Episode 44 Dominoes. Ripples. The Butterfly Effect. – You Make A Difference

Dominos – Ripples – Butterfly Effect: You make a Difference Have you ever felt small or insignificant, maybe even powerless? In our big world where media gives us access to the vast happenings across the globe we come to realize the scope of the world, the overwhelming nature of the trauma and catastrophes across the globe, and all too often that bigness creates in us a sense of smallness; a sense of overwhelm and insignificance. Once we feel powerless, that our efforts will make no difference, we become passive passengers on this rock we call a planet. We hope for the best, but feel too small to instigate change. When we get to that place we have essentially stopped believing that we matter. Today I want to remind why this is untrue. Stay tuned for the small and simple things that change the world. Stories are our lives in language. Welcome to the Love Your Story podcast. I’m Lori Lee, and I’m excited for our future together of telling stories, evaluating our own stories, and lifting ourselves and others to greater places because of our control over our stories. This podcast is about empowerment and giving you, the listener, ideas to work with in making your stories work for you. Story power serves you best when you know how to use it. You’ve pushed the first domino in a string of set up dominoes and watched one fall into the next, and the next, and the next as the domino structure unfolds. You’ve thrown a rock in a pond and watched the ripples start small and get bigger and bigger until they cover the pond, or watched a fish break the surface of the water sending ripples out to the shore.  You’ve heard of the ‘butterfly effect’ which posits that the flap of a butterfly wing on one side of the world generates the air movement that eventually culminates in a storm on the other side of the world. All of these are an illustration of how one action sets in motion other actions, that continue to set off additional actions. And we do this a hundred times every day… There are thousands of reasons that each of us matter. They begin in the intrinsic value of being alive and that alone means we must be significant…to the butterfly effect and how even our smallest actions create responses, affect lives, change the world in ways we can’t fully understand.  If you’ve had a child you’ve changed the world. If you’ve loved someone you’ve had impact. If you’ve hurt someone you’ve pushed a domino. If you’ve shared or forgiven or learned something you have created some type of ripple. In a way, it seems like a silly thing to talk about because everything we do and don’t do affects the people and the world around us, in ways we can sometimes see and often in ways we cannot. It’s so obvious, but at the same time, maybe it’s not so obvious, so it merits a fifteen-minute conversation about how much we each matter in the world. Despite this tremendous influence and significance of each person, one of the most struggled with concepts, across the board, is that of self-worth. The one ghost that I have seen, as I’ve been privy to people’s deepest self-work, is that even the most successful of us, at our deepest core of things that hold us back, struggle with feelings of self-doubt and our own handful of insecurities about being enough—whether it’s physically, mentally, even spiritually. Self-doubt, in one way or another, is a killer of dreams and joy. It’s kind of crazy when you break it down. Cultural values that say odd things like – you matter if you’re a movie star, you matter if you’re a sports star, you matter if you make a lot of money…when you actually step back and evaluate the absurdness of those ideas and how heavily they are bought into, it’s disturbing. In Scientific American and Huffington Post in 2012 both ran articles on research that pre-teens put the value of being famous as their number one goal, overshadowing financial success, love, and community. American Idol, You...