You know the answers to all your own questions.
It’s the first week of July in 2021; let’s get to the heart of the matter.
Your heart.
We are now officially halfway through the year and it’s time for you to revisit the commitment you made to yourself 6 months ago. You might have said you want to be married or in a committed relationship. You for sure said you wanted more work/life balance, and as I’ve assured you, work is part of life, not a separate entity.
In order to achieve balance in life you need to embrace your personal as well as your business sides equally, not pit them against each other. Meaning, you can’t place your qualities on a scale and pick away at the things you don’t like until each side weighs exactly the same as the other. That’s diet mentality and it doesn’t work for your life any more than for your body because it doesn’t engage you to embrace the essence of who you are, it only keeps you focusing on what you think is wrong rather than loving what’s gloriously right!
Embracing all your facets means accepting who you are as you are, not waiting until something you don’t like changes in order to feel acceptable. And it for sure means first deciding for yourself what is valuable and worthwhile.
As long as you continue to value business over pleasure, work over play, and other people’s definitions of success over your own desire to be in a loving, monogamous, enriched romantic relationship, nothing will change.
You will continue to feel unbalanced – separated from your true, singular, spiritual self – in other words, you’ll feel single.
Are you willing to do for yourself what you want a man to do for you?
Ah, but here’s the rub; the thing that might be holding you back is, in order to embrace putting yourself first you need to embrace all of your facets. All of you. Even the parts you aren’t crazy about. Especially those parts.
How many times have you said you want a man to love you for who you are and then declared the large size of your thighs or the small size of your bank account to be absolutely unacceptable?
How many times have you wished for a man to tell you he loves you and cherishes you just as you are and then berated yourself for making a mistake and declared yourself unworthy of being loved?
How many times have you sought a man who wants to spend the rest of his life with you and then couldn’t bear to sit with your own thoughts and either dove head-first into a gallon of ice cream, poured yourself a large glass of cabernet or ran out to buy something to take your mind off your mind?
But how can you possibly embrace things about yourself that you just don’t like? Learning how is your work. This is that place you’ve heard other people say they don’t want to go, although if you’ve read this far, you’re not like other people.
If you want to feel cherished by your life partner, you’ll need to start that ball rolling on your own. Self-love, self-compassion, self-respect – pretty much every phrase that starts with self – is what you need to learn to cherish yourself, for yourself, with yourself. This is what will open the door to finding the partner you seek, a man who will cherish these things alongside you, not instead of you.
Have you looked in a mirror lately?
And if so, what did you see?
Did the woman looking back appear happy? Well-taken care of? Hopeful? At ease? If not and you want to be, here’s something you can do.
Honor yourself by taking action. Whatever it is that you said back in January you would do, if you haven’t done it yet it’s officially time. If all you make is excuses, the only difference between this year and last will be the number of times you wore slacks with a zipper rather than yoga pants.
Choose your personal relationships over your work. Do it already. The thing you haven’t done because it scares you – post a profile online, tell that woman at church you think her brother is attractive and ask if he’s unattached, strike up a conversation with the man you keep bumping into in the produce department.
Because it’s not just about saying you want something, or even writing it down; you’ve got to take action to activate your result.
You know that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. Well, here’s my definition of staying single in a way you don’t want to be – always choosing work over play, business conversations over social interactions, waiting for someone else to embrace you rather than embracing yourself in all your essences and thinking thoughts that make you feel separate and alone.
This is your life. The way you live it is up to you.