The Secret Sauce - Your Recipe!

Hello again, my friend!  

How did last week's Blog Post work out for you?  I hope you've taken the time to think about your life and identify any areas that could use a bit of attention and TLC.   If you haven't, I definitely recommend reading last week's post and going through that exercise before continuing this week.   

What we are going to do this week is truly a life changing exercise that you will find a lot of fun!  I am going to assume you did the exercise and have a few areas of your life that need some work defined, or chosen.  So let's get into it!

First,  understand that you can work on multiple areas at the same tine once you understand the process.  And it IS a process, so give yourself a little time to get comfortable with it.   Go easy on yourself.   It took more than a minute to create the drama in your life whether you created it yourself or not, so it will take a more than a minute to fix it!  

For our purposes today, take a look at one area of your life from the journaling you did last week. Until you understand the process you need to go through, I'd like you to choose just one thing from your list that you'd like to work on.  You can make it one of the easier items, just to give this a try!  

  

To begin, I want you to remember that we are all just energy.  Everything is energy.   Good and bad, pretty and ugly, it's just energy that we are dealing with. And as energy,  we attract common energy. If you operate at a high level of energy,  you attract back to yourself a high level of energy.   And if you live your life in negative energy,  you attract that back as well.  So here's the big question.  What kind of energy do you want in your life?  

The first, quick answer that we all give is of course, I want the GOOD energy.  But it's not quite that simple. To only entertain good, high-level energy in your life, there are things you will have to give up. Things like the ongoing pity party.  The comfort in doing things the way you always have, even when you know you'll get more of the same results.  The bad habits that you have developed over the years that perpetuate the results you're getting in your life.  

I remember working with a client on making her life better and more positive.  We worked for a few weeks on actions that she could take to feel better every day about her situation.  Each week she would report back that she had done the work I requested, focused on her mindset and had truly been feeling better.  Then at the four week mark, we began talking and examining how she was doing and how proud she was of herself for creating her own happiness.  She truly was happy, she told me. Then she said to me, "I want to talk about when I was at my worst."  I asked her why she felt the need to rehash the worst time in her life, to see if there would be some value in it and she said, "I just want to remember where I started."  She then went into along talk about how terrible things were for her, how hard it was to be in her situation, how hard it was to have the time she needed to make friends and enjoy herself, how hard it was to feel good each day.  How every day she woke up with a feeling of dread and just wanted to stay in bed all day.   Down, down, down, down.  Until I made her stop. Guess what she had done?  She had brought herself right back into a state of misery, and why? Because that's where she was comfortable.  She was miserable, but comfortable because that's how things had always been for her. It took a few more weeks of work, but she finally did get the point. She needed to talk about the progress she was making, not the misery of the past.  The progress is what made her feel proud of herself and empowered.  I'm telling you this as an example of what you may need to give up in order to move forward.  All of that past junk has got to go!  

This is going to be a new start for you and if you are consistent about managing your mindset, you'll find it quite enjoyable.  Here is where I would like you to start:

1.  Choose one of thing from your work last week that you would like to change, repair or say goodbye to.  Write it down.

2.  Ask this question:  In a perfect world, where nothing stands in your way, not money, time, location, NOTHING, what would that situation look like?  If you could wave a magic wand and recreate a situation that is occurring in your life, what would it look like?

3.  Spend some time quietly deciding what it would be like if this issue were to disappear for you right now.  Visualize what your life would be like if it were perfect.  Be very clear in your visualization.  If it helps you, write it down.  Describe the situation as being fixed - turned into exactly what you want it to be.  What would it look like instead of how it looks now?  Write down a few words that describe the new situation.  

4.  Still visualizing in great detail, how do you feel, now that things are great?  Do you feel happy, free, light-hearted, calm, confident, etc.  Find just three or four words that make you feel tickled inside.  Keep visualizing and really FEEL the goodness that has come from the change.  

5.  Come back in from your visualization and focus on your list of words that made you feel great.

Write down two or three things that you can do RIGHT NOW to continue feeling this way.  They can be small things, but what can you change now?

EXAMPLE:  

1.  I need to get along better with my coworkers.  I'm tired of the pettiness and attitude that they have and I have.

2.  In a perfect world, I would come to work, feel good because I want to accomplish something today, feel happy to be there and know that I'm doing the best that I can, and earning my paycheck every day.  In a perfect world, I'd laugh a lot at work, and find someone to go to lunch with so feels more sociable and comfortable.  Celebrate my successes!

3.  If the drama at work were to go away, I'd have a friend or two there.  I'd hang out with the friendly people at lunch.  I'd feel a sense of teamwork because my great attitude would be contagious and others would begin to feel happy, too.  I'd feel confident, because I would know I'm the one who fixed the situation.

4.  Now that I see things as fixed, I feel confident.  I feel happy.  I feel excited because I can accomplish more at work.  People are now taking me more seriously, so I feel accomplished in what I do.   My words:   CONFIDENT.  HAPPY.  EXCITED.  ACCOMPLISHED.

5.  What can I do right now to begin feeling this way?  I'm going to listen to some good music on my way to work, which will make me HAPPY.  I'm going to focus ONLY on my task at hand at work so I can get things done and feel ACCOMPLISHED.  I'm going to reach out to one of my coworkers and see if she'll go to lunch with me and when she says yes, I'll feel EXCITED.   At the end of my day, I'll feel CONFIDENT because I made it a point to manage my own attitude and actions and created the feelings I want to feel at work.  

That's the Secret Sauce.  Knowing that although you cannot change the people around you, you can change how you react to them, as well as your own attitude toward them and toward how you operate and act.  

The big take away from this is:  You are EMPOWERED.  You get to CHOOSE what your situation looks like.  You get to CHOOSE how you react to any given moment or incident.  You get to CHOOSE to react, or walk away.  When you CHOOSE to be happy and manage your own feelings and attitude, more and more of those feelings will come back to you until it becomes who you are!

Remembering that everything is energy, when you control your energy and use your power to focus on the good and walk away from the drama, you attract more and more of the good into your life. After a little while, good is all you have, because you've attracted so much goodness, there is no room for negativity!  

Just try it out.  Even if you need to choose something tiny, try it out.  I promise that you'll feel better and better as they days go by.  

Leave me a comment below and let me know what you think!

Love,

Donna

And if you'd like to have these posts sent directly to your inbox, please enter your email address to the right.  If you'd like more info about how to work with me, please email me at CuratedDonna@gmail.com.

Clarity is Power!

We've all heard it before.  The Tony Robbins quote, "Clarity is Power!"

We've heard it again and again because it's true. It's just logical.  How can we make educated, empowered decisions if we are not clear on where we are and what we want?  The honest truth is, we can't.  We can't make a change if we don't know what we truly desire.  We can rant and rave about what our lives look like.  We can bitch and moan and complain and blame, but if we haven't done the work to get clear on what we truly desire, we're just making noise.  Annoying noise!

But chin up, my little cupcake!  Getting clear is easier than you may think.  I am writing about this because it is the very first step in creating the life of your dreams.

The first thing I am going to ask you to do is to spend some time internalizing this concept of getting clear.  Not forever, but just a bit of time.

Examine the places in your life where you find yourself complaining or feeling uncomfortable, unproductive, unhappy - or any other "un" you my have.  Look at the times during your day to day life where you find yourself shaking your head, rolling your eyes or feeling defeated.  When you take the time to look around at your life and examine those places that didn't turn out exactly the way you wanted, you may be surprised at how many areas there are!  But don't be unhappy about it!  You're about to turn it all around!

So what am I really asking you to do?  Yes!  I am asking you to throw yourself a pity party.  Wine or Champagne, or the beverage of your choice is highly recommended.  Also recommended is a bit of solitude.  Go through this exercise when you have some time alone.  Your pity party must be a solo experience.  Get out a journal or notebook, or just a piece of paper.   Write down the date and just brain dump your way through this.

I really hope that you will take this first step seriously.  This is where the good stuff, the magical moments, will happen for you.  This is where you'll find all of the areas of your life that are missing the secret sauce or fairy dust required to get the ball rolling!  When you identify places that need some work, help, redesigning or otherwise fixing, you'll begin to feel a little bit better about your life.   Believe it or not,  just knowing which areas need work will provide you with some clarity.  

Don't worry about how you're going to fix your 'not so happy' places.   This exercise is about identifying those pesky trouble spots.  In next week's blog, we're going to mix up your personal secret sauce.  I'll show you how to create your own recipe that will allow you to curate, tweak, bend and push your life into the direction you have been longing for.

For now, bring all of your baggage to the front. Now is the time to allow all of your feelings to present themselves.  Remember, it's just you, me and your journal and we're going to have a nice bond fire of celebration once this is all over and you'll be able to throw that journal into the fire and bid it farewell forever!

No one else should know about your journal, so be sure to keep it well hidden while you go through this process.  Don't worry about grammar, punctuation or spelling.  We're going to be dealing with raw emotions and feelings, not poetry.  So scribble, draw, write and brain dump everything that comes to you.  Think of it as a mental bath!  You'll be cleansing all of that old gunk out of there so that you'll be free to dream, build, create and curate your way to joy, happiness, and freedom from the past!

Oh!  All of that nasty guilt and shame that might come up for you - since we all have it - consider it soon to be gone!   This mental bath you are about to take is going to wash it right out of your pretty little head.  After all, 90% of it was created by you in the first place.  You have every right, as well as the power, to kick it to the curb.  And then you'll use all of that newly cleaned space for creating and curating your beautiful life!

Here are the life areas I want you to consider during this process:

Your overall happiness.  Day to day peace and contentment.
Family.
Geography.  Do you love where you are?
Career.  Are you fulfilled by your job?
Daily habits.  How do you live?
Health.
Your past lives.  Marriages, relationships, decisions, mistakes, regrets.
What excites you each day?
Is there something that makes you jump out of bed each morning?

PLEASE PLEASE do not try to do this exercise without writing about it.  When you write it down, you can make a plan to fix it.  If it's just a thought, it's just a thought.  Fleeting and flying around.

I'm going to leave you with this thought:

There is NOTHING in your life that you can't feel better about.  Next week, we'll dive into some steps to begin the necessary work that will create a path for you!

If you have questions or comments, please leave them below for me!  Or email me directly at
curateddonna@gmail.com.

Cheers to your discoveries!!

Donna

Going Through the Baggage!

You know that baggage we are all carrying around with us?  The baggage that we know - secretly - we're going to have to deal with at some point or other?  Let's bring that suitcase out into the living room for a little while, ok?  I'll show you some of what was in mine!

For many people, the baggage I'm speaking of is inside a gorgeous piece of Gucci Luggage.  It's where your most heartfelt desires are buried.  It can also hold your most hidden moments of fear and regret.  For me, it was in my pink Rimowa carry on.

I want to share with you a bit of my baggage story.  I grew up in a very religious family.  We were allowed to sing and dance, thank goodness, but there were things we could not do.  For instance, we couldn't participate in any school activities.  We kept a Saturday Sabbath, which meant that we had to be home and settled in by sunset every Friday night until sunset Saturday night.  We also were not allowed to wear makeup for the first ten years or so of finding our religion.  Then they started changing the rules.  But before they changed the makeup rule, we were told that God made us beautiful enough exactly the way we were.   No enhancement necessary.  Not true, by the way.  I love God, but I think this was an oversight while he was trying to manage Adam's libido.

Anyway, back to my Rimowa.  In this bag, was a marriage and a divorce at age 21.  No one other than my family and closest friends knows about this and I hope you don't mind that I share it with you.

I buried that situation so deeply that I almost convinced myself that it didn't happen.  Almost. Denial was my friend for many years, but once I allowed myself to give the situation more thought, I realized that I needed to deeply examine a few things:

1.  What was it that drove me to need a husband at that young age?
2.  Why was I so sure I knew that I was doing the right thing by marrying him after only 6 months?
3.  When exactly did I give up on the marriage?
4.  Why, oh why did I think that I could get divorced with no push back from my family?

What I realized - approximately twenty years later - was that I was brought up to believe I needed a husband.  Not that it would be a joyful experience, but that I NEEDED one to survive.  I thought I'd never be able to take care of myself, so I had better hurry up and find one!  Mission accomplished!
Sort of.

Since we were both very young, and pretty stupid about the whole subject, it all fell apart very quickly.  He didn't know that I was so insecure and I didn't know that he enjoyed constant social drug usage with his odd ball group of friends who remained friends since kindergarten.  I was definitely the outsider in this marriage.

I know that his parents were happy when the marriage ended.  I never felt like I was good enough for them.  Of course now, I know that was all in my head.  But...

Then the push back came.  From my mother.  I was very upset that the marriage was ending, so I called my mother to talk to her about it.  Immediately, she reminded me that no one in our family had ever been divorced.  She told me she didn't want anything to do with me and to never call her again. Ahhh, motherly love!  She then hung up on me.  Of course, I was pretty hysterical and called her back.  This time she told me I was no longer a part of this family, and hung up again.

Let me remind you that I was a very young 21.  I was an overly sheltered girl who believed she needed a man so that she could survive.  I would never be able to support myself.  God would never approve of me.  And now I had no family.  Nice, right?

But as always happens, time passed and I became more comfortable being alone.  I had friends from work with whom I celebrated Holidays.  I had girlfriends to go to lunch with.  I had a pretty demanding job - which paid me $11,000 per year.  Yes, year.  I was comfortable living on Ramen noodles, Campbell's Soup and pretzels.  Yum!  I also found out, after some time had passed, that my father never knew that my mother had done that.  He traveled a lot for work and just thought that the reason he hadn't seem me was that I was as busy as he was.

So now that I've shared this sob story with you, you might understand a little more about my life and how I've chosen to live it.  Let me just add one more thing about Donna at age 21.  Back then, you would never have known that there was any sort of problem in my life.  I had buried it all very deeply as quickly as I could.  I told myself it was a do-over.  And it was.  Sort of.

What I actually needed to do, and eventually did, was spend an entire weekend alone just remembering and reviewing what had happened back then.  It wasn't until I did this that I realized that the whole event was the first step toward STRENGTH for me.  Of course, I was seriously pissed off when I put two and two together and recognized that I was set up to fail by my upbringing.  But my parents did the best they could with the tools and knowledge that they had at that time.

By opening up my Rimowa carry on, I was able to examine all of the facts - from an adult, less emotional place.  I went over exactly what had happened and why it happened.  I reviewed how I felt as the situation was unfolding and recognized how easily I allowed my mother to effect my emotional state.  I was able to look at what I could have done differently, which enabled me to see that I had some control over the situation.  Although I didn't recognize it at the time.

Knowing that I had control over any of this, created a sense of empowerment over this and other situations that may confront me in the future.  And I felt ready.  I felt I could defend myself and my actions if necessary.  I felt I could trust my own future choices.  But I must admit to you that my insecurities didn't end right here.  On the contrary.  It has been a long journey of decisions, mistakes, regrets, more decisions to regret - I'll fill you in on the rest at some point.

For now, I had uncovered the Beauty, Brains and Brilliance of the situation.  The Golden Nugget so to speak.  From a soul-crushing shunning from my mother, to a feeling of empowerment over my next confrontation, whatever that might be, I learned to feel more confident.

The moral of this story is this:  Dig through your past.  Every second of it.  Sit with it, cry over it, and hunt for the positive lesson that you can take away from it.  When you begin to focus on the positive lesson rather than the negative experience, you will have successfully added a level to your self-esteem.

Each time you add another level to your self-esteem, your are moving yourself forward toward becoming your most brilliant self.  Those levels are going to be baby steps, one after another, after another, after another.  And you will LOVE the new you!

Thank you for reading my step one.   Leave me a comment below and let me know what your step one is or was or is going to be!

With Love,

Donna

Welcome, my friends! Here is where it all starts...

Hello and Welcome to The Carefully Curated Life!

I thought for my first blog post, I'd share with you a bit of me:  What I'm all about.  This will give you a basic look into what to expect from this blog and from MOI!

I love high-end everything.  There.  I've said it.  Wine.  Shoes.  Handbags.  Makeup.  Kitchen appliances.  All high-end.  All of it.  I love to travel First Class, although I only do it if I get a great deal.  It feels so good to have said all of this!

I think that as women,  everything in our lives should be as calm and as elegant as possible.  Of course, that may mean something very different for me than it does for you.  But I stand by my statement.  Whatever elegance means to you, I think you deserve to have it in your life.  That's right. You deserve it.  We all deserve it. 

I believe that everyone can have pretty much anything they want in their lives - once they choose to make it a priority.  What we focus on will always grow.  So as soon as we stop focusing on the lack in our lives, and begin to focus on what we desire, we will find those desires growing and manifesting and coming true!  

I am also a 'less is more' sort of woman.  I am learning to combine my love of luxury with a life of minimalism.  It isn't as contradictory as it may sound.  I'm finding that as I remove the clutter and the "junk" from my life, what I have left is a life full of the high-end pieces and items that truly make me happy. The more I surround myself with only the items that I love, the more fulfilling my life becomes!  

It is definitely a journey.  I began my decluttering process along with my carefully curating process a few months ago and I'm starting to see a big difference in the feel of my home.  The more I see the things I love all around me, the more I see a difference in the way I feel day to day.  A beautiful, cleansing feeling comes to us when we start to rid our lives of the things that no longer represent who we have chosen to become!  And this decluttering process is an extremely effective way to begin this new journey of growth.  You'll read a great deal more on this concept in upcoming posts.  

Being a woman who grew up in Pittsburgh, PA, in a middle class, hard working family, it took a while for me to realize that I had a passion for luxury and a deep appreciation for the high-end.  Once I realized this, and saw that there was no good reason that everyone couldn't have access to a beautiful life, things began to get very exciting for me.  

When the lightbulb went on over my head, it all suddenly made sense to me.   One great handbag rather than 6 cheap ones.  One or two glasses of Veuve Clicquot Champagne rather than an entire bottle of the $7 bubbly.  A small amount of Godiva Chocolate rather than two candy bars.  Wow!  I felt great!!!  Saving up from two paychecks to purchase a Chanel Powder rather than impulse purchasing the $3 powder at the grocery store.  That Chanel powder was my very first high-end purchase.  I was 18 years old and my Mum thought I was insane.  It made perfect sense to me!  

As I grew up and learned more about life, I realized that part of my journey to all things luxe meant dealing with the people who were closest to me.   My parents wondered where I came from.  My brothers thought I was the biggest snob in the world.  It's all ok now.  They love me for who I am and occasionally seek out my opinion on things!  

But please don't misunderstand me.  I am not a snob.  Not even a little bit.  I have always been supremely grateful for everything I have and everything I learn.  The last thing in the world I am is better than anyone else.  Far from it.  I just learned what I love.  And I share it generously with everyone around me.  

So.  While I am being all of these things:

Pittsburgh girl

Dallas girl

Luxe aficionado

Minimalist

...and more...

I'm also a Certified Master Life Coach, a student of several mentors, the creator of several day planners and the author of one fun self discovery book.  There will be more blog posts, more writing and another book coming soon, but for now I'll leave you with this:

Take exquisite care of yourself, both physically and emotionally.  Figure out what you love and surround yourself with it.  And for God's sake, upgrade to First Class.  You deserve it.

With love,

Donna