30 May / 2017

I Give Up.

I woke up.

No really, I literally woke up. It was a Tuesday morning a couple weeks ago. I’d spent much of the previous 3 or 4 days attempting to be fully present at Lisa Nichols’ live event while simultaneously cramming for an interview with Danielle Laporte like it was final exams week.

Story of my life. Trying to do eight things at once. Crush the interview. Find the Quote of the Day clips. Prepare for this month’s mastermind presentations. Launch the JERF Bar. Create the money mindset course. Write consistent email content. (Fail.) Stay relatively engaged on social media. (Fail.) Keep myself from getting fat. (Depends on the week.) And try to maintain somewhat of a social life. (The struggle is real.)

Anybody got a violin?

Woe is me, right? No, not really. But if there’s something that really woke me up while reading Danielle’s new book, White Hot Truth, it was this passage …

“Too often, desired feelings aren’t even part of the manifestation equation — which is a total miss. Because we’re not actually chasing the goal; we’re chasing how we want to feel when we reach it. If you’re not clear on how you want to feel, you’ll keep running in law-of-attraction circles. Got the promotion, still feel unseen. Got the relationship, still have abandonment issues. Got the house, still looking for a home. Intentional creating boils down to what I call Core Desired Feelings. Once you get clear on those, then you’ll know what you really want, and you can set about doing whatever generates your Core Desired Feelings. It’s not much about attainment — it’s about attunement with your heart and Soul.”

Yeah, stuff I kinda already knew. My core desired feelings have been the joy of helping people make their lives better. That’s the feeling that keeps me up way past my bedtime getting ready for interviews and stuff.

But lately it’s been feeling more like a joyful overwhelm. If that makes sense.

There was something about reading Danielle’s book that made me realize that there’s another feeling I’ve been both craving and dismissing. The feeling of being Fully Expressed.

Keeping it real, I have a lot to say. But I hold it back. Because the interviews “aren’t about me.” And The Quote of The Day Show is “the speaker’s time to shine.”

Excuses, excuses.

Besides, a few of my favorite words are fuck, shit, and fucking shit. But parents keep sending me emails about how much their kids love me. Just the thought of little Sarah’s innocent ears hearing a four-letter word coming out of my mouth makes me feel a little nauseous. Hmmm.

And then there’s the JERF Bar. My pride and joy. My little real food baby …

But damn, two years of pregnancy was killing me as I tiptoed the line of trying to keep potential customers from unsubscribing from my email list. Don’t email too often, Sean. You have too much invested in this bar. Can’t risk pissing off your subscribers, dude. They’ll jump ship.

Yeah, probably one giant mind-fuck. But still a valid concern, I guess.

Anyway, so I woke up. On that Tuesday morning at 5am. Feeling a gnarly sense of dread. With zero desire to interview the uber-popular creator of The Desire Map. Ironic, I know.

In that moment I made a choice. And what I chose was myself. Because really, for the past nine years I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time, energy, and dedication being the Don King for everyone else’s message and expression while neglecting my own.

Because it’s okay to choose yourself. To give yourself permission to put yourself and the expression of who you are first. To say what you want to say. To be who you are, unapologetically. To be willing to let go of the somethings and the someones who you’ve allowed to keep you locked up in a suffocating box of perceptions and expectations.

Or as Lisa Nichols said in last Saturday’s QOD Motivation Mix, “When you can live like, walk like, play like, and work like you have nothing to hide, nothing to protect, nothing to prove, and nothing to defend, you allow yourself to become the next best version of yourself.”

That’s fully expressed AF. (Social media jargon … look it up.)

So I’m hitting the reset button. Upgrading to SC version 3.0.

Here’s the deal. The interview podcast is no longer with us. Destroyed. Adios. Gone bye-bye, to make room for new forms of expression.

(BUT, I will be posting a monthly Quote of the Day interview episode. Our first guest will be Mel Robbins in late July. I can handle one a month.)

Speaking of The Quote of The Day Show, parents can continue to expect a clean show. But the YouTube channel is another story. I’ll put a PG, PG-13, or R rating somewhere at the beginning of the video. Keep your eyes peeled and earmuffs handy. 🙂

It’s funny, I’m always asking people what they want for themselves. Because it’s pretty hard to take action when you don’t know where you’re going. So here’s what I want …

I want a super-engaged community of go-givers dedicated to doing whatever it takes to improve their lives and the lives of others. A community willing to get inconvenient and uncomfortable. A community to which I can send six emails a week (that’s one for every Quote of The Day episode) and not hear complaints about how I’m “sending too many emails.”

If you don’t have 2 minutes to read an email and 5-12 minutes to listen to an empowering message during your commute to work, then we’re probably not a good fit.

So expect more emails from me. Way more. More social media content. More blog posts and videos about money mindset and other cool stuff I’ve been learning lately.

An F-bomb here. An S-bomb there. More me. More expression. More connection. More Core Desired Feelings.

And more unsubscribes, I’m sure. More criticism. But that’s part of the deal. It’s what I want.

Last week, I posted this quote on my Instagram page: “To have what you want from life, you must first give up being the one who doesn’t have it.”

To feel the feelings you want to feel, you have to give up being the one who doesn’t feel them.

So I give up.

And it feels really fucking good.

Happy Tuesday,

Sean