Significance...Who Tells You Who You Are?

Your heart is the most beautiful thing about you. And in that beautiful heart, you'll find every need that shows you how to find your passion and purpose.

The 2nd need of your heart is SIGNIFICANCE. To know and value who I am.

In this podcast I'm talking about YOU, a potential Woman on a Mission.  And, because of that, you are a potential Beautiful Warrior.

YOU who have walked through life with all of its hills and valleys, challenges and disasters.

It's not the bombs that go off in your life or the boulders that flatten you when they drop out of the sky unexpectedly...it's the meaning you give to every event that happens.

It's all dependent on how you see what's happened in your life and how it shapes how you see yourself. Midlife creates a crisis of identity.

You are discovering who you are all over again. Who will you allow to tell you who you are?

Come on in and I'll help you answer that question.

Download here:  FREE e-Book:  How To Find Your Passionately Personal Midlife Mission

____________________________________________________
Are you in the struggle of navigating midlife with grace and power? I hear ya!

How about a daily injection of "Beautiful Warrior wisdom" injected into your day?

"The Way of the Beautiful Warrior." Our brief daily emails provide insights and inspiration, turning the challenge of midlife into an empowering adventure.

Click this link and embrace your journey as a Beautiful Warrior today.

Transcript

(00:01):

Hello my lovely ladies. I am so excited to be back with you on the podcast, soft and Strong. We are becoming women on a mission.

(00:17):

I want to tell you a quick story. I was about 11 or 12. I was in a girls club, I guess it was called Pioneer Girls. Some of you might recognize that it was pretty popular back in the day. It was centered around - sort of like Brownies - uh, building skills and getting badges, learning how to g have great character, and as it was in a church, it was about learning about God too. This particular year, they had a Princess Contest. The girls all voted for who they thought should be crowned, but the leaders were the ones that had the final say. To my shock, the girls voted for me to be princess, but the leaders, sadly, had a different take on it.

(01:14):

No, we can't let her have first prize. Even though the girls all love her and she has all the other qualities, she hasn't met the criteria for completing her badges. We''ll give her runner up. Well, I think they even said this in front of everybody. Everyone who had come to see the princess crowned - it was the final event of the year or something like that.

(01:45):

Now they were right. I wasn't very good at completing things. This has always been a fault of mine, and truth be told, still is. I'm bad at that. But even though I understood that I didn't meet the qualifications, as you can imagine, I felt extreme shame even though I understood. "You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting, oh, these words, they haunted me. They were from one of the stories in my church days where the finger of God wrote on the wall when God was sizing up one of the kings who was, you k.ow, pretty wicked and he really did need to be chastised.

(02:37):

What it was referring to was a weigh scale. When it said you have been weighed in the balance, a weigh scale, where they would determine the value of something by putting weights on one side. So it's like the king was being put on one side and the character and the worth of what he should have been was on the other side, but he wasn't enough to balance the scale out, so he was found wanting, Lacking, not enough. Those words, hmm, became one of the themes of my life.

(03:17):

I believed that's how most people saw me. Our world is tough. There are so many things that can absolutely shape us in negative ways because of what you make them mean. That's why Robert Reacher, remember the researcher we talked about in the last podcast, that's why he devised a way to help teachers, help children to feel accepted and loved and significant in the classroom.

(03:51):

If those children, and you and I as grownups, are to feel good and proud and worthy, we need to feel like this. I'll name the five needs that he saw as pillars of self-esteem. One, I need security to feel certain and safe. Two, I need significance to know and value who I am. Three, I need to belong and feel loved. Four, I need purpose - to contribute something I want to achieve, and five, I need to feel competent. to believe I'm good at what I do and will keep getting better.

(04:39):

Last time we talked about how the source of, of the first one here, security and certainty is actually found inside of you. It's recognizing that you have -ready for it - the heart of a warrior. The part of you that knows that you can handle whatever comes at you on this path of life. It's the only way that you're going to feel a measure of certainty. Your your beautiful warrior is the part of you that has a deep, unstoppable belief in who you are.

(05:19):

She is the confidence that you will find the solution, the strength, the way to face whatever life throws at you. So this week I want to talk about the second one. I need significance to know and value who I am. This is about that little girl side of you who was me in my story about missing out on the crown. She's the part of you that so wanted to be seen, to be heard, To be special.

(05:57):

To know that she was beautiful, smart, and funny. And I love this word - captivating. Isn't it something we all wanted as little girls? And, actually, that little girl still lives inside of us. Walking on this path called life means that we're going to have a lot of stuff happen. I call the big shockers, you've probably heard me say this before - "bombs" that go off rocking your world, changing everything. Your parents' divorce, death, your husband cheating on you, losing a child. These are all like bombs. So which bombs have gone off in your life?

(06:53):

Then there are the Boulders that drop on us. Think about this. They flatten us for a time. We're left crushed with our arms and legs sticking out. Bankruptcy, a serious illness, a bad car accident, an addiction. These are things that require recovery, time to process and rebuild. How many of those boulders fall on us throughout our lives?

(07:28):

The third and last thing that I reluctantly refer to as happening in our lives are the Rocks that we have being thrown at us continually. I might say words. These are words that hit us right in the heart, or unfair and undeserved. Expectations thrown at us.

(07:54):

What do we do with all of this? Well, I'll tell you what we do. We come up with a meaning for why it happened. That's how our brains make sense of it - why it happened to us. We give it a meaning. Things like, well, it's because I'm bad or unlucky or it's just what I deserve, or it's the way my family is, so it's the way I am. Every scene we live through in the story of our lives, we give a meaning. And then, something else happens. One more thing happens right in the middle of life. We go through that phase we call midlife.

(08:53):

The door closes on where we've been comfortable living, and suddenly we realize that our time is passing. We're in the middle of our lives and we better make some decisions about where we go from here. However, we come back to that place where we ask ourselves, do we have the energy, the courage, the creativity to reinvent ourselves? Many of us at this point, deep inside, believe that we've been weighed in the balance and found wanting. To reinvent yourself means you have to have a source of belief in yourself.

(09:45):

If you're going to find a mission, if you are going to make the next half of your life matter, you must come to terms with this. Women on a Mission find their significance, now this is the good news, not from the outside, but anchored on the inside in their Inner Warrior. Ladies, you have to step up and be your own defender. Believe in yourself.

(10:23):

Women on a Mission who believe in themselves and believe in their mission, find their significance by answering this question, "Who tells me who I am?" When you ask yourself that, what's the answer? Is it the leaders who didn't give you a crown, who tell you who you are? Who is it? Is it the boyfriend who decided he preferred someone else way back when or just last week? Is it the bully at work who went behind your back to get you in trouble? Is it the teenage daughter who says that she hates you and you are the worst mom ever. Who tells you who you are?

(11:22):

Can I take a shot at it? Let me tell you this. You are a woman who has been on a long walk, most likely way more than 40 years, uphills down valleys. You've had Bombs go off and scare you to death. You've had Boulders fall from the sky and flatten you. You've taken hits by Rock words and expectations, right?

(11:52):

 In your heart, I'd say you're pretty amazing. You're still standing, and you're here at this crossroad, this crossroad that stands at the door at the portal of a new adventure, a new section of your life. The courage, the intelligence, the creativity, the ability to dream up any life you want to live from here on in is right there in front of you. If you choose to believe that it's you who tells you who you are. No one else. This is between you and well, I guess in all fairness, of course, your Creator, the one who made you, because that's where you're known best.

(12:54):

If you decide that from here on in, you decide to be who you know you are meant to be, here's what you do next. First, you start from scratch. You ask yourself, "Who am I? Really?" I want you to peel away everything, everything, all the negative things that anyone ever made you feel. I want you to take an imaginary bucket and put them all in there. Oh yeah, and put the lid on it. Okay?

(13:31):

Next are all the things you think you have to be in order to be anyone. Just strip them away. Peel them off. Put them in that bucket too. Your education, your experience, the skills you've learned, and anything else you were rewarded for being or doing or saying. Take all those things away, all the things that brought you any kind of praise, just take them away.

(14:03):

Now, who are you at your core? Just you. You're really, really beautiful. And precious and amazing. Not because of anything you've done or anyone saying that you're anything, but just because you exist. you are.

(14:38):

Okay. Secondly, I want you to build a bridge from the you that you were before. You reach this age to the you that you are now. So all the things on the path behind you, I want you to think about it. I want you to bridge that to the person you are today. Now, ask yourself what gold has come out of the fire? Pretend that life is like the intense fire that heats gold and brings all its impurities to the surface where they can be skimmed off. What's left is the incredible beauty of one of the most desired elements on earth. Pure gold. What qualities do you have that are there because of what you've lived through? Compassion, resourcefulness, integrity, resilience?

(15:46):

Make a list and just enjoy that list. Look at it as you stand there wearing nothing but these things. These qualities. Isn't it beautiful? This is you at your most valuable, your most significant.

(16:12):

Now, third and last from this place, what would you like to do to transform the world? What hurt would you like to heal? What right would you like to wrong? Which tears would you like to dry? Now, the words. "I don't know are not possible here". I want you to just sit quietly, wearing nothing but your qualities and all the strengths that have come out of everything you've been through, and just feel your heart.

(17:02):

Embrace this. Absorb it. Don't let it slip away. I want you to take a paper and a pen right now, whatever is close to you, or if worse comes to worse, write it in your phone, but preferably on paper with a pen, and I want you to write everything in your heart down right now. Write fast, write all of it. Just let it pour out the qualities you have, the picture of what you saw you'd like to do from out of those qualities, no editing. Just write it down. Just write, write, write, write everything.

(17:43):

Then after this, I want you to take what you've written there and put it into a notebook or a journal, whatever you love, and I want you to call it a Strength Journal. In addition to all that you've written in there. From this moment, I want you to find poems and quotes and things you wanna aspire to. And I want you to answer two questions over and over. Who tells me who I am and who am I?

(18:26):

I want you to own this. This is you, a Beautiful Warrior, willing to fight for you and who you truly are, without judgment, without criticism, just fighting for you to bring the qualities out. No flaws, no focusing on your weaknesses, but just the strengths of who you are, the beauty of who you are.

(18:59):

Women on a Mission, find their significance on the inside, from the heart and the voice of their Inner Warrior. So start your strength journey journal, write in it. Collect items for 30 days straight. Reread it whenever you begin to doubt yourself. Draw pictures and plans of you doing what you'd most like to do with your life. The thing you saw in your mind, the thing you felt in your heart. No matter how small, no matter how big, just draw it. Collect pictures of it, write it, dream it, create it.

(19:48):

That's all I want you to do right now. Just sit with it and let it take hold. All right? That's all for today. Good work, awesome work. You are incredible, and I will see you in the next podcast.