good enough

If You’re Fighting You’re In Fear

Before walking this path I was always proud of being a fighter. I would fight because I thought I was right. I would fight because I wanted to prove you were wrong. I would fight, just to fight. But what I didn’t realize is that I was fighting because I was in fear.

Looking back almost every decision I made was fear based, I never would have said that, in fact, I would have told you back then that I wasn’t afraid of anything. That was not the truth. My whole life I lived in fear. Fear you wouldn’t like me. Fear I wasn’t good enough. Fear I wasn’t smart enough. Fear of loosing what I have or not getting what I want. If there was something to fear I was fearing it. To mask that fear I would overcompensate and try to act strong, which many times caused me to pick fights to make myself feel better, or at least, smarter than you, and the lower I felt, and the lower my self-esteem was, the more aggressively I would fight, like somehow I could fight my way into feeling better, but I never did, it only made me feel worse over time. Oh sure, I might get a small hit of satisfaction from my “win,” but that would wear off and I was back to feeling bad again.

When I think back to those many years I lived in fear, most of my actions back then were the opposite of how I truly felt, as though I thought I could just force myself into feeling something different, but none of my actions were authentic to who I was or what was really going on.

Today, I don’t feel the need to lash out to those around me. I don’t have a need to be right, because I am comfortable in who I am today, I love who I am today, and, I am no longer motivated by fear. That’s not to say that I don’t have any fear about things in my life, but I don’t act out on it, and I know that if I did I would just have to apologize or make amends for it later, which doesn’t seem worth the fight, not today, and today I don’t need to find outside battles to try to fill an inside problem, I’ve learned to love myself and I’ve learned to fill myself with good things, with an abundance of self-love and all of the things that make my heart and soul shine, which is the antidote to fear. The counter action to fear is self-love, self-love conquers all, once you are able to find that the fear starts to fade away and those battles that used to seem so important, or even mandatory, are replaced with wanting to spread goodwill and to help those around us. So next time you’re get ready to fight, ask yourself, what am I so afraid of? SLAY on!

SLAY OF THE DAY: What are you most afraid of? When you’re in fear, do you act out? Do you try to hide your fear? Are you aware that you might be trying to hide your fear? Why do you think you have fear? Are those reasons based in fact? Or, are they based on stories you’ve been told about yourself, or, stories you’ve told yourself? What if you stopped telling those stories? Do love yourself today? If you do, what do you love about yourself? If not, why don’t you love yourself? Are those reasons legitimate today? Are these things you can change or improve on? What can you do today to focus on the good in you? When we focus on our good and share our good with others we start to lose our fears and when we lose our fears we lose our fight and need to be right. Let those moments when you want to fight be an indication that you are in fear and instead of putting on those gloves and stepping in the ring, ask yourself what you are most afraid of, the answer will likely lead you to the place you need the most love, heal that place, love yourself in that place, and don’t fear that place, that place is you, at your most beautiful vulnerable self, let go of that fear and let love in.

S – self L – love A – appreciate Y – you

Slay Say

Good morning SLAYER! At your absolute best you are still not good enough for the wrong person. At your worst, you’ll still be worth it to the right person. Remember that.

New blog goes up Friday, until then…SLAY on!

State Of Slay Courageous Acts

Inactivity: The Fear Of Failure

There are a few reasons why we don’t take action, but many of them are rooted in the fear of failure. We assume we’ll fail so we don’t start. We delay. We make excuses why it won’t work, instead of just trying. As I’ve said before, sometimes the win is just in the trying itself. But we don’t even try, we get stuck where we are, even when we’re not happy there. What happened to us? When did we let fear win? As children we are fearless, most of us, we climb, we jump, we try new things, with new people, and then something happens, and we let fear take over.

For me it was outside voices telling me I was different, not normal, that I couldn’t do something, coupled with my inner-voice echoing the same, that inner-voice got so loud it was the only voice I could hear. And many times I stood paralyzed by fear. There are moments when I burst through, got out of my comfort zone, let the light in me shine, but for the most part I dulled that shine and stayed hidden in plain sight.

When we don’t start something, we can’t finish, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that we’re not good enough to have what we want, but we haven’t worked for it. We always seem to leave that part out, and solely focus on the not getting what we want part. And the more we don’t take the responsibility for not taking action the more we fall down the rabbit hole of believing we’re not good enough to get it. There are those of us too, who just fling ourselves into things without doing the footwork or looking into it first, we’re just flying by the seat of our pants hoping that it’ll all work out, instead of arming ourselves with the work and research needed to fully tackle something head-on, giving us the best chance at a positive result. When we fall, we again tell ourselves that we aren’t worthy of it, but we didn’t set ourselves up to necessarily succeed. It’s another way, a sneakier way, of self-sabotage, because we can say we tried, but we didn’t do all the work leading up to it.

So, why is failure so bad? It’s not really. Failure, like I’ve said before, is just information. And, if you’re like me, you learn the most from failure, especially when it stings, I do my best learning from that place because I don’t want to feel that again, so I’m likely not going to try to do the same thing the same way again. At least not anymore. The old me would have, in fact did, expecting different results, when the only result was always me losing and telling myself I deserved it. But today, I learn from those failures, which if you think about it, don’t really make them failures if you take away some valuable information away from it. As I said, failure is really just information. The start of a blueprint of how to do it different next time. And that’s also the key. To keep trying. Try to do it a different way, a new way, a way you haven’t tried before. And don’t be afraid to fail. Everyone has failed, everyone. It doesn’t mark you as a bad person. In fact it’s within those failures that we often connect with other people, who have also failed, and we learn that we are not alone, but we don’t get that lesson if we don’t start in the first place.

Take away the power fear has in your life that you might fail. The only thing failure does is show is that the way we tried isn’t the right way, so, go look for the right way, or the right path, or the place that you are meant to be. Sometimes the failure to get what we want is actually saving us from it, because it’s not what’s best for us, or where we’re meant to be. Trust those signs.

Follow your heart, go after what moves you, excites you, inspires you, and if you fail, remind yourself that it’s just information, look to see if there is something you missed, something you could have done differently, if not, maybe that failure is pointing you in a new or different direction, something you hadn’t even thought of. But most importantly, you have to start in the first place. Always take action when and where you can, when you take action you begin to defeat fear, or even, walk over it as you sprint to the finish line. SLAY on!

SLAY OF THE DAY: Do you let fear stop you from trying new things? What are you afraid of? Are these fears real in your present life, or stories from your past? Name 3 times you let fear stop you from going after something, or doing something you love. Name 3 times you walked through your fear. Beside each example, write how you felt. Now, wouldn’t you rather feel like you did when you walked through your fear? Remember those feelings next time fear pops up and tries to stop you from doing something new, or going after what you want, think of those feelings and let them quash your fear as you sail ahead to your goal.

S – self L – love A – appreciate Y – you

Our White Lies Don’t Protect Us, They Damage Us

I used to tell little white lies, and some big ones too, and tell myself I was telling them to make things easier, to not hurt someone’s feelings, or to protect myself from someone else, but all I was really doing was looking for an excuse not to tell the truth, and by not telling the truth I was not only damaging those relationships, but I was damaging myself. I was also living a life that was not based in truth. My life, then, was based in fear. Fear of missing out, fear of loosing what I had, fear that you wouldn’t like me, fear I wouldn’t get what I wanted, fear I wasn’t good enough, fear of…well, fear. So when a life is ruled by fear, the truth, is not the first thing that comes to mind. My life was built on so many half-truths, or white lies, that it constantly felt like a house of cards that was about to tumble to the ground at any moment. That feeling, that life I built for myself, kept me in a steady state of manipulating the truth. I twisted the facts to suit my needs, to tell the story I wanted to tell, one that always favored me, because in my mind, the chips were stacked against me, so why shouldn’t I try to level the playing field? What this thinking, and this way of life got me, was more and more fear. To the point where I couldn’t keep track of all the lies anymore so I retreated and hide by myself, alone in the darkness.

When I stepped on this path, this path of light, this path, had no room for lies, only the truth. That scared me. But I had lived so long not telling the truth, a path that led nearly lead me to my death, that I knew it was time to start telling the truth. As terrified as I was, I knew, my life depended on it. I started with the friends and family who meant the most to me, I just let it all out. Shared my truth. I wasn’t worried about what they would think of me, I just knew I had stop hiding, so I jumped in, full throttle. The response was positive, supportive, and that felt good, but I knew I had to keep going. I had to make this my new way of life if it was going to work, going to stick, and if I was going to continue to heal, continue to grow.

When we tell white lies it chips away at our self-respect, we tell ourselves that our truth isn’t good enough, and that we are not good enough. And if we can’t be truthful about ourselves we start to suspect others are doing the same, believing that they are lying to us, or trying to manipulate us, as we are to them. It’s a vicious cycle. And one that doesn’t end unless we stop and start telling the truth. If we can’t trust ourselves and our truth, how can we trust anyone else? That trust, that truth, starts with us. In fact, it’s all we really do have control over, we don’t really know truly what someone else’s truth is, but we control how we share ours, that we share ours, and so no matter what happens, we know we’ve been truthful and that we have nothing to hide, and when we find that place of truth for ourselves, we find self-respect, we find self-love, we find self-worth. We also find our relationships get stronger, and those that don’t, were perhaps, weren’t built on truth in the first place, but the real relationships, those lasting relationships we all desire, those, those get stronger.

I’ve learned on my journey that telling the truth really is much easier. Even during those times when I think it will be hard, I’ve always found that when I share the truth, or my truth, most times, it’s received far better than what I had anticipated, and if it isn’t received well, that’s some useful information to have. Most people prefer us to be honest with them, certainly anyone in my life surely does, and I them, so start to practice being honest in your life, even those little white lies we think can’t hurt anyone, hurt us most of all, but chipping away at who we are and what we stand for. Always stand tall and tell your truth, you never know, one day, your life might depend on it.

SLAY OF THE DAY: Do you find yourself telling little white lies? Why do you think you do this? What’s the last one you told? Why did you tell it instead of the truth? How do you think it helped you? How do you think it hurt you? Do you think the person you told it to would be upset if they found out? Would you be upset if you found out someone had told the same lie to you? Are you in fear of being found out? When you tell a lie how does that make you feel? How does it make you feel to tell the truth? I challenge you SLAYER, to tell the truth this week, to walk through your fear of being honest and see how that changes you, how that makes you feel. Be you. And, SLAY on!

S – self L – love A – appreciate Y – you

How You Talk To Yourself Matters

Would you allow anyone else to talk to you the way you talk to yourself? If the answer is no, your self-talk needs to change. The way we talk to ourselves directly affects every aspect of our lives. Our relationships, our success in business, our own personal development. As a reformed negative self-talker I can tell you, tearing yourself down, or apart, will only keep you down, or help you to slide further down into the darkness.

From as far back as I can remember I always talked down to myself. I always felt different, less than, awkward in social situations, I hated school and always felt uncomfortable, so when I didn’t reach my own expectations, which I often set at a level that was unattainable, I would tear myself apart for not being good enough. That behavior didn’t change as I got older, and the more time I put into speaking to myself in a negative way the more I believed it as truth. I also, sometimes unconsciously, would set myself up to fail to continue that narrative. I would viciously attack myself in away that no one else could, because, I wouldn’t let them. So, why did I allow myself?

It all goes back to self-love. Oh yeah SLAYERS, we’ve doubled-back to that again, that’s not going away, but, that really is the negative self-talk antidote. My negative self-talk nearly cost me my life, so it was imperative for me to learn how to talk to myself in a more loving way. They’ve done studies, with plants, where they’ve put a label that says love on one plant and hate on the other.  Loving words are said to the plant with the love label on it and say negative things to the other. They are watered just the same, but the plant with the hate label eventually dies while the love plant flourishes. It’s not any different with people. The more we tear ourselves down the more we die inside, and the more we speak to ourselves in a loving way, the more we flourish. No one is perfect, no one gets it right all the time, so why do you expect yourself to? We learn when we fail, we learn the most when we fail, that’s all part of the journey, so why not love yourself through that journey? If someone you cared about failed, would you berate them or cheer them on? You’d cheer them on, so why not do the same for yourself? In fact, we should cheer even louder when we fail, we should cheer that we tried, we should cheer that we keep trying, we should cheer because we should always cheer for ourselves. When I fail, or don’t meet an expectation I had, now, I counter that with saying something loving to myself, something I do like about myself, something I am grateful for. I practice some contrary action, which I’ve talked about before, so, even if some negative thoughts creep into my head, I change my thinking to something positive. It works. I also practice that when someone else upsets me, to move past it and not dwell in the act, I try to find something I like about that person and from that place, can usually find some compassion for them so I don’t sit in a resentment, something I can’t afford to do.

No one should be a bigger cheerleader for ourselves than ourselves. And we can be by practicing self-love. Life is hard enough without us being hard on ourselves, so give yourself a break and break out some encouragement and care when it comes to the words you choose to use on yourself. Next time you find yourself saying negative things, stop, and say something positive, something you would want someone to say to you, or, you would say to a someone you care about deeply, those are the words you should be saying and you can, it just takes the effort to stop the negative and turn it around into something positive. I know you can do it SLAYER, in fact, I’m positive you can.

SLAY OF THE DAY: Do you talk negatively to yourself? What do you say? Why do you say it? How do you think it helps you? How do you think it hurts you? Looking at your last answer, why do you make the choice to hurt yourself? Would you let anyone else speak to yourself this way? So why do you allow yourself? We believe what we say, so why not say positive things and lift yourself up rather than tear yourself down. Say those things to yourself that you would want to hear, and if you need a cheat sheet, write down 5 things you like about yourself on a piece of paper, fold it up and put it in your wallet, and the next time you start to say negative things to yourself, take out that list, and read it out loud to yourself, until you start to believe them. It’s time to stop the negative self-talk and start some positive self-love. SLAY on!

S – self L – love A – appreciate Y – you