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Have you ever seen your mentor cry or royally mess up? Probably not right? They aren’t supposed to show normal emotions and behaviors like the rest of us, right? I’m asking this because I saw one of my mentors cry last weekend. My first thought was ‘oh my gosh she cries too?’ I couldn’t believe it. And then I realized how dumb that was. Of course she cries, of course she gets upset, of course she’s not perfect. I had subconsciously put her on a pedestal thinking because she was such an inspiration that it meant she had her entire life in perfect order.
The exercise was to write about something you are ashamed of. As you can imagine this was a challenging task and brought up a lot of crappy feelings. When it was her turn to read what she’d written she struggled with some tears. Did the pedestal crumble as soon as I saw her cry? Absolutely not. Her taking a risk and allowing us to see this side of her made me realize there was no freaking pedestal! She’s wonderfully human just like the rest of us.
I was thinking I had to be a superhuman in order to be a mentor for people. That I had to always have my shit together and be the brave, strong one–24/7. But then I realized that I now respected and looked up to this woman so much more as she wiped a few tears from her eyes.
How does this transfer to me? I’m realizing that it’s ok that writing blog posts feels like trying to lift a car up with one hand. It’s ok that every single time I put anything out into the universe–a blog post, a video, a Facebook post etc. I worry that at best it won’t be well received and at worse people will think I’m a fraud. This amplifies the voices inside my head asking myself these two things: ‘who am I to do this? and ‘people will think you’re in this just for the money’. I have a lot of crap around money. Gosh that’s hard to say out loud! The brilliant Jen Sincero says that money is like sex–we are all suppose to be excellent at it, but aren’t suppose to talk about it. Good point right?
It feels really good to out myself. Hiding fears and true emotion is exhausting and more importantly not serving me nor the people I’m trying to help. I hope my mentor realizes how much showing her not perfect side helped me because showing realness and vulnerability–that’s the trail a true mentor blazes.
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