I want to acknowledge all the good and adorn the bounty of
my heart with quiet accolades, some that I alone will see in this lifetime. I
want to smell the laurel of my laurel wreath, not to tout to others, but to recognize
my trusting self and let her know how grateful I am for all her efforts and lucidity.
She is the one who trusts before anyone else in the world ever sees a thing.
She deserves to be acknowledged.
I want to see every one of my own successes because I know
seeing these will summon even more.
In this life, I still have untamed dreams. I’m not despairing,
because I’m receiving my own recognition all along the way. I am substituting the
dismissing voice with the one that makes things count, makes them genuine, and
makes them last. I am telling the angelic terrified part of myself a parable,
the tale of the success of Erin. It’s a nighty nite time
story she needs to hear day and night, so that lesser stories have no room to
take root. I tell her about her brave feats of spirit, dedication to advanced forces,
courageous choices and obstinate formidability. I am on my side now.
If I could have handed the collection chock full of published
articles, letters of recommendations, thank you notes, and character references
to that self of five years ago, she would have cried with gratitude that the
dreams she cherished had come true. She would have flung the mail she carried
like a ticker tape parade. She may have fell to her knees and sung to the skies
with multi colored hummingbirds soaring from her mouth, "I accomplished it,
I accomplished it! I did it!" Just a
few miles down the road, this album was filled with thrown away success,
because I did do it. Who cares? So What?
No one else can bless you in the same way, and no one else
will. It’s an essential practice, on the order of breathing or talking to the divine,
I’d say, to witness to your own footsteps, genius, average, and very, very
small.
Because let me tell you, the anti-leader of success is alive
and well within you. Its satire and caustic voice can leave you believing
you’re not successful even when you win. Here’s the voice I mean. Oh that was luck.
I couldn’t make that happen again- Ever. It’s just a gamble that I took because…fill
in the blank, and it’s not that big a deal. Besides, it’s just a drop in the bucket
to where I have to go. You may think it’s not a really big result, but only
because you’ve allowed yourself to think you’re no big result.
Believe me, I know about the agitated darkness of that
power- of that voice. I’ve seen it eat away the confidence of my students and clientele,
people who had everything going for them except themselves. I’ve been one of
those people, too
Critical self-talk stirs broken glass into your fettuccini
alfredo ; you cut yourself whenever you take a bite of the creamy noodles . You
may not even consciously hear this voice, but it’s a “realistic point of view,”
a “concern” that suddenly arises, or a subtle suggestion that changes the landscape
as Ralph Waldo Emerson said “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit. To a
man laboring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then,
there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by
death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in
the population.
Only this landscape is in your mind , in your spirit in the
very depths of your soul.
One part of you is crazily grinding away like a weed
attempting to crack through the cement in the middle of midtown Manhattan-
like a Tree Grow’s in Brooklyn. It’s your job to nurture
those attempts and cheer them on as though your life depended on it. Your
creative life does depend on it. Your divine life needs constant love and
support.
It’s murder by diminishment. Admit it; you know I’m not
alone in this. Many of us yearn for validation, shoot at the moon up in the sky
to get it, yet treat our own victories like used paper towels after dinner. We
tell ourselves, that once we got “there,” we’ll really take it all in. That is
a moving bull’s eye on a target. We’re so busy longing, straining, and uncertain,
we pass through promised lands and vortex and never arrive. So here’s what I
want you to know. Success comes in the middle or not at all.
“Wild success is not a path of quiet desperation clinched by
a big bang. It’s a path of honoring you every step of the way. You may already
be great at this, but me, I had some remedial work cut out for me, something
like writing ten thousand times on the blackboard of life, “I will not be mean
to Erin anymore. Erin is healthy,
wealthy, wise, safe, loved, and lucky. She is a great person who is trying her
best.” See, I was forever at a casting call for a part in my own movie, instead
of embracing the leading role. I was waiting to “make it,” instead of making it
every step of the way. I saw most of my success as nondescript motel rooms on
the road to somewhere “big.” I was so busy studying the cartogram, I never
gazed in the mirror and said, “Go Girl” to the one who didn’t always know which
way to go, or how to show up in one piece, but was showing up anyway.
Coaching tip: what success (s) do you need to acknowledge?
These moments will not come again. In honor of her, and all of us on creative journeys;
about how crucial it is to witness to your own amazing, everyday success-- if
you want to create a life you love.
I want to pick posy of roses for myself-- not the self who
got featured in the class catalog 9 or 10 times for a class being offered. I
want to pick that posy of flowers for the self who attempted this excursion where
there is no contract, agent, publisher or media in sight and plenty of bills
and relatives who averted their eyes or shook their heads. I want to acknowledge
that part of me that sobbed when she didn’t get certain speaking commitments,
but who spoke to whoever would listen instead. She’s the one who got me here.
It isn’t the confident one who is the wizard. It’s the one who was wigged out
of her mind, but who chose to believe in love instead of fear, one desperate
minute at a time, until she created a life that has others believing in their
own powerfulness, too.
If you do not cultivate this voice of intentional self-appreciation,
the voice of despair and discounting and giving rise to more pain and miles to
go. I am trying to not just keep rushing on with other deadlines, but to take
this moment of my life into my cells, for myself and for all of us who dare to
obey our own spirited instincts in this lifetime.
I want you to see how amazing you are in this very moment. I
want you to take in your touchstone right now, instead of the miles between you
and your ever changeable goals. I want you to look in your mirror of your past
as far back as you can go and take in how far you’ve come, in everything- to
see you have arrived.
“I want to leave my mark on the world,” one of my students in
a hushed tone whispers to me in a Surreptitious tone. I hear the years fleeting
by in her mind. “Does your life leave its mark on you?”- I had to query. Lately,
I’ve begun to watch how much we are deeply missing our own lives, pushing ahead
to be first in line, with destitution and sorrow in our hearts. I want you
to give to the world—but from all the love you have given to yourself.
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