Embracing Failure

Whenever I start to feel like a failure, I know that’s my cue to try to become even *more* of a failure - to fail harder, more often, and more consistently.

Failure is a close friend and ally to success, ingenuity, creativity, and progress, and it’s a thing that reliably moves me forward, builds capacity and resiliency, and gets energy moving.

So now whenever the thought “I’m a failure” comes up, I try to follow it with, “I sure hope so.”

Because I sincerely hope I never stop collecting failures. I hope I will always be someone who is willing to fail and ready to leap into risk and uncertainty.

So if you’re feeling bummed out by a recent failure: congratulations! You were brave and tried a thing! And making that a habit reliably leads to good things.

Take up Space!

There’s a great scene in “Knock Down the House” – a Netflix documentary that follows 4 women running for Congress in 2018 – where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is preparing for a debate against her opponent, Joe Crowley, the district’s incumbent of 20 years. 

She sets down her notes and says, “I need to take up space,” as she reaches out and waves her arms.  She takes a deep breath and says, “I am experienced enough to do this; I am prepared enough, mature enough, and brave enough to do this.  And this whole time, he’s going to tell me I can’t do this – that I’m small, little, young, inexperienced,” and then she extends her arms with a sharp exhale, as though she’s pushing all of that away from her.

I love this scene because moments later in the debate, you feel only the strength of her energy and presence.  You would never guess that she felt anything other than confident and ready for the moment.

I love that we see her fear, uncertainty, and vulnerability but then also see her step through all of it to claim her place on the world stage.

Watching her process reminded me that it takes copious amounts of inner work, energy management, self-talk, and intentional practice to build a capacity to command energy and take up space like that.  It takes staring down your terror, building belief, and staying devoted to your deep reasons.

For Alex, the world benefited enormously from her willingness to take up space, but it didn’t give her that permission.  Even as others encouraged her, she had to be the one to believe she deserved to be there and then step up and forward to claim it.

All of this was a reminder, inspiration, and challenge for me.  And that’s the beautiful thing about taking up space and claiming your bigness: it inspires other people to do the same.  And that is a gift for the world. 

Amping Up Your Beautiful Weirdness

As a 6’0” American woman, I fall in the 99.38th percentile of height. (Info courtesy of this calculator).

People see my tallness first. It’s the thing about me that’s most noticeable and conspicuous.

People often look at me with wide eyes and say the obvious, “you’re tall.” (or random dude on the street one day: “your daddy must be biiiiig!”).

People ask me if I play basketball. Or used to model. Or if my (male) partner is shorter than me (he is) and how he feels about that (totally emasculated, obviously).

All of this is only sometimes and sort of annoying (and there’s actually a lot of social privilege in being tall), but my height is definitely a thing. It leads the way and defines how I show up and occupy space in the world.

After the awkward teen years, I got better at standing up straight, not shrinking away, and enjoying the benefits of getting things off the top shelf and being able to see and breathe fresh air in crowds.

But I pretty much always wore flat shoes. Because I thought I couldn’t wear heels (isn’t it awkward and rude to tower over people like that?) or because I thought I wouldn’t be able to walk gracefully (higher center of gravity and all).

But I recently got a couple of pairs that make me about 6’2”, and the experience of wearing them has rocked my world.

These shoes make me feel like I have superpowers, which makes sense – because they do amp something about me (my tallness) that actually is a sort of weird, mutant superpower (statistically speaking).

It makes me wonder: why don’t more of us amp up rather than tone down what makes us weird, different, and special?

The places we don’t fit (maybe literally) are portals into so much beauty, power, and realness.

I’m finding that for me, wearing shoes that make me taller is an act of embracing my bigness – not only my actual physical size, but also the fullness of who I really am.

And there’s something catalyzing and life-affirming about stepping into that simple truth.

It feels good to feel like more of myself.

I’m tall. So I might as well own that shit.

Is there anything about you you've been toning down that wants to be amped up? Where is your invitation to step into your bigness?

Whatever weirdness, uniqueness, or realness is waiting to find deeper expression in and through you, I encourage you to embrace it, own it, and let it take you to truer depths of your vast and beautiful being.

Embracing Complexity and Paradox

I used to understand the essence of self and life as singular – that there is one path we’re meant to walk and one self we’re meant to actualize in this lifetime.  Of course, we wander around trying to find it, but the ultimate goal is to arrive at the one true thing.

But thanks to recent happenings and some amazing conversations with coach-astrologer extraordinaire KJ Sassypants, I see it another way.  Becoming ourselves is not a process of narrowing or stripping away to get to a tidy, unified something; it is a process of living into the paradoxical plurality of the varied – and sometimes conflicting – forces, energies, motivations, traits, and desires that make us “us.”

There’s definitely a certain kind of narrowing that comes with clearing out the gunk we’ve absorbed from the culture, unwinding the unhelpful stories we inherited through our lineages, and dispelling the lies we’ve internalized from the voices around us, but the more I’ve done the work of unpacking and releasing what I no longer want to carry, the more I’m finding complexity, not simplicity, at my core.

What I’m seeing now deep down in myself and in the beautiful humans I work with is not a simple self, straightforward destiny, or clear answer; what I’m seeing is beautiful chaos, irresolvable multiplicity, and unruly paradox.

In a world that often wants to shrink and flatten us (into compliant citizens and eager consumers), reclaiming our multidimensionality, complexity, weirdness, and apparent contradiction is a life-affirming and radical act that’s profoundly important. 

Living from this space of all-and (KJ’s phrase) with integrity and alignment requires an expansion into ourselves and into the world.  It means embracing the unwieldly internal chaos and paradoxical mystery that is always pulling us past the edges of who we thought we were.  It means reaching toward new horizons of meaning.  It means living a big life. 

For me, this perspective has been super liberating.  Instead of jumping into the fray of endless internal conflict or fighting with the aspects of me that don’t always get along, I’m forging unlikely truces, building imaginative bridges, and just showing up as me.  I’m embracing the convoluted weirdness in my own self and in others and appreciating all the ways this makes life more interesting, expansive, and magnificent.  So shine brightly and weirdly and paradoxically, friends.  The world needs our real selves.