Whenever I speak or teach, someone invariably tells me that I should write a book. My typical response to that has been to laugh and say some day I will. Well that day has finally arrived, and my first book will be published this fall. It is called The Energy of Success: Discover the True Nature of Your Power. While it is exciting and something I am proud of, it has also made me feel rather nervous and exposed, which has surprised me. I have explored all those feeling in the last few days and thought about what I have learned and who I have become as a result of this writing process.
Both of my parents were excellent writers and while I did well in creative writing in high school, I am not sure I ever really liked it. When I went to college, I had to learn how to write because I decided to be a history major, and that required an endless stream of papers to be churned out on a regular basis. I am still not sure if I actually like to write. It feels more like a necessary tool that I use in order to do what I love, which is to help my clients achieve their personal and professional goals.
Ultimately, writing enabled me to do what I want, which is to be who I am, offer what I have learned, and hopefully use the darkness of my own life to add to the light, hope, love and beauty in the world around me. The Energy of Success evolved from the manual I originally created to teach my clients about energy and the creative and magnetic power that is stored in the thoughts you think and the emotions that you feel. I am a big believer in the expression No one hears the answer to a question they haven’t asked, so I really have no interest in asserting my ideas into anyone else’s way of thinking. I just trust that this book will make its way to those for whom it can be some sort of answer for. At the end of the day, I trust that Like Attracts Like, and will let the channels of distribution be the work of the Divine!
So, back to what this writing and publishing process did for me! It certainly made examine the choices we make in our lives, especially the ones that we think we made for the wrong reasons. I didn’t actually want to be a history major in college. In fact, the past really didn’t interest me and I spent most of my days dreaming about the future. I made the decision to major in history as a result of my life long effort to systematically avoid anything that had to do with math or science. So here I am almost twenty years later writing a book that has become my life’s work, and it is based on scientific principles of energy, the very subject I attempted to avoid. I guess it just confirms what I already believe, that what you resist, persists. It also affirmed for me that sometimes the choices that might seem wrong in the first place, actually end up leading us in the right direction…and maybe they were right all along..
When I wrote the last chapter of my book, which I titled My Story, The Abridged Version, I thought a lot about my father and all of the choices I have made since he passed away. Then I thought about some of the choices he made in his life, and their subsequent effect upon me. His choice to value honesty, integrity and loyalty played a large role in shaping who I am today.
I was born the youngest of seven children. We had six girls and one boy in my family, and yes, my brother was indeed my mother’s favorite. He was the second oldest, and considerably larger in stature than his five younger and one older sister. Despite this, my mother considered my brother to be unfairly outnumbered. She was convinced that, as she used to say You girls pick on your brother. Being twelve years younger and clearly much smaller than my brother, I was always mystified at this lack of reason on my mother’s part.
As the youngest of seven, I rarely had the good fortune to be in control of what we watched on the television. My mother only allowed us to watch one hour of TV each week, and we had one TV to share between the seven of us. On the unusual occasion that I was even able to watch TV, my brother would come along, pick me up out of my chair and dump me on the floor. Then he would plop down in my chair and change the channel to watch whatever he wanted to. This would of course make me very mad and I would stomp off to complain to my mother. Unfortunately, this never got me the results I wanted, and even when I was in my teens (and my brother was therefore in his twenties) my mother remained convinced that “Poor Bill” was being picked on.
If I was ever lucky enough to get past my brother, I still had five older sisters to contend with. They were even more of a challenge when it came to determining who got to watch TV and at what time. No matter how logical my argument was, this was a battle that I would never win. Somehow, I always ended up being sent to my room to write a hundred times I will not be snippy and defiant…Today the memory of that still makes me laugh because I am pretty sure that that particular punishment did not get my mother the results she wanted either. It did however begin my writing career…
Now, my father, on the other hand, could always be counted on to use reason and logic when confronted with any situation. Although, living in a house with six girls and my mother, my father was rather immune to emotional outbursts and he was never very helpful in sorting all of this out. In addition, he was an attorney and appreciated a good debate when approached with any problem. My father tended to offer long arguments on the merits of something that he was discussing. These were usually met with an eye roll and deep sigh from his daughters, as we resigned ourselves to a long dissertation on the subject at hand.
Even when we were reprimanded and in trouble, his lectures used big words attorneys like to use like heretofore and wherewithal, and seemed to go on forever. Maybe that was his strategy when we came to him with our complaints. He would talk for so long that we grew tired of our position and simply gave up! I guess it worked because to this day I have no desire to fight with anyone over what to watch on TV. In fact I rarely even watch television, because it all seems too negative and fear based for me. I even appreciate the choice my mother made to limit the amount of TV we were exposed to. But what fascinates me the most is that I have even come to appreciate the lowly position I had in my family, because I can see how some of those battles were the beginning of my life long quest to understand who we really are, and the true nature of our power.
My inability to watch TV growing up created within me an intense love of reading and later on, an intense need to write and express myself. I could easily escape into the world of books and imaginary lands of make believe. I definitely had what you would call an active imagination. In fact, I still do! And as it turns out, so did my father. Some of my favorite childhood memories of him were the bedtime stories he would create for me. Maybe all of his long dissertations and love of words prepared him for this task.
Each night I would prepare my latest challenge for my father, and try to think up the most impossible title for an adventure between two characters that he had created. I’m not sure where the main character first came from, but every story centered around a little boy whose name was Freddy Flip-Flop, and he had a obnoxious, pesky older sister name Beatrice Bucktooth. Now Beatrice, as you might imagine, spoke with a terrible lisp, in a high-pitched whining tone, and she was always interrupting Freddy at crucial points in the story.
What I loved about this time with my father is that he seemed to enjoy these stories as much as I did. He was fastidiously proper and very formal, and most of my friends found him incredibly intimidating (as did I). Yet, when he was narrating one of these stories, he became quite animated and created a world that we loved to inhabit together. Part of the fun for me was making up the title of each story. I would do my best to concoct the most wild and ridiculous title that I could imagine. It never even occurred to me that this was probably quite a challenge for my father. It required him to be very creative and inventive at the end of a very long day he had spent working, to provide as the father of seven children.
He always met the challenge with great ingenuity and fun. I would announce the title and say, “Tell me the story of Freddy Flip-Flop and the Purple Hippopotamus with Pink Slippers.” Or, I would want to hear The Adventures of Freddy Flip-Flop and the Magic Yellow Banana That Could Sing. It really didn’t matter what I came up, my father would begin to narrate a magical tale with all the elements described in its title. Freddy was frequently faced with some challenge that required creativity and self-determination to overcome.
His annoying older sister Beatrice inevitably appeared somewhere in the story line and would say in her terrible lisp “BUT FRWEDDY, YOU CANTH DO THAAT… and this would make Freddy very mad. But despite his anger, this very annoying intrusion usually inspired him to do exactly what Beatrice Bucktooth told him he couldn’t do, and that was how the story unfolded and reached its conclusion. Freddy was always successful after meeting some confounding challenge that required him to outsmart his older sister. Then he got to do what he wanted and succeeded in spite of her.
I was much older before I realized that my father probably had his own message encoded within that story. In every one of Freddy’s adventures was the idea that sometimes it is important not to listen to what other people tell you that you can or cannot do. If I used my imagination and followed my heart, I could be successful and achieve what I want. I don’t think that my father felt he was able to do this in the life he led. As a husband and father of seven, he sacrificed most of his life for us, in an effort to provide what he thought we needed. Being responsible and living with integrity were the two things my father valued most in his life, and he tried to impart that to us on a daily basis.
Yet, I think he also had a dream for us to have the courage to take risks that he was not able to, and to have the faith to find our own greatness. He knew how challenging it can be when too many people offer their opinion and advice, especially when you have not asked for it. I think deep down, he wanted me to figure out what was best for me, and to follow through with it, which is what Freddy Flip-Flop always managed to do by the end of every story.
I hope my father would be proud of me today, because in addition to being a wonderful storyteller, he was a prolific and talented writer. I know he would be happy to see my determination to write and express what I believe. Over the years, I struggled with the voices that told me to give up, and go back to doing something that makes a lot more money. Writing and doing what I wanted did not always feel like the most responsible choice. But then I would think of Freddy Flip-Flop and his creative abilities that enabled him to meet every challenge and experience inevitable success. Maybe the annoying sound of Beatrice Bucktooth is the voice inside all of us that tells us we can’t or won’t succeed.
The nice thing about growing up is that even though I’m still the youngest, I no longer have to listen to anyone telling me what to do. While I hope that I am no longer snippy, I am definitely still defiant and cherish my ability to think for myself. I persevered and continue to believe that being who you are, and doing what you love is the most important thing of all. When you do that, everything else seems to take care of itself. At least that is what happens in the Fabulous Adventures of Freddy Flip-Flop, and I’m pretty sure that is what my father wanted me to believe.
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