StoryJacker Episode 3

 

In this episode of StoryJacker, Lyssa Danehy deHart interviews Lori Ann Davis about her transformational story.  Lori talks about her deeply personal journey and talks about how she has changed her life.  Lori shares her insights about how she created something unexpected from the ending of a long marriage.

Lori has over 28 years experience empowering individuals and couples to live richer, happier lives. She has a private practice that spans the spectrum from dating and singles, to working through divorce issues, and to renewing long-term marriages. She is the author of, Unmasking Secrets to Unstoppable Relationships. She is also the host of Real Talk on Ivybe radio.

Lori Ann Davis, MA, CRS

author, relationship specialist and radio host

www.lorianndavis.com

Radio Host

http://www.wgivcharlotte.com/ask-lori.html

This has been a production of Creative Human Solutions.  Recording and editing by Lyssa Danehy deHart.  Music from Garageband Loops.  www.creativehuman. me copyright 2015

Check out this episode!

StoryJacking Relationships

In thinking about my own StoryJacking, it’s come to me that I have had dozens if not hundreds of StoryJacks in my life.

In an effort not to overwhelm, I think what I am going to do is just start with one at a time.

As things come up I will add a personal StoryJack to the podcast series, that seems important or relevant to whatever is going on, or that I am trying to explore.  You can listen to an expanded version of this blog on my podcast, “How StoryJacking Helped me Love.”

One insight that I have had is that the more that we look at our lives as transformative StoryJacks, the more likely we are to learn from the experiences versus being dragged down by them.

I have an ordinary story in some very universal ways. My parents divorced when I was 9, and while their marriage wasn’t great, the fighting was disturbing emotionally, the divorce more importantly disrupted my sense of security. This might be a terrible thing for some people, but for me it was my first wake up call.

Then life added the loss of my favorite grandfather, and a sister/friend who died from cancer when she was 19 and I was 12, all adding to my journey. I don’t know if it is about my personality, or my need to feel some sort of control, instead of seeing these losses as tragedy alone, I also began to see that death had a very real presence in life and that I didn’t want to take people or life for granted. These early StoryJacks set me up to continue the process through each adventure and tragedy that has rolled through my life.

The StoryJack that I want to share today is about finding love and growing relationships.

Through my journey of questioning I realized that I had no clue what a healthy relationship might even look like, I wasn’t paying attention to good relationships, I was only looking at the dysfunctional ones that were everything I didn’t want. So, I shifted focus, I looked to my grandparents who had a 50+ year relationship and were in love until the day each of them passed on;

What had worked for them?

• They valued their relationship more than they valued being right.
• They maintained their friendship their entire relationship, they never forgot they liked each other.
• They laughed and shared a sense of humor, sure they groused at each other, but they found ways to turn that into laughter.
• They shared some really important values about life, and they talked about those values, they discussed what the value meant to them, what the value looked like, how they felt when they were demonstrating the value, and they knew that they were in agreement, not just about a word, but about the meaning of the word.
  • And this is crucial if I say I have a value of “honesty,” and you say, I do too! and we go on and only find out later that my value of honesty and your value of honesty were a 100 miles apart. On the surface of the planet a 100 miles isn’t much, but in the intimacy of a close relationship it might as well be the moon, we are worlds apart.
• The areas that each struggled with shyness, or being bossy, the other one either accepted or helped to balance out. They complimented each other in their personalities and human frailties. These were not personality quirks were deal breakers for them; in fact they had no deal breakers in their relationship at all.
• They both really wanted to be in a relationship with each other.  My grandparents were ‘all in’ versus one foot out the door. A lot can be muddled through if both people are invested in the relationship working. We tend to be kinder in our approach if we care about the other person and want to keep them around.
• They both took responsibility with each other and worked really hard not to hurt each other’s feelings. When it happened, they apologized and took ownership, and tried not to press the repeat button too often.
• And, when I asked my mother about my grandparents relationship, she said they didn’t hold grudges with each other, there were no resentments and no hidden agendas. They were fully and honestly present with each other.

The more I thought about what relationships could look like, the more I was willing to risk to grow into the person that could bring these qualities to a relationship of my own. I wasn’t going to settle, I was going to soar. I also decided that I wanted to find a partner, not a savior or a project. That was huge for me, because I had to give up these ideas of Prince Charming or Prince Project.

There was no one coming to take me away from the tough things happening in my life. If I was going to get out of debt, or finish school, or find love, or create a meaningful life for myself, I was going to have to quit waiting around for it to find me and go out and create it.

I also had to give up on the idea that if only ‘someone’ would see my value and my worth, and chose me, I could help him have an amazing life. I realized I needed to save myself, and work to find an equal. If this resonates for you at all, I wrote an article on my blog called, “Sleeping Beauty Must Die! Why you need to kill her to grow up.” I talk a lot more in depth about this issue.

I made another pivotal StoryJack as I dated, 180 dates over two years, where I went from worrying “do you liked me?” to assessing if I liked you. This was huge! It meant, I not only had to stop wrapping myself up in the idea that someone could define my value for me, I had to stop twisting myself into a pretzel to make myself into someone I wasn’t in order for someone I wasn’t even sure I liked to love me. Simply put, I had to learn to love myself.

All of what I was learning meant I would have to be honest about who I am, learn to love myself, get comfortable just being myself, and trust that I was enough.  If I worked at being someone I would like, then the people who like people like me, would find me.  And maybe I would meet the one who was strong enough to handle a real relationship himself. Mr. Lucky 181.

Through this journey of revising and transforming my ideas about myself, what I was capable of, what love authentically looked like for me, and what a real ‘all in’ relationship required, I did meet someone who fell in love with the “me” I had become along the way.

For the past 17 years, he has shown up and loved me and I have shown up and loved him back. When we are being silly, or annoying, insightful, my bossiness, his being wrong, (being silly here) and we have discussed and agreed, and agreed to disagree, on our share of important ideas and values.  We have learned to understand each other and agree that we know what we mean when we discuss these values, and we have learned to laugh at ourselves and at each other… but that will have to wait because that is another story, my friends.

Quick link to the expanded podcast version of this blog.

 

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images from http://www.bigstockphoto.com

 

Sleeping Beauty must die! Why you need to kill her to grow up…

One of the prevalent stories of our lives is the one of Prince Charming and the Perfect Princess.  We all know it, because it’s a story we have been told since we were born, we’ve watched the story play out in books, in movies, in songs, and yet, we rarely see it work in life.  Yet, we’ve all bought into the fairytale, because at different times in our lives we have tried to save someone or wished with all our might that someone would come along on a white steed and save us.  I know I am guilty.  In my 20’s I was ambitiously looking for Mr. Right, to come and save me from… whatever I needed saving from.  I wanted to be Sleeping Beauty.

The fantasy of Prince Charming is a little like thinking about what you will do when you win the Lottery. Which is a great tool to distract us and is perfect if we’re avoiding our life.  I might even make the argument that the Lotto fantasy is the same story with the character of Cash instead of Charming.  These are hard stories to live with because we either sit around waiting to be a hero in someone else’s story or we sit around as a victim, waiting to be swept away from all our own troubles.  Unfortunately, when we are sitting around we aren’t actually doing anything to change our life in any of the meaningful ways we might if we were taking action.

And, that last bit is key to why you have to kill the Sleeping Beauty/Prince Charming myth in order to grow.

• Why do you think that being asleep through your life makes you worth saving?
• What do you learn about taking care of yourself if you are waiting for some magical solution to show up?
• Have you ever met anyone who could perfectly take care of you, past the point they started to bug you?
• At what point are you taking care of your own baggage if your focus in on fixing someone else’s?
• How do you grow up if you choose to hold onto a fairytale?

Let me be clear, I like fairy tales, I love to read them and watch them at the movies.  I just don’t want to pretend that I am waiting for the fairytale to show up and save me from my life.  I don’t want to wait for Prince Charming, the Lottery, the perfect Mentor, the perfect body, the perfect job, I want to go out and find what makes me happy and grow if from the inside.  It’s  time to wake up.

I’ve always wondered at the end of the fairy tale, “and, they all lived happily ever after…” Not only is there no such thing as “happily ever after” it is an ending to a story that continues on the next page, it’s also an untruth that gets us into some serious trouble.

What if my life is filled with the normal ups and downs? What does that mean about my value, my abilities, and me? If I never meet Prince Charming am I lost? Or, I didn’t get the happily ever after just because I met Prince Charming, what then?

And, maybe I did find my Prince Charming, but he has a few bad habits, he doesn’t always listen to me the way I want him to, he doesn’t always clean up after himself, he disagrees with some of my genius ideas, he needs me to take care of him sometimes, sometimes he just needs me to be quiet, and happily ever after actually has taken an epic amount of work and willingness to find a middle path.  In fact finding the right partner for my life, took a lot of courage and an astronomical amount of self-realization, self-improvement and some deeply honest and painful conversations with myself.  I won’t even go into the painful conversations with my partner about my “not so Princess like” qualities that I have had to take a good look in the mirror about, so I could address them.  I am happy; in fact, I may have found what amounts to a real happily ever after.  But I am not happy because I sat around waiting for someone to come and save me from my past, my problems, or myself.  I am happy with my life because it didn’t just magically show up, I have worked on my thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, my actions, and learned to take real ownership of my crap. These tools will stay with me and grow through the rest of my life and add to my happily ever after in real and tangible ways.

Learning to take care of yourself means you have to take your own leaps, you get to run with your equals, that you learn to trust yourself, and learn that you don’t require someone to help you feel powerful in your life.  You don’t actually need to be saved.  Your care is not dependent on someone else, it can’t just be taken away from you, and so you get make choices, make mistakes, learn, grow and kick ass for the rest of your life.  And, magically, you find friends and partners to share all this with, and when you continue to ‘own yourself,’ you get to keep these brilliant gems of people the rest of your life because you’re not wearing them out with your need to save them or be saved by them.

My happiness is a direct result of my willingness to grow myself into a person who I would actually like to be in a relationship with.  I want to be a person who owns her good qualities and her ‘in need of improvement’ qualities, a person who listens even when she disagrees, and I want to kill the fairytale so I can choose wake up and get on with my life; finding my happiness along the way.

images from bigstockphoto.com

Are you a StoryJacker?

What the heck is StoryJacking?  This is a question that I have been fielding a lot recently.  Part of the reason is that I invented the StoryJack mashup, so this is a new concept.  If you don’t know what it is, you are not alone.

We all live in stories: the ones we tell ourselves, the ones others tell us, the ones we believe, the stories that scare us, and the ones that we use to drive ourselves forward.  Stories are our narrative, describing life as we see and feel it.  Every bit of information that we take into our mind comes to us in the form of a story, the news, movies, reality tv, books, gossip, education.  And, if you think about the things that capture your attention, it’s probably a juicy story.

Narrative psychology is a viewpoint or a stance within psychology concerned with the “storied nature of human conduct” or in other words, how human beings deal with experience by constructing stories and listening to the stories of others. (Wikipedia)

As you’re looking, you will see stories everywhere.  Our lives are so intertwined with stories that we are often unconscious to the mystery and magic that are embodied in the stories that we connect with, and how those stories impact us.

As children we play in the fields of make believe, enjoying the stories we create from the mist of our imaginations.

Today, science is showing us that our memories, the very things that generate our life stories, are mostly made up.  Yet, we are constantly creating narratives to explain ourselves, or situations, and these stories are filled with tragedy as well as triumph.  Stories can capture us within powerful emotions.  There is always a story that we are telling ourselves in every situation.  Whether we feel empowered or disempowered, there is a story we are telling.  These powerful stories engage us and form a glue that binds us to people, places, ideas, and ultimately to our sense of self.

Stories help us to describe and align with our tribe; the people we will love, the people who will challenge us, the work we are passionate about, the lives that we will create, what we could never do, what we must absolutely do, and each intention is a story.

It can feel overwhelming, but we have the unlimited ability to change stories that don’t work for us, and as they change, they have the power to transform how we interact with the world around us.

StoryJack / stohree jak / verb

Definition:
Story a narrative, either true or fictitious, designed to instruct the hearer or reader; a narration of the events in the life of a person or the existence of a thing, or such events as a subject for narration: example the story of his life or the story we tell ourselves about what we are capable of, in Business it might be the story of our organization or how our team is functioning.

Jack to increase, develop, raise, or accelerate. (Typically followed by something: in this case, awareness, understanding, or insights) To boost the morale of; encourage.

Related terms: StoryJacking, StoryJacked, StoryJacks

Noun: StoryJacker ex. I am a StoryJacker, helping people recognize the stories that will transform their lives, careers, teams, and businesses.

So, what’s your story?  Are you a StoryJacker too?

I am developing a podcast series, StoryJacker, if you think you have an interesting and transformational story, I would be very interested in connecting and having a conversation about having you on the show.  Thank you for reading. 

photo: from bigstockphoto.com

What my electric car taught me about creating limits

As often happens, I was having a lively conversation with my friend Julie. We were talking about my driving over to see her house… which led perfectly into a conversation about my car.

I’m a traveler, I’ve driven all over the country just for fun. Then, last year I decided to go ‘all electric’ and purchased a Nissan Leaf. I had many important reasons in my head about why I wanted to do this; I was trying to support a new direction in the automotive industry, I wanted the pleasure of driving by gas stations, and I had thoughts about my Carbon Footprint. This decision, as most things in life, I probably hadn’t thought all the way through.

In hindsight it appears to me that my conscious brain chose a situation and my unconscious brain saw it as an opportunity to push me… Or, maybe I made a hasty decision.

My car gets about 90 miles to a charge. And, for 80% of my driving, that is actually just fine. I live on an island, that’s 10 miles long and 5 miles wide, so really it’s more like 95% of the time my car is perfect for my situation. Which to be fair, is really great.   It’s actually better than my last 3 cars.

The issue I hadn’t thought about was distance travel.  What will I do if I want to drive from Bainbridge Island to Portland or the Coast or Vancouver Canada? If I want to do that, I am going to have to stop a few times along the way and charge up. Depending on where I stop, it might take 2 – 6 hours. This is a bit of a hiccup from my perspective and it’s forced me to take the train a few times. Which is really nice and a good thing in it’s own way.  Because of my dependence on electrical charging stations for my car and the time requirements, I have to admit I’ve been a little leery of about leaving the island and I’ve created a very limiting story about actually going far off island in my car.

This hasn’t severely limited me in my normal driving, but it has impacted my willingness to jump in my car and drive off without a thought. I felt tethered.

Getting back to my conversation. As I was talking with Julie, we decided that I would drive to her house, on the far northeast of Seattle. This may not be a good commentary on me, but there was a part of me that felt a twinge of concern, my tether was pulling on my psyche. In my mind I was telling a story about how this will be about the farthest I have ever driven in my car.   I could feel myself stretching outside my car comfort zone. Stretching doesn’t always feel good in the moment, it seems to feel better when it’s over.

Julie and I hammered out all the basics; yes, I can plug in when I get to her house; yes, she is willing to hang out with me for 4 hours, before she’ll show me the door; and, yes, I need to bring some wine because 4 hours is a stretch.

At the end of our negotiations, she tells me, that her house is only about 29 miles from the Ferry… All of the sudden it hits me that I am making limits where there really aren’t any.

I might not even need to charge my car… I will however still bring wine.

Aha! Isn’t this is what we do sometimes? We create stories in our heads that limit us. We grapple, we toss and turn, we worry, and then we work hard to find ways to stay safe or avoid. All the while, the truth is, we are just fine and we don’t need to be creating these limiting stories for ourselves. Lucky for me, this insight was motivating. I may be going “farther” than my experience has taken me in my car, but it’s an adventure. When I’m done and safely home, I think I’m going to feel great and ready to stretch a little further.

My four take always:

1. We unconsciously choose situations that will push of out of our comfort zone. These situations offer us opportunities to get creative in problem solving, or help us learn to breathe through the discomfort.
2. When we’re uncomfortable we tend to default to our most conservative self, telling ourselves the limiting stories in an attempt to stay safe.
3. Once we shift our perspective, the whole situation can become an adventure.
4. My car is actually perfect for me because it’s pushing me to stretch.

 Thank you Nissan Leaf, you’ve helped me grow!

Everyone has a Story

Dan McAdams, Narrative Psychology pioneer, along with others, wrote and taught about the Personal Myth: that is, the meaning of one’s life can be more important than happiness. How we create personal meaning is, according to McAdams, by telling autobiographical stories. People have a Narrative Bias: When given the option, we prefer to give and receive information as a narrative, that is, as a story. Narratives are how we transmit meaning across two people, and then across cultures. How human beings deal with experiences is directly connected to how they construct their own stories and how the interpret the stories of others.

We like narratives that are linear and linearity (beginning, middle, end) it’s how we prefer to explain our world, cause and effect. Our stories often attempt to answer one (or more) of three big questions:

Where do we come from?

What is the purpose for why we are here?

Why am I going through this experience?

Narrative psychology tries to understand how the stories we tell ourselves, impact us. And, this is important because, as far as I know, we are the only species on this planet that asks these questions about our experiences.

The need for StoryJacking exists because how we answer these questions and how we tell our stories is important to how we experience our lives. StoryJacking is not about creating a quick happy ending to a life trauma. Laura King, PhD from the University of Missouri, discovered in her research that when people jump to quickly to the happy ending story, they may be happier in 2 years, but they miss important learning. People, who have survived and experienced major life challenges, can sometimes gloss over conflicts or the challenging bits of the experience. Again, over the period of 2 years, they may be happier, but there is a lost opportunity of ego development. A person’s ability to experience the grief or unhappiness, improves the person’s ability to conversely appreciate the beauty and complexities of life. The ability to sit in the discomfort of the story can gain the individual deeper wisdom. StoryJacking is about creating neural networks for developing meaning, wisdom, and ultimately happiness.

Yet, we all have some flaws in our authorship.

Common Belief Fallacy: If most of the people you know believe something is true, you are also likely to believe it is true. The earth is flat and the center of the universe. Florida has cities of gold and the fountain of youth. Global warming is not a product of human activity. You get the idea.

• Appeal to Popular Opinion – This type of appeal is when someone claims that an idea or belief is true simply because it is what most people believe.

Representativeness Heuristic: ignoring the odds and instead comparing the similarity of the story to a familiar archetype. “That sounds right!” Buy a lottery ticket, look at all the stories of winners. Never mind that the odds are 176 million to 1 that you will win.

Correlation Implies Causation Fallacy – Otherwise known as Cum Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc, this is a fallacy in which the person making the argument connects two events which happen sequentially and assumes that one caused the other.  I heard a dog barking, then my dishwasher broke.  Therefore, barking dogs are bad for appliances.

So our storytelling is fraught with potential plot holes and rarely matches the reality of the situation. So what? We are all susceptible. Here’s the thing, by paying attention to where stories can go wrong, by developing our awareness we can StoryJack the story, we can make our lives more meaningful and again, have a much better shot at happiness.

People create meaning from the stories that they tell themselves about the events in our lives. And, this meaning can actually create a better life, depending on how you go about creating the stories that explain the events. But, businesses have to do the same thing.

Let’s play with an Business example.

Cable has lost over 125 thousand customers in the last year and that is with HBO bundled in the service. There are a myriad of reasons for this, poor customer service, forcing subscribers to take bundles that they maybe don’t want, etc. Interestingly, rather than change the delivery model, they are actually hiking prices.  Which will probably have the affect of losing even more business.  So then take a company like HBO, HBO is losing viewers by remaining tied to cables faltering delivery system. I think it is fair to say that HBO has wanted to shift its delivery system for a long time, but it meant changing a very long held belief about the importance of cable companies. Regardless of value, the faulty delivery system (cable) has been a very long held story and as much as we have disliked it, we have also believed that it might not ever change… collectively we used to believe we might always be held hostage to cable services. But, HBO decided to StoryJack this long held story. HBO comes to Apple TV, as announced by HBO CEO Richard Plepler on Monday March 9^th. The story has now shifted and become one of listening to viewer/customers, becoming a story of partnership, creating customer choice, and with a connection to Apple, developed a subplot of coolness.

But, by breaking loose (StoryJacking their own story of content delivery) and offering themselves up “a’la carte” to the growing number of cord cutters, they remain meaningful.

They also show that they may be dragon slayers themselves. And, the beneficiaries of the new story are? Well, HBO customers now get an opportunity to watch Game of Thrones for about $15.00 a month, far less than the $100 a month it would take to a cable package, and they can stop sneaking in to Aunt Louise’s cat infested house to get a Sunday dragon fix.

image from Bigstockphoto.com, artist Gustavo Frazao

Where the Heck is my Magic 8 Ball?

As I am navigating my life, in the great unknowing, it occurs to me that knowing the future seems to be a wish that most people have.  We want someone or something else to “tell” us what we should do, or what will happen. If we do A… then XYZ will be the outcome. If we marry this person, we will be happy. Or, if we take that opportunity then we will be wildly successful.  We want guarantees that follow a, “if… then…” and the irony of life is that until you dive in, you will never know how warm the water is.  Life requires us to take leaps of faith. We can gather up all our skills, we can collect all our supporters, and we can spend a lot of time collecting tools to make sure we have the very best chance of winning the day. But, at the end of it, when the time comes to make a choice, you are going to have to walk through the unknown. There are no magic wands or magic 8 balls to steer us through the void. And, this is where your personal story can help you, how you decide what you are worth, how you believe that your message is powerful, and what you decide to share about yourself, will ultimately determine how you handle these leaps.

Leaps of faith are at the center of our brilliance, they generate the energy of creativity and they push us into being strong and having fortitude.

“All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without benefit of experience.” Henry Miller

A leap of faith is required if we are going to move, change our life, change our career, or do anything of real importance and meaning to us and the world. There is no action that you might take that doesn’t require this leap. You can fight it, wish you knew the future, pretending that you have everything under control, or you can leap luxuriously into your life, no Magic 8 Ball needed.

Be brave and let’s get to the other side!

Becoming Yourself

An interesting thing happened on the way to my new life…

I had moved from New Mexico to Washington State and I had the opportunity to reinvent myself.  I took the opportunity with both hands and I began the transformation from Therapist to Coach.  As it often happens with any change, it hasn’t been exactly comfortable.  As I shifted gears, (visualize a big boat turning… slowly) I found that I didn’t exactly know how to even think of myself in different ways.  I was comfortable in my old story of myself and the reinvention forced me to think, a lot, about how to describe myself, what I do, who I work with, or even what exactly I was passionate about.  I didn’t want to seem wishy washy, but I was going through various ideas of myself and descriptions, like trying on outfits at the mall. I am a Therapist, I am a Coach, I am a Life Coach, I am a Business Coach, I am a Leadership Coach… I was trying on niche labels like trying on jeans.  Some looked ok, but didn’t feel right; others just didn’t fit at all.

I have a very good friend who is a Business Coach and I admire her.  I thought to myself I have had a business since 2004, I understand business systems, I have done a lot of marketing, and I have a lot of training that supports businesses. I have designed team building trainings. Yet, I wasn’t really resonating with the idea of calling myself a Business Coach. Calling myself a Therapist seemed easier when I began my private practice 11 years ago because people seem to know what “Therapist” means. There is a issue with Coaching in that everyone on earth seems to want to be a Coach, trainied or not.  So, I was told I have to differentiate myself from the Coaching masses and in ways that as a Therapist I didn’t feel that I had to.  So, what does the label/niche really mean?  What are the words that resonate and empower you to communicate clearly who you are and what you do?  And, how does one traverse the journey of personal discovery that you have to navigate as you go?

The point of sharing my identity crisis…

A friend asked me why I felt the need to call myself a Business Coach instead of a Life Coach or some other type of coach?  I responded, “Because I thought it sounded better…”. We both started laughing.  I am person who works with people to find their authentic voice and there I was doing just the opposite.  The huge take away for me was that it is easy to get sidetracked when you are discovering yourself.  Our brains want to be in some sort of comfort zone, and at times we might be willing to slap a label, any label, on ourselves just to be done.  Yet, it also feels uncomfortable when we slap on a label that doesn’t fit and we are not being authentic.  Internally, I was dealing with the anxiety that comes from feeling lost, like I had an no authentic message and desperately wanting the internal churn to stop.  The hardest thing I had to do was I had to sit in this place of discomfort and breathe into the experience.  I needed to allow my mind to wrangle with these ideas and not throw an instant “fix” just to superficially stop the discomfort.  And I discovered along the way just how wrong it felt to be heading down some path that didn’t feel right, because I had no words to authentically express the right path.

Aha Moment!

Words clearly matter and they are very literally attached to the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. This is true for all of us. When we aren’t being authentic, if feels wrong inside. Oscar Wilde once said, “Be yourself, everyone else is taken.” So how do you just “be yourself”?

Six quick thoughts:

1. The journey of authenticity requires you try on different ideas of yourself like clothes, but it also requires you to feel if the outfit actually fits for you. Be willing to try again and again until you start to feel what resonates. The focus is on becoming “You,” not trying to become someone else.  And, it’s certainly not about slapping on some label that is doesn’t resonate.
2. Discovering your true self is scary and often messy.  You may think something feels right, then as you wear it for awhile, you may find out, you need to tweak your direction.  This is all part of the discovery process.
3. There are two types of discomfort to be aware of.
   • You have to listen to the discomfort you feel when you are going off course by not being true to yourself and trying to be someone you’re not comfortable being.
   • You have to breathe through the discomfort and worry, that maybe you’re not good enough the way you are, that you’re not smart enough, or that no one will like you.  This will probably take more than one breath.
4. The more you focus on developing yourself, listening to you body, playing with what you love to do, and exploring how you want to show up in the world, the more clarity you will develop.
5. The more you share your truth, the quicker you will discover your tribe of people.  That tribe includes people you have never met, but when you do, and you share your authentic self, they will resonate with you and appreciate your unique message. This includes finding a job or career that you resonate with, choosing friends, and most importantly, finding intimate partners.
6. Not everyone is a part of your tribe.  If some people you meet don’t get you or like you… well, that’s ok. I spent many years in my 20’s trying to make people like me, it meant I was like a chameleon, constantly changing my color depending on who I was with.  It was exhausting.  Truthfully, it’s a big world and your job is to just focus on being you. The right people, the ones who will “get you,” will show up.

 

Ira Glass, from This American Life, says it very well, “Everything is more compelling, the more that you are yourself.”

 

 

 

 

 

images from BigStockPhoto.com: Transformation Cartoon cartoon resource and Five Girls Image conrado