This week the Universe had some big lessons for me.
The first was about playing small, and how it can clip your wings. The second was about ignoring intuitive signs at my peril: it cost me time, energy, a good deal of money, emotional overwhelm, and most of all: it put my sweet 6-year-old daughter into a place of pain and fear for no good reason. Here’s how it went down.
It started at the amazing 3-day event of my business coach in the NYC area. Wow. It was flawless and intense. Lots of insight, lots of shifting energy, and that was before I got special attention from and on the stage. I felt kind of like a rick star—people wanted to meet with me, and I booked about 2 months’ worth of new clients right there at the event.
And right in the middle of all that buzz and attention, a decision I’d made last September came back to bite me in the derriere.
Right in the middle of all those people wanting more from me, I had to take down my website, for this one reason: last fall I had flinched in the face of fear and decided to play small.
Ouch.
(The perfect irony of course, was that I was on a panel talking about how I was no longer playing small and loved the new me.)
So what was that decision to play small? I decided to go with a web designer that wasn’t listening to me based solely on the fact that I could pay for my new site in small monthly increments. Small thinking = small results, and did I get those in spades!
The designer refused to listen to my vision: I said I wanted something light (it’s the family name of the company, after all!), and he gave me a heavy, black site. But I stopped protesting when he insisted he’d already made more changes than he normally would. Playing small. I didn’t even protest much when he didn’t deliver all the promised extras.
Then he moved my hosting from something very reliable to something unknown. Good for him, probably (I imagine he got kickbacks) but bad for me. It turns out that I went from having 10 email accounts available on my url to only one: mine. When I recently hired an assistant, I learned that I could not have her email all my fancy telesummit speakers as my representative, but that she had to use her own yahoo account. How humiliating.
The unknown server also had a problem with storage: I could delete old messages til the cows came home, but it would never open up more storage space. I asked my new team to take care of it (they created the current look of my site, and this nice template), and they took the alarming “87% full,” “89% full” messages off, but apparently it did nothing to stop the root storage issue.
So there I was, mid-way through this even with undreamt-of exposure to my exact ideal clients, and my inbox hit tilt. No way to get in or anything out. Right in the middle of organizing and performing interviews with 15 speakers. So the whole thing, site and all, had to be moved. All those people dying to get on my list just had to wait. Ugh.
Talk about lack of control! I didn’t even know who to email to say that if they’d tried to reach me, I had no idea. This was a major lesson in surrender.
Another lesson came the very same day, with my daughter getting sick while I was away. Poor sweetie was not a happy camper: she was by her own admission too sick to go to her skating lesson, which is one of her favorite things in the world. By Monday she was mostly better, though good citizenship kept her out of school that day in an epic round of tag-team parenting: he stayed home in the morning while I did a Becoming Unstoppable VIP half-day, then I moved or handled my afternoon appointments while he went to the office.
He wanted her to be seen by a doctor that afternoon, and in spite of my strong sense that she didn’t need it, I let him make the appointment. In the midst of preparing the telesummit I had little “extra” time, and I could tell it wasn’t necessary, but I didn’t want to look like the uncaring parent. (I can see now that I must have been feeling that myself, or the button would have been unpushable.) I felt funny in the waiting room, but decided it was because I didn’t know the place and was feeling a little overwhelmed by circumstances.
Well, the doctor couldn’t find much wrong, but ordered a CBC to be sure. Anne-Charlotte didn’t say a word, though looked surprised and worried during the blood draw. I had a feeling (there was my intuition again, and there I was ignoring it!) that something was wrong but didn’t say anything. I chalked it up to me being exhausted from the trip and the piles of work.
Ten minutes later, as I was checking out, I heard a crash and looked up to see her slumped on the floor, twitching! She had passed out cold, right then and there.
Something inside me broke. I’m not used to panic, but this, after the drained reserves of the previous weeks, was just too much. I wanted to take her to the hospital, but I couldn’t do anything but hold her limp body in my arms.
As I sat waiting for my husband to arrive to whisk us to the ER, I was numb. It wasn’t until later that I realized what a waste it was. Wasted time (a precious resource for me right now), wasted money, wasted energy—it was ALL gone—and unnecessary pain and fear for my adorable daughter.
All because I didn’t say no to the appointment and then no to the blood draw. And because I didn’t pay attention to the (faint) alarm bells going off when she looked odd during the procedure. I thought it was just my fatigue showing, so I ignored it.
My reward for that was 6 lost hours, hundreds of dollars down the drain, the last scraps of energy and willpower wiped completely away, and the pain of watching my daughter suffer needlessly.
So don’t do what I did.
Don’t accept what doesn’t feel right. Don’t accept to play small. Don’t acquiesce to make things “easier” (ha!) or because your buttons are being pushed.
Stand up for yourself.
Stand in your Truth.
Stand for what you know is right.
The easy path is almost never the right path. And it’s almost never the easy path, anyway.
