This post is dedicated to the lovely Ann Moller at Diva of the Word, in New York City.

We met last Wednesday evening and I discovered that she’s a dedicated actor who, like all of us that care about our craft, experiences doubt about her talent and her potential to master her chosen field.

As we were talking, I knew it was high time to share with all of you, as I shared with her, one of the best quotes I’ve ever heard on the nature of self doubt. It’s this:

When you doubt your talent…that IS your talent.

It might seem a little puzzling at first, but let me ‘splain.

The person I’m quoting was a writing coach and he helped beginning writers find their voices and develop their talent.

And he noticed a common theme:

The bad writers never worried about the quality of their writing.

Only those with actual talent ever worried about whether it was any good.

So the talented writers who had the potential to become really good were the ones obsessing over their writing and doubting their talent.

The really bad writers in his groups tended to think they were great! They had no concept of the difference between their own writing and really good writing.

And because they couldn’t see the difference, they couldn’t really do anything about it to close the gap and improve their own abilities.

This, he realized, was the essence of what made them different.

Those with talent could actually see the difference between bad and good and great in their chosen craft.

And what’s more, they cared deeply about the craft itself.

It was this caring that called them to obsessively measure where they were on the scale of bad to great.

And it was this same caring that drove them onward to constant improvement in the hopes of attaining mastery one day.

So their self doubt, he realized, was actually a by-product and even an indicator of their talent!

In fact, if self-doubt was absent, it meant that they were less likely to improve because one of the crucial ingredients of awareness, caring or ability was missing.

I’ve come to understand in the years since that what he really meant is this:

The very senses and abilities in you that know what good work is, are the same senses and abilities that are doing the doubting.

They’re the same thing.

Talent leads to study.. which leads to awareness… which leads to caring… which leads to aspiring… which leads to doubt… which leads to practice… which leads to improvement.

So let’s return again to this quote and read it with this new understanding:

When you doubt your talent…that IS your talent.

So when you worry about whether your own work is “good enough”, it means fundamentally that you care AND that you actually have the ability to know quality in your craft.

And that’s talent!

Let that move you into aspiring and practicing and improving.

Now help me find the author!

I have to plead for your help, now, in tracking down the source of these golden words. My husband read this quote to me about 3 years ago from a magazine article that’s long gone to the recycling bin. I’ve Googled it in quotes several times and come up empty-handed.

If I’d had any idea then how deeply supportive these words would turn out to be in my life, I would have paid better attention to the author!

I have a hunch it might have been from Richard Carlson, the author of the whole “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff” series. So if you can deny or confirm this, please tell me below so I can finally express my gratitude.

How does this quote strike you? What has your experience been with talent and self-doubt? And has self doubt been motivating or limiting for you?

I’d love to hear your stories and impressions below!

“Oh, well. I guess it’s back to square one.”

This is a phrase I hear a lot in coaching sessions and I heard it again from a client just last week. It’s almost always said with frustration and regret.

It means that all our good progress has been ruined by a missed action and now we have to start all over again, building our step-by-step pathway from scratch.

I spent years thinking this way and here’s what I say to that now…

Hogwash!

No progress is EVER wasted

When I really GOT this concept, it was the hugest relief to me. I had spent most of my life feeling like I was always going back to square one because I could never seem to stick with my intentions for very long.

And when I look back now at those times, I realize that the story I was telling about starting all over again was actually more damaging to me than any of the missed actions were.

What I wish I knew then was this:

Every action wires up your brain for the next one
(no matter how long that takes)

We often use this “square one” idea as a way to give up on something that we said we’d keep doing for a while. We miss one day of our diet or our writing and suddenly we’re ready to throw in the towel and abandon the whole thing.

But the first thing you need to know is – every time you took action you actually created or strengthened the pathways in your brain and nervous system that would help you to take action the next time.

In a very real way, every time you take an action, you’re physically one step closer to being the person who can do that all the time, effortlessly. You’ll just keep accumulating more brain wiring and better pathways until it’s not hard anymore.

And that wiring does NOT go away just because you miss a day. It’s right there, waiting for you to use it again.

The second big thing you need to know is:

Every choice to go forward digests a little chunk of your resistance

I’m a big fan of celebrating the power of the tiniest choices.

And the choices you make to go towards your dreams and desires really do add up, but it’s hard to see that from day to day.

You see, in the moment when you manage to overcome a doubt in order to take an action, you’ve quite literally transformed the energy of that doubt into the energy of your action.

There is now just a little less doubt, not just in you, but in the world as a whole!

That’s pretty cool!

AND it adds up.

You won’t suddenly feel all your doubt lifted tomorrow. But if you keep acting in the face of your doubt or fear or anxiety, etc, you will very definitely look back in a few weeks or months and realize how much they’ve decreased and how much your power over them has increased.

Our resistance loves to cut and run

I think a big part of why we use this all or nothing way of thinking is that it’s really vulnerable and humbling to fail at something we said we’d persevere with.

We get scared that we won’t have what it takes or that our efforts won’t really get us where we want to go.

That’s a vulnerable place and it tends to bring up past failures, too. And our safety brain would do almost anything to keep us from feeling all that bad stuff.

So it distracts us with anger, frustration and “Never mind. It’s all ruined now. Back to square one.”

So now you can listen to that and say “Thank you for sharing. But my brain is all ready for step 7 now, so I think I’ll do it!”

How has this concept shown up in your life? I’d love to hear your comments and questions below.

And I also want to let you know that I had great fun contributing one of the bonus interviews for the Engaging eCourses progam presented by Kelly Kingman of Sticky eBooks and Pace Smith of the World Changing Writing Course. You can see what all the fuss is about here: Engaging eCourses

I wanted to wake up differently today. I wanted to be energized, refreshed, ready to get on to things.

But that’s not what’s here.

Today is dark inside. Something snide and mean is speaking, dripping little bits of acid on everything.

I’ve been waiting for something to surface.

For days my inner world has been foggy and aimless – with shades of un-named longing at the edges. I could feel an iceberg under the water, it’s tip not breaking the surface yet.

I’m almost relieved it’s finally here, ready to make itself known.

A part of me would like to push it back under, though. But I know that won’t be helpful. I know that all the energy I’ve been missing these last few days has been caught up in managing this lump of inner stuff as it’s been rising into my awareness.

And I’ve done this many, many times before. So I know a few things that make it possible to actually welcome this feeling, like:

• I will not be annihilated by this
• I will be more alive once I’ve been fully present with it
• It has something immensely wise to tell me

So I dive inside.

Breathe. Feel it.

Deeper.

I’m watching the part of me that gets off on the drama of this. I keep it in check.

I know if I really nursed this heavy, dark feeling I could be in a full blown depression within days. Part of me is SO compelled to follow it – I don’t know why.

Oh, wait….

I remember the wisest thing I was ever taught:  the part of me that’s feeling the feeling is CAUSING the feeling.

Riiiiiiiiight.

There it is…..an agenda….right behind the blackness.

I know what this is, now….this is my edge.

The place my ego doesn’t want me to go beyond.

And if it can just get me back into that old familiar sinkhole where I know that nothing is possible and it’s all crap anyway, then I won’t move forward and it won’t be scary.

But there’s a seed of something else here, too. The bitter hopelessness is just a cover.

Underneath is a pure, clear anger.

Aaaaahhhhh. Now feel that!… That’s my antidote to this sad, sinking pessimism.

That’s where all the aliveness has been hiding! It’s explosive. It can move me.

Breathe into it.

This morning’s deep disappointment must have brought this to the surface. A part of me was ready to settle and just go complacently along.

But this other part says – roars – NO!

This part is ready to show me how to be LESS tolerant when it’s right.

This part of me is all for going WAY beyond that edge. Because the stuff I really want is over there. And it’s not time to settle.

I’m always SO relieved once I know what’s really going on in there.

It’s like a bogey man in the closet until I can actually name it.

It’ll take a day or so for me to own and engage this new energy. I’ve learned not to push that part of the resolution. Maybe my body needs to move. This writing has helped…a lot!

I’ll take an action to honour it – to let it know that it’s wise message was felt and heard. And I’ll thank it.

And I’ll breathe with whatever shows up next….I hope.  = >

When you decide it’s time to really step out and do something great, it usually brings some fear up, right?

And you probably think that fear is about what’s outside you – what will other people think?, will they like it?, will they judge me?, will I be approved of?, will it be any good?

But most of what we’re really afraid of comes from the inside first.

We start judging and doubting and tearing our own work down WAY before anyone else has a chance to.

We run all our ideas past a gauntlet of tests, critiques and invalidations before they ever get to see the light of day.

Did you know that the only outer criticisms you’re ever afraid of are the ones you worry are true?

Think about this for a moment. When someone tells you something negative or even constructively negative, and you’ve never heard it before – you’re surprised right? And maybe even grateful to hear it, saying “Wow, I never even knew that!”

But when someone tells you something you’ve heard in your own head over and over again, you react. It’s already got a huge charge on it and it’s not like you NEEDED to hear it again. You’re  defending yourself against it on the inside every day.

So how safe are you making it for yourself to risk and create and express?

Everyone says in order to succeed and gain attention in this crowded world you’ve got to “be revolutionary” and “do epic shit”. And I agree.

But how safe is that when you’re waiting for the hammer of inner judgment to fall?

Now at this point, a lot of people will defend “judgment” saying it’s not really negative in and of itself, we all need to “discern” good from bad and right from wrong.

OK. I’m not talking about discernment here. Yes, that’s a good thing.

I’m talking about anything you say or think to yourself, about yourself, that’s the slightest bit unkind.

And for me, unkindness is as much about the “tone” you use with yourself as it is about the words.

It’s about how you treat yourself every day.

If you had a friend that spoke to you in the way that you speak to yourself, would you stay friends with them?

That’s a really good test for the quality of your inner dialogue.

Every single interaction you have with yourself makes your inner relationship better or worse. Every time you speak to yourself, you set up an inner expectation of what the next interaction will be like.

You have the power to leave yourself with a safer, more encouraging place to play, anticipating kindness and support.

Or you can leave yourself in a slight atmosphere of dread, waiting for the next unkindness or harsh word.

And, just like a 35 year marriage, these constant interactions and their quality add up over time to create a space for you to bloom in or not.

So if you want to step out and do something big, something you’ve never done before, your inner world will need to be safer than it’s ever been before!

Risk requires support. A place to fall back when we fail – where someone will say “There, there,” and help us console our hearts and lick our wounds.

And the very first place we can create huge support is inside ourselves.

When I was getting ready to step out in 1997 as a coach for the first time, I found myself completely unable to do it. And then my own coach at the time pointed out that I had no community or outer support system and that I would really need that first in order to get out there.

But what neither of us realized then was that support was entirely missing in my inner world too.

When inner support is missing, we go looking for support in our outer world. But in a cruel irony, we’ll often assume that we’re going to receive the same kind of support from others as we’re receiving from ourselves.

And if by chance someone lovely and truly encouraging happens to stumble into our circle, we’ll go ahead and project our inner judgment on them, telling ourselves a story about what they must be thinking about us.

It’s really crazy making isn’t it?

No wonder we have such a hard time creating and expressing and stepping out as our true authentic selves!

So if you’re getting ready to take a risk and be bold and revolutionary…

…take some time to lay a foundation of inner support and encouragement.
You’ll need it.

What’s your experience with risk and inner support? How do you make it safe for yourself to step out? I’d love to hear in the comments below.

When things go wrong in your life, what do you secretly whisper to yourself?

Most of us who see and know the value of “staying positive” keep our thoughts and feelings pretty upbeat when things seem to be working against us.

But I would suggest that, buried underneath all that positivity, are some things that we hope like heck aren’t true, but we’re afraid they really are.

And until we acknowledge them, lurking under there, taking up all kinds of hidden mental and emotional energy, they have a way of gumming up our progress and becoming a central part of our inner resistance.

Here’s an example:

One of the deep fears I grew up with was that anytime I didn’t get something, I had the sense that the real truth was that I didn’t deserve it.

So all through my life, I had a huge resistance to asking people for anything. Because I was terrified to find out (based on them saying no) that I was still undeserving. And while I might accept their explanations of why they couldn’t give it on the surface, a deeper part of me would assume they were making up those reasons just to be nice, thus reinforcing the terrible truth I had tried so hard to avoid.

But for years I never knew what the underlying fear really was. I just couldn’t seem to ask for anything. I would distract myself from making the phone call, I would procrastinate, I would eat, I would watch movies, I would wait until it was too late at night to call or too short notice and then let myself off the hook and not do it.

Does any of this sound familiar?

It’s a classic resistance pattern.

And I believe these deep fears, that we never quite say out loud to ourselves, are at the bottom of most of our procrastination, if not all. The longer we put off the action, the longer we can avoid facing the possibility that our terrible fear is true.

But how do we get underneath these patterns to what’s really driving them?

It’s not very easy for most of us to just sit down one afternoon and get the answers to these kinds of questions.

We need a process and sometimes, in this murky territory of our inner world, we need support.

And I’m getting ready to offer both!

In the next day or two I’ll be announcing a 5-week teleclass called “The Wisdom of Your Resistance” that will help you find and release the hidden causes of procrastination so you can make real progress toward your most meaningful goals and dreams.

And you can do this through creating deep friendship with your inner self, not battle, and receive the incredible wisdom and guidance that your resistance has been trying to share with you all along.

AND, I’m going to be making 3 scholarship spaces available, so 3 lucky people will be able to get moving on their dreams for FREE! I’ll be sharing all the details of how to enter to receive a spot when I launch the class.

If you want the announcement to come straight to your Inbox, just Sign-Up Here and you’ll be the first to hear about it.

Until then, I’d love to hear about your experiences with procrastination and the fears underneath it. What are you hoping like heck isn’t true? Tell us in the comments below.

When you’re dealing with the part of yourself that’s getting in your way, it’s helpful sometimes to grab onto a metaphor - an image or idea - that helps you understand what’s going on.

But what if that metaphor is making things worse?

I read a post a month ago by Marelisa where she did an excellent review of a book by Theodore Bryant called “Self-Discipline in 10 Days: How to Go From Thinking to Doing”. Her post was very well written (and I thank her hugely for the inspiration), but Bryant’s book sums up every single thing that I object to about classic ‘self-discipline” thinking.

And the metaphor he uses for our inner impulses toward action and avoidance of it is, of course, Jekyll and Hyde.

By the time I finished reading the article, I was ranting. When I’d finished my rant, I realized that I had finally summed up the essence of why I believe this traditional view is so un-supportive of our growth.

Today, I want to take apart the Jekyll and Hyde metaphor and show you why it’s so very damaging and why we MUST outgrow it in order to create truly healthy, encouraging relationships with ourselves.

Mr. Hyde is an icon for our fear of what’s inside us.

Most of the people who use the image of Mr. Hyde these days do so pretty lightly. They sometimes paint him as a kind of trickster or mischief or someone who just enjoys going against our decided course of action and messing things up.

But his image is actually much darker.

The reason that Robert Louis Stevenson’s original book was so powerful, and so horribly fascinating, in 1886 was that Mr. Hyde was a character of pure evil with no human mixture of both good and bad. Other characters felt disgust for him immediately without being able to say why.

There’s no middle ground with Hyde. No grey area. He’s all bad and he lurks within. The idea that there might be something that dark in us brings up as much fear now as it did when the book was first published.

And the thing about an icon is that the mere mention of it calls up everything it represents in our subconscious, whether we’re aware of it or not.

So every time we invoke him, we’re telling ourselves there’s something in us to be very afraid of. And that shuts down all our impulses to explore our inner world.

Hyde is also an icon for the “inner enemy”.

This image puts us into a battle with something inside us that we can’t quite see or name.

It creates a constant tension, an “us and them” mentality within our very self that means we need to constantly use our energy to keep up the fight and keep our unknown enemy from winning.

As some of you know, it’s the battle metaphors that really set my teeth on edge when it comes to working with resistance.

And that’s one more reason that I truly hate this image. It consigns us to a lifetime of using up all our energy in a battle with something that will never go away.

So now, let me tell you 2 things very, very clearly:

#1 – NOTHING in you has EVER been your enemy!

Read that again and let it really sink in.

EVERY single impulse you’ve ever had, EVERY action you’ve ever taken, EVERY behaviour you’ve ever engaged in, even the darkest ones you can think of, have been in the service of your ultimate protection, survival and ability to meet your needs and thrive.

There’s nothing in you to fight against.

There are definitely parts of you that believe that going towards your stated desires and intentions won’t be safe for you. And they’ll get in your way if they think they must.

And there are also more instinctive parts of you that might not want to act in accordance with your higher intentions. They’re more like children that simply need a parent around for firm direction.

But what these parts are calling for is deep questioning, compassion and understanding in order to address the buried fears, impulses and safety needs.

As soon as they’re brought into your awarness, you get to meet them in the best way you can and move forward without a battle.

What would it feel like to relax into a deep knowing that every single part of you is working for you and can be trusted and guided?

And what if you knew that, far from trying to mess with you and thwart you, these parts of you actually WANT you to show up in all your loving awareness and bring the guidance and healing they need?

How would that change your relationship with them?

And now for the second place where Hyde misses the mark:

#2 – You have NO bad parts!

Read that again, slowly, and breathe.

You only have qualities that have been buried, wounded or thwarted into less than constructive and beautiful expressions of themselves.

And what they need is not more denial and ignoring. Their thwarted expressions and behaviours begin to transform with even the slightest amounts of love and attention.

But when we grab hold of a metaphor that makes us fear, mistrust and ignore these parts of ourselves, we close down all possibility for real dialogue and healing to happen.

We need a metaphor that encourages exploring and deep inner friendship.

 I’m not sure what that metaphor would be right now, but I sure as heck want to see Jekyll and Hyde replaced permanently!

For me, this quest to understand and guide all the parts of me is really more like a treasure hunt. And the treasure is what our denied parts become when they’re honoured and allowed to find balanced expressions in our lives.

What are your metaphors for YOUR inner parts or your resistance? How do they work for you?

What do you feel when you think of the Jekyll and Hyde metaphor and what would you like to feel about these parts of yourself?

I really want to hear your thoughts and ideas below. Please share a comment! I’d love to see this whole conversation evolve over the next few weeks and months as I share the next installments of “the rant”.

And if you’d like to receive the next posts by email, just sign up here: Fresh Updates

I’m writing from Portland, Oregon today, about as far away from my home in Nova Scotia as I can physically get in N. America. I’m here attending a Life Mission workshop with my teachers and fellow students from The Way of the Heart, and these weekends are always a great opportunity to take a look around my life and see if I’m doing what I really want to be doing and, if not, how can I do more of that.

Sometimes, looking at my life like this can bring up a moment or two of regret or remorse and this time it was a pretty deep one. So I’ve been reflecting on how any kind of evaluating that we do in our life can bring up moments of seeing something clearly, maybe for the first time, and wishing that it had been different. At these moments, it’s so very tempting to dive into hours of self-judgment, criticism, self-pity and just general moping and feeling crappy about it all. (Hours, heck, sometimes days or weeks!)

And I’ve come to see that how we handle these moments makes the most enormous difference to the quality of our lives and to our ability to learn from our mistakes.

These moments can be hard on us emotionally and they tend to bring up a bunch of old stuff relating to how our mistakes were handled by our parents and early caregivers. But it’s really, really worth learning a beautiful and empowering way of dealing with remorse and regret so we can approach our learning and growth in a gentle way. And that allows us to get excited about trying new things that we might make mistakes at.

My moment came in the Las Vegas airport, when I decided to download my email. I received a message from someone who had been expecting something from me and hadn’t received it, (as it turns out she actually did have it already but didn’t know it.) At that moment, I had a revealing look at a pattern in my life that was all about keeping me feeling “busy” and not allowing me to put my heart’s most important things first.

The realization was actually so quick and went so deep that I didn’t even read the whole message. And I definitely didn’t have the space I needed, sitting in the airport food court, to process it fully. I finished my meal and tried to find a space somewhere away from the Muzak to just breathe.

It wasn’t until I was on the plane, with my face turned toward the window and nowhere else to go that I was finally able to just let myself feel the regret.

As it washed over me, I realized that I actually wanted it. I wanted to feel it so that I would want to change the pattern that created it. And I realized that I wanted to stay focused on the other people that my pattern was affecting, those I wanted to serve  fully, more than I wanted it to be about me.

And it was that caring that kept me out of the self-pity.

Oh, not entirely, mind you. I’ll admit to a short wallow. But I didn’t stay there. And before long, I started moving out of the remorse and into thinking constructively about what was actually creating the pattern and what I might want to do about it.

And I’ve noticed that this is what naturally happens when we manage to stay focused on what’s most important to us, instead of letting the feeling just take over completely.

So here are the steps that I use to deal with regret without getting stuck in it.

1) Breathe, slowly and fully (this can be harder than it sounds at the moment of remorse!)

2) Allow yourself to actually feel it, to whatever degree you can.

3) Have gentle compassion for yourself – be as kind as you can. (it feels icky enough without us making it feel worse!)

4) Notice that your regret means that you really do care about this.

5) Recognize and feel your caring about it.

6) Remember WHY you care about it.

7) Try to catch yourself in any self-criticism or judgment and remind yourself that what happened is simply about what you did and doesn’t change who you really ARE.

8 ) Remind yourself that you have the power to change this.

9) Allow yourself the space and time to process your regret.

10) Get constructive about changing things as soon as you’re ready. (This step is a great antidote to the icky feeling!)

11) Resist the urge to totally overcompensate for feeling badly about it by telling yourself you have to make some kind of huge impossible changes. Take small do-able steps to address or change what happened.

12) Congratulate yourself for how well you handled it and how you learned from it and how you’ll be OK with the next big “learning” moment.

I’m looking forward to finding a new way myself this weekend and I hope this might offer you a new way to handle your moments of regret.

I’d love to hear your comments about this below. How have you handled regret in the past? What helps you with it? What do you find gets in the way?

First I have to say that this is on my Top 5 Most Hated Phrases list, so I”m not going to pull any punches about it.

It’s one of those phrases that we hear as children and by the time our parents have stopped saying it, we’ve usually internalized it and we take over saying it to ourselves.

I heard this phrase a lot growing up and, in hindsight, it created a dynamic in my life where
there was NO such thing as an enjoyable learning curve.

So, this is a phrase I try NEVER to use on myself or anyone else.

I had a major insight about this pattern a few years back when I was planning an event and feeling a little out of my depth with it.

All of a sudden it hit me that I didn’t feel any permission to use the event as a way to learn. I realized that I was expecting myself to fully know how to do it already!

But why should I already know it?

I looked at how crazy it was to be expecting myself to already know how to do something I had never done before.

I started hunting for where this pattern of expectation came from and it wasn’t long before I heard this phrase ringing in my ears -
“you should know better”.

Now, in all fairness, I know my parents didn’t use this phrase with the intention of creating all this expectation in me.

It’s usually used when a child is displaying a behaviour that they’ve already been told is not approved of.

But we hardly ever take something in fully the first time  – it usually takes repetition to really get it down pat. And the phrase is usually just an expression of the parent’s frustration in the moment with the behaviour itself – and not some statement about the child’s inadequate learning.

But what it created in me was a world where there was no such thing as learning something “in the right time”. Everything was always learned too late, because “I should already know better”.

So now that I’ve seen through this pattern in my world and where it came from, I’m really working on allowing myself the freedom and permission to not know things yet and to actually enjoy learning them!

What a concept!

And I’ve stopped using “you should know better” inside my own head as a way to torment myself for not being further along than I am right now.

(And this gets right to the heart of what Garrison Keillor was saying about too high expectations in the last post.)

So if I could send my fully understanding “now-brain” back into the body of my 5 year old self, this is what I would say to “you should know better” :

Actually, I shouldn’t know better. I haven’t totally learned this yet and I’m working on it and that’s OK with me. I’ll know more soon, thank you very much.

I would love to see the look on any parent’s face, hearing that come out of a 5 year old child!

But for now, if this freaked-out-expectation comes upon me while I’m learning something new, I take the opportunity to make it a teaching moment for my 5 year-old self and I let her know all about our new way to learn.

Has this phrase or expectation played out in your life? I’d love to hear about how you took it. And if you never heard this as a child, I would love to hear from you what’s it like to grow up without that!

Leave your comments below. And to get fresh new content from The Heart’s Voice, just sign up here.

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Garrison Keillor, author of The Prairie Home Companion and host of the radio show of the same name,  said the most brilliant thing about writer’s block, and it sheds a lot of light on the “I don’t feel like it” bug.

He said (and I’m paraphrasing here) that there’s no such thing as writer’s block and that we never, ever hear about surgeon’s block or bricklayer’s block, etc, etc.

Can you imaging a surgeon showing up for work and saying that they can’t operate today, that they just don’t “feel right”?! Never!

Garrison says that writer’s block comes from writers putting pressure on themselves to create at a level beyond their current abilities.

So whatever we’re working on, it’s as though we’re always looking for that “perfect state” that will cause our work to turn out like a master’s, even though our skill level can’t take us there yet. It’s kind of a fantasy, really.

And we have to remember that the masters became masters by showing up to their craft every day no matter how they felt.

I believe that “I don’t feel like it” is often a code phrase that means “I’m afraid this won’t be good enough”.

And then, in order to avoid facing our sense of not feeling like we’re good enough, we buy the reasoning that it’s all because of our current state and if we wait until later we’ll magically be good enough then! (Even though by not doing it now, we’re throwing away any possible chance of improving our skills for “later”.)

That’s some kind of crazy reasoning!

So what to do?

I’ve found 2 things helpful:

1) Get good at being able to sit with the feelings that are sitting just under the surface of “I don’t feel like it.”

Make sitting with the feelings part of your action step on whatever you’re moving towards. Give yourself a time limit at first – no more than 30 seconds, if that’s all you can take. Work your way up to 5  minutes and those feelings will permanently stop holding so much power over you.

2) Slow WAY down and do each step or action as though it’s simply for it’s own sake.

When you get extremely present with what you’re doing at this moment, and you start to notice the subtle sensations and nuances of the task itself, there’s no room to be making moment to moment calculations of whether it’s any good.

And remember, this is supposed to be the thing you love, the thing you want…right?

Lastly, take a good solid look, like Garrison says, at your exact skill level right now and be honest about how good you can expect anything to be at this moment in time. And then let that be completely OK!

And now ask yourself – do I still want to get better at it? And if you do, make a choice to practice or take an action just for the joy of getting better at it.

How has this pressure to be better played out in your life? Share your thoughts, questions and comments below.

And if you missed it, you can still catch the free e-course, called Ignite Your Desires to take full advantage of the energy boost we’re getting this week when the planet Mars goes direct starting late Tuesday.

(Note: Even though this was published for the Mar.10-22 time frame, you can still jump into our e-course at the bottom of this post!)

As some of you know, I LOVE astrology. It’s been the best antidote in my life for taking my own shifting energies too personally. And I get really fascinated with the global astrological “weather”; the shifts that move all of us collectively, and we’re definitely in one of those now.

My favourite astrologer is Eric Francis of Planet Waves. He’s a former journalist and he has a gift for telling the larger stories in the current sky and for presenting the shifts as doorways and opportunities that we can take great advantage of in our lives.

And we’ve got a doozy of a doorway getting ready to open next week!

Since last December 21st, Mars, the planet of desire, passion, energy and movement, has been in retrograde. That means, from the perspective of the Earth, it appears to be moving backwards in the sky and what we experience is a slow down or a challenge with all that it represents.

In Eric’s words:

Now that we’re at the dregs of the retrograde, the sensation ranges from not being able to get anything done, to determination to accomplish exactly what you need (which may or may not be working)…In psychological terms, you may be feeling frustration over direction, initiative and/or desire.

I read someone speaking on her blog the other day about feeling like she’d been “sucker punched” over this winter. For some of us, this is what Mars retrograde has felt like. It’s also had a “frozen” quality to it, like all the heat has gone out of everything.

Well, it’s time to get ready, because things are going to heat back up starting next week!

And Mars is turning around and moving forward again in a very particular place on the astrological wheel – the first degree of Leo, one of the most fiery spots in the whole zodiac. Again, in Eric’s words:

Mars stationing direct in the first degree of Leo is all about desire, motivation and identity — and the place in awareness where the three meet.

What’s especially in our faces right now are all the things that try to tell us what we’re “supposed” to want and who we’re “supposed” to be and all the ways that we’re limited in our desires without even realizing that we let go of something that’s deeply meaningful to us.

So it’s like there’s a big wind coming next Wednesday and, if we want it to take us somewhere good, we’ll need to have our course set and our sails up.

Interestingly, I’m noticing as I’m using this wind metaphor that we’ve had one wind storm after another here in Atlantic Canada. The last big one a few days ago blew down a tree very close to the house (a near miss) and covered our front yard in roof tiles!

I feel like that’s the kind of power and energy we’re talking about here, and it’s going to be important to have a way to harness it AND some conscious intention around both moving the obstacles we might have piled up over the winter and which way we want to go with it.

That’s why I’ve created a FREE 20-day e-course called
“Ignite Your Desires”.

This is exactly the kind of process I often take myself through when there’s a big shift or doorway of this kind being offered. And, to be honest, it never occurred to me that others might like to go through it too.

But a couple of recent conversations convinced me that it’s time to get out of the closet with both my own process and with the astrological stuff that I get juiced about.

It’s time to get really clear about what we REALLY want!

I’ll be sharing 10 easy to apply e-lessons, 3 audios and 2 guided meditations between now and the end of March. The course will take about 25 days from whenever you sign up, and it will take you from obstacles to clarity to action steps so you can use all this great Mars energy to make great progress on your most important desires.

Go sign up here: Ignite Your Desires E-Course.

Then come back and tell us what you’ve been noticing about your desires, your obstacles and where things have felt thwarted these last few weeks and months. (It’s SO great to know that it’s not just you, isn’t it?)

And yes, it is free, so please share the link with others so that as many of us as possible can use this wind for the greatest good!

And I’ll be posting about this for the next few weeks, so if you want to follow our dialogue, you can sign up to receive the new posts by email.

You can also follow me on twitter at :
http://www.twitter.com/susanjohnstone