Faith over fear. Mind over mountain. Heart over hardship.

They're easier statements to speak than put into action and embody.

However, the fear, mountain and hardship are exactly what give life its spice. It's important to embrace discomfort, whether that's in your day-to-day living, or a single significant project, challenge or experience.

My story starts with a plethora of injuries.

Not the dramatic coma-in-ICU variety, but a slow, creeping dysfunction from years of abusing my body and shrugging off the warning signs that all was not right.

When I was 26, my body finally said no more. It made me finally pay attention.

The biggest gift you can give yourself while you’re alive… is to live.

The temptation in modern day civilization is to die before our end. To give in to distraction, to give our power away to the future and past long before fully experiencing the present as it comes. To withdraw instead of attack, and diminish instead of expand. 

This is death, only of a different sort.

What does it mean to be genuine?

First and foremost, it means being honest with yourself. It means being unashamed of your humanness… imperfections, questionable choices, and everything that makes you wildly, beautifully you. Being honest enough with yourself to own all of it and stand proud in who you are, regardless of who the world tells you to be.

Life is becoming increasingly hectic, disjointed and fast-paced. You may have days when you wake up feeling less than stellar. Tired. Uninspired. Overwhelmed. Questioning how you got to this current state and where you’re going from here. And why. Why is life so complicated?

When life feels chaotic, it’s easy to lose your footing.

With a few simple tools, it’s possible to bring yourself back to centre.

Where do you imagine yourself five years from now?

It's a question asked so many times that it feels cliché. If it wasn't such an important one, I wouldn't be repeating it. The image you hold in your mind’s eye is who you become, so in that light, this question is a critical one.

Whenever I talk about striving or reaching, I always get kickback.

It's a risk we take in pursuing this personal growth journey that we may one day reach a time when things have become too focused, serious, strict, routine and regimented. This is when our own good intentions begin to work against us.

There will never be a shortage of ‘shoulds’ in our lives. Those things we should be doing to be better, healthier, more productive, more ‘perfect’. Meditate, drink the right amount of water, filter your water, eat organic, write affirmations, walk miles a day, take vitamins, listen to motivational podcasts, read books, do yoga, stretch, cold plunge and sauna. These are all powerfully beneficial.

The process of living feels imperfect more often than not, so it’s easy to constantly judge ourselves or hold ourselves up for comparison against what appears to be perfect. Remember, the journey is meant to be messy.

The mess, the fluctuation between emotions, complications and success, is how we learn, grow and expand. A linear life never made for a good story… it’s the times the straight line went scribbly that we laugh about later. At worst, there is tremendous growth in that chaos.

Even when the world looks entirely black and white, even if it looks like there is no opportunity, you can create something. This is your power as a human, you are a creator. This world is far more grey energy than it is black and white unchangeable substance. You just need to know how to work with it.
Start with this perspective shift

Creating change in your life can be a difficult endeavour.

Changing a lifestyle, routine or pattern has an element of personal growth and discomfort inherently built into it. Sometimes change looks like a small tweak, other times like a tornado ripping through your life. Sometimes it’s wonderful, sometimes it’s terrible, or it lands somewhere in between. Either way, it pushes you to adapt and reinvent. The question isn’t whether change will happen.
It’s whether you will meet it with resistance — or use it to build your power.

Being patient enough to wait is a superpower.
However, waiting for the perfect moment, until you feel better, or to know it's all going to work out is exactly what will keep you stuck and stagnant. Emotions have a way of running the show before we realize they've taken over and are deciding our fate.
It feels like the right thing to do, allowing ourselves the grace to back off the pressure a little bit. This is absolutely a necessary skill to avoid burnout or harm to your health. Forcing productivity or progress never produces positive outcomes and can, in fact, be detrimental to the process.

Let's quickly address the political state of the world we currently live in.
No, not to choose sides, or debate, or amplify the fear and other emotions surrounding everything that's going on. Instead, I want to acknowledge the uncertainty that many people are feeling. We can't control the direction the world takes, or who steps into power and how they use that privilege, for better or worse. But we can control one thing.

Consistency without immediate reward. This is the tough part of learning, growing, or jumping to a new identity. It feels awkward to begin, slow to progress, and suddenly...
Doubt creeps in.
Am I doing the right thing?
Am I capable?
What will the future look like?

Whether it’s fear of failure, or doubt in our abilities, seemingly insurmountable circumstances, or myriad of other psychological barriers we can put in place for ourselves, many of us are used to never fully publishing our lives before we die.

Learn how to challenge yourself daily.

Convenience, ease, safety… these are all wonderful achievements. To live in comfort and safety is to celebrate all that we as humans have achieved and built for ourselves, actively stepping away from the hardship of earlier times.

There can be, however, too much of a good thing.

There are a lot of question marks in life. If we could look ahead, jump to our future reality and get a glimpse of how things would turn out, it would be much easier navigating the unknown. Instead, we have to march boldly forward with a plan in hand and faith in our hearts that everything will work out in our favour. 
I will tell you this…

All the self help topics I talk about come down to one thing: Know yourself.
All of us are so beautifully different, so incredibly diverse, that there is no one size fits all solution to the challenges we face. What works for one person won't click for another.

This is a short and simple reminder: The small steps you take always carry you somewhere. Whether or not that's where you want to be depends on the baby steps you decide to consistently choose. The small things you do everyday often matter more than the big things you do once, even if they seem too insignificant to matter.

Being resilient isn't always going to feel very strong.

It means wading through what’s tough, making hard decisions and being vulnerable and honest with yourself about how you're really doing. In other words, you express the most resilience when you feel the least comfortable and resilient.

Resilience isn’t about bouncing back.

Imagine this; you’re start a romantic relationship at Point A in your life. You bring your whole self to the table, a heart full of love, but after a time of full emotional investment, it doesn’t work out. You both go your separate ways.