Living Up To Our Own Expectations
Living up to my own expectations of myself is something I think I’ve always been challenged by. Or should I say setting (sometimes) ridiculous expectations for myself to live up to, has always been a challenge.
Why do I do it? What drives me? And how does it affect those around me?
I believe that, for whatever reason, I don’t feel I’m good enough, and so I’m constantly striving to be better. This in itself is not a bad thing, because being the best we can be is a good thing to aspire to, right? But how do we measure that? What does ‘being the best we can be’ look like?
Covid 19, and being in lockdown, as scary as it sometimes felt, gave us all an opportunity to reflect on our lives, our priorities, what motivates us, and why. It was an opportunity to slow down and breathe… and I knew that something wonderful would emerge, if I allowed it.
So, what did I do? I worked even harder, pushing myself to utilise the time away from the shop as much as I could to ensure that Inspire Me would not only survive this ‘crisis’, but that it would thrive into the future. Part of the reasoning behind that was Fear. Fear of the unknown really, fear that lockdown would go on so long that we wouldn’t be able to re-open. Fear that I’d let our Awesome little team of Earth Angels, and our Inspire Me community, not to mention Peter, down by not making the ‘right’ decisions, and stuffing it up.
I had this inner battle going on between the ‘fearful I’m not good enough to pull this off’ part of me, and the ‘knowing everything always works out’ part of me. It was neck and neck for a bit, and of course this had (and has) consequences for those around me, because my expectations of myself has a flow on effect at home and at work.
I was so busy ‘doing’, that I didn’t really take the opportunity for reflection that Covid 19 presented; that is until Peter and I headed South for a week. I owed it to myself and to him, to chill out and enjoy myself, which I did, allowing an epiphany one morning as I awoke and took in the amazing landscape around me.
I have a wonderful life. I have the best job in the world, I’m married to an amazing man, I have a loving family and awesome friends that I work and play with. I AM HAPPY!
What more could I want? How complicated does it need to be?
Every morning now, when I wake, I’m setting an intention that TODAY I AM HAPPY, no matter what’s going on around me; and I’m trusting that everything else will take care of itself because that’s the energy I’m surrounding myself with, and I pray that ‘my intention’ will have a beneficial impact on everyone around me as well, and that they will CHOOSE HAPPINESS too.
And can you just imagine the effect on the world, when more and more of us CHOOSE HAPPINESS as a way of life, how resilient we can be? That’s the kind of opportunity a crisis affords us, so let’s make the most of it, let’s CHOOSE TO BE HAPPY and see what unfolds…
Namaste
Michelle
