Your life. How are you living that?
Today I have life coach Laura Neff with us. Laura is the heart and soul behind "More In You" Life Leadership Coaching. In this past year, I've had the wonderful opportunity of getting to know Laura. In that time, I've come to really see the beauty of her soul shine through. She comes from a place very much filled with abundance – abundance in life, in living, and in the potential in everyone.
To get a real sense of Laura, check out a recent article she wrote on starting a bliss revolution. That sounds pretty great, if you ask me!
Laura also has done a wonderful job of creating video to support her message, and one I found very enlightening was her discussion around how we sometimes minimize ourselves by using the word "little".
It is an honor to have Laura here, as she shares her thoughts on how defined boundaries in certain areas of our life can really help take us to new heights in others aspects of the life we are creating. Please join me in reading…
Choosing Boundaries For Life Success
"Once we accept our limits, we go beyond them." ~ Brendan Francis
Greetings, readers of The Jungle of Life!
First off, can we all just stop and raise a glass/pom pom/pumping fist to Lance? I never, and I mean never, leave his blog without inspiration, and I’d be surprised if the same isn’t true for you. Lance, my friend, you are one of the brightest lights in our sky!
If you’re a devoted follower of the Jungle of Life, then I know you didn’t miss Lance’s recent guest post called Life Is Art, at the Evolving Beings blog. In this creative, spunky, and thought-provoking post, he challenged all of us to think of our lives as an ever-evolving work of art, created by the myriad of choices we make each and every moment of each and every day. As a Life Leadership coach, I have to admit to a fist-pumping, “Yeaaaah!” moment as I read his words. In short, I wildly concur, as that message is very much akin to the foundation of this work that I do in the world each day, helping people more powerfully lead their lives toward both who they want to be and what they want to create by the choices they’re making.
And wow, in that vein, are we off to an amazing start for the new year! Somehow, something has opened up a bit in our collective breath with the turning of the new year. The emotional/ financial/spiritual/fear-based gridlock of 2009 is beginning to loosen up, like an ice flow in the early spring when the first warm breezes start blowing through. Given the power, tenacity, and fierceness of the human spirit, all we need is a tiny crack to appear, and POW! We push our way out of what’s been holding us back, eagerly searching for what’s next and what’s possible. That’s what the beginning of 2010 feels like to me as I listen, watch, and experience this fresh start. We have much work to do, and it’s the good work of becoming more of who we truly, deeply are. Many of my clients and friends are excitedly choosing their word of the year (mine’s “Vitality!”), creating goals, setting intentions, and in the past three weeks have started exploring how their choices this year will help them experience those things as real in their lives.
Aaaaand that’s where things tend to get stuck/stalled/stagnated!
Being at choice + craving change = choosing something different to create the “Life is Art” masterpiece you can see in your mind and feel in your heart. It means saying YES, PLEASE! to what will get you closer to that vision and NO, THANK YOU! to what takes you further away. Simply put, each and every choice we make…and I mean the eeeensiest choices all the way to the huge ones…is either moving us toward or further from the selves and lives that we crave.
So there’s a vital leap to be made from choosing the word/goals/resolutions/intentions to then really choosing differently, moment to moment, in order to see those things to fruition…choice by choice, step by step.
One way I’ve been playing with that this new year is by harnessing the power of saying “yes” and “no” by way of boundaries. I’ve noticed that unless I create boundaries within myself, for myself first, then not much happens differently on the outside in my life. Here’s an example:
Like many of you, 2009 was the year I dove into social media. Facebook and Twitter literally seem like a party that never ends, and both my business and my personal life have flourished in ways I couldn’t ever have imagined because of the time I spent there in recent months. (I’m writing this blog post because of meeting Lance on Twitter last year!) Work and play blur into a sparkly gray area in Social Medialand for me, and it’s been both a blast and a boon.
But, I’m also a solopreneur. And I have a laptop. The good news? I can take my work anywhere! The bad news? I can take my work anywhere! In 2009, I found myself doing things like cooking dinner, laptop on the kitchen counter, recipe website up, but then checking Facebook and Twitter while the onions were sautéing. I’d take my laptop upstairs and while my husband read or surfed the net on his own computer, I’d don my pajamas, hop into bed to chat with friends, connect with colleagues, and while I was at it, hop on over and check my email. ‘Cause I could. At 11:00 p.m.
Bottom line? I was becoming a bit addicted to being on the computer but could rationalize it to myself because “it was helping my business.” And, it was too much. My boundaries were non-existent, and work was bleeding into everything.
When “Vitality” became my keyword for 2010, I knew I had to create boundaries–by myself, for myself–around my time online. To do that, I’m experimenting in four different ways…creating time boundaries about when and how long I’m online, putting a temporary boundary up around Twitter, creating boundaries on the fly through “vitality checks” during the day, seeing if what I’m doing is creating or depleting my vitality and shifting my choices as a result, and finally putting a boundary up around my laptop itself, deciding that its primary residence is my office, and it only comes to visit my home on occasion..
You might notice that each of these boundaries are self-imposed. That’s the thing about boundaries…most often, no one’s going to set them for us. It’s up to us to harness the power of them for good, and I’m working toward with the example above.
Is it working perfectly? Not yet. But is it getting me closer to where I want to be? Slowly but surely, moment by moment, choice by choice, step by step.
So as you move more fully into this new year of ours, I encourage you to think about not only what you intend to create for yourself and in yourself in 2010, but how the choices you’re making are moving you closer to or further from those intentions. Where might you benefit from creating boundaries of your own? How will they serve the masterpiece-in-progress that is your life?
Keep up with Laura by subscribing to her blog, and following her on Twitter and Facebook.