I stole the name of this blog from Tony Robbins’s “behind the scenes” documentary about his large, life-changing event called Date With Destiny. The documentary shows some of the stories of the 7,000 people at this event who have begged, borrowed and hopefully not stolen the $6,000 it takes to get there.
The problem with billing it as behind the scenes is that, except for a few interviews with Tony Robbins, it’s not really behind the scenes at all. Missing are the moments when someone freaks out on the hotel staff and gets ejected from the event, or the kitchen realizes that they haven’t staffed Tony’s green M&M’s, or his event staff starts having serious meltdowns about being asked to work twenty hour days for six days (or longer). People, there are 7,000 people at this event! Shit is definitely going down!
Where’s the real shit?
We always want to see the juicy stuff – the honest stuff. The stuff that lets us know that yes, he’s a multi-millionaire with an international brand and an amazing vision– but he’s also a real person beneath that. Does he still fight with his wife? Does he still get angry?
People who are putting out honesty:
If you read anything from Gwennon Doyle Melton of Momastery, you’ll be hit with a different brand of honesty. A level of honesty that reaches in and pulls your soul right out. And for that brand of honesty, she’s been on Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday (my goal!) and has gazillions of blog readers, two best-selling memoirs, and a community that supports others moms with donations and kindness. Take that for inspiration. Boom!
No one needs a guru.
Why is Gwennon’s message reaching so many? Because no one needs a guru, and she never purports to be one. She’s just a survivor who tells it all. This doesn’t mean that we don’t need to find our teachers, our guides, our friends, helpers, and life coaches! But no matter what help others offer you, no one else can give you the magical answers as to what you need to do with your life except for you. (That’s kind of the unspoken secret of therapy.) No one else can help you to leave the gray box you’ve been living in if you don’t want to.
Binge-reading Gwennon’s blogs was a wake-up call to me. A reminder that I had promised myself to be brutally honest on my own blog. So here’s my honesty: I love my life.
I love what I do for a living, as complicated and hard as it to explain to others (life coach plus romance writer plus blogger plus occasional freelance writer plus mom? That’s a mouthful.)
But it’s been a hard road to get to this point, and if this were a behind the scenes on my life, you’d see that loving my life doesn’t mean that my life is perfect. Far from it. I yell at my kids. I argue with my husband. I have moments of total self-doubt and fear: fear of rejection, of not being good enough, of not being any sort of enough.
The behind the scenes would show me yelling at my kids to please stop bugging me while I’m working (hello, summer!). Or having another discussion with my husband about the amount of “me time” that I try to squeeze in. Or me struggling with parenting decisions, or struggling with whether I needed to speak with a friend whom I thought had purposefully hurt me. (I decided to just let it go after good counsel from another friend.)
But these moments of doubt, frustration, and negativity have gotten much less over the years, by using the very same tools that I teach to my clients. And one of the biggest tools for me is accepting that all of this self-change stuff is a process. Only in looking back can I say how much I’ve changed. It happened slowly, in small increments, using 5 degree shifts, instead of 90 degrees. (Using the same methods that I use with my clients.)
Loving your life isn’t about being perfect.
Because loving your life isn’t going to happen from attending a six day event (sorry, Tony). Though that can help as a jump-start, in order to really change, you’ll need daily discipline, daily practices that slowly –so slowly you might not even see it happening– move the needle towards fulfilling your dreams, your goals, and living your beautiful, vibrant life, in all of its messiness and imperfections.
And if all of this honesty means that I fall down in your eyes as a coach, then I’m okay with that, too. My clients are people who see me not as a guru, but as a survivor. Out there fighting the good fight, each and every day, and giving you the same tools that I use to love my life.
I hope that you’ll join me as I start to expand this blog into a community of messy, imperfect people who absolutely, and with total honesty, love life. I’m rooting for you, me, and all of us.
