Make Yourself Available for the Ridiculous

BLOG ONE IN A PAIR.
How many of you have wonderful, caring, well-meaning, incredible humans in your life that insist upon protecting you by telling you about how hard showing up for yourself and your dreams and goals is? If you’re like me, you’ve had to fight for your right to make yourself available for the ridiculous.

People who love us, yet have no idea what we are doing, or what it will take to do what we want to do, love to give us their thoughts because they think they know us better than we know ourselves. They really are trying to help. To save us from pain, fear, and folly. They’ve been conditioned to do this by our society.

I am so tired of the cheerleading of people being novel.
It’s wearisome and boring to have the act of celebrating people’s amazingness be a unique value proposition.
For goodness sake, when are we going to normalize showing up for ourselves.

When are you going to make yourself available for the ridiculous and have that be … dull.

I gave a pep-talk on this topic, and more, last Monday.

I’m here to expose the fear in sheep’s clothing.

I’m here to call out when fear comes up in here and masquerades as wisdom.

There are three lies that fear tells us:

1. “We live in an either/or culture, so you better pick which version of hell you want. The hell of being miserable, or the hell of being great.”

In the book “You Are a Badass at Making Money“*, Jen Sincero astutely states:

“Here’s the deal: We live in a fear-based society that totally gets off on cautioning us, on reminding us how difficult life is, on warning us how hard it is to make money, on holding us back lest we bite off more than we can chew, on screaming, “Look out!” instead of “Rock on!”. As a result, we’ve bought into this idea that it’s better to limit ourselves than to stretch, and we’ve developed this fun-free either/or take on what’s available to us: You’re either doing what you love or making money. You’re either a good person or a rich person, you can either help the world or you can help yourself, you can either go on vacation or pay your car loan. Y.A.W.N.”

Yawn is right.

2. “Low risk equals high security”

Hate to break it to you, but safety and security are not necessarily the same thing.

Sure, “safe” and “secure” share one definition “free from or not exposed to danger or harm.”

Dig a little deeper and you’ll see this:

Safe: involving little to no risk, free from hurt.
Secure: dependable, firm, not liable to fail.

Levels of risk are no match for your decision-making abilities and your insights around how to stay in control over what you’re actually responsible for.

Tight rope walkers, with their big long balancing pole, their trained equilibrium, and a giant net are secure, even if they are at high level of risk. So are those incredibly brave people who climb Half-Dome in Yosemite. They’ve got the ropes, the footholds, the carabiners and the hutzpah that secure them to the mountain face… yet the level of risk is… well, you know.

3. “The quality of the decision you made last determines the quality of the decision you will make next.”

I call this the “false equivalency of decisions”. False equivalence is when we exaggerate the degree of similarity between two things being equated.

We inflate the importance of the similarities and ignore differences.

Any of these hit home?

• “Last time I made a decision about how I was going to onboard a new client, it didn’t go well, so the next time I onboard a new client, it will be awful.”
• “I can’t start another revenue stream because my other revenue streams do not line up with my current goals.”
• “I’m not sure if I can sell new program X because I’ve never done this exact same thing before.”

Whataboutism is rampant.
Where are you “whatabout”ing yourself?

Take some time and marinate in this.

Next week, I’ll be headed here to discuss the three “R’s” of combatting the “fear in sheep’s clothing” lies, so you can truly make yourself available for the ridiculous.

Have a wonderful weekend!