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On December 31st, 2017, like everyone else in the world, I was super pumped for my 2018 goals and I had everything in place to make this first week epic.
Then, just like everyone else in the world, on January 1st, 2018, I self-sabotaged faster than a millennial in an Apple store trying not to spend all of their tuition money. Why? Because I’m human.
If you could win awards for self-sabotage, I would have been standing at the podium all day on Monday, holding my trophies, thanking God and all the little people for helping me get there. Like my good friends from “Geordie Shore” (the U.K. spin-off of America’s proudest TV Show, “Jersey Shore”) say, “It was doing me head in”.
So I powered through my self-sabotage day like a champ and woke up the next morning, promptly calling my best friend to help me pull my head out of the “Jersey Shore”-level bender I had put it through (without any of the sex-on-the-beach fun). We talked for a while and I got my head back in the game (yes, she’s magic), but there’s really only one thing I remember her telling me:
Stop treating the world like it’s Henry Avery.
When it came to the intriguing articles I was writing, and the incredible content videos I was originally so excited to produce (before my trip to the dark side), she said, “You’re treating the world like it’s your carrot. If you’re not going to do it for you and enjoy it, what’s the point?” And she was totally right, of course.
When I focus on my audience and what they want, I’m doing it for them…which also means, by default, I automatically need their approval. What made this example ten times more memorable was her telling me about her 10-year-old daughter, hanging out with her 12-year-old friends who, of course, are super boy crazy.
She said she was listening to this one 12-year-old girl talking about the boy she likes, Henry Avery. She talked about everything he said, did, liked, and didn’t like, non-stop—and finished it all off laying a big kiss on the picture she has of him on her phone. She is a girl obsessed, and it snapped me right back to remembering what it was like to be that age.
Instead of Henry, my obsession’s name was Ryan, and I remember every detail of what I wore on our first “date” to the kickball game our friends were having. He was two grades older than me (no surprise to any of my regular readers), with blonde hair and blue eyes and was charming as hell. I was a woman obsessed. It was like he was my whole world. I remembered everything I thought, everything I felt—it was all in reference to him. It was almost tangible, the energy between us.
Side Story: The energy was also very tangible between us when he broke up with me two weeks later and coincidentally (thanks to the universe), ended up playing tennis with his father on a court right next to my dad and I. The same court where my dad, who’s typically an excellent player and had no idea about us dating or breaking up, hit Ryan in the head with a ball—hard! The best part was when my dad went over to apologize and make sure he was okay, Ryan’s dad said, “Don’t worry about it, maybe you’ll knock some sense into him!” #dadsforthewin
One of the most intimate and surprising things that my male clients tell me in our couples coaching is how much they love to feel things through their wives. To these men, a vacation is much more relaxing when they can feel how relaxed she is. And sex is even more exciting when they can feel both intuitively and physically how excited she is.
Your audience works the same way! They’re there to feel things through you. They’re excited to be there because you’re excited to be there. The greatest gift you can give them is the opportunity to truly experience you—all of you—experiencing yourself. After all, we’re just the universe experiencing itself seven billion different ways, aren’t we?
Stop needing the boy, the girl, the deal, the hair, the score, the car…stop needing it all! Need only yourself, focus on experiencing yourself seven billion different ways, and you will find everything you have ever been looking for, in the last place you thought you’d find it.
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Photo credit: Getty Images
The post How to Punch Self-Sabotage in the Face and Make Your New Year’s Resolutions Happen appeared first on The Good Men Project.
(via The Good Men Project)