How to forgive yourself for making mistakes

During a coaching call this week, a client asked an important question about mistakes. We were tackling the subject of self-love and how important it is to remain your own best friend and to be caring for yourself, especially when you are working towards your goals. And that made her think of how terrible she feels when she makes mistakes, and how hard it is for her to forgive herself for them, let alone love herself through them.

I feel that this is such a widespread issue, and one surrounded by a lot of shame, so that I need to write about it, and provide you with the perspective that I gave her. I believe we don’t talk about our mistakes nearly enough. And when we do, we always do so in a very negative way. But who can blame us?

We’ve been thought to feel ashamed for our mistakes and to feel bad for making them. As if there’s a state in which we could exist that would be mistake-free.

But feeling bad for making mistakes is nothing more than another illusory state our society has thought up for us to aspire to: like being a size zero, or being able to have both a perfect career and a perfect family with perfect kids, and be happy all the time about it, too… or like, in this case, living a totally mistake-free existence. It’s just not possible.

But just because perfection isn’t possible doesn’t mean we have to dread our mistakes or feel ashamed of them. Not always. Making mistakes can be a good thing sometimes, and a necessary step towards new skills, or new knowledge, or even new perspectives about things. And even when the mistakes have rather negative consequences, like losing a significant amount of money due to a bad business decision or hurting other people because of something that we did, they’re usually not as bad as we make them out to be.

So, here are a few things to consider when you’re beating yourself up about a mistake you made.

Ask yourself, what’s the worst that could happen? Very often, we play catastrophe scenarios in our heads when we’ve made a mistake. What is everyone going to think about us? How are we going to survive it? These are just a few of the things that our inner critic loves to throw at us when we’ve made a mistake. And that’s why it’s so important to stop for a minute and take a breather. And ask yourself, what’s the worst that could happen? In most cases, you’ll realize that what your inner critic is telling you comes straight out of a sci-fi movie, and that the consequences of your mistake are really not what you make them out to be.

People really don’t think about you that much. Our inner critic really loves to be in the spotlight. That is why she makes us believe that other people are always talking and thinking about us. Truth be told, they aren’t. They have their own lives, their own problems, and most certainly their own mistakes to deal with before they have time to think about us. Remember this when you think the world is going to end and someone is never going to forgive you for what you did. Chances are, they’ve already almost forgotten about it.

Making mistakes mean you are in action. I love to tell my clients to cheer for their mistakes, because those mistakes are a living proof that my clients are in action. And I’ll take action over inaction every single day. Try to use mistakes as a positive reminder of you working towards something, and trying to achieve things. You’ll feel better about them instantly, I promise.

Making mistakes simply means you’re human. Making mistakes doesn’t only mean you’re in action; it also means you’re human. And how beautiful is that? The human experience has many colors and shades, and making mistakes is part of that. It’s a reminder that life is fragile, that goals are worth pursuing, and that the journey you’re on means something to you.

By embracing your mistakes as a part of who you are, you’ll be able to deal with them much better, forgive yourself for making them, and love yourself through them. Because mistakes are not just something to avoid.

Of course, we hope we won’t make many and that, if we do, the consequences will be limited. But making mistakes is part of the game of life and business, and if you’re not making any, that means you’re not playing. It’s just like with the omelet; don’t be afraid to break some eggs.

How to love yourself more by letting go and being vulnerable

I’ve been thinking about giving and receiving a lot lately. Now that the holidays are approaching, and gifts and giving are all that shopping malls and adverts care to talk about, I’ve been wondering about what it means to really give – but most of all, what it means to really receive.

Because I believe that receiving, although it’s not easy, and although most of us are really not that good at it, teaches us how to love ourselves by asking us to let go and be vulnerable.

I’ve always been a giver. I think it’s part of my nature to give, for sure. But I also think that it’s a result of my upbringing and life experiences. Growing up, I wasn’t exposed to a lot of receiving. Giving was the word of the day back then, where I was expected to give by not complaining, by accepting circumstances, by forgetting unhappy experiences, and more generally by not receiving anything from the heart or that really mattered, except for the necessary food, shelter and clothes. As a result, giving became second nature, while receiving was so rare and uncommon that I grew out of knowing how to do it.

By not knowing how to receive, I didn’t really know how to love and be loved either. I became so good at giving, and it became such a big part of me, that I started associating giving with caring, and eventually with love. And somewhere through that process, I started giving so much that I lost the ability to love myself, too.

Then, because receiving had become so uncommon in my life, I started to rebel against it. When someone would give me something, I would feel so uncomfortable that I would try my hardest to avoid any situation that would force me to accept anything. This continued for a very long time, until I realized that giving had become a way of being for me – the only way I knew how to be seen and feel valued. Because I found that recognition through giving, the act became much more than simple gift-giving. I loved not to owe anything to anyone, but to be the one that was giving instead. And that also meant that I loved to be the one to care for others, and yet had a very hard time allowing anyone to care for me. Including myself.

When I understood this, something big shifted inside of me. I realized that I had been using giving as a shield to protect myself from getting hurt by not being seen. And I knew that if I wanted to change this, I needed to allow myself to receive. So I started practicing, in the hope that it would help me to learn how to love others, really love them, and eventually how to love and care for myself, too.

At first, it was hard – even starting with little things, like a favor someone wanted to do for me, or something someone offered to help me with. Being in the habit of giving, I felt my “tab” always needed to either be at zero or in my favor. So, having it the other way around was one of the first things I practiced.

Then, when I felt ready, I decided to let go of even more by accepting bigger gifts. Accepting friends who wanted to do something just because they loved me, or someone willing to help me out even if that meant a lot of work, like painting the living room white or coming to get me in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere.

By allowing myself to receive gifts like that, I allowed myself to be vulnerable, and this opened me up for love.

Because when it comes down to it, there simply can be no giving without receiving, as there can be no true love without vulnerability and letting go. And that goes for the love you have for yourself too. And more.

Your emotions are a strength, not a weakness. Here’s why.

If you’re a woman, and if you’ve ever shown what society claims to be too much emotion, you’ve probably been called unstable at one point or another in your life. I know I have.

For the biggest part of my life, I felt that my emotional life was one of my biggest weaknesses. The burden of this belief has weight heavily on me, for a long time, until I understood what a strength it actually is.

Early on, I realized that crying or expressing feelings wasn’t going to cut it at home, where emotions were something that didn’t belong. Later, I was led to believe the same thing when I started my professional career. The corporate world I was venturing into hardly had room for women, let alone for their emotions. I learned to do without, to hide my emotions most of the time. Only to show them sporadically, mostly to my romantic partners – who weren’t equipped at all to deal with them – which further reinforced my belief that emotions were a problem. That I had a problem.

That’s how I came to believe that hiding my emotions was a good thing, and that the palette of colourful feelings I was gifted with (hello highly sensitive empath!) had no place in the left-brain macho world I was living in. Although, I didn’t understand the world like that at the time. The only thing I could make of it back then was that it felt as if I didn’t belong.

From feeling like I didn’t belong, I took the next logical step and convinced myself that my emotions were a weakness. One that I should hide, and do everything I could to try, and correct. From there, it was easy to include my womanhood and femininity into the mix. I started to see those qualities as weaknesses too, and secretly wished I was born differently. For that would have made my life much easier.

We live in a world that has been dominated for centuries by left-brained thinking, science and technology. There is no room for emotions, intuition, or anything other than measurable quantities in that world. In such a world – that is, in the one we actually live in – we’re all being conditioned to be like that as well. To see emotions as a weakness, something that is not quantifiable. That must be hidden.

Now, after many years of trying to live up to this programming, I know emotions are not a weakness but a strength. I got curious, and questioned my beliefs. In the process, I realized that those beliefs didn’t work for me – and that I had the ability to choose something different for myself. My inner life, in all its beautiful, bright colours, emotions, feelings was waiting for me, ready to be born again.

By embracing my emotions, magical things happened…

First, I’ve been able to make deeper and more personal connections with people from around the world. Once I stopped being ashamed of my emotions, I stepped into my power full-force and learned a new way to connect with others, especially women. Instead of competing, I learned to collaborate. Instead of comparing, I learned to help and be happy for others. Instead of thinking I was all alone and needed to be strong all the time, I learned the power of community by allowing myself to receive friendship, love, compassion, and care.

Then, letting my emotions flow allowed me to start living a more meaningful life. When you’re separated from your emotions, there are no exceptions to which emotions get silenced. Even happiness and joy don’t come easily. By opening myself up to what I was feeling, I was able to experience these emotions more profoundly, which in turn makes my life so much more worth living.

On top of that, I’ve been able to infuse my businesses with new and better values. Although I’ve always been conscious of the good that I wanted to do through my work, I once approached building and running my businesses from a very left-brain perspective. There was no real heart in my work, and not enough love for the people doing the work with me. Things are different now. I consider my businesses to be extensions of myself and, as such, they’re now flowing with emotion. My businesses have hearts now.

Finally, allowing myself to express my emotions has made me know myself so much better. I love all the feelings that I have now, even the not-so-good ones. Because they’re the proof of how infinite life is and how much potential lies in every moment.

Having all of the above in my life doesn’t make me unstable. On the contrary – it grounds me. Gives me perspective and makes me care. For others, and for myself, too. But most of all, it allows me to love and feel… which, in the end, is the most important of all.

I invite you to embrace your emotions for the strengths that they are. The world needs them. It needs you. Desperately.

The power of unlimited thinking

I love the word unlimited. It speaks to me; it talks to my soul. It makes me believe that I can be and do anything that I want, and that there are no limits to what it is I can achieve. And I honestly believe that. I believe it’s true. That there is nothing in this world that I couldn’t handle if I wanted to. And that’s why I love this word so much. It reminds me of the possibilities, even when all odds are against me.

I gave a talk once in which I explained how I believed I could marry Brad Pitt – if I wanted to. I remember the girls and women in the audience looking at me and going “yeah, right,” but when I said it I really believed it, and I still do now. To me, the possibilities that life offers are like the laws of physics. I don’t understand them all, and I don’t know them all either, but I do know they work and I believe them to be true. Every time an apple falls from a tree or we launch a rocket into the sky, I’m reminded of those laws.

With unlimited thinking, it’s the same thing. To me, it’s a law just like the ones from Newton. The only difference is that this one is about us and not the world we live in. And what it says to me is pretty simple: by believing in unlimited thoughts, you will achieve unlimited things. I love that. So simple, yet so powerful. But I didn’t always use to think this, and nor did I always like the concept. For a very long time, I believed that the world was small, and that my place in it needed to be even smaller. I had thoughts of all the things that I wanted to do and say and be, yet I never believed I could actually achieve any of them. My thinking was not unlimited at all; on the contrary, there were boundaries everywhere. I would dream about being me, living a life in which I felt happy and fulfilled and content to be who I was, yet I thought that those goals were totally out of reach. My daily life was filled with beliefs about the world that limited me not only in my actions, but in the way I looked at myself and loved myself. I was blocked and unable to move forward. In all honestly, I was miserable, too.

But, back to Brad Pitt. There I am, in an auditorium, speaking to college students, young women with a life of opportunities ahead of them, and none of them believe me. They all immediately limit the thought that I put out into that room: you’re too short, you’re too old, you’re not Angelina, so he could never marry you. All of them fair comments (it’s true, I’m not Angelina), yet really only speculation. And that’s the problem. Who in that auditorium actually went and called Brad, and asked him directly what he thought of the idea? And even if someone would have done that, marrying someone requires love (I hope), and that doesn’t happen overnight (well, it could, but it’s rare). So this goal would need to be put in motion with a lot of different actions, and if it were a real goal, I should keep at it for a while, in order to reach it. But that’s okay, no issues there. I’m all up for that, and it might be worth it, too.

The problem is the limits we immediately put on our thinking. And the results that that impulse has on the size and horizon of our personal universe. I cannot say for sure that Brad wouldn’t marry me, except if I try.

Yet, when our dreams get big we all immediately jump to conclusions and deny ourselves the opportunity. And that makes our world small – very small.

Think of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Austrian bodybuilder who not only became one of the best action heroes of our time, but governor of California, too. But okay, enough with the guys. What about women like Amelia Earhart, who made history as an amazing adventurer and flyer, or Coco Chanel, to this day one of the icons of style and fashion? What both of these women, and all the other women and men who wrote history before us, have in common is –  I believe – a muscle for unlimited thinking. The biographies, movies, documentaries, and books about all these great people tell tales of thoughts that were greater than themselves, that they couldn’t shake, and that kept them going forward, even when everyone was against them.

That is the power of unlimited thinking. The limits we believe are all around us are not really there. Of course, there is order to be kept, and it’s important to respect and protect everyone’s freedom and life, but apart from those provisions, there are no limits to what it is you can achieve.

This realization came to me very slowly, and it took me a long time to grasp its full meaning and potential. One day, I wondered if, perhaps, instead of continuing to listen to beliefs that were keeping me and my life small, I could actually change my future and decide to live a life I really wanted to live instead. So I pressed against the invisible boundaries I had set for myself, and I pushed through. Once on the other side, after a lot of pushing and pressing and breaking through my own beliefs, I realized that in fact there are no limits at all, apart from the ones we create for ourselves. And so I developed my own muscle for unlimited thinking. And as a result, I have achieved amazing things, been to amazing places, met amazing people, and even married a man that I consider to be my very own – and better – version of Brad Pitt.

Because that too is the power of unlimited thinking. What we want changes over time and the more you use the muscle the more what looks impossible now will become part of your normal thought pattern in the future.

Never forget: everything you think is easy today, you once found really hard to do. So think as big as you can. It’s only up to you to decide how inlimited you want to live.

How to cultivate a procrastination-busting mindset

You are a multi-passion woman. You have many interests, and you want to achieve and learn so many things. It sometimes seems as if you have too many interests. And you feel you need to choose. But you don’t know what to choose, let alone how to do it. So you do nothing. You contemplate all that you want to be and do, but you do nothing. You procrastinate. Sound familiar?

I’ve been there, and I’ve looked at that mountain of things I wanted to achieve for many, many years.

Languages I wanted to learn, courses I wanted to take, things I wanted to build with my hands, creative endeavors I wanted to start, books I wanted to write, places I wanted to visit, experiences I wanted to have….  All the while, I was doing nothing, or at least not enough. And I kept putting things off based on small and insignificant excuses that I kept on telling myself to make myself feel better.

It was as if I was living two lives. The one I was in, where not a lot was happening and I felt I was out of place. And the life I was dreaming about in my mind – the one where I was doing all the things I knew I wanted to do, and where I was living all these amazing adventures and being who I really wanted to be. Until one day I decided that I could no longer just think about what it was I wanted, but needed to actually go get it, too.

And what a paradox that was. On the outside, I was very successful. I was an accomplished business woman, running large projects and esteemed by my peers. But on the inside I was called to do so many others things, always telling myself later, one day, when I grow up. But then one day I grew up. I was 35, and I realized I could keep waiting like this forever, or I could actually go out and start living. But to do that, I had to learn to beat the procrastination habit. Because that habit had been with me for so long that I didn’t know any other way.

Every time I looked at what I wanted to achieve and become, that mountain became bigger and bigger. And every time I gave it even only a tiny little glimpse, I feared climbing it more and more. But that was before. That was when I hadn’t taken any action yet. Once I did that, once I decided just to do one thing – anything, really – I set something in motion that led me to where I am today. For me, it was the day I decided to stop doing things the way I knew wasn’t working. I woke up, and that day for the first time I told someone that I wasn’t happy and that I was going to stir things up. That little step, just expressing that thought, was enough of an action to propel me towards change.

The day I did that, I started to cultivate a procrastination-busting mindset. And although it seemed like an almost impossible task then, now that I’m here, it sounds so easy. To cultivate a procrastination-busting mindset you have to do things and express thoughts. Because expressing a thought is as much doing something as lifting a box, writing in your journal or cooking dinner. You have to stop thinking about things too much, you have to avoid putting too many things on top of each other in your mind, and instead, you have to act out and express. Action drives change. Yes. But it kills procrastination too.

And yes, I hear you. You’re thinking: “Now, that sounds easy; if I knew how to get into action, I wouldn’t be procrastinating all the time”. And you are right. But you see, the secret to taking and being in action is simply, well… to start. And the secret to starting anything is to do it. And what I have found to be the secret of doing things – and I promise this is the last secret I’ll share today – is to take it one small step at a time. Because when you take enough of those steps, you go really, really far.

So the easiest way to cultivate a procrastination-busting mindset is to choose the tiniest of things to do on your dream to-do list, and to take action on that immediately.Procrastination hates it when you don’t wait to do things, but tackle them right away instead.

Another way to look at this is to tell yourself that whatever it is you’re going to do, you only have to do 5 minutes of it at a time. That’s all. After 5 minutes, you’re free to do whatever it is your procrastinating self wants to do. I guarantee you there is no better way to get you into action and working towards your dreams.

Now, of course there is much more to staying in action and keeping procrastination at bay. What do you do, for instance, when you feel paralyzed by too many choices? Or when there isn’t a small step to take, but only what looks like giant steps instead? I have developed techniques and systems to help with that and much more and I’m sharing all of it in my 3-week self-paced Dream Bigger Course. Feel free to check it out!

Why you should consider hiring a coach

The internet is full of articles and top lists about all the things that you must try at least once in your life. Some of those things are beautiful, like walking a pristine white beach at sunset or going on holidays to the most amazing places of this Earth. Other things are more everyday, like making out, eating scones by a campfire, or singing Karaoke.

The list goes on and on. And although it seems endless, all the options have one thing in common: your experience. Everything you have to do at least once, according to those lists, involves you feeling something, and that feeling in turn serves as an enrichment in your life.

And what I want to argue below is that hiring a life coach, precisely for the same reasons and more, is something that everyone should consider doing at least once in their lifetime.

When we get onto this Earth we are nurtured by our parents (if we’re lucky), we get a formal education (again, if we’re lucky), we are taught how to keep ourselves alive with food, clothes, and housing, and we learn how to live with others in society. We learn the values of sharing, of giving (hopefully), and of participating. But in all of this learning and growing and becoming a person, there seems to be no room for learning about our unlimited potential, incredible powers, or our amazing ability to achieve things, to love, to be compassionate, to explore what it is that we are, and to create the life we want for ourselves. And to me, that’s precisely what life coaching makes possible.

How incredible would it be if our schools would teach our children how to live fulfilling and self-actualized lives? And be places that would encourage them to explore how amazing and limitless they are?

Alas, things tend to go the other way. We teach our children to believe in structures and systems that cut right through the flow of their creative power, engraining in them concepts such as scarcity, fear, guilt, and responsibility. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we taught our children how to live unapologetically warm, wholehearted, loving, and real lives instead?

Maybe that will never happen, or maybe it will. But in the meantime, our lives – in the West, at least – are very often a product of pre-existing structures and belief systems that keep us from achieving our full potential. And we suffer. In some cases, very clearly: we are unhappy, sad even, waiting for life to really happen. Or we are lost, insecure, and unable to handle what life throws at us. In other cases, it’s subtler: our lives are quiet and okay, but there is something missing. We feel we are meant for something more, something different.

And that is where life coaching comes in. Life coaching is basically a means of being coached about life. Unlike psychotherapists or other medical professionals, life coaches are trained to help you engage with your life in an active and goal-oriented way, to get you from where you are to where you really want and can be. As such, they focus less on how you got to where you are, and more on how to get you where you want to go.

Life coaches usually have a particular field of expertise they coach in. My field, for instance, is helping high-achieving, perfectionist women to be more self-loving and to let go of having to be in control all the time. As a coach, I help women in a number of life areas, such as:

• How to stop sabotaging their success in life and business

• How to overcome the mental blocks that keep them from taking action

• How to learn to love, nurture, and nourish their bodies

• How to take care of their self through practices of self-love and self-care

• How to use the power of unlimited thinking to succeed in their life and business

• How to move past self-doubt and achieve their goals

• How to find the confidence to express themselves creatively

• How to cultivate loving relationships and move away from toxic ones

As you can see from the list above, life coaching can be very helpful to get you unstuck, to help you to see things from a different perspective, and to help you achieve what it is you want for yourself in your life. But even if you already are at a happy place, life coaching is still helpful. Because sometimes we just want change, or we have a bit of a project we know is in us, but which we are afraid to tackle on our own. Life coaches are great to help with that, too.

The reason why everyone should consider hiring a life coach is because it’s truly transformational. After a successful life coaching series, you are a different person. Not only have you achieved some tangible things, like a career change, better relationships, less stress, and more self-love…

Your life will never be the same again. You have grown and changed, and so has your life. And that is precisely the point. A life coach will help you to uncover what it is you need, want, and really are, and will guide you and help you to achieve exactly that.

Life coaches don’t have all the answers, but they do have very powerful and deep questions in their bags of tricks. And they know how to listen, very carefully, to every word you say. That’s why having a life coach in your life can be so powerful. She will help you to reach that next level in your life, to achieve the dreams you thought you couldn’t even dream of, and she will let you hear yourself and see yourself through her, so that you can grow and become a better version of yourself.

The school of life is the most important school of all. That’s why everyone should experience the transformation and power that comes from working with a life coach.

Interested enough to learn more? And feel we might be a great fit for each other? Why not start with a free 30-minute session with me?

How to deal with unsolicited advice about your life

Last week, I was talking to a friend about her enrolling in an expensive 7-year Chinese language course. She’s a really smart woman with a passion for travel, adventure, and foreign cultures. When she told me she wanted to start this course, I was immediately certain that this was a great decision for her. But she didn’t seem happy about her decision to enroll, and although I knew this was really what she wanted, she told me she wasn’t sure what to do.

A bit further into the conversation, she told me she had been having quite a few discussions with her parents about the Chinese course. And they hadn’t been very encouraging. On the contrary, they had been all over her with old-fashioned, well-intentioned advice about the cost, the length and the difficulty of the project, and it had cluttered her judgment. As a result, she didn’t know what to do anymore, and had not only started doubting her decisions, but also her ability to actually achieve her dreams. Sound familiar?

Having been there many times myself, I knew exactly what was going on. She was the victim of unsolicited advice about her life. One of the deadliest attacks you can imagine, a surefire way to kill ideas, ideals, and dreams, and often performed by the most well-intentioned friends and family members… in many cases, the parents.

And oh dear, how ironic. There I was and here I am with a few tips to survive the free-throw of unsolicited advice. To my defense, she asked for my advice. But obviously, you didn’t. So please feel free to treat what follows with a dash of my own medicine below.

Unsolicited advice is nothing more than someone else’s opinion. So, treat it like that. The big difference here is that the opinion is about you and expressed by someone who you love or care about. That makes the opinion look like much more than it really is, and makes it much harder for you to move past it. Always try to remember: it’s nothing more than any other opinion out there. And if you’re able to pass on those, you’re able to pass on these ones, too. Like when your Mom tells you not to go on that yoga retreat, because you’ll be all alone. If it was a stranger who didn’t know you, you would have no issue explaining that – on the contrary – you wouldn’t be alone at all, but rather surrounded by so many amazing and like-minded people. But since it’s your mom, things are different. When she tells you that you’ll be alone, you get scared. Because she was there every time you felt alone in the past, and because she taught you everything. So when she says you’ll be alone, there is a part of you that believes her. But she’s wrong. It’s only her opinion.

Unsolicited advice is anchored in beliefs. And, therefore, most of the time, well-intentioned unsolicited advice will not work for you at all. What I find most interesting about advice is that it’s a beautiful expression of someone’s entire belief system. Like when your mom tells you not to go on that yoga retreat, because it’s too expensive. What your mom forgets to mention when she says that is that the yoga retreat is too expensive for her. And those two little words are crucial. The yoga retreat is not expensive on its own. Actually, without anything to compare it to, can it really be quantified at all? It’s only when a belief system is put next to it – with ideas about what something should cost, how much one has to work to gather a particular amount of money, and so on – that the yoga retreat can really be quantified as expensive or not. And inherently, that will always be personal and subjective, something for you to decide. Remember this when advice makes you doubt yourself, and measure things as being based on your beliefs, and nobody else’s.

Unsolicited advice is often fueled by fear. Although, it usually seems as if it’s fueled by love. Most people have fears, and are quite unaware of how those fears give direction to their thoughts and their actions on a daily basis. And this is certainly true of them giving you unsolicited advice. Like when your Mom tells you not to go on that yoga retreat because it’s just a waste of your valuable time. This advice might be anchored in a belief that time is precious – which it most certainly is – yet that only certain activities are worthy of it. When people warn you with unsolicited advice like this, look for the fear that speaks behind the words. It will usually be uncalled for, and finding it will help you to realize the advice as a whole probably is, too.

Eventually, my friend signed up for her Chinese course, and she feels great about it. But she had to push through with a decision that was hers and hers alone to make. That’s what unsolicited advice can keep you from. Eventually, what she remembered, and what I hope you and I can remember, too, is that we only have one life… and despite all the unsolicited advice we might receive, nobody is going to live it for us. So we might as well do what we love and be who we want to be. And to do that, ignoring unsolicited advice is key.