Coffee, Chaos, & Change

Dear Wild Heart,

Sometimes change is gradual like a river slowly carving away the land until one day you turn around and don’t recognize the land you are standing on or the person you have become. And sometimes change is quick and exacting like when the same river floods and in a moment it swallows up the land you stood on giving you no choice but to sink or swim. Our lives are filled with both kinds of change, gradual and rapid. Both are necessary agents of becoming, evolving, and growing. But only if we answer the call.

I want to share with you one moment from my life where the land beneath me dropped away and I was confronted with change. In the moment, I felt so much absolute rage and frustration, but in retrospect it was pretty damn comical and I couldn’t be more grateful for the experience as it forced me to grow into and toward My Truth…

On a day like many other days in my life at that point, I was late getting my kid to school. Yet this day was a day in February… in Ohio. As we ran outside to get in the car I realized that I had not given any forethought as to how I was going to get through the 10 inches of snow that had fallen overnight. I had recently downgraded from a big badass truck, to a modest mouse of a car. So the idea of driving through the snow was laughable at best. Nevertheless, I was resolute, I had to get my kid to school because he had to present his big project on the book he hated. The same project that we both started and finished the night before, despite having weeks to do it. Oh, and I had client meetings. So we had to get out that freaking driveway.

Here I am, like a 90’s sitcom mom, in my PJ’s, coffee in one hand, slipping and sliding all around my effing driveway. Wondering to myself: How am I thirty-effing-six and living like this? Like a clueless teen. I am not sure you know this Dear Wild Heart, but it snows every year in Ohio. Especially in February. So letting it be a disastrous surprise every year was a choice that I made that only perpetuated chaos…

Then my coffee spilled. All over.

When I say all over, I mean it went places I didn't think it could go. From the dash to my ass, the coffee was everywhere… everywhere but in my mug. And we can safely say, I lost my cool. Every ounce of cool that I might have been clinging to was gone. Nope, no cool was to be had, at least from the mess that sat in the driver’s seat. Over in the passenger seat, on the other hand, my son had all of his cool.

When your ten year old rubs your shoulder and reminds you to take deep breaths you can be sure of two things:

1- You are a good parent for teaching him such skills and empathy.

2- Something probably has to change.

Something did change. And by something, I mean I changed.

Shortly after, I started working with a life coach who gave me a new set of eyes to see the world. She helped me reframe how I looked at things in my life so that I could live from a place of intention rather then reaction. For so long I had been living as if life was happening to me and I had to sort things out as they came at me. Please use this classic clip of I Love Lucy to demonstrate what my internal world was like.

Here she is working at a candy factory, unable to keep up with the rate of things flying her way so she starts stuffing candy everywhere, her pockets, her hat, her face. Yea, that’s how I felt. The work I did with my coach helped me reclaim my power through understanding that life happened through me, not to me. My thoughts, my feelings, & my actions created my world. It turned out, I was the conductor of chaos. And that was surprisingly good news because if the problem was me, so was the solution.

In that moment of chaos (admittedly brought on by moi) I was forced to either further devolve into self pity, blame (why hadn’t my husband taken care of this?), and perpetual frustration, OR EVOLVE into a woman that sets herself up for success instead of victimhood and chaos.

I chose to EVOLVE.

I took responsibility for myself and my contribution to the chaos of my life. Through all of the choices I made, whether passive or deliberate, I had constructed my life as it was. So I committed to the work of reclaiming my power, even when it was uncomfortable, even when I didn’t like what I learned about myself, even when I failed and had to retry.

It was SO freeing. I felt so empowered because I had reclaimed my power through owning my decisions, learning from their outcomes, and making adjustments as needed without beating myself up or blaming others.

I have stayed committed to my EVOLUTION through living in breakthrough. This is the daily decision to be a victor rather than a victim. I reflect, I coach myself, I get coached, I meditate, I heal my nervous system, and I expand my capacity to become the next version of me.

And because I make that decision daily, I am presently living a life that reflects what I really desire as I continue to reclaim my Wild Heart.

I am so grateful that when life rang that day with the self created coffee spilling chaos in the driveway, I answered the call.