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...

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...

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...

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...

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...