Welcome to my first-ever guest post! I am honored that my first guest blogger is none other than the sensational Jodi Chapman, author of Soul Speak. She is a wonderfully soulful writer, an inspiring human being, and a beautiful soul. (And I’d say that even if we weren’t married!)

For those of you who know her, you know that you’re always in for a treat when she shares part of her soul’s wisdom through her writing. For those of you who are just being introduced to her now, you’re in for an even bigger treat!

In this post, she writes about a topic near and dear to my heart: the importance of stories–especially the stories we tell ourselves (and, even more especially, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves).

But I’ll let her tell her own story…

What’s Your Story?

by Jodi Chapman

I was watching Oprah’s Lifeclass the other night and author and speaker Iyanla Vanzant was talking about changing the stories that we tell ourselves.

Oftentimes these stories are true. They are parts of our life and parts of our past that happened. Yes, you have been hurt and mistreated and lied to and cheated on and stolen from and stepped on. Yes, your childhood was far from stellar and you weren’t treated as well as you should have been by your parents. Yes, you have had trouble speaking up for yourself and have been walked on by others because of that. Yes, your health isn’t great and you have battled one illness after the other. Yes, you lost a lot of money in the stock market when the economy tanked. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. These are all facts. No one is denying that.

But by staying in these stories, you’re staying in the past. By staying in these stories, you’re making it next to impossible to move on and create a new story. By staying in these stories, you’re deciding to remain a victim. I know that these are harsh words, but they are true. Believe me, I know. I have stayed in my own disempowering stories for years.

But what I’m realizing is that if we continue to blame the circumstances of our past, we never have to take responsibility for our present and future. Our life will always be more of the same. If you have always been that way, then you are giving yourself a way out – you’ll never have to step up and change, right? But I know that I want to change, and I suspect that you do as well. Staying stuck in these stories is keeping us from moving forward into our dream lives – the lives that we feel we were born to live.

One thing that I find particularly fascinating about our stories is that we’ve carried them around for so long that we just assume they are our own. And yet, oftentimes they aren’t ours at all. They have been handed down in our family or given to us by society or projected onto us from someone who didn’t realize what they were doing – didn’t realize how impressionable we were and how powerful words can be.

If we dissected each story that we tell ourselves and others, we could begin to see where it came from.

Oftentimes these stories are passed down from generation to generation:

• “In our family, we don’t go to college. We are hard workers, but we aren’t book smart.”
• “In our family, we are prone to depression. It’s just in our genes.”

Sometimes we have unspoken stories in our family that are just beneath the surface:

• “It’s not okay to show emotions. If we are upset, it’s better to stuff it down and deny feeling this way.”
• “Money doesn’t come easily. We have to struggle to have it, and even then it slips through our fingers.”

Other times, someone told you a story when you were a child, and you accepted it as your own:

• “You’re not very smart. Learning is hard for you. You probably won’t get very far in life.”
• “You’re very frail and sickly. You’re going to have a hard life just trying to stay healthy.”

Sometimes, our stories come from society:

• “The world is a violent place – no one can be trusted.”
• “The recession is making it hard for anyone to get by and prosper.”
• “The chances of making a living from your business are slim to none. It’s better to play it safe and go get a ‘real’ job.”

And sometimes, our stories come from a small part of ourselves that is afraid of change – afraid to fly toward our dreams:

• “Change is hard. It’s better to just stay in this comfortable place – even if I am not completely happy because who knows what will happen if I leave the known.”
• “I am not really worthy of much – why do I even bother trying?”
• “I am too shy to take the stage – even if I have a message to share, it’s just too much of a stretch. And who would want to hear me talk anyway?”

Sometimes our stories are events that happened to us:

• We were abused.
• We were fired.
• We have/had a serious illness.

Sometimes our stories are made up from our behaviors:

• We are afraid of commitment.
• We are super emotional.
• We are scatterbrained.

But what every single story has in common is the fact that we can let go of it if we choose to. We don’t have to carry these stories around any longer. We can decide to create new stories that we tell ourselves and share with the world. And we can decide that right now.

I have decided to change my story.

These are some of the stories that I have repeated throughout my life:

I am shy. I have extreme stage fright. I don’t push through fears. I say no when I am given the opportunity to shine. My body is fragile. I am not able to physically do what most people can do. I have to treat myself with kid gloves a lot of the time. Money doesn’t come easily to me. I feel strange accepting money for sharing my gifts. You have to work hard and struggle to achieve in life.

I have begun to form my new story. Here is what I have so far:

I am grateful to be a part of this beautiful world. Everything flows easily to me and from me, including love, money, health, and happiness. I embrace every way that I can share my message with others, and I know that I am always supported by the universe each and every time I step into the public arena. I am strong – body, mind, and spirit. And I am always loved.

Now it’s your turn.

Write down the story that you’ve been telling yourself and others.

And then write down your new story. Your empowering, positive, uplifting, story. The one that you will feel proud to share. And then come back and share it with us. We’re all waiting to hear it. 🙂

…

Jodi Chapman is the author of the inspirational blog, Soul Speak; the upcoming book, Coming Back to Life: How an Unlikely Friend Helped Me Reclaim My True Spirit; and the bestselling Soulful Journals series, co-authored with her amazing husband, Dan Teck. She would love to connect on Facebook and Twitter. Click here to receive her free ebook: Journaling from the Soul – 100 Prompts for Self Exploration.

If you enjoyed this post, please help spread the love by sharing it on Facebook and Twitter (buttons below). Thank you!

 
(book photo credit: Copyright (c) 123RF Stock Photos)

Let’s try a thought experiment…

Imagine that you’re approaching the end of your life.

You look back upon your long, mostly happy life. You remember many joyful moments, but you also have some regrets. As you reflect upon all of this, you say:

If only…

• If only I had taken that chance.
• If only I had expressed my true feelings.
• If only I had followed my heart.
• If only I had __________ .

You also find yourself saying:

What I wouldn’t give to __________ one more time.

You think of everything–big and little–that you’d love to experience again:

• What I wouldn’t give to see the person I love most just one more time.
• What I wouldn’t give to swim in the ocean–to feel the power of the waves and the warmth of the sun–just one more time.
• What I wouldn’t give to hear my favorite song just one more time.
• What I wouldn’t give to spend one more day with my best friends.
• What I wouldn’t give to sit in the grass and listen to the birds one more time.
• What I wouldn’t give to _________ just one more time.

Your list goes on and on and on, as you think of all the things you’d love to do…if only you had a second chance.

But then something miraculous occurs:

A genie appears. He tells you that you ARE getting a second chance! You CAN go back and make different choices–including doing some of the things from your “if only” list. You can also go back and savor many of the joys you remembered so fondly.

There are only 3 rules:

1. The genie can only affect YOU — no bringing back the dead or changing other people’s lives.
2. The genie chooses what age you’ll return to — rather than send you all the way back to childhood, he picks an age when you were mature enough to make important decisions and young enough to carry them out.
3. No more do-overs! — no third (or fourth or fifth) chances–this is it!

You agree to the rules and agree to be transported back to an earlier time in your life–a pivotal moment when your choices and actions could REALLY impact the whole of your life.

The genie claps his hands, and it happens…

All of a sudden, here you are–years younger, able to live again with the benefit of your lifetime of experience. Able to learn from mistakes. Wise enough to follow your heart, to preempt regret, to savor every precious moment, no matter how big or small, significant or “mundane”–because you now know that nothing is “mundane”!

This opportunity is truly a miracle!

Now the question becomes:

What are you going to do with your second chance?

• Will you cherish the people dear to you, not taking your time with them for granted?
• Will you gain a new appreciation for the little details of life that you barely used to notice?
• Will you follow your heart and pursue your dreams, even if it’s scary?
• Will you see every moment as a miracle?
• Will you express your authentic self and live your true life?
• Or will you live the same way you lived the first time around, and end up with the same regrets?

Only you can know. Only you can make the most of this miraculous opportunity, this second chance. Only you can live the life your heart wants you to live this time around!

The miracle has already happened. The rest is up to you.

…

So, what ARE you going to do with your “second chance”? How will your life be different this time–in terms of external actions and/or internal experience? I’d love to hear your comments. And, if you enjoyed this post and want to hear your friends’ reactions, please feel free to share this (by clicking the buttons below–or word of mouth or any other way). Thanks!

This month, I’m finally getting organized!

I’m tired of being buried in paperwork, wasting time looking for things, and worrying about important information slipping through the cracks. So, for July (and, if it works, beyond) I’ve committed to trying a system based loosely on David Allen’s “Getting Things Done.”

Don’t worry–I’m not going to bore you with the details of how I utilize weekly planners or label manilla folders! This isn’t that kind of blog post! (I don’t find that stuff particularly interesting, and I doubt that you would either).

What I did find interesting, however, was noticing my immediate knee-jerk reaction while considering the system:

I’m just not an organized guy!

I’ve always been messy. I’ve never stuck with organizational systems. I like to keep my important papers where they belong: on the floor!

Me? Organized? “No way!” a voice in my head half-yelled, half-laughed. “I’m not that kind of guy!”

But then another voice–a quieter one–popped into my mind, asking:

But what if I were?

And then it hit me: maybe I don’t see myself as disorganized because that’s how I’ve always been–maybe I’ve always been that way because that’s how I see myself.

In other words, maybe my limiting self-identity has kept me in this rut!

Who knows how or why this self-identity got started.

• Maybe when I was a kid I saw a poster that said, “A clean desk is a sign of a sick mind,” and thought it was funny.
• Maybe I saw a picture of Einstein’s paper-strewn office (see below) and thought that having papers everywhere made you a genius.
• Maybe I believed that artists, writers, and other creative types have to be disorganized. (I wouldn’t be a “real” writer if I had labeled, organized manilla folders, would I?)
• Maybe, for whatever reason, I decided that being messy was “cool”…or maybe it was just an excuse to get out of the tedious work of cleaning and filing.

But now, if I so choose (and I do!), I can just as easily re-identify myself as an organized guy–or anything else!

Einstein’s office on the day he died.

The importance of self-identity extends way beyond organizing (otherwise I probably wouldn’t bother writing a blog post about it). It touches everything we do, who we are, how we see ourselves, and how we live every day of our lives.

How do you identify yourself?

An ex-smoker once told me that the most important step he took to quit smoking wasn’t hypnosis or using the patch–it was defining himself as a non-smoker. If he got an urge to buy a pack of cigarettes, he stopped himself by saying, “Why would I want cigarettes? I’m a non-smoker!” If someone offered him a cigarette, he’d decline by saying, “No, thanks–I’m not a smoker.”

And, much to his amazement, he soon realized that he was telling the truth!

The Power of “I AM…”

Not only are the words “I am” incredibly powerful on their own–they also bestow power on whatever follows them. So when you complete sentences that begin with “I am…” make sure that you really want that sentence to be true–that you really want to be the person you define yourself as!

Limiting vs. Empowering Self-Identity

This power cuts both ways: You can limit yourself by identifying yourself as “disorganized” or by telling yourself (and others) things like “I’m not a ‘Finisher'”–self-assigned labels that keep you from reaching your potential.

Or you can identify yourself in ways that support your highest vision of who you want to be: organized, a non-smoker, a finisher…or anything else you want to be–and CAN be if you so choose!

Like a snake sheds its old skin, you can shed your old, limiting self-identity and let a new, more empowering one emerge–one that embodies your higher potential, the person you’re becoming right now!

Labels are Self-fulfilling Prophecies!

Remember: the labels you assign yourself (like the stories you tell yourself) are self-fulfilling prophecies, so why not fulfill prophecies you actually like?

This doesn’t mean you should lie (or even “fake it ’til you make it”)–just label yourself with identities you can believe in…and WANT to believe in!

Mr. Organized?

So, for me, I might not (yet) believe that I’m “Mr. Organized”–but I can and do believe that I’m becoming increasingly organized. So I’ll identify myself in ways that are honest AND support this vision: I am diligent. I am conscientious. I am sincerely open to change.

Maybe one day I’ll embrace “I am organized,” but for now you can call me by my newest label: “Mr. Getting Organized”!

…

How do you identify yourself? How have your self-assigned labels helped or hindered you? Are there any old labels–in any area(s) of your life–that you’d like to trade in for new ones? How would your life be different if these self-fulfilling prophecies came true?