Falling Forward

My 5 year-old was playing on a high chair and she fell backward. She came to tell me about her misadventure and after I ascertained that she was not hurt my initial thought was to tell her that she should be careful. She is a daredevil who is often climbing up and leaping off things. But I stopped myself and instead asked her what did she learn from this?

Unfortunate things happen all the time in life and we can focus backward and get hung up on the failure, disappointment, and blame, or look forward and ask ourselves what can we learn. This shift is empowering because it enables us to focus on something positive: the future and what we can do differently. It enables us to grow from hardship and mistakes rather than be diminished by them.

I imagine that this week will bring you unexpected disappointments and difficulties. When this happens, pause to notice your responses/feedback towards self and others. Then take a breath and gently turn and ask yourself, are these thoughts empowering/energy giving or energy draining/disempowering, what can I learn from what happened and what can I do differently in the future.

What's Your Purpose?

On Sunday, I facilitated a session for about 20 women at a church. The intention for the session was to develop a deeper awareness of our life purpose and to be aligned with that purpose. We started the session with the acknowledgement that each of us is born for a purpose. We explored this in depth by reflecting back on the times when we were living our purpose fully and exploring with a partner what was going on in our lives and how we felt. When we are living our purpose, the group noted, we feel deeply fulfilled no matter the difficulties and obstacles. To look forward to deepen our clarity about our individual purpose, we used a picture-based tool named Visual Explorer. This helped us focus on the essence of our purpose and what we need to do to live more in tune with this purpose. For the participants, this brought a sense of clarity and connection to their core and what they could do to recommit to what matters most.

In sharing this with you, I invite you to find a little quiet time and think about a time when you felt completely in tune with your purpose? How did you feel? What was happening in your life? What were you doing? Write them down. When you look at the list, do you see thing you were doing that you’ve somehow lost? Perhaps it was volunteering for a nonprofit. Perhaps it was time spent in meditation or in prayer? Perhaps it was time spent with our children? Is there a way you can revive a couple of those practices? As we create the shift, we can live more fully our purpose in life.