How would your dating life look different if you knew that you were the prize, rather than waiting and hoping for someone to deem you worthy of being chosen?

How much has your heart hurt over the years as you’ve waited anxiously by the phone, rehashed every date, dissected every nuance of the most trivial conversations or texts, wondering if you were too little, too much, if he would call, what he thought of you, if he was interested, if maybe…just maybe…he might choose you, the anticipation of the full body sigh of relief that would come with that choosing. The feeling of being chosen. The calm. The reassurance. The validation of your worth.

And where were you during all of that time? What were you feeling on those phone calls? How did it feel in your body on those dates? Were your senses calm, or on high alert? Did you feel respected and seen? Did you notice? Did your soul feel safe with him? Were you grounded and present with yourself, or were you so focused on him — what he was thinking, how he was seeing you, whether he would choose you — that you forgot to notice whether he was worthy of being chosen by you? Whether he felt like calm, like home, or like that rush of adrenaline that comes from the activated nervous system of an unhealthy attraction stemming from wounding?

How would your life look different if you knew you were already worthy? If you chose yourself and didn’t have to go through the pain of that game, over and over again?

Are you addicted to the game?

To the heady rush of feeling chosen, be it for a night or a month?

To the challenge of wanting to be the one he finally changes for, the one worthy enough to be chosen by the man who does not choose? Where does that need come from? Who was the first man to break your heart by not choosing you, and what wound are you trying to go back in time to heal? How can you begin to sit with that pain and give yourself the love, security, and validation he was unable to give you?

Are you complete in yourself and looking for another complete human to create something extraordinary with, or are you hoping that somehow two broken humans might make a whole?

When exactly did you decide your worth was an ambiguous thing that needed a man’s opinion to have its boundaries and edges set into being?  Pinpoint the moment when you gave away that power. How old were you? What was being modeled to you about what it meant to be a woman? About what it meant to be a man? About relationships?

Too often we run around this world making adult relationship decisions based on little girl hurt and wounds.

Ask yourself these questions, and give yourself the gift of looking deep within and being radically honest.

In what areas of your life do you need to step into your identity of a powerful, worthy woman?

Truth can be uncomfortable, but truth can also set us free.

And in case you’re not sure, hear this: you are worthy. You are enough. You deserve to heal and be whole. And you have permission to choose yourself, and to bring the highest degree of selectivity to the man you choose to allow into your life.