You know, writing and singing songs on a stage in front of thousands of screaming fans. That kind of thing.

Well, I got older, and older, and “life” seemed to get in the way. I all but abandoned that dream for the last fifteen years.

See, I’ve been doing some concentrated living since I graduated high school. I had a kid, got married, had another kid, started a couple of businesses, lost a couple of businesses, and bascially set about living a normal life, instead of chasing after some “hare-brained, childish dream” from a time when my hips were a lot slimmer, and my hair wasn’t even starting to grey.

Then, a friend of mine, who holds a weekly meeting for spiritually minded folks at her shoppe, suggested we all put together vision boards.

I’d been saving up all kinds of bits of paper I’d been wanting to put on a board. I even bought a “life boarding” kit on deep discount back when Borders was going out of business. So I came with all my scraps of paper, a handful of magazines, and realized I didn’t have nearly enough to fill up the board in a way that made me feel worthy.

Which I recognize is crap, but at the time, that’s how I felt.

So I started flipping through some other magazines, and found a few other pictures that caught my fancy. Among them a picture of Bradley Cooper wearing a t-shirt that spoke to me. I glued him down, and plastered another bit of text over his shirt so that it read:

“What if… starts with me”

I’ve been on a big ol “what if” jag for a few months, so I thought it was a cool motivator.

See, some people think “what if” is a downer, a moot point, and a needless waste of breath.

I confess I used to think that way, too.

But now, I see it as a catalyst to potential greatness.

And it’s led me to today’s story.

See, after gluing Bradley down to my board, I became intensely interested in him. I really hadn’t paid him much attention before he was glued to a board I was ogling every morning. In fact, I had watched “All About Steve” and didn’t even realize he starred in it! But he was the only celebrity I had glued to my board, so I figured I should at least know something about him. My research (thank you Wikipedia) led me to two very important discoveries.

The first is that Bradley Cooper and I share the exact same birthdate (month, day and year!). The same cold, snowy Sunday in January, our moms were both in labor. That struck me as TOO much of a coincidence. It drove me to find another connection.

I didn’t really find anything else, but in my search, I came across a press release about a new TV series called “Duets” that ABC is launching this summer. They’re looking for people who want to sing with one of four amazing vocalists. Among them Lionel Richie.

So I put my Bradley Cooper obsession aside for a few minutes and sent an email to the casting folks, indicating my interest in the show.

Then (and this is where I nearly made a baby cry, I was screaming so loud), they sent me an email back, asking for an audition video.

That’s when I realized there’s no such thing as “on a whim” – God knows exactly what he’s doing.

I gave up on being a professional singer more than a decade ago. Yeah, I recorded a couple of albums, but I think I’ve maybe sold about 30 copies total. I wanted to do something later this year, maybe record a new album, but I wasn’t feeling very confident about it, until I auditioned for Duets.

Because even if I DON’T make the cut for the show, I’ll be infinitely farther along than all the people who never even had the courage to audition. And I think I’ve got a pretty good chance at advancing at least to the next round – whatever that looks like.

I spent most of the weekend obsessing over, scripting, shooting and re-shooting the video. Then I sent it, according to their rules.

Then I got an email saying the rules had changed, so I re-sent it.

In the mean time, I also reached out to my friends for encouragement, support, and even some helpful advice (many thanks to @fitarella for her great suggestions).

I learned that I have some amazing friends. People who really want to see me shine and succeed and achieve my dreams.

Which makes me a winner already.

So if you want to see what happens, keep watching. I’ll let you know as soon as I have something I can report. Until then, thanks for being on this journey with me.

A while back Andrea Patten asked me to proof her “Inner Critic to Inner Ally” program and offer my feedback. I proofed it and offered some suggestions, and left it at that. A couple of weeks ago, she was talking to me about some of the great results her clients were getting, so I asked if I could review the entire program and see if it might be something useful to my subscribers.

I had started working through it, and got stuck on an emotional block for me. It stemmed around describing my Inner Critic, and quite frankly, I had spent many years trying to shut it up. The last thing I wanted to do was spend time putting energy into describing what I believed was the very thing holding me back in life.

Then, my coach posed a question last week that vexed me. “Really, Lisa. What if it REALLY didn’t matter what other people thought?”

And finally, my eldest son, who for the past 25 months has been living at Ohio Wilderness Boys Camp, graduated yesterday. We’ve known for a few weeks now that it was coming, but the actual event was far more gratifying than I ever imagined.

A few days before graduation, because I was feeling particularly excited and pretty invincible, and decided to sit down with Andrea’s program. In all fairness to Andrea, I was worrying about nothing. Her activities to that point had been easy to follow, painless and took me less than a few hours to complete. This particular exercise had me stuck not because of her, but because of my relationship with my own inner critic.

I’ve got friends who’ve talked about their inner critic before. They always sound so ugly, so menacing. So mean spirited. I really didn’t want to start fantasizing about something so dreadful.

But as I worked through Andrea’s exercise, it wasn’t painful. It was beyond incredibly helpful to finally put a face and name to the voice in my head. The voice that wasn’t really there to make my life as miserable as I was making it out to be.

In short, I stopped making my Inner Critic my scapegoat, and fell in love with her.

Well, sort of.

Because I discovered that so much of my life is what it is now because of my Inner Critic – both the good and the bad.

In fact, let me introduce you to what may very well be my new BFF:

I call her “The Devil Inside Me”. She looks much like my mom on her wedding day, yet has this magical ability to shape shift into whatever will most validate her point at the time she’s talking to me. She talks to me about forward motion – having to “keep moving” and “not slowing down” lest someone pass me up.

In short all of this “doing” that I’ve been up to for years is a direct result of The Devil Inside Me. All this doing that people keep saying is so impressive has been a function of her, preventing me from getting too attached to any singular moment of celebration in my life.

• She kept me from celebrating my admission to college (because I was supposed to get in there, duh!)
• She kept me from celebrating the birth of both my boys (because I had work to do, and needed to get back to it, doggone it)
• She kept me from celebrating my first profitable month in business (because there were other people that were doing a lot more than I was, and I was not going to pass them if I took time out to celebrate)

I didn’t recognize how much of my life was passing me by because of her. But it’s not her fault. In fact, it’s because of her that I was able to do and achieve so much in the last few months, let alone the last few years.

• The Devil Inside Me has learned how to keep the carrot and stick working in my life and business. I’m grateful for that.
• The Devil Inside Me has kept me on task to finish up all the training for parents so that I would be ready when my son came home from camp. I’m grateful for that.
• The Devil Inside Me has kept me from dwelling on many hurts that have been a natural part of life. She says “there’s no time to cry, we’ve got things to do.” And that’s kept me sane during some pretty tough stuff. I’m grateful for that.

And now that I know her more intimately – who she really is, and why she’s really here – I can be grateful for her, and even a little in love with her. She’s not only become a friend, she’s become my own Inner Ally: a powerful helpmeet to partner with me through thick and thin.

The Devil Inside Me serves a powerful purpose in my life.  I see that now. And as a result, I am more confident. I see things more clearly, with less judgment. I’m thinking harder about what really matters to me. And on Sunday, as I watched my son standing in front of his peers, delivering his first speech, he brought it all home for me:

“Don’t waste time. Follow the Chiefs, they’ll get you where you want to go, through thick, thin, and in between.”

The “Chiefs” are the leaders of camp. They are the counselors, supervisors and directors that lead these boys every single day. They live in community with them, helping them become thoughtful young men. In those words, it became clear to me that The Devil Inside Me has been like one of those boys. Exerting influence over me instead of the other way around. I am the Chief. God is my Chief. My Inner Critic needs to follow the Chiefs, not the other way around.

My boy taught me a lot about investing time and energy in nurturing his true self, becoming the person God has called him to be in the world, and quieting the voices that were leading him down the wrong path in life.

This weekend, was as much my graduation day as it was my son’s.

So me and my Inner Critic are mending fences, setting boundaries and healing our broken relationship. Building a life and a business based on love requires self-love as much as anything else. That is my prayer for you.

I told Andrea about the camp, and how blessed I feel to have had a program like that for my son, and how her program was similar in many ways for me. She and I are thrilled to tell you more about this program as an act of love. This being Valentine’s Week and all, she’s graciously opened up her program to my readers and is giving half the profits from every course sold through this link to my son’s camp. I would gladly pay three to four times what she’s asking for this program because it’s already done so much for me. I can’t wait to see what happens in the next few weeks (and I’ll report out if y’all are interested).

So if you want to show yourself some love this week, and do a good deed as well, check out Andrea’s program. I can’t say enough good things about it, and since I’m not making a dime off of telling you about it, I hope you understand the sincerity of that statement.

Above all, love yourself this week. You’re the only you that you’ve got.

In fact, the birthday wasn’t much different from every other day this year. I had promised myself to take the day off, but it just wasn’t very convenient to do so.

So I walked the kid to school, and worked on website issues with my tech team, and dealt with a few “fires” that had to be put out.

It was pretty much an uneventful birthday.

At first, this did not set well with me. See, I’m an action taker – a DO-er – and sitting around NOT doing what I wanted to do kind of pissed me off.

Add to that the fact that my husband didn’t even have a birthday card for me that morning (he came home with one, though), and the day was NOT going to my liking.

I’m kind of crabby right now about my husband’s new work schedule. Last year, his schedule allowed him to pick our youngest son up from school each afternoon, giving me an opportunity to finish up my work before they got home, have dinner ready, and spend the evening doing at least one family-oriented activity together.

But now, I’m doing the dropping off and the picking up. At first, I thought I’d be okay with that (God knows I could use the exercise!), but yesterday was my birthday, and I was feeling a bit crabby about it, to be frank. In between, I’d squeeze in some “me” time by hanging out on social media and checking my email (yep, that’s what I do for fun. I’m strange. I know).

Well, my inbox (which hasn’t had fewer than 500 unread messages in years) had no less than three emails from coaching clients indicating a problem with the website.

Joy.

Now, I could have easily ignored these emails – I had told them I was taking the day off, after all. But that’s not how I roll.

You can scold me later. Right now I have a story to finish.

So I put the word out to my tech people to see what the dealio was. And then I started kicking myself for reading emails on my “day off”.

See? I told you to scold me later!

Anywho, the rest of the afternoon went by uneventfully, as I tried to step away from the computer and “enjoy” myself.

But I couldn’t. I was hurting too much.

I didn’t realize it until today, but that’s why I was glued to my computer.

See, pulling myself away from my electronics would have forced me to feel the uncomfortableness and isolation I was experiencing. It would have allowed the resentment, pain and tears to rise to the surface, and then I would have started bitching and moaning about how it was my birthday, and my husband didn’t even get me a card and all that crap.

Yeah. That.

And quite frankly, because it was my birthday, I didn’t WANT to feel that way. So I stuck my nose in my laptop until it was time to walk to the school and pick up the kid. We walked home. I read him a story, and I let him watch Netflix while I went back to trying to troubleshoot the website issue.

And then my husband walked in with a grocery bag. He was late coming home because he was at the store, picking up my birthday card among other things, and had forgotten that I wanted to go visit my friend Rhonda’s shop that evening. Actually, I have to take some ownership for that, because I didn’t put it on the calendar on the fridge. Mostly because I had been talking about it all freaking week.

So when he got home, I went by myself.

Apparently the City of Flint did not get the memo about it being my birthday, because there wasn’t a single place to park on the whole block. So I drove around and parked a block up.

I walked into the shop – bustling with activity, as I was there for a special event. A spirited gathering of spiritual seekers, this group was quite a cross-section of the community: young, old, black, white, wealthy, poor. It was a delicious mingling of kindred spirits.

THIS was how I wanted my birthday to be.

I’m reminded of the passage in the bible about the wedding, where “good people” were invited, but didn’t come, and how the king was so enraged, he decided to invite “just anyone” off the street who could get there to attend.

Not that I’m a king or anything of the sort.

But here, in a room of mostly strangers, they sang to me. And I cried, which is sappy, but hey, I’m cute like that.

It was sad and wonderful all at the same time.

It reinforced for me the need to create what I want myself instead of waiting for someone else to bestow it on my behalf. It highlighted how I’ve been using my computer to self-medicate and distract myself from really feeling what I’m experiencing.

It clarified so many things for me. My birthdays tend to do that.

So I’ve got some work to do. And the good news is that I’m not doing alone. I’ve been blessed with pretty cool friends – and apparently some pretty cool strangers – to help me on the journey. And you’ll be along for that ride too, if you’re here with me.

So what’s all this babble got to do with you? Well, think about this: where are you distracting yourself from really living your life?

Why?

What are you going to do about it?