A RISING TIDE RAISES ALL SHIPS

I grew up on the Eastern Shore of Virginia. Its a small rural peninsula buttressed by the Atlantic Ocean and the Chesapeake Bay. As a teenager I used to enjoy going down to one of the many inlets and just listening to the water lap against the dock. Sometimes, the water was so shallow that I could easily see the ground beneath the water and the water stains on the posts of the dock were several feet above the water level. Other times, the water would come up to my knees when I'd hang my legs over the edge.

I never once saw a high tide that only raised a few of the boats tied to the dock. That's not the way tides work. When high tide comes in everything that floats is effected. Our life is pretty similar. Have you ever had the feeling that you have so many things to "fix" that the overwhelm literally paralyzes you into doing nothing? I get it. It happens to all of us. The next time you have so much on your plate that seems "wrong", I want you to remember this simple little phrase, "a rising tide raises all ships".

What this beautiful little truth means in the context of our lives is that when you fix any one problem in your life, you raise your "tide" and the rest of your "ships" rise as well. I'll give you an example:

Mary is a housewife. She graduated from college 24 years ago and has three children, 12, 15 and 17. She has been married for 21 years but lately her and her husband Bill limit their conversation to morning grunts, an occassional argument over money or the kids, and if things are going really well, they may say "goodnight" to each other after exchanging pleasantries about the obligations each of them have the next day.

Mary doesn't have any time for herself. She wakes up, gets in the shower, makes breakfast for the kids, straightens out the house, gets a cup of coffee, fights traffic to get to work on time, deals with impatient clients all day for a boss who sees her as nothing more than a necessary evil that drains his bottom line. She fights traffic home, makes dinner, cleans up, picks the kids up from their various activities, begrudgingly pays the bills online and collapses on the couch to watch a reality show and then repeats the sequence the next day. Its been this way for about 10 years now. Mary is among the walking dead. No passion. No joy. . . other than the occassional stop at the local fast food place or the ice cream that she eats right out of the container while she watches her show.

Mary's self esteem is incredibly low. She has no passion in her marriage. She feels fat and old. She has no energy. She feels unappreciated and unloved. Her life is passing her by and she feels trapped in a life that is nothing like she envisioned. She talks about making some changes but when she thinks about it, she doesn't even know where to begin and even if she did, she immediately gets overwhelmed by the thought of squeezing the acts of change into her already crammed day.

So what should Mary do? The answer is . . . anything. Because if Mary changes anything in this scenario, the principle of "a rising tide raises all ships" will begin to take effect. Here are some examples from Mary's life:

- Mary decided and committed to changing her diet and adding exercise into her life. She came up with a plan, picked a start date and recognized that she would have to carve out time to implement her plan so she wouldn't have any excuses. Mary felt that if she could lose some weight maybe she could feel better about herself. She was right. She removed the ice-cream reality show hour and replaced it with a walk that turned into a jog. She removed the fast food runs in favor of packing evenly spaced out healthy meals. She started taking a multi-vitamin every day and replaced soda with water. Here's what happened from mary choosing to address her health and fitness ONLY:

Mary lost 56 pounds in 12 months. She also saved approximately $1,200 a year "eating out" which she used to buy new "skinny clothes". Her energy level went through the roof and she automatically began sleeping better and waking earlier. Her self-esteem shot through the roof and she felt sexier. Her new self-esteem was interpreted as sexier by her husband. She was less tired and had less "headaches". Mary's sex life was rejevunated. As a result her husband started sending her flowers out of the blue and began going on the walks with her. She began to love how she felt so much that she began cooking healthier for the whole family and soon Bill was down 22 pounds himself. He also started feeling more attractive which only helped their passion. Soon they were riding bikes with their kids on weekends. Mary loved her new fitness lifestyle so much that she began blogging about it and even started a local morning "mom run" in her neighborhood. Two years later, Mary became a certified personal trainer and now owns her own business where she coaches other moms to get in great shape. She makes three times the money she did as a receptionist working from home and she loves every minute of it. Mary's entire life is different.

The moral of this story isn't that getting in shape is the cure-all for your "second half". The moral is that Mary didn't set out to change her finances, her marriage, her physical fitness, her self-esteem, her family, and her career all at one time. She simply made some simple changes in one area. The rest of the ships just rose with the tide.