What if you weren’t afraid?
I know! I know!
Stay with me here. But what if you weren’t afraid to do things that you’ve always wanted to do, but have been holding yourself back because of possible ridicule or ‘failure?’
What if you weren’t afraid of your own goodness and light?
What if you actually believed in it, believed in yourself?
As most everyone knows, I was (and sometimes am) a person who gets scared of things a lot and I avoid them. I do Be Brave Fridays to force myself to show my art and that side of my creativity.
I write novels even though I’ve spent a lot of time being terrified of bad reviews.
I’ve talked a lot about my voice and my sloshy s’s and how that kept me from singing and acting and public speaking because I just couldn’t handle the potential ridicule.
I once had a teacher tell me that nobody would ever hire me or love me, that I’d never get into college or get married because my voice was so ridiculous. I was little. It hurt. I believed them.
To be fair, even as a successful grownup, people still mimic and mock my voice sometimes. It still hurts a bit, but mostly it makes me sad for them. Once I was lucky enough to talk to a man on NPR about just this and he said, “It’s better to have a distinctive voice. We love that in radio. It makes you stand out.”
Standing out can be scary, can’t it?
Anyways, that’s why we started the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE and then our LOVING THE STRANGE podcast. It forced me to have a voice. And it forced me to listen to my own voice when I mixed down the audio and get used to it.
But despite these bit leaps I’ve made in two years, I still notice things that I do that might be based in fear, that might be me trying to hide anything shiny in myself because of fear.
My fears:
- Being super poor again.
- Ridicule.
- Being thought of as arrogant.
- Hurting other people by being too vulnerable, out-there, shiny, honest, whatever.
- Not making a difference
Those fears are probably why I have such a hard time with videos, why I assign my own daily motivational/inspiration thoughts to my dogs and cats on social media posts, why I’d rather be behind the camera instead of in front of it.
So, I obviously still have some work to do, right?
But that’s okay. Work is a good thing. Growth is a good thing. And allowing yourself to realize that you are more than adequate, that you can create yourself, that there is something shiny inside of you and you need to uncage that, cultivate it, let it flow?
That’s a big ass deal.
When you let your own self be shiny, be real, be kind, you give other people a chance to be lights too.
In a way, it’s selfish to hide your shininess, your belief because not only is it holding yourself back from making the biggest contributions to your family and your world, but it’s also teaching by example.
If I hide my light, you can hide yours.
If I show mine, you can show yours.
We all have goodness and crud inside of ourselves, right? Real love is when we see the crud in someone else, in ourselves, and we love our way through that anyway. Love and acceptance are huge things. So much of the darkness inside of us is about fear, anxiety, pain, trauma. And there are so many shiny, gorgeous humans who have been through so much and they still light up the world.
Shouldn’t we want to be one of them?
This is so important that I’m going to repeat it. When you accept how amazing you can be, how good you can be, then you show other people that they can do it, too.
People get addicted to fear. We watch scary shows. We search for the rush of adrenalin. But what if we could turn our stage fright, our minor anxieties into excitement? How cool with that be.
What if we could allow ourselves to see the good in ourselves and other people, to step away from judgement, admit mistakes, be okay with being embarrassed and transform?
I think we can. We can love our way through it, right?
LET’S HANG OUT!
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Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness on the DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE podcast and our new LOVING THE STRANGE podcast.
We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of.
Please share it and subscribe if you can. Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow. There’s a new episode every Tuesday!
Thanks so much for being one of the 263,000 downloads if you’ve given us a listen!
One of our newest LOVING THE STRANGE podcasts is about the strange and adorably weird things people say?
And one of our newest DOGS ARE SMARTER THAN PEOPLE episode is about fear setting and how being swallowed by a whale is bad ass.
And Carrie has new books out! Yay!
You can order now! It’s an adult mystery/thriller that takes place in Bar Harbor, Maine. Read an excerpt here!
It’s my book! It came out June 1! Boo-yah! Another one comes out July 1.
And that one is called THOSE WHO SURVIVED, which is the first book in the the DUDE GOODFEATHER series. I hope you’ll read it, like it, and buy it!
