As the year draws to a close I am reflecting on things, as I think we tend to do. I expect 2015 to be my best year so far. In order for that to come to fruition, I know that reflection and correction are critical.

One of the things that I have realized is that in the past I have lied. I have lied a lot. I like to think that it was only when I was a kid. Or only as a young adult. Or certainly before I “woke up” a few years ago. Sadly, that isn’t really the case. I catch myself in lies even now.

The lie has one purpose. Self-protection. Well, without getting into a full spiritual discussion of lies and why they are there and where they originate, suffice it to say that the goal of self-protection is the core of why we buy into the lie. We lie to get our way. We lie to avoid conflict. We lie to protect others and thus ourselves. We lie to make ourselves look better. We lie to keep from doing the work.

This self-protection, however, is really a big myth. It is a big lie! Lying ends up harming more than helping. And the Truth shall set you free.

The mechanism of lying isn’t reserved for the school playground nor is it usually a boldfaced untruth we are telling someone else. The most prevalent lies are the ones we accept for ourselves or even tell ourselves. There isn’t enough. I made a mistake so I call myself a dummy. My results show that I am a fraud and my past successful performance was a fluke. I have lost my mojo. My abs should look better and when they do then everything will be great. I am gonna fix that next year.

Awareness is the beginning of correction. What are the lies you have been believing or even telling yourself? Love yourself enough to dig deep and look. Love yourself enough to find them, forgive yourself for them and then release them. This is a continual process as your awareness expands. But doing the work will improve your life in a way that is unprecedented for you. My great pleasure is in helping people see and do their work.

We are counting down to the very last days of the year. For most of us, it is a very busy time of year with the holidays and extra activities such as parties and gift-shopping and decorating and cooking. For those of us who are also executives, it brings another whole layer of activity and perhaps stress. For anyone facing the end of the Fiscal Year and/or the end of the Quarter, this is crunch time.

If one has planned properly and prepared, hopefully it is not an issue because you made your numbers and commitments weeks if not months ago. But even if you have, there is still that pressure to do even more.

So how do you deal with that? How do you get it all done? What do you compromise in order to do all that you need to do? Oftentimes, it is the very thing that will sustain us that we let go. Our routine of eating well, exercising and writing, for instance. We cut corners. We deserve to pick up takeout because we are exhausted and don’t have time. We eat the takeout and then suddenly don’t feel like working out. We become more lethargic and want to watch TV to unwind. We sleep later or have other things we must do so we skip our morning routine, the one we have worked so hard to make habit.

All of these are very normal responses to stress and added responsibilities. They also are some of the worst coping mechanisms that we can employ as far as our real goals are concerned. The lovingME way says, what does my body really need? What is going to be the best for me long term? How is this food going to affect me tomorrow or the day after? What do I really want here, in the end?

We all have lapses. We all want to and should treat ourselves from time to time. My caution is to do so with full awareness. Go into it knowing that doing X now will likely cost Y later. If you then choose to pay Y anyway, then that is great. Savor every bite, every minute, every facet of it. But if you simply go with the crowd and blindly do what others are doing, then whose life are you living? Be true to who you are not who you have been.

Have you ever thought, “What do I want specifically?” I mean not just what will I be okay with, what would be nice in general but really put some time in to determine what exactly it is that you want?

I am sure you have. When you were a kid you did it all the time. You would, especially at this time of year, get your turn with the Sears Wish Book and you would dream away about the things in there that you wanted. You would think about how you would use them and envision yourself playing with them. You also would, if you were like me, prioritize them. In our house it was instilled in us at a young age that there was a finite amount of everything and one mustn’t ask for too much. One must prioritize and budget. Those are worthy ideas in some ways. However, when it comes to imagination and getting clear on what it is that you actually want, they are real buzz kills. We have to let go of those voices in order to really hear ourselves speak from the heart. Current budget and limits of any form hinder creative thinking like walls in a courtyard. It is your imagination, set it free! By definition it is play and so there are no limits!

You see, if you cannot imagine having something, the likelihood of actually obtaining that something is very low. Simply imagining it does not guarantee that you will get it but it sure goes a long way toward it. How about some productive daydreaming today? Ask yourself what you really want and then experience that thing in your mind with as much detail as possible. You are now closer to having it.

I realize I have been letting my mind let me down. I am changing the way I think and sometimes in that process there are some casualties. When you move away from old paradigms that no longer serve you, there will be collateral damage if you are not careful.

My issue is that in moving away from a paradigm in my life, I painted with too broad a brush. I forgot that I still live in two worlds, as an employee as well as a business owner. I am not totally free to do things my way in my role as employee. I have a great deal of autonomy which can make it trickier but because I am still an employee, I really should be doing things as my employer would have me do them, and not as independently as I had been. I can learn from this and put my twist on it but I am still playing by their rules. The great thing is that I am aware of this, of the paradigm, and now I can, as an actor, play my role according to the way the part is written and I can observe and learn. I needn’t get caught up in the paradigm because it is not mine any more than an actor’s life is that of the part he is playing.

How freeing! Just as an actor brings part of himself to the role and makes it his own, I too bring myself to my role. But I must never forget that I am playing a role in someone else’s play. At the same time, I am also writing and directing and starring in my own.

My brother passed away last year. He had aggressive tongue cancer and he battled it bravely for nearly two years. In the final months, he told me something that blew me away. He said he always knew he would die young. A student of thinking and speaking I was horrified that he would say that. Actually by this time he could no longer speak but he typed it on the tablet my sister bought him so that he could communicate. I asked him why on earth would he say that. He typed simply, “because of the way I lived.”

It broke my heart to hear him say it like that. I also wondered if it was the chicken or the egg. Did he live the way he did because he thought he would die young so it didn’t matter or did his thoughts of dying young make him live in a way that would bring it to pass?

This has been an amazing gift he has given me. A legacy he has left. It is awareness. Awareness of how important and how interconnected our lifestyle and thoughts are. He is a part of what I bring to my work with my clients. And we are all better for it.

I love my name. I am not sure I could always say that. There was a time I tried on Susan for a couple years when we moved to Beavercreek, Ohio when I was in Junior High. I thought I needed to be more sophisticated now that I was an adult. Or nearly an adult. I changed it right back when we moved two years later.

When we got married, I knew I wouldn’t take my husband’s name. I was Susie Franscini after all and everyone at work knew me by that and I had a business reputation in that name, blah, blah, blah. So I kept just my maiden name at work and on my official paperwork. I did change my driver’s license. It was fun to see coworkers at the airport wondering about Mrs. Davis.

When I was broken and separated but knew what a mistake I had made, I realized that I was Mrs. Davis. I wanted to be Mrs. Davis. I was sorry that I hadn’t fully embraced his name and how that must have, at some level he never showed, hurt him.

So I became Susie Davis. During that time, I worked hard to throw out all that had been Susie Franscini. Her hard driving, type A overachiever control-freak ways. I left all of that behind. But that didn’t really fit either. There are also a whole lot of ladies named Susie Davis and I respect them too much to add to the pool unnecessarily. ☺

I began to realize that, wait, there was a lot of good in Susie Franscini. She had a way about her and a tremendous amount of positives to offer. So I welcomed all of it back in, this time much more aware of what I didn’t want and what I did. I realized and learned to begin to see what was just fear or insecurity driving good qualities into not so good qualities. I learned that with awareness and choice, I can funnel the qualities more and more in my desired direction.

So now I am and embrace all that is Susie Franscini Davis. And yes, it is ridiculously long and too many syllables. I get that. I also love that and the fact that it is different. I love that it breaks some rules. It is me.

I am up and I am writing as I do every day. I also am still battling some stomach bug. I feel well-rested and much better than yesterday but it would be easy to blow off my early morning routine. Except that now it is habit. It is a pretty strong habit, thankfully.

It is hard to describe how important habits are in our lives. I only relatively recently discovered their power and consciously set about to change mine. Once I realized that so much of human behavior is habit, I no longer wanted the vast majority of mine to be driven by conscious or more likely unconscious choices I made years and years ago. So I decided to change mine. It was small and slow at first. Mostly just becoming more aware of the habits I already had and identifying those I wanted to change. I added a few things and I was able to build on those. I also looked for a lynchpin habit that was really the key to changing a host of other habits.

A lynchpin habit is one that a whole group of other habits rests upon or tag along with. Breaking that one habit leads to major gains in breaking the habits that tend to group with that. For me, sleeping late was a key factor. When I slept late I had to rush to get to work and be focused. I couldn’t even consider working out first thing so I had to make sure that I had energy and drive to do so at the end of the day. For years I paid a personal trainer and that worked to get me to the gym and his coaching made sure I worked out and worked out hard, whether or not I had energy at the ready. When I slept late, I had little time, energy or desire to think about or do anything other than what was on my must-do list. Most often, as I have discussed, about 90 percent of my must-do was driven by outside influences, not by my conscious decision to move me toward my destiny. I never really even had time, energy or desire to look into what it is that I wanted.

I was in the habit of working (a lot), working out, traveling (usually for work) and sleeping. Perhaps you can relate. I still do every one of those things, better than I did before, in fact. But now, my time and big goals are on my radar at all times. Focusing on them and how everything else fits in has become habit. I love that I get to help others make this happen in their own lives, for that is my calling.

I rarely get ill anymore. I used to have sinus infections and migraines and all sorts of nagging issues. As I began to love myself and treat myself well, actually trusting my body to heal itself and to show me what it needs, those things went away. I learned how to manage stress better and now I don’t really have as much since I learned how to think better.

So today is a very unusual day. I feel like poo. I won’t go into gory details but I know that this is not right and my body is telling me something is awry. Now is time to listen to it and give it what it needs. Right now it is saying I would like a hot bath, please. So that is what it will get.

We essentially have two weeks left in the year. Sure, it is actually three but in many businesses, that week between Christmas and New Years is not so conducive to getting a lot of people together. I believe that this is a good thing. People need time off and need time with their families. We need to reflect on our year and on our blessings and to really examine our beliefs and expectations.

That being said, the end of the year can add a lot of pressure to an executive’s life if the thinking, planning and preparation haven’t been sufficient to finish the year strong. You see we can do a whole lot to manage to this. I used to get on everyone else’s agenda and process. Then, I became a hard driving, you gotta do it today not tomorrow, please do this for me as a favor, assertive salesperson. I did very well with that, actually. People are amazingly kind and like to feel like they are helping both you and themselves at the same time. They were, because they were often getting better pricing or a guarantee on the schedule or some other benefit to moving forward now.

Now, more than ever, I want people to do what they truly believe is going to be best for them and for their organization. I want them to be comfortable but stretched beyond the norm and fully committed to their decision. Only then will they really do well in the end. If they are doing something under duress or because someone “sold” them on doing it before they are really ready, that ultimately serves no one.

However, sometimes people need another reason or perhaps permission to move forward and stop procrastinating. There is always a reason to wait. There just is. There can be a hundred more behind it. The question is pretty simple, like I said to a strong, sassy, wonderful businesswoman yesterday, “Do you believe this is the right thing for you and your organization?” If the answer is yes, then why wait? Really waiting serves no purpose if the decision has been made. Timing and scheduling can all be worked out, the money will be found perhaps in creative new solutions, and the team will come together under strong leadership, if someone really wants to move forward.

So, I am bold and point out the facts. If you really need more information in order to make a decision then by all means, take your time and do that. But if you were convinced weeks or months ago, you have known in your gut, and have just been stalling, it is fear and procrastination stopping you again and you have to step out in courage. You are worth it.

I encourage you to be bolder and to follow your instincts more fully and more quickly. I know that is easier said than done when you see a finite pool of resources, but you would be amazed at what happens when you act as if it is infinite. It is the difference between walking a straight line on pavement and walking a tightrope 100 feet in the air. It is all in the mind and your results will prove it out, either way.

I have a certain set of beliefs. I know that some of those beliefs are no longer serving me. These are things that I have thought were true and have spent my life gathering evidence that they are true. You have to work hard at a job to secure a good living is one of those beliefs.

Our brains are amazing organs that can help us sift through the millions of data points coming in at all times. The consequence of this is that much of what we are taking in with just our five senses is not being delivered up to our consciousness. So my unconscious mind is registering millions of things right now but only when I place my consciousness on something do I really notice. There was a famous experiment where the test subjects wore goggles that would turn everything upside down for the wearer. For a period, the test subjects became disoriented and ill from seeing everything upside down. However, within a number of days, every person’s brain had auto-corrected for the glasses and again showed the world as “expected” which is right side up.

What a fascinating experiment. I recall learning about it in college, many years ago and thinking hmmm interesting. Only recently have I begun to question what this study really means and the ramifications of it. If our brain is auto-correcting what we see and experience to what is expected, what does that say for our lives? What are we expecting to see that we are seeing because our brain has the instruction that this is how it is?

Back to my old belief that you have to work hard at a job to earn a living, what is the reality of that? How many examples of this has my brain been finding for me all of these years, because that is the instruction? How many examples of people who are wildly successful doing what they love has my brain filtered out because that is “upside down”?

The wonderful thing is that with awareness, as my mentor Bill Harris says, comes choice. I can now choose to actively seek out examples that align with my chosen new belief and I can continue to reinforce those until my brain takes over and shows me automatically those cases that fit the new belief and discards the others. Fabulous!

If you need some assistance understanding this in your own life or want some guidance toward awareness and are ready to address some of your old beliefs, I am at your service.