I have this friend…

I have a friend. Her name is Aileen. I have never actually met her. We are online friends. Facebook friends. I admire her greatly.

She is a writer, she is hilarious, she is a life coach and an overall badass. Her newsletter is amazing and I love reading it. Here is where you can check her out – Aileen.

An interesting thing happened at 3:30 a.m. this morning. I woke up thinking about how much I adore her writing and then I did the thing that I always tell my clients not to do. I compared. I kept thinking I wish I could write like her. I wish I could have the courage to really get out there and be more vulnerable like her. She has such a cool vibe. A super cool writing style. I kept thinking it. Thinking about her confidence and her baddassery. I realized I am so close. I feel on the edge of the cliff ready to just go all in. To get in the dirt and really start digging.

My writing has been stunted ever since I got that skewering by someone in a group. And maybe that was just an excuse to have a small hiatus. Who knows. Things like that usually go much deeper. I would say the much deeper for me is feeling like an imposter or feeling like I don’t know enough or being afraid of being judged when I go all in. The feelings of not being sure of myself or feeling like an imposter are alive and well inside my brain. Super common, I know, but I still feel it.

See, Aileen actually was the first person who ever called me a writer. It made me feel amazing. It actually validated the fact that I do write and I am a writer. Thanks lady! She is on my mind a lot and I actually really look up to her. She’s a go-getter, but I know that she has struggled too, as we all do.

So in the span of two minutes this morning, thinking about a ton of shit and writing a few notes down, I went back to sleep. When I woke up, I made sure to look at what I had written down because I knew I wanted to write about it. Aileen gave me this cool little decorated tin that contained a pad of paper and a pencil to keep by my bed for that very purpose. It’s like she knew.

I started really thinking about what was going on in my brain. It was so interesting and I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Compare and then feel bad. Compare and then wonder. Compare and then procrastinate. Compare and then, and then, and then. You get the idea.

So many times so many of us fall into the compare trap. I feel like my deeper is fear. Feeling like I don’t know enough. Feeling like the more I learn, the less I know. It’s pretty damn scary. Feeling like I’m not enough. And then all those feelings and emotions of not being good enough, or even enough period, not having any confidence, feeling like an imposter, and then the self-sabotage begins. Self-sabotage you say?

What is self-sabotage anyway? It can be a number of things. For me it is pressure I put on myself to think I need to be not perfect, but close. LOL. That pressure can be back breaking. It can be intense. It’s hard to break away from that. It can be hard to give myself a little bit of compassion. Procrastination is a great form of self-sabotage, so is overeating and over drinking and even overthinking. Trying to find something else to focus on instead of what I actually should be focusing on is where I notice I self-sabotage. I find a billion other things to do instead of what I should be doing. Oh, the floor needs vacuumed? Oh, look, the dogs need to go outside. Oh, I should really run to the store. So many “other” things. LOl

And then I got real. Nobody is like anybody else. It’s all me. Nobody can do the work for me. Motivation is fleeting, but discipline is the name of the game. Small things lead to big things. Small things lead to being confident. Sometimes I think, what’s the use, which is another form of self-sabotage. I have a voice and my voice does not sound like Aileen’s voice and that’s what is so great about it. We should’t want to be like someone else. Sure, we can admire someone else, but when it comes right down to it, we should be ourselves.

I’m working on me. I’m working on the self-sabotage. Instead of overthinking and over reading and wondering if it all sounds good, I am learning to just push publish. I’m learning to be okay with it.