Life Without Guilt, Duty or Fear

What would your life look like without guilt, duty, or fear?

Imagine how you would live!

Fear, guilt, and duty have very heavy energies. They weigh us down and stop us living well. I think that guilt is a wasted emotion. Officially, it is a moral emotion that occurs when a person believes that they have compromised their own standards or have violated moral standards.

I use guilt as a guide. It's either telling I am doing something wrong/going against my values/not being true to myself, or that I have an outdated belief that I need to shift.

Working mothers suffer from a lot of guilt. Guilt that they aren’t able to be everywhere and everything to everyone. That they cannot be in multiple places at one time. The fact is, there is one of you. Maybe you have several children, plus a job, plus other significant roles or relationships. You cannot do justice to all of these energies all the time. You need to pick the ‘highest bidder’, the persona or thing that is the most important in that moment.

In 2014, I wrote my book ‘Juggling in High Heels’, a handbook for organising chaos. It was written for exhausted, overwhelmed women by an exhausted, overwhelmed woman! It was a book of ideas on how you could live your life on your terms while delivering the many demands that life puts on us. The demands that we accept as capable, caring, responsible women.

Planning helps. Planning your priorities, planning your day, your week and your year. Planning was the only way I found to fit in all the ‘things’ that I wanted to do, be and have!

Duty is a tricky one - broken down, it has three parts. Obligation, responsibility, and performance. The word originates from "due", meaning "that which is owing”. It is a commitment or expectation to perform something. In my one-day workshops, we spend quite a lot of time breaking down the roles that we have. The duties and obligations that we take on in service to others. These duties are often not given, they are assumed. They are taken on and then magically turn into resentments.

Fear is the trickiest of all three. It holds us back, it keeps us in the familiar, even if familiar is awful. Familiar literally means well-known. The same. You are used to it. It is your normal! Fear makes us think that suffering is safer than the unknown.

We are programmed to avoid risk and new experiences. We feel so safe when we are familiar that we often choose fear over freedom

Fear can ultimately give us pain, pain when we shrink to fit in. Pain when we choose fear over freedom.

I love the question, what would your life look like without guilt, duty or fear?

Imagine how you could live!