Daily Gratitude: This is what I realized my view of life has been for many decades. My eyes always had this screen covering them. Seeing through a screen is hard and seeing anything clearly through it is next to impossible. You can do that but you have to adjust your focus. Even trying to take a picture through a chain link fence is not unmarried. The metal chains obscure the view. On a window screen the holes are even smaller and you have to step way back to alter your focus. You have to look beyond the crosshairs. Then your eyes can see more clearly, provided the glass (or screen) is not dirty. As you can see, there are many factors which impact your ability to see clearly. I had to work through the dirty windows, the narrow holes and my screwed up focus (inner past issues) before I could see the beauty of my life. I hope that makes sense. My primary intention was to help you be easy on yourself as you are cleaning your windows.

Daily Gratitude: How often do we do this? Let other people define who we are? Why do we do this? Because as a tribal organism I think we care too much about other people say or think. As such we ask for opinions all the time and then we abide by those opinions rather than analyzing all of them given our circumstances and then making our own decision. Often times we think we know what we want to do but then we hear someone tell us that what we think isn’t correct. So then we change it. This happened to me. I had a complete first draft of one of the books I have wanted to write for years. I signed up for a course on memoirs and from what I learned in it, I decided what I wrote sucked and I needed to start over. That was kind of heartbreaking and as you can imagine, I have yet to restart it. Ugh. Why did I listen. Another smart friend later said “maybe your book isn’t a memoir?” And in many ways she’s right. It’s about my experiences and wisdom obtained in my career but not specifically about me. So I have no idea what I am writing. It’s funny how listening to others destroyed the confidence I had while drafting it initially. Don’t let this happen to you! Your life is your script.

Daily Gratitude: This is so true. It seems that when we want something so much, there is often some form of fear (or even more than one form) standing right in front of us. It’s embarrassing to think of the number of things I’ve missed in my life because of fear. We couch that fear in many “outfits” or “costumes” such as “I really don’t want to”, “it doesn’t matter that much”, “I’m too old so it’s too late”, “that’s not in my wheelhouse”, “I don’t know how to do that and there’s no time to learn”, etc. These are all coverups for fear. We need to recognize what we’re doing and how we are avoiding pursuing our goal and then figure out the things we are fearing. Once we find the underlying fears, we can develop strategies to overcome them. Some we can overcome on our own but others might need help with it. It takes work but take it from me, it’s worth it.