If you haven’t seen neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor’s TedTalk, don’t wait another minute.
When a brain scientist has a stroke and can view it as an amazing adventure, it is storytelling at it’s best! Her passion and glow makes her story come alive.
I highly recommend it. This is one to watch!
I don’t cry pretty. When I cry,it’s not like a Hollywood cry. I go straight to the ugly cry with a twisted face… swollen, bloated and red. When I have an injury, it’s not sexy. No breaking a leg skiing. No, I am the one who rips a tendon trying on Spandex.
And I am definitely not pretty when I make a personal breakthrough to change my life. Shouldn’t positive change be a lovely, pretty thing?
In my mind, when I have a personal breakthrough there will be a beautiful moment of enlightenment. The music will swell. A look of realization will twinkle in my eye. Then, with a tilt of my head a slow, “Yeaaaah” would escape my lips. My life will change and things will be better.
But reality? Picture, if you will, a cat over a toilet bowl. Claws are out, grasping at anything possible to avoid getting wet. Wild scrambling. Fur flying. Picture a baby who does not want the spoon-full of medicine you are trying to force in her mouth. The baby suddenly has the strength of ten men.
I am not pretty during personal growth.
But I am normal.
Once I realized that it’s normal to resist change, I stopped resisting quite so much. It’s normal for my mind to want to think the way it’s been thinking for a long time. The old way had been working for me pretty well. But pretty well is not good enough for me any more.
I’m on the hunt for consistent awesomeness.
Now that I know that resistance is often part of the process, I notice it more easily in myself and others. It’s fascinating. It’s an opportunity. It’s OK.
When I get my ugly on, it’s my brain’s final fight to avoid creating new synapses. It’s the car wreck on the neural superhighway that forges a new road for my thoughts to take.
So I take it easy on myself.
It’s like childbirth. A new and wonderful thing comes out of something painful. The pain is part of the process. It isn’t as scary if you know it’s supposed to happen.
And come to think of it, childbirth was not what I would call pretty.
But it was beautiful.
Some people are getting all bent out of shape about Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In.
Some have taken it as a slap in the face to stay-at-home Moms.
Are you Team Home or Team Workplace?
If you aren’t doing it all, you aren’t working hard enough.
It’s a regular hornet’s nest.
The book isn’t really about work life balance. But frankly, it doesn’t really matter what the book is about. It’s like bumping a spot that is already bruised.
It’s a sign of pain in our society.
Women are feeling pain about trying to please society.
Some women are trying to follow society’s rule that a good woman puts her family first. Some women are trying to follow society’s rule that to be successful you need to climb the corporate ladder and make as much money as a man.
Sounds like a lose-lose situation to me.
Did you get that?
A woman in American society can’t make everyone happy.
We hear it, we say it, but we don’t internalize it. We still try to make everyone happy.
Solution?
There is only one.
Do what is right for you. Listen to your gut.
Then let what everyone else says go right by you.
I think life is like a swing. Sometimes you lean in and sometimes you lean out. It takes both to make the swing soar high. Corporate ladder or home, they are not at odds, they are a partnership.
It takes some work to get rid of those old rules in your head. But it is so worth it.
Swing those legs, girl.
Rewrite the rules.
Make the view yours.