Step into Your Moxie. Alexia Vernon

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ compelling enough that nobody noticed. (And while this episode has zero bearing on where we are headed, I’m throwing it in so you can appreciate why I stayed as far away from a science classroom as possible once I got home. Girl crew plus blade plus another unintended peeing mishap equaled “I hate science” in my tween head.)

      Fast-forward to the last day of Space Academy. Everybody in my girl crew was exchanging her Academy yearbook, and every time I asked if somebody would sign mine, I was greeted with a painfully overenthusiastic, “Of course!” Yet nobody asked me to sign her yearbook in return. The good news is that by lunch I had figured out why. The bad news is — by lunch I had figured out why.

      That final day I decided I would do anything to sit with the girl crew, so at lunch I skipped the food line, went to their table, and put my yearbook down next to the other ones that were reserving seats. And that’s when I saw it. The inside joke that had bonded the girl crew together. Next to my picture was a note, the note, that revealed all.

       Had so much fun. We’ll always remember our Little Hairy Beast!

      Simply typing the words Little Hairy Beast today feels as much like a sucker punch to the soul as it did when reading those words back then. Except when I was pregnant, I’ve been pencil thin my entire life, and I was lucky to escape the body shame so many adolescent girls experience, and perpetually experience, once they curve and fold in new ways. But being called hairy and discovering I hadn’t been oversensitive, that I had in fact been ostracized, also emboldened me. Unlike my friends, who often felt enslaved as their bodies betrayed them, I realized I could do something immediately about my beastliness.

      When I got home early the next day, I promptly went into my mother’s bathroom, grabbed her razor, and shaved every inch of hair (and at least a few centimeters of skin) off my legs. Over the next year, I’d shave my armpits. Then my arms. Then the stray hairs above my upper lip. I won’t keep going, but you should know. I. Did. Keep. Going.

      My current-events speech, complete with headgear, was humiliating because I performed badly. Space Academy was humiliating because of the mistreatment, sure, but also, and more important, because of who I concluded I was. Or wasn’t. Therefore, like an addict who transcends her pain every time she gets high, through my teen years and into much of my twenties, I similarly got addicted to my version of emotional numbness. I would temporarily rid myself of my congenital beastliness (thank you, Eastern European Jewish father and Greek mother) by shaving my body hair. But of course, within a couple of days, the hair always grew back. And with it came a new wave of self-hatred — and a desire to disappear that no amount of shaving could absolve me from.

      Thankfully, although I had a codependent relationship with my razor until my midtwenties, when a couple of guy friends staged an intervention, my high school and college years were considerably less humiliating. (Although when I won the Miss Junior America Pageant at nineteen, I froze a little too long after hearing my name called because I was wondering, Are the cameras from America’s Funniest Home Videos here for a gotcha moment? It was that inconceivable to me that even freshly shaven I could win the one and only beauty competition I had ever entered.)

      The Birthplace of Moxie

      What I know from telling stories like these during my keynotes, and from sharing them privately with clients who are struggling with their own visibility, is that as wackadoodle as I can be, my inner monologues were not, are not, aberrations. They are actually the norm. Sometimes our worst visibility fears do come true. People laugh when we speak. Or tell us that we are wrong. That we’re not smart. Attractive. Funny. Or deserving of a seat at the table.

      Whenever I speak with clients or audience members about their communication, I’m struck by how almost every one of them (even those like me who had a phenomenal education and a ton of privilege or who I know were the kids laughing at classmates’ speeches and gossiping behind so-called friends’ backs) has had a headgear or a hairy-beast moment. And as a result has slipped into a self-defeating narrative about who they are and their potential to use their voices in the world.

      But can I let you in on the truly heartbreaking part?

      Most people allow how they perceive their own voices to be determined by one or two moments in their histories. That moment when they spoke up and didn’t get the response they wanted. Or stayed mum and allowed something unjust to happen. Those fleeting moments have become the stories they replay, often unconsciously, over and over again. And I get it. I did, and sometimes still do, the same thing — despite the many moments in my life when I have been more than moxieful.

       What story have you been carrying around about who you are as a communicator?

      Give yourself an opportunity to sit with that question for as long as you need to. Journal on it. It’s an important one. For until you know the narrative that underpins how you talk to yourself, nothing I tell you about how to step into your moxie will matter — because it will be treating the symptom rather than going to the source of what’s standing between you and the consistent, empowered use of your voice in the world.

      Then it’s time to assess your story. And I don’t just mean in terms of its validity. Whether your story is true, kind of true, remarkably untrue, or somewhere in between, ask yourself:

       Is that story setting me up to show up, speak up, and be seen in the world?

      I recommend that you go back to your journal and freewrite on this too. Because if your answer is anything other than an unequivocal holy yes, it’s time for a rewrite. For the way we communicate with ourselves fundamentally shapes the way we communicate in all facets of our life. I know, not rocket science. Which is fortunate, because as you also know, my hairy legs precluded a career in science.

      Here, however, is the bigger story. The meat and potatoes — or for my plant-based friends, the kale and quinoa — of it all. It’s possible to shift your internal communication so that the self-talk that arises, moment to moment, sets you up to think, feel, and speak from a place of moxie. The problem is that most of us attempt to address our self-talk without doing the deeper dive into identifying the story (or stories) that trigger the self-talk in the first place. As a result, we might tell ourselves affirmations like:

       My inner beauty creates my outer beauty.

       I’ve got this.

       I am the hero I’ve been waiting for.

       I am a vessel for love.

       My flatulence makes me powerful.

      While these words in and of themselves are not necessarily flawed, they usually don’t stick. And sometimes, unfortunately, they actually prompt us to communicate and act in ways that undermine our moxie. They can make us want to puff up and project a confidence that is ego-rather than heart-driven. They can make us pursue external success, thinking if we simply check off more items from an achievement list, then moxie will finally be ours. As a result, we hustle harder for other people’s approval — losing more and more connection to our authentic voice along the way.

      Let’s stop doing this, uttering words we haven’t created the context to believe, psychically stabbing ourselves for failing to believe them, and then abusing ourselves by going out and behaving in ways that don’t serve our highest good. Instead, let’s go deep — and delicious. Let’s identify and release the stories that are giving rise to the most important communication we do in the world — the communication with ourselves.

      Find Your “Come to Jesus” Moments

СКАЧАТЬ