We live in an era of entitlement, blame and finger pointing. Too few people are willing to take responsibility for the state of their lives, too many are happy to lay it at the feet of others. Only when you own your power to affect change, can you ever create the life you truly want. It begins by taking a good hard look in the mirror and owning how your choices have shaped your reality.
Marriage doesn’t have to be all hard work, but unless you are committed to working at your marriage, it’s unlikely to last the long haul (or at least be one you enjoy being in.) As I reflect on the last twenty years of married life, here are seven ways to help keep love alive and your marriage strong.
Holding a grudge can be self-satisfying, but it always hurts us far more than the person we’re holding it against. At risk of sounding like a preacher, you must learnt to forgive. Doing so isn’t about them; it’s about you. It’s about deciding that you no longer want to carry negative emotions from an event in your past forward in to your future. You’ll take the learning, but you’ll leave the resentment behind.
“I got three messages,” said Diana Nyad as she crawled out of the water in Key West after her epic swim from Cuba. “One is, we should never give up. Two is, you’re never too old to chase your dreams. Three is, it looks like a solitary sport, but it’s a team.” It’s a message that holds wisdom for us all, particularly those of us who often think we’re too old from pursuing dreams that seem audaciously big.
I have to confess, I excel at going fast. I’m not so good at slowing down (except from exhaustion at day’s end). In fact, I find sitting still and being silent much harder than running around like a blue-ass fly. But as I have to remind myself time and time again, How does all my busy ‘doing’ undermine who I am ‘being’? If in my haste to pack as much as I can into a day I am not present to my gorgeous kids, or not really listening to my husband as he shares his day, then it comes back to the question “Busy for the sake of what?”
Resilience is crucial to our success in the bigger game of life. Not only does resilience help us to cope better with major crisis and traumatic experiences, but it helps us cope better with the smaller, more mundane, events and circumstances that often take the biggest toll on our health and happiness on a daily basis.
Athletes, educators, corporate heavyweights, religious ministers – none of us are immune to the temptation to surrender self-respect for self-interest. All of must remain vigilant about whether we are stepping into a slippery grey zone that is often hard to retreat from. Integrity doesn’t come in shades of grey. Living and leading with integrity means that we must tune into our conscience to guide our decisions, and refuse to compromise on what we know is right regardless of how inconvenient, costly or politically inexpedient it may be. That doesn’t mean we don’t work to find mutually agreeable solutions with those around us; it just means we don’t sell out to our principles for the sake of our ego, our status, our hold on power, or bank account.
While no-one I know has ever had relatives executed or brutally tortured, few people I know have escaped loss, hardship or heartache. The truth is that wherever we live, life will bring its fair share of struggle, sorrow and setbacks. As I was reminded time and time again in recent weeks, while our adversities can shape our lives, they don’t have to define them. Rather we have to make a conscious choice how we will respond to life when it fails to conform to our plans, our hopes and our expectations.
While the future may be looking very uncertain for Nigella, one thing is not. That the pain in her private life is now in the public domain and that millions are cheering her on to be the strong woman we’ve always seen her to be – not just in the kitchen, but in her life beyond it.
If Angelina Jolie’s bravery has a lesson for us all it is this: That sometimes life calls each of us to decisive amidst uncertainty; that sometimes after weighing in all the probabilities and measuring out the pro’s and con’s, we each need to tune out all the noise and opinions around us and turn inward to listen the voice within making whatever decision feels most right for us, even if we’re not 100% sure it’s 100% right. We then have to trust ourselves more deeply to meet whatever challenges those choices may give rise to.
Is how you define success keeping you from achieving it? How you define success determines not only how successful you feel throughout your life, but how successful you become in terms of the impact you make on those around you, the quality of your relationships, and the value of the contribution you make along the way. Taking time to decide how you want to measure your life, framing those measures in ways that enable you to feel enjoy success today – and tomorrow –enables you to stay more purposeful, more courageous and more optimistic, even when your efforts don’t produce the outcomes you’re working toward. Which, let’s face it, can be more often than we’d like.
Indeed there’s a science to success when it comes to achieving goals and making life changes – whether on January 1st with your New Year Resolutions – or any other time of year. On the link below are 7 strategies to help you make the changes you want in the year ahead – including making the right resolutions to begin with. I hope you will read it, but more so, I hope you will apply them so that 2013 will truly be the best year of your life. Not because everything will go as you want, but because you be firmly at the helm of your own life – living by design rather than by default.
The marathon is an event that challenges those who enter it to dig deep into their reserves of strength, determination and courage in order to cross the finish line. Many didn’t get the opportunity to finish this one. Yet if ever there was a marathon that challenged us to dig deeper and called us all to greater courage in an increasingly fearful and turbulent world, it was this one.
Losing your job is tough, whether it had everything to do with your performance or nothing at all. But regardless of why you lost your job, it’s how you respond in the days and weeks that follow that will set you up to get back to work quickly and successfully. Here are 8 keys to helping you do just that.
Courage is saying ‘Enough!’ to the fears that urge you to play safe, speak safe, love safe and live safe, knowing that becoming vulnerable to you fears lies at the heart of everything worthwhile.
(Reprinted from original CourageWorks column in Forbes Magazine) We've all been there: Brimming with resolve on December 31st as we boldly declare the goals and changes we plan to make in the year ahead, and by January 31st that resolve has evaporated into the...
(Reprinted from my CourageWorks column in Forbes magazine) None of us are immune to the same temptations that Armstrong succumbed to. As self-serving, deceitful and cowardly as his behaviour has been, it’s also very human. The discovery of Lance Armstrong’s drug...
Yet as I know you will have experienced yourself, it’s through those times when we cannot rest on what we have known, and have to dig deep and press on, despite the challenges each day can bring, that we discover in ourselves strengths we didn’t know we had. Sometimes we just have to dig a bit deeper than others.
After a month of pressing my alarms snooze button, I finally hauled my weary self out of bed today to a 6am exercise class. As I yawned my way through the various exercises I had to remind myself that sometimes just showing up is more important than anything else.
It’s impossible to chart a certain path through uncertain waters. You can only adjust your sails as you move along – with greater flexibility, more resourcefulness, deeper faith and a heightened appreciation of the mysterious nature of life.
