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Your Current Reality Doesn’t Define You

Last updated on: Published by: Recognizing Potential Coaching 0

I think we can all agree that 2020 has been rough for everyone in different ways. 

For myself, I have found myself in this limbo where I’m teaching from home and feel so guilty talking about the difficulties that come with that, pregnancy, having to handle everything on the home front while Moe is flying, and everything else because the flipped side of the coin is that I am teaching from home while my co-workers are back in school and dealing with a whole other level of hard there. There are so many women who would kill to be uncomfortable, exhausted and 4 weeks from having a sweet baby and in the aviation industry, many women are scared and grieving because their husbands have lost their jobs altogether. 

Oh the guilt. I was journaling on this a few days ago, trying to gain some clarity around it all and here’s the revelation I had. 

Your reality doesn’t define you anymore than mine defines me. Our realities are based on past decisions we made. Decisions to or not to get married, decisions to or not to adopt, invest our money or spend it, pay off debt or buy another thing we think will make us happy off of Amazon. Choices to work for a certain company, go into a certain industry, etc. 

Your reality also doesn’t dismiss the hard just because someone else seems to have it harder than you. Both realities can be hard. It’s not a competition on who has it worse. Both are hard and different. The last part of my pregnancy can be hard and I can also have empathy, sympathy and compassion for women going through the hardship of wishing so badly to be pregnant and being disappointed and heartbroken month after month when it doesn’t happen. I’ve been there as well. It can be hard for me to juggle 30 plates of my own while my husband is flying and it can be hard for those women who have their husbands home and not flying at all. We don’t have to choose. We don’t have to feel guilty because our hard is different than someone else’s. 

The judgement we have for someone else as they talk about their hardship comes from our own ego of feeling like we have to have more sympathy than they do because our hard is harder. How selfish of us as human beings! The judgement we have for ourselves comes from a place of shame. We are shaming ourselves into believing we are horrible people for feeling a pain and a struggle that we shouldn’t be feeling when we do. There is no should/shouldn’t. It just is. It’s there. It’s teaching us something- gratitude for what we have, perseverance, to choose a different path. Each lesson is different for every person. 

Above all, we need to let go of the shame and guilt- society gives us enough of that anyway. We need to check our ego when we start shaming our friends for going through a hardship that may be hard to them. Have compassion and empathy- it goes a lot farther than judgement and resentment. Again, not a competition. Lastly, we need to give ourselves grace. Our hardship is validated just as much as the next person’s even though it may look different. 

XOXO,

Kameran

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Are you settling?

Last updated on: Published by: Recognizing Potential Coaching 0

Do you love your job? Are you passionate about it? 

I was working with a client the other day and she was talking about how other women, much younger with half her experience in her job are quickly advancing but she isn’t. I asked why she thought that was and her response blew me away. She said “because they’re passionate about what they do and I’m not.” I asked why she chose that job if she wasn’t passionate about it and her next response reminded me a lot of myself. “Because it made more money than the previous job, didn’t have the benefits but made more so I looked at it as a step up.” 
WOW. How many of us can relate? I know I can. I chose elementary education because I’d been in college for 4 years and changed my major 11 times. It was what I had the most credits in and I needed to be done. So a teacher I became. Then when I went back 4 years later, I started out in dietetics but when I got divorced half way through that program, dietetics wasn’t going to pay the bills as a single mom and neither was teaching. So marketing became the next settle. I’d settled in my first marriage because I truly didn’t believe I’d ever find anyone else. See a pattern here? 

SO much settling! How about dreaming? How about recognizing our potential, that one thing we can do like only we can do? How about that? How much time would I have saved if I would’ve thought about that instead? So I asked my client how often she dreamed. She scoffed and said “I don’t think I do. I stay where I’m at because I’m good at it and I’m afraid of failing in front of people.” Next question: If you knew you could do anything in the world and not fail, what would you do? “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about that.” Been there. But the the thing is, people aren’t thinking about you because people are selfish. They’re only thinking about themselves. People don’t worry about your failures because they’re too concerned about their own. 

How often do you dream? Do you let the negativity of other’s projections override your own belief in yourself? Do you stay where you are simply because it pays the bills and you’ve never thought about what you’d really like to do? For some, dreaming is really hard. It brings out the possibilities versus what truly is right here, right now. But your reality, as we talked about last week, is just a series of decisions you made in the past that led you to this point. So if you dreamed more, would you settle less and thereby gain the life you truly want?

I can tell you from my own experience that when I started dreaming, started believing in myself and stopped settling, my life went from constantly stressed and digging myself out of a hole to checking things off my vision boards right and left and being grateful that I had made different decisions that led me to the reality that I have now. 

So the question is, are you settling or are you making decisions that create the reality you desire most?

XOXO,

Kameran

P.S- Have you signed up for the Gratitude and Attitude challenge starting Nov 1? 30 days of gratitude (with prompts to help you) and a daily prompt to help you get to the best version of yourself. We start Sunday! It’s free and it’s going to be fantastic!