What happens when you let fifty gurus into your home via the internet?  Answer:  Your brain gets overrun with groovy possibilities.

They are all brilliant, they all have something to offer, and they all say I need them right now.  Suddenly I am spinning and crazed. I’m not having fun anymore and my goal is to have fun every day, since every day just might be my last.

Yuck.  How did I let this happen?  To whom did I give away my fun and how can I get it back?

A Note About Fun

I believe Fun is a grossly underrated spiritual practice.  We trust seriousness and overwork and being stressed and overcommitted.  We even brag about how busy we are.  But tell people you believe in having fun and they will often say something about how life is serious and we can’t always have fun.

I’m legally blind.  I know it can’t always be fun.  But the sooner I get my pain to migrate to my funny bone, the sooner I will regain my perspective, and the sooner my brain will work well again.  I take fun very seriously.

Enter Real Life

How do we build a business, run a home, raise loving, responsible children, and succeed in our career while staying centered and happy? I am committed to living these questions and the answers out loud.

Radical Releasing: Unsubscribe.

Here is one way to create more space in your brain and your life: Cut two or three newsletters you are getting. Even if you aren’t opening them, they are taking up space in your Inbox and in your psyche. Unsubscribe even if they are fabulous, (I just cut Jack Canfield!). Too much of a great thing is still too much.

Cut back and breathe deep! Get your life and your sanity back!  Unsubscribe from me if you are not getting great benefit from my newsletters.  Yes, go to the bottom of the page right now and unsubscribe if your inner voice of wisdom is telling you to do that.

I walk my talk.

It’s easy to say no to stuff that doesn’t serve us. It is much harder to say no to the good stuff, the great stuff, especially when all these great people seem to be hollering that you need what they have right now. RIGHT NOW!  Sign up now or you are missing the one and only opportunity that will ever come your way.

Yuck, once again.

I’m susceptible to urgency, because I am a recovering urgency addict. I have learned I cannot trust urgency. That push of “Now! Now! Must do it now!” does not serve me.

I am starting a movement, a Joy Revolution, and I am getting my message out with integrity and without urgency. I have anointed myself the Queen of Anti-Urgency, the Queen of Self-Expression, and a Master of fun.  Ha!  Who can stop me?

Free Week of Joy

Do not sign up for this unless you need some practice re-calibrating yourself to focusing on joy rather than on your To Do list.

But if you want some help getting joy in your life now, click here: http://www.daringtobejoyful.com/freeweekofjoy/. Again, don’t sign up unless you hear something inside you that says, “Ah! I’m parched and this feels like fresh spring water.”

There is no rush. There is no rush.  Unless someone is bleeding from an artery or cannot breathe, there is no rush!

Blessings and May the Joy Be With You,

Vicki

When I was six and getting taught to swim, I was told, with great certainty, that the only way to swim was to put your face in the water.

I hated putting my face in the water, and I thought there was something wrong with me.  I did not like the lessons and thought I did not like to swim.  I could swim, I passed all the tests, but I thought swimming was not for me.

Fast forward twenty two years. I am a new mother of my first born child, a perfectly marvelous little girl named Katie.  Her father and I were committed to being the very best parents we could be, so we followed the advice of the day and enrolled ourselves and our baby girl of six months in an introduction to swimming class.

We were told, again with great certainty that we needed to get our daughter used to the water, specifically having water on her face.  We dutifully donned our suits and entered the pool with our precious bundle of joy.  We passed her cheerful self between us several times, and then, as instructed, we dipped her in the water on one of the passes between us.

We were told she would be startled, but that she would soon recover.  Let’s just say the screaming began and did not end and we exited the pool.  Not only that, she screamed during every bath for the next three years.  Three years.  No more water in her face, mind you, I had given that up, but the memory of our betrayal of her trust took years for us all to recover from.

She recovered from her water phobia completely only when we got a hot tub and she could play in warm water and completely control the situation.

Fast forward another thirty years.  I’m in Bali staying in a delightful small hotel called Melati Cottages. There is a pool.  It is hot in Bali, and I love to cool off in the pool, but I do not swim.

Then I get it. I can swim any way I like and it is still swimming!  Yes, if I wanted to become a competitive swimmer I would have to learn to put my face in the water, but for my purposes, I could swim backstroke or dog paddle.  I get to swim with my face happily out of the water.

I could get great exercise, cool off, and thoroughly enjoy the water, my body, the surrounding tropical foliage, and feel pretty darn grand about myself.

Authentic swimming is not just about swimming.

In all areas of our lives people err telling us what we should do:  how we should do yoga, and how we should eat, and how we should dress, and how we should not get any wrinkles, and blah, blah, blah.

It’s not that any of this advice is bad or wrong. It’s just that we all get to run all the expert advice through our own system and decide what is authentic for us.  Period.  That’s  it.

Where have you surrendered your authority? Do you let anyone else tell you whether or not you get to sing, write, dance, wear hats, wear or not wear makeup, or eat dessert first?

We have been systematically taught to surrender our authority. When we do this, we lose our authenticity and we are no longer the author of our lives.  We are the victims of bad or good advice, but we are not practicing taking responsibility for our every choice.

With responsibility comes freedom and with freedom comes joy and with joy comes my floating in the pool in Bali feeling grateful to be alive.

I’d much rather be floating in the pool on my terms than avoiding the water on someone else’s terms.  So there!

My perfectionism is so insidious and so pervasive that it can and will spoil anything.

“Turmeric is good for preventing cancer.” someone tells me.

My Perfectionist Voice says, “Now you feel bullied.  The only way to be free is to not drink turmeric or not fully embrace drinking turmeric.  I you do drink turmeric, you will think about all the other things you could be doing to be healthy that you aren’t doing.  You are an unhealthy aging loser.”

Sigh.

Every tip for better health — reducing sugar, building up core muscle strength, raw foods,   — all gets eaten by my Perfectionism and then spit out on my self-esteem.

But I am tricky and I don’t give up.  I have found two new ways to get my Perfectionism to instantly evaporate.

There is nothing wrong with me.

I’ve started saying to myself, “There is nothing wrong with me.”  For some reason, this gets in better than “I love myself completely and unconditionally.”

When I say there is nothing wrong with me, my whole body tingles with relief.  Try it.  Let me know what happens for you.

There is nothing wrong with me!  There’s nothing wrong with me!  I think even if I had an addiction other than perfectionism, saying to myself and believing that there is nothing wrong with me, would help me set myself free from shame and help me find a solution to any problem confronting me.

I want to lose weight, but there is nothing wrong with me.
I want to increase by core strength, burn fat, and reduce the size of my belly, but there is nothing wrong with me.
I want to feel more energetic and reverse the aging process, but there is nothing wrong with me.

It is working of already.

I like my face.

The other sentence I stumbled on in my imperfect recovery from Perfectionism is “I like my face.”  When I say this I smile.  Try it.  Does it make you smile or giggle?  Do you feel the freedom that comes with embracing silliness?  Does saying you like your face feel like a Big Lie?  If so, see the paragraphs above on “there’s nothing wrong with me.”

The next ten people I meet, I’m going to stick out my hand to shake hands and say, “Hi!  I’m Vicki.”  To myself I will say, “and I like my face.”

So there is nothing wrong with me and there is nothing wrong with you and I like my face and I like yours too!

Like this approach? It is a good thing I’m a coach.  There is a lot more where this came from…