When I worked in corporate America I thought quitting my job, being home with my children and not being slave to someone else's dream was the definition of freedom. For years I dreamt of this "freedom" and thought of everything I could to taste it. In June of 2006, my wish was finally granted. My husband and I agreed that it would be better for our family if I stayed home. So almost three years later, here I am.

Yet, I've realized over these past two and half years that "freedom" is about more than just firing one's boss and being able to take my kids to the park at 10:30 a.m. on a warm Tuesday July morning. Freedom starts with a state of mind. I had to learn that the hard way.

Before I quit my job I created a vision board and I still have it. It's green poster board with the word "Freedom" written in glue and covered in glitter smack dab in the middle of the board. All around that word are images and pictures of things I desired in my life; attitudes and ways of being I hoped to take on and a level of financial stability I strived to reach. Once I quit my job, I was pretty certain that the things on my board would quickly come to pass. Not so.

Now I'm not suggesting that vision boards are not effective because they are in fact very effective….granted the right mindset is attached to the visions. And at that time, my mind just wasn't in the right place, so the majority of the things on that board never came to fruition.

I was still thinking and acting from a lack mentality. I was feeling inadequate and insignificant in many areas of my life. I was trying to build a business that my heart wasn't excited about and using my gifts to their best abilities. I was looking at my vision board daily next to my computer desk, watching The Secret over and over and spinning my wheels trying to figure out when my windfall of good fortune was going to come rushing in. It never came. I wasn't free at all.

To be honest, I'm still not free, but I am a lot closer than I was two and half years ago. And I've come to realize….wait, let me be honest. I've always known that my own thinking and the power of the mind plays an enormous part in my success, but I wasn't living from that place. I knew what I needed to do, I just wasn't doing it. I think we've all been there at some point in our lives.

I would shift my thinking temporarily, experience a tiny taste of freedom, and then slip back into my old habits and ways of thinking. The power of what was familiar was stronger than the power of what was possible. I hated it, but most days I didn't feel like I was strong enough to escape that familiar place of complacency and boldly step out to be and do something different. I was prisoner to my own fears.

I admit that I am a work in progress. I have a lot of layers that still need to be scrubbed clean before I can claim the total victory of freedom, but I feel like this is the closest I've ever been. And it all came down to a decision – the decision to stop trying to figure things out on my own and employ divine guidance before and during the process, not after what I've tried on my own has failed.

Since making that decision, I am learning more each day and feel that I am growing stronger spiritually, mentally and emotionally. I still have down days – in fact last Friday was a doozey. We won't go there. But even on down days, I feel like I'm handling them better than down days of the past. And that's a great thing.

Something that helps me, and I'd like to share it with you, is a song that I heard while attending Dani Johnson's First Steps to Success Seminar last February. As the song played in the hotel meeting room the words resonated with me immediately. I felt like someone had secretly tapped into my emotions and put my thoughts and feelings to song.

At the break I purchased the CD Isa & Nina Live at First Steps to Success™. The song is beautiful set to an acoustic guitar and is titled Free. I have shed many a tear as I've played it over and over and over and over again.

You can listen to a preview of the song and download it from Amazon for only $0.89. Trust me – it's worth every penny. The CD overall is very positive and uplifting, but I admit that Free is my favorite because it speaks to me so intimately. I hope that it speaks to you much in the same way that it spoke to me.

As I journey through my early midlife celebration, I am seeing more and more clearly how very important it is to be deliberate in our thoughts and step into who we are truly meant to be in order to experience the freedom of love, joy, happiness, abundant health, wealth, complete and total blind faith and just pure bliss.

I'm not there yet, but I'm well on my way to experiencing the freedom I claimed on my vision board three years ago. I now understand what it means to be free – not just in theory but truly free in thought, actions and deeds. I now make it my priority to do what I have to do to daily to get to that place I've so long dreamed of but am just now truly understanding.

For me "freedom" or being free means to walk boldly and confidently, and sometimes blindly, not knowing where the next step may take me, but trusting with complete faith that my every need will be met without fail. What does being free mean to you?

In Celebration,
 

Earlier this morning while I was writing my first blog entry my three-year-old daughter was sitting on the floor behind me with one of our Harry Potter books. She had opened up the book and was pretending to read.

After I heard what she was saying I quickly opened a new Word document and began typing down what she was saying word for word. At first I wasn't going to make mention of it, but the more I think about, the more I see how appropriate her message was for me in that moment, and how it could be appropriate for anyone else who may need the message. So, here goes….

"You can never, never give up. You can't be afraid. So you have to stop the rain from falling. And when the clouds start crying you have to sing the rain song – rain, rain go away. Come again some other day. You can't give up. Never ever give up. You can do it!"

And there you have it. Sage advice from a three-year-old.

In Celebration,

The more I step into this place of being open about early midlife celebrations, the more women I’ve noticed coming forward with their stories of frustration and loss. And when I say “loss”, what I’m hearing more and more is that they’ve lost sight of who they are and are frustrated about who they’ve become.

For most of these women, they’ve arrived at a place where they can’t stand to face the person staring back at them in the mirror. So they avoid the truth of their own reflections and continue on in their day-to-day existences; the very same existences that have them feeling disconnected from who they truly are.

As I’ve listened to these women and even shared my own frustrations, what I have found is one common mission – they, we, are trying to get back to who they, we were. Somewhere between being single and marriage and motherhood, or being single and taking on the added responsibilities and pressures of life for those who are not yet mothers or married, we’ve forgotten who we used to be.

Somehow, something inside of us clicked and we decided that we can no longer be who we used to be. Many of us abandoned connections, personal interests and taking time for self to completely cloak ourselves in the roles of being wife, mother, career woman, business owner, caretaker, etc. For whatever reason, we seem to believe that in order to be good at our new roles in life our old selves don’t fit into the equation. This can’t be further from the truth.

Who we used to be is critical to who we are to become if we truly desire to rise above where we are currently. Right now, I’m guessing that there are many of you reading this feeling hopeless, inadequate, frustrated, angry, lonely, lost and confused about how you got to this current place of feeling like you don’t even know who you are anymore. I can tell you from firsthand experience that the only way to begin to move beyond those negative feelings and get back to a place of intimacy with yourself is to get back in touch with you.

For some, this is going to be difficult. Many of us are not willing to face the truth about ourselves. We’re afraid to see where we fall short and admit the mistakes we made in the past that were damaging to ourselves and possibly others. But the truth is, you’ve got to get over it. You’ve got to be willing to face those things about yourself that you don’t like just as much as you’re willing to face those things about yourself that you do like. It’s called balance. And when we break it all down, we are where we are now because we are out of balance with our personal truth.

The good news is that as you spend time reflecting and getting back in touch with all things you, you also have the opportunity to explore those things about yourself that you absolutely love and may have lost a connection with.

Perhaps you used to love to draw, paint, dance, swim, have regular “girls’ night” or dine out at a new restaurant once a month? As you remember those things that used to bring you joy and make you happy, find ways to bring them back into the fold of your life.

As women, it is critical for us to remember that until we can be good to ourselves we are completely useless to others. We are the goddesses of this earth and the vessels that bring forth life. We are nurturers and creative beings by nature. We contribute much not only to our immediate circle but to the world at large. Until we can get over our petty internal conflicts and see that there is something much greater that we are meant to do, be and have, the truth of total self-acceptance which is rooted in love, peace, joy and harmonious balance will continue to elude us.

If you have been feeling disconnected from who you are, I challenge you to be truthful about who you were, who you are now and who you desire to be.

I shared with a friend yesterday experiencing this very dilemma of losing sight of who she was, that the overall goal of getting back to the root of who you are isn’t to make things “like they used to be”. That’s just taking a step backwards.

The goal is to get in touch with those positive things that made you who you were when you felt good about yourself, fold them into those new aspects of you that you like and carry them with you as you step into who you are to become. No, the goal is not to just get back to the old you and make it like it used to be. The goal is to be better than you used to be. The goal is to be the best you’ve ever been.

Please feel free to share your thoughts and join in the conversation.

In Celebration,
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This morning while working out I kept hearing this strange noise and I thought my three-year-old was up to something she had no business doing. So when I went to check it out, it turned out to be a bird on our front porch trying to fly through the window above the door.

It was pretty interesting to watch because the bird would bang against the glass, go sit for a few seconds and try again. I stood at a distance and watched the bird attempt to get into our house at least 15 times. My daughter even joined me and kept saying "silly bird", but I just told her the birdie was lost.

So after a minute or so of watching the bird I went back to resume my workout. Not even a full minute had passed before my daughter came running in to tell me that the bird was now trying to get through the window of the playroom where she was watching TV. The playroom is on the left side of the house.

I went to check it out, and sure enough, there was the bird (although it quite honestly looked like a different bird) trying to get into our house, but it had moved one window down to my son's room. It would bump up against the glass, and then go sit on the fence as if to think, and then try again.

Amused but still determine to finish my workout, I left thinking the bird would figure it out eventually. Again, not even a minute later, I hear that same noise again, but this time it is coming from the dining room, which is on the right side of the house. I go to look, and there it was, the same bird trying to make its way in through the dining room window. By now I am completely convinced there is a message or a lesson to be learned from all of this. Thus my blog topic for today had been revealed to me.

What is the definition of crazy? Doing the same damn thing, the same damn way and expecting different results. From personal experience, I am certifiably nuts.

Like that bird trying desperately to get into my house, I have done things over and over and over, only changing a few minor things, but still expecting different results. Here's an example:

I have dabbled in a home-based business or two and while I've made money, I am not the success story grinning from ear-to-ear standing in front of my Jaguar and custom-built mansion in Georgia. Nope, that ain't me. Why? Because while I've stood behind the products and services of each business I've been involved in, I had a lot of self-limiting beliefs and thoughts that kept me crippled.

I was afraid to open my mouth. Afraid to share this great opportunity I'd found with others. Afraid they'd think I was being too much like the pushy Kirby vacuum salesman that comes to your front door. You know, the one that won't go away until they show you how great their vacuum suction is with all of the little sample filters filled with the dirt from your carpet lined up on your floor, and convince you to shell out $2,000 for a vacuum. My husband had to put a Kirby salesman out one night because the man WOULD NOT TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER. I didn't want people to feel this way about me. "Oh, here comes Kitara. She's going to try and sell me something or want me to join her business", so for the most part, my mouth stayed shut.

I am not a serial direct seller like many people I know hopping from one business opportunity to another. I can count the number of businesses I've associated myself with on one hand, and it's less than five. But still, as I'd move on from one to another, I'd convince myself that "other" opportunity wasn't a good fit for me or it was a "hard sell" and that this new opportunity would be different. Easier. Not so. True, I had changed companies, but I was still bringing the self-limiting baggage I had with me from the last business. And of course the results were the same. There is no way those results can change until I do. The same goes for you and whatever craziness you may be caught up in.

Perhaps it's your weight loss goals? Every year you vow to try a new workout routine. You join the gym, get a trainer and commit to exercising four days a week. Yet, you "reward" yourself with a plate of baby back ribs at Outback after your workout because you did such a good job in the gym that day. And then you have pizza for dinner with your family because you were too tired from your workout to cook something healthy. Adding an exercise routine but still eating the same way you always have and expecting to drop 20 pounds in two months in time for summer is craziness.

Or maybe you're bouncing from relationship to relationship and wondering why "this one won't stick"? If you're needy, demanding, jealous and insecure and always accusing men of cheating or being interested in other women, and yet are shocked and heartbroken when they move on, and they always do, that's craziness.

And here's one of my own personal insanity traps. I'm always rushing. I'm hardly ever late, but right on the verge of it. I don't manage my time well and get easily distracted with other things going on in the house or on the computer. Next thing I know, I've got 10 minutes to get to my destination and I'm scrambling to get the kids out of the house and driving faster than I should. I always feel overwhelmed, yet for some reason I don't plan ahead very well or have enough self-discipline to say NO to whatever it is that is enticing me away from what I should be focusing on – leaving the house on time.

In fact it happened this morning. My daughter's dance class was at 10. I needed to go to the post office 15 minutes away to pick up a package. I planned to be there at nine. We probably didn't walk in until 9:30 and when I got back in the car it was 9:45. I cursed myself for not leaving the house sooner and had to rush like a madwoman to get her to class. I'm crazy.

Like the little bird outside of my house, moving from the front, to the left to the right side of the house wasn't going to make a difference. In some ways my daughter was right, it was a silly bird. It kept trying to force itself into a place it did not belong. And with each attempt, it was met with a "thud" against the window, but it kept trying. Had it resolved to admit that it didn't belong here and try something different, perhaps flying into one of the many trees behind our house, it would've found that to be much easier – not to mention a welcoming environment. Because had that bird made it into the house we would've had some problems.

What craziness are you involved in, doing something over and over and expecting a different outcome? Are you willing to be honest with yourself and admit that perhaps the results you seek will continue to elude you, and they cannot and will not change until you do? A change of scenery does not change the storyline. You've got to rewrite the story to fit the new scenery. It's the only way it will work.

And since this is an honest and open blog, please feel free to share your craziness and perhaps myself or others who are not also crazy in that same department can chime in with suggestions. For myself, I need help with time management because I am truly crazy when it comes to that. So if you have any suggestions, I'm all ears.

Thanks for reading and have a great day!

In Celebration,