Creating Your Own Luck: A Personal Tale of Hope
Posted on 25. Jun, 2010 by Susan in Blog, Luck
As coaches we strive to be “TAO” (transparent, authentic, and open) in all that we do. So let’s just lay it all out on the table. I am here to admit that when I heard about Susan Hyatt’s forthcoming book on “Creating Your Own Luck”, I thought the idea was romantic. I thought it was sweet. Create your own luck? I thought it wasn’t possible.
I adore Susan. She is one of the luckiest people I know. The authenticity oozes from her every pore. She has a naturally great life. She is the girl I wanted to be best friends with in high school but was too filled with angst, self-doubt, and longing to ever conceive of becoming a part of her circle. And yet, here I am. I consider Susan a friend and a mentor. I now even consider myself part of her circle. How did a girl like me ever manage to make that happen? This thought truly gave me pause.
Let’s examine:
I was born in a shack down by the river. OK. Not really. I was born to a middle-class family in Western Pennsylvania. My family adored me. I was the youngest by several years, and while my parents were separated when I was born, I never wavered in the belief I was totally awesome. I had a lot of confidence. I want to be clear (without making this a novella) that I didn’t have what may be considered a “normal” upbringing, but honestly I thought it was cool that I had such an unusual family dynamic. I thought I was lucky.
On the other hand, my mother was restless. She wanted more for herself. She wanted to travel and live a life she felt she deserved but that society had told her wasn’t acceptable for a responsible mother. She wanted to move to Maine, to travel to Europe, to feel free and able to experience her life. With her two oldest out of the house, she sold our home, booked us flights to Europe, and we were off. She made it happen. All by herself. Boy did she feel lucky during that time.
So we lived her dream. But then things started going wrong. She had no friends in Maine. She wasn’t able to get a job, even though she had a Master’s degree in Human Resource Management. The checks bounced. The dream died. We fled from Maine quite literally in the middle of the night 4 years later.
How could following your dream turn out so badly? She was running out of money and was scared. She had lived a life up to that point filled with judgments against frivolous, spendthrift women who make foolish decisions to get pregnant at 17, spend too much money on books, irresponsibly sell their perfectly-adequate homes and embark on a foolish journey. As she got desperate, she began to dip back into those old stories and believe them. She began manifesting what she felt. She lost her mojo.
When we first moved to Maine, I was my usual confident self. But as my mother lost hope in her new life, I compulsively overate. I fed off my mother’s new, grasping energy and it scared me. I had never seen her like this, crying and weak. I was terrified. I truly began to believe we were unlucky.
In the interest of space and time, let’s just that I became so fixated on needing external circumstances to create my happiness that I gained a lot of weight, became very isolated from my peers emotionally, fell into a deep depression, and had my worst fear realized at 17 when my mother died from breast cancer.
I sleepwalked through the next several years of my existence, unsure of how I got to such a deep place of disconnection from that confident little girl. While lots of good things happened during this time, I could only focus on the negative (I called myself a “realist”, which is really just a polite word for “pessimist”). My life was just moving along, happening to me. I was hollow.
Gentle reader – remember this is a tale of hope because sixteen years later I am happier and more connected with my essential self than ever before. I am on my path towards my right life after years of believing I would never, ever, ever, ever find it. I am in the process of building my own coaching practice. My own business. I am leveraging my years of toiling away at the “wrong career” to help people find their own best life. I am more confident, excited and hopeful than ever before. I feel lucky again!
At this point I imagine you wish I’d just tell you how I got to this place and reconnected with my luck.
I asked myself this very question as I was e-mailing with two Master Coaches who were working me through lingering fears from old belief systems. I felt so fortunate to have access to such talented minds and to have them speak so frankly and warmly with me. I practically had to pinch myself. How was this happening to ME?
And then it hit me. Susan Hyatt was right. I created this luck. All by myself.
You can guess now what happened, right? I began happening to my life. I showed up for myself for the first time in a long time. I took a few smart, calculated risks and flew in the face of all the things my dad had taught me. I listened to what I wanted for myself not what he wanted for me. And I refused to believe that I deserved anything “less than”, in spite of what Sweet Petunia, my Inner Lizard, had to say.
I did all my work and figured out what I really wanted my life to feel like. Once I started coming from such a real place, magic started happening. I found my tribe. I gained access to people as smart, intuitive, and energized as I am. And if I live my life backwards for a moment, none of this would have happened if my mom hadn’t taken that first leap towards her dreams. She modeled what it would take to have both a good outcome and a bad outcome in life.
So now I not only feel lucky to count Susan as a friend, I know that she is lucky to have me. And for the first time in a very long time, I actually believe it. I still have a ways to go, but I can’t tell you how incredible it feels to know you are finally pointed in the right direction.
That’s right. I can’t tell you. You have to go figure it out for yourself.
Just know that we’re here to help you create your own luck.
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Jessica Steward is a Personal and Professional Life Coach and owner of Steward Coaching. With 15 years of experience in the corporate world, Jessica combines her practical, business experience with a passion for helping people to begin happening to their own lives. With a direct and intuitive approach, she helps her clients reconnect with their authentic selves, banish painful beliefs, turn their seed of an idea into an actionable plan, and everything in between. She lives in Boston with her husband, her dog, two cats, and two ukuleles. The cats cannot play the ukuleles. Yet. Contact: jessica@stewardcoaching.com
4 Responses to “Creating Your Own Luck: A Personal Tale of Hope”
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Jessica- I love this piece- you have a fabulous “voice”- amazing. Thank you for sharing your story- keep writing- you are great at it!
Thank you for sharing. Congratulations for working through all of the challenges and triumphing! Good luck in your coaching business!