Ep115 Lessons Learned from 2019
(Transcription from Podcast - Please forgive transcribing errors)
You can find this episode anywhere you find great podcasts including ITunes and Spotify.
I wanna take a look back. I wanna share with you all what I learned in 2019. And I wanna say some of this is deeply personal, so thank you for listening and giving me the grace to share. As always I hope you can look into your own lives and take something from what I learned.
I wanna start with relationships because last year this was the area I was most impacted. At the end of 2018, I fell in love. I fell really in love. I knew I loved her on our second date. That might sound crazy but love is our true nature and I had simply put down all the roadblocks to love and let myself access the love, power, magic, and spirit of who she was. I could only see her as perfect. It didn't matter what she said or even what she did, I loved her.
See Love isn't about finding it, or that perfect person that checks all the boxes, it's about putting down the walls and barriers to allowing it to flow in and out.
2019 was a year I declared I would be all in, in relationship so starting that year in love with her, seemed like game on.
And what I learned about love last year is it will truly only take you as far as you are willing to go. That all you can give or receive is measured by how much you give or receive with yourself. I learned while I was all in I didn't have the capacity to love without fear. I was afraid. We talked about marriage, kids, creating a life. We talked about having the most unreasonable love, but for some reason, we didn't move forward and ultimately in Nov the relationship ended.
I believe our job in a relationship is to always look at ourselves. Marianne Williamson says, even if the other person is 90% of the problem, great you get to look at 10%. While I don't think she was the problem at all and I chose to look at 100% of myself. I wasn't brave enough to love myself enough to be fully open to love. I wasn't courageous enough to love her with reckless abandon, ignoring reasons or circumstances of doubts and fears. See showing up as simply love would create a blank slate. A blank page without scuffs or marks of the past. Showing up in pure love would set me free to just love and create something new from love. But I learned looking back that subconsciously I was holding back not because of her but because I was afraid. Those little moments of love I reserved punched holes in the fabric of what we had. Those little moments of love I was too scared to lean into let doubt peek in. Those little moments of love I grasped onto created cracks in the love and future we could be creating. While I was all in, while I gave this relationship everything I had...there is always more. See we aren't cups that can get full, we can't max out love or trust or faith, kindness or compassion. We can expand exponentially and there was more love for me to give her through giving it to myself. See if I had loved myself more I could love her more because I wouldn't be holding back from fear of hurt, heartbreak or even being wrong. This was the greatest lesson I learned in 2019! Either love or don't, but if you choose to love, really love, dive in, love fearlessly, love without logic or reason, love unreasonably, love in every moment like it's the last moment to share your love.
That will create the life and partnership you want.
And yes, you might fall hard. But think about it, you’re gonna fall hard eventually so why not love the love of every second of the journey down!
Wow… where do we go from there?
The second thing I learned in 2019 is to have Grace with myself. Be easy. Be gentle. Be kind. Whipping myself for not being good enough, for messing up, for failure or disappointment wasn't making me better, it was simply ruining the journey. Also if I stopped beating myself up I could use that energy to get back in and give whatever it was that i didn’t succeed at another shot. We spend so much time judging, evaluating, critiquing every little detail of or lives and our performance and it's not often constructive. It’s mean. It’s mostly judgmental. For me anyway. I’m a fucking asshole to myself. I spent months this year practicing being kind to myself. Telling myself I love myself. Looking and thinking about all the ways I am proud of myself. Surrounding myself with people who only show me support, love, and demand my best but are willing to love me even when I fall short.
I believe the goals I reached this year, most money in a year, a month, a day, a week, doing karaoke and improv for first time, writing and publishing my 1st book, creating over 100 podcasts, creating the best relationship to date we're all directly related to the grace I gave myself.
The next lesson I learned in 2019 had to do with community and partnership. People are challenging, we let each other down, we drop the ball, we say and do things that we don't mean or don't intend to. Working powerfully with others is a gift and a practice. In the hospitality world, I believe I was pretty good at it. But here as an entrepreneur, I have work to do. I can be great at having a partner, but I suck when I have a few people working under me. I get frustrated things aren’t getting done and then guess what I notice I’m the cog in the wheel. The lesson here is the simplest, I have some work to do around letting go, giving up control, but also around setting others up for success in a way that enables them to take the ball and run with it. While I haven’t seen the outcome yet, realize this is a challenging area for me is worth its weight in gold. I can now go to my coach and do the work I need to do to change this, to have it go different and create a new relationship with entrepreneurship, leading and delegating.
Another lesson I learned this year is about enrollment. I’ve never really totally got the power of enrollment. So what is enrollment, in its simplest form it’s the idea that I could present someone with something and get them to see the value in it for themselves, me and even others which would have them get on board because they see and directly and personally connect with the vision. People that matched with MLK were enrolled in the vision, it might have been dangerous but they saw something in MLK’s vision that connected with them, that could impact their lives or areas of their life that mattered to them and maybe they could see how the vision would impact the world overall. That’s badass enrollment. Obama, Trump, and that man Bernie Sanders are all amazing at enrolling people in their vision. While it doesn’t matter if you agree with them, they have troves of people who are all about it because they see something for their lives and others. Enrollment is so much better than sales because sales are about showing or convincing people what they want, it can be a powerful tool, but it’s limited because you are creating that for them, with enrollment they are seeing your vision and creating something for themselves which is much more powerful. I would say a great salesperson is enrolling people not selling to them. What I learned about enrollment is when I’m excited about something, when I see a vision of something and it’s not about it just benefiting me, I can be very enrolling. It’s not that I didn’t know this about myself before but what I realized was I have to let go, surrender to falling in love with a project or an idea and from that place I could see so much possibility. From love possibility was endless and from the places of endless possibility, enrollment is easy.
Another lesson I learned was a powerful one. My friend Angel Quintana said to me, everyone’s truth is real. Say what. She said everyone’s truth is real. What that means is everyone’s perception is a reality for them. So when you think something is different or wrong you are right but so is the other person. You can’t see it like them and they can’t see it like you. And because we aren’t viewing life like that there is a right and a wrong, a truth and a lie, a should and a shouldn’t, etc… But if we held everyone’s truth as real for them, then we approached people with compassion and love we could much more easily meet them where they are. From there we could understand what is true for them, we can understand why they believe what they believe. We could understand why they cling to their believes…we all do.
But we are so fucking conditioned to be right, that there is even a right or a wrong that we can’t let go of our truth being the real truth. It’s crazy. I recently read a study that showed something like 60% of scientific studies couldn’t be replicated. That means if we did a study that showed a specific result another set of scientists trying to validate that study wouldn’t be able to. That’s insane. And that’s science. For me this was all a reminder the everyone I work with, everyone I talk to, people I’m angry at, sad about, disappointed with or whatever are all doing their best inside their truth and their truth isn’t wrong. It’s all they can see given their vantage point, past, experiences, traumas or and everything else that has happened to them.
There are 9 billion realities all happening all at once and every single one of them is the truth for that person.
The lesson here is to be kind, be gentle, be compassionate as you have no idea what truth that person is living inside of.
Last I want to leave you with this, the best practices I created all year for myself and the best books I read. Let’s quickly run through the books:
I read Conversations with God for the 5th time in 5 years. It’s my favorite book, if you haven't read it, please please please go read it. I hear it’s also great on audible.
I also loved The Brink by Mark Hunter, my coach, I think it’s an excelled book on leadership.
I enjoyed Seth Godin’s this is Marketing and Michael Singers The Surrender Experiment
And I loved this book called Fictional Authenticity by Alex Terranova it’s an excelled fun and inspiring read.
Now the best practices: The number one thing was checking in on my needs not slaving away at the gym or yoga every single day, but checking in, what would be the best thing for to start the day tomorrow, would it be hot yoga, sleeping a little more, walking the dog, the gym, a jacuzzi and mediation, coffee and a book. But choosing consciously which activity on a specific day would support the results I am working towards.
Another practice I did routinely in relationship was when I got triggered upset angry was to notice and do my best to come back with love. To lean in and love more and harder. But let love lead. This was often extremely challenging but also so rewarding, saying I’m sorry, saying I love you, hugging instead of walking away, crying and feeling the pain instead of trying to ignore it was an act of leaning in and loving my humanity.
Another practice I loved this year was one of the simplest, I wrote This is going to be fun on post-it's and put them everywhere in my house. See I often view life as challenging and hard, but that sucks because when you view things like that you bring that attitude to the game. I want life to be fun, I want to bring a fun attitude to all that I do, so I put reminders everywhere.
Lastly, I got tons of support, I used the tools I teach, I read the books that anchor me, I called the people who remind me who I am at my best. I fought for the great year that I had. I fought for the love I lost. I fought for the wins that didn’t happen, the money that wasn’t made, the deals that didn’t get done, I fought for all of it and it was an adventure.
Thanks for listening. I love love love doing this podcast. It lights up my week and I'm so grateful to everyone that listens and shares with others. My goal is always the same to create and provide value, I hope you took value away from this episode.