You can give people grace and still hold them to a higher standard.

You can acknowledge other people’s beliefs, blocks, and traumas and still ask them to do the work to heal and grow. You can feel empathy for their experience and still set boundaries, even walking away entirely. You can have deep understanding and still be angry, hurt, or upset.⁣
⁣
There’s room for both.⁣

Always.⁣
⁣
But you have to take yourself to the chopping block first before you can ask more of others. You have to be willing to do your own work, despite the debilitating fear or discomfort. You have to be willing to bring awareness to what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and how it’s affecting you, your life, your work, and your relationships. You have to be willing to own your stories, admit to your deepest fears and wounds, feel your feelings fully, and untangle yourself from the strategies and ways of being that have keep you safe, secure, and successful all your life.⁣⁣

You have to be able to give yourself grace while holding yourself to a higher standard. You have to be committed wholeheartedly to your own work… your own growth and healing… before you can ask that of another.⁣

You have to be able to stand steady inside the messy duality that is living this life and having both a human and spiritual experience. And you have to understand that there is a way to demand something better or different without invalidating someone else’s truth and experience. If you’re unable to do that, you have to ask yourself where you’re not able to hold the wholeness of your own truth and experience.⁣⁣

There’s room for both.⁣
In every situation.⁣
Always.⁣

⁣Hold yourself and others to a higher standard, but do it with all the love, compassion, and understanding you can muster. We’re all in need of a little more grace, as well as more soft, safe spaces to do our work.⁣ @StephenieZ (Click to Tweet!)

Stephenie Zamora is an author and life coach, business and marketing strategist, and founder of CallOfTheVoid.tv., where she merges the worlds of personal development, energy healing, intuitive coaching, writing, and mixed media art to help individuals rise up and come back from the darkest, hardest chapters of life. She guides her clients through the challenging process of re-orienting to their lives, relationships, and work in a way that’s fully aligned with who they’ve become in the aftermath of loss, trauma, depression, and big life changes. After struggling with PTSD, grief, and anxiety from a sudden and traumatic loss, she navigated her own difficult healing journey, and has set out to help others find the purpose of their own path using The Hero’s Journey as a framework. She is also the founder of Stephenie Zamora Media, the author of Awesome Life Tips®, creator of Journey Mapping Sessions™, and is currently working on a second book, Unravel. Her work has been featured on The Huffington Post, Yahoo Shine, Elite Daily, Positively Positive, and many other publications over the years. Connect with her on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or at www.CallOfTheVoid.tv.