My Journey

Early Years

I grew up in church. I’ve been ‘saved’ ever since I can remember. I have vague memories in early grade school of answering the “if you want to receive Jesus or just rededicate and make sure” call to come forward.

Church was a regular part of life that I took for granted, without thinking about it until everything changed in 6th grade.

Growing up in Kansas City we’d get anywhere from 0 to 4 or 5 good snows each winter and they weren’t often thick enough for sledding, so when we got a good snow it was a big deal. But I can’t really remember the sledding. All I remember is the last time we headed out to go sledding, and I never made it there.

I was sitting ‘shotgun’ in the front seat, my brother and neighborhood playmate were in the back seat. We stopped at one of two stop lights that were on the way to the park with the great sledding hill. As the light turned green my dad looked up and started to go and I looked over and saw that this lady in a van was running the red light and was going to hit us. I instinctively folded my arms over my chest and ducked my head, and boom, crash.

I woke up a second later in the car, pushed up against the far left side of the intersection. My door was smashed in, my dad was checking to see if I was ok. Apparently I seemed fine, but then I started to move and realized my shoulder hurt, bad.

I remember asking my dad what was taking so long and he said the ambulance was on its way, but was taking a bit because the first report that went out said no one was hurt.

It turned out all I broke was a collarbone. And while that was a painful injury with what felt for a 10 year old to be a painstakingly slow and annoying 8-12 week recovery, it was also a miracle.

I distinctly remember them telling me that if the van, which impacted the car near my feet, had been a foot closer to me that I could have been in a body cast.

I remember simultaneously not being able to truly process what that meant – body cast? what did that even mean? what did that look like? – and knowing without a shadow of a doubt that something had saved me and that I was here for a reason. I walked away from that accident with a sense of calling and destiny that I’ve never been able to escape.

But it took 20+ years to make sense of it. I set off on a personal quest for meaning in the only source I knew – the bible. I found a copy of Haley’s Bible handbook in our house, and I remember sitting in our sunroom in the summer between 6th and 7th grade, reading it, and then reading the Bible, and then reading the handbook again. I set out to read the Bible and understand it.

And not just the Gospels and Genesis. I read Numbers, and Leviticus, and the minor prophets, referring to the handbook when I didn’t understand something.

Bible Quizzing

In 8th grade I visited a Nazarene church with a mission friend who was home on furlough and discovered Bible quizzing. So cool, I was hooked.

It was April and there were only two months and a few quiz meets left in the year. I went home and memorized as many as I could of the dedicated 100 memory verses that there would recitation questions about.

The following year I memorized all of them. And when I won the jump I knew the answers to the question 95% of the time. I started memorizing whole chapters. We went to regionals and nationals and won trophies. It was a lot of fun.

Senior year came and it was time to go to college. I almost went to MidAmerica Nazarene University in Kansas City, but my parents convinced me to visit Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, and I really felt the presence of God there, somehow I knew that was where I was supposed to be.

I absolutely loved my four years there, and I remember talking to the career guidance counselor freshman year about picking a major and telling him I wanted to teach and he said there were two tracks. I could get a degree in education and go that route or I could pick a topic and take it all the way to a doctorate and then teach it at the graduate level.

Getting My Degrees

I decided to go deep. Now I just need a topic. Some good friends of our family that I looked up to advised me to get a ‘tent making skill’. Many times over the years I’ve questioned my degrees and wished I would have listened to them. But at the time although I enjoyed everything I learned in school, church was my world. I felt drawn to whatever had the highest meaning about life in an ultimate sense. For me that was the Bible and I felt drawn to study it deeper.

I wanted to understand, to know, why I was here, why we here, what God was really telling us through the Bible.

So I picked New Testament as my major. I tried to minor in Youth Ministry or Psychology, but because of the classes ended up needing another option and ended up picking Old Testament. So I learned both Greek and Hebrew, and it was fascinating to learn to read the text and the terms in the original language, while also studying the accompanying culture.

Senior year I met my now-husband, and after graduation followed him home to Virginia Beach, Virginia to get my Masters degree at Regent University. They had the degree I was looking for, not the typical 60 hour MA or the practical ministry track, but the 72 hour Pre-Doctoral academic track. Yep, that’s for me, because I am so serious about this. I started my studies in Virginia in Jan 2006.

In 2007 we got engaged, Charles graduated and found a full time webmaster job at the School of Divinity where I was still a student, and we got married in the fall. I took the spring semester off and then resumed my studies, finishing in May of 2009.

In the fall and winter of 2008 I came to a fork in the road. I was preparing to graduate, which raised the question, what next? Was I getting my doctorate? Where? How?

That Christmas we had a really special time with extended family and I remember coming away from that holiday with an impression having been left on me. Something touched my heart, changing my priorities. I had only applied to a few, hard-to-get-into doctoral programs, and when the letters came back negative, it felt right.

Having Kids

I felt in my heart that it was time to start a family, and then see where we went from there. I graduated in May, started looking for a job to help pay back student loans, and found one building websites for a small real estate team. We started trying and I got pregnant in Aug. I worked in the office full time for 9 months and then after my son was born they let me switch to working part time, mostly from home.

One night that summer right before I found out I was pregnant, I woke up from the only dream I’ve ever had that impacted me this way. In my dream I had seen a boy and he and I had this special bond, and then I woke up and found myself crying from a real sense of loss. Because it felt so real and meaningful, when I woke I felt I had lost something I was meant to have. A week or two later I found out I was pregnant and then I was at peace because I knew God had shown me my son. I told my friends and family that I knew it was boy, and didn’t even think about names for the first kid because I knew my husband had always wanted to name his first son after himself, and his father. And I knew we were having a boy. That’s the only time in my whole life up to this point that I’ve ever had a dream like that. Usually I don’t even remember them at all.

Searching

During my years in college and grad school I always felt a bit restless, like I was searching for something I could never find. I got used to this feeling, it was a constant companion that never went away. 

Until I got pregnant for the first time.  

Being pregnant filled me with this incredible peace that I was where I was supposed to be and doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing. I think the dream really contributed to me being able to be in that place during my first pregnancy. 

That restless feeling went away for 8 years. I spent those years working from home and raising kids. We had another boy in 2011, and another in 2014 and then got surprised with a final fourth in 2016, while debating whether to have 3 or 4 kids. But he is meant to be here, I see now how he completes us. Looking back I also see so much providence in his coming in 2016, helping me to keep my priorities on family at a pivotal time.

When he turned 6 months old and started sleeping through the night, I began to get back to normal, getting enough sleep and feeling more myself – as happens at some point for us after each baby. But this time that restless feeling came back.

I couldn’t shake it.

What now? What’s my purpose? What is the meaning of everything? What are we doing here? Isn’t there something more?

At the same time the feeling was more one of purpose and hope and curiosity. I knew so much more than last time. 

Me and my husband. Our four boys. Doing life together. Ok, what does that look like?

As my older boys had gotten into school, it became increasingly on my heart to research homeschooling and consider homeschooling our boys.

This would require leaving my job, and so I started reaching online business and other ways to work from home, with greater freedom and autonomy.

Early in my research, learning about homeschooling took an unexpected turn into personal growth and healing. 

What I found in a few early books I read helped shed incredible light on me, and why I was the way I was. It helped me see how being schooled had formed a large part of my identity. This set me on a course to ‘unschool’ myself and made me more determined to find a way to homeschool my boys.

Starting a Blog

I’ve always been a big reader, but I had slowed down quite a bit during those early child raising years. But now I was searching again and I was hungry so I read book after book about psychology, business, personal development, nutrition.

I started a blog in the Spring of 2017 called Energy for Moms and I shared about the books I was reading. I was increasingly not only restless, but truly unhappy and just feeling, stuck. You can see in my blog archives from the summer of 2017 where I talked about trying to read my way out of starting to feel depressed. After my second son I had been in a bad place emotionally for awhile and I wanted to keep from going back to that state of mind.

So I searched, and I learned, and I worked, and made dinner and changed diapers, and searched, and read. I took courses and learned strategy. I read books and worked on my mindset, and my attitude, and my patience. I took a blogging course, and recorded a couple of videos during that time, saying where I was at and where I wanted to be. It’s evident in my writing that I had a faint but solid glimmer of hope and resigned determination to just keep going forward.

I learned a lot about the blogging and the online world, but I hit a few roadblocks. I stopped writing. I rebranded to Energy for Mompreneurs. This felt a bit silly because I was not an entrepreneur yet, but that was the world I felt drawn to and I wanted to learn everything I could about it and figure out how to belong in it. As 2018 turned into 2019 I was switching my focus from writing and blogging to figuring out how women made money now, without building a reader base first.

 So I learned all about service-based solo entrepreneurs, I met a lot of other moms and saw what they based their businesses on. The biggest categories seemed to be virtual assistants, marketers, and coaches. I knew I had the potential to do any of those. I was encouraged by my options.

In all of my spare time from mid 2017 to mid 2018 I worked on ideas for my business. I talked to women online, did market research, learned how to diy my branding, looked at which of my skills were marketable, and made my first money from a small job for a friend.

The first half of 2018 was full of turmoil at work, and this combined with the culmination of my own journey brought me to a breaking point in August. 

By late summer 2018 I had set up two desks in my office, with two computers. One was for my job, and one was for my business. I would work the hours for my job at that desk, and then look for time to sit at my business desk and work on figuring out a plan that would carry me to the future I was envisioning. 

I remember two days in a row sitting at my computer desk for my job, and sitting there, making myself work and just sitting there crying through the process of getting simple tasks done.

That was when I knew it was time to make a change. My parents came in town for the weekend and at the end of their visit, on the way to the airport I finally told them where I was at, how I was feeling and what I wanted to do. My dad called the next day and offered to loan me some money as an extra emergency fund for my income. The next monday, Aug 27, I gave my company two weeks notice.

My last day was Sept 7, 2018. I had been there since Aug 3, 2009. Some of my friends thought I should just be grateful for a reliable job that paid well and let me work from home. But what had long been God’s provision and a perfect fit had become a toxic environment for me. And I see now that something in me had been awakened and I was being called forward into a new season.

It’s Saturday. Two of the boys spent the night at grandma’s. The third woke me up at 5am with bad dreams. The fourth, who is 3, crawled into our bed at 6:30am.

It’s been exhausting two weeks, a busy month, a crazy summer, and insanely unpredictable year of transition and change.

And all I can think is how grateful I am for all of it. For the boys, for this house, for a year of growth and change.

It’s been a year of change in two different and deeply meaningful senses. My husband lost his job the first week of January and we immediately decided to sell our house of 5 years and rent while he found a new job he could settle into. During the past 8 months we’ve lived in 3 places and each tried multiple jobs, or for me – business models. So it’s been a lot of physical change and shaking up of life.

The other year of change just ended in the traditional sense. On Aug 27, 2018 I gave my boss of 9 years my two weeks notice. I knew in my heart that it was time for me to move on to a new chapter, a new season of life. My goals were to prepare a way to start homeschooling our boys, and to give my husband greater career flexibility. I had just finished a year of research and networking and my plan was to start my own business.

My husband was suddenly let go due to downsizing, in Jan. He got a new job across town in April and we moved into a nearby rental house, taking the opportunity to start homeschooling.

In May he got a better job across town the other direction, this time near his parents and in the area we wanted to be in. While we gave him time to get settled in the job, we debated breaking our lease early, and whether to rent again or buy, while being told that the market was hot and it would be best to wait a while to buy. Meanwhile the kids and I were a bit cramped in our small white rental house. I remained incredibly grateful for it, but also starting to dream about a house in Chesapeake.

After only just starting to look at neighborhoods, mainly focusing on learning the traffic patterns of the area, looking for where our price range might coincide with a decent commute, I saved a few properties on zillow, and then got an email of a similar house, it was a FSBO that just came on the market that day, which was Aug 23. I called the seller the next day, we saw the house the following day, negotiated price the following week, ratified a contract, and set closing for Aug 30.

Despite the fact that neither of us were using an agent, everything went so smoothly that closing was moved up to Aug 27.

I woke up that day super excited about closing on the house, and then slowly realized it was exactly a year to the day since the day I had given my boss notice a year earlier.

This year has been full of miracles, and growth, a rekindling of hope, a rediscovering of faith, a stripping back of old layers of bad habits, old thinking.

I feel like I’ve come back home, and at the same time am starting a new season that feels like a whole new life. I have so much yet to learn and figure out, but I finally feel I am setting out on the right journey, that I’m headed down the right path.

I’m looking forward to sharing that journey with you, sharing what I’ve learned, where I’ve been, where I’m at, and discovering together where we are all headed as we make sense of this wonderful gift called life.

I think it’s incredibly powerful to slow down and question the purpose of everything, to be sure that you have your own intent behind the activities that you are doing.

I have begun including affiliate links for the books I mention. If you use them I may make a commission at no additional cost to you. I am so grateful for your support. Learn more here.

Hey beautiful,

Has your summer been restful so far? I love how the pace of everything has been slower, and I’ve been using the time to do a lot of soul searching. Unfortunately that usually leads to a lot of journaling and thinking, but less time writing and blogging. But I have been developing the habit of sharing small posts on Facebook.

I keep thinking I need to create a content schedule to help me get back on track with a regular posting schedule. But then I realize I am doing the foundational work of finding clarity about my identity and my mission and I’m finding that that just can’t be rushed.

If you’re finding yourself digging deeper into who you are and what you really want to do, I want to encourage you to embrace that process.

I think sometimes we have seasons in life where we wake up and realize we’ve been going through the motions, doing all the obligatory things, letting people and life just rush us along through everything.

I think it’s incredibly powerful to slow down and question the purpose of everything, to be sure that you have your own intent behind the activities that you are doing. And when you find yourself asking ‘why’, why am I even doing x or y or z, if you don’t find a satisfactory answer that lines up with your values and aligns with a fresh vision for your life, give yourself permission to stop doing those things.

Allow yourself to outgrow things that no longer serve who you’re becoming, or where you are in your life now. Sometimes even people, places and activities need to be downmoted in priority when you are deciding how to spend your time, money and energy.

And that’s okay.

With YouTube videos and online courses as a solid second, my favorite way by far to push myself forward in personal growth and finding my way in life, is to read books and capture my thoughts in my journal.

I’ve always prioritized non-fiction, personal development, spirituality, psychology, business. But recently I’ve heard several teachers and authors I respect encouraging us to also read fiction, biography, history, not just self-help. So I’m taking that seriously.

(And as soon as I decided to read some fiction, not knowing at all where to start, one of you recommended a book and offered to send me a copy. I’m accepting that my life is like that now. When you truly begin to seek and live in alignment with the goodness of the Universe and God’s divine purposes, and your own truth, when you are ready for the next thing, it just shows up. Our upcoming home purchase is a great example, I’ll be sharing that story in the facebook group soon.)

I’ve found that the right book always shows up next, whether it’s mentioned in a book I’m reading, shows up in amazon as similar to recent purchases, is recommended by a friend, or draws my attention when I’m browsing Barnes and Noble. I’ve come increasingly serious about paying attention and being open to what I might read next.

I started reading Mastery, by Robert Greene recently and he talks about how those who become great at something, go through the process of giving themselves a self-apprenticeship in a topic that captivates them. The way he talks about it makes me think of how James Hillman talks in The Soul’s Code about the way each of us has a soul that will draw us toward our destiny through interests that naturally and intrinsically fascinate and captivate us.

That’s been true for me with books and learning. I keep trying to find the common thread, the core topic that runs through all of the books and information that I love to read and share with you all.

I started out my membership focused on sharing from books, a book a week, in a methodical book-based way, but now that I’ve done that for a month, I found I needed to keep searching for a theme, something I could consistently speak to and be known for. Something that would organize my own thoughts and be a filter for what I share.

Through the books and authors and videos and personal life stories, whatever I might share, I want there to be a clear theme that I always help you with so that you know what you can always expect to get, and you can come check out my writing when you feel the need for that thing, and when friends are talking about that, you can recommend my stuff.

Way too many people are generalists, trying to cover too many topics. I’ve known that, and that I didn’t want to fall into the same trap. But it’s taken me years to dial down into my unique space, which I think is a testament to why so many don’t, because it is really hard. Steven Pressfield says in Do the Work, that when you ask yourself that simple, clear question of your work, “what is this really about”, he says that is the thorniest nut to crack.

My Core Theme

What I’ve got so far is this sense that everything I look at, I see spiritual depth to it. And sometimes that is my favorite part of an author’s work or of an idea, and sometimes it is the crucial thing that I feel is missing, that I think would take whatever it is, to the next level. It would add an important dimension to the discussion or to the application of the concept, whatever it is.

I was walking across the parking lot to the grocery story last week and I was thinking about an example and had this sudden, strong sense, of ‘yeah, that is important!’ and ‘why doesn’t everyone see this?’ As I was thinking about how I don’t see anyone covering quite that thing in quite the way I would, it dawned on me that that must be it. That layer I see is what I need to speak to.

So I’ve set my intention to look everywhere for that layer I see, to begin to define it, and get feedback from you all both about what it is – how to describe it – and how it helps you practically in your life.

I think the essence of it for me right now is finding the spiritual depth in everything and integrating that truth and feeling to whatever we are talking about – especially the practical, every day stuff.

Rob Bell would say (as he does in What We Talk About When We Talk About God) that it’s about marrying the mundane and the sacred, removing the false separation there, pursuing a holistic integrated approach to our lives.

This has gotten me thinking about the strategies that most helped me get to the point of finding that unique layer this summer, that focus that would really allow me to find my voice.

You’ve still got time left this summer to take advantage of the slower pace and extra down time to listen to yourself and reflect on where you are compared to who you are at your core and where you truly want to be.

A few things stand out as the most helpful and I wanted to share them with you.

3 Tips for Finding Yourself and Your Voice

1. Align with your future self

When I learned, with help from Morgana McCabe Allan, to take time to look into the future and envision my future self and then allow that vision to speak to me, I gained an immensely valuable tool that I want you to understand and utilize as well.

You can visualize who you are becoming, and when you really feel into that future reality, you begin to train your brain both consciously and subconsciously to look for ways to make it happen. And I think a really powerful practical application of this concept is learning to live in alignment with that vision now.

One example of that for me is really unplugging and relaxing (mentally not physically lol) when my husband and I took our 4 boys camping a few times this summer. Part of my future vision for our family is the freedom to have outdoor adventures. So when we do the version of that that we can afford to do now, I choose to fully embrace the experience, and be thankful for it and treasure all of the experience, being present and joyful, in alignment with how I envision my future self – who is of course more successful, wise and carefree – how she would enjoy her off time with family. I’m also doing this with my visions for being a writer, homeschooling my boys, and improving my physical health.

There is incredible power in considering who you want to be, and taking every opportunity to at least mentally begin to live in that reality. The rest of life will then get on board with your vision and conspire to make it happen.

2. Consider what you love

Another thing I’ve found incredibly powerful and informative is really diving deep into your desires. Allow yourself to go there.

What makes you truly happy? Which activities make your heart sing? What is it about them that you love? What is your favorite part of it? What are you precisely doing in that moment where you feel at one with your soul, at peace with the universe? When do you find yourself in the flow and losing track of time?

These questions are drawn from the line of questioning that Gay Hendricks uses in The Big Leap to find your zone of genius. They are also inline with the idea of having a soul, a true self, with a destiny imprinted on it. I believe that we each have a sense of destiny and knowing, that we need to uncover.

Do we discover ourselves or create ourselves? I believe it is one and the same. Our modern culture and mode of coming to adulthood causes us to lose a sense of self, of true identity and unqiueness. Through the process of coming of age we too often lose our sense of unique desire for that which lights us up. But at any time we can choose to recover it and begin to live in alignment with our core design. We discover who we truly are and create a life in alignment with the truth of who we are and how we are wired. Within your desires are the call of the divine on your life. A good resource for discovering your core desired feelings is The Desire Map, by Danielle LaPorte. Identifying how you want to feel, as well as which kinds of activities speak to you on a primal level, these kinds of self-discovery can help you uncover a sense of joy that you may have lost or muffled.

The point here is to take time to examine yourself and discover what makes you truly happy. What do you want? What brings you joy? What do you desire to have in your life?

3. Find the common thread

What do you always see in everything? What is most fascinating to you, and what do you see is often missing? What bugs you when it gets left out, and why is it important?

Once you’ve worked on understanding who you are and what you want, look around at the world around you and ask yourself what stands out to you.

What do you most want to speak to, contribute to, or change? Where do you see a need that no one is addressing, or where someone is helping but with a crucial component missing?

Begin to watch and think, and journal and take notes. Begin to keep track of those pieces that spark your interest, and they will start to form a common thread that will point you to a unique contribution that you could take great joy in devoting a season of your life to.

I’d love to hear if this was helpful and if you’d like for me to go deeper on this or related topics.

With all my love,
Alicia

What I’m Excited About

• Ryan Holiday released pre-order bonuses for his Oct release, Stillness is the Key .
  
• Bo Eason is giving early access to his book, There is No Plan B for Your A Game , to those who pre-order it.
  
• I’m giving up desserts for good as part of who I’m becoming, and I’m about 2 weeks in and feeling good about the long term commitment.
• I’m wrapping up a training series I got from Gabrielle Bernstein about being a spiritual teacher and it was amazing.
  
• I’m adding amazon affiliate links to my book references in my blog posts, so that you can support me in this way if you would like.

What I’m Reading
Mastery, by Robert Greene
There is No Plan B for Your A Game, by Bo Eason
The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron
The Science of Self-Empowerment, by Gregg Braden
A Course in Weight Loss, by Marianne Williamson
The Tapping Solution, by Nick Ortner With all my love,

News from My Life
We’re moving! Across town at the end of August, to be closer to my husband’s work and his family.

Next on Alicia’s Soul Adventure
I’m working on a new framework for it that is topic-based instead of book-based. Stay tuned! If you’re not a member yet, click below for more info.

I’ve been listening to Gabby Bernstein talk about having a spiritual practice. And then I was re-watching a video by Bo Eason and he was talking about how those who are great at what they do focus more on the practice than the game, so that when the time comes, when the opportunity comes, they are ready – to perform at their best.

And I’ve realized I need a practice. No, I need to learn how to practice.

I need a spiritual practice, and a physical one, and a financial one, and a relational one.

Practice is defined as a) the actual application of an idea, and b) the habitual procedure or way of doing something.

It’s basically consistent ongoing action.

Yeah, I’ve always been bad at that. And it’s time for that to change.

Do you remember writing papers in school? Were you a procrastinator?

I wasn’t. I’d get the assignment, make note of the due date and start and finish the paper right in the middle of that timeline.

But you know what I never did? I never revised my first draft. I was a decent enough writer that I’d always write it, and turn it in to see what would happen. I almost always got A’s.

And so I never learned to hone my craft, to keep working at it, to make it better.

For the last 10 years I’ve been a multi-tasker and a generalist, both at work and at home.

I’ve decided it’s time to change that. It’s time to simplify and streamline and narrow life down to a few things, and do them really well.

That’s another reason I haven’t developed a habit of practice. When you’re doing a ton of different things, if you tried to do them all on a regular schedule, it’d be overwhelming. When you’re keeping plates spinning, you can’t be in that place of routine and regular practice of key activities. You don’t have the time or the mental capacity. You’re not making space for that state of mind that accompanies practice.

I was watching a live teaching recently by Morgana McCabe Allan where she talked about having places for thoughts, notes and ideas so that you don’t hold them in your head. I’ve heard this before, but I was freshly convicted.

It’s time for me to stop living a haphazard life and become intentional in my every day living. And whatever hinders me from that needs to be put in line or cut out.

At first I’m not sure how to change a habit that is so ingrained. I’ve found I have a deep compulsion to address things in my life randomly, and a strong resistance to consistent order.

How do I begin to change?

As I literally sit here and ask myself that question I realize I can start by looking at the habits I have changed and the practices I have started. And the big changes my husband and I have made in the past year with our family.

I started a journaling practice for the first time about a year ago and that has solidified into a consistent part of my life. I’ve also been consistently cultivating a mindset of gratitude and a dialogue in my head around giving myself permission to be happy, to feel good, to expand my awareness, to accelerate my personal growth, to seek and expect to change my life in increasingly dramatic ways.

I’ve been cultivating a mental state of expecting growth, joy, peace, and transformation.

So I’m seeing the fruit of that every month, every week, every day.

Ten months ago I quit my job of 9 years. Seven months ago I started making money on my own. Five months ago my husband changed jobs. Four months ago we sold our house of 5 years and moved. Three months ago I started homeschooling. 

Two years ago I set my intention to change our lives dramatically and as I pressed into that with God what I found was that the first order of business was for me to change on the inside. And then at a certain point in that process things began to transform externally in our lives in big ways.

So now when I feel the need to go to a deeper level with personal disciplines, and I have a desire for further external change, I realize that one has to precede the other.

Which means the question is simply this: What mindset and attitude do I need to cultivate to become the person I’m meant to become in the course of this next season?

Centered. Confident. Patient. Aligned.

That’s my mission.

What’s yours?

I went to public school K-12, got straight A’s, was the typical teacher’s pet, loved learning and generally enjoyed school. I grew up in a caring Christian home, went to church every Sunday, volunteered, went on mission’s trips, and won awards in bible quizzing. I went on to get a BA and an MA in Biblical Literature from Oral Roberts University, and Regent University, respectively.

I did everything public school and the church asked of me. And then I got married, graduated, started a family and began living life in the real world.

I’m grateful for my experiences growing up, they sheltered me from so much baggage that many young people start life with. But they also left me woefully unprepared for so many of the most important aspects of real life.

In 2009 I began a long 8 year season of having 4 kids and working part time in websites and marketing to pay back student loans. During that time I began searching for what I was missing. I basically read book after book about nutrition, parenting, psychology, religion, exercise, time management, personal development, business and finance.

What I found was an amazing world of affordable information provided by experts in their fields. And what this revealed for me was an incredibly beautiful and nuanced understanding of the world that I didn’t get during my extensive school career.

Do you know what I’m talking about? Are you on a similar journey? Do you feel somehow that we were made for more, that this life we’ve settled for is not everything we wanted, and yet not sure what’s wrong or what to do next?

The journey starts on the inside, it’s one of self-discovery. You begin by relearning your relationship with yourself, then with the world.

I’m on a mission to continue this journey, and to unschool, to re-school, really to un-condition and re-teach myself about the significant realities of our world that are so necessary for a successful, happy life, yet either neglected or misrepresented in the schooling process. And as I go on this journey, I believe the natural result will be to educate my children in a new way, one that does not use traditional curriculum but also doesn’t completely reject curriculum either.

We need to take ownership of our own education, embrace the incredible resources that we have through books and the internet, and forge a new path forward.

This is my road less traveled and I’m inviting you to join me on it.

I hadn’t thought of an idea to write about yet today, because my mind is spinning from all the recent developments and all the potential that tomorrow holds. I’m feeling torn between amazement of all that’s happened, and all the ideas for where I want to go next.

And then I just had this great realization that I’ve been here before. This past Dec I was celebrating several wins from the early phase of my business, and eagerly – maybe a bit impatiently – anticipating all the things I wanted to accomplish next, and I had this distinct moment, a few days before Christmas, when it dawned on me that I should stop and take time to process and soak it in and just really be grateful for everything that had happened that year. I stopped and really thought about where I was a year prior, and it filled me with this overwhelming sense of gratitude for all the wonderful ways that my life had changed.

And I just had a parallel experience tonight. In the midst of a turmoil of thoughts about decisions and new paths, it dawned me that it’s time to stop and savor success for a bit.

We closed on our house last week, and were able to make substantial progress on some debt payoff and savings goals. And yesterday I went to check the mail and found our official letter of approval to homeschool from our new city. And my husband and I have both moved on from the company that a year ago I didn’t know if or when we’d ever manage to move on from, even though I knew in my heart that we needed to.

So yeah, homeschooling, selling the house, new job, new business. These are big dreams that have been on my heart, and behind everything I’ve done, since I started blogging and learning about online entrepreneurship two years ago.

I set out Jan 1 fully prepared for it to take all year to accomplish those goals, and it’s the middle of April.

So yeah I’m going to slow down for a moment and really savor the moment. Tonight and for the next few days I’m going to fill my mind with this incredible sense of gratitude until I feel it in every part of my being.

In reflecting back, one thing that stands out is that with each big goal I’ve accomplished, I set an intention, full of emotion, that I was going to accomplish it, in spite of having no idea of how I was going to do it. And then from that place I set out to figure out how it might turn out to be possible, with attitude of faith and gratitude that it was possible and it was my future and all I had to do was take the next step as best I could at each point.

If you’ve got some big dreams, I hope that encourages you to press on toward them, and if you don’t I want to encourage you to do some self discovery and self care, and figure out what your dreams are. We all have them, but sometimes they get forgotten in the midst of life. And that’s not where they belong, we are all meant to recover, pursue and live our dreams, the ones that make our souls sing, where we end up helping others and enjoying abundance while becoming our best selves. Pursue those dreams, and you’ll find life itself rallying to assist you.

I’ve emerged from the Belly of the Beast. That’s what Steven Pressfield calls the heart of the creative journey, the part where you’ve gone too far to turn back, you’re past the honeymoon phase of your idea, and things seem to be falling down around you, you’re under pressure, but you still believe in the veracity, the power of your idea, and if you stick it through, you’ll be on the downhill coming out of it, toward a beautiful finished thing that you have created.

It’s intense, and scary, yet peaceful and still. Because you know, you’ve fought your demons, you’ve made mistakes, learned lessons, poured blood, sweat and tears into your idea. You’ve tested it, you know it’s good, it’s worth it. But now you have to earn your stripes, do your time, but you become part of a sisterhood who has been there. No one is with you now, in this space you’ve never felt so alone, and yet you’ve found peace with yourself. You’ve conquered the ego, you’ve lost the battle but won the war.

You’ve labored on behalf of your creative work and won the soul battle, now all is left is to manifest the final version in physical form.

How did you get here, and how do you truly know the way out?

You feel it.

I can feel it. I’ll teach you to feel it too. Your way in and out, following the creative process of your genius, past the dangers, through brilliance to find practicality and the final execution that produces something useful and beautiful, that satisfies both the artist and the customer.

How do you follow that road? You have to learn to feel it, to lean into the journey, to embrace its intensity, the passion, the loneliness, the ecstasy, the highs and lows, following the thread of purpose through discouragement, temptation, until you find your Way, your internal compass, the call of your soul to do your work as an artist.

Hi, I’m Alicia, I’m here to show you a better way to think about life. When you truly make the shift, it will be as eye opening as when Neo took the red pill in the Matrix, and I guarantee you these two things will be true: it will put you on the greatest journey of your life, and you will never be the same.

How do I know? Because I’ve been there. Join me as I retrace my steps through the journey of thought that brought me here.

For years I’ve studied the best, sought out the authors that were doing the work, paving the way to help us have a better life. I read their books, and then read their mentors’ books. I wrestled through implementing them in my own life, reconciling different ideas to create a new framework, finding the common patterns, uncovering big, scary questions about life and spending years searching for the answers, and finding them in unexpected places.

I’ve come through what Pressfield calls the Hero’s Journey:

“Our primary hero’s journey as artists is the passage we live out, in real life, before we find our calling.
The hero’s journey is the search for that calling.
It’s preparation.
It’s initiation (or; more precisely, self-initiation).
On our hero’s journey, we see, we experience, we suffer. We learn
On our hero’s journey, we acquire a history that is ours alone. It’s a secret history, a private history, a personal history. No one has it but us. No one knows it but us. This secret history is the most valuable possession we hold, or ever will hold. We will draw upon it for the rest of our lives.
The hero’s journey ends when, like Odysseus, we return home to Ithaca, to the place from which we started. We wash up on shore. We have survived. We have come home.
Now what?
The passage that comes next is the Artist’s Journey.
The artist’s journey comes after the hero’s journey.
Everything that has happened to us up to this point is rehearsal for us to act, now, as our true self and to find and speak in our true voice.
The artist’s journey is the process of self-discovery that follows.
It will last as long as we’re alive, and maybe longer.”

– Steven Pressfield, The Artist’s Journey, pg 6

I’ve finished my hero’s journey. I’m starting my artist’s journey. I’ve found my calling. And you know what it feels like? It feels like inner peace, that certainty of identity and purpose, that sense of having found something precious, something truly Yours, that no one can take away, and better yet, that has the promise of captivating you for the rest of your life. That creative mission that produces both internal fulfillment and outward service.

Pressfield says that you start the artist’s journey with a gift for the people, the hard-won result of your experiences from your hero’s journey, and that the gift is the work you will now produce as a result of your experiences.

That is what my writing will be from here on out. And I’m just going to dive in, because I’ve taken the red pill, I’ve flipped a switch, I’ve arrived home to Ithaca, I’ve found my calling, my voice and my true self. This journey has turned a corner, set my on my true path, and that is where I will be writing from now.

This current piece is my attempt to explain the difference you are going to see in my writing. It’s also an invitation to a few of you to work personally with me, as your coach.