My Journey Archives | Alicia Eichmann

Taking time to savor success, and express gratitude

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.

My Story – Part 1

Motherhood, 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.

Reflecting on this past year

My Journey

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.

Why we shouldn’t just stand firm

Books, My Journey

Reflections on finding our spiritual path, and why we need an answer beyond just rejecting manic self improvement or embracing the basic tenets of Stoicism

Earlier this week I read Stand Firm: Resisting the Self-Improvement Craze by Svend Brinkmann (affiliate link). A friend recommended it to a friend and I ended up reading a borrowed copy in a day.

What was most illuminating to me was the way this author helped me see how I disagree with how he would solve the problem he was discussing. But perhaps equally helpful was how he looked at the personal growth and development movement from an outside perspective.

He critiqued what he saw as a religion of the self, and talked about how the push to constantly improve yourself has permeated every part of our culture.

As someone with an internal drive to constantly improve, his message did not immediately resonate with me, but I found myself open to seeing what he was seeing, knowing that this is part of my quest to understand both the broader discussion and the experience and the reactions that people are having today. The success of his book and his resulting demand as a speaker is evidence that his message resonates with people.

I continued reading, wanting to understand why, and to see what I can learn from him, how he might give me some wisdom to round out my own pursuit of knowledge.

So I kept going, reading chapters about saying no, thinking about the negative, and not working with a coach. I see how he is pointing out an obnoxious tendency in society that he is probably right needs correcting. I see how there are excesses in the modern ‘positive-thinking, say-yes, personal growth, find-the-answer-inside-yourself’ movement. But I think there is so much good and actual advancement represented here that instead of rejecting it we should look at how it can be corrected and given better guidance and direction.

His solution, which he wishes to point the reader to without fully explaining it himself, is the tradition of Stoicism with its emphasis on acceptance, steadiness, goodness and self-discipline. He focuses on exhorting the reader in the practice of standing firm, and occasionally resisting forward motion and the command of society to be ever flexible, always changing.

I found myself both agreeing and disagreeing with him at the same time. He helped me see something I was too close to the issue to see, how the emphasis on self improvement has perhaps become pervasive and destructive in certain ways. But I would argue that instead of simply rejecting or resisting it, as one would stand in a river and brace against the current, that we need to restore what should be at the heart of this positive, empowering movement.

What I see here, as in so many other places, is that the heart, the compass, the guiding light is missing. I see in the personal growth, self-help movement, so much hunger and desire for change and for good. Good people who once felt stuck are cultivating hope that they can be better and that they can make the world better. We need this.

I would argue that the correct approach to the problem that he sees is not to swing the other direction but to seek to add spiritual truth to the conversation around personal growth and development.

Brinkmann helped me see the role of Stoicism in a new light as well. I’m truly grateful for that as I’ve been navigating these different ideologies and trying to get a sense of what each one is, where it fits, and how it relates to the problems at hand.

I’ve recently become a fan of Ryan Holiday, partly because of his peripheral content aimed at helping budding writers. But his core content has been all about bringing the ideas of Stoicism to personal development. Stoicism sounds smart and wise, and certainly has value in its response and contrast to the whims and trends that currently rise and fall in our culture. It would be good to see a return to a greater sense of duty, honor, and discipline.

However, I think that to embrace Stoicism and look no further would be to settle for good rather than seeking great. Or perhaps that is not saying it strongly enough.

I’m coming to see how many personal development frameworks put out today by various authors seem incredibly smart, novel and effective – an attractive combination for Americans with our penchant for the new and novel, the useful and effective – but lack a sustained power in and of themselves to truly transform, at least not without a lot of grit and self-discipline, and a low conversion rate of those who are able to simply follow the formula and get the same results.

But that low success rate means many who have flocked to these ideas are still stuck in their circumstances, sometimes also financially or emotionally drained, or both, from applying the required effort and resources.

But this does not mean that we should encourage them to stop dreaming, stop reaching higher; the last thing I want to see is an improved ability instead to simply stay where we are and get better at accepting it and being grateful for all we have.

Yes, gratitude is key, but so is growth. It is both a moral imperative and our birthright, for all who desire it to spend their lives continually growing and improving and striving for something greater than they have today. This is not embracing a power or money-seeking mindset but rather the same beautiful spirit found in nature. All of creation is constantly growing and expanding and we have that same nature in us.

We are meant to spend our lives growing into the truest sense and expression of ourselves, bearing the fruit of love, service and joy in contribution to the greater good of the rest of humanity and nature as well.

So how do we pursue this healthy, divinely sponsored growth, without pursuing the excess of a ‘religion of self’ which Brinkmann rightly critiques, or solely embracing Stoicism, which Holiday has so ably reintroduced as a useful tool?

I believe we need to embrace our divine calling to a spiritual path and a spiritually-enhanced understanding of our lives. I do not yet by any means have all or even most of the answers. But I believe with my entire being that our future lies down this path.

We are spiritual beings just as much as we are physical beings. In our progress, our history, and the evolution of our understanding, we have recently been through a long phase of history where science and reason was emphasized and prioritized above emotion, art, love, and faith, everything related to spirit, spirituality, and that which is sacred or holy, not completely understood with the mind, or examinable with the scientific method.

We are now in a new season of human history where we correcting back toward the middle. This is why you hear so many great men and women talking now about bridging faith and science and pursuing an ecumenical approach to social, economic and religious issues.

I think Rob Bell is onto something when he talks about holism. I think Marianne Williamson is onto something when she talks about the politics of love and recovering the soul of America. I recently did some research on the most influential spiritual leaders alive today and found recurring themes in their work around ecumenism, healing, love and the bridging of faith and science.

Simply reading a list of quotes from Deepak Chopra freed me to realize that I can begin sharing and perhaps teaching when I am still seeking and learning myself. He said to learn from those who are also seeking and be wary of anyone who has all the answers. That was so freeing because while I’m so excited about everything I’ve learned and am continuing to learn, I still feel like there is so much I don’t know. I feel as if I am just getting started. I feel my whole life has led up to this point, of finally finding the right path for me, the path I must take. And that I am only now heading down the path, having finally found it.

We need to re-embrace a sense of mystery, and to hold in tension the quest for spiritual truth with an acceptance that the journey will take a lifetime and that some of the best spiritual truths exist primarily in paradox form.

We are spiritual beings.

We are spiritual beings who unfortunately have forgotten who we are, we have lost our birthright, we have misplaced our sense of certainty, of destiny, of awe.

We are spiritual beings who unfortunately in today’s world too often have mental, emotional or spiritual wounds around words and concepts such as God, sin, salvation, and surrender.

But that reflects more on the imperfect human messengers, teachers, leaders, who have come before us, than on the nature of the divine, on the character of God.

I believe the most dangerous tendency in our world today is the inclination and habit of rejecting a spiritual nature, understanding or explanation for anything. And I believe our greatest cause for hope is the growing tide of awareness and desire for depth, meaning and spiritual truth.

When I look back at everything I have learned in my journey so far, the most meaningful and powerful parts of my journey were where I had a fresh revelation around the deep, present nature of spirituality constantly surrounding us.

It is time for us to press in to our own spiritual journeys, to a fresh knowledge and revelation of the divine, our divine nature, our beautiful world, and our place in it. To pursue a true sense of holism, a marriage of the sacred and mundane, and an understanding, to quote Rob Bell, that “everything is spiritual.”