…from my next book, Yes Changes Everything! Coming in May 2020!
“You’ve got to sing like you don’t need the money,
Love like you’ll never get hurt;
You’ve got to dance like nobody’s watchin’
It’s gotta come from the heart if you want it to work.”
These are lyrics from the song, “Come from the Heart” by Susanna Clark and Richard Leigh. I love them! They help me relax my grip on whatever I’m trying to do and ditch the illusion of ever being perfect at it (…and *exhale*).
Perfection is just someone’s opinion anyway. The perfect cake, song, beer, or whatever is in the eye of the beholder. We may think a song is perfect, but to someone else, it’s just noise. A beer may be out of this world to us—just perfection—but someone else may think it’s awful. That means a perfect home, city, restaurant, or night out doesn’t exist. It’s not objective and real like the chair I’m sitting on or the candle burning next to me or Blossie curled up on my lap as I write this.
The perfect whatever
When we buy into the illusion that perfection is possible, we also get a whole lot of frustration and staying in place. Because perfection isn’t a thing, so we end up exhausted, running after air, or worse, staying frozen in place because we think we haven’t got the talent or connections or money we need to go after the perfect whatever.
What we really need when we go after something new is heart, energy, and passion. Things that don’t take talent or connections or money but lead us to the amazing goodness that’s hiding in plain sight, even if it’s a little dinged up or dusty or smaller than we’d thought.
Let’s wobble without fear
Something else we also need: to be okay outside our comfort zones, outside our safe, familiar space in an area where things get…wobbly. Where lines are thin and crooked. Where we stumble and fall. Where we’ve said yes to something for the first time, and we’re not good at it. It feels wobbly and weird, and it will come out tilted in the beginning—far from perfect.
But you know what, beautiful someone? Not only is wobbly okay, it’s great because when we wobble, we have to figure out what to do to steady ourselves. When things feel weird, we have to learn how to make them feel…unweird. When our cake, crocheted llama, or row of garden basil comes out gnarled and curly, we have to figure out how to straighten it out and in the process, learn a whole lot about what doesn’t work. When we wobble, we grow.
So let’s wobble, and let’s not be afraid.
Like nobody’s watching
And while we wobble, let’s turn off the noise—whether that’s opinions or articles or “experts” or headlines. Let’s tell them to shush. We’re trying to grow here. We can’t be distracted by every click that comes our way.
And hey, beautiful someone, see you outside our comfort zones where we sing like we don’t need the money and dance like nobody’s watching.