My dear sweet love,
It is five years today since I knew you existed. A few months later when you first got your real name.
And four years today since we marched into City Hall in San Francisco and made it official.
I felt as though I was holding you in the palm of my hand, trying to grasp how something so fragile and so special could breathe and exist in this world.
Like if someone breathed too hard, you would be gone. Whoosh. A dandelion in a gust of wind.
But I was wrong.
I don’t mean to imply that plans are … bad. Because they’re not.
After all, nothing happens without form. Boundaries are useful. Structure can — and should — be supportive.
And at the same time, we’re alive. And guess what? Life is a dynamic, organic, ever-changing thing of mystery and wonder.
Which is to say, you [...]
It is not exclusionary.
If anything, it’s the opposite.
Everyone gets right people. It’s not just some special right people who get right people.
And everyone gets right people who are fabulous. You get right people that you adore. Not right people that you have to settle for. They wouldn’t be very right if you did.
There is absolutely no need to actively exclude people who don’t fit. The idea is that we are naturally drawn to the stuff that speaks to us. So if we aren’t drawn to something, we aren’t being rejected. We’re just being drawn somewhere else.
Me: Well, there’s something weirdly magical and transformational that happens when you go to a space with that kind of person.
It’s like a ritual of transition.
With a huge amount of power in it. If you put a week of your life to doing nothing but being in that transformational experience, and you’re doing it with someone who is brilliant and fun and has great material, you come out having shed a skin.
You’ve walked into this version of you who knows how to access more of your you-ness. It’s still you, but now you know what you need and how to get it.
The boring way that people try to apply this is by (yawn) having a niche or talking to a “target market”.
So yeah, technically speaking … saying that you only work with “former journalists between the ages of 45 and 60 who live in the greater Chicago area” is a red velvet rope.
But it’s a stupid rope — the kind that doesn’t necessarily fit your Right People. I mean, what if I’m 37 and in Sheboygan but we would totally hit it off? Or what if I’m exactly in that group you described but we don’t madly adore each other? Not interesting. Not useful.
Maybe watching people go from being terrified of even having a website to having popular blogs with prestigious biggified guest-blogging gigs.
These amazing people creating products, starting programs with each other, working through their stuff, getting over debilitating fears, growing into their own skins.
People coming to work on one set of problems, and then healing family stuck, body image stuck, relationship stuck, biggification stuck all at the same time. Crazy.
And the love. I had no idea how fiercely loyal people would become about helping each other through anything and everything.
I am one.
Which is weird, because I spent the first couple decades of my life thinking anything even remotely business-related was extremely icky. At best.
But for reasons that I don’t understand*, I am like Rain Man. But for business.
*Actually, I kind of do understand, because I’m pretty sure it’s all the years of having Dance of Shiva restructure my brain.
Her Twitter bio says:
“Twenty years with brain injury has taught me: identify with love over limitation.”
Twenty years. With brain injury. And now she knows about identifying with love over limitation. So she’s teaching heart-meditation.
You’re intrigued, right? Of course you are!
Because hello, how is that not fascinating? Without knowing anything else about her, I was already one of her Right People just from that bio. Sold! Tell me more about your pet kangaroo.
What I really mean by being clear.
Being clear about what you stand for and what you care about and what you will not put up with, dammit.
Being clear and using the word dammit as often as possible, dammit. If only just in your head.
Oh, and let me say that yes, dammit is the most important word when you’re manifesto-ing it up, and ideally every sentence ends with it.*
Even though it can really just be implied.
