3 inspirational quotes that helped me start changing my life

On every step of a personal growth journey some words of wisdom can help us get started, find new motivation, push trough, let go or just enjoy the ride.

Here is a little collection of quotes that helped me get my personal tranformation started.

I don’t care- I love it

This song by Icona Pop became my mantra about a year ago. At this time I was very much occupied with thinking about other people’s expectations.

My head was constantly spinning around what I was supposed to do, what people expected of me, how I should behave, etc. The ridiculous thing was, that these expectations didn’t necessarily have to be real. I just thought the professor expected me to be humble about my test results, my boss to be tough and so on. I never challenged if this was really the case.

I started to realize that in order to be good at my job and feel whole I needed to let go of expectations towards me.

So in order to break this pattern, I established my mantra-song. Whenever I realized that I was caught up in blindly following other people’s expectations I started singing (mostly in my head): “I don’t care. I love it“.

At first I thought this would bring me in trouble and weaken my position at work. It turned out to be the contrary: Clearly stating what I needed in order to succeed, what I was offering to give and under what conditions, in short – dancing to my own tune- resulted in one on my biggest successes of my professional life.

Everything you want is on the other side of fear

When I realized how blindly and obediently I was following other people’s expectations, I got scared. I had spent 99% of my time thinking about what other people want from me. So I had no idea what I, myself, wanted.

I felt like a puppet on a string. In my notebook I wrote this on sentence: If I get rid of all expectations, what the f**k is left of me?

I felt naked and ashamed. Here I was. A person who dealt her whole life with helping other people to change for the better not even knowing who SHE was. What does this woman want? for herself? for her life?

At the same time I understood that I had to face this fear. I needed to dive into the unknown and explore the other side of fear. Only by going through my fears, I would grow as a woman and create a more powerful life for me.

Actually, I can

This sentence was on my mobile’s screen for several months. I was exploring who I was as a person and who I wanted to become. I was still struggling to distance myself from various expectations towards me and find my own voice.

To continue my path of exploration, I sometimes had to do things differently than I used to do them before: speaking up, speaking my truth, setting my boarders at work, or refraining from a high profile project when it did not match my criteria.

As it happens some of these things were very unusual. Not only to me but also my working environment. People told me: “you can’t do this”, “nobody ever did that”, “this might hurt your career”, “this might have consequences”.

Every time this happened I looked at the screen of my mobile phone: Actually, I can.

And I could. Step by step I started to build a new life with new behaviors, with a sharper profile and a more powerful voice.

I still walk along this path and keep exploring – and now a came to love it.