"So why wait?"
Eating my words. Yum.
A year ago I had a breakthrough with one of my executive coaches.
First, a little about me. I’m a planner because I’m a strategist and a futurist, not because I’m organized. I think most planning and organizing activities are tedious and a waste of time. Plans change constantly. I like change. And I like structure so I know there’s something to break. I like breaking things.
We sat at my large, round kitchen table, a muddy shade of deliberately distressed green, now also distressed with finish-chipped cream-colored marks. Scarred by art projects, rowdy game nights, hundreds of family dinners, debates about finances and carpool logistics orchestration.
I sipped lukewarm licorice root tea across from my coach. She was crowned by her latest artfully crafted mohawk, covered neck to toes in tattoos, an entire sunset painted across her eyelids above bright, bulging eyes and stoic lips. Always eager to hear more but patiently sitting back, well-postured in the matching muddy green chair while my latest problem unpacking continued.
This Sunday morning I had an unoriginal need to put a bunch of personal and professional puzzle pieces together. A need for a plan that would unlock a monetary milestone years in the making.
“I’ve been trying to game play it out,” I said. “It’s either this $ decision or that $ decision but then I’m like, wait — why does it have to be an or, why can’t it be an and. . . .”
I thought this was my breakthrough until she offered, “What would it look like to make the plan be a feeling?”
“I don’t know what that means,” I said, genuinely confused.
“Instead of trying to figure out what the exact plan needs to be, what if what you’re looking forward to financially is a feeling of . . . complete satisfaction? ‘By [pick a time period], I want to feel satisfied every day. I want to feel whole. Peaceful. Grounded. Authentic. In full expression of myself. Abundant. Prosperous.’”
Okay . . . so build a calendar based off of feelings to look forward to, not plans or achievement of material things. Got it, I think.
“Instead,” she continued, “what would it look like to expand on the feelings and set that as the goal? Then let the material things come to you. ‘I step into who I am and I get to equal whatever I want to obtain. I am the equal part to the material thing that is manifested or appears in my reality. And the only way I can be equal to that is to embody the vibration it holds.’ What energy does money hold in regards to a feeling for you?”
I love all of this stuff. All the woo-woo, all day long — recognizing that these law of attraction principles are thousands of years old (“there are no new ideas”). But I don’t worship the woo-woo. I don’t worship anything or anyone, really. I let the kernel of advice resonate.
“For me,” I replied, “money represents possibility, achieving balance, energy.”
“Yes! So don’t wait for a plan to work itself out and make that what you’re looking forward to. Make it happen now by making the feeling the goal.”
We buy into a lot of false dependencies in our personal and professional lives.
“When I am X, then I will do or have or be Y.”
Worse still is the co-dependency.
“When she or he does X, then I will be able to do Y.”
I had this conversation with my teenage son recently. “When I’m 18,” he announced, “I am going to livestream myself playing video games and make money off of it.”
“What’s so magical about 18? Why not start now?” I asked.
* * *
“Some day I’m going to be the founder and CEO of a billion-dollar company,” one of my mid-20s, single co-workers said to me.
“Why are you only working here then?” I asked. “Why aren’t you creating your first failure on the side right now?”
* * *
It’s easy for me to nudge the younger generation. Learn them a thing or two about how
Life is a constant cycle of what we do and what we become. So why wait?
Easy to say, harder to do. Classic. And wise words in the lyric, “Shoo-be-doo-be-doo-be-doo-da-day.” Sing it, Stevie.
Someone at some point said, “To feel time, write.” The need to feel time, well, really to feel started when I was six or seven years old. I found a used forest green hardcover book with “Journal” gold-embossed on the front. That one journal multiplied to dozens in my childhood, teenage, and young adult years. When my fourth grade English teacher assigned us a short story, I wrote 27 pages. Then I majored in English at college and turned in hundreds of pages in essays, stories, and poems. Twenty years later, I have hundreds of pages of traditional paper and digital journals.
And now I find myself constantly composing in my head. I write scripts of how I want conversations or presentations at work to go while I’m commuting. I’m thinking of how to structure a chapter in my book while I load the dishwasher. I mentally capture new posts and articles I never publish. But who would read it? I often think.
The most silly thing to me is I actually read what others write. I left all social media except LinkedIn years ago (best decision ever; more on that later). I appreciate and leverage a lot of the quality content that especially the Product community publishes regularly. See my Recommendations section for some of the best.
I’ve wanted to do something to “give back” for a while but I’ve been deeply committed to my own false dependencies:
“When I have more time . . .”
“When I get more signals that people will read what I write . . .”
“When I am mentally stronger and don’t care if people disagree with me . . .”
“When I figure out the right platform to publish on . . .”
“When I’ve reached a certain level professionally and can be more unfiltered online . . .”
These are all just bullshit excuses. So why wait?
So here I go, sharing some of my hard-earned wisdom emboldened by my rich inner world of musings and the never-ending need to feel.
Welcome to my newsletter. Thanks for reading. I hope it helps.
