Like attracts Like

I had the opportunity to share a message at a TedX event yesterday and I was very confident in the morning and excited (though this past week it went from fear to excitement, back and forth)

There were some challenges in the process, one being we could not see our slides, they would only show up on the screen behind us. So you had to look over your shoulder to see if they came up or not each time you forwarded the slide.

The inability to see what was coming up next threw me off as there was a very specific flow to what I wanted to share so that it made sense. I got through the talk but left feeling empty as I "felt" as I wasted this opportunity. In fact, the rest of the day I spiraled as seemingly "every event" in my history that shared a "similar emotional syntax".

The feeling was one of "shame and failure", which brought forward feelings around my divorce, my feelings of failure as a father to my children keeping them emotionally safe, to perceived failures from my childhood, to challenges in business trying to grow to a new level and the often sense of frustration that accompanies that.

What is interesting to observe is that in the past I would have not recognized what was going on and would have spent months if not years in that "stuck place" and now I am able to "center myself" much more quickly. This is the beauty of this work as we are looking to reduce the time it takes between getting taken emotionally offline and getting back to who we wished to be.

The emotional strengths I needed to call forth faster and obviously need to embed more powerful was that of "truth, to be able to realize the truth of the circumstances and that it was not a career-ending event, the courage to reach out while in what Brenne Brown calls "the shame spiral" and allows others to share their strength while I was struggling.

It was a very uncomfortable but powerful lesson for me and one that I felt important to share. So I am leaning into the work heavily knowing that there is so much in my life that I am grateful for, and where I spend my attention is what I will experience more of...