Welcome to episode 25 of the Unlock Your Life podcast. Tell me, how much life will you allow yourself to have? There may be things in your life that you are not trying, attempting, or event contemplating. Not because you don’t really want it, but because you believe you can’t have it. What if I told you that you are the only thing standing in your way? That you can change that. We’re going to talk about how. Let’s get going.

Welcome to the Unlock Your Life podcast, a podcast for highly successful visionary women who want more out of life. If you feel that ache of unfulfillment in your soul, you’re in the right place sis. Join life mastery consultant Lori A. Harris as she teaches you how to stop living for others and finally put yourself first. Let’s dive into today’s show.

So it’s December and it is the month of wishes. In many different traditions during this month of the year, many people put together a list of wishes. Things that we would love to have, that we would like to magically come to us. Perhaps it’s our fairy godmother. Perhaps it would be brought to us by Santa. Perhaps our Prince Charming will deliver us all of our dreams and wishes. We’re not going to do anything to get it. We’re just going to wish.

When it doesn’t happen, we’re not surprised because we didn’t really think we could have it. There’s a part of us that might believe we don’t deserve it. So I ask you, how much life are you willing to allow yourself to have?

2021 has been a tremendous year for growth and exploration for me and for many of my clients. The thing is, it’s been super exciting to allow myself to receive and to watch my clients do the same. All of my clients work in industries and professions that serve their mission, a mission to reduce suffering in the world.

Some of them work in fields that allow them to contemplate a world where it’s not dangerous to be born female. They’re actively doing the work to take back the streets and give more life to the women of their community. Some of my clients are working with people who have much and want to share it. They advise them on this is a good idea. This is the best way to expand your ripple. My clients want a lot. They really want to help the world.

It’s tempting to put all of their baskets in the basket of service. But they’re discovering, as am I, that fulfilling our own wishes, our own desires is actually the key to getting much more done in our vocational area, in our mission work.

So I ask you, what is it that you would absolutely love to have but you are not doing anything to allow it to come into your life with ease? We all operate with some kind of internal dialogue of decision. We make decisions about our lives, about what we can be, do, or have based on our own internal belief system. We convince ourselves that those rules are real and that’s just the truth. They’re logical. They’re reasonable. They make sense. They make sense in a world that is full of rules and restrictions.

I want to tell you that the things that you are not experiencing right now in your life but would love to, the restriction is not the money. It’s not the numbers. It’s not how many years you’ve served or how much experience you have. It’s not how much you weigh or don’t weigh. It’s not about the numbers on your credit report. It’s about you and how you make decisions.

So you could open the menu and look at the menu and look only at the left side of the menu first to decide what do you want. Or conversely, you could just look at the right and pick based on what’s in your wallet and what’s the cheapest choice without any consideration of what you want. I want to remind you that the very best reason to do anything at all, anything at all, is because you want to. I want to encourage you to tap into that place within yourself that knows that you know that you know what you want.

So while you’ve been operating from a place of limitation or decision making based on other people’s numbers or societal rules, you can always change that. The good news is change is always available, and it’s really just the matter of a decision away. You could decide to notice your thoughts.

When you find yourself having a desire bubble up, rather than punished the breaks, you allow it to come forward without saying to yourself internally or mentally, “Oh that could never happen because of X, Y, and Z.” But you allow yourself to feel what you actually feel and to know what you want. Because Santa, fairy godmother, and Prince Charming aren’t going to show up, but you already have within you the power to make your dreams your reality.

So what’s stopping you from experiencing that which you really want? It’s fear. Fear is the one thing that can stop us from crossing over the border from desire to expectation to realization to having that which you really want. Fear is the thing that often stops us. I want to teach you or share with you some tools you might use for tapping into discovering your own internal truth.

So in the Hebrew bible, there are two words for fear. Pachad. Pachad talks about that basic fear that goes to our instinctual need and desire to be safe and to survive. So whenever you find yourself feeling real fear, it might be pachad.

Now there’s another form of fear spoken of in the Hebrew bible as well. That’s called yirah. Yirah is that fear you feel when you find yourself on the edge of your own glorious expansion. When you find yourself facing and discovering the divine within yourself. To me, it’s that edge that I call where we make magic. I love making magic. It just feels glorious.

So when you look at people who are artists, they face their fears on a regular basis. They show up and look at that blinking cursor and throw words on the screen and make a beautiful transcript, a beautiful writing. There’re artists who face a blank canvas and bring something out of nothing. Those artists who create music and create something that didn’t exist moments or hours before. They make magic. They bring along an audience who joins them in the creation of something beautiful and wonderful.

My very first career was in the theater, and I loved it. I loved that moment where an audience would be transformed and the lights go down, the curtains go up, and they enter a completely new world. So artists join together and create this world from the writer and the director and the participants on the stage. The costumes and the lights and the scenic directors who come together to create a whole new world. We are joined together for a period of time in believing in something that didn’t exist until it was born within the mind of an artist.

There were times in my life as a trial lawyer where I experienced magic. It was glorious and it was wonderful. Those times where you get up and you’re in a trial court and you transform a set of facts and help a jury to understand a perspective that’s completely different than the one that was put forward by opposing counsel. You bring a jury along and you create magic. You persuade.

Or perhaps those moments when you persuade a fact finder, the judge, to come along with your point of view when they fully didn’t intend to. When they read the briefs and you came in and they had already made up their mind. You’re able to create magic. I love that.

So there’s a line in the Tom Hanks movie, Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington Philadelphia, where Tom Hanks says the reason why he loves being a lawyer because every now and then you get to do justice. It keeps you going for all those times when it doesn’t feel like it’s justice. For me, I called those times come on, let’s walk on water. It was so much fun. It was stressful and it was challenging, but it was a lot of fun.

In doing that, I did have to face pachad. That facing a fear that seems like your very survival is tied to it. You as a lawyer, you’re on the edge of your seat actively listening. Making decisions in an instant. Listening to the question asked, listening to the answer given. Is it objectionable? Do I want to object? Am I going to let them in? Am I going to stop it? Making so many decisions. It takes a lot of energy to actively listen.

It’s stressful because quite frankly our egos are on the line. In doing it, in facing it, in standing up and coming forward to give another way to look at a set of facts, you might encounter yirah. That place within all of us that is in tune with the divine. So in this season of making wishes and wanting things to come true, I want for you to make a list of the things you would really, really, really love to be.

So when we encounter pachad, perhaps we’re experiencing what author Gay Hendricks calls an upper limit problem. An upper limit problem is when we’re on the edge of growth and we’re experiencing four possible reactions to this new possibility.

So one is a fear of outshining. We are all in community and part of a group, a family, a community. Sometimes we will encounter an opportunity for growth. When we do, we might think or actually be correct that if we go in that direction, we may outshine the people in our community. Maybe we will earn more money than either of our parents earned. Get more attention than anyone in our community ever has and get more recognition for the work that we’re doing. So it’s tempting to want to play small.

It could be that we fear being rejected and left by our community. Particularly as women, our survival for millennia has been connected to being in connection and in community. Because we need others to help us survive. We were gatherers while our partners would be hunters. The gatherers need to work together cooperatively. So the idea of being rejected by the group could mean actual death. So we don’t want to outshine because we don’t want to be rejected or expelled from our community.

On the other hand, sometimes we might just experience a fear of success. Maybe if I’m really successful at this project, it’s going to require me to do new things. Take on new responsibilities. Or we might actually have a fear of failure.

So when we encounter an upper limit problem when we’re contemplating having more life than we’ve ever known before, we need to be able to pause and recognize what might be happening so that we can decide who we want to be in that instance. The good news is we can deal with it. Whether it’s pachad or yirah, we can deal with any fear that we might be experiencing.

I’d love to chat with you about doing a body scan so that we can learn the difference between a physical fear versus an emotional fear. Are we really afraid of danger? The monsters under the bed or the monsters in our head. Are we scare-cited. We want to go forward, and we’re excited about the opportunity to go forward, but there’s a part of us that is scared.

So one way that we can deal with that is to have a practice of doing a body scan. So do you know right now where do you feel your emotions in your body? Do you feel them in your gut? Do you feel them on the edge of your skin? Do you feel them in your head? Do you find that when you’re experiencing emotional tumult that you feel a tightness in your jaw? Learn to do a body scan so that you can address it and know the difference between the different types of fear.

Sometimes fear and anger can live in the same place in the body. So for me, it’s very rare that I will become very angry. When I do, it feels very much like when I’m afraid. Occasionally I will have an experience where I am driving and the edge of my skin will rise up almost. It becomes very, very hot. It actually hurts because I’m processing so much emotion.

So occasionally if something happens and I’m driving and I avoid a dangerous situation, sometimes the skin on my upper arms and at my elbow will actually hurt. I’ve also had that same experience on rare occasions when I’m very angry. I actually get hot. That’s just me.

Sometimes feel it in their gut. They’ll feel like a tightness. I know a woman who when she hears a really good idea, it’s so good that it scares her, her feet will start to sweat or perhaps her palms. So learn to scan your body so you can determine what is this? Is this scary, scary fear like monster fear? Or is this an opportunity fear? Learn to identify those feelings.

Finally we can remember how to manage these emotions or feelings. After you do your body scan, you can return to number one tool, your breath. Remember not to hold your breath but to take deep cleansing breaths in and then release it slowly out. In order to receive, you have to be willing to give. So give your body good oxygen and then release it so that you can feel a little bit better.

Another thing that you can do is move your body. Perhaps you can go for a short walk or do a couple pushups. Go for a run. You could even consider dancing in place or playing music. These are things that can shift the energy and get you a good reaction right away.

So change your scenery. Change your position within our body. Move your body. Learn to feel better so that you might actually learn how to tolerate difficult physical feelings in your body, and then move through it and towards your dream, your desires. My dream for you is that you will be the kind of person that will always choose growth. Go towards growth. Go towards having more life and having it more abundantly because you choose for you, not for anybody else, to make your dreams happen. To take active affirmative steps top take you in the direction of your dreams.

So my dream for you is that you make magic. Make more magic in your own life. Whether it’s in your vocation or within your personal life where you achieve and experience something that you thought you otherwise could not do.

Oftentimes in the coaching community, my clients experience that kind of joy where it feels like they’re doing magic. Not because it was impossible, but up until their effort it was impossible for them because they had been unwilling to try. Unwilling to believe that it was possible. In fact, unwilling to allow themselves to mentally experience, “Hm, I could be, do, or have that thing that I’m thinking about if I would stop saying but and allow myself to experience it.”

So remember this. If there’s something that you would love to have, be, or do, learn to identify one active step that you could take. Then take it. If the prospect of it, the thought of it causes you to feel a lot of anxiety and feelings within your body, do a body scan.

Go from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet. Allow yourself to section by section discover what’s going on within your own body. What am I feeling? Is there a tightness in my draw? Am I holding my breath in my throat or in my chest? Am I tight, tight, tight with my shoulders near my ears? Is there a feeling in my gut? Do I feel it on the edge of my skin? Am I experiencing some sweatiness?

Discover what it is that you are feeling, and then learn to discern between is this that kind of scary there’s something going to destroy me fear? Or am I scare-cited? There’s something here for me and I’m so excited about the prospect, but I’m a little bit scared but going towards it makes me feel really good. And we can dissipate that energy by shifting the energy. We can do some breathing exercises. We can move our bodies. Or we can play some music. These are the things that will get you closer to a life that you love living.

So you’ve been using all of your powers up until now to make magic, perhaps in your workplace. I invite you to make more magic in your personal life, in your life. See what happens. Discover how more expanded you can be within your own living and see the impact it will have not only in your personal life within your family and your friend group. You’ll even be able to get more done at work without working harder.

This has been the Unlock Your Life podcast. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, I’d love it if you would share it with a friend. You can go to Apple podcasts. Look for the Unlock Your Life podcast with Lori Harris. Rate, follow, and review this show. I’d love it if you gave me a five star review, but what’s more important is that we grow this community in a way that helps more and more people. We’re trying to expand the ripple here and make a world and expand a world that reduces suffering and makes more joy.

Thank you for listening. This has been the Unlock Your Life podcast. It’s your life. Make it a great one.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Unlock Your Life podcast. If you want more information on how you can transform your life and do it quickly, visit loriaharris.com. See it on the next episode of the Unlock Your Life podcast.