31Ways2GetItStarted™! January 3, 2013

Day 3: Allow Yourself to Succeed

Yesterday I implored you to be realistic as you set about making changes--since it is a process, not a one-time thing...well, it is if you want to be successful!--so on a related note...allow yourself to succeed. Whether you're trying to make big changes or small--and all big changes start out small--you have to allow yourself to succeed. Translation: Don't sabotage yourself! Some of you are rolling your eyes at this one...and yet, I know I'm not the only one who has, routinely, sabotaged herself. 

And by "sabotaging," I mean, consciously, or even sub-consciously, creating situations, or at least not stopping certain situations from creating, which I know are going to waste my time and stop my emotional development. I've dated men, or worked in jobs, which I knew were wasting my time and allowing me to luxuriate in bad habits simply because I didn't have the courage/determination/desperation to say, "Basta! This is not the person I want to be. This cannot be my life!" Or, for example, I've let myself sleep through morning workouts, on days when I knew there wouldn't be any other time to workout, and then groggily rolled out of bed at 9am, feeling like crap and pissed off at myself, which meant that I'd be eating crap food all day since, whatever, who cares, I didn't work out anyway, which meant I didn't do all the other things that day which would have made me feel good which means, Hello Shame Cycle!

(None of this, I stress, means I'm perfect now. Oh my no. It means I can see where bad behavior and bad habits will eventually lead me, IF I ALLOW THEM, so I refuse to allow them, since time is passing and I have a lot of people to nag, um I meant "help." Yes, help, right.)

So, my hint for today is about allowing yourself to succeed. Whatever you're trying to do, before you go wild, take a moment to be honest with yourself and make sure you're not, in fact, setting yourself up for disaster. Take it step by step. You don't have to change your life today, and in fact just thinking of it that way is exhausting and makes me want a mug of Scotch. So how about you pat yourself on the back for acknowleding that you want to make changes, and you understand how difficult making changes can be, and you do one small thing today which will make tomorrow easier? How about that...?

Want some help making those changes? Email me @carlotazee@gmail.com!

'I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand.  It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what.  You rarely win, but sometimes you do.'
 -To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

'Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.'
-Helen Keller

In this business, I spend a lot of time coaching people to overlook their fears and get started doing the things that they desperately wish to do. That seems counter-intuitive, no? People come to me to achieve certain goals, I give them a strategy, they get excited...and then the Fear takes over, and I have to spend a lot of time coaching/supporting/nagging/kicking ass to get them to leap-frog their fears so they can achieve their potential. But Fear doesn't have to make sense, it has fear going for it. 

The problem, of course, is that fear is greedy: it wants all of you. So if you avoid doing the little things that scare you, hoping to make some kind of "deal" with fear...yeah, the only deal you've made is a deal to lose. Because once you start giving up, fear wins and fear, that self-aggrandizing bitch, likes to savor her triumphs, which she does by making everything else in your life equally fearful and hard. 

So, for example, say you've always wanted to act, but since you don't like your body, since you're (understandably) afraid of being made fun of, since you're not comfortable with yourself...well, you don't take acting classes, you don't join a glee club, you do nothing and you let fear win. The problem isn't that you simply gave up on acting...you're now more likely to give up on everything acting could have brought into your life.

You're now more likely to give up on taking care of your body, to give up on going to the gym and to give up on loving yourself. So then, if you don't like yourself, if you don't think you're talented...now it's much easier to give up on figuring out whom you really are, on what's important to you, on living your potential, right? Now you're more likely to start giving up on a lot of other (emotionally-related) opportunities regarding life, love and the pursuit of  your happiness. Does that sound far-fetched? It shouldn't. In your mind (i.e. your life), everything is connected. You have to believe it to build it, right?

We don't get to pick and choose what we're afraid of, but we do get to choose what we remain afraid of. So, let's say that you get bored hating yourself and decide that, Yahweh help us, what this world needs is more actors*so you take some acting classes, do some community theater...and you start getting that ole confidence up and thriving. And that confidence makes you go to the gym, makes you start eating better, makes you start wanting to take care of your (talented) body. This confidence becomes infectious. And you start seeing the world as full of opportunities, instead of restrictions. You've got Fear on the run, don't stop now! #gospeedracergo!

I, for example, moved to Moscow after I graduated Wellesley College, because of a Russian boy I was dating, and I was also curious to see if I could make a life in a foreign country. (Short answer: Yes...if I learned how to drink all night, while eating more picked foods than I thought humanly possible.) Now, I had already spent my junior year of college in a lovely small town up in the north of Russia....but this was different. Now I was, somehow, going to have to get a job.

Oy. I can't even tell you had many nights, before I left, were spent tossing and turning in my bed, sick to my stomach with melodramatic fears of failure, whining piteously. My poor dog started sleeping on the sofa, since my angst was keeping her awake. I have, as you may have guessed, a rather over-active imagination and so I foresaw all the many, many ways I was going to  end up staring in my own version of "Midnight Express."

Needless to say...none of that happened. I went to Russia, ended up working for NBC News' Moscow Bureau, adopted some (spoiled) cats, dumped the boy...and had some pretty fantastic years, working and living in Mother Russia.

Now. I'm not writing this to suggest you, at home, should move to Russia, or adopt several cats, or even perform dinner theater. (Well...I would never say that adopting cats is a waste of one's life. Let me be perfectly clear on that point.) But I am strongly suggesting that you do the thing(s) you're most terrified of...since more than likely, the scenario you've envisioned in your over-heated little brain is the direct opposite of what is likely to happen.
And honestly: doing what terrifies you, can only open up your life. It is, in fact, likely to bring you into contact with the people and experiences you may only have dreamed about.  And really: life is a lot more fun lived with opportunities than with restrictions, no?

'You must do the things you think you cannot.' -Eleanor Roosevelt

Want some help telling fear to piss off? Email me @carlotazee@gmail.com!



*...and seriously, since Bradley Cooper destroyed his hawt...might as well. That's a damn shame.

Good night, Irene!

I’m writing this in Queens—that sounds like the opening narration for some very bad, 1970s post-apocalyptic “message” film starring Charlton Heston- before Hurricane Irene makes landfall AKA before Queens is washed out…to other parts of Queens? Whatever. Neither the cats nor I am evacuating. We have cash, candles, batteries and kibble…we shall rebuild! On the other hand, if the MTA blinks and shuts down the subway system then I probably will give up, give in and hitchhike to…Oregon? Too much rain. Possibly Montana: no speed-limit and lots of aging hippies, which equals free love. So: Bloomy has his plan, I have mine.

But I recently watched a fantastic documentary, Medal Of Honor (http://www.pbs.org/medalofhonor/) which was  simultaneously inspiring and hilarious, as Medal of Honor recipients from World War Two, Korea, Vietnam,  Iraq and Afghanistan, discussed—quite casually—the almost unbelievable things they had done. Of course, none of them had done these acts hoping for a medal. They acted because they saw a need to act. And when I say “unbelievable” acts, I’m talking here about a single man shooting, and holding off, Japanese bombers, during the attack on Pearl Harbor, or an American soldier in Vietnam, whose medal was held up, because it didn’t seem possible that he could be alive following all the acts of heroism he had accomplished in a twenty-four hour period.

It’s a wonderful documentary and I can’t recommend it highly enough. But once thing I noticed is that almost all of the men, when asked how they did what they did say something like, “I have no idea…I just did!” There is the common theme of people in desperate circumstances just going out and doing what needed to be done to survive. And that, I think, is very important. I’m not going to seriously compare our present economic mess to World War Two, for example—how could I? Then, we had effective, competent, inspiring leadership…--but for people who are unemployed, or under-employed, who have been foreclosed upon, or have generally seen their way of life evaporate into something unfamiliar and deeply confusing…this is a war. This is a period of great upheaval and struggle. It’s exhausting. But if we sit around and brood about how difficult things are, and what the dismal future might hold…ugh, it’ll be much, much worse. So, don’t think: DO. Get through it. Get through it, to make something better tomorrow. Or, as a certain President once said, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”