In Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds…”. Don’t allow your current ideas and opinions to be dictated by what you used to think. We are all evolving. And through that process, we may dramatically change our believes – and that okay. It means you are growing.

The truth is change is the only constant in life. Just like the seasons change and we grow and evolve, everything else around us changes. We have this comfort in the known and when we feel the threat of change, we freak out.

But since change is going to happen anyway, why not embrace it? Instead of seeing it as an inconvenience, what if we looked at it like an opportunity?

I know some people who would rather stay consistent in their life, even if they are miserable. They fear the chaos they feel with any amount of change, that they avoid any kind of distress by keeping things the same. Even when the same no longer serves them.

It is human nature to stick with our same old patterns and routines, even when we know we’ve outgrown them. We take comfort in the known, and the unknown fuels feelings of uncertainty. We’d rather stick with the devil we know, because at least it is predicable.

Remember, change is inevitable, growth is optional. We can stick to our same habits and stay comfortable. But we know that the real magic in life happens outside of our comfort zone. So, what if we changed how we see breaking patterns that no longer serve us, and saw them as opportunities for growth?

What if these new habits could support who we are becoming rather than who we used to be? 

Here are some things to remember when breaking old patterns and routines:

• It is okay to change your patterns when they no longer serve you. You don’t have to keep saying yes to something you’ve outgrown.
• Validate your feelings of wanting comfort in the known. It is human nature to crave certainty and if you slip back into old patterns every now and again, don’t beat yourself up for it.
• Remind yourself of why you are changing your behavior and how it supports the person you are today and who you are becoming.
• We learn so much more about ourselves when we try new things. We learn what we like, what we don’t like, what works for us and what doesn’t.

What patterns in your life are no longer serving you? What small changes can you make today to support who you are becoming?

One of my favorite motivational videos is from Jocko Willink. I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s so valuable it is worth repeating.

If you are still breathing, that means you are still alive and you still have some fight left inside you. You believe that you have tried every possible solution, but there are always other possibilities. Remember, the way out is through. And you have it within you to get through it.

Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Simple Man espouses so much wisdom. Yes, money can make our lives more stable. But how many times have we heard stories about people who are “rich” and are incredibly miserable and lonely? We all need money to survive, but the “lust for the rich man’s gold” has destroyed many more people than it has saved.

From time to time, we get caught up in what we don’t have materialistically. I’ve said this a thousand times, but social media can really increase our feelings of missing out on things. Or not being good enough. But money cannot buy happiness.

At the end of the day, all we really have is who we choose to be. You see, happiness doesn’t come from anything external. There are tons of people who are objectively rich, successful, attractive or “have it all”, yet they struggle with feeling liking who they are and being happy.

Don’t lose yourself in the standards of success that other people set. What matters to you? What is a happy, successful life to you? Is it building strong relationships? Is it being a more plugged in partner or parent? Is it focusing more on connections with others?

It’s completely human to care about what the people who we love think of us. We naturally want to be liked and accepted. Where things start to go off track is when we start listening to other people’s opinions over our own.

We only have this one life while we are here on this Earth. Like Ferris Bueller says, “Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” We are all perishable items. We need to start living accordingly.

Think about it like this: When you were a child and you were playing in your backyard you did your own thing and you didn’t care what anyone thought. You were fully present and engaged in what you were doing.

As a child I felt like my life was limitless. I could be whoever I wanted to be, and I could do anything I wanted to do someday. I was definitely a weird child, but I knew deep in my soul that I was born to stand out from the norm. I didn’t care what anyone thought of me or who they thought I should be.

But as I got older, other people’s opinions infiltrated my heart and mind. And it happened slowly. And before I knew it, I lost sight of who I was because I was so busy trying to be who they wanted me to be.

In the book The Four Agreements, there is a term used from Toltec wisdom called mitote. Mitote is basically a fog in the mind of a thousand voices, filled with ideas and messages from the world telling who you should be based on what the world says will make you feel loved and accepted. It causes us to see things incorrectly, in a completely distorted way and causes us to deviate from our true path of who we are. We become clouded by who the world says we should be and fight against our true selves. Long story short, the people telling you who you should be are the mitote and we have to silence their voices once and for good. Seriously, think of the mitote as all the messages we get from society and the people we know.

Here are some things to remember when the mitote get too loud:

• Other people’s opinions of you are not your business.
• The greatest prison we will ever live in is the fear of what others think.
• If you live for other people’s acceptance, you will die from their rejection.
• Worry about your character, not your reputation. Your character is who you are, and your reputation is what others think you are.
• Your life isn’t yours if you care about what others think.

Now some of us might struggle because we’ve listened to the mitote too much. If that is you, try answering these questions to help you focus on and re-discover who you really are.

• 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?

Thomas Edison is famous for saying, “I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” The truth is, we miss 100% of the shots we don’t take. If we are out there still trying, we are still in the game. And if you’re doing that, it might surprise you know that even if you are going slow in your progress, you are still lapping everyone who is sitting on the couch. Sadly, a lot of people give up and refuse to try.

If you aren’t willing to try, then you are failing. If you are trying over and over again, and you don’t get the results you want, you are not failing – you are just finding what doesn’t work. It is experience – not failure.

What typically holds us back from continuing to put forth effort is fear. It might be fear of failure or even fear of success. Last week I talked about how fear cuts deeper than swords. Are your fears running the show? Or are you allowing yourself to feel defeated?

Remember, the only impossible journey is the one you never begin. And our time here on this amazing planet, is limited. We don’t know when our time will be up. Yet we often put things off or wait for the “perfect” moment to make our move. If we don’t know how many trips we have around the sun, why are we waiting? What life event must happen to us to push us out of our comfort zone and finally take that leap of faith?

You can be deceitful and treacherous, and no one may never know what you did. But you will know it. Any for many of us, the toll of carrying that box of rocks can stick with us for a long time.

At the end of the day, all we really have is our word and our integrity. And we determine our own set of core values and morals. Having integrity means that we behave consistently with those morals and values – especially when no one is looking.

Deviating from your own code can have some serious costs. When I was in high school, I got in a lot of trouble. It was typical teenage stuff, but one of my problems was that I had friends who were older and out of school already, and I didn’t want to go to class. I would make the argument to my mother that I was going to get more hours in at work – and I usually did. But sometimes, I would go to the beach or spend time with my boyfriend. At that point though, I was in the last semester of my senior year, and I had turned 18. And my first period class was history, which I found boring at the time. Ironically, I married someone who loves history and now I love learning about it.

Anyway, long story short, because I had missed so many history classes, my teacher was going to fail me, and I needed that class to graduate. So, we made a deal that if I passed the final, I would pass the class and graduate. Now, I am a firm believer in when you choose the behavior, you choose the consequences. But my 18-year-old self was scared. And really scared of not being able to graduate.

I had started to study for the final, when a friend approached me with a copy of the exam. It was all pretty much multiple choice. She said all we had to do was look up the answers. I rationalized it to myself that it was kind of like studying and I was using it as a study guide.

Well, for someone who hadn’t really gone to class that semester, I soon learned that trying to memorize a bunch of historical events wasn’t easy. So did my friend. So, we ended up researching the answers and carving the answers to the exam into our pencils.

I had never cheated on a test and the day of the exam; I was a mess. I was convinced that I was going to get caught, and I thought about how embarrassed I would feel and what my family would say. Whenever the teacher walked past me, sweat beaded up on my forehead and I was convinced that he would see the etchings in my pencil and grab it out of my hand. I was also convinced that he would pick up on my nervous, strange behavior and suspect that I was cheating. It was awful. But nothing happened. I finished the exam and handed it in.

I ended up passing and I graduated. But I can honestly tell you, that YEARS later – I still have nightmares of being in high school and being unable to graduate. And it is because I know in my core that I didn’t earn the right to graduate. My teacher made a deal with me that was more than fair, and I deviated so far from my own morals and values, that my guilt from it manifests itself in the occasional nightmare – years later.

Obviously, I was young and when we are young, we make a lot of mistakes. And my husband and I laugh when I have a dream about not being able to graduate. Because it is still haunting me! And it’s kind of funny. But the lesson here, is that when we lack integrity, there is a consequence to our psyche. And honestly, I am grateful for this experience, because it taught me how live with more integrity. When you look at your own set of morals and values, do you feel like you are living with integrity? If not (or if you’ve just cheated on a final), what can you start doing today to start being more consistent with your beliefs?

When you are fearful, you become more ego focused. You want to protect your ego at all costs. A great example of this is in romantic relationships when we fear our significant other leaving us or becoming interested in someone else. We turn into horrible versions of ourselves, filled with insecurity, suspicion, and distrust. And we end up creating exactly what we fear the most, because our behavior pushes them away.

To me, healthy love is a competition in generosity.  You see, when you show up in your relationships without being focused solely on what you will get out of it, you are less ego focused. You don’t have all these expectations for your significant other and you come from more of a place of abundance mindset, rather than trying to control the relationship to soothe your own fears. As much as you know you need to protect your own heart, you also know that the responsibility of love is to keep another’s heart safe.

When we come from a place of fear, we feel a sense of lack and enter situations with a scarcity mindset.  So naturally, we are trying to fix that, but it comes at a great cost.

When we stay rooted in our own fears, we begin to create these expectations from others or from life in general to make us feel better. And like Shakespeare said, expectation is the root of all heartache. The danger of this kind of mindset is that you start living your life from a victim mentality. And when you’re fears dominate your relationship, it will stagnate.

So how can we shift our thoughts into a more abundance mindset?

1.) Every morning before you start your day, write down three things you are grateful for and why. If this is the only step you take and you do it consistently for a couple of weeks, you will begin to rewire your thinking to approaching the day with more of an abundance mindset.

2.)  Stop being a passenger in your life. What if I told you that life wasn’t happening to you, but it was actually happening for you? You can attract exactly what you want in life if you know it’s happening for you. Be intentional and seek out what you really want. Once you become intentional, you will begin to see paths to what you want that you never even knew existed.

3.) Embrace change and see it as an opportunity. When you are open to change rather than fearing it, you open yourself to things you never knew were possible. Remember that life’s magic happens outside of our comfort zone.

4.) Have a learning and growth mindset. When things don’t work out as you expected, see it as an opportunity for you to learn and grow from the situation. Just because this one thing didn’t work, doesn’t mean nothing will. You just learned that this way isn’t the best way to achieve your goal.

Anger can be a powerful motivator and it is a healthy emotion. I look back at some decisions I have made in my life and there have been times that anger has fueled me towards my goal or kept me motivated. But what happens when we hold onto anger?

When we hold on to feeling angry, it is like drinking poison and expecting person who wounded us to die. It’s really a punishment we give ourselves. And sometimes, it is actually a buffer we use to protect ourselves from what we are really feeling. Maybe what we are really feeling is hurt or betrayal or sadness. Addressing those feelings in a vulnerable state can make us feel scared. But we owe it to ourselves to be honest with ourselves.

When you find yourself holding onto anger, ask yourself what you are really feeling besides the anger? Maybe you feel betrayed or hurt. Focus on healing yourself from the root cause of the anger, rather than focusing all your energy and time on feeling angry.

Don’t allow anger to erode you. The roots of anger, bitterness and resentment run deep and will imprison you. Free yourself from it.