I wish I could visit the version of myself seven years ago and give her these strategies. But it required going through those years of experience to find them and more experience to learn how to apply them.
These days when you search happiness on the internet, you can find millions of answers at your fingertips. At that time, the only thing I found was a song called Happiness song by a girl who decided she’d be happy if she went back to her boyfriend.
So I focused on my marriage that—I didn’t realize at the time—had not a green sky’s chance of survival. And I focused on my children, who I spent each day with alone. And for an hour a night I asked their dad for help so I could write. That’s all I asked for myself. Not even self-care time; just a sliver of time to attempt building a flexible career around everyone else’s desires and needs.
The one thing that could have made me happy would have been to give myself a bigger part in the equation of my life. But even the idea of that was the furthest thing from my mind. In general girls are raised into women who care about everyone else; not themselves.
It wasn’t until I was confronted with the question; “Did you celebrate those hundred sales of your ebook?” that I realized I had a bigger problem than the outside factors in my life.
I dodged the question with a long string of all the things that had happened since I self-published my first ebook that I eventually took down out of insecurity. My little family had moved four times since then, twice across the country. I had taught for a year, alone with my kids, while their dad started a job out of state. We were both unemployed for a while before that, and crammed into a one bedroom apartment that my mother had generously shared with us. I’d been stressed by the inherent dangers to my small children on the property and had to constantly watch them to protect them. While I was teaching my first year, my son was diagnosed with autism.
After moving across the country again he couldn’t get behavior intervention at all for months, since he was too old to start early intervention again and was on a waitlist for everything else. I’d quit teaching after my second year to focus on his development since he still wasn’t talking or potty trained.
I hadn’t had time to put into my writing during that long train of events. It was all about survival.
The life coach repeated the question, “Did you celebrate the hundred sales for your book?” (I wasn’t even sure it was a hundred).
“No,” I resigned.
“If you don’t celebrate a hundred sales, why would you celebrate more, like a thousand or a million?”
The lessons here were clear;
Start by celebrating small successes.
The other lesson;
“It’s your life. No one else is going to make you the priority unless you do. You deserve to be the priority in your own life.”
Those were Amber Nasha Apple’s words.
Before I met her and accelerated my journey of consciously creating the life I wanted, I’d made happiness a personal study. I’d built my own foundation to progress through the insanity that had been my life, and added to it the life coaching tools I picked up after that.
When I couldn’t afford more life coaching, because I was still paying off the first big program I attended; I listened to transformational speakers on YouTube.
I listened to them in the car, I listened to them while cleaning and getting ready for the day. I listened to them falling asleep at night. My head was so full of negative thoughts that I kept these speakers on constantly to help change my thinking. Before that I was conditioned with patterns that kept me miserable.
Now I have trained myself to think positively. I do not need the speakers on for hours or all day every day. I just listen to them on occasion or a few times a day for maintenance.
Not only were the positive thoughts helpful, but each speaker shared essential tools for success. With these I started changing my habits and changing my life. It has taken time to implement, but like the tortoise that one the race with the hare, it’s okay to take it slow and steady—or slow and sporadic, which is better than nothing.
Besides prioritizing myself I needed to start trusting myself. One of the epiphanies I came to is that I was raised in a patriarchal society where almost every message sent to me is that women are not valuable and not worth listening to, so it is no wonder I had always let men talk me out of my own intuition.
In order to start trusting myself as a woman I had to change the messages I was receiving from the world. When I search speakers, the top ten results have been male speakers. I have to specifically type women or female speakers to hear a woman’s voice.
I started paying attention to the books and entertainment I was consuming. I noticed that I was learning finance from men. I was watching interesting stories about men. So I started to look for books written by women; female experts who often beat their male counterparts in the same industries, though no one I knew had heard of these winning female experts.
I have to intentionally search for women, because the search defaults favor men. I still learn from men, also. But now I make sure women are prominently included in my personal study of happiness.
Everyone, Nicole Lapin is more knowledgeable than another well known expert. I won’t name any names, but let’s just say it rhymes with Rave Hamsey. There, I said it. Look her up; “Lapin” pronounced like “makin’ it”! I helped a couple people I know get 20-30% raise increases by using her advice. And one of those happened during quarantine!
And that’s not all. I learn from anyone who has been in my shoes and makes shoes that are higher quality and fit better; so we can run further and faster and not get so many blisters.
Universe Rules 