“If you don’t let what you don’t know stop you from doing your best in every situation, you will surprise yourself over and over in life, as I have.”
This is a statement from a book I just finished, entitled If You Have to Cry, Go Outside: And Other Things Your Mother Never Told You. The author is a famous publicist in the fashion industry in New York City. She shares her failures and successes in life– from being a homeless drug addict to running a bi-coastal business in marketing.
She is speaking to all women - urging us all to learn from her mistakes. Be fearless. Be yourself. And never quit. She believes that women’s abilities are unique, but that many times we do not exercise our full potential because we are not following our own intuition. She rashly and fearlessly left her safe haven of rural upstate New York for the unknown - New York City. She learned life’s lessons the hard way. But, the important thing is that she never stopped until she found fulfillment. Not riches, fame, success, or glory. She found that, but was miserable. She wanted something else. She had already indulged the “lower energies” of her mind – “greed, ambition, insecurity, self-doubt, and guilt.” She only became really happy and fulfilled when she discovered who she was and what she was meant to do. She had to have faith in herself and follow her intuition. It was then that she started “surprising herself.”
She also points out that “sometimes, if not most of the time, you find out who you are by figuring out who and what you are not.” It’s like shopping for a dress. You find many dresses that you know will NOT work before you find the one that will. But, when you try on the right one, you know it.
Everyone has fear. But, I think as women, we do not address this fear like we should. We are the nurses in battlefield rather than the warriors. But, to gain ground, we need to be the warriors. In fact, we will be better nurses when we can take over the territory. We live with fears that are ultimately going to feed our insecurity and keep us from being who we were born to be. We focus on caretaking, fixing problems, picking up after others, which is fine – until we let our fear overrule our intuition. Our intuition is our greatest asset. It is firing on all four cylinders when we have eliminated the fear in our lives.
The world needs our intuition and needs us to do what we were born to do.
Children are good at beating fear. Every day, my son tries something new. I’m in awe. He goes into each challenge knowing he is going to conquer it one way or another. He has not been programmed to back down, relent, or give up. He’s programmed to win.
When he is shooting pucks in the laundry basket in the basement, all I can think of is that one of those pucks is going to shatter the nearby 50 gallon fish tank and clown fish and anenomes are going to come spilling out. Not my son. He concentrates on stick handling, shouts out the play by play, invents his own players, keeps the score close and ultimately wins the game. It’s all in his head.
But, I’m naturally acting as the ref, anticipated the worse, trying to head it off at the pass, and ultimately letting my fears get the best of me. Sometimes, a little caution is healthy. Like when my son decides to skateboard down the middle of the street. Healthy caution keeps him alive.
But this caution should not interfere with our natural intuition about who we are and what we were born to do. In fact, it’s the tasks that no one knows how to do that we are going to be the best at. Because there is no play book to these games. We follow our intuition to discover the solution and create the play book. We are programmed to run interference, but it’s our natural asset to go for the end zone and discover new solutions to old problems. Through our intuition, we have our own play book. We just need to find it and use it. In other words, we need to spend less time focusing on the clown fish and more time on hitting the back of the laundry basket.
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