Blog: Boundaries, Have You Set Them?

We are in the middle of what has been designated “The Great Resignation.” What that means/what that entails has been the mass exodus of workers from the corporate world. Why are people leaving in droves? In short, they’re realizing their worth. The silver lining that has shown through the cloud of the pandemic has been that people have grown sick of being treated like cogs in the corporate machine. They have looked at their lives, looked at the impending mortality presented by a global pandemic as well as the ever escalating climate emergency, & thought “WTF am I doing with my life?!” It’s hard sending yet another BS work email on the behalf of someone who doesn’t care a lick about you or your well-being while the world literally burns outside your door. People are realizing that for so long we have lived at the whims of our corporate overlords & that life isn’t meant to be lived under lifeless florescence of a forty+ hour work week for not even close to a livable wage.

This all boils down to the fact that for so long we as workers were encouraged to compromise ourselves for the sake of our jobs. We have been asked to overstep the outlined terms of our employment & go above & beyond what exactly we were hired to do. It is not only the norm but the expectation. If you aren’t sacrificing your time, your health (mental or physical), your desires for the sake of some company that wouldn’t do the same for you, you’re a bad employee & people are sick of it & if I’m being honest, I’m so happy that their sick of it.

Living your life slowly working your way into the husk of a human is no way to live. We are meant to explore, to socialize, to connect with each other, with our planet. We are meant to run & breathe & be free, not to be chained to a desk for the majority of our lives. This is where boundaries come in. We as a society are in a pivotal moment where we can renegotiate the societal contracts that have minimized so many of us for so long. We are in a position to demand the bare minimum things that we should have been receiving all along but that mentality doesn’t need to be limited to our work lives.

So many friends of mine who come to me for advice could use a healthy reestablishment of their boundaries. Whether it’s familial, interpersonal, whatever, so many people I know don’t know how to tell the people in their lives “no.” It may stem from fears of abandonment or rejection but we are often far too afraid to “offend” the people closest to us. Here’s a little secret, if you can’t be honest with the people close to you about the things that harm you or diminish your quality of life then you’re not that close to them. Those who love & respect you will hear you out & put in effort to honor the boundaries you’ve set. You should be able to sit down with your friends & family members & have a conversation about something they’ve done that harmed you or made you uncomfortable & have them hear you & I mean really hear you, not just passively listen. You should be able to do all of this before these things happen as well. Your loved ones should honor & respect your predetermined boundaries.

Boundaries are healthy, they allow us to assert our health & wellbeing into our lives & keep us in check. I think we all need a healthy dose of them from time to time but I also think it’s okay for you to constantly be pushing your own boundaries to expand your realm of comfort. As Elizabeth Gilbert says “fear is boring” it is a boring emotion to have because it always leads you to the same place of nothing. Respect your own boundaries that keep you happy but don’t be afraid to tweak them from time to time. Also don’t expect people to automatically know where your lines in your sand are set, communicate.

As always I hope you all have a fantastic week! Shout out to Jenna Vitolo for this week’s prompt, it’s always a fun exercise for me to get ideas listed at me & see what sends my brain into a tangent, this week it was this, next week it’ll definitely be something different! Keep up the good work & stay healthy out there!

-C

Blog: A Little Belief Goes A Long Way

Howdy folks!

How’s your day been? I’m sorry I missed you all last week,I’ve been busy, busy, busy in the best possible way! I was wracking my brain a little bit this evening on what to blog about after having finished a day of blogging for someone else. Then I thought, well, there it is!

I recently started a new job outside music/songwriting/what have you. It’s freelance work writing, I’m turning a podcast centered around production into a blog. The job is whenever I have the free time to do so or whenever my boss needs a blog to post & pays a livable wage! Imagine that! And I can’t help but feel like I manifested it into my life.

For those of you who were unaware I had to leave my previous freelance job at the beginning of COVID & was thankfully on unemployment up until recently. Our lovely, terrible excuse for a Tennessee Governor, Bill Lee, put a moratorium on the extension for unemployment benefits that was put into effect by the federal government. The date of this expiration being July 4th. Happy Independence Day!… He put this moratorium in effect despite Tennessee having one of the highest unemployment rates in the country & the highest COVID infection rates. I knew I needed to find a job stat but there didn’t seem to be anything working in my favor. Was I applying for work? Yes, but I didn’t want something soul sucking & I wanted something that would pay me what I know I’m worth, what we’re all worth, which is something you can live off of.

So the weeks passed, every one getting closer & closer to the 4th of July but instead of being stressed about that fact I found myself in a state of unwavering peace. How? Well, I had this belief that something would come along, something that allowed me to set my own schedule, that paid well, that wouldn't leave me a husk of a human, that allowed me to be creative & express myself artistically. The weeks went by, spring turned to summer & summer faded into fall, not really, but still nothing. I still kept faith. I believed in it, I believed that the opportunity I had no idea was coming was actually coming my way.

Enter the week of the 4th. Still nothing. That is until a friend of mine reached out on that Wednesday & asked if I could send a sample of these very blogs that I’d been doing weekly for heaven knows how long now. I did & asked what it was for to which she explained that her boss, to which she works social media for, was looking for someone to convert their podcasts into a blog format. It was entirely freelance, allowed me to be creative, & it paid well. I immediately reached out to the host in question, simply introducing myself. We set a time, had a meeting, I sent over a sample of my work, & I was hired! I never once doubted the job was mine, not once. Never did it cross my mind that it could be given to someone else or that I wasn’t deserving of the position, I knew it was mine because, at the end of the day, it was!

Why can’t all things in life be like that? Why can’t I have that level of belief with everything in my life? Why can’t I believe opportunity will fall into my lap like it did just a few weeks ago, unwavering & confident? It definitely goes against our human conditioning to do so, there’s no doubt in that. Why must we as humans doubt everything we work towards or are worthy of?

A friend of mine, Amanda Francis, a self made millionaire, whom I mention often in this blog wrote a book called “Rich As F$ck” that all of you should read! In RAF she says that she believes money will come to her like she believes the cars on the highway won’t randomly sideswipe her. Laws of attraction & all that. You have to believe it like you believe water will come out the tap when you turn the faucet, that the sun will rise in the east & set in the west, that your plane won’t come randomly crashing to the ground for no reason. That’s not to say, give into delusions though.

You see attracting the things you want requires work. Another friend of mine, Stephen Lovegrove, likes to give his clients that he coaches the analogy of the cheesecake. It is as follows: Say you’re craving cheesecake, have to have it, no if &’s or buts about it. There are several ways you can get the cheesecake. You can go out & buy a slice or a whole cheesecake from the cheesecake factory or another restaurant, you can go to the store & buy a cheesecake, you can get the ingredients at the store & make your own, you can have the ingredients at home & make one that way, &/or you can order UberEats & have a slice of cheesecake delivered. You know what you can’t do? Wish it into existence. You have to put in some for of effort & follow it with the belief that the cheesecake is yours, that one way or another you’re getting that cheesecake come hell or high water.

I think this job opportunity was a test for me, it was affirmation of what faith & belief can achieve, it was proof that we all attract the things we believe to be true, whether that good things or bad things. So why stop here? Why stop at my freelance job?

My advice to you in this practice is to start small, be it monetary, opportunistic, or what have you. As I mentioned several times in my Maui blogs, I have super power that allows me to get a reservation at any restaurant or find a parking spot anywhere. How? Because I believe there’s no alternative option. There is no reality that exists for me in which I have to hunt for parking or miss a restaurant I want to try because they’re booked up or in this case, have the job I want. So give it a shot, start with parking spaces or restaurants & see how it works for you. You have to believe it though which does require a good deal of faith to pull off, but once you tap into that the options are limitless!

So give it a shot!

What’s the worst that could happen?