These end of summer nights remind me of catching fireflies when we were younger. I loved the chase, but I had mixed emotions about actually trapping them in a jar with a lid. Friends with no such reservations said, It’s fine, we’ll just let them go.
What’s interesting is that many times when the top of the jar was removed, the lightning bugs failed to fly away.
This same phenomenon can happen to humans. We can be free to “fly,” but we don’t. We come to believe, like the lightning bug, that we can’t fly away because at some time in our life we couldn’t. This might be because we were young and dependent, we were raising families or taking care of an aging parent, we didn’t yet have the credentials or financial stability we needed, or we were working under an unsympathetic boss.
But here’s a happy truth: things change.
Circumstances change and more importantly we change, yet too often we allow barriers from an earlier time to limit what we can imagine for ourselves today.
Here’s something to try:
- List five things you’d like to accomplish in the next one to three years.
- What’s on your list that, if you do it, you will feel proud, excited, happy, fulfilled?
- Instead of making a mental list of why you can’t achieve these things, shift the question and ask: What would it take for me to… (fill in the blank)?
- If that voice in your head says you can’t or you shouldn’t, pause and consider that the voice may be one from your past – limitations someone or something imposed on you (a lid that kept you “stuck in the jar”).
And now, open that lid and allow yourself to fly away.
Until next Tuesday,
Elizabeth
P.S. If you need some support for “flying away,” you might want to check out the Live Large Group Discussion Guide with a few friends!