Making space for desire
Reading the Desire chapter of The Joy Diet stirred something in me this week. Martha Beck writes that if we are attuned to our heart’s deepest desire, we will recognize our calling, our gifts – our true purpose in life.
One of the places my journey toward more fearlessness has taken me this year has been toward a deeper understanding of my own truths – my desire.
Here is one of my truths that has been unearthed – I have a deep desire to speak with my own voice, and I want to do it out loud, in public.
I think I’ve known this for a long, long time, but it’s been buried under many layers of “I’m not good enough”, “Public speaking is about showing off – you shouldn’t show off” and one of the original ones… “women aren’t meant to speak in church.”
The first message was pretty constant, growing up in a conservative Christian home. Again and again, I watched men do what I wasn’t allowed to do. When I was around fifteen, I practically begged my dad (who had taken over the leadership of our tiny church in the absence of a pastor) if I could at least be allowed to do the scripture reading on a Sunday when there were few men available to take on the duty. He said no, it wasn’t appropriate.
That message stayed with me through two years of Bible College. I could join the drama group, but I couldn’t speak in chapel. I could be the vice president of our class council, but I couldn’t be the president. It was there that I learned to “lead from behind” as I did all the work but let the male president pretend he was in charge.
I tried to honour the longing in my heart by sinking myself into drama. I went to University and studied theatre. But I wasn’t really meant to be an actor – speaking in someone else’s voice didn’t fit me very well. I learned fairly quickly that I was better at writing plays than acting in them. I got pretty good at writing and directing plays, but I felt the longing as I sat in the audience watching other people speak my words.
After university, I started working in government, and soon I put my skills to work by becoming a professional communicator. I wrote dozens of speeches, and then watched politicians and bureaucrats use my words on stage. I wrote hundreds of press releases and “quoted” the experts in my words, but with their names following the quotation marks. I wrote endless newsletters, web content, reports, communications plans, etc. – always telling someone else’s story and letting someone else be the expert.
Things started getting better when I left the government and started working in non-profit. I still mostly wrote for other people, though – about passions that were not my own, and stories that inspired me but didn’t really dig into the places where I wanted to dig. I got to do a little more public speaking, but more often than not I was preparing presentations for someone else to deliver, producing videos for someone else to narrate, and planning media events where someone else would step into the spotlight. All the while, I wondered why I wasn’t more fulfilled, considering I was getting to do so many of the things I loved to do and writing about things I felt at least somewhat passionate about.
But then this year came, and more and more I began to realize that there was something else stirring – something that I’d been burying while I thought I was following my calling and sharing my gifts in the best way imaginable. I think the turning point came when I won the Communicator of the Year award and realized that, for me, the best part was when I got to speak in front of a room full of professional communicators about my experiences and expertise.
The truth is, the times when I’ve felt most alive are those times when I’m speaking and/or writing from my own truth, my own passion, and my own wisdom.
Having a blog (or two) has helped a bit, but it’s not enough. I want to speak and I want to lead workshops. I want to write more, but I want that writing to lead me to more opportunities to speak. I don’t want to be behind the scenes anymore. I don’t want to write for other people or edit other people’s work.
That’s my truth – my heart’s desire. Now that I’ve acknowledged it, I need to find ways to fulfill it.
Let the little children lead us
Maddie has no doubt that she’s an artist. “Of COURSE I’m an artist,” she told me one day as she put brush to paper, just after I’d mused “maybe you’ll be an artist when you grow up”. Why would there be any doubt – if she can pick up a paint brush, dip it in the paint, and apply it liberally to the paper – that she’s an artist? Sheesh! Moms are SO silly sometimes!
Maddie is seven. Last night, I picked her up from her weekly “young artists” class at the local leisure centre. After waving her art in front of my face, she bounded through the parking lot, talking a mile a minute about all the projects they were going to make. “Next week, we’re making DOLLS! Can you imagine? I don’t know HOW we’re going to make dolls! I’ve never made a doll before! And then the week after that, we’re making paper maché. I don’t know what paper maché is yet. Today we did finger painting and I forgot to wear my paint shirt, and – Mom – I’m sorry I got it all over my clothes, but the teacher says it’s washable. And why would you EVER make any paint that wasn’t washable? ‘Cause really – kids are gonna get it on their clothes!” She didn’t stop chattering – from the moment I picked her up, all the way through the grocery store, to the moment she got home. I think the only reason she stopped talking was because she needed to divert her mouth to the task of eating!
Oh the joy and confidence of a seven year old in love with art! I want that effortless joy, that confidence that I really AM an artist just by virtue of picking up a brush, that willingness to experiment with things I haven’t tried yet, that willingness to give away my art without doubting that it will be lovingly received, that unabashed delight in getting dirty, and that ability to make mistakes without translating that to mean I AM a mistake.
Let’s talk about fear (One of the dragons I’m facing on the Treasure Hunt)
I’ve had a few people tell me lately that I’m “one of the most fearless people they know”. Gulp. Part of me is flattered and wants to wrap that description around me like a colourful jacket and wear it proudly as I strut down the street. But part of me is completely uncomfortable accepting that moniker. It just doesn’t fit the real Heather I know deep in the hidden parts of me.
Sure, outwardly I do a fair number of things that might appear “fearless” to some. I took great delight in jumping out of a plane when I turned 40 (as you can see in the above picture). I’ve wandered in parts of the globe where few North Americans will ever set foot. I’ve taken pictures of gun-toting rebels in Ethiopia. I’ve slept in a tent on a farm in Kenya. I’ve stayed in bed-bug-infested hovels in Bangladesh where wild dogs sang me to sleep (or, I should say, howled me awake). I’ve para-sailed in Mexico. I’ve back-packed in the Rockies with a bell hanging from my pack to warn the bears. I’ve climbed on top of a bus in Tanzania to get good photos of lions 20 feet away (lions that could have bounded over that bus faster than I could say “oops – shoulda stayed INSIDE the bus”).
It all looks rather fearless, if you line up all of those adventures and stitch them onto my jacket like Girl Scout patches, but if you look a little closer at that picture at the top of this post, you’ll see the undeniable truth. That’s fear written all over my face, plain and simple. Yup, I was terrified. Even questioned my own sanity when the plane door opened. But I’m kind of stubborn and more than a little bit proud, and I wasn’t about to admit that I was too afraid to do it, so I jumped. And OH MY GOSH am I glad I did!
The thing is, I was raised in a family of adventure-junkies. All four of us siblings would rather take an adventure over a material possession almost any day. Offer us something exciting to do, and we’ll all be out of our chairs so fast our spouses barely have time to shake their heads and give each other that knowing glance that’s their universal sign for “the Plett siblings are at it AGAIN!”
But this post isn’t really about all the times I’ve managed to conquer the fear and do it anyway. No, this post is about the times I had no right to wear that jacket or accept the Girl Scout badges. This post is about the many ways that fear has limited my life.
In some really important ways, I feel like I’m the most fearful kitten in the litter, hovering in the corner of the room, hoping that the big hand swooping in will be gentle, but almost certain that it will not. Sometimes I even hiss like that little kitten, mustering up all the courage I can to send the big scary dragon back to where it came.
This year, I’ve been dealing with a lot of that fear. At the end of last year, I’d had a growing realization that fear was limiting me in far too many ways and it was starting to feel really, really icky. I was being held prisoner by my fear dragon.
I was afraid people wouldn’t like me, so I made decisions that wouldn’t offend anyone. It’s kind of hard being a manager who never makes unpopular decisions, but I was trying my hardest. Mostly I was accepting mediocrity and my team wasn’t growing because I wasn’t challenging people to try harder and I wasn’t standing up to bullies. I was just trying to make sure everyone on the team got along, and ironically it meant that nobody was really getting along because nobody was hearing how their behavior was affecting people and excellence wasn’t really being expected of anyone. The team was stuck in old patterns and I was enabling them by being too afraid to address it.
Beyond the fear of not being liked, one of my biggest fears was failure, so I wasn’t taking some of the risks I wanted so desperately to take (in work or personal life). Even though I longed to be an artist, I hadn’t ever tried to paint because it felt scary and overwhelming and I didn’t know who to ask to help me and I didn’t want to admit how chicken I was. I hadn’t tried yoga because I had too many memories of how clutzy I’d been in aerobics or jazz dance classes and didn’t want to make a fool of myself again. Even though I’d been writing for years, I wasn’t always writing from my most authentic truth because I was afraid of what people would think of me and afraid I wouldn’t be able to take the criticism when they didn’t agree.
So when the new year came, I knew it was time to do something about the fear dragon. Even though I knew I would never be truly fearless (in fact, everyone needs some fear because it tells us we’re alive and passionate and it helps guide our paths), I chose “fearless” as my word for the year. In retrospect, I probably should have chosen “courage”, as I knew from my sky-diving experience that it’s not about not having fears, it’s about feeling the fear but doing it anyway. But I stuck with “fearless”.
First, I created a little video montage to mark the beginning of the journey, and then I started chipping away at my fears one by one. I took my first watercolour class. I signed up for yoga at the local fitness club. I learned to release my daughters into their own bold lives. I laid my soul bare in a frighteningly authentic way in front of my staff team. I put some more of my writing and art and creativity out into the world (including this website).
It’s been good and rewarding in so many ways, but I won’t lie to you – it has also been really, really hard. Sometimes it seems like every dragon we conquer reveals an even bigger dragon hiding just behind it. I started painting, for example, and fell in love with it, but then people wanted copies of my paintings to hang in public places and one person even asked me to participate in a charity art exhibit. Yikes! Was I really ready to open myself up to critique? What if nobody liked my art?
One of the really big fears I’m still dealing with involves my leadership experience. This has been a rocky journey for me lately, and the dragons just keep getting bigger. After being really honest about my fears and failures with my team, it seemed like everyone responded really well and things got better for a while. But then things started slipping again and even bigger problems started emerging. Was I ready to conquer these dragons too?
Gradually I’m facing more and more of those dragons. When it came time for annual performance reviews, for example, I was much more honest than I’d been in the past. But that led to some hurt feelings and even anger, and my first instinct was to brush it under the rug and pretend it wasn’t there.
I wish I had a nice simple way to wrap this up, but I don’t. Today, though I’ve conquered some of the dragons, others feel even bigger than ever and there are more things to be afraid of. And the truth is, I’m ready to walk away from some of these leadership challenges, but my fear of failure is telling me “you can’t do it! Imagine what people will say when you’re gone! You have to SUCCEED!”
But one way or another, I have to face these dragons. I do not want to end the year on a fearful note. Whether I need to admit defeat or find a way to forge ahead, I have to do it with courage. With God and my community (that’s you, dear readers!) on my side, I will carry on.
Are you with me, dragon-slayers and sky-divers?
Treasure Hunt! The official launch and a gift!
If I’m starting a Treasure Hunt, do you think I should start talking like a pirate? Ay matey!
I’m so excited about the Treasure Hunt that I introduced at the bottom of this post! It’s all about going on a journey to discover the clues that lead us to our passions, our values, our gifts and our calling. It’s all about finding treasure and learning to share it. It’s all about celebrating the beauty we see along the way and the beauty that is revealed in each of us.
We’ve got lots of fun and exciting clues to unpack as we set sail on this amazing voyage of discovery. The whole idea has inspired me so much, in fact, that I made a map on the weekend! What do you think? Does it look like a journey you want to go on? Think about all those lovely inviting islands! Imagine how invigorating and challenging it will be when we sail past the dragons and monsters together!
A few things to keep in mind as we set sail on this Treasure Hunt:
- This will not be a straight path. You can not go from point A to point B (without detours) and expect to learn all that you are meant to learn about who you are and what you have to offer.
- Even if you didn’t recognize it, you’ve already been on this voyage for a long time – probably since birth. Sometimes you’ll need to dig up clues that were already revealed to you (but perhaps forgotten) back then.
- Sometimes there’s no other way to move forward unless we circle islands and re-learn things we’ve already learned in the past.
- Sailing a boat like ours through so many islands, past dragons, and over rough seas takes patience. We can’t rush the process.
- Yes, there will be dragons. Some of them will be big and seem impossible to pass, and others will be little but equally deadly if they get under your skin.
- You have to pay attention and watch carefully for the clues. If you miss one, you might have to backtrack a bit before you’re ready to move on.
- Treasure hunting is much more fun when you do it with people whose company you enjoy.
- But… even though we’re in this together, sometimes your clues will look different from mine. That doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong.
- When you find treasure, it’s best not to hoard it or its value will wilt. It may even turn out to be fool’s gold.
- Sometimes you’ll be offered false clues by well-meaning (or not) people. Be sure to test them before you accept them at face value.
- We’ll need nourishment along the way. Pack well, bring good food, good wine, and some musical instruments for our entertainment.
- When we’re weary from the journey, we need to cast anchor in a peaceful cove and just rest. It will be okay – the map will be waiting for us when we’re ready to move again.
Just one more thing… there’s a GIFT! Two lucky commenters will get to record their Treasure Hunt stories in this very special journal created just for that purpose! Any comment will do!
What are you willing to sacrifice?
In my travels in Africa, India, and Bangladesh, I’m met a lot of people making profound sacrifices for their passion, values, and beliefs. Elizabeth was one of those people.
Though I never met the people in this photo, I know that they made sacrifices too. We were staying in a pepto bismol pink staff housing complex in Northern Ethiopia. It was the Ethiopian Christmas season, so most of the staff had gone to spend the season with their families – probably 800 miles away in Addis Ababa.
I don’t know whether the tiny sparse bedroom I stayed in belonged to the husband or wife in this picture, but I know that it was only one of them and I know that whoever it was had made a major sacrifice to live and work in this remote site. Working in a village with the poorest of the poor, helping them plant gardens, build roads, grow trees, and protect the hillsides from erosion, this life was probably a far cry from what they dreamed of the day they married their sweetheart.
But something drew them here. Was it a passion to make a difference? A deep compassion for the poor? A commitment to following their heart? A faith-related calling? A sense that this was what they were meant for?
In our comfortable, affluent lives, we don’t have to make a lot of sacrifices. We have the luxury of dabbling in our interests and hobbies, trying our callings on for size, testing the waters of our passion – all within the comfort of our weather-proof homes.
What if it were harder? What if we had to make sacrifices? Would we still be willing?
Hi, I'm Heather Plett. I'm excited that you've stopped by to learn more about how we can make the world a better place through the sharing of our gifts and creativity. I've been thinking about these topics for a lot of years now. Through my work in creative communication, workshop facilitation, fundraising, leadership training, and freelance writing, I've gathered a lot of wisdom and stories from my own experiences and the experiences of the people I've been blessed with knowing.
