Motivational

On Deciding to Be Beautiful [Part 1]

January 31, 2023 by PrincessSarah

On Deciding to Be Beautiful: Letters from My Younger Self

Today I changed my life. I changed my life because, for the first time, I am deciding to be beautiful.
I decided. What powerful words. I have often been asked how I accomplished certain things or how I manage certain disciplines that people perceive as being hard or challenging. People ask “how did you do it?” – they want a formula perhaps. But, no, it’s deeper than that. We want to know what it takes to harness the will-power we believe must be required in order to perform this task or accomplish this goal that to us seems so unachievable.

So very often, after a reflective pause, my answer begins with the simple, quiet, humble, yet declarative statement, I decided.

The Value of Deciding

When you decide to do something, I think you’re at least 70% there. There’s something on the inside that shifts when you decide you are going to do something. I believe something dies, and I think that ‘something’ is resistance. It gets tied up and tossed out when we simply decide to do a thing. When we decide, somehow all the chatter shuts down and our resources are suddenly marshalled to focus on something entirely different and new – the HOW.

The question is no longer whether we are going to do something. That debate is over. The negative committee in our head is adjourned and dismissed. Now only positive voices can be heard, offering insight, creativity, and ideas to facilitate the daily tasks necessary to complete the desired result.

The Battlefield of the Mind: Choosing the Voice of Truth

Well, today, I decided something I’ve never decided before. It wasn’t an activity, a goal, or destination. Today I am simply deciding to be beautiful, and I was set free from a lifetime of bondage to the torment and debate about whether or not I am.

If you asked me whether I’m beautiful, I would immediately answer in the affirmative. In part because I know (intellectually at least) that it’s the truth, but more so because I know I must. If you asked me if I believe I’m beautiful, there would be a moment of silence while I try to articulate a feeling that goes more often than it comes, depending on countless variables. When forced, I will admit that I hesitate because deep (or perhaps not that deep) down inside, I don’t believe I’m beautiful at all.

Within my hesitation, there echoes a lifelong internal debate triggered by the loss of my right eye long before I could speak, walk, or perceive my own value. The debate continues between the voice that empowers me with truth about my beauty and the voice that believes a lie and resonates far more with it.

My internal climate has always been tuned to the voice that tells me I’m not beautiful. So it’s easy to connect with feelings and thoughts that resonate with that – after all every internal ecosystem defaults according to its settings.

But because I know the words I contemplate and speak contain the power of both life and death, I intentionally and willingly engage in the struggle to force my thoughts and my spoken words to line up with what I know to be true but have trouble seeing when I look in the mirror sometimes. Yes, it’s a lot of work. But the battlefield truly is the mind, so I know it’s worth the fight. I also know I wouldn’t be where I am had I not signed up for this fight in the first place. Surrender is not an option. So I engage every day, and somedays, it’s a real slug-fest.

The Decision: The Ultimate Tie-Breaker

The big news is that today I decided the debate between the voice of truth and the voice of lies is no longer a worthy expenditure of my time or effort when it came to my beauty (at the very least). Today, I shut the debate down by simply deciding TO BE beautiful. Is there a difference? If I already know I’m beautiful (at least intellectually), what sense does it make, and what difference does it make to decide to be beautiful?? But for me there’s a chasm between these two things. Somehow for me, thinking you are beautiful and the decision to be beautiful are completely different.

To say of myself, I am beautiful might seem empowering, but it has taken a great deal more energy and work for me to embrace. After all, ‘beautiful’ is just a superficial description. It’s not a state of being. Instead it’s an adjective with which I have to figure out whether or not I can (or am willing to) agree, depending on the day. Whether or not I believe this description, it’s still just an opinion which somehow carries less weight, perhaps because it’s subject to change.

But to be beautiful is my decision – it’s a choice to take on a state of being. I seize it and therefore it’s mine, it’s my entitlement, it’s my right. It’s something I can own, instead of having it be some elusive thing that escapes me or that belongs to people who meet certain criteria that I might not. It is literally something I can choose for myself.

I can identify myself with it and own as mine. Because being beautiful is something I have chosen and decided to be, it’s no longer something that might evaporate while I’m asleep, leaving me abandoned to fend for myself in the morning. I don’t have to figure out what I have to do in order to be beautiful. I don’t have to be a certain way, dress a certain way, style my hair a certain way or even wear any make up at all. None of these things matter in the face of something I have chosen simply to be. There can be nothing more empowering than that.

Why New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Work

December 31, 2022 by PrincessSarah

I think it’s fair to say that most people are committing themselves to specific New Year’s resolutions as we prepare to ring in 2023. But I would like to propose that New Year’s resolutions don’t work because they actually undermine our success and productivity in most cases.

Here are five reasons New Year’ resolutions don’t work and why they’re worth avoiding altogether.

1. New Year’s Resolutions only lock in the behavior we want to avoid.

Most New Year’s resolutions are borne out of 11 months of beating ourselves up. We might think guilt and condemnation are good motivators, but they actually serve to cement the very habits we are trying to escape. They create an internal law or edict telling us we should do a certain thing or refrain from a certain thing. Most New Year’s resolutions don’t work because our enactment of a “law” literally triggers in us the opposite response – the very behavior of which we are most ashamed.

What we often fail to realize is that not beating ourselves up is one of the primary steps towards the progress we’re after. To reach that place of no longer beating ourselves up, sometimes we have to blow through January 1, focusing instead on identifying and rectifying our negative self-talk and the triggers that cause the bad habit.

2. Most New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Work Because We Make Them Before We’re Ready

It’s an unfortunate reality, but any true and lasting change starts internally. It’s not forced by an intellectual choice. It’s initiated by an internal softening that sparks a change of heart, which eventually manifests itself in changed behavior.

I bit my nails terribly well into adulthood. As a miserable child and young person, it was many years before I realized I needed to just stop resolving every year to stop biting my nails. I had to come to terms with the fact that there was nothing I could do about it because the gnawing internal fear was so all consuming that it necessarily manifested in my gnawing at my fingertips until they bled.

It was horrible! But nothing I tried could make me stop. Something had to change on the inside. So I just had to do the internal work, allowing myself the space, grace, and time to heal and grow, instead of trying so hard to reach my destination before the process was complete. It’s a frustrating reality. But most New Year’s resolutions won’t work because we’re simply not ready to make the necessary adjustment.

3. People Mistake the Excitement of the New Year for the Discipline They’ll Need When the Fireworks Fizzle

Most of the time, when we make New Years resolutions, it’s because we quietly think there’s some magic about the New Year that will make up for our lack of commitment and discipline. There I said it. But isn’t it true? Gym owners know that a fraction of the new members who sign up on January 1 will still be showing up on March 1 (ok, February 1).

One of my closest friends fell prey to this many years ago. There was nothing I could do to convince her that, she would not go to the gym simply because she had spent the money on a new membership. So she made her donation to the gym and admitted with dismay months later that she had surprised herself.

I’m not criticizing, people….!. As the year draws to a close, we reflect on our lives and naturally tend to make decisions and commitments for the new year, presuming we’ll have the energy and drive to follow through. We think that feeling we have at 12:00am January 1 will persist, and that life won’t come against our plan.

But there’s an insurance commercial in the U.S. with the slogan “Life Comes at You Fast,” which observes that life brings unexpected twists and turns. New Year’s resolutions often won’t work because most people err by making changes without resolving to follow through even when life punches us in the mouth.

It was Mike Tyson who said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” All I’m suggesting is that New Year’s resolutions don’t work because they are steeped in the romance of the changing calendar year (or perhaps the guilt that we’re running out of time). Under these circumstances, we generally forget to implement the ground work necessary to succeed in the new commitment.

4. We Forget that EVERY DAY is New Years Day!!

Let’s face it, New Year’s Day really is JUST another day on the calendar. It is yet another day that will never happen again in history, which makes it no more special than the rest. This is a beautiful thing, because it literally means that every single day we’re alive has the potential to be New Year’s Day when we decide to make a change for the better.

One meaning of the word “repent” is “to turn.” So it literally means we are turning away from something and towards something else. We can change directions at any time of the year. There’s no magic or secret sauce available to us on January 1 that’s not available to us the rest of the year.

For me, it just helps to always remember that, as long as there is air in my lungs, I am never too lost to turn around.

5. New Year’s Resolutions Create Unnecessary Pressure to Make Big Changes

Perhaps its human nature to want to reach our destination even though we just left home. We don’t gain weight in one day. Yet still we look for diet plans that help us lose weight yesterday. We just want to get there already.

New Year’s resolutions don’t work because they cause us to announce to ourselves and others that we will accomplish some Herculean feat that might have eluded us until now. We feel good announcing it. Just talking about it puts pressure on us while somehow building confidence that we might actually do it this time.

I have found it more helpful to commit to small changes, maintaining them consistently, and then building on them – it always works. When I’ve chosen this path, instead of beating myself up for not accomplishing all of what I’d like to see today, I find I make much more progress. Instead, of lurching back and forth on a miserable merry-go-round of healthy and unhealthy change, I have found I’m better served by building small new habits into my life which, over time, inevitably render the old, less healthy habits obsolete.

For example, I used to eat macaroni and cheese every day of my life. I’m talking about without fail. If they made it a food group, I would have been pleased. I could make it from scratch, or I could eat Food Lion’s generic mac’n’cheese from a box. It didn’t matter to me. I also never drank any water. Eventually, though, something caused me to realize that my consumption of cheese (real or fake) was complicating asthma symptoms when I exerted myself physically. I was a young adult in seemingly great shape. So my body at least appeared to be forgiving me for never hydrating or eating vegetables….. that is until I wanted to breathe sometimes.

When I did an experiment and cut all dairy products for a few weeks, I was shocked that I no longer found myself reaching for my inhaler. To be clear, I wasn’t trying to quit using my inhaler. So if you need yours, please DO NOT trash it on my account. All I know is that after that I knew change was in order. But pasta with as many different cheeses as I have hair on my head (there’s a lot) was the love of my life. (I still make the best mac’n’cheese I know, I might add.)

Did I stop eating it altogether? I think you know the answer. Not only did I not stop eating mac’n’cheese daily, I didn’t change anything about my other unhealthy daily habits either. All I required of myself was one bowl of broccoli every day. No sauce, no salt, and definitely no cheese. (sniff..)

Eventually, I started building in a glass of water here and there. Now, drinking 20 ounces of water is the first thing I do in the morning, and I do my best not to drink my calories. Also, hard as it may be to believe, I never seek out mac’n’cheese because I have found foods that nourish me, that I actually like, and make me feel good. (Basically I learned how to cook.) I used to think it wasn’t possible. But it was.

This way, life isn’t a constant race to the next cheat meal. I’m thriving and it feels good. I believe all resolutions can be good for us when handled wisely. I am just of the belief that the New Year isn’t the best time to make them. I hope this inspires us to live well not only in January, but through the rest of 2023.

Happy New Year!

On Your Inferiority Complex & Fear

July 1, 2022 by PrincessSarah

Letters to my younger, academically-challenged, and chronically insecure self.

On Unfriending Inferiority and Fear

You will often find that your deepest hardship and pain will fuel your greatest gifting. At times, you will want to curl up in a ball and disappear. You may even wonder what life would be like if you were strong enough to believe that ‘what it takes’ lives inside of you. When you realize that you are strong and that you do have ‘it,’ things will get a little easier. This letter is to help you on your way to that place.

It has been said that “in every adversity there is the seed to an equivalent advantage” (quote) and this is definitely true. Your struggles to read and understand things others find “intuitive” will feel like an infirmity worsened only by the sense that there is no one in the universe struggling the way you are. As an antidote for this sense of inferiority, I offer five points of encouragement:

Never Compare Yourself

You must vehemently resist the urge to compare yourself to others. Absolutely everyone falls victim to this tendency sometimes, with the result of either feeling better about themselves or feeling worse.

At one extreme, comparing yourself to others in self-congratulation is a sinister trap. It will deceive you into thinking you’ve arrived at the summit when you’ve only made it to the rest-stop halfway up the mountain. People caught in this trap don’t push themselves to develop or improve, satisfied in thinking they’re doing better than most.

Comparisonitis Cuts Both Ways

At the other end of the Comparisonitis Spectrum is the trap that causes people to believe they are losers or failures. You are most vulnerable to this. This evil will cause you to compare your worst feeling or opinion of yourself, with others’ best performance. Remember that exactly the same war that’s going on inside your head is happening inside everyone else’s.

Left unchecked, a constant drip of self-criticism will poison your view of yourself and stunt your growth. Combat this by repeating the vision and promises that have been spoken over your life and that resonate with your purpose. This will build your faith and confidence and renew your mind. Failure to do this will cause you to see those around you as giants and yourself a grasshopper. You will find yourself looking around in dismay, forlorn and intimidated as the people around you seem to advance in life with ease. Those who do advance have only succeeded in shutting down the noise in their head. This isn’t easy. But you must make it your priority.

Know Your Worth

To escape the tendency to be intimidated by others’ “genius”, you must know and value your own. As Albert Einstein put it, “Everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”

Know that many well-respected CEOs, successful entrepreneurs, and effective community leaders have overcome challenges far greater than yours. They aren’t bothered by the fact that we can’t all be good at everything. Their success was borne of a blend of resilience and creativity that helped them work through great academic and professional failure. The pain of their childhood only fueled their success.

Hard as it may be to believe, there are things you do with ease that many others might find hard.

Yes, You are a Genius Too!

Are you the person who tends to pick up on things others tend not to see? Do you have an innate ability to assess a situation, diffusing tension and misunderstanding through your humor and emotional intelligence? Are you the one who goes the extra mile to ensure the people who are often overlooked and under-appreciated are seen and applauded? Are you a great listener? Do you understand people’s pain? Are you a great mentor and counselor?

These are valuable qualities. Never forget that, even if you find yourself surrounded by people who don’t appreciate them.

Understand that, while humility has great value, self-deprecation (putting yourself down) has absolutely no place in your thought-life or the words that come out of your mouth. It is possible to be humble and confident at the same time. You must work hard to be both.

Honor those around you and serve them fervently. But make a point to know your gifts and talents and always celebrate them without apology.

Fear is Not Your Friend

Fear will often masquerade as wisdom to hinder you. When you think you are choosing wisdom, it will often be fear that sits at the table to counsel. You must develop the ability to discern the difference. Wisdom is your friend. Fear is not.

To build strength and do hard things with ease, you are going to have to take calculated risk. You must respond to fear quickly. When you do that, you will starve it of its primary sources of nutrition: time and excuses, both of which fuel great unproductivity in most people’s lives. You must seize the opportunity of a lifetime within the lifetime of the opportunity. If you pause at all, do so only to contemplate how you would feel at the end of your life when thoughts about your failure to act flood your mind. Let the only fear to which you respond be the fear of that regret.

Of course, this absolutely does NOT apply to situations involving physical safety. In those circumstances, it’s usually best to run away from the (head)light at the end of the tunnel, instead of towards it.

Just remember that courage is not the absence of fear, it is the ability to continue a course of action in spite of it. Whatever you know to do, hurry up and do it, because the torment you experience will only increase with the time you waste agonizing over it. In short, although fear will be a familiar companion in your life (you are not alone in this) never let anxiety tell you what to do.

Fear opens doors to the negative

You will hear it said that “fear is faith for the things you don’t want,” because it opens doors to the negative, attracting it to you. As Job of the Old Testament once said, “The very thing I feared the most has come upon me.” This is definitely true.

When it comes to choices relating to your purpose and destiny, if anything, the thing you fear is to be food for you. Let it be your fuel and your guide. Think of it as a scarecrow that has been strategically placed in the middle of a field to scare away the birds. The only purpose of the scarecrow is to protect the harvest. In many circumstances, i there weren’t so much at stake, and the voice of fear wouldn’t be so loud. Always seek wise counsel regarding your purpose. But having done so, when you sense fear, run towards it with the expectation of a soon-to-be-harnessed promise.

You will be afraid that people will laugh at you. Let them laugh. They are quietly wondering what their lives might be like if they had your courage. It is a sad reality that most people never fulfill their destiny because fear is more real to them than reality.

Fear closes doors to opportunity

The ability to respond affirmatively to fear is like a muscle that develops when you force yourself outside of your comfort zone. Do this as often as possible.

You will hear it said that people often unwittingly reduce their lives based on the things they are afraid of. For example, someone with a fear of flying might go to great lengths to ensure they never have to board a plane to travel. As a consequence, they live their life never feeling fear. But that is simply because they have reduced their life to accommodate it. They may think they are living “free” from fear, but that’s only because their entire existence is based on the subconscious goal of leaning away from the things they fear instead of leaning in to engage them.

This is an easy trap that many respectable and even highly accomplished people fall into. The live safe lives completely void of courage because they couldn’t face themselves if they failed or found something hard. But now you know. Just as fear opens doors to the negative in your life, it also closes doors of opportunity that you would have wanted to stay open had you known what was on the other side.

THE VALUE OF FAILURE

June 16, 2022 by PrincessSarah

I recently reviewed one of my favorite John Maxwell books, Failing Forward. In it the legendary leadership expert observes that “The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.”

I fell in love with this book years ago because it taught me the value of failure. Now, on the other side of many more failures, including some in my voice over work, I’m finally beginning to appreciate it, and I’m wondering a thousand things….like what would happen if we thought of failure differently, processing and moving through it with the mindset that, without it, we would be disqualified from success and incapable of it?

What would we attempt if we were socialized to embrace failure as a necessary and invaluable milestone?

What kind of people would we be if we didn’t work so hard to escape failure?

And what is the cost of our fear of failure??

In what ways are we shrinking the intended depth of our lives because we are more responsive to our fear of failure than to the voice of our purpose and destiny calling us to advance?

THE REAL VALUE OF FAILURE

I think a great deal would improve in culture as a whole if we would value failure instead of fearing it.

First, our children would be empowered to discover and treasure their unique giftings. Although they wouldn’t be empowered to quit during times of stress or hardship, they also wouldn’t feel demeaned or marginalized. And they would always have at least a parent or an enlightened educator reassuring them much like Kinko’s founder Paul Orfalea’s mother did when she told him “the A students work for the B students. The C students run the businesses. And the D students dedicate the buildings.” Overcoming Dyslexia, Fortune Magazine, May 13, 2002

Could you imagine how much fun learning would be if kids were required to have a certain number of earnest, failed attempts. This would to develop their creative and critical thinking while also breaking the back of the fear that would hobble them in their adult lives? Some are grasping the concept, and are urging us to teach our young that “failure is a great thing.”

What if the reason we don’t succeed is because we don’t pursue failure enough? Failure is a numbers game after all. Thomas Edison is famously quoted as having said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.” We love this quote. But it doesn’t feel so great when we’re in that low place.

FAILURE AND THE VOICE OVER ARTIST

Nobody likes to audition endlessly without success. But through consistent auditioning, we develop creativity, stamina, (hopefully) our talent. Perhaps most importantly, we develop a thicker skin because eventually we don’t take the rejection so personally (or ourselves so seriously).

The painful part of this journey is that we have to keep auditioning to get where we say we want to go. There are no short-cuts. Although I truly enjoy auditioning most of the time, I have to admit I’m not always a fan of this sacred Process.

I sometimes have to be reminded of the baseball greats whose place in the record books was only secured because they swung at, and missed, countless balls. Like most, I hate to be reminded that it was those countless misses that got them into the record books.

There’s no doubt they had worked hard on their craft to improve themselves every day. Having done that though, they were undaunted by the concept of failing over and over again. They didn’t allow the voices of insecurity and failure to define them. They stayed focused, humble yet confident in their own giftings and discipline.

MY STORY – THE SPOILS OF FAILURE

Challenges with Reading……

I struggled to succeed early and had a miserable time academically as a child. To say that I struggled learning how to read is very much an understatement. I could see the words I was reading on the page. I could read them to myself only very slowly. But when it came time to read them aloud, getting them out of my mouth was almost physically painful. Back then, I was in school in England, where reading aloud (and with feeling) was something all students were required to do.

Having to read aloud in class somehow caused everything within me to freeze up. I would stand, silent and terrified, staring at the words on the page, but unable to actually say them. The fear and nervousness were so debilitating I would sometimes recite words I wasn’t even seeing.

Of course, because reading to myself was a hardship as well, standardized tests were an added misery. The primitive tests that were supposed to reveal dyslexia were unhelpful. So my school sent me home to struggle with the help of my tireless parents, who even signed me up for a reading contest where I placed second or third. (Perhaps not surprisingly, I have no recollection of the reading contest.) I have taken more speed-reading crash courses than I care to remember. But, to this day, when left to read on my own time, I read slowly and even repetitively.

…….just About Anything

It would be decades before I realized that the trouble I’d had sight-reading piano music as a child and college student was exactly the same as the trouble I’d suffered reading words. My Guyanese teacher would bellow in my ear, frustrated that I wasn’t moving to the beat of a metronome or her tapping finger. This made me feel even smaller.

There was nothing I could do to actually play the music I was reading. Music theory was never a challenge. Playing piano fairly well was never a challenge either… as long as I didn’t have to read the music, that is. Although I became advanced in skill over the many years I played, I never improved in this struggle to sight-read. Every semester in college, I had to practice for hours each day until my hands began to remember where to go on the keys.

This process literally took most of the semester. During that time, my bewildered, but very kind piano teacher would quietly ask me if I was practicing. Week after week I sounded terrible. This would continue until one day my brain somehow no longer had to work so hard because my hands would begin to remember which notes to play.

Suddenly my vision and my brain could relax, and I only needed to look at the sheet music to get a general reminder of where I was in the piece I was playing.

Only then would all the hours of practice suddenly begin to shine through. I could easily feel the music and allow the emotion of it to flow out of me. From that moment until the end of the semester, practice would be a breeze.

There was nothing that could make the process easier. I simply had to slog it out, sounding like I had never touched a piano before until, one day, I would miraculously sound like a pianist.

The Light on the Other Side

Did I feel like a failure as a child and young person struggling with her reading? Absolutely.

Did I feel like a failure when another student who had overheard me practicing piano one day commented on how terrible I sounded? Most definitely.

But now, on the other side of those years, failure adds value to my life in at least two precious ways.

For one, there is this thing of tenacity. I don’t believe tenacity can be developed without repeated, sometimes crushing failure that causes us to regroup, but that never lets us quit, even though we might seriously consider it.

I’ve been told I would have been one of the last men standing at the Alamo in 1836. Perhaps I can attribute that trait to my childhood.

The second fruit of my failure is that, while I have much to learn in my voice over journey, my ability to inflect, enunciate, and portray emotion as a voice over artist is due entirely to the countless hours spent reading aloud as a child. There is no doubt that I would have quit had I been left to my own devices. But my parents saw something different for me and would never allow me to do that.

I can’t say it’s not hard to compare myself to others to this day. But I’m learning that this tendency only slows me down and undermines my hard work.

GRATEFUL FOR FAILURE

There are many negative things in life that we shouldn’t accommodate, but do. For example, we make room for fear, nourishing it with time and excuses when we should evict it.

In Failing Forward, John Maxwell teaches us that failure can and should become our friend (dare I say roommate). He encourages us to see it as a lesson and a stepping-stone. Although in the hard moments, I still feel the sting of failure, looking back, I can see that I would never have made it this far without it.