The Top 5 Positive Affirmations for Women
You roll out of bed and it’s early. Everyday it feels too early.
Brush your teeth, examine your face in the mirror with pink pillow line indents still migrating on your cheeks, and you shuffle into your clothes. Is there coffee? Maybe. Or perhaps just green tea this morning because you’re trying to be healthy. Out the door and off you go.
What’s missing, gals?
What is your intention for the day? Have to offered your next 12 hours any direction . . . like fruitful and bountiful thoughts? Or are you on autopilot to just take whatever comes? Let’s fix that. I know I don’t talk enough about affirmations, but they are one of the most important intention-setting aspects of your day.
Softness is strength
Softness is strength. But sometimes we forget.
Our world thrives on the critical. So much so, that when we’re real and soft with each other, it’s suspect.
Lies make all the good shows on TV. Think Preacher, Barry, Game of Thrones, Orange Is the New Black. All depend on lies to spin them forward.
Realness and vulnerability are so much harder to write, let alone act.
That means these are rare, and what’s rare is coveted. Which means you are coveted. Because you are not a lie.
Take this moment to feel how real and soft you are. It’s a rare and divine commodity these days. Forget what they say about being hard and tough. Hard and tough is easy. It’s walled, shielded, and thick. Bricks are easy to come by.
The truly strong let their softness walk through their front door, knowing the risk, and they still take it. And because you do that, you are truly strong.
I always see you loving yourself last
I always see you loving yourself last.
Why are you doing that? Loving yourself last, I mean. Who taught you that? It’s terrible. Stop doing it. Stop it so your own kids won’t learn that from you.
Oh someone told you that good people put themselves last? Do unto others before you do unto you?
You ever see those old Looney Tunes Chip and Dale cartoons?
The two chipmunks are so over-giving (“You first. No you first!”) that neither of them gets anything. They can’t receive. It’s a lose-lose. And we laugh at it since we get it so deeply somehow.
And forget that stuff about being a saintly martyr. You aren’t a martyr because you like it. You hate it. It boils your blood and makes you feel lonely and righteous. These are horrible feelings.
You put yourself last because you’re scared, baby. You’re scared that if you put yourself first, all those delicate relationships around you will get rocked. You think your family will suffer, your friends will call you braggy, and your boss will wonder why you’re no longer a team player.
You think that if you shine, and give yourself what you need first, you’ll be a selfish little pisspot like all those other selfish little pisspots you see and hate out there. Self-serving bitches.
Except, you could never be that. You don’t ever need to fear that.
Sword of Damocles
Caution: This is a morbid yet strangely happy post. It’s a weird post for me. It’s for all of you who are fogged out in the stressed-out “just getting by” zone, and for those of you who are just depressed as all hell. I have words about this. Read on.
I just got my second clear MRI. No cancer.
MRIs suck. It’s not the needle in your arm, the cold medicine injected up your veins, the tight white sterile tube you’re sucked in, or the grinding, deafening sounds that rip through your body. That’s all fine.
It’s the wondering what they see. And that you have to wait. And that those pains I have might go unexplained, which is better than if they DO get explained . . . as cancer.
I rose up high in relief for an evening after my doctor emailed me that they saw nothing. Year 3. You got more time, Sum.
The DMV, Long Waits, and Way Stations
The line wrapping around the DMV at 8:40 on a Tuesday morning encompasses three sides of the building.
They won’t let us inside anymore because the building just won’t hold us all. We begin to creep forward. It’s hot in the sun. No one dares leave his or her spot for a bathroom break. We’re all pretty quiet and uncomfortable.
Most people are staring down into phones. We have a 4-hour wait ahead to get my daughter’s drivers permit. No, we didn’t make an appointment – the wait for that was 13 weeks.
Life is about waiting sometimes. Waiting for the right job, waiting for the drivers learning permit, waiting for the right man or woman to come into your life, waiting for the right house or apartment. Waiting.
Think about all this interim time that goes by in the “in between” zones. As if life decided that for every one part of action, it requires 2 parts non-action, like a cosmic recipe.
Doers vs. Wishers
My friend and I are talking, and you know that feeling when someone mirrors back to you something that seems obvious, but for a second you’re able to see it through that other person’s eyes? It’s kind of a marvelous “ah ha” moment. My friend said, “I really admire how you were able to get…
Down with consistency!
Consistency is a bitch.
Let’s look at blogging and newsletters. If you’re a business owner in any sense, if you’re a writer, if you’re a coach . . . you’re supposed to ritualistically crank out illuminating advice every week ad infinitum.
You do it, or you’re supposed to hire someone to sound like you and do it and give advice on personal growth. Or astrology. Or Real Estate. Or healthy eating. Or your personal brand or vision. Advice, advice, advice. Insight. Scintillating ah-ha-provoking pieces of literature.
But this is what I see happening instead: Bright stars with amazing messages push out a month or three of amazing blogs or newsletters, then go quiet.
Really quiet.
I know how they’re feeling: They’re wondering if anyone has noticed that they emptied out. They wonder if their precious audience, who read their stories and illuminations, are all scattering to the winds.
Right now, I’m struggling to think up three new fascinating topics for my podcast. And I just can’t. I’m 500 episodes deep. That’s 500+ topics. What more can I say? What haven’t I said dozens of times?
A teacher, a true teacher, does in fact say the same thing 100s of times. We mine our jewels in incredible hardship (often) then we begin to plant them along the road for others to pick up. We plant the same seeds over and over.
Wisdom isn’t cheap. It’s not a weekly marketing email.
We offer our wisdom, then we offer it again. And eventually, we have to stop and wait for more wisdom to incubate itself inside us. Unfortunately, this isn’t how the capitalist world is set up. In that world, there’s always someone peddling a product, or an idea. Keep up.
Self-development is different. Or at least it should be.
I know why I unsubscribe to so many self-growth and business-growth type emails: they become all surfacy. “Buy this and be that.” I can feel how gradually uninspired they are-how the person behind them is reaching to get to some truth, but they don’t give me THEM , the real them.
They want me to buy into them, but they don’t let me see into them.