Aloha!  I hope you’re having an awesome start to your week.  I have a quick question for you … “are you true to your word?”  Now, if you were to ask me that, I’d say of course I’m true to my word.  And I’d venture to say if I were to ask any of you that, you’d say you were true to your word as well.  But I want to ask you to examine that and it’s really important and I’ll explain why.  I was dealing with a situation where somebody had told me they were going to do something.  I’d asked them to participate in something with me and they said yes.  They were so excited numerous times by emails and messages.  But they didn’t follow through.  I sent a few reminders asking if they were still on board and if not it was okay, but just to let me know.  And they would say ‘sure thing, I still am.’ But still nothing happened.  So I sent a few more messages saying ‘ look, I’m just getting things together so are you onboard?  No worries either way but I’d like to know so that I don’t bother you and I can release this as an option in my mind.  So if you’d let me know, you’d be doing me a favor.  So then they started ghosting me.

Then I saw them again, and I was working on a similar project and I asked them again. 
And they said they were onboard and they’d do it today.  When I followed up – nothing –
crickets.  And I know better.  I know that I should just let it go.  But it was still eating at me
and I found my mind wandering to it.  It angers me when someone says they’re going to do something and then they don’t do it. If I tell you I’m going to do something I do it.  Or if I can’t do it or there’s something that comes up that prevents me from doing it, I immediately will pick up the phone and call you and renegotiate or apologize.  I won’t leave you hanging.  My word is important to me. 

So it was bothering me so I decided to write a forgiveness letter to the person with no intention of sending it.  I wrote the letter putting it all out there and put all the ugliness on the paper.  Then I said “I forgive you.  You’re an awesome person.  That’s why I was drawn to you, to begin with – I see your light. I’m working on myself and I apologize because I found myself judging you.”  And that’s not a healthy state of being and that’s not cool on my part.  And I’m in deep gratitude for you because you helped me examine some areas where I wasn’t true to my word to myself. 

Recently I was doing a fitness regiment and lost 10 pounds and it felt great!  But I was in
California for about 2 weeks and decided to relax and was happy that I maintained it.  But yesterday, in a moment of absentmindedness, I was headfirst into a bag of tortilla chips!  Now you may be thinking, give yourself a break.  You just started; don’t
be so hard on yourself.  Remember the book “Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff?” 

Well, I say you should sweat the small stuff.  Not in the sense that you should feel guilty or shameful or judgmental on yourself.  But sweating the small stuff in that the details matter. 

So I want to get you to think.  We think, we grow, we have little “ah-ha” moments and we get better, we move beyond them.  So a couple of things, when a situation bothers you, a person or a situation keeps needling at your mind and entering into your thoughts, it’s time to forgive.  It’s time to let it go. 

I would recommend that you write a forgiveness letter to that person or yourself if you need to forgive yourself for making a mistake.  Write it in its ugly then look for the good.  Look for the lesson in it.  I guarantee that something that is constantly at you, there’s a lesson in there that you need to learn.  That’s why it’s constantly chipping away at you.  So let it go, rip up the letter, burn it, release it and move on.  Then learn and grow from that lesson.  I say sweat the small stuff because the details matter.  When you give yourself a command and decide you’re going to follow that command, that’s you leading yourself.  But when we chip away at ourselves by making decisions or not thinking and slipping into our old patterns, we’re chipping away at our self-confidence.  

It might not seem like a big deal at that moment, ‘oh I’m just having some corn chips even though I said I was going to start this program today.”   It doesn’t seem like a big deal at that moment, but that’s your paradigm.   A paradigm is a multitude of habits stored in your subconscious mind that governs your habitual behavior.  96-98% of all of your behavior is habitual.  We have about 60,000 thoughts every day.  These are the thoughts that are operating under the surface that are governing our activity.  So we’re not thinking most of the time.  We’re allowing our subconscious mind to move us into action.  So that action of me diving into the corn chips was allowing my paradigm to override my behavior. You’ve got to flip the switch. That 2-4% window in your conscious mind where you’re thinking, that is where your leadership of self is. So you’ve got to decide and think at that moment, wait, what am I doing right now. 

Because your subconscious mind doesn’t want you to change, doesn’t want you to grow.  It wants you to remain the same and play it safe.  So you’ll make excuses for yourself as to why you don’t need to change. 

But you WANT to change.  You want to create something better in your life whether it’s in your fitness or your finances or your health or your relationships or your relationship with yourself.   Your subconscious mind views that change and growth and discomfort in that growth as a threat.  Your subconscious mind – your paradigm will do little sneaky things to pull you back to safety – to your home base.  So I say sweat the small stuff; the details matter.  When you constantly break your word to yourself even in the small things, especially in the small things, it chips away at your image and your self-confidence.  So sweat the small stuff.  If there’s something that you’re hanging onto, where you need to forgive somebody else or yourself, write it out and then let it go.  Then look for the lesson in that.  These are the details that matter.  These are the details that are going to help you step into the perfection that is already inside of you.  I hope that helps and sets you up for a fabulous week. 

As always if you’ve got questions or are stuck, use this Facebook community.  Ask questions in the group, I’m in there all the time.  Send me a message, too.  Then we can get on a call and help you move forward.