Hello beautiful people of Expansive Capacity! Hello you glorious creatures!

It’s time again for Superpower Sunday! 🙂

This is all about how we can implement wee changes that can turbocharge our *existing* superpowers so that we don’t dim our own lights due to inertia, stress, or any other upper-limit problem that reveals itself along our path.

This month’s Superpower Sunday is a focus on The Bait Tag.

Travel back with me about a decade ago. I was in a partnership with a legend in this business… someone I felt low enoughness around… or so I thought; the longer our partnership went on, the clearer I got that what I was feeling in her presence was a sense of needing to fix HER low enoughness in so many of the more innovative things our partnership was introducing.

Whatever the reason, there was an intersection of not-good-energy and the way it often played out was that an issue would concern her enough to fire off an email to me, that email would land in my inbox, I’d see her name in the unreads section, my adrenaline would spike, my heart rate would increase, my breathing would go shallow, my body temperature would elevate, and my mind would start whirring through dozens of different scenarios about what she might be upset about, what I might have done wrong, what I was going to have to defend about decisions we had already agreed to in the last meeting, what she didn’t understand about how something worked… whatever.

It wouldn’t matter what the subject was; it wouldn’t matter how easy the fix was. Her energy + my energy = not-good-stuff in my mind-body resting state. Contact from her made me reactive. I had to come up with a way to soothe how this was landing in my system so I could stay Best Bon more of the time.

Enter: The Bait Tag.

In my email program, I created a filter for all messages from her. This filter would route the emails to a special inbox — nested and hidden below the main inbox — called BAIT.

And a couple of times a day, I would feel aligned enough to be able to weather whatever it was that might be waiting for me to take a deep breath and GO IN. I would — knowing full well that I have a tendency to be reactive with these messages and this person in general — protect myself from even SEEING the incoming energetic load ’til I was officially *ready* for the task of fielding the actual issue.

This is the basis for the aligned hustle, BTW. It’s as essential as my “gratitude, then grind” ritual. It’s a way of making sure I don’t take bait I’ve learned is ALWAYS potentially there. Not even due to what *she* puts there as much as due to what *my brain* perceives as bait! Some combination of conditions that keeps my amygdala feeling unsafe.

It’s a “count to ten” for the reactive brain. When we know — even if we don’t know the reasons WHY — we get triggered by someone, we can prevent feeling *as* triggered by them simply by clocking IN for doing the work of engaging with them.

Think of the places you can use the bait tag: dedicated friends groupings at Facebook, color-coding in your contacts, DND status for texts or calls from the people who are *always* triggering, a filtered inbox, a TIME OF DAY during which you can show up as Best You… ready for whatever might be there.

Honestly, the bait tag is such a great practice for my next-tier self that I use it liberally with certain clients, certain topics of discussion with the hubs, even certain types of TV shows I’ll watch. There are just healthier ZONES for dealing with so many things… why not use them?

How will YOU use the bait tag in your life? I wanna know! Hop over to the dojo and share with me in this month’s comments as we round out October armed for all the best in our lives!

A reminder: Your November Aligned Hustle Calendar is at the Welcome page if you haven’t already grabbed it. Get ready for greatness!

As always, continue sharing how everything’s going for you in the dojo as we head into November for more self-care than you could imagine! Right on time to be sure you’re FILLED with all the best tools for navigating the holidays through the end of 2019!

So much love flowing your way,

Enoughness is an inside job… and sometimes you need a guide to find your way there. Let Bonnie Gillespie get you started.