Discover the truth that all is Love by relating to all lovingly. When we suspend judgment and offer every element of our experience unconditional Attention, Acceptance, Appreciation, Affection, and Allowing, we open ourselves to the Love that permeates and surrounds us. The default human operating system is designed to ensure survival, which includes a strong negativity bias, putting us on the lookout for what's wrong, amiss, troublesome, dangerous, lacking, insufficient, unrewarding, uncomfortable, untrustworthy, etc. This despite the fact that we live in a time of unprecedented abundance of resources and physical safety. Isn't it time to courageously venture out and treat every experience as gift?

Throughout childhood most everyone had to adapt to environments and conditions they could not control. Seeking security we adopted identities and ways of navigating the world that could be counted on to satisfy our wants and needs, or those of others to whom we deferred. Often there is a great deal of comfort in confining oneself to what is most familiar, until we sense a need for change, which requires courage to forego comfort and step into uncertainty.

Sense into some of the qualities embodied by leaders you admire and how those virtues are used to inspire others. Consider the possibility that you too can provide leadership simply by recognizing your capacity to uniquely express similar virtues and values when interacting with others. Simply being authentic and sharing one's perspective can be the starting place for building a base of self confidence from which additional steps are taken with increasing ease. 

Operating from a mindset of abundance and interconnectedness we can discover that gratitude, service to others, and generosity promote greater abundance, security, and self fulfillment.  Start with family, friends, neighbors, and local community members. Notice what feelings come up as you do so, both in you and in others. If the point of capitalism was to share and redistribute wealth and resources rather than accumulate them perhaps the large majority of participants would operate in similar fashion, working together for the common good.

A mindset built upon perceptions of scarcity, inadequacy, or deficiency in combination with self-centered individualism results in greed. In our current upside down economic system wealth is extracted from workers and consumers to enrich corporations and businesses who then invest in more ways to continue to accumulate wealth. It reminds me of the game Monopoly, which ended up in disappointment for all but one player. We are told by those who trust in capitalism that there are no other good alternatives, so what can we do? In the case of Monopoly we declared the game over, everyone returned accumulated assets, then they were divided up equally to start a new game. If wealth was periodically redistributed within our economic system, perhaps the game could go on and lessen the rewards for being greedy.

Most of us have an inner critic that delivers negative self talk. The sources of the messages and the tone with which they are delivered are important to discover and understand, as they are replays of past recordings, meaning that they continue to have power over us only as long as we believe them.  When we were young, vulnerable, and lacked boundaries, we took on or made up beliefs about ourselves that were not true but reflected others' judgments and feelings about us or what we most feared.  As adults we now have the power to disbelieve them and contradict them to reflect what is really true about us, and others.