Queen of Dreams Radio
Posts Tagged ‘Life Changes’
The day came and went. It was official, the conference was a bust. My coping techniques, learned as a child, were to plaster a smile on my face and to address one thing at a time.
First up was to pay all of the speakers. I wrote out checks from my credit cards to pay the speakers. I was exactly $34,500 short. I had exactly enough to pay everyone except for three speakers who were booked to one speaker’s bureau. With speaking engagements, you agree to pay the speakers even if the event doesn’t happen. As a business person, I get that. It makes sense.
I dragged myself out of bed each day and one step at a time I addressed what I needed to.
Amazingly, at the end of my credit and my rope, for some reason, the speaker’s bureau called and told me I didn’t need to pay the remainder for these speakers. I could not believe it. What a gift! I celebrated and was thankful, but was too wounded and too consumed with the mess to even be able to see the invisible hand at work in my life.
Not only did the conference burn to the ground, but so did all of my business relationships with people I had spent a decade with helping them succeed in their own endeavors. I felt as if I was standing in a cave and someone took a blowtorch to my life. Everything was gone. Burnt to the ground. My family remained in tact and I had a few friends left. For that, I felt so grateful.
A funny thing happened during this time, which helped me understand the world…people at large in a much more compassionate way. My can-do attitude was replaced by mind-numbing torrents of drivel. Thoughts came over and over again. I literally could not get it to stop. I felt numb.
After the initial step-by-step addressing of the ashes and cinder, I realized I needed to find a way to fund all of the checks I had written.
One morning, about four months later, I stumbled down the stairs to check email. I did not have a solution, and what reserves I had in the form of my cashed-in 401(k) were dwindling fast. I received one email from a woman I did not know. She invited me to an event. I felt pulled to go, but in my fugue I didn’t want to. I forced myself to go anyway.
I would meet the company at that event that I would work with for nearly 7 months and that would help me shift and begin to move again.
Even though the invisible hand was at work in my life…nudging me to go, guiding me to gifts, I still could not see it. I could not feel anything I was so utterly numb. I couldn’t see it at the time, but it was not unlike the post partum depression. And, again, I could not claim the gift that was sitting there waiting for me to grab it.
I felt obsessed, consumed by the debts that chided me each morning. I had to let go, but I didn’t know how.
Looking for a Dream Life:
I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the most brilliant minds in the world. Some are household names, some aren’t. What unites each one is an invisible force that seemingly guides the person, regardless of whether the person knows what they want or where they are going.
For me, like most other people, I projected outward what I most wanted myself. By the end of 2005, working in my mind and ego, I felt ill-equipped to deal with the choice I made to leave behind my identity of consultant-marketing guru. If I am not that, then who am I? I sensed the economic unrest in the world. I could see a big shift coming and I ran around like Chicken Little screaming that the sky would be falling in a few years. We have to get ready!
I really wanted someone to save me. So I took that desire and focused on saving my clients. I could see devastation coming in the world, little did I know it was coming for me, too.
In my own desperation to find solid ground and also to have a ‘thing’ to focus my energy, I created a one-of-a-kind conference that would invite firms to go to the next level in professional services. It would take the strategies I had created at my previous employer to another level and create utopian-type places to work for those lucky enough to work there. These types of strategies were my hallmark. Win-win-win thinking. But this time would be so different.
In 2006, that event would become the biggest failure of my life. And, the biggest invitation to my future and my heart.
And, from there, I would think I wouldn’t be able to let go.
I’ve worked with enough clients at this point to see predictable patterns in their life history. For me, my cycle is a predictable four-year pattern. Every three years or so I begin to feel bored with what I am doing, and make a decision to shift and then I move during the fourth year to the new creation. I’ve had other clients who live in a 10-year pattern. Others who have a five-year pattern. Every single one of them intuitively knows their number. I don’t even have to explain the concept and they can give me a number.
I faced a disruption in my pattern due to my post-partum depression. I couldn’t access myself…couldn’t tell my own feelings from my lack of feeling due to the hormonal imbalances. I went through the motions and spent the next four years taking care of clients, desperately searching for an answer to my disconnection.
At the time, I didn’t see the gift in the post-partum depression. I was, at last, free from the creaky mind chatter. But I could not feel anything. It was as if I had the best of both worlds, but I just couldn’t feel it. As a sensitive, not feeling anything left me feeling unnerved…I didn’t trust anything. I did what I did, but I felt checked out,disconnected from the heart beat of life.
My sense is that in the midst of that was my three-year marker to move again, but my focus was on looking for an answer for my not feeling. I feel like I missed my uptake in a sense. By the end of 2004…almost to my fifth year of my current ‘place,’ I felt off track, dissatisfied, unhappy.
It didn’t occur to me to make the decision to ‘move again’ because I had always made those decisions in response to an inner prompting. To ‘do’ this in any other way was ludicrous, but that is exactly what I did. In 2005, I fired all of my consulting clients and ‘decided’ I would create something new. This time, though, I was making decisions from my head…not my heart.
But nothing worked the way it did before when I moved with the rhythm of my heart.
When I ‘decided’ to leave my ex, instantly the game of making a living changed for me. Suddenly, I believed there was ‘more’ available and instantly there was.
Five to six months before I actually left, my plan to leave was already at work. The initial boost came in the form of a job. I simply asked God for a job and was told, “tell others you are looking.” I knew exactly one person to tell, so I told her.
I had exactly two weeks to find something. I had been working for a shady CPA, making much more per hour than he truly wanted to pay…again, following guidance, I asked for more and got it. I say he was a ‘shady’ CPA, but in reality he was a con man who was not a CPA, but a bookkeeper masquerading as a CPA. He was playing his part. I was playing mine. I could do a full week’s worth of ‘work’ in less than 2 hours. I systematized and streamlined all of his ‘work’ and could do it in my sleep. I spent the rest of my time talking to the people next door who ran a small embroidery business. I would take the cordless phone with me to answer the two or three calls that came in each day – all a result of the marketing letters I sent out each day. The occasional credit card company would call and quickly I pieced two and two together and realized that this guy was using someone else’s credit cards.
I woke up one day and knew my free ride was nearly over, and asked God to help me find a new job. That’s when I told my one friend at the junior college I was looking.
I didn’t know it then, but I was at a crossroads. Will I go right…literally, into my creative right brain? Will I go left…literally, into my structured left brain? I am what people call a naturally balanced hemisphere person. I am as Spock-like as I am wildly-creative. I had no idea what a gift this is, and so I told my friend I could do anything, which was true since I had done a bit of everything in the 100+ jobs I had held since I was 9 or so.
She called about a week later and told me she had a controller position open with one of her firm’s clients. Accounting – left-brained, okay, sure. She told me to send in my resume and I did. I sent it right over to the office where she was working in a similar position.
I just wanted a ‘job’ and I didn’t care what name the company had on it, what it paid except that it paid enough to pay my bills. To say I asked for nothing more than a job is not an exaggeration.
That’s when fate stepped in and said, You know what, you are more creative than you are structured…go this way.
What my friend did not know is that a position she thought the firm was eliminating was actually going to be filled. This position was a blend of right and left…HR and marketing. Behind the people skills most associate with human resources lies a highly-structured, extremely regulated paperwork. In addition to having a marketing and HR background, I was also an award-winning writer. This position called for the HR and Marketing Director to also write the newsletter each quarter.
My resume printed out at her office, but she did not receive it. Instead, the person leaving the firm grabbed it from the fax machine. As she read it, she could not believe the mix of skills and quickly took it to the firm’s managing principal.
Four days later, I began my new job.
That job paid me more money for 40 hours per week than any other job I had ever held. In fact, it paid me more money than I had ever made working two jobs. I felt rich, I felt fortunate. I felt like maybe, just maybe I could make it on my own.
The job gave me the financial courage to leave my marriage. To try. To see what was available in this world for me.
Yesterday, I wrote about anger. But, seriously, is everyone crankier than normal? For me, I float around in a love-bliss state most of the time, but what I have noticed as we’ve been out and about at different times of day and in situations where we normally don’t frequent… is an overall feeling of agitation.
Beyond the headline making stories of Steven Slater and others, I believe this is indicative of the stress most people are dealing with and that there are many, many more people dealing with stress who have not ever really had to deal with stress before – white collar workers, in particular.
What I’ve seen in my companies (from our marketing agency to our current company) is that successful people can laser beam onto a goal better than most, and they can ignore pretty much anything else around them as they focus in on achieving the target set before them.
Well, isn’t that handy? (insert Church Lady voice here)
But, what happens when you don’t have a goal because the entire game board has been turned upside down? What happens when everything you thought you knew isn’t at all acting like what you believed?
Well, welcome to today. Welcome to Crankyville. Where Mr. and Mrs. Overachiever has turned into Mr. and Mrs. Crankypants.
What to do?
Quit trying to do everything the way you used to do it. That’s what is making you so cranky (and perhaps crazy and a bit OVER stressed). Start creating some new neuro pathways in your head and get back into the world – playing a new game.
You just might feel like you are 18 again!
And speaking of CRANKY… 108 degrees for days on end… this is how we feel down here in Texas! Swimming Pool anyone?