Right now I am in the waiting room of Northwest Community Hospital waiting for a family member to get out of surgery.  Honestly I am tired and exhausted, and any attempt at writing a poignant blog is not happening.  I had intended to write about a really interesting quote I just heard.  Instead I am just trying to keep my eyes open.  You see, I have not been living up to what I preach.  Every day I tell clients to take care of themselves first.  I show them different tools to relax, recharge, and center themselves.  I explain how we are no good to others if we have not first taken care of ourselves.  But I haven’t been following my own instructions.

As with my clients, my fall from stress-free living started simply enough.   A client needed to meet with me for an emergency session over the weekend.  Two new clients wanted to start in the same already busy week.  I was asked to speak at some wonderful events.  A can’t miss networking event popped up.  None of these caused my stress.  But all of them together started to add up.  First I started to have too many morning events and my usual morning meditation started to become sporadic.  As my days began to fill up exercising and clear my mind walks started to drop off.  Then my 40 hour work week became 50 then 60 then even 70 hours.  My sleep began to be interrupted.  My beautiful eating habits started to deteriorate as my travel schedule increased.  About a month or so ago, I realized I was really off-track but thought I could push through it.  “I only have to do it through March (April).”  There were just so many opportunities and emergencies to work though.  As I entered this past week, I could feel my exhaustion.  I had hit my breaking point, but I couldn’t break down now.  I had too many important things that week.  So again I pushed on.  Finally on Thursday night, my body said enough is an enough and it sent me a cold to slow me down.  But, of course, I fought against that too.  I have made commitments on Friday and Saturday I needed to live up to.  But after those commitments, I allowed myself to do nothing.  And, as Peter Gibbons said in Office Space, it was everything I thought it could be.

Over the weekend, as I watched chick-flick after chick-flick in between little bursts of sleep, I remembered who I was.  I remembered what it meant to have a life.  What it meant to LIVE my life.  Be IN my life again.  As much as I love coaching, as much as I love working on my business, as much as I love meeting new people through networking, I was missing out on just being me.  I have a history of thinking my career, my profession is me.  Don’t get me wrong, it is not that I don’t love what I do.  But it is not me.  The analogy I might give a client would go something like this.  Michael Phelps is an incredible swimmer and has dedicated much of his life to his sport, but it is not who he truly is.  If he suddenly lost the use of his legs and arms so he could not swim, what is left is truly Michael Phelps.  Everything outside of ourselves – our roles, our jobs, our hobbies, our passions – are part of the fun of this life, but they are not our soul and our true being.  Who we are in the moment, at our core, in the silence, is who we truly are.  And I am so glad that life has once again taught me this lesson.

So instead of forcing myself to write a brilliant blog for you, I am going to stop writing now, because it is what I need to do.  It is what I need to do to take care of myself.  And it is what I need to do in order to be fully present for my family member after surgery.

Have a wonderfully, centered, relaxing, recharging week!

It is finally spring here in Chicago and along with noticing all the work that needs to be done to the yard many families are making their plans for spring break.  Some are big extravagant plans like trips to Florida.  Others are just day care arrangements and maybe one family day together.  Planning a trip or arranging childcare takes time.  First one decides what spring break looks like to them whether that means visiting Mickey Mouse or making sure the children are taken care of while the parents are at work.  Next there is research, pricing, and scheduling.  And finally there are phone calls, purchases, and contracts.  It takes a lot of work to make a family’s spring break happen.

How many hours or days did you personally spend conceiving, arranging, and planning spring break?  Now how many hours have you spend this past year in determining your ideal life, researching what it would look like, and determining what would need to occur to make it happen?  It has been said most people spend more time planning their vacations than planning their lives.  Is this true for you?

by Iprole

All too often we drift through life without a direction.  I know there were many years of my life where I didn’t know what was next and most importantly I didn’t know I could decide what was next.  I spent the time doing the best with what I had, reacting to events and opportunities, and wondering if this was all life was suppose to be.  I thought life was only about survival in a system someone else created.

For example, I had gone to California for theatrical directing graduate school just because UCLA accepted me.  If they had not, I had no idea what was next.  After graduate school did not work out because my heart was not into it, I floundered around Los Angeles for a few years not knowing my future or what I wanted that future to look like.  Then when the company I was working for was no longer stable, I decided to come back to Chicago.  What I was to do there, I had no idea.  What happened was I worked with a placement company to find a job, any job, to pay the bills.  This chance secretarial position led to a 15 year marketing career.  There was no conscious thought.  The decision to find this job and accept it was made out of fear and desperation.  It was not made from my heart, from my passion.  And eventually my body made it clear that the 9 to 5 corporate world was not right for me by waking me up with undiagnosable pain so I could finally begin listening to my heart.

All too often we move through life not being aware that we have a choice in what that life looks like.  We go through our days doing what our parents did, what are friends are doing, what we perceive society expects from us, or just accepting what comes our way.  We go to college, get married, have children, and retire at 65.  That’s the course that is laid out for us.  That is the course we assume we have to take.  Sometimes that course is not right for us.  Perhaps the course laid out is not composed of the right elements or those elements are not in the right order for us.  But it is difficult to go with our heart, to move toward what makes us happy versus what we assume we are expected to do by society.  People who stray from society’s course are seen as courageous, rebellious, or gutsy.  But really they are just following their heart.  They have put their heart’s needs above the fear of assumed repercussions of not following perceived expectations.

by Bjearwicke

We make it difficult to plan our lives from our hearts because we fill our time being busy with stuff.  All day long we have to answer emails and texts.  We have to buy this or that to remain modern, trendy, and to keep up the image of success.  We have to race between work, soccer practice, and karate.  We fill our days with stuff keeping ourselves from looking at our heart’s desires.  The analogy I often use is that our lives are lived like we drive our cars.  We put the pedal to the metal.  We race through yellow lights.  We rush around slow cars.  We get angry at roadblocks and potholes.  We are racing around fast and furious because we are late and have to so much we think we need to do.  But if we don’t stop and define if we are driving to Los Angeles or New York, will we ever get there?  We spend our days adding mileage to our lives but we are not moving toward our desired destination.  All too often I found, the more I did, the more fires I put out, the more to-do’s on my list, the more I was actually pulling myself away from what makes me truly happy.

Are you ready to let go of what you think you need to do and to begin listening to your heart?  Are you ready to start planning your life today? Share with us the first steps you will take to have the life you truly desire.