03 Mar Lifebook Challenge Winner – Heather Rice’s Big BUT!
Congratulations to Lifebook Member Heather Rice so winning the January VIP Challenge to eliminate her biggest BUTs!
Heather wins a FREE certificate to participate in My Lifebook Online! Congratulations Heather!
Read her winning article below:
January 31st came and went and I had wimped out. I had only joined the challenge on the 12th, so that meant I had 2 1/2 weeks to address my BIG BUTS.
Excuses had been rearing their ugly buts all month. “But these were valid excuses!”
“But my daughter is sick…. But I’m sick… But Patrick (my husband) is out of town for 3 weeks… But my office was flooded by a broken pipe next door… But my front desk assistant had a heart attack”
And then came January 31st and I had not played my violin daily or exercised daily or the biggest 2 buts: I still had not had those 2 difficult conversations with Patrick (my husband) or Sarah (my business manager) that I had committed to having.
“BUT I missed the deadline 1/31/11 for doing what I said I would do” I have to admit there was a day of “pfew” and “oh well”. But then I went right back to going to bed kicking myself for not speaking up and lying awake for hours imagining the conversations. What I would say and then what they would say, back and forth, me imagining it all, conjuring up the worst case scenarios and getting really stressed about it. I’d wake up in the morning with these two conversations on my mind, determined that today would be the day to face these dragons that were haunting me and causing me to lose sleep.
I realized that I kept waiting for the “right time” to discuss these things and it was NEVER the right time… well, ok, there were a couple opportunities BUT either things were going so well, why would I want to ruin it with heavy (read this as ‘scary’) conversations OR things were not going well, so why would I want to make things worse. Every knight knows it is easier to slay the dragon when he is sleeping rather than when he is pissed off.
In the fairy tales the funny thing about the dragons that need to be conquered is that when they are finally faced and engaged with, their many heads disappear and they become allies in the end.
With the lifebook challenge was over, having publicly made my commitment and failed, I now got to add embarrassment and lowered self-esteem to the weight I was already carrying.
And then came Jessica’s email announcing the deadline for submitting essays on YOUR BIG BUT. I decided to use this as a second wind. This time I would not wait for the right time. I would create it!
I contacted Patrick and pinned him down on a time when we would meet in a neutral environment. I emailed him with requests for financial information we would need to get these things sorted out and finalize our divorce agreement. Early on in our negotiations we had used a mediator. I realized then that the mediator was an expensive way to force us to have the difficult conversations we avoided in our marriage. I knew then that we just needed to have those conversations ourselves and use the mediator once we had had them to finalize the details.
Last Wednesday, we met in a local diner for breakfast and actually figured everything out to the point that we were ready to go to the mediator. We made that appointment right then and there for next week. It was just like the fairytale dragon once faced and engaged with… I wouldn’t call it easy, but it was nothing like the imagined conversations I thought I was previewing.
This has now put me on track with one of my biggest annual goals of closing this relationship to open space for my next one, as well as getting my finances clear to move forward with my financial life goals.
My talk with Sarah ended up happening on last Friday afternoon. We ended up both staying later than usual. I noticed that this window of opportunity was suddenly open and I was not going to let it pass without at least starting the conversation.
With every item on my list I got clarity on where things were at and how they were being handled. I also got to just check in with her about the grumpiness and adversarial tone I had been picking up. I learned that she was frustrated with not reaching the goals she had set for the business as fast as she had expected and not having enough face time with me to understand what I was grumpy about! We also got very clear about some confusing financials which spun the adversarial tone right into one of congruency.
In working with my practice members, I recognize that there is, at times, a moment when a nerve interference pattern clears and ease floods the body creating an opportunity for profound healing.
I had been tolerating a subluxation pattern in my practice that was palpable as it cleared. And it was all really just based on open communication.
I could feel a tone of alignment once more. This was what had been eating at me for the last few months: the destructiveness of incongruence. I knew something was not right, but didn’t quite know what it was. Every night I had been assuming worst case scenarios that weren’t even real!
Mark Twain was known to have said on his deathbed “My life has been filled with troubles, most of which never happened!”
I feel tremendously blessed to have the momentum in my life that this LIFEBOOK community generates. Blessings on you all.
Time to go practice my violin. 🙂
Heather in Vermont
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