MAMACADABRA

I don’t typically take or make personal calls at work.  Recently, due to an increase in staff, I was moved from an office with a door back to a cube.  This is where you picture me like Dylan McKay, after he’d learned of his wife’s untimely death, in the middle of the rainy street on his knees screaming “noooooooo” at the dark sky.  I’ve accidentally overheard far too many conversations I wish I could have medically extracted from my memory to know that I do not want to be talking about the things I typically discuss with my girlfriends at work.  So needless to say, when Ess called me this afternoon and said “I need to ask you a serious question” I was a little nervous.  She’s found herself feeling like now is the time to step-up, become more visible, and make things happen in her career that she knows are within the realm of possibility.  This afternoon she had a moment of genius and wanted my opinion on whether or not she should pull the trigger.

I said YES and we walked through the steps together.  By this evening she’d made a bold move, something that her superiors were completely blown away by, and she accomplished exactly what she’d hoped.  In one of our last conversations today she said “I just made a clutch move.  It’s totally out of character for me, but I channeled you.”

Her words have been bouncing around my mind ever since.  Channeling ME?!  Umm…has she met me?  I think something’s a great idea, get hopped up on it, and then do nothing.  I learn of opportunities for which I, and my friends, think I’m perfect and then come up with 723 reasons why that’s actually not the case.  I am not clutch.  When it comes to myself.

When it comes to my friends, however, I’m all over it.  I’m almost obsessed with all of them reaching their full potential, making bold moves that will benefit them in the long run, and chasing their passion with everything they’ve got.  I can give tough love like it’s going out of style.  I can talk people off ledges, talk in circles until they see how perfect they are for something, or tell them over and over and OVER that they are in fact talented until they start trying to make something REAL and TANGIBLE out of their passions.

And yet when it comes to me I have trouble jumping.  I can talk a good game, I can get excited, but I often stop just short of that clutch move that would likely push me into bigger and better things.  I’ve even shared ideas on this blog over the past eight months, ideas that seemed crazy, but those are the moves that get people noticed.  That get people to the next great thing.  That make things happen.  And yet…nothin’.

As I’ve thought about this tonight I’ve wished I had something to act upon…an idea, a strategy, something bold to try, but nothing came to mind.  I know it always comes to you in a moment where you either go with it or it passes you by.  But I’d like to make a commitment that the next time I’m faced with a moment like my friend Ess was this afternoon, that I will do what I helped her do, I will make the clutch move.

I’ll do it for me this time.

TODAY:  What if I take my mad skills of encouraging my friends to go for it and apply them to myself for once???