Sometimes things don’t work out like you plan. Sometimes things are much more difficult than you expect or wish. Sometimes, there are barriers that arise that you didn’t see coming. These things can wreck your day, they can wreck your mood and they can even wreck your momentum and plan. If you let them.

Today, I am traveling for work. I decided to bring only my work laptop because carrying two seems silly. I always write on my Mac. I have all my website info and setup on my Mac. My password is programmed in. I got up at 4:44 AM to have time to write and post because that is what I do. I have people I want to help, after all. Well, I cannot get into my site. My password isn’t working and even my username isn’t working. Ok.

But I won’t let it stop me. I won’t even let it deter me or distract me. I have a mission to help people each day and now this situation, this unexpected roadblock has turned into an opportunity to examine these types of occurrences. I have a choice to make. Waste time worrying or trying to fix something beyond my wheelhouse and wasting all the time I have to write or write and get the right resources to help me when I have time later today? I choose to follow my calling of sharing and so I write now, troubleshoot later. It will all work out for the best. The more I roll with things, accept things, love myself enough to stay true to what I am to be doing without distraction, the better things always work out and the more relaxed and joyful I feel.

Fear is a really powerful thing. Fear makes you do crazy things but more often it keeps you from doing. It keeps you from taking a chance, making the first move, opening up, connecting, creating, listening, seeing, the list goes on and on. I didn’t realize this power that fear has had over me until relatively recently.

 

Fear can be a good thing and was intended to help us to stay safe. It was intended to protect us from things that could harm us. It still does that in many ways. If you never try anything, you’re probably less likely to get hurt. At least in an obvious way. Less obvious is the fact that by not doing, by not living, you are hurting yourself and others who would have benefitted by you truly living your life as you. You are staying small and stunting your growth. I know I have and now realize how much. Not that I am beating myself up about it. That is totally contrary to the LovingME way. No, I embrace the new knowledge, forgive the past and learn in the present so that I can apply now and in the future. I also actively look for fear in my life for awareness is the first step.

 

It seems like we would know what we are afraid of, right? It seems that we would be able see and feel the fear in our lives and that it wouldn’t have to be uncovered. Not so much, in many cases. Some of the most dangerous and damaging fears are those operating outside our consciousness but affecting us nonetheless.   These are the stealth fears that oppress us without us realizing it.

 

Here is an embarrassing small personal example.   About six months ago, I finally looked into my electric bill. Here in Texas, we have had deregulation for a number of years, which means that there is competition for the service. Everyone pays the same for the connection and infrastructure portion but then companies compete for the actual usage. When all of this happened many years ago, I didn’t know what to do. I had no knowledge of the different plans and exactly zero interest in researching it so I did nothing. I was busy with work I told myself and I told myself that I didn’t want to get tied into a long-term contract. What if the price goes down? What if the price goes up at the end and they gouge me? I will keep my options open, thank you very much. Well, suffice it to say that I had been overpaying for electric by thousands of dollars in that time. Because I was afraid to make a mistake. I was scared of the perceived risk in changing and instead of mitigating that risk with knowledge, I chose to do nothing.   Nice, valuable lesson I learned. You are welcome, Mr. TXU!

 

Our education system creates and rewards risk aversion and conformity. I will skip any conjecture on motive except to say that I suppose the powers that be believe it helps keep kids manageable in the classroom and it is the way we have always done it. Mistakes are graded off. You are judged by the number of answers you give that are the exact answers that the teachers are expecting. Anything else is a mistake and will cost you in your Permanent Record. Teacher says cat, student says cat. Don’t go asking questions about why or seeing if blue is a better answer. It doesn’t matter if blue is a better answer because the only “right” answer is cat. So we learn to recite what the teacher wants and we do not risk a bad grade. We aim to get them all right because that will get us the reward of the good grade. And we love the reward. And we learn to hate the mistake. We learn to avoid the mistake more than seeking the best solution. I did anyway. I was excellent in school – a model student. You tell me what you want and I will throw up exactly what you want in the way you want it. It doesn’t matter if none of it is real or what I want or what I think. It is what you want and expect so that is what you are gonna get. And I get my A. Sweet.

 

Unlearning can sometimes take longer than learning. I am still unlearning the throw up what they want method of life. I still want the A. But I am learning not to fear the mistake. I am learning not to fear the F more than life itself. I learned more by being fired than I ever learned by getting the A. I learned that fear is nearly all self-inflicted. It loses its power when you do it anyway. Now I help people find and work around the fears that have held them back so that they can live in their full potential. It is amazing the energy that those old fears suck from life and what can happen when you take them offline.

 

What if you gave someone a really wonderful, powerful, life-changing gift and they thanked you, put it on the shelf and went on with their life without ever really unwrapping it, taking it out of the box, examining it, learning how to use it and what it can do?   You obviously can’t make anyone do anything they don’t want to do or aren’t ready to do.  But what if it was your kid and you gave him the coolest toy, game, learning tool, sleep aid and energy drink all in one?  He looked at it, loved the idea, even talked about it to his friends in excitement, and then put it on the shelf where he would look at it sometimes and smile, happy with the idea of having it, but thinking he really didn’t deserve it – never really actively receiving and using it.

 

Can you imagine the frustration you would feel, as a loving parent? To know what a powerful tool you have provided but watching as it wasn’t fully received and utilized? You would probably start trying to speak to him about it, to teach him the benefits. You would give him books on it. You would arrange for people to come into his path that are really using those they have been given. You would gently guide him into understanding. Or, being human, you would throw a mini-tantrum and tell him he better start experimenting with it and playing with it or you are taking it back. Seeing what it would do for him and what it cost you, you would really want him to use it to improve every aspect of his life, not just a small corner of his little world of his bedroom.

 

What if you have been given that gift? What if you accepted it with thanks and yet, not fully understanding it, nor believing you are worthy on some level, you have it on your shelf right now. Take a look. It is there. It is waiting. It is God’s grace. It is there to be received and applied every single day. To yourself and to others. But put your own oxygen mask on first. You are only then able to fully help others.

It occurs to me that I have spent my entire life playing it safe. As safe as I could possibly make it. Oh sure, I’ve made a lot of stupid moves (and I really struggle to use that word because I am anything but, however some moves I have made cannot be accurately described any other way), but they were still within my framework of contrived safety. I haven’t really stepped out in a big way but that is changing now.

I was reading a magazine that I don’t normally read and ran across an article about an artist whose work recently sold at auction for $4.35 million. The piece, from 1999, was called My Bed and consists of an actual bed in disarray with stained sheets, discarded condoms and a giant vodka bottle amongst other things. Now this struck me as wild. At first I thought oh my gosh you gotta be kidding me! Four million dollars for a filthy bed? But reserving judgment (well eventually), I thought now, why? Why on earth would someone pay that for that? And it hit me. For someone, particularly in 1999, to be that vulnerable and open and risk-taking with her art? To put her life out there in a snapshot so personal, real and powerful? Uh, yeah, that is amazing and awesome and that is what people are connecting with. That emotion and purity in expression is what moves the audience. It is not for everyone. It doesn’t have to be. Art isn’t, typically, for anyone but those who it is for. Sometimes that is millions and sometimes that is a few.

I am increasingly intrigued by creativity and art. I realize more and more that creativity is uniquely and wonderfully human and so I celebrate it and seek it more in myself and in others all the time. My husband is a professional artist. For many years people would turn and ask me, “So are you an artist as well?” “Who, me, oh goodness no! I am not creative at all,” I used to say on a regular basis, comparing my talents and gifts with his. Oh my. What a stupid mistake of an ill-informed and less loving version of myself back then.

You see, I am an artist. He is an artist in his way. I am an artist in a completely different way. One cannot compare the two. To truly live life fully means embracing the creativity that is in us. In each of us. Yes, you.

You have likely stuffed it down like I did. You probably even forgot about it. I minimized it for so long that it lay dormant for many years. Sneaking out in ways that maybe weren’t the best for me. But it was always there. It will always be there. It is also there in you. You don’t have to show the world your dirty bed but your inner artist is waiting for just a little acknowledgment and freedom to express itself. Embrace it. Encourage it. Let it out.

Living life day to day just in the routine is easy. It is easy to push aside everything that is nagging at you to correct or calling you to achieve and keep plugging away doing the minimum. You tell yourself none of the other will matter. You are too tired. You want to look on the bright side, you tell yourself. You want to keep moving forward and don’t want to get bogged down in the past.

You do the things you know that you must do and that takes pretty much all of the time, energy and focus you can muster. Of course there are things on that to-do that never get done. But that’s okay you tell yourself, I will do them tomorrow. You put them on tomorrow’s to-do list. Or you just plain ignore it.

Oh the oblivion of denial! So sweet is its call. So convenient is its offering. Scarlett O’Hara said it so well “I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about that tomorrow.” Sometimes, being laser focused on today is exactly what we need. When we must deal with what is most pressing in the moment. That is why living in procrastination and denial can be so easy and attractive. It works. Until it doesn’t.

I used to live in denial about my spending. Until I realized I couldn’t wait until tomorrow to look at it and to begin repairing the damage that had been done. I made really good money and have for many, many years. Once I got my self-esteem out of the gutter after a long teen romance that lasted into my mid-twenties, I started making better and better money. And I started spending. If I look at my life in the more recent past, I see the exact pattern I had that first time many years ago. I went wild spending after that relationship ended as I was setting up house. Then I got serious, paid off all of my debt and started making exponentially more money than I ever had before. I kept way ahead of my bills and managed to sock away some money even while my lifestyle got a lot more expensive.

All went along pretty well, really, living in somewhat of denial about how much I was making and how much of it I was spending. I was grinding away just trying to do my job and stay ahead of that, so I deserved the vacations and other things I blew my money on. I used to even say, I work for vacations. It was my stated goal.

I do not regret those vacations. Not at all. They hold fantastic memories for us. It was a learning process and now I see it a bit differently. After all of this freewheeling and sometimes crazy spending, I found myself separated from my husband. I had just bought a car pretty much on a bet that I wouldn’t. It was a 2009 Shelby Cobra. Convertible. A GT500. She was gorgeous. But even after test driving it I knew it wasn’t for me. I bought it anyway.

A year later my world was upside down. I had to quit my job then lost the next two and for a good while, I thought it would be three. My finances have still not yet recovered from that but are on their way. As I regain my self-esteem at a greater level than I have ever had before, I know that my financial blessings will follow. But not if I continued to live in denial. The first step is awareness. Awareness cannot happen amidst denial. Part of loving myself is to seek awareness even in the parts I would rather ignore and the benefits of that are immeasurable in terms of growth, energy, focus and overall success.