A few years ago, while I was working in corporate America, I had the opportunity to go work for a company I really wanted to work for. The only catch was that I had to take a much lower position than where I was in my professional career. When I was debating whether to take the position, my eventual manager told me that all the experience I have under my belt would be an advantage for the position I would be taking. It will allow me to seamlessly transition into the job and be up to speed faster. So, I ended up taking the job.

What I didn’t realize at the time, was how toxic the culture in my new department was. Unbeknownst to me, before I started the job a lot of my new peers had been under the constant threat of layoffs. Months prior, the company had laid off a bunch of people and it was traumatic not only to the people, but the business as well.

Over the following months, the company would be hiring to fill positions they realized they should have downsized, and my role was one of them.

Because of my prior experience, my new boss, who honestly was a great guy, depended on me to take the lead of certain initiatives and I ended up stepping on a lot of toes on my team. He wanted someone who had fresh eyes and who could think outside the box. And I could simply because I wasn’t aware of how they had done things previously.

As much as my boss and VPs loved me, my peers began to resent me, and it became uncomfortable. And honestly, it was kind of lonely. I wasn’t there to make friends with people, I was there to do my job. But still, it sucked feeling like everyone else on the team didn’t like me. From their perspective, I was a showoff and thought I knew everything. From my perspective, I was just doing what management asked me to.

Looking back, I do feel like my experience there helped me grow as a person. And the advantage that I had going into it was beneficial to the team, it just came with a price.

What makes you feel more alive? What fills your heart and makes you feel like you are living your life’s purpose?

You see, we often put off the things that truly ignite our soul. We feel like that is a luxury that we can indulge in when we have more time. We don’t see it as important. When we get all of the things on our to-do lists done, then we can get to it. And you know how that goes. We never will actually have the time; we need to make the time and make these things a priority.

But for some reason, we deprioritize these things. But what if I told you that what makes you feel more alive is your highest purpose? What if that is the reason why you are here?

Twelve years before I was diagnosed with breast cancer, my mother was at age 48. It was such a scary time for our family. Breast cancer didn’t run in our family, and we didn’t know many people who had it.

A few months before my mom’s diagnosis, I had started working for a small recruiting firm on the shoreline in Connecticut. The owners were an older couple who were in the office every day. I gravitated towards the wife, whose name was Georgia. She was snarky and sweet at the same time, and she was full of wisdom about life. As a young woman, I found her to be kind of a mother figure to me. She also was a stage 4 breast cancer survivor.

I was amazed at how this woman lived dealing with a terminal illness for so long. She was so filled with humor and gratitude, and it was so inspiring to me. She was determined to live the best life she could with stage 4 cancer as she could – and she did. For 19 years.

Georgia emphasized how important it was to be your number one health advocate. She was so passionate about it, and truly loved helping others.

When my mom got the devastating news that she had cancer, Georgia became such an amazing resource for our family. She connected us with her medical oncologist at Yale who ended up being such an incredible doctor for my mom. He was a great consultant for me, too, years later when I was living across the country and had been diagnosed with it, too.

Who Georgia was to us, taught us both how important it is to be your best health advocate and to ask the difficult, uncomfortable questions. She did so much for us in that respect and it is so difficult for me to even think about how different our experience would have been without her in our lives. Always remember, that somebody, somewhere is depending on you to do what you have been called to do.

Shortly after I was diagnosed with cancer, I became fixated on the fear of dying. And those fears make sense when you first get a diagnosis like that. It’s scary and there are so many unknowns. There were so many tests to be done that might give me an inkling to my fate.

I had always been a super laid back, fun person who all of sudden, had lingering thoughts late at night, lying in bed, worrying about dying. Reflecting back on it, I find it kind of silly because, well, we are all dying. No one knows when their time on this planet is up.

Preoccupation and worry about the future, robs us of what we can do now. And the truth is, the tide is always changing. Fixating on death or any worry doesn’t stop it from happening.

Like Gandalf in Lord of the Rings says, “all we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.” When we look at it that way, we are focused more on living and what we can do with our time here.

What are you doing with the time you have here?

Who you are and how you treat people means so much more than any amount of money. I grew up in a small, wealthy town. We were by no means poor, but my classmates certainly thought so. As I got older, I saw challenges that other families had and felt so much gratitude for all that I had. I felt so blessed and lucky.

Because of the kinds of homes my friends had and opportunities, at times I didn’t feel good enough, or that I didn’t have the luxury of certain things. In high school, while my friends were off playing pranks and being kids, I was working from the time I left school to sometimes 10 at night. Then I would come home, heat up a plate of food in the microwave that my mom had put in the refrigerator for me and get started on homework. Sometimes I even worked two jobs at any given time.

I wasn’t working for riches, though. I was working to pay for things I needed, like clothes or our school trip to Florida. I was also saving money for college, even though I had no idea what I really wanted to do.

Now I don’t think that my friends had it easier than me – quite the opposite. I am so grateful and thankful for those struggles because it taught me a lot about managing finances and practicing delayed gratification. These lessons were invaluable to me, and I wouldn’t trade them for anything.  

Building character, overcoming struggles and challenges, and sharing your story is so much more important than what you have. It’s more important than the kind of car you drive (I drove an old, light blue 1984 Chevy Chevette while saving up for a car – my friends called it The Gremlin!) or house you live in. Those are just things that can be taken from you when you least expect it. It is our unfiltered stories and personal victories that inspire others, not what we have.

Always be ready for someone to call your bluff because people will test you. It is human nature and even the people who care about us most will test us.

It all comes down to knowing what your boundaries are and feeling comfortable and confident with acting on them. One of our most popular posts on this blog is empathy without boundaries is self-destruction. For years I struggled with being an empath and setting clear, healthy boundaries.

Boundaries are your responsibility. You decide what is and isn’t allowed in your life. Boundaries are the limits that you set with yourself and the people in your life as to how they can treat you and behave around you. They come from your own personal values, beliefs, perspectives, opinions and life experiences. It requires understanding how to separate your own needs from the needs of others and prioritizing them.

Many of us avoid setting boundaries with others because we worry that if we do, we will be abandoned. This can be a deep-rooted fear that was taught to us in our childhood. And as children, we needed belonging and acceptance. So not setting boundaries was a way for us to survive.

We never learned how to create boundaries, so we try to navigate through life without them. We tend to believe that other people’s needs, and feelings should come first. We worry that setting a boundary may jeopardize the relationship. And for many of us, we struggle with understanding what we really feel and want. It’s hard to set boundaries when we can’t identify what we are feeling.

One way to start contemplating what kind of boundaries you want to have is to think about what your limits are. Identify your physical, emotional, mental and spiritual limits. Think about what you can accept and tolerate. Knowing what makes you feel uncomfortable, stressed or resentful are great guidelines to help you define your boundaries.

Sometimes taking a step back and having sometime to yourself enables you to consider people or things more objectively and see them in a truer but less favorable light. We tend to lose sight of what is happening in situations when we are in the middle of them and things emotional. When we stay in situations like this for too long, we tend to lose sight of what we deserve one compromise at a time.

How can we use time away from someone or a situation to re-center ourselves and remember what we deserve?

We need to look at ourselves closely. When you truly begin to believe in what you bring to the table in any relationship, you will tolerate less of the bullshit. When you know your worth and what you deserve, you will find it harder to stay around those who don’t. And when you close the door to what was before, you put yourself out there to attract what you deserve and all these new, amazing doors will open for you.

My question is, do you really know what you deserve? We often accept the love we think we deserve and many times, our idea of what that is, is actually not accurate. We tend to settle or stick with what is comfortable for us, even if it’s suboptimal. Or even if it makes us sad. We tend to stay at jobs we hate because it’s predictable and pays the rent. We lose sight of what we deserve one compromise at a time.

When thinking about this topic, I first thought about some ways you can identify what you want and deserve in your relationships and career. But I found myself coming back to one thing. And that is simply this idea: When you focus your time, effort and energy into becoming the best version of yourself, everything else will follow. And it will be there in abundance.

Let me say that again.

When you focus your time, effort and energy into becoming the best version of yourself, everything else will follow. And it will be there in abundance.

When you to treat yourself with love and respect you have already set the bar for how others should treat you. And the right people will love that about you and gravitate towards you. When you know that you bring value to the table at work, you will start reaching for more, because you know you’ve earned your place in a better role.

It really comes down to how you treat yourself and what you expect from yourself. When you raise that bar, people take notice and know what you have to offer. And they want to be part of that.

I’ve talked about the law of attraction many times in posts. Let’s talk about the science behind it.

What we believe about ourselves influence what we attract. Our beliefs create a filter in which we see the world. If we believe that we aren’t worthy, our brains will seek out information or “evidence” to push through the filter that validates and confirms what we believe about ourselves. This is confirmation bias. Our brains will purposely seek out people who confirm the negative (or positive) beliefs we have about ourselves. But if we believe that we deserve good things and we’re consistently working on becoming the best versions of ourselves, we will naturally attract that in our lives. We will seek out “evidence”, if you will, that validates, confirms and supports the idea that we deserve good things. We will attract people who are liked minded who want to constantly grow and improve themselves. As a result, what we give and receive in these relationships will have more opportunity for deeper connections and experiences.

You cannot afford to live in potential for the rest of your life. At some point, you have to unleash your potential and make your move. Ask yourself what is holding you back? Maybe it isn’t the person you are, but the person you think you aren’t.

Ask yourself if you are really living or just existing? We tend to choose to exist because it’s safer. Really living requires courage and a vulnerability that is just plain scary to most of us.

Why don’t we live like we’re dying? (Spoiler alert – we are all dying.) We are perishable items and our time here is limited. Yet we forget that and fall into our daily patterns and routines. We stay inside our lanes, just looking ahead to what comes next. We go onto autopilot chasing all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons. And chasing the wrong things and staying within the lanes of what society says we should do is not living.

You are here for a reason. And it’s not to live a monotonous life. Or a life filled with fear and worry. You were created to be victorious.

When fear overwhelms us, it paralyzes us. If we going to fear anything, it should be the idea of being in the exact same place as we are today. In our busy world, with all of its constant distractions, it is easy to lose sight of what we have been called to do.

If you are struggling with unleashing your full potential, sometimes asking yourself these questions can help you remember who you are and what you want.

• What did you love doing as a child?
• What are your happiest memories growing up?
• What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?
• What makes you forget to eat?
• What are you willing to stand up for?
• What are you willing to struggle for?
• What makes you forget about the world around you?
• What thoughts provoke strong emotions in your heart?
• What kinds of conversations do you have with the people closest to you?
• What do you feel passionate about?
• If you didn’t have to work a regular job, what would you do with your time?
• What’s on your bucket list?
• If you knew you only had one year to live, what would you do?
• How do you want to be remembered?

What are you will to sacrifice in the short term to get what you want long term?

Do you know your reason why?

You see, the struggle you’re facing is a test to see if you’re truly committed to the life you say you want.

The truth is, you are not going to be motivated 100% of the time. No one is. So, what can you rely on when you don’t feel motivated? The answer is discipline.

Here’s how you can become more disciplined.

1.) Understand your why. Why are you doing this? I find that writing down all my reasons why am I doing something and reviewing it first thing in the morning keeps me focused and disciplined. It reminds me every day what I am playing for, so to speak.

2.) Do what you need to do when you don’t feel like doing it. I know, that sounds pretty obvious. But it can be really hard to do when you don’t have motivation. What I find helpful is using the Pomodoro Technique. Say I have to complete a project that I feel overwhelmed by. I break it down into manageable chunks and set a timer for 25 minutes. For those 25 minutes, I focus on the task at hand and block out everything else – which are usually my excuses about why I can’t do it or get into the right mindset to do it. When the timer goes off, I take a break. And usually, just by forcing myself to take action, I am able to get into the right groove and mindset.

3.)  Become intentional in what you do. All lasting changes you make in your life come from the small choices you make, consistently, every single day. Know what you need to do and make a conscious decision every day to do those things. Understand what your pitfalls might be and have a plan on how you will combat those things.

4.) Forgive yourself when things go wrong but keep going anyway. There are going to be times when you will fall short of your own expectations or fail at being disciplined. That’s okay – it means you are human! When you fall down, get back up, dust yourself off and get after it. When things don’t go according to our plans, we tend to feel overwhelmed and second guess what we are doing. It’s kind of like when you’re trying to eat better, and you overindulge in one meal and the rest of the day becomes a free for all mini game of making bad dietary choices, because, you know, you can just start fresh tomorrow. Acknowledge what happened, take it as experience for the future, forgive yourself and move on in the direction you want to move in.