by : lacylit10 Life Lessons

When Hindsight is 20/20, and the Future is Bright.

A couple of months before I quit my job, I was talking to a friend about a friend. The friend I was talking about made a big, hairy, audacious decision (I’m tweaking “BHAG“), and her life flourished afterward. I explained that is how life is supposed to go. Things are supposed to fall into place when you’re making the right decisions. Under tears, I asked, “What are the right decisions that I’m not making?” Because both my work life and my personal life had gotten much harder. 

Going into the new job in 2021, I was aware of some reservations. Ultimately, I chose to listen to my head rather than my heart. And I was semi-conscious of that decision. I was coming to terms with things in my personal life, and I didn’t feel like I could 💯 trust what my emotions were telling me.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20. And I think blaming my emotions on certain issues I was dealing with personally was an excuse. Although that, I did not realize at the time. I thought I was being logical and rational.

It’s not a secret that my dream is to be a writer. While I do not think that is my immediate next step, the job I took wasn’t going to get me closer to that goal. That, I did know. But that job was everything I had been working for, and I’m glad I took it, because I would have regretted the “what if” if I didn’t take it. (And it got me closer to realizing what I do want.)

But I heard something on Instagram the other day that perfectly summarizes the uneasiness I felt in my soul.

The magic you’re looking for is in the work you’re avoiding.

My immediate reaction was, “FFFFFFFFFFFk.” If you know what I mean. I don’t know who said it. But it eloquently states what I absolutely knew was true.

I also read:

The only thing standing between you and your goal is the story you keep telling yourself as to why you can’t achieve it.

Jordan Belfort

What we see online makes everything look so easy. “Just go out and do it,” they say. (From people who have already done it and are successful at it. 🙄) I think that’s what I painfully enjoy about expressing my fears and insecurities here. You may have saw me excitedly post about my new business on Instagram, but inside, I felt sick to my stomach taking that step and declaring my next move. I want you to know that. I don’t want to live in smoke and mirrors.

Taking the leap of faith to find magic comes with less in some ways and more in others. As Mel Robbins says, “Choose your hard.”

And I have reached a place where I am tired of telling myself I can’t do it. I am tired of making excuses. I am tired of listening to my head when it’s not aligned with my heart. I am tired of letting what other people project onto me infiltrate my thoughts and instill doubt when I am confident in what I can do (and will do).

It irritates TF out of me when people tell you not to wait until you’re retired to enjoy your life. When they say, “Life is too short to do things that make you unhappy.” Then you make decisions to give you that freedom, that happiness, and that fulfillment, and they’re all like, “Ohhh, are you sure you want to do that?”

For the first time in a long time, my response to them will now be a deadpan, “Yes.”

I am certain this is what I want to do. I no longer want to allow other people to instill (more and unsolicited) doubt and insecurity in my life, when they do not have the courage to make BHADs themselves. So, while I hope to shamelessly project confidence as I move forward on this venture, you’ll know my secret: that I am choosing the hard that makes my dream come true. And I am doing it with fear, every step of the way.

by : lacylit10 Life Lessons

Biggest Lesson of The Year.

I’ve been seeing a lot of people post about the biggest lessons they’ve learned this year, and I have been mulling over mine for the past several weeks. This has been a very significant year of growth for me, and I’m not sure I can narrow it down to one big lesson. If I had to summarize what I’ve learned into a general theme, I think my biggest lesson would be that courage can take a long time to build. 

The more philosophical definition states: courage is the quality of mind or spirit that enables a person to face difficulty, pain, danger, etc. without fear. I like this definition more than “doing something that frightens one.”

What I find interesting about these definitions of the same word is that one definition says to do it with fear, the other says to do it without. What I find fascinating about the conflicting definitions is that it’s a great example of the complexity of language. Context matters. The courage to jump out of a plane is different from the courage it takes to walk away from a marriage.

The courage I’m referring to is the philosophical kind. To get your mind and spirit into a state of confidence to do something without fear requires identifying and overcoming insecurities and weaknesses. It requires self-reflection and processing. It requires intentional, meaningful, purposeful, and thoughtful consideration. These things definitely do not happen overnight. In fact, it can take years. And I don’t feel like people tell you that. 

We live in such a fast-paced, instant gratification society. We never see the work that goes into building the final product. Singer Lainey Wilson spent over ten years in the country music industry trying to make it before she became an “overnight” success. I’m sure those ten years were a critical time of learning, both personally and professionally, before she was launched into fame. 

God’s timing is perfect.

When I reflect on some of the challenges I’ve faced, I’ve been thinking about those with whom I have confided. They have been so patient and supportive. They’ve known for a long time what I am just coming to terms with. Part of me feels silly for admitting now what they’ve been softly telling me for years. While I logically knew what they were telling me was true, my heart hadn’t caught up. Until now. My mind and spirit are finally aligned. And I’m so grateful for their kindness. They knew I would get there in my own time. They never pushed. They let me feel what I needed to feel, go through the (e)motions, and learn the lessons on my own. 

Philosophical courage comes from deep within your soul, and it takes time to rise to your head and your heart. And that’s okay. To embrace the nature of courage, getting to a place of quality mind and spirit to do something without fear, takes courage in itself. There are so many factors woven into the fabric of who we are. Tugging at one thread, sometimes, unravels several others. It takes focus and patience to mend. We can be hard on ourselves for not getting there in a timeframe others expect of us or we wish of ourselves. And it’s important to recognize, not everyone will choose to repair in the first place. It takes courage to start, courage to endure, and courage to overcome.

by : lacylit10 Life Lessons

Just a Beginner.

I don’t know if I heard this from Mel Robbins or Brendan Burchard. Actually, I might have heard it from both of them in their own ways, but essentially they said, “Never feel ashamed of being ‘Just a beginner.’ We all start somewhere.”

As I navigate through this transitional phase and consider what I truly want to do next, I keep coming back to how scary it is to put myself out there. Generally, I know what I need to do, but, in some ways, fear is holding me back from implementation. It’s not the fear of failure. It’s not even the fear of success. It’s a fear of being vulnerable. A fear of being my authentic self in a world that is alarmingly cruel.

But this statement, “Just a beginner” keeps popping back up in my head. I am just. a. beginner.

What I’m realizing, though, is that I also have an underlying fear of not being a beginner. Perhaps, to the point of self-destruction. I do not want to be seen as an expert. In life (and in farming), we have to be adaptable and flexible with all of the unexpected things that get thrown at us. It has to be acceptable to grow and change.

I got to a point in my food safety career, where people considered me an expert. And it kind of terrified me.

Expert is defined as someone having comprehensive and authoritative knowledge in a specific area. By that definition, I was an expert. But I felt like I couldn’t be wrong. I couldn’t change my mind. I put so much pressure on myself to know and be right. Always. I burned myself out and kind of resented that I was supposed to be this end-all-be-all decision-maker.

But the pressure wasn’t entirely just me putting it on myself. There was an expectation that I was supposed to take the fault for a team of people who all contributed to the decisions made. I could be held personally accountable for natural environmental conditions where causes were nearly impossible to identify. This mindset was/is entirely unfair.

And the expectation was industrywide. Since the food safety representative held the certifications that qualified them as the expert decision-maker, they were the responsible party. Seemingly, it didn’t matter that the guy signing my checks could override my recommendation. And really, that’s all it was, because I wasn’t the final decision-maker of the business.

In this regard, food safety burned me. It made me feel like having comprehensive and authoritative knowledge was a bad thing. We live in such a litigious society that people need to hold someone accountable. That most likely person was me. And as things in food safety became increasingly complex and regulated, the more scary it became to be the responsible person. So much so that it drove me to leave the field altogether.

This was my experience with being an expert. I doubt that being an expert in different areas comes with these expectations and responsibilities, but it has made me fearful of gaining too much knowledge that people don’t give me the grace to continue learning and growing and changing. Of course, I know that I cannot control other peoples perceptions and emotions, but when people are so quick to make judgments and assumptions, it’s hard to not feel fearful of being vulnerable, especially without context. And people do not consider context.

For now, I’m just going to replay the “Just a beginner” mantra and remind myself that we all start somewhere. But realistically, I’ve been expressing vulnerability in this blog for years. Apparently, it doesn’t get easier. So I will just continue to feel the fear, and do it anyway.

by : lacylit10 Leadership, Life Lessons

The (Wo)Man in the Arena.

In the opening of one of Brene Brown’s books, Daring Greatly, she references a quote by Theodore Roosevelt. I recently came across this quote again. It’s full of powerful words that I feel should really be taken to heart.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

It sure does paint a picture, doesn’t it? I just imagine some guy in the middle of an arena, fighting for his life, with an audience looking down on him, full of critics, skeptics, and supporters alike. People criticizing moves he should have made when he is tired, weak, bloody, bruised, and broken. People laughing at his inability to fight stronger and longer, and the hurtful things they would likely say. “He can’t even fight. He’s good for nothing. He deserves this.” And the supporters, tears streaming down their faces, cringing with every blow, comforting one another as they watch the defeat of a loved one occur slowly and mercilessly in front of them.

Long ago, these moments were relatively only observed by the people in the arena, and while the stories may spread throughout the land, it is often only the survivors that get remembered as heroes and regarded as great fighters of their time. As if one person’s life means more than another, because his abilities were different. Yet both had the courage to walk into the arena knowing full-well where their individual strengths lie. The man who loses is deemed a fool, yet he walked into the arena knowing his fate and did. it. anyway.

I can’t help but wonder, what does the arena look like today? And is the person in the arena a willing or unwilling participant?

The arena is obviously a metaphor for life and the observers are all the people we may encounter in it. While we may be able to control what we do in the arena under watchful eyes, we cannot control the stories the audience takes home and tells to others. This is just as true today as it would have been back in, say, the Roman Empire. 

I would just hope, for myself and for others, that we don’t just get remembered for how good or bad we fight, but that we are respected whether we win or lose because we had the courage to step into the arena in the first place.

Our lives cannot and should not be narrowed down to a single fight, because it’s all the events that led up to that point that build the character of the person who chooses whether or not to enter the arena, and fight the fight, knowing his or her odds. It’s not always the outcome that matters most, but the effort you put into it.

by : lacylit10 Life Lessons

Growth.

I am all for holding people accountable, and I am skeptical of people who change their minds. But we don’t know what we don’t know, until we know. Quite frankly, I live in fear over the things I post online. When and how will it come back to haunt me? Nothing is safe anymore.

It seems that people neglect context. They jump to conclusions. They make immediate judgments and assumptions. And that’s fine, it is natural human behavior. It takes practice to be aware of when we are making judgments and assumptions, then overcome our initial reactive feelings. But it is the second step that is critical in how we interact with each other and form conclusions.

Take the short food safety videos I do on Instagram, as an example. You cannot and should not come to a conclusion on the safety of your food in one 2-3 minute video. Not even a series of 2-3 minute videos can begin to cover the complexity of efforts taken amongst our food supply chain.

But this is exactly what we do. We see a short video or quote or paraphrase, and we base our entire belief on something with just a fragment of information. We take so many things at face value.

But it goes beyond that. If we’re not changing, we’re not learning, and we’re not growing.

I recently saw something online that said “Trying to hurt me by bringing up my past is like trying to rob my old house. I don’t live there anymore.” I am an entirely different person today than I was 10 years ago, and definitely different than the 16 year old I was 20 years ago. So. much. life. has been lived between then and now. Unless I have done something ethically wrong, should I be held accountable for personal decisions made in the past?

We all take our own specific journey, and that includes making our own mistakes and learning our own lessons. We do not know the mental state of a person that led them to make their decisions. We do not know their past and their trauma. (And everyone has trauma no matter how small it may seem to someone who has suffered more severely.)

Today, we pick up our cell phones and record complete strangers for actions without their knowledge and post it on the internet without their permission. What if that person had been abused by their spouse before the angry outburst? We drudge up information from people’s pasts and try to hold them accountable to today’s societal standards, when the environment is completely different. Then when we can’t hold them accountable, we humiliate them and shame them.

This behavior is being normalized and promoted as acceptable. It. is. terrifying. People learn from their mistakes, but we aren’t letting nature take it’s course. Instead, we are taking it into our own hands to ensure that individual is punished by a means that we see fit. We aren’t letting the past that people have learned from stay in the past. We are forcing them to relive what might be painful experiences.

We tell children not to bully each other online or offline, yet, we, as grown ass adults, do exactly what we tell them not to. We ruin people’s lives without context. We ruin people’s lives based on fragments of information. We ruin people’s lives based on past decisions they may be trying to move on from.

I try to be honest with what I post here. I do not know everything. As I say in my intro, some people may consider me an expert in food safety. Yes, I may know a lot more than most people, but I know a hell of a lot less than others. And everyday, I am learning more.

How I handle a food safety crisis today may be different than how I would have handled it 5 years ago. But that doesn’t make how I handled it 5 years ago wrong. Since then I’ve gained knowledge and experience, regulation has changed, and the environment has changed. We all start somewhere. Can I be punished for something today that I did 5 years ago when I acted to the best of my ability given the knowledge and experience I had at that time?

The ability to learn from our mistakes and build upon our experiences is how we grow. Genuinely good people who act poorly without malicious intent should not be so publicly humiliated and shamed for errors in judgement. It’s cruel. And if they are genuinely good people, they’re actions will not go without personal punishment.

You have to be vulnerable enough to share things about yourself to connect with people. We should not attack those with whom we do not relate, because we are not going to connect with everyone. When we do attack those with whom we do not relate, we push them into silence and create our own echo chambers. And we wonder why our society has become so polarized…🤨🤷🏻‍♀️

by : lacylit10 Life Lessons

Spirit.

If you remember, melancholy is defined as a “sadness or depression of mind or spirit.” As we are well. over. 6 months into this pandemic, melancholy seems to still accurately describe my mood. I feel like my spirit is curled up in the fetal position, tucked away in a small corner of my heart. It’s gone into hibernation through this pandemic, and I am consciously sad that my spirit is depressed.

Regardless of political beliefs, the fact is that our government is dictating what we can do, how we can do it, and with whom we can associate. People need people, and we are literally being told to stay away from each other. If we look at the 3 dimensions of loneliness in a pie graph, we need connection with those in our intimate, relational, and collective spaces in order to feel whole. But our relational and collective spaces have been pushed into non-existence, we are only getting a small sliver of the connection we need.

Research has found that one does not voluntarily become lonely. When we feel on the verge (or in the midst) of social isolation, it increases our motivation to connect with others while also increasing our motivation to go into self-preservation. In other words, isolation makes us feel vulnerable. While we crave interaction with others, we also feel more susceptible to social threats. Our bodies and minds are not meant to sustain social isolation for long periods of time. Loneliness can increase physical and psychiatric risk factors including, but not limited to: depression, alcoholism, suicidal thoughts, anxiety, high blood pressure, diminished immunity, and decreased sleep.

I am not trying to downplay the severity of this virus, but I am genuinely concerned about the long-term effects this is going to have on us, as social beings. Forget about what everyone else is or isn’t doing; what they should or shouldn’t do. What do you need? What do you want? What do you feel?

Strip away all of the noise, and listen to your inner self. Great leaders look inside and heal their own hearts, before they lead outward to help others heal theirs.

Lorenz Sell wrote a piece on the human Spirit for the Huffington Post and said, “The human spirit offers us the capacity to persevere in pursuit of truth.” He defines truth as “the deepest desire in our heart.” So, the human spirit offers us the capacity to persevere in pursuit of the deepest desire in our heart.

Well, that’s just great. 😒 How is my human spirit supposed to persevere when it has gone into hiding?

The answer: My spirit is not actually hiding, it is taking time to heal.

My little spirit has been persevering through the last, what? 9 months of a global pandemic. It’s like, “I’m tired. Give me some time to re-energize.” And that’s okay. It’s the pause that keeps us alive.

Sells continues, “Not knowing how to move forward, being stuck in limbo. It’s painful and can make the strongest person want to quit.” While, yes, we have vaccines, we are still a long way away from returning to any sort of “normal.” People will be recovering from this pandemic, mentally, physically, emotionally, financially, etc. well beyond 2021.

If your spirit needs a break, give it a break. Lean into the sad and melancholy emotions for a while. The only way to get through those negative feelings is to embrace them, so we can move on from them. Some of us may need to stay with the negative emotions longer than others, and that’s okay too. But be mindful of how you care for yourself. If you are going to embrace the sad, do not eat junk food. Eat fresh fruits and vegetables, get exercise, step outside for fresh air. There are healthy and unhealthy ways to cope with a depressed spirit.

Hang in there, friends. 💖