Inside: A full, meaningful, beautiful life will also be a messy life. Ask yourself these 8 meaningful questions and then practice imperfect action to bravely bring your vision your life.
Your joy is not dependent upon perfect circumstances. Your worth is not dependent on looking, sounding, or showing up like anyone else. And a brave and beautiful life is not void of messiness or struggle. A brave and beautiful life requires consistent, intentional (imperfect) action. It requires risk and showing up through fear, uncertainty and discomfort.
Make your life a work of art. And remember, making art is messy.
You are already strong, wise and brave. You may have learned to distrust yourself, you may have experienced painful things in life that left you weary and broken-hearted, you may simply have never been told that you have permission to be exactly who and how you are, shame and judgement free! We’re all stretching, becoming, messy and beautiful lives in progress. However we came to this point in time, what’s most important is that we exercise our agency and CHOOSE for ourselves how to move forward. We don’t have to see the whole path ahead to handcraft a brave and beautiful life – all we need is light for the next small step.
Krista xo
PLAN FOR THE LIFE YOU WANT NOT THE ONE YOU HAVE: 3 Powerful ideas
Life is messy. The truth that life is messy does not mean you’re doing it wrong. If we focus on needing life to be neat and tidy for happiness, or we focus on the problem (aka life is messy and this scares me!), we’ll live perpetually discouraged, disempowered, and feeling less than.
If, instead, we turn our attention towards what we can control – our response to a messy life, our vision and goals, how we walk out our values in every season, then our experience of life begins to shift. We have space in our bodies and lives for beauty, joy, and creativity amid the messiness. We awaken to the strength, wisdom and bravery that lives inside of us. And we expend more of our energy and resources on building a life we want and becoming the person we want to be.
Keep the following three ideas in mind to stay out of perfectionism and black and white thinking as you do the brave work to build a life that feels like home to you.
1. practice imperfect action
One of the greatest skills I’ve honed over the past two decades as a recovering perfectionist is to practice imperfect action. We need to learn to loosen our grip on a needing a precise outcome for happiness or wellbeing and stop placing our worth in anything outside of ourselves. Trying something new is brave regardless of outcome. Risking vulnerability to pursue a values-aligned life, relationship, or creative work, is something to be proud of. We don’t control everything but we can choose to show up through fear, consistently and on purpose. Instead of all or nothing, we get to choose all or something.
2. Begin as you mean to go on
Release urgency and focus on sustainability. Urgency pulls us out of our pre-frontal cortex into making decisions that don’t reflect the full truth of who and how we want to be in the world. Our culture promotes hustle and a more and faster is better mentality, so we must be intentional about choosing a sustainable and soul-honouring path forward. One small step and then another we bring about powerful change in our life.
3. Your choices today determine your life/business/health in three months from now
Even if our goal or the vision we hold for a beautiful life feels impossible, even if we aren’t sure we have what it takes to bring to fruition the thing we dream of, start anyway. The seeds we plant and water today bear fruit in time – whether 3 days, 3 months, or 3 years from now. The choices we make today (including honouring the season we are in and our current emotional and energetic capacity) DO matter; they are an investment in our vision of tomorrow.
This is what I really want you to know – read this post.
8 meaningful questions for a brave and A beautiful life
I encourage you to journal through these questions. Notice everything that arises without judgment because we cannot change what we don’t first acknowledge. You may, for instance, notice objections, anger, or grief. You may experience a glimmer of hope or new joyful possibility for your life.
Once you’ve spent time grappling with these questions, ‘take them into the woods’. Go for a walk amongst trees and moss or do something fun and restful because this is often where we receive creative and wise insights about how to move forward.
And then, if you want further support as you practice showing up in freedom, wholeness and joy to your messy and beautiful life – reach out. I’d love to help.
1.Ask yourself: Do I know and like myself, am I continuing to delve underneath my conditioning and armor to meet and befriend my True Self, and do I practice self-compassion consistently and behave like my own best friend?
2. Ask yourself: Do I trust myself and regularly quiet all the noise to listen inward for wisdom and direction, and am I growing in emotional intelligence and intentionally shifting my relationship with comparison, perfectionism, fear, shame, and my inner critic?
3. Ask yourself: Am I living a vision and values-aligned life, with regular check-points built in, and when I’m at the end of my days am I clear how I’ll know that I have lived well? And am I truth-telling about and bravely pruning or decluttering what no longer serves me and the vision I hold for my life?
4. Ask yourself: Do I know how to practice paradox or make space for both/and in my body and my life, and do I notice the beauty and joy already present in my life even in the hardest seasons? Am I consistently practicing imperfect action to build a brave a beautiful life that feels like home?
A member of the Brave + Beautiful Community shared a phrase she learned at a Harambee celebration: “my soul misses me.” I love this as it expresses so beautifully how we feel when we end up disconnected from True Self, weary, and in desperate need of remembering our way back home.
Krista xo
5. Ask yourself: Do I give myself permission to (truly) rest or get resourced before giving and serving and have I uprooted the story that my value is tied to productivity or jumping through hoops? Am I consciously building my resilience bank account including a healthy support system? Do I practice naming, communicating, and honouring brave and healthy boundaries?
6. Ask yourself: Do I honour my wiring, natural rhythms, and ebb and flow of creativity and emotional, energetic, and physical capacity, and show up fully and mindfully to my life in every season? Do I practice curiosity more than judgment? Do I allow myself to grow and evolve including aging with joy?
7. Ask yourself: Do I know how to work with my autonomic nervous system and emotional/relational patterns to live regulated more of the time (and come back into regulation more quickly) even as I gently stretch my window of capacity? Do I give myself permission to heal at my own pace? And am I expanding my capacity to be with both joy and pain?
8. Ask yourself: Do I feel safe, at home, and joyful in my body and life and am I walking in freedom? Do I witness my strength, wisdom, and bravery? Am I using my voice or expressing the truth of who I am, and offering my gifts, to help build a world I want to live in? Do I exercise my agency as I write a new story – or make new meaning – for my life?
A full, meaningful, beautiful life will also be a brave and messy one. Beauty and messiness tend to go hand-in-hand. Making art is always messy.
Krista xo
