best self – in thriver words

Generosity

How do you view generosity? I’ve worked with nonprofits for years. Each has a unique culture and way of treating donors. They also have different scales for measuring the value of donations. We each have a similar internal scale.

Some of us associate generosity with monetary gifts. Others value material gifts like cars, toys, furniture, or computers. Tangible gifts and money to pay for them are obvious contributions. But there are other signs of generosity that are often overlooked.

Elederly woman in Santa hat leaning over child wearing chef's had and holding a tray of gingerbread men. Christmas decorations in background.

There’s the teacher that stays up late preparing individualized help for struggling students. There’s the mom that makes homemade treats that even the allergic in the class can have.

There’s the child who always throws trash in a bin, recycles cans, or picks up toys without being asked. There’s the grandmother who reads books to you and the grandfather who gives the best hugs. There’s the uncle who teaches you how to use a table saw or aunt who shows you how to do a back handspring.

These acts of generosity show care for others. They can also be given by someone who lacks monetary means or material possessions.

Other acts of generosity include teaching someone to cook, garden, or sew; tutoring an adult who cannot read; fostering a pet; organizing a party or dinner; hosting a holiday; and giving someone a ride. A neighbor hasn’t been able to drive for a couple of months. Another one is driving her to and fro. This is a generous gift of time.

Generosity of thoughtfulness is another often overlooked kindness. It’s one thing to give a generic obligatory gift. It’s another to listen carefully, observe closely, and choose an appropriate offering. The giver may not always get it right, but their investment in the attempt is still valuable.

Listening is a gift in and of itself – sometimes, the most important one. Beyond food, water, and shelter, listening can provide a sense of security, belonging, companionship, understanding, and love. Without those, material gifts are meaningless. Active listening is a valuable gift that we may fail to appreciate in the moment.

A culture focused on money as the measure of success and greatness can lose sight of the value of intangible things. When this happens, integrity, character, honesty, law abidance, and trustworthiness are more easily compromised. Anyone who pays close attention will see that money doesn’t buy internal peace, happiness, or contentment.

If you are generous with your time, energy, commitment, kindness, attention, and concern, but do not have the means to make monetary contributions, your efforts may seem unappreciated. This happens in families and organizations. It’s unfortunate.

It’s also easily remedied. Keep a watchful eye as you gather with friends, co-workers, colleagues, and family during the holidays. Then take a moment to acknowledge generosity that often goes overlooked. Let someone know you noticed their effort to prepare your favorite dessert, play your favorite Christmas music, or listen to you drone on about your grandkids. That’s all it takes.

It can feel uncomfortable for someone to notice the best of us. But isn’t that what we really desire – to be fully seen and appreciated as our best selves? Doesn’t allowing that recognition fill our hearts more than someone appreciating our holiday decorations?

Perhaps in the new year, we can all listen more, acknowledge and appreciate more, and grant more grace. So many of us are currently struggling. Being generous with our time, focus, energy, and kindness is something positive each of us can afford to contribute.

Getting to Zero

What is the process for getting to zero? What does getting to zero even mean? Let’s call zero the point of self-determination. Reaching the point of self-determination may not sound important to you now, especially if you’re young, but as more and more of my friends reach their late 50s I see them shift.

I’d describe the shift as a change in focus that comes with a desire to make a contribution to the community and an impatience for the senseless. It’s a time to repeat the question, what am I going to do with my life, but from a very different point of view than that of a teenager.

At a later age, the answer to this question must align with our inner truth or it causes distress, anxiety, and activity I can best describe as flailing about. This struggle is often identified as a midlife crisis. Getting to zero early can result in a more satisfying life and prevent a state of crisis in midlife.

Why do so few of us confidently follow a path of self-determination throughout adulthood? There are many ways to get distracted by everyday necessities. We spend time doing what’s needed by our parents, children, bosses, colleagues, teammates, and friends to the degree that if feels as if there’s no time to get to zero.

Sometimes this is by subconscious design. If we reach the point of self-determination, we must then make choices. Many of us have learned to fear making choices.

Choices come with inherent accountability. If we become accountable for our own destiny, we cannot blame others for our failed plans, foibles, miscalculations, distractions, delays, or regrets. We must embrace our uncertainty, roll the dice, and do the best we can with the information we have at the time.

Sometimes we’ll choose well. Sometimes we’ll wish we had known more before we made a choice. If we have courage, we’ll be willing to learn from each experience and do better in the future.

This is the process of showing up and living with intent. It puts us at risk of living with our own decisions and any resulting guilt or shame. To do this takes resolve, courage, and strength. It also makes us feel vulnerable.

I don’t know if it’s due to our diminishing sense of community, shrinking churches, the rise of social media bullying, or aggrandization of the shallow, but we seem to have lost the connection to our core strength, our moral substance, our character. I say this collectively because it feels like a cultural shift.

I know there are individuals of great courage and character in every community. They just seem harder to find. They’re not the media sensations the badly behaved have become.

The relevant point is that you may feel alone when you begin down a vulnerable path. That doesn’t mean you won’t find support or mentoring along the way. It just means that if you wait for support to show up before you begin to live intentionally, you may never get started.

You can live a whole life of going along to get along. This will limit the positive impact you can have on your health, in your relationships, in your friends’ lives, in your neighborhood, and on the community. You simply can’t be an agent for growth, improvement, innovation, advancement, reform, or progress by going along.

Build Internal Strength
A step toward getting to zero is to build internal strength and faith in that strength. How you build strength will be an individual journey.

Begin by finding an avenue that builds your sense of having something to offer the world. Some will rely on religious faith. Some will find grit and resilience by drawing on stories of their ancestors. Some will connect to themselves through collective experiences they find in books. Some will find a community that recognizes, acknowledges, and reinforces their value.

Evaluate How You Spend Your Time
Part of living with self-determination is deciding how you will spend your time. That decision can’t be made until you know how you’re currently spending your time.

One way to get a handle on this is to keep a timesheet. I know you probably think you can just wing this, but keep track in writing for a couple of weeks and you may be surprised.

Once you see where your time is going, you can determine whether that time allotment reflects who you want to be and how you want to live your life and/or what you want for your family. Anything that is not in alignment with your values can go.

No, really…it can go. That’s such a scary idea! We find comfort and security in the routines we create. And we know our friends and family may grumble with any changes. Kindness, consideration, understanding, compassion, and sometimes concessions are important during big shifts. Nonetheless, grumbling itself should not throw you off course.

A balanced mix of work, family, self, and community leads to a feeling of meaning and contribution. If any area gets out of balance, it prevents us from being our best selves or making our greatest potential contribution.

Even self-care can be allotted too much time. I’m not saying self-care is bad. It is essential, but if most of your energy is directed toward yourself, your impact on the world will be limited.

Appropriate Time for Stillness
Once you’ve set aside activities that do not align with your values and intentions, fill some of the holes in your schedule with stillness. Breathing techniques, meditation, or somatic experiencing may help you find an avenue to stillness or they may not be available to you until you have already mastered it.

How you get there and how quickly you get there are not important, getting there is. Without stillness, it is impossible to know yourself.

Know What You Know
Once you’re internally strong and have made time for and embraced stillness, you must be willing to know what you know. This is the most difficult emotional task I’ve ever tackled. It is an unraveling of the stories we tell ourselves in order to deal with the world we have experienced.

We are all remarkably adaptable. When we are forced to endure difficult, stressful, or traumatic events early in life without adequate emotional support, we create stories that allow us to survive but do not necessarily reflect the truth of our experience.

A small child cannot bear the idea that her mother watches her boyfriend beat her because the mother values the boyfriend more than the child. Even reading that, you may excuse the mother’s behavior to some degree by reasoning that she’s probably afraid of the boyfriend. Unfortunately, she may not be afraid at all.

The mother is not afraid and she does not intervene. Ouch! That is a truth that feels unbearable, mind boggling, unreasonable, and wrong. And yet, it is the truth that her child knows on a very deep level and, simultaneously, actively avoids knowing in order to feel loved.

Being willing to know what you know means both seeing and accepting cruelty as cruelty, humiliation as humiliation, neglect as neglect, verbal abuse as verbal abuse, manipulation as manipulation, and violence as violence. Knowing what you know can change your life because it changes your story.

Knowing what you know frees you from the fiction that prevents you from making the specific choices that will serve you best, but it is not easy. Our story defines how we view ourselves. Changing that story can feel like losing our identity. But a story isn’t who you are and it can be rewritten. In this rewriting lies freedom, meaning, and redemption.

You have the power to write your own story. You just have to get to zero.

What We Eat Reflects Our Priorities

scale Looking back at the horrific events of the past week reminds me that our actions always reflect our priorities – even what we eat reflects our priorities. No matter what we tell the world, what we do sometimes belies our words. Not only can this sometimes confuse those around us, it can hinder us from reaching our goals. No change can come until we have the courage to stare the facts in the face.

There are millions of choices when it comes to food and health. What works for one person may be detrimental to another. We each have a unique ecosystem within our bodies. The only way to know what works for you is to become aware of your body’s signals and educated about the foods you choose to eat.

Keep a food journal for a month and you’ll learn a lot about yourself and your priorities. Sometimes when we express a priority, what we really mean is we feel we “should” focus on a particular thing because of peer pressure or a doctor’s recommendation. It often turns out to mean much less as far as our everyday behavior. Not only does this make us feel bad, it becomes an impediment to making positive change. For example:

If your stated top priority is to limit the sodium in your diet, but you don’t take the time to read the labels on your salad dressing, sandwich meat, cheese, packaged soup, and whole wheat bread, then you will not be able to achieve your goal because you won’t know whether you’re within your limit.

It could be that limiting sodium is not a top priority, but instead falls below work, screen time, working out, or whatever it is that keeps you too busy to read labels. That’s okay. Once you recognize the facts, you are in a great position to make the best choice for you.

muffins If your stated priority is to avoid sugar and you continue to eat bread, breakfast cereal, frozen pizza, muffins, ketchup, barbecue potato chips and Ranch dressing, you are choosing foods that contain sugar. Once you recognize this you can decide to: 1)Eliminate these foods and all others that contain sugar, 2)Limit sugar by not eating dessert or “sweets”, but stop trying to avoid it 3)Eat as much sugar as you want.

Any of these choices is okay. Only you can decide what’s right for you. Once you look at the facts, you’ll be able to see how to achieve your personal goals more easily.

If your stated priority is to avoid processed food, but you eat at fast food or fast casual restaurants every day at lunch, then a revision of your stated priority or a change in venue may be appropriate.

If your stated priority is to avoid carbs, but you eat potato chips, drink beer, consume commercial smoothies, or coffee drinks, eat bagels or yogurt with fruit on the bottom, then it’s time to review your priority. It could be that research must take precedence while you learn more about carbs or it could be that you decide you don’t want to avoid carbs other than those from added sugars.

If your stated priority is to feed your children real, unprocessed food, but you grab the Lunchables®, packaged mac & cheese, or fruit roll-ups more often than the broccoli, black beans, sugar snap peas, carrots, cauliflower, squash, green beans, and asparagus then perhaps it’s just a goal and not a priority or maybe you believe education, sports, or dance are more essential building blocks for a good life and have prioritized those over real unprocessed food. If so, that’s okay and only your stated priority needs to change.

This flight of fancy may seem unimportant to you, but choosing and owning our choices is the only real power we have in life. You cannot control other people. You cannot control nature. You cannot control what foods make you feel bad. You cannot control all public policy. You cannot control feelings that come rushing from a subconscious trigger. You can control when and how you act on your feelings and you can seek help if prior trauma leaves you doubting your perceptions.

Ultimately, it is our choices that allow us to create the best possible life we can have no matter what uncontrollable or tragic circumstances we encounter. This is true when it comes to diet and health. It is also true in relationships, finances, on the highway, and in a job situation. Changing our lives for the better is always within our power, but it will not happen until we have the courage to observe the facts and tell ourselves the truth no matter how ugly or difficult that truth is. It is at that point that it becomes possible to give up excuses and blame in order to craft the lives we desire.

When I can embrace and accept the things about me about which I feel the most shame, I begin to treat myself as though I matter, my priorities matter, my health matters, and my heart matters. While I hope that this will be valued by everyone I encounter, I know it will not. When my values run counter to yours, I can make a choice to argue with you, bully you, harm you, dismiss you or hear you, inspire you, and have compassion for you. I will not always make the ideal choice. It is then you can have compassion for me.

I wish us all the courage to become our best selves.