I am so excited to share with you the first Life Inspired feature of the year!  Shanae is an amazing mama, wife, and overall human being.  Getting a chance to chat with her one on one for this project was such a delight. There’s something to be said about first meeting a person and feeling their openness, warmth and acceptance.  That is Shanae. She’s genuine and caring, not to mention motivated, driven with an entrepreneurial spirit.

She is a team leader with Perfectly Posh, which offers naturally based pampering products, and they are so delightful! Keep up with her and check out the products HERE!

To learn more about this Life Inspired Project, go HERE!

And as always, if you would like to nominate someone for this project, yourself included, please contact me today.

And now without further ado, here’s Shanae:

When did you realize that your life was being held back by fear or self-doubt, and what kept you from moving forward?

I don’t think there is ever just 1 single thing holding us back. I feel like there have been several times in my life so far that I have had to step up and just be, well, brave! So far in my life the biggest thing to hold me back the most was my unchallenged world-view. I subscribed thoughts like “You can’t do that, it’s not right” “Moms can’t do that” “To be the way you’re supposed to be, you can’t do that” etc… My biggest world-view shift came a few years ago when I realized that my former religion wasn’t what I could participate in with integrity anymore. It was a huge wake-up call and I can honestly say it is the hardest and best thing that ever happened to me. It was the most scared I have ever been. When we talk about “what’s the worst thing that could happen?” I was grappling with what I had always been taught which meant that the worst thing that could happen would have eternal consequences! Fear of what God would do, what my family would say, what my friends would do, how to raise my kids, and what to believe myself held me in limbo of taking the next steps in my life for over a year. I tried to make things work, but as everyone reading this probably knows, once you see something for what it is, you can’t unsee it. Once you have grown, you can’t shrink back to fit. As you can imagine, it didn’t end well with the majority of my former faith community. 

What triggered you to no longer live a life of fear or self-doubt?

Discomfort. Pretending to be something that I wasn’t anymore became impossible. Questioning everything I had ever believed (and I mean everything) made me very difficult to be around for basically everyone I knew and dealt with on a daily basis. I knew I wanted to be able to be myself. I wanted to be able to wear different clothing, to love people freely and without judgement, to get to know new people who had a larger and more inclusive view on things and to really experience LIFE without so much fear of everything and everyone. Our situation was tenuous with everyone. We loved the people in our life a great deal (which made everything harder) and, frankly, the discomfort was palpable daily. I didn’t want to live like that anymore. My husband agreed that staying in our current situation was not a healthy decision for our family. 

What did you have to let go of in order to take the leap to move forward?

What did I have to let go of? Everything. My entire world-view, belief system, community, tradition and more. The hardest? Letting go of what the most important people in my life might think about me for picking a different life path. We actually let go of a lot more than that! Although doesn’t seem very brave to say it like this, it’s what happened; we were in such a difficult place that we just picked up and left…We sold everything we owned and traveled for about a year while we decided what to do next! It created a difficult and amazing adventure for our family. With our 3 boys in tow, we hit 43 states and even 2 countries in about 10 months while we vagabonded around the US in our minivan. It took a lot of ingenuity and discipline to work our businesses and homeschool on the road and while it seems insane to just pick up and go, sometimes doing something that seems CRAZY really is the most sane. Taking that time with our children to get some space and just experience life was really one of the best decisions we have ever made. A SCARY decision, but a GREAT decision.

What did you find on the other side of fear that made it worth it?

I found an entire world. Truly. Previously, my limited world-view had set me up with the “right” choice about what to eat, drink, wear, do, read, watch, say, which, of course all of that dictated what I thought and felt. 

Taking back my power to decide and the freedom to explore has produced an amazing gift.  Facing that fear, accepting the change, and leaning into life experiences has been revolutionary to say the least. I love my intentionally-chosen life and the people in it! I am better at loving and accepting myself. I am better at loving and accepting others. 

What would you tell someone (or your former self) who still feels held back by fear or self-doubt?

2 things: What is the worst-case scenario? You have to start over? Doable. It doesn’t work? Then you just end up back where you are. What will people think? Well, that never killed anyone. You can do it. The second thing is to realize that you are already the person you need to be to make things happen, because you’re the one who IS going to make it happen. You’re probably braver and stronger than you think.

Is there anything else you would like to share?

Listen. Listen to everyone and everything and don’t be afraid to admit that you’ve been wrong. It’ll make you better. It’ll teach you. It’ll help you grow. I love this quote from an article by Marisa Pond Calderwood 

“I started to realize that I had been given an incredible gift: the perspective of intimately understanding what it feels like to be 100% certain that something is true – and then to disprove that to myself. To accept that I was WRONG on something so crucially important to me that I built my life around it. Which begs the question: what other underlying assumptions in my life are wrong?”

THAT is when growth happened. When I found the freedom to be wrong, to stop being afraid of what happens if I misstep and in choosing a path that isn’t necessarily “right”  to everyone- but right for me; When I chose it intentionally instead of just following the default path; THAT cast a lot of fear aside and is ultimately allowing me to fully become, well- just me.