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CHAPTER 1

DISCOVER YOURSELF

Create the highest, grandest vision possible for your life, because you become what you believe.

OPRAH WINFREY

“What did you do today?”

The question was posed innocently enough, in between bites of dinner. I was leaning across the table, cutting Jack’s chicken into tiny pieces, and I felt the knife skitter across the plate like a record skipping.

I knew John was genuinely interested in how I’d spent my day. But every evening when he asked me that question, I would feel the sweat begin to form on my hands and sense my heartbeat quickening ever so slightly.

I hated that question.

I hated it because it made me feel small. It made me feel like I needed to justify how I’d spent the last twelve hours of my day—not to him, but to myself. I thought I needed to prove I had spent my day being the best worker, the best mom, the best friend, the best volunteer, the best . . . well, everything.

And yet I always fell a little short. Not quite there. I believed I hadn’t worked hard enough or long enough, I hadn’t crossed off enough items on my ever-growing task list, or I hadn’t been patient enough and fussed at the kids too much.

It didn’t matter that I had run myself ragged all day long. It didn’t matter that I filled every single moment, cramming 36 hours’ worth of tasks into a 24-hour day. Quite honestly, most nights when the question was posed, my mind went absolutely blank like a chalkboard wiped clean. What had I done all day? When I frantically scoured the edges of my brain, I overlooked the multitude of jobs I had fulfilled throughout my day: mother, business owner, friend, teacher. The list went on and on.

If I had paused and taken a deep breath, I would have remembered I had answered a solid handful of customer emails, taken the kids to the library, chased them around the playground, used the in-between moments to toss in several loads of laundry, and made some serious progress on my new website. I would have given myself the grace to see what everyone else around me saw: a woman who was doing her very best.

But I couldn’t see it. Instead of sharing all my wins, I rattled off what I hadn’t done. I forgot to sign up Jack for art class; I didn’t get a chance to stop at the post office; I wasn’t able to finish with the blog post; and— “Wow,” John cut in jokingly, “didn’t you do anything right today?”

In my mind, I hadn’t. Hot tears streamed down my face because I could not see a single thing I’d done “right.” Always falling a little short. I was good about seeing the good in others, but I never could seem to count my own marbles.

MARBLE JAR MOMENTS

Are you familiar with the marble jar trick? It’s an old tactic teachers have used forever. I used it myself in my years when I stood at the front of a classroom. It’s simple, really—every time the kids do something good, you drop a marble in a jar. When the jar fills up, well, that’s when the class gets a reward.

But it’s not just the reward that’s exciting. That fresh marble makes a solid, satisfying clink as it bounces around in the jar. The kids’ eyes get big and round when you hold up the marble, and they quiet down just to hear it rattle its way into the jar.

For the years I taught, I was a big believer in the power of the marble jar, and with great reason—it reinforces good work. We all want to be recognized for our efforts, don’t we? We want credit for all the good we’ve done, which is why I believe we all have an invisible marble jar we carry around with us, begging to be filled.

Got up and worked out . . . marble in the jar! Made the kids’ lunch . . . marble in the jar—wait, it was a healthy lunch . . . two marbles in the jar! And so our day continues with marbles clinking and filling up our jars.

The problem with these imaginary jars comes when something doesn’t go quite right. We forget an important ingredient for dinner or we miss a deadline at work, and we don’t just say, “Oops! No marble in the jar.” We feel so defeated that we loosen our grip and allow our jar to slip out of our hands and crash onto the floor.

Marbles and broken glass are everywhere. It doesn’t matter that the jar was almost full. It doesn’t matter that we had done really well. All. Day. Long.

Instead of picking up those perfectly good marbles we earned, we decide we need to hustle to earn more marbles. We overfill our schedules with tasks and errands, desperately trying to refill our jars, which seem to shatter again and again throughout our day.

Our days are filled with far too many of these marble jar moments, aren’t they? These moments when our marbles are scattered everywhere so we can no longer count them. We have to make it stop.

But too many of us tie our self-worth to our busyness. Stress and overwhelm are badges of honor declaring our worthiness. We falsely believe that if we are not busy, we are failing. In the pursuit of finding balance, we try to do everything, but the more we do, the less we succeed.

IT’S LIKE RIDING A BIKE

This idea of doing it all—and doing it well—is the problem I have with the concept of balance. Balance sounds nice, but it’s nothing more than a productivity buzzword, an empty promise that leads us to falsely believe we should be able to do everything equally.

If life is perfectly balanced, we aren’t really moving forward; instead, we are spinning chaotically like a top. We can take charge of our destinies only when we let go of balance and decide the direction we want our lives to go. Movement, in any direction, requires shifting—it requires counterbalance.

Think about balance like riding a bike. A bike has the ability to move in a deliberate direction. It requires some equilibrium to stay upright, but have you ever tried to balance on a bike that’s perfectly still? It’s almost impossible. We have to lean forward a bit and start gathering momentum by pushing on the pedals. The energy we create keeps us from falling over.

With a bike, we can choose to turn and move along a path we really want. We can go left or right by shifting our balance—we have to move away from perfect balance in order to turn. If we continue to lean heavily to the side, though, we will topple over. We need to counterbalance, read-justing our center of gravity to keep the bike upright and moving forward on this new path.

You see, magic doesn’t happen when life is centered and balanced—it happens when we lean into our priorities. When we start concentrating on what is truly important to us, we will go out of balance.

Let’s explore this idea together and apply it to real life. While we are all different, our lives are made up of the same three buckets that need to be filled: work, home, and personal.

WORK: This area is what we consider our job. This might be running your own business or working in a small office or for a Fortune 500 company. Our work doesn’t need to be tied to an income—it might be that your job is CEO of the Home because you are a stay-at-home parent or a student going to school.

PERSONAL: This section of our lives is tied to relationships and interactions. This includes the connections we have with people like our significant others, our families, our friends, and the world around us. Our life goals, hobbies, and health all fall into this bucket because they are part of our relationship with ourselves.

HOME: This area includes the tasks and projects that keep life running smoothly. While our personal bucket is about emotional needs, home is where our basic needs are met. This bucket includes chores and tasks like cleaning the house, running kids to activities, and keeping up with daily happenings. Home is an important bucket because it helps us feel safe and secure.

Each of these areas is important, but balance implies that all three must be perfectly equal. We believe we need to distribute our time, energy, and focus in each of these areas evenly. Here’s some truth I want to share with you—there’s no way to keep all these buckets evenly filled, to keep them balanced all the time. It’s simply not possible.

Creating an extraordinary life for ourselves requires moving away from balance, because when we lean into a priority—when we give time to the most important things—we have to take that time away from something else. We cannot give equal time to all the tasks on our lists.

Let me explain. We all have three key resources available to share with the world—time, energy, and focus. Each of these elements, though, is a depleting commodity; once it’s invested, it’s gone forever. You cannot get it back. By far, these are the most valuable resources we have to give. But in an effort to make our buckets feel like they are somewhat even, we spread these resources out far and wide, making little to no impact. We end up stretching ourselves thin, exhausting ourselves.

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When we combine these three elements, though, we’ll see the exact opposite—we’ll discover exceptional results. This is true in all the areas of our lives, including our relationships, our work, and, yes, our productivity. We need all three to work united together to make the biggest impact possible in our days. We will dive deeper into each of these elements in section 2, but it’s important to understand the power these three hold.

When we get caught up in the idea of balance, we are busy trying to make everything even. We don’t concentrate our time, energy, and focus to move in the direction we really want to go. In chasing this illusion of balance, we end up creating a life that feels busy—not meaningful. We have to be willing to go out of balance. We need to be willing not to do everything. That’s the real magic.

WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE?

Balance is just one of the stories we tell ourselves. We all have a library of folklore filled with stories about ourselves that we believe: we are supposed to be a certain way, have a certain job, or live a certain life. But the question we need to ask ourselves is: Are these stories even true?

Over time we all accumulate beliefs about ourselves and about life. These stories we tell ourselves again and again gain a mythology-like quality and begin to feel like truth. Often these stories are steeped in other people’s truths—in their ideas and opinions that we’ve gathered together and made our own.

We hold ourselves up to the high standards these stories demand, even when they aren’t realistic. These stories are almost always written in absolutes, using the words always and never: A good mom never hires a babysitter to give herself some alone time.

A good friend always returns a text within ten minutes.

A good boss never leaves work before anyone else on the team.

Are these statements true? Are they fair? We set ourselves up for unrealistic expectations no one could achieve, and, in fact, we wouldn’t hold anyone else to these standards. These stories seem innocent enough. After all, they are just stories, right? But don’t be fooled—these stories transform into limiting beliefs that hold us back; they demand that we spend our time in ways that don’t really fit into the life we want. We follow their strict rules because we think we should. We think we are supposed to behave a certain way, and so we do.

One of the stories I told myself for years was that good moms stayed home. They had cookies baked when their kids got off the bus, and they volunteered almost daily at their kids’ school. That’s what my mom did, so I set those requirements for myself.

But those rules didn’t work for me, which made me feel guilty because I believed I should have been fulfilled by those things—but I wasn’t. I really like working, and my work schedule made it hard to fulfill these strict requirements I had set for myself. I couldn’t let go of the guilt that was telling me I wasn’t a good mom. It ate away at me and my happiness. I had to change my thinking; I had to shift my definition of a good mom and what it means to me.

I don’t stay at home, but I make a conscious effort to be there in the afternoons to help with homework. I’m not a lead volunteer like my mom was—I’m a supporting volunteer.

I quieted the stories in my head and reset my expectations to make them realistic for my life. I’m not going to say I’ve completely gotten rid of the guilt, but I feel so much better because I changed my way of thinking. I do what I can, and my story now tells me: a good mom loves her children the best she can.

DECONSTRUCTING OUR STORIES

What do you think defines a good person? Is it that a good person always puts others first even if it means they don’t get to work on their goals? That a good person never accepts help? Or a good person doesn’t make time for themselves?

I want you to fill in this blank for me. Don’t overthink it. What is the first thing that comes to mind: A good person always ____.

And then ask yourself: Is this statement really true? Or am I just holding myself up to a high standard I can never actually achieve? We need to recognize the limiting beliefs that are holding us back.

Why do we have these limiting beliefs, and where did they start? There is a point in our lives where we seem to go from confident to questioning—from being assertive and sure to hesitant and uncertain. For many of us, there’s a tiny little blip on our life maps, somewhere between elementary school and high school, where we lost our self-assurance in who we are.

Ask any kindergartner what they are good at, and you’ll need to sit through a laundry list of topics: art, running, painting, climbing trees, eating potato chips—seriously, five-year-olds think they are amazing at everything! But wait ten years and ask the very same child, and she’ll think of almost nothing; at best you’ll maybe hear one or two things she believes she excels in. What happens to us in this space of time? How do we lose our belief in ourselves? We’ve allowed the world to define us and reinforce these limiting beliefs, but it’s time to break through.

YOUR UNKNOWN STRENGTH

We’ve all heard tales of people who suddenly acquire superhuman strength to lift a car when a child is trapped beneath or who heave huge slabs of concrete rubble aside after an earthquake. While not all of us may experience a surge in adrenaline like that, we all have a superhuman ability inside us to transform. Sometimes it’s just a limiting belief, the idea that you simply cannot do something, that restricts you.

In early October 2009, eighty-seven-year-old Warren climbed on the roof of his home to make a quick repair. One week later, he was diagnosed with a cancer so severe that by Thanksgiving his family was carrying out the mournful task of planning his funeral. His widow, Gwen, was suddenly on her own.

Gwen had never lived alone—at the age of eighteen, she had moved from her parents’ house directly into her new husband’s home once he returned from war. She had never paid an electric bill or used a credit card; in her eight decades she had never once pumped her own gas. With Warren’s death, her family fretted about how Gwen would hold up. They worried about how she would survive when she’d never really done anything on her own, but Gwen surprised them all.

When talk came up after the funeral about her moving, she put her foot down and insisted she would live alone in the home she had built with Warren. And she did. She made adjustments and created a whole new independent life for herself.

Gwen didn’t just survive—she thrived. Why? Because, at the age of eighty-three, she was willing to understand she had other roles to live. She wasn’t just a widow—she was a mother, a grandmother, a pie baker, a friend. She took on a new role as encourager for the elderly. She had a regular rotation of visits to women in the nursing homes—a group she lovingly referred to as “my old ladies.” And now Gwen is gunning for one hundred because, in her own words, she has a lot to live for. I know this because Gwen happens to be my grandma.

To tell you that we were shocked when she proclaimed that she would be just fine on her own would be an understatement, but she had a strength inside her no one knew about. In fact, she didn’t even know this strength existed. She didn’t allow herself to be defined by her eighty-three years of being dependent on someone else. Sometimes we have to let go of our old stories.

CHANGE YOUR CONJUNCTION

I’ve met thousands of people through speaking and workshops, and many have shared with me that they identify closely with one role. Often, if it’s women of a certain age, it’s the role of mother, but it might be “career woman” or “caregiver.” They look at this role and feel that it defines every part of who they are, which leaves almost no room for anything else—certainly no room for other priorities or dreams that fall outside these tight parameters. I hear stories like these: I can be a mom OR I can chase my dream of opening my business.

I can be a career woman OR a hands-on parent.

I can take care of my elderly parents OR pursue my art career.

They fool themselves with their stories and conclude that life is an either/or situation.

Donna,* a woman in my liveWELL Method course, shared with me that she wasn’t sure about the direction of her life. In her own words, she felt “pretty much stuck.” She had homeschooled her now-grown children for over a decade, followed by nursing and caring for her father until his passing, and then, not long after that, she had taken charge of handling a relative’s estate to alleviate the stress for her family. She had spent years in the role of caregiver—giving willingly and lovingly. But now she was in a space where she didn’t have someone else defining her role, which felt scary.

Sometimes WE HAVE TO LET GO OF OUR OLD STORIES

When we spend a long time centered on one role, we often find it hard to look around and see other possibilities. Donna and I went through her answers to an exercise she had done as part of the course. She shared with me that she was an avid reader who enjoyed attending writers’ conferences, craved time to read, and wished she had more time to spend on self-education. I told her, “You obviously have a love of books, authors, and writing . . . so I’m wondering, why isn’t writing at the heart of your purpose?” I noticed, too, when she shared her ideal day, that she considered focused, uninterrupted writing time the highlight. But Donna struggled with this and admitted it was hard to switch gears.

The issue here was with the way Donna viewed herself. She limited herself to the role of caretaker and left no room for anything else. She didn’t feel right letting the focus be on herself after spending a lifetime focusing on others.

Donna needed to add an and in her “job description.”

Instead of only filling the role of caregiver, why not open it up? Why couldn’t she be someone who cares for her family and spends time pursuing a passion for writing?

We all need to add some and to our lives. But let me be clear: this is not about piling more on our plates—it’s not about adding more to our day. It’s about opening our eyes and shifting the way we look at who we are and reclaiming our lives by placing what’s important to us front and center.

Because so many of us live in a state of either/or, we tend to push aside other things we really want to do. Far too many of us have pushed aside our aspirations because we believe we don’t have time or don’t have the right to pursue them. This is just another story we need to reset.

One of the ways to stop these unhealthy stories is to take inventory of what we believe. To do this, ask yourself, Do I believe my life is ready for growth, or is my path fixed?

If you believe your life is ready for growth, then you see yourself as fluid, a work in progress. Your fate is one of betterment and opportunities to explore and discover. If you believe your life is fixed, however, you view yourself as unchangeable. Basically, you believe you are who you are and your destiny is already set. Your objective might be to go through life avoiding failure, which also means you avoid challenge.

Which one are you? Are you ready to effect some change in your life even with the possibility of experiencing discomfort? Or do you want to stick with the status quo and not deal with disruption? Because change is a disruption, it’s something people tend to avoid—even if it means staying on the same old path heading in a direction they don’t really love.

I’ll be honest. I know that sticking with the status quo is easier. After all, it’s a well-worn path—we know where it turns, where the rocks are . . . But do you like where it’s heading? The road to change is full of uncertainty, so it can be scary. It might even feel uncomfortable. But we need some discomfort to make a change.

When we are doing something new, we are shifting our mindset, and that means something fulfilling is just around the corner. I’ll be there, next to you, guiding you through it.

It will be worth it, I promise.