The past couple years have featured a collective purging of unworkable habits around people-pleasing and diplomacy that doesn’t include one’s own needs, along with an embrace of increasing self-assertion and instinctive willfulness that creates more space for one’s self. Today that dialectic wants to be grounded in a love that is bigger than the personal self, in a drive toward beauty that is ambitious and grand, that remembers the past and holds a future aspiration.

What will you invest into yourself and your life to move you toward greatness? What does greatness mean to you, personally, in your own life? It’s a word that’s loaded up with its own toxicity when it’s attached to ideas of status and fame that really don’t matter to you. If you could set those ideas aside and sit with the question, what would make my life truly great? What would I need to acquire, to learn, to unlearn, to let go of that would increase what is great within my life, my relationships, my family, my community?

When you know your worth, you know where your value serves and where it does not. You don’t need to be all things for all people. You simply are the best of yourself and find the people and situations that value what is best of you, and find the people and situations that can help you with things that aren’t your best. Spending time knowing yourself in this way gives direction to that energy of self-assertion that might otherwise be too impulsive, too distractible, too lacking in a plan. It harnesses that energy toward your own purpose.