I recently soothed myself with this affirmative self-talk as the not-good-enough trolls made their voices heard loud and clear on the stage between my ears. Since March of this year I’ve been speaking to high schoolers on a few different career day panels. I shared about my artistic professional path. I shared about having an earning job (job outside of my ideal profession) and balancing that job with endeavors and opportunities to keep the passion alive in my preferred fields. I shared about my ups and downs.
The process leading up to these high school talks allowed me to exercise major self-compassion and pride in my experiences. See, I sometimes vacillate between “We’re kicking butt, girl! So proud of how far we’ve come and where we’re going” and “Wow, it doesn’t look like you’ll be living that ideal career any time soon, if ever. If it ain’t happened yet, I don’t know if it ever will.”
Let me talk a little more specifically about one of these panels. A few weeks ago I caught wind of a Dance Career Day event at a visual and performing arts high school here in L.A. I wanted to throw my hat into the ring to be a speaker as soon as I read the event description. But a twinge of shame soon followed my initial excitement. I doubted my qualification because although I used to work as a dance fitness instructor, appeared in a few dance and fitness vids and had this career that felt like it was going somewhere, I hit a bump in the road in 2011 and had to put a hold on the hardcore pursuit of the dance path as well as some other artistic professional endeavors.
When I saw the initial Dance Career Day invitation, I assumed they wanted people currently working in dance. The trolls were speaking loudly, “How the hell can you talk to students about dance when you are not earning a living from it now? You don’t have a career.” Vicious. Them trolls can really lay it on when they don’t want us to shine. But the troll talk led me to revisit my idea of success. To paraphrase rockstar business coach Ariana Pritchett, the success process is a squiggly line, not a straight path at all. It is full of stops, starts and unexpected turns.
So did I end up saying yes to the invitation or did I listen to the trolls and punk out?
Read part 2 HERE.
You can also peep a related blog post I wrote about redefining success HERE.