying to produce that. 

It doesn't allow you to actually experience the moment that you're in. 

And it requires when you're constantly going after goal, what could I be doing next? What could I be doing right now to get me closer to that goal, rather than looking at the practice of living the life of the person who will have achieved that goal. The intention is to switch from being goal oriented, which is where I lived most of my life to becoming someone who is practicing their life, practicing what it actually looks like to be this person that you want to become. Think about who you want to become. 

Who do you want to be remembered as? 

What kind of mom do you want to be? What kind of partner do you want to...