Tag: Roberta Shepherd Edmonton

Having been subject to societal paradigms around what it means to be professionally successful my entire adult life, I’m deeply pressed when I don’t meet those standards. You know the ones: your bank account should be bulgy, you should be busy, productive, effective without mistakes, and your work schedule should be replete with long hours that propagate a quiet martyrdom. I, for one, am ashamed of the current state of my bank accounts – desperately, I try to keep my financials a despicable secret, agreeing to coffee meetings where I buy coffee I can’t afford to shield the truth. God forbid anyone know how broke I am since that means I meet one of the top criteria of professional failure. My daytime hours are spent building my new expression of business, but without consistent bookings to fill those hours, I’m bombarded by my slanderous mind, long inundated by said societal paradigms. The slander infiltrates my physicality and, on days that I don’t have clients, I get to feeling like an awkward hindrance wherever I go –  “useless” in a world where generating lots of money in ways that deplete my spirit has come to define my worthiness, or at least that’s how the story goes. In direct conflict to that story is another paradigm that I also happen to be deeply entrenched in. The one that tells me that money is “bad – the root of all evil”. What a shit show!

There was a time in my life that I worked 3 jobs, 7 days a week. And for what? Surely not for personal joy or fulfillment. Hell no. I did it for money because society tells me that the more of it I have, the more valuable I am. Concurrently, my familial paradigms told me that having lots of money meant that I would be arrogant. And so, equipped with a stifling work schedule, my hard-earned and learned martyr syndrome and addictions, I drank and smoked all the money away, on a miserable hamster wheel for years, slowly killing myself as I tried to align to polar paradigms.

Fast forward to about 6 months ago, when I thought I was having a nervous breakdown. Accustomed to working 5 days one week and 6 days the next, this schedule was normalized, and a noble expression of popular culture’s standards – having 2 consecutive days off felt superfluous. I had myself on Olive Flower Essence for burnout – nervous exhaustion from excessive slogging. I didn’t feel burnt out as of yet, but was getting there and figured that taking Olive would help me achieve deeper rest. As it turns out, Olive FORCED me to slow down by near burnout, which came to a head in a precise moment. There I was, sitting across from my fourth client of the day, distinctly aware of something rising inside of me – like a tidal wave coming up to drown me with its pleading swell. Something was screaming inside – it’s miraculous that I heard each word my client shared as this scream intensified. What was the scream saying? And then I heard it: “I’M GONNA LOSE MY SHIT!” Shortly thereafter, I wound up in my doctor’s office asking about a stress leave, to which she said no, it would cause me more stress than good and I should reduce my working hours instead. Since then, I no longer work Thursdays. Permanently. And I refuse to bend on that even while my paradigms flare up telling me that I don’t do enough – that I’m lazily hanging out at the pit stops of the rat race, a joker of a participant who walks while everyone else runs.

It’s time to make my life look how I actually want it to look, not how I think it should fit with the expectations of our society. If slogging doesn’t equate financial freedom in my case, then why slog? Life is fleeting and full of beautiful moments that are worth being shared, not missed because I have too much to do.

And so here I am, working on these deeply rooted, insidious paradigms around joy and money.

A couple weeks ago I had no clients, which means I didn’t get paid. Previously, I would have slunk away home, isolating myself to bathe in this idea that I must not be good enough or have any value to offer this world. But instead, I decided to function within the law of opposites. Feeling like a blight on the fabricated prototype of professional success, I took a pile of posters I’d had printed with a Reflexology offer for Edmonton service professionals and I stomped around downtown, stopping in at umpteen businesses to ask if they’d put my poster up in their staff area. And do you want to know how that felt? Terrible. It felt terrible because I felt terrible. I was sure I’d show up and express my request only to be laughed out the door because obviously, I’m a pointless contributor to this unremitting urban sprawl – do my insecurities not precede me? Apparently they don’t, because 23 of my posters got hung up that day. And you know what happened the following week? I was almost fully booked. Why? Because success actually has nothing to do with how busy I am, how much money I make or how much I sacrifice myself – success is a mindset. If I continue reacting in the face of perceived failure the way that I always have, then I can expect more of the same results. So I took those feelings of failure related to old, shitty paradigms and I stuck it to them! I let them know, by my action, that I heard them, but that they are not allowed to direct the show of my life! “Move aside false failure”, I said, in an unpretentious inner voice, “we’re doing this anyway!” And I did it anyway even though I didn’t want to.

Here’s a video I shot on that day in the midst of my discomfort:

Here’s the thing – something that I am FAR from integrating, but which I know damn well to be true: financial abundance AND enjoyment of life can coexist. In other words, no one need work – even at a job they love – 6-7 days a week at the expense of the finer things in life, like relationships, connection, travel and rest. The only way I’ll ever be able to achieve this reality is by changing my mind. And that’s what I plan to do. One of the ways I plan to do this is by the law of opposites – whenever my mind tells me to do what I’ve always done – to slink away from the limelight of my life – from my wildest dreams and aspirations including the potential for a luscious professional practice, I’m going to act in opposition to that. In so doing, I change the energy and challenge my inherited belief construct. Money, contrary to what I learned in my life (“must be nice”, “money doesn’t grow on trees”, “the meek shall inherit the earth”) is NOT “bad”. Nor is downtime and enjoyment. So move aside shitty paradigms because you’re being re-written. Right now.