My definition of ambitious = someone who has dreams, crushes them, sets more challenging goals, learns from them, gets up the next day and finds new ways to be fully alive in this world.
Ambitious people know their strengths, call in support, set the long-term vision, establish clear plans, and keep moving forward. I wrote #35 to invite in someone who would live this life with gusto—ever mindful of what’s possible.
When I wrote “successful,” on my love list, my intention was to attract someone who had written a story of accomplishments in life. I was calling in someone who had demonstrated an ability to do important and inherent in that is understanding that life’s path twists and winds and bumps and is sometimes hard.
I’ve come to believe that success is also embracing everything that happens along the way. Yes, success is a personal standard, and we are drawn to reach for the highest that is in us.
I believe we ALL have, within us, the power to create exactly what we want this life to be. All of the desires of our heart are possible—we’d never desire something for ourselves that was impossibly out of reach.
Yeah. First.
Not all the time, but from time to time, I want my needs, wants, and desires to be put first, with a spirit of excitement and kindness.
Claiming this desire can still feel uncomfortable at times for me. This item on my list is similar to #10 (willing to make it all about me), and as I wrote then, I’ve shifted some deep energy that places a priority on sacrifice, so extremely that it becomes martyrdom. Playing the martyr is the fastest path of feeling powerless. And, it's the fastest way to resent the people in your life that you love.
I’ll say it again: “Don't confuse a focus on SELF as being SELFISH and don't fall into the scarcity mindset that says, ‘if I feel awesome, someone else must feel less than awesome.’ That's false and limiting and minimizing.”
One fundamental reason that I believe we are all here is to connect with others, to learn, to share, to be helpful to someone along their journey, and #32 speaks to the connectedness that “community” offers. I wrote this love list item to attract a match to my desire to be a part of something greater than myself.
As a participant in community—whether it be local or virtual (I belong to both sorts)—I benefit when I give to others, and I benefit when I receive others’ gifts. And, in our ever-connected world, I feel “community” gets bigger & bigger, making the world smaller & smaller.
How do you connect with “community?” How does “community” nurture you?
A volunteer spirit, really. So much good in this world has been offered by those who give of themselves freely to take part in an enterprise or undertake a task. The rewards of volunteering nearly always outweigh the sacrifice, and it’s this spirit that I called in by writing this requirement on my love list. To me, this spirit speaks to a knowing of your own blessings and gifts and a belief that to give those away freely is of greater good than keeping them to yourself. I’ve given countless volunteer hours to schools, to youth sports, to shelters, to colleges, to charity, to churches—happily and sometimes tirelessly, until I was exhausted. In the periods of time in my life that I have not volunteered with regularity, I’ve felt a contraction of me and my gifts.
Giving of oneself brings gifts back, many times over.
I wrote in a previous post that something I love about me is my desire to be helpful to others, to do good deeds, to make others feel special. I encouraged: “Practice giving. See what comes back to you.”
For all the 100 desires I wrote on my love list, I also know this is true: I wrote them to call in a match to ME, because in calling in a match, I was saying aloud to the universe, “I want to be THIS, too. I want to show up as a match to THIS.”
I wrote my love list in April, 2008, the year I ran two marathons—Phoenix in January and San Francisco in October—so I was devoting a lot of time to running. I had both loved the solitude of running and longed for sharing this experience with a partner. I’d run so many races and witnessed couples participating together in events, and I felt a longing for that experience.
What’s funny is that my own love for running had started to fade when I met my husband in late 2009. I’d had an injury after the San Francisco marathon that put me in a walking boot for a couple of months, forcing me to be in the water for exercise. I had no fondness for swimming at the beginning but absolutely came to love the rhythm of my arms, lap after lap. Once recovered, I just never felt the same obsession about running. Though I continued running for most of the next year, I gave my yoga practice far more attention and, slowly, running faded away.
I’m glad #30 made my list, because it’s an opportunity for me to offer this advice: see you list as the snapshot of YOU. If you live your life from a place of growth, openness to change, & belief that there’s always more excitement right around the bend, you’ll attract exactly that. Think of your love list as broadcasting, “I want this FEELING and I am open to even more.”
