Category: personal growth

settling down

We look at people who are living outside the norm, maybe its a young man dating a lot of women, or a woman choosing to focus on her career, or someone travelling the world instead of going to school, and we say “When they settle down, they will get married, or have a baby, or get a real job”. Why on earth would we ever choose to settle down, why don’t we settle up? Just the phrase has a negative meaning if you really think into it. Its saying to lower your expectations and become average. It implies that once you “settle down” you will have to give up what you had before. What if that is a crock of shit? What if you decided instead to settle up, to make the next phase of your life even more magnificent than yesterday?

I think too many people think that life has to be ordinary. That you lose the passion after a long time doing one thing, or being with one person. People talk about their glory days, or when I was younger, or before I had kids like it was the best of their lives. I know that the best is yet to come. I know that expecting today and however many tomorrows I am fortunate enough to have on this earth will be even more extraordinary than today. How do I know that? Because I expect it. I live as if it were true. I dream and stretch my imagination and know that no matter how old I am there is still so much I don’t know. I will never settle down. I am committed to always growing and stretching higher so I can fully experience all that this life has to offer me, and bringing as many people along with me as I can.

It doesn’t matter who you are, or how stuck you may feel, all it takes is a dream, a vision and a belief in your potential to continue to grow (and maybe a helping hand to give you a little pull!). I continue to take that hand when it presents itself to me. When I need a reminder of how great life is all I need to do is reach out and there it is, most of the time my amazing husband’s, but sometimes its the invisible hand of kindness with a stranger or someone on my team.

“There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living” Nelson Mandela

disconnecting

I just got back from 2 full days where I was disconnected from all technology. We took our youngest son up to Kennedy Meadows to camp, hike and make giant campfires. It was such a gift to be able to spend the time with my husband and my son, uninterrupted by emails or phone calls. I found myself reconnecting with the earth and feeling so refreshed and at peace watching the flowing river. The extremes in the weather, from hot to thundershowers and hailstorms were a reminder to me that life goes on with or without my attempts at controlling it.

I can’t remember the last time I spent 2 days away from computers or phones or tv, or even 1 day. Even my writing was different, usually I am hammering it out on a keyboard. But since we were camping, it was instead in pencil in the little blue book I have-the cobalt blue cover with “Fearless Dreamer” in gold script that I bought as a vow to begin dreaming again. The way I “write” write is an mirror of my journey, there are pages and pages filled at the beginning, then a lapse with a shopping list, lists of stories of milestones in my life, a list of names I have promised to pray for, lots of blank pages, and then a new series of thoughts beginning at the end of the book moving backwards. There are even pages where for some reason I have written upside down. There is little that is linear.

For roughly the first half of my life thus far I lived a very…how can I say…planned out life. I had a distinct idea of what my life was supposed to look like, and I followed the path of least resistance to get there. I got married just 4 days shy of my 21st birthday, and bought my first home, a cutesy, old little cracker-box, not long after. I worked for my mom’s business, without much ambition, but happy to stay in the safety net of her influence. By the time I was 23 I was a mother myself, and with my new baby girl in the picture, my girlhood dreams were coming true.

It was the birth of my son and the upheaval that he brought with his unique and unexpected special needs that was the first big disruption in the linear path that was my life until then. At the time I could not see it, but now with the wisdom and perspective that time brings, I can see that this was the greatest gift I could receive. His presence caused an earthquake in my small, sheltered, safe life. He was a loud and insistent messenger that there is little that we can control.

That is, and continues to be one of the lessons I am challenged with as I grow and continue this journey that is my life. Life, death, weather, seasons, sunrise, eclipse, all happen with our without my involvement. The changes and fluctuations in life from comfort to uncertainty and back are all part of the natural flow and law of existence, and the only thing I can control is my own thoughts and reactions to them. And it is a process, a journey, a moment by moment decision to let go of the desire to control.

NAB notice appreciate believe

I love acronyms, they help me remember important tools that I use to keep myself focused in the direction of growth. When I am up, or when I am down, NAB often comes into my thoughts, as a way of noticing why I am feeling this way. Feelings are the direct results of our thoughts, and what I NOTICE, APPRECIATE, and BELIEVE are the answer key to why the emotion is showing up right now.

What am I NOTICING? I am noticing that the more I build on my strengths and continue to intentionally grow every day, the more I seeing the positive effect I can have on the people I am leading. I am noticing that the growing leaders that I am investing my energy and love into are lifting me up as I continue to search for ways to add value to them. I am noticing all the good things in life. I am noticing my own process of labeling events as good or bad, and learning to accept the “bad” as not bad, just part of the journey of life.

What do I APPRECIATE? I appreciate the opportunities that come to me and the choice I have on how I want to respond to them. I appreciate that I am catching myself when I react instead of respond, and apologizing as soon as I realize I have done so. I appreciate myself as a whole learning growing person, and I forgive myself when I react. I appreciate the health and the abundance that is available to me.

What do I BELIEVE? I believe that I am following my purpose. I believe that small changes make a huge difference. I believe in the innate goodness of life. I believe that kindness is the answer to any problem. I believe that the positive effects and changes we make in ourselves have a ripple effect on the entire universe. I believe in being open and transparent and generous and humble.

choose love

Be independent of the good opinion of other people- Abraham Maslow

Life is teaching me that what other people think of me is none of my business. Other people are looking at us through their own glasses, which are absolutely different from my own , even though we may have similar values. They are basing their judgments and opinions about my actions, beliefs and success/failures on their own unique life experiences.

Each one of us is operating with a different prescription of perception. What makes you you is the series of experiences you have had in your life. For everyone, our experiences control our actions and thoughts, but sometimes we wake up to this. It can happen as a natural progression of your ongoing personal growth, and it can also happen as a result of a catastrophic event such as deep pain or loss. When we finally come to realize that we are not set in stone to react to everything, that we do have free choice, and can rise above reacting to actually responding, life becomes a more vast and open space of opportunity.

For me one of my big sources of pain was a fear of abandonment. I really have no idea where this came from, other than as long as I remember as a child and a young girl, I felt that I was not enough. This feeling of insecurity and uncertainty accompanied me through my life for a long time. As I grew and became a mother, and more successful in my career, it quieted down to a hum below the surface. This was better than the constant low I felt in the past, but it was not gone.

It would get triggered mostly by the ones I loved the most, as is their purpose. I believe that the people closest to us are here to help us grow, to trigger those reactions so that we can look at them and work to be free. My wonderful lover James is so devoted to me that he would always take steps to ensure that I felt safe, loved and secure. Inevitably there were instances when I was triggered nonetheless. Usually this would happen on the rare occasion when he left for a trip without me.

I distinctly remember in November of 2014 when James had an invitation to go to Maui with his friends. I made the conscious choice to tell him to go, with an open heart, truly wanting him to go without me. Maybe I knew that this was my opportunity to grow, because grow I did. While he was gone, I began to ask myself-why do I react with hurt, sorrow and abandonment when he is away from me? I looked inside, and realized that I had a choice! It made no sense that I react this way, I knew this man loves me totally, and he has always put my desires and wishes ahead of his own. It was time for me to do the same.

I still don’t like being away from my love, when I am with him I love the way we can be in a place of love together. What is different now is that I know that when he is gone (still rarely!) I will be growing more deeply into myself. I have learned that it is really true that you can change your life if you change the way you look at things. I have taught this for a long time in our business, when teaching how to deal with an unhappy guest or teammate. I have always looked at it as “They must really be having a bad day”, maybe they just received some bad news, or their spouse doesn’t tell them they are loved, or they are in pain. By changing the way you look at the experiences that come to you, you can choose to learn and grow. You always have the opportunity to make the choice of how you view your world and the people who come into it. Choose Love.

intention

Its not what you do but how you do, is what I have been told time and time again, but do we really realize how true it is? How many times have you said yes to something that you really didn’t want to do, for reasons like obligation, or not disappointing someone, guilt? But if it is really true, that its not what you do but how, doesn’t the “how” if you are not doing it out of pure joy and desire negate any possible positive impact from saying yes?

If you are martyring yourself or would rather be elsewhere, and you say yes, the energy you are bringing to the interaction or date or dinner or event is not going to be positive. What if you made the decision to stop trying to be everything to everyone? What if you gave up trying to please everyone and really got to know yourself and what brings you joy?

I’ll tell you what if. When you begin making decisions based on your values and truly what aligns with them its a game changer. You will suddenly find a tremendous feeling of peace. You will appreciate the freedom of being where you are, because you have chosen to be there. I can’t count the times in the past when I have said yes, sure, of course, no problem, okay, I’ll be there, I’ve got this, I don’t need help, I’ll do it. My habit of over committing and over booking was in constant danger of sending me into overload. The process of learning to be OK with saying no has shifted my perceived stress into genuine wellbeing. Everything I commit to I am all in, I know that this means I can’t say yes to everything. Take a look at your calendar from the past 30 days and you will see really look at where you are spending your time. Can you see what you are placing value on? Does it tell you what you want to hear?

who we think we are

“She is unapologetically herself” is so appealing to me. Hearing it has me thinking about the image we have of ourselves and how it drives our actions, our thoughts, our beliefs. It is all tied to our being caught up in other people’s opinions of us. The fact is that we are not who we think we are, we are who we think other people think we are. You may have to read that again to wrap your head around it, I know I did.

We can never get into another person’s head and see what they see, so the projection we have of ourselves is filtered through our own eyes, our own experiences, our own perception. I am always surprised when I hear myself being described by someone, positively and negatively. It’s much easier to say that you don’t care what other people think than it is to get there, I am there in theory but in real life I’m not. I get tested time and time again. A few years ago I had an exiting employee tell me I was selfish and greedy because I did not let them work overtime. No matter how I attempted to explain to him the facts about running a healthy business with over 80 employees, I could not change his views. Why did his opinion of me strike a nerve? I know that what other people think of me is none of my business. I know that his opinion is based on his own world view and life experiences. I know that I operate from abundance, yet it still hurt. My image of myself and who I really am at my core is love and generosity and giving. I work and practice and write and read and talk and dream and pray and live this.

But selfish and greedy. That was his view of me. This interaction caused me to turn my awareness inward and to look deeply into myself, and to see that there absolutely have been times in my life where I have acted selfishly. Maybe this is why it hit a nerve. I needed to look at that part of me that has sometimes run the show, the selfish, scared, victim part that can justify anything, who needed to be stay in retirement.

There will always be people that don’t agree with the way you parent, or drive, or your political views, or how you run your business, or spend your money, or live your life. We are so caught up in ensuring that we don’t stray from the image we have of ourselves as a “good father, good husband, good man” that it can cause us agony when we feel the polarization that is caused with people when you are being true to who you really are.

We are dealing with this right now, having had to make a so very hard decision that we believe is the right decision. Although we are strong and firm in our belief that we are doing the most loving thing, albeit the most difficult thing for this person by letting them fall down and hit bottom, the harder part for our hearts has been, even now, with our increased awareness of ourselves, the opinions of other people. Specifically people that are close to us and as a result of relationship have more ability to touch the thorns that are still deep in our hearts.

So we come back to being unapologetically ourselves. To being consciously aware of our actions, and to remember that you can’t expect everyone to agree with you or approve of you or like you or think you are great. To work to detach yourself from the good opinions just as much as the harsh ones and to become more self aware, and to always act with love.

dream lesson

Do you ever wake up from a dream only to go right back into it? If its a good dream I get fuzzy and happy, but the last time this happened I kept going back into the dream/nightmare of having to sing on stage. I love to sing, but I sing in my car. When no one’s around. I remember when my son was a baby and I sang him a lullaby and he cried. Despite years of being in choir, I am not a singer. Yet for some reason my subconscious last night had me singing solo with a guitarist on stage to a song I didn’t know. I don’t usually put much weight on the importance of dreams, but as I reflect on this dream, it seems to be sending me a couple of lessons that have been coming up a lot lately for me.

Preparation and fear. “If you fail to prepare, you are preparing to fail” is a quote I have used when gearing up my team for a busy holiday, and my dream-identity’s obvious failure to prepare for the stage is a vivid reminder of the fear that can rise up when you’ve not done the groundwork. As I am leading my new projects at work and continuing to grow my business, preparation is the left side of success- fear is the right. It can be so easy though to take it to the extreme and spend so much time on preparation that you never face the fear and take action. This brings to mind another quote, just as important, “Do it afraid”. You may never feel ready, but that’s ok. Your mindset must be I am always ready, because opportunity knocks once.

Do It Afraid!

patience

I struggle with impatience, I know it is one of my weaknesses. When I decide I want to do something, it is like lighting a fuse on a stick of dynamite. I begin to become more and more aware of the thing I want to do or be or see or try. It’s especially hard when I can envision how I want something to be. The gap between where I see things being and where they actually are is the testing ground for my practice of patience. It takes time to build a business, it takes vision and consistency and few rewards for the hours spent building the foundation.

We may have been in this business for 17 years, but when I look at the path that has let us to where we are today, I see that James’s first restaurant job working as a busboy at Dino’s was just one of the places where the seeds were sown in the field that is our life today. The Saturdays in high school that I didn’t want to work at my mom’s bridal shop were the path to learning to sacrifice for the family business. The winters in Tahoe were where James learned the value of a free meal while holding two jobs, one of them at the ski slopes and one in restaurants. Being able to keep the proceeds from the little shop my parents helped my sister and I set up when we were in our early teens was the beginning of my lessons on managing money. The years in Maui where James had his first experiences with entrepreneurship, where he learned the value of being the boss. The moonlighting I did making wedding cakes while I worked on bookkeeping for my mom’s company were the testing grounds for being self motivated. The excitement of having something new to offer the community when James brought espresso to Castro Valley in the early days at Cookie Express was the inspiration for innovation. The realities of starting a new business with young children and little financial resources…bouncing checks and selling tires to pay rent…learning to be resourceful. All the time spent along the ride we were learning the lessons and building the foundation of our lives now.

So my impatience gets tempered when I reflect back and see that it’s a process. Every step along the way is a chance to move in the direction of my vision. I can clearly remember the feeling when we could not do what other people around us were doing. We could not take vacations, we could not buy cars, we put every dollar back into the business, and all of our energy as well. Our kids grew up in the restaurant. The kids came in while we worked in the morning and after school, and watched cartoons while they did their homework. The train tables we have in our restaurants were to help entertain our kids while we worked. The photos of our family on the walls are because the restaurant is an extension of our family, and we spent most of our awake time at the original Denica’s in Dublin.

This world of right now can only perpetuate the impatience, which is why reflecting on the journey and the building blocks to today remind me of how life unfolds with our without my impatience.

be kind or be right

Have you noticed that in a lot of the more heated conversations you have witnessed or participated in there is a battle of the egos being played? There is a back and forth, each person rallying back their opinion or statement, focused on being right. The ego wants to be right all the time, and if we are not aware of this, or even if we are, but caught up in the discussion, it will take the reins and charge. It can be like a horse racing out of control, the desire to prove to the other person that they are wrong and you are right. The truth is that you may be right, but that you have a choice. The choice is whether to be kind, or whether to be right. Choose the higher choice, choose to be kind instead of right and notice the effect on the person you are in debate with. It is powerful stuff.

enjoy the ride

My lungs were burning as I grinded up the hill, keeping my eyes focused just a little in front of my front tire. It had been at least 4 months since I was on my bike. Life had gotten in the way, and as I sometimes do, I forgot the incredible high from getting a great workout. I kept pedaling and breathing and working to keep my mind from going to the deadly thoughts of stopping to rest. If I keep my eyes only on the dirt, I don’t look up the hill at the steep incline still in front of me. I finally reach a little part that is still uphill but not as steep, and fool myself into thinking its flat, telling my dying lungs, recover, recover. I make it to the top and immediately take a moment to put my feet on the ground, panting, sweating from my head to my dripping back, and let my heart slow. I know this trail well, it’s close to my house and I have ridden it many times. Without stopping or falling. I have also had it kick my butt more than once, as my beautifully scarred knees are evidence of.

The next section is a rolling hill to the point where it becomes technical. This is always the scariest part for me, the steep downhill that requires intense concentration, trust in God and the bike. The deep grooves, ruts, roots and rocks that are signature on this trail have sent me skidding at best and over the handlebars in a youtube worthy spill at worst not too long ago. I practice a mantra as I navigate the downhill, “You got this, trust the bike, keep your eyes where you want to go” over and over in my head to keep out the fear. I let myself stop and walk a particularly steep section, forgiving myself for not being brave. When I blessedly reach the bottom I am excited because the last part of my ride is my favorite. The rolling hills are just hilly enough to require little pedaling, the momentum from the smooth downhill carries me right up the next incline and I am able to let go and smile, breathe and feel the joy and thrill of the wind cooling my sweaty self.

This part makes it all worth it and is when I am reminded why I love to mountain bike. It’s such a perfect metaphor for my life, the hard steep uphills when we are working to build something new whether it is a new restaurant, or striving to buy our dream home, or raising our young family full of little ones years ago. Then comes the really hard part, after we open, the tweaks and reversals and start overs you have to make when learning something new or raising teenagers or stretching your limits. But finally there comes a time when you can breathe, coast a little and really take a look at what you have done. This is where I say thank you, thank you for the ride, then start again.

“Though the road’s been rocky it sure feels good to me.”
― Bob Marley