Celebrating Two Years: Top Ten Favorite Power Principles Episodes

Top Ten Episodes

Are you new to Power Principles? Episode 99 shares the Top Ten listener favorite from the first two seasons. Tune in to hear episode clips and listeners’ takeaways.

Warner Family Favorite Christmas Eve Stories

Warner Family by Christmas Tree

Ep. 98 To celebrate the holidays, the Warner Family is sharing their Christmas Eve tradition. Each family member creates a story, poem, song, or play highlighting a memory from the year to share on Christmas Eve. We’ve chosen a few of our favorites and hope they bring a smile to you this year. Most of all, we wish you a healthy and memorable holiday season. Love, The Warner Family

The Power of Podcasting

Woman with headphones talking into microphone

Ep. 97 Maleah Warner shares thoughts about two years of hosting the Power Podcast. Listen to learn why she started the podcast, what unexpected surprises have resulted from producing this podcast, and get a sneak preview of where the podcast is going in 2021.

Show Notes:

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Ep 35 Sidedoor Approaches to Solving Problems

Lies of the Magpie Ch 36 & 37

Woman read Lies of the Magpie in kitchen

Ep. 82 In Chapters 36 & 37 of Lies of the Magpie, Maleah finds herself caught in a tug-of-war between allopathic and homeopathic medicine. She struggles to decide whether to take the prescribed thyroid medication or continue homeopathic treatment in hopes that her body can heal itself naturally.

Ep. 12 The Power of Imbalance

Our goal isn't to achieve balance.

The Power of Imbalance

I used to believe that achieving balance was my life’s goal. I pictured a balanced life as a kind of Utopia, a paradise of bliss and perfection. I believed that once I attained this Promised Land of Balance, I could kick off my shoes, find a reclining chair, and bask in the light of Balance’s Sunny Beaches.

In my mind, I had an image of what a Balanced Life would look and feel like. My balanced life would look organized, clean, planned out. Everything would be in order. In my balanced life I would feel unstressed, calm, settled, grounded, and in control. In my mind, I had a picture of waking up early before my kids, spending time in prayer, meditation, journal writing, exercising, cooking a nutritious breakfast and being on time for every appointment. Aaaah, perfect balance.

My life looked nothing like that. Raising four children, my days were filled with unplanned, unexpected, and often unsavory glitches. Inevitably someone would wake up in the night with the stomach flu and dreams of my “perfect” day would dissolve into mountains of laundry and frantic trips to the store for Pedialyte. 

Thankfully I met a personal trainer who taught me the truth about the Power of Imbalance.

Imbalance Develops Strength

I am not a work-with-a-personal-trainer kind of girl, but my gym membership included six months of free personal training and I never let a coupon go to waste. This is how I met Shaun. He taught me a routine using free-weights, and just as I started to feel confident with the routine, he made me move from the flat floor to standing on a balance saucer. After teetering and falling into the mirror, I complained, “Nothing about this feels right. I feel completely out of control, completely off-balance. I was doing better on the floor.”

Shaun said, “It’s not supposed to feel comfortable. You are not supposed to feel balanced.”

Then Shaun taught me this importance lesson about balance.

Stop focussing on how awkward and embarrassed you feel. Stop worrying that people are judging you. Instead, pay attention to what your leg muscles feel like.  Feel how the muscles are correcting you, when you tilt too far to the right, your leg muscles fire up and grab your body and correct you back to center. It’s the imbalance that is making your leg muscles smarter and stronger. Being off-balance is what’s building your strength.”

Yes, this is another reminder that life is not about the destination. The growth is in the journey. And if the process feels like a struggle, then you are probably doing it right.

Balance Signals End of Growth

We talk so much about achieving balance because balance feels good. Being in balance feels comfortable, and don’t we all just want to feel comfortable? YES! But remember:

There is no growth in the comfort zone and no comfort in the growth zone. 

Once I mastered my free-weight routine on the floor, I felt confident and in control, so naturally I wanted to stay there. But my growth had peaked out. I was no longer challenging my core muscles. Shaun taught me that life is not about achieving balance, life is about struggling to achieve balance.

Think about this: stand perfectly still with your feet aligned side by side. You feel balanced, but you also aren’t going anywhere? There is no moving forward while balanced. In order to take a step forward, you have to tip off balance, shift all weight onto one foot while the other foot moves forward, then shift all the weight back onto the other foot while the other moves. Progress in life comes only through transitory periods of imbalance.

If I am balanced, I am not moving forward. If I am balanced, I am not growing.

Balance is a Goal, but Not a Destination

So why are there a gazillion self-help books about achieving balance? Are they all wrong?

The answer is NO. They are right because we do want to work towards balance. Balance is our goal. However, balance is not our destination.

We often tend to think of balance as a destination and that once you get there, you stay forever, like arriving in Hawaii. I had friends who moved to Hawaii, and they loved it for a few months, then guess what happened? The beaches, the ocean, the scenery became the normal backdrop of ordinary daily routines. When they brought their kids to visit Utah, their youngest exploded with joy at the sight of pinecones and squirrels. 

If Hawaii can become hum-drum, then balance can certainly become boring. 

Here is the sad news about encountering balance: the moment we meet balance, it’s already time to move on. Why? Because it is not finding balance, but the struggle to find balance that moves us forward. 

Myths of Balance

Do you hold on to any of these myths about achieving a balanced life?

Myth #1  Balance is a destination. Once I arrive, I can stay forever.

Myth #2  In order to be successful, I have to achieve a balanced life.

Myth #3  Balance means symmetry, an equal focus on all areas of my life.

If so, try on these truths.

Truth #1: Balance is a goal to work towards, but I don’t want to stay balanced. As a human, I seek growth, which require me to continually step forward out of balance. 

Truth #2: To be successful, I must often struggle through transitory periods of imbalance.

Truth #3: Progress requires extra focus on in one or two areas that sometimes leave other areas a bit neglected. But that’s okay because at another time, those areas will get the attention.

Conclusion

Understanding the Power of Imbalance has helped me to embrace the discomfort of the struggle. While remodeling the kitchen, we may eat too much fast food and cold cereal, but that’s okay. Once the remodel work is done, I can refocus on cooking nutritious family meals. When my garden is thriving, my kitchen is usually a disaster because my counters are covered with squash, cucumbers and tomatoes and a lot of flies. During the winter my countertops stay clean, but I eat canned vegetables. There are times and seasons for everything. When life feels out-of-balance, take some advice from my trainer, Shaun. Stop worrying about how uncomfortable you feel and pay attention to where the growth is happening. 

Let me introduce myself

Maleah: An Introduction to My Writing, In My Own Words

Trapping Life with a Word Net

I was tracing over-sized tropical flowers onto long strips of colored butcher paper, the kind you find on giant rolls in the faculty lounge, when Mrs. Wirthlin shouted to my best friend, “Lara, cry like you mean it.”

We were almost twelve, and Lara was starring as Dorothy in the annual sixth grade play. Mrs. Wirthlin explained to the preteen cast that Dorothy is a difficult role to play because she is a real, human girl.

“Sometimes it’s easier,” said Mrs. Wirthlin, her magnificent classroom voice always flowed with vibrato as though she were on the verge of singing about fractions in an opera, “to cackle like a witch, roar like a lion, or squeak like a munchkin than to cry, believably, like a real girl.”

My name is Maleah, and I write contemporary women’s fiction – the kind that chronicles real life and doesn’t have any heart-throbbing vampires or bare-chested Fabio’s.

If fiction gives readers a momentary escape from their reality, then why would anyone want to read fiction so real that it borders on being creative nonfiction?

Good question. Maybe nobody does. But I will write anyway, because

life is rich, messy, interesting, monotonous, beautiful, hideous, exhilarating, and devastating.

Life is so easy to complicate.

I must attempt to capture real life with words, like a child who chases a butterfly with a net, hoping to trap the graceful creature – not to cage, but to slow for a brief moment of closer examination, admiring its magnificent, yet delicate form. When the child releases the creature to again fly free, he barely feels the ripples in the air that softly kiss his cheeks, and then crescendo to form tsunamis on the opposite side of the earth.

This is my goal – to momentarily entrap and ponder the metamorphosis of the monarch life.

I will see you here on Smashing Stories every 10th, 20th, and 30th of each month.

maleah

post script–the child in the picture is mine, the butterfly is courtesy of photoshop.

FEARLESS

Did you know?

 

That I have a fear of being blown into the Grand Canyon.

And did you know?

That in a dust-covered cardboard box labeled “Maleah’s college stuff” is a rumpled newspaper article from the Salt Lake Tribune, April 27, 1994. The last sentence quotes me, a nineteen-year-old college freshman, and reportedly I said, “I have anxiety about writing and having people read what I write.”

So what, in good glory, am I doing on a writers’ blog?

For years, my fear of writing for the public overpowered my love for writing. (Yes, I am also in possession of an ancient cassette tape–press play and hear me as a squeaky-voiced, ten-year-old fourth grader declare, “I love to write; I want to grow up and write stories for people to read.”)

Now, I approach writing with a (somewhat) fearless disregard for public opinion–because, what the heck, I have:

* pushed a human the size of a seven pound bowling ball through a one centimeter bodily crevice without pain meds (not by choice…the first time) while naked from the waist down in a room full of strangers,

*slid to the cliff of mental reason and did not fall off the edge,

*watched every last penny of life savings slurp into a bottomless, black business hole,

*and returned each time, still breathing, still alive, and still mostly happy.

So,

I. Can. Write.

Michael Jordan said,
I’ve missed more than 90,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games, 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

If I need to invest 10,000 hours of practice in order to excel at writing, (thank you Malcolm Gladwell and Dr. Livingston, I presume) then, by golly, I’d better get crackin’!

Up, up, and away…

sincerely yours,

maleah

post script: here is the Vogue-worthy (so not!) photo of me that appeared in the Salt Lake Tribune next to the article, “Gang Presence Unnerves Residents” – not the article for which I was interviewed. Okay, Loraine, this is my bulbous-head-mini-feet mug. Let’s see yours!

By the way, this photo was the model for the new Maleah Bobblehead, available at Wal-mart this Fall (also, so not! phew).

Choose Your Cyber Words Carefully

Remember my fear of being blown into the Grand Canyon?

This is me last Saturday.

Notice the wind mightily huffing and puffing to blow me down.

Which just goes to show –
BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU SEND INTO CYBER UNIVERSE.

Last post I confessed my lifelong fear of being blown by a sudden gust of wind into the depths of the Grand Canyon (thus the reason I have lived north and south of the big GC and never stopped to visit). Nine days later I’m fighting to keep my footing at eleven thousand feet on the saddle of Mt. Timpanogos. The wind reached its blustery hand into my jacket pocket and stole my stash of Kleenex, releasing the fragile tissue to be teased, whipped and torn to confetti along the streams of gusting current. I thought of every person I knew in the Utah Valley, and wondered if they would catch me should I become blustery tissue paper.
Last post I also typed out my online confessional, my fear of public writing.
I surrendered my safe hideout as a closet writer.
I hit “publish” and voila, people, real people, read my writing. Aaaahhhh.
(Thank you for reading. Thanks for taking the time. I am terrified and grateful.)

I see a pattern here.Let me try this…

Did you know that?

I have a fear of money, lots and lots of money.

Let’s get a visual on that – the power of one thousand words.


There you go cyber world. Take that and run with it.