Personal Growth & Transformation

Redefining Beauty

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beauty

In today’s media driven society, we are constantly confronted with constructed notions of what it is to be Beautiful. Technology has enabled re-touching and digitalisation to such a point that beauty, as defined by movie stars and models in magazines, is an almost impossible target for most women because it simply isn’t REAL. Yesterday I saw Dove’s latest marketing campaign, where they used the concept of “selfies” to help teenage girls and their mothers re-define their notions of beauty and it made me think about myself, and what I think beauty is.

I’m a 21 year old Australian woman with thick, long brown hair, hazel eyes, a slightly olive complexion and a face full of freckles. I happen to be quite content with how I look, but this wasn’t always the case. Even now I wouldn’t rush to call myself “beautiful”; But why not? I love to hear it from someone else as much as the next person, yet I seem to think that there is some taboo against thinking it of ourselves; as if this instantly makes us vain when in all honesty, thinking of ourselves as beautiful is one of the most empowering things we can do.

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8 Lessons in Change from Exercise

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exercise

I have spent the last two weeks recuperating from a shoulder surgery after being injured for half the year. The time away from exercising, a hobby which in the past four years has turned from a distant source of woe to something I look forward to on a daily basis, has given me ample time to think about the benefits of exercising.

These benefits extend far beyond getting a Hot Bod or Rock Hard Six Pack Abs. The stigmatized cultural approach to the exercise obsession is that it’s an aesthetic practice, and will make you look like a celebrity or instantly become a Better Person. We’re sometimes told to exercise for the wrong reasons, to use physical discipline as an ends to something other than itself. The truth is that imposing a culturally-defined idea of vanity on something as basely beneficial as physical activity is outrageous.

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Planning for the Life You Want

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planning

I haven’t always been as intentional about the life I want to live as I am now. And I haven’t always been as successful at getting what I want. Now I know that simple old-fashioned formal planning about my life makes getting what I want much more of a sure thing.

Earlier in my life I probably could not have easily identified what I wanted. For instance when I had been married 17 years the first time, and I had three teen-age children, I was depressed, confused, and adrift with no vision or strategies for my life.

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How I Went from Fear to Freedom

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fear to freedom

If I could go back in time to meet myself five years ago, he wouldn’t be able to believe what I would tell him. My self from five years ago was hopeless and couldn’t see any way out of the depths of suffering.

So he wouldn’t have been able to believe it when I would tell him that in just a few years time he would be truly happy and truly free from all the anguish that had been with him for the preceding twenty years…and it would be far simpler than he had ever imagined. The trouble was just that my self from five years ago was still looking in the wrong direction.

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Persistence and Diversion: My Wayward Path Through College

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wayward path

I had joined the Army right out of high school for two reasons: To get away from home and to earn money for college. I succeeded in both goals.

After two years and 10 months active duty service, I mustered out, drove home to Texas, and enrolled in junior college. It was going to save me money on the front end so I could have more for the back end. Good plan, but it didn’t work that way.

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How to Raise a Good Man

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raise a good man

I was recently asked to be godfather to a very special young man; the ritual requires godparents to oversee the lad’s ‘spiritual education.’ Not being a great churchgoer, I thought I’d rather leave him my thoughts on what it takes to be a good man, if not necessarily a religious one.

I just saw a movie with the boy’s mom; it was called The Descendants, starring George Clooney. Afterwards she described the main character as a ‘good man.’ It occurred to me what an undervalued concept that has become in today’s society; men today tend to think of themselves as successful or not successful, sexy or not so much, cool or nerds.

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How I Overcame the Torturous Choice Between Doing Work and Slacking Off.

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work torture

Sometimes I’d rather claw my own eyes out then sit down and start working. You might think this is because I have some faceless soulless factory job. Or that I’m merely a cog in the corporate machine but I’m not. I run my own business. I set my own schedule. And I love what I do. Despite all this, just getting started is one of the hardest things I do all day.

This is what work morning looks like. I’m sitting at my house after breakfast or a run. I open my computer where I have a list of things I’d like to get done today, this week, this year, and this lifetime. I look at the list and begin to formulate what I want to do first. Then all of a sudden, as if hordes of Mongols have invaded my brain, I think of some decadently lazy thing I could do.

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Real Estate, Music & Top Ramen. My Path of Perseverance.

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Perseverance

It was the summer of 2008, also known as The Beginning of the End. I was thirty years old, married and living in Spokane, Washington. My twenties had been spent enjoying a great economy and a booming real estate market. I had been developing real estate and enjoying some substantial success. However, it became very apparent that my business endeavors were in serious trouble. Mistakes were made, projects were stalling and the market was sliding toward the cliff. The unavoidable path that suddenly lay before me left me speechless. I spent months trying everything I could to avoid the inevitable. It was late August when I realized, we were finished.

Running out of money, I had to tell each of my business partners I would not survive the next few months. Everything was about to burn right in front of me. I would have to file for bankruptcy and it was going to hurt like nothing I’d ever felt before. This would take years to recover from.

What would I do? Where would we go?

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