potential

3 Things to be Thankful For In Your Love Life

It's Thanksgiving here in the United States, and I wanted to take the opportunity to let all of you know just how thankful I am that you're all here, and for the words of encouragement that you share with me and with our community.

I also wanted to thank you for sharing your lives with me and touching my heart with your personal stories.

If I had my wish, I’d want all of us to spend Thanksgiving together this year.

Forget the logistics, because, yes, I’m well aware that we’d have to rent a small stadium to hold all of us, but wouldn't it be wonderful?

All of us together, free to be our best, most beautiful selves, free to do what we want and live the way we want. Just enjoying the day without worrying about what others are thinking, wondering if they're judging us for being alone.

You could just be.

You could just enjoy.

Free of the worry about those inevitable questions from your well-intentioned family members about whether you are dating anyone, leaving you to wondering about the hidden messages behind the questions.

Barring us all getting together in this one joyous gathering that I can, at least right now, only dream about, we can at least be with each other in spirit. We can feel good knowing that we all have a safe place to turn, a community of beautiful, encouraging women that we can reach out to in order to get the support we need.

So, in the spirit of being thankful, I wanted to convey to you a sense of what I hope for you to feel this holiday season. I want you to see that it’s not about any lack. It’s not about anything you don’t have. It’s about what you do have!

It's about seeing the opportunity, the endless possibilities that lie before you. It's about being grateful for everything that you have in your life right now, and forgetting about what you think might be missing. You see, what very few of us see when we’re still in it, when we’re still in that place where things aren't yet the way we pictured our lives at this point in time, is that we have some very special things to be thankful for.

So, while there are many more, and I'll ask you to come up with your own that apply to your specific life and circumstances, to get you started here are three things you can all be thankful for in your love life right now:

1. You!

Yes, you know that beautiful woman otherwise known as you? The one that knows her own worth, who refuses to settle for anything less than she knows she deserves? You know how she figured this all out?

By going through what you've been through.

By being willing to put yourself out there and refusing to let your heart get hardened.

Few of us learn the things we do without going through our heartbreaks the hard way. Few of us remain unscathed. And yet, just by getting to this point, just by finding your way here, you’re showing that you've got that resilience to rediscover your true beautiful self and find a love for yourself first that you never knew you were capable of.

It’s only when we learn to love ourselves like this, that we shine that beautiful light of our true selves bright enough so that someone who’s truly deserving of you will be able to see exactly the woman he’s been looking to find in you.

2. That he didn't call or wouldn't commit.

I know it seems like the last thing you want to be thankful for. After all, that’s exactly what you wanted – you wanted him to call or maybe you were hoping for a commitment from him.

But please hear me when I say that if he wasn't there, if he wasn't on the same page as you, the very last thing you would have wanted in the end was a guy who was leading you on, giving you just enough to keep you hanging, wasting your life away waiting for him to finally be ready for commitment.

You would have found yourself in that miserable kind of a non-relationship with a guy who isn't really into you, a guy who is committing just enough for you to stay stuck in a relationship that he didn't really want.

No matter how much you wanted it to work out, know that you only knew the part of the story that was all about the potential only you were seeing; the rest of the story was the reality that he knew he wasn't on your page. The only ending that two people on different pages end up with is heartbreak, and you know you deserve more than that.

3. For all that is still to come.

This isn't how your story ends, no matter how much it seems like it sometimes. Your life up until now has just been one story, one way of seeing, one way of living. You are just beginning to catch a glimpse of the life that is still waiting for you.

We can get so stuck in that place of doubt, where we begin to think that the love and the life we desire, the life that seems so effortless for everyone else, is somehow out of our own reach. But when we come to see that there isn't a select chosen few who somehow deserve more, when we come to see that there is nothing we don’t have that someone else has, a type of shifting begins to happen. We start to question, we start to say why not me?, and we start to see the cultural factors that have played into a programming of how we believe ourselves and our lives to be.

With every learning experience along the way, a little more light shines through. A new way of seeing becomes that much more of a possibility, and a new energy and confidence begins to replace what was once only heartbreak and despair.

It doesn't matter where you've been, or what you've been through. See yourself the way I see you; see all that is still to come for you the way I see it for you. You haven’t been forgotten, you haven’t been passed by. Keep that beautiful dream alive in your heart and soul and don’t let anyone or anything extinguish it.

You have so much to be thankful for this Thanksgiving holiday and every day!

How about you? What are you thankful for in your life right now? Tell us about it in the comments!

Am I Too Nice?

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Some recent questions I've gotten from a few of our beautiful readers are: How can I stop being so nice? How can I stop being so emotional? I want to be the dream girl, not the doormat!

Here's my response:

You are nice! You are emotional! Not only do you not need to stop, you need to love about yourself the very fact that you have these beautiful qualities!

You have the ability to feel, to empathize, to care, to love - and to do these all so deeply. These are special gifts you have to share with someone who is worthy of you! Someone who is looking for someone just like you because these are the qualities you possess. But when you are just getting to know someone, there's no possible way to know if this is someone you want to share these qualities – essentially, your YOU – with. You don’t know him well enough yet to know if this is someone you really want to have anything to do with at all!

I know how this happens because it used to happen to me all too often. Someone would come into my life and start paying so much attention to me that I was so flattered I would immediately start going into my programming. If he was confident, attractive and had those other surface factors that piqued my interest, I was there. I was showing him just how much of a catch I was, how much I had to offer him and giving him every reason to stop looking any further because I was everything he could possibly want in a girlfriend!

But there was something I had missed in this process. I wasn't taking my time to get to know him. I wasn't slowing things down to a speed that would allow me to do this. I was too excited, too caught up in his potential and the pace he was setting that I wasn't taking the time to figure out if he was really the right guy for me.

What I didn't now then that I do know now is that if he was the right guy for me, he wouldn't think I was too nice, or too emotional, in fact he would love those qualities about me!

This isn't about pretending to be something you’re not. While much of the popular dating advice centers around how to play it cool and how to play hard to get – where it falls short is that if you’re not there, if you’re not in that place in your life where you’re so confident of your worth and what you have to offer and you have enough of a life that behaving like this comes from your real self, pretending is going to have the opposite effect. You’re going to be acting like something you’re not, and so you’ll be attracting someone who is looking for this other person you’re pretending to be and not your beautiful true self!

You see, this isn't about you being too emotional, too nice, or not playing it cool enough. This is about you being who you really are!

It's also about guarding this beautiful heart and soul of yours and not giving yourself away to someone you don’t even know yet. It’s about being your true emotional self but also bringing in that practical side that we forget to bring along all too often so that she can give us her honest assessment of whether or not he’s worthy of all you have to offer him – because you do have so much to offer!

It’s not about playing hard to get, but actually being hard to get because you know that no man is worth dropping your own life, your own interests, your own friends and family for.

No matter how tempting it is for us to rush into things, to get so caught up in being in love and letting our emotions run wild because we’re so ready to be done looking for love, it's never worth it. The reality is that the only thing this kind of reaction does is get us so caught up in our fantasies - that are the farthest thing from reality - that we can’t get bring ourselves to get out once we’re in. And that’s what takes so much time!

Going through this process of falling so hard so fast and losing ourselves in another human being only to find out too late that you weren't on the same page, only hurts us in the end. Then we spend so much time in the recovery process – letting go and getting over someone who wasn't right for us if we had just taken the time in the beginning to find this out before investing so much of ourselves. It’s no wonder it’s hard to justify ending something that we've invested so much of ourselves in!

Take that time in the beginning. Slow things down. Make him wait for you. Keep living your own beautiful life that you've created for yourself and let him be a part of all this slowly enough so you can see just how compatible he really is with you. If he’s not the one for you, you want to find this out sooner, not later, before you've invested so much of your beautiful you!

It doesn't matter who he is, what he has to offer, or how much of a catch he seems to be; you’re the catch, my beautiful friend! You save your own beautiful, feeling, loving, giving self for someone who is looking for those qualities in you.

If he’s right for you and this is meant to be, there’s nothing you ever need to be except yourself. And that's true regardless of how nice, how emotional, or how whatever else you are!

He Was Never Really There

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It's always hard to let go of a dream. The dream of all the potential the relationship showed, the dream of all that could have been. We tend to have such a selective memory when we finally let him go or he lets us go. Either way, it's the same.

We remember all the wonderful times, the great things, that amazing potential he showed. And we start questioning ourselves and why we couldn't just have been this or that. Why we couldn't have been more understanding of him (as if we weren't already all too understanding!)

We wonder why we couldn't be content with less.

And then we start wondering if we're worth it. We forget just how miserable we were far too much of the time. We forget how many of our own needs weren't being met. We forget all the waiting. We forget all the uncertainty. We forget all the times we felt like anything would have been better than what we were living. We start on that slippery slope that has us second-guessing ourselves and leaves us spending all too much of our time and energy fantasizing about how to get him back and how different things would be this time around – if only we can convince him to give us another chance.

Stop right there, my beautiful friend. It's time to see this through your strong adult eyes instead of through the eyes of that little girl who's been trying to get that love she wants so badly. It's time to ask yourself some questions to see what was really there.

Did he really care about what you wanted?
Did he want the same thing?
Did he say he wanted the same thing, but his actions showed otherwise?
Did you feel anxious when you were with him?
Did you feel like if you could just be content to go with the flow, it would have been turned out so much better?
Would he have been perfect if only he could commit?

We can be so understanding, so forgiving, and so willing to put someone else first without thinking about whether they even deserve that kind of response from us in the first place. Is he worth what you've been putting yourself through? Is he worth your beautiful you? We can get so caught up in whether he wants us, whether he loves us, whether he's going to commit to us, that we forget that this is so much more about us than him. It's not about what if, it's not about what could have been, it's not about if only, it's about what is.

And you, my beautiful friend, deserve nothing less than a real relationship based on reality; a reality of two people on the same page who want the same thing and are committed to making that happen regardless of any extenuating circumstances.

Because if you don't have that, what do you really have?

What to Do When He Suddenly Disappeared

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Almost all of us have been there before at least once in our lives. The perfect guy, the one you've been waiting your whole life for, suddenly disappears, never to be heard from again. No call, no text, not even a goodbye note. There you are, left all alone, wondering what happened, where’d he go, what went wrong, and, most importantly, what should you do now?

While some of us try desperately to get him back, others go back and forth second guessing everything and blaming ourselves for being the reason he disappeared. Most of us, at one time or another, have found ourselves so utterly devastated by the disintegration of what seemed so promising, so full of potential, that we are unsure of how to move on.

The good news is that there's a process for getting through this and getting back on track, to where you were before he disappeared.

Express it.

Whether you punch couch cushions or a punching bag, cry into your pillow until your tears are finally dried up, scream at the top of your lungs or pour out your heart to your best friend, the key is to let it all out. Let yourself really feel everything no matter how painful, say everything you want to say until you get to the tears and then let it all out. There is nothing as healing as those tears that finally come when we realize that underneath our anger and our rage at what happened is simply a hurt little girl who wasn't ready to give up on a dream. From there, true emotional healing can finally begin and life can begin anew.

Write it out.

Write a letter or email to him letting him know how much he hurt you and how much it hurt you that he disappeared. Don’t miss anything you want to say to him. Write out every detail, every feeling, every way you feel betrayed, misled and disappointed with the way he suddenly disappeared without a trace, without any explanation.

But don’t send it to him; this is for you, not him. It’s in putting it down on paper that you get it all out while it serves as a reminder of what it was really like with him when your memory can only conjure up all the wonderful things about him and the relationship and forgets all too easily the reality of what it was really like. Then when you no longer need this reminder, once you can see the reality of what was instead of the fairytale fantasy of what you wanted it to be, get rid of it.

Forgive him.

Yes, you read that right. You have to forgive him for the fact that he disappeared without so much as saying goodbye. Let go of the anger and the sadness realizing that he just wasn't there didn't know how to handle the situation any better. He wasn't on the same page as you and as much as he might have wanted to be, he didn't know what to do to get there and wasn't able to be honest and upfront with you when he realized this. This isn't about excusing him or lessening what you went through; this is about you recognizing that he is just as human as you and can make mistakes, too.

It doesn't absolve him of what he did or the responsibility for his actions, it’s simply about you making a decision to forgive him and let go of holding a grudge against him. It's about not letting that kind of negative energy permeate your relationships going forward. It’s this lack of forgiveness that all too often ends up with us having hardened hearts with jaded attitudes even when we move on from these past hurtful relationships. It’s when we truly can see him for the less than perfect guy that he really is that we can learn to forgive in a genuine way that allows us to forgive ourselves, too.

Realize it was a gift.

The bottom line is that he wasn't the one for you. You weren't meant to be together. And it really was a gift that you found out now, as painful as this realization can be, before you invested any more of your time and energy on someone who isn't there, isn't on the same page where he can give you what you’re looking for from him. It doesn't get any easier the longer you’re together; it only gets more painful. So know that you've been saved from so much more heartbreak down the road by finding this all out now.

Now you’re available for someone who is on your page.

You now have the time and energy to spend on someone who is right where you are, looking for the same thing you are with someone just like you. There is nothing that compares to this when you find it, and the surest way to finding it is in the process of letting go of the ones that aren't where you are, as painful as that can be to accept.

Above all, by looking at our relationship endings this way, we can begin to see that these things really do happen for a reason, and when it’s meant to be, it will be! And when it’s not, it’s a beautiful thing if we choose to see it that way; as it clears the way for the right one to arrive.

The Reason Your Type Is Not Really Your Type

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If you are anything like I was back when I was single, you know exactly what your type is. You can spot him as soon as he walks in the room. He's got that certain look, that air of confidence, that vibe that calls you out like no one else in the room. And when the two of you finally talk, finally connect, it all becomes that much more obvious to you: This is it! He's the one! This is your guy! Usually sooner, rather than later. And then you're off, once again.

It starts off amazing, like nothing you've ever experienced before. He says all the things you've been waiting to hear, he does everything that you've been dreaming of, and you find yourself unable to do much of anything else except think of him. It doesn't matter that you barely know him or that you just met; those first blissful days and weeks have you convinced he's different from all the rest.

Except that it hasn't worked out quite the way it seemed. In spite of all its potential – all his potential – here you are once again. Alone and heartbroken wondering what's wrong with you. It was the same story, the same guy, just a different face and name. And even though you told yourself it was going to be different this time, it wasn't.

I have good news for you: It wasn't you. There isn't anything wrong with you. The problem is with who you're choosing, who you're attracted to and why you're attracted to him. Because the reality is this type you're so attracted to isn't working out for more than one reason.

These men you're attracting may seem like your type, but the reality is, they're not. You deserve so much more than the surface relationship they're offering you, based on all the bells and whistles but nothing of the substance that makes up a real relationship. You may think this is what you want, that he's the type who can give you what you're looking for if only he was ready for a commitment or on the same page as you, but the reality is, he's not there and he's not going to get there anytime soon, if ever.

You see, the real you isn't willing to settle for this one type that never works out. The real you knows that there is so much more to love and being in a relationship with someone than this! He isn't looking for the same things you are. This type wants so much less than you know in your heart you're worth! He may want the surface relationship without a commitment, but that isn't who you really are!

This type of guy you're so attracted to isn't real. He's based on a fantasy you have of what a relationship should be like and what happily-ever-after looks like from the fairytales, the movies and TV shows and romance novels we've been led to believe are real. But they're not. A real, committed relationship requires two real people who know the difference between fantasy and reality and aren't afraid to find out if this might be the relationship you've both been looking for!

Deep down inside, you know all this. Every time your type hasn't worked out, and you ask yourself what is wrong with you, your true self knows that this isn't about there being anything wrong with you; but about two people on two different pages who want different things. You can't make someone love you; you can't make someone change. What you can do is get to know yourself, the real you. And take a pass on the type that isn't working. Over time, you'll find yourself less attracted to this type that had such a hold on you before, and you'll learn that it's only when you're with someone real, who's on the same page as you, in a relationship based on the reality of what is, not what you know it could be if only he were different, that you'll get to that turning point where you'll find that relationship your heart has been longing for.

That, my beautiful friend is everything you deserve!

Don't Fall in Love With His Potential

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"I have a history of making decisions very quickly about men. I have always fallen in love fast and without measuring risks. I have a tendency not only to see the best in everyone, but to assume that everyone is emotionally capable of reaching his highest potential. I have fallen in love more times than I care to count with the highest potential of a man, rather than with the man himself, and I have hung on to the relationship for a long time (sometimes far too long) waiting for the man to ascend to his own greatness. Many times in romance I have been a victim of my own optimism." ~Liz Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love)

I love this quote – it just so succinctly summarizes the story of our relationships for so many of us; how we inadvertently set ourselves up for such heartbreak by falling in love with the potential of a man and a relationship with him, instead of looking at what is right now.

It is such a beautiful quality we possess; this optimistic, positive outlook that we apply to the men and relationships in our lives. We meet someone and see not just the person he is in front of us today, but we see so much of what he can be, so much of his emotional capacity that is not there yet, but could be if only he were loved by someone like us.Continue Reading

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3 Things to be Thankful For In Your Love Life

1. You!

2. That he didn't call or wouldn't commit.

3. For all that is still to come.

Am I Too Nice?

He Was Never Really There

What to Do When He Suddenly Disappeared

Express it.

Write it out.

Forgive him.

Realize it was a gift.

Now you’re available for someone who is on your page.

The Reason Your Type Is Not Really Your Type

Don't Fall in Love With His Potential

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