It's time to wake up.

Have you ever experienced something in life that takes you from feeling safe and warm to suddenly having a giant pit in your stomach? That moment when you realize that you were just blissfully unaware of the dangers in life.

There are a few incidents in recent memory that triggered and left me with that giant pit in my stomach. There was the time in 2013 when I stood at the start line of the Bucks County Half Marathon, days after the Boston Marathon Bombing. Then, there was 2016, when I woke up the morning after the election and realized it wasn’t a dream. Or the time, earlier this year, when I sat at my desk reading an article in Philly.com about my [prior] company’s IPO and realized that all my worst fears about the motives of the leadership team and the dreary future state of the company were true.

And then there was yesterday when, about an hour into services for Rosh Hashana, I realized that the friendly police officer that met me at the door was not there to celebrate the Jewish New Year, but rather to protect all those inside who were.

Incidents like these serve as a wake-up call. They shake us to our core, rob us of a protective innocence, making us feel vulnerable and afraid. They trigger a stress reaction, and that pit in your stomach is often tied to the “victim” mindset.

What we do next and how we choose to react is critical. It determines how long we’ll stay in this “stress reaction” state and what happens once we are ready to take action. Do we choose to close our eyes, hoping that it either goes away or that someone else will step in to fix it and make us feel safe again? Do we get angry and act to minimize the stressor? Do we try to rationalize why this incident happened to make ourselves feel safe despite whatever is occurring? Or, do we try to find the opportunity or understand the bigger picture?

As a semi-practicing Jew who only attends services on the high holidays, I cherish my time spent there not for my connection to G-d, but for the time I get to spend with my nearly 90-year old grandfather, my family, and my husband, Matt. I use the time to read the stories, recite whatever is available in the transliteration, and to think. I listen to the sermon and try to understand how it relates to the bigger picture called life.

The Rabbi’s sermon yesterday was about the Jewish people falling asleep. Falling asleep and letting the world happen around us. Falling asleep and not standing up for our people, leading to incidents like recent shootings in Synagogues. Falling asleep and forgetting why we practice our religion, the meaning behind it all. Falling asleep and forgetting to wake up. He concluded that there is time to wake up. That there is time to take action, to flip the script, to stop playing the victim, to stop rationalizing the behaviors of others, to take control of our story.

While his sermon was specific to the Jewish people, as a coach, it totally resonated with me. Many of my clients come to me with a feeling of being “stuck” of wanting more, but not knowing how to get it, or just feeling at the effect of their life. This concept of falling asleep and becoming at the effect of our lives happens to all of us, every day.

In life, there isn’t always a loud alarm like the ones I discussed earlier, sometimes, it’s one of those silent alarms that start to grow louder and more intense until you wake up. Whether it’s when you realize you’ve been at a job longer than planned, or when you celebrate your 30th, 40th, or 50th birthday and start to question where the past decade went, we get so caught up in day-to-day living that we forget to take a step back and question if it’s the life we want to be living, and if it’s not – taking the time and effort to do something about it.

It’s time to wake up. We have the power to take control of our lives. The power to choose how we want to show up and the mindset we approach life with, the power to influence and inspire others, the power to start a ripple effect. The question is when you hear the alarm, will you jump out of bed, or will you hit snooze and choose to keep your eyes closed?

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