A Gift To Be Thankful For…

“Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all of the care, kindness, and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.” 

- Og Mandino

Flying Without A Net

I’ve never been afraid of speaking in public before.

But as I picked up the microphone, it felt like I was in the open door of an airplane at 30,000 ft without a parachute, getting ready to jump. Heart pounding, stomach churning, breathing to keep the anxiety at bay, scared and realizing it was too late to back out.

Scarier than chemo, childbirth, and my ex-mother in law all rolled into one. 

Standing up in front of a group of cancer patients, survivors, and oncology professionals, without a prepared speech or plan. Trusting that my skill and intuition were more important than a presentation and a pre-planned message.

“You’re insane,” my inner voice screamed. “How can you possibly consider going in front of a room full of people and talking for an hour with out preparing?! You’re a professional life coach – you’re supposed to be prepared. This hospital is counting on you to make a difference for their patients. What if you fail? What if people hate you? Your business will be ruined and you’ll be a laughingstock.”

“I can’t not do it,” I argued back. “I’m tired of always having to be prepared and worrying about not being good enough. It’s draining, boring, lifeless, and NO FUN.”

“Well, fine then,” my inner critic snarled. “You’ll be sorry.” I responded, “No, you’ll be surprised.”

Then I opened my mouth and jumped.

An hour later, my presentation was over. I can’t tell you for sure what I said. But I knew that it had worked. The audience was engaged. They had lots of questions. They were comparing their own experiences among themselves. I was ecstatic.

I’m not sure why I made the leap on this day, but I know my higher power had a hand in it. Maybe I was tired of over thinking everything; second guessing my intuition and ideas; staying safe in the box of how I’ve always done things.

Whenever I’m facing an idea that seems scary, crazy, ridiculous, I remind myself of that day. I ask myself what I would do if I couldn’t put it off. If I knew my time was up and this was my last chance. And then I jump, and feel the exhilaration of the unknown overriding the fear of the leaving the box. And I love it!

What would it be like to jump out of your box and fly? Give it a try and you’ll realize that the fear was false, and being alive is real. Why wait?

What boxes have you left behind in your life? Share your story with us!

There’s A Mouse In My House (A lesson of denial)

At first, I just heard a few innocent little rustlings every now and then. Something creaking in the wall. “Just the wind,” I told myself. A sound in the kitchen while I was watching TV. “The cat must be climbing around somewhere,” I thought.

No big deal. Just some background noise. So infrequent I might have been imagining it.

As time went by, I gradually noticed that the rustling had escalated to scampering. That was a little harder to ignore. The scampering was infrequent, but impossible to put down to mere imagination. “Maybe there’s a bird’s nest in the eaves,” I smiled to myself, imaging little chirping mouths receiving food from their parents.

When my cat started camping out for hours in the kitchen, staring underneath the counter, the light bulb should have gone on for me but it didn’t. “I bet some of those cute little gecko’s (lizards) have gotten in,” I mused. “Hope she doesn’t catch them.”

But when I walked into the kitchen and saw a mouse eating out of the cat food bowl the truth was staring me in the face and all of my denial went down the drain with an adrenaline burst like you wouldn’t believe. I had a mouse in my house!

I did what any confident, powerful, fearless woman would do. I ran screaming from the house calling for my husband. Since he was out of town at the time, he didn’t come rushing to my rescue. (Smile)

Wishing I hadn’t ignored those little warnings, I berated myself for a while, kicking myself for not listening to my instincts, and wondering what the heck I was going to do about it. My feelings quickly escalated to panic. How could I stay in a house with a mouse?

“So,” I debated. “Hotel? Stay with a friend? Bomb the kitchen?” After tossing around these improbable solutions, I sucked up my courage and went back inside.

I started to go about my business, avoiding the kitchen like the plague. Fortunately, my husband Chuck replied to my urgent messages on layover between flights and we came up with a plan (that included an urgent call to an exterminator right then).

With the truth about the mouse in the house out in the open, and a plan in place, I started thinking about what had happened. About how natural it is for us as human beings to know in our hearts that something isn’t right and go right on pretending to ourselves everything is fine. We all do it. We pretend things are OK while burying our imagination of the worst possible scenario. When we do this long enough, quite often the world steps in and says, “Hello. Here’s the reality.” And you end up facing what you were avoiding anyway.

What’s rustling or scampering around in your life? Where are you spending energy to pretend nothing’s up instead of addressing it? Where are you stuck? What needs your attention? I challenge you to look that mouse in the eye and make a plan. You’ll be glad you did.