Suzanne has been one of our mother’s best friends since graduate school and is basically our third parent. She moved into our home the day Lauren (the oldest of the four of us) was born and lived with us for thirteen years.  She was there for every birthday, knee scratch and first day of school. Just like any other parent, she helped mold me into the person I am today.  What can I say, she is the best.  When we were growing up, every time we said goodbye to Suz, she would tell us, “Trust in yourself.  Do what’s right.”   I asked Suz about her biggest life lessons; this is what she had to say:

Suzanne’s Biggest Lessons

Do what’s right – While it can be hard, you’ll never regret doing the right thing. Part of doing what’s right is to try to live without clocking up regrets.  It’s being true to yourself.  It’s way easier to do the right thing the first time, than it is to go back and apologize. If you do things right the first time, you will live with less regret.

I asked Suz how you know what the right this is.  She said, “You think about it. Nobody can say what is right for you.”

Don’t treat people with different levels of respect because of their station in life – I learned this lesson when I began to work and realized that people are just people. For example, whether you do or don’t have a degree does not mean you are more or less special. Often, if you exclude people from your life, you are the one missing out. Don’t be quick to judge people. You are only cheating yourself.

Live below your means – Living below your means is a way for you to protect your future, and the future of your health and family. If you live at the edge of exactly what you are making, you have no room to grow financially.  You cannot build your life by living above your means.  By living below your means, saving for retirement and/or a catastrophic event, you are taking responsibility for your whole life. 

In case you missed it, check out Biggest Lessons: Part 1 here.

This past November, I had a love affair with Oprah’s Lifeclass. I had never really been very interested in Oprah, so a lot of the footage was new to me. I thought that her series was so wonderfully put together and gracefully summed up Oprah’s biggest life lessons. If you haven’t watched the series, you must because it is so powerful.

In light of my new interest, I started to find myself curious of other people’s life lessons. I decided to ask each of my parents what their biggest life lessons were. My mother was the first to respond, although her response may not be considered a lesson.  I told her that, “the lesson is a challenge and the challenge is a lesson.” Here is what she wrote:

Biggest challenge: Mom

My biggest challenge is to live through my heart and not my head. One might think this is easy, but it is really tricky – (tricky trick as my mother would say).  It may just be the trickiest trick of all. Living with my heart guiding me means disregarding things that the mind throws in front of me, things that often seem so reasonable but feel off. That is the key I think, to knowing when you are in your head and not your heart- how you feel.

People don’t necessarily like it when you’re operating from your heart because your actions or responses often don’t make sense in a logical way – so they see you as not thinking straight. This is exactly what happens. The brain sees things in a straight line – if that, so this. The heart however “considers” and somehow comes down on the side of love, however messy and unclear that seems. I want to live here. This is my biggest and most consistent challenge.

Stay tuned for part 2 and 3.