This covers days 12 and lucky 13 of 30 for the Hypnotherapy Project, which I'm collaborating on with Los Angeles-based hypnotherapist Greg Beckett. You can read more about this experiment, what motivated it and what we hope to accomplish here.
Here's my big, stupid confession: I want more than this.
Not that I'm not happy with my life, my work, or my current location: I love many, many aspects of all three, and over the course of the past five years I've turned into one of those annoying people who pretty much bound out of bed most mornings, excited to see what the day will bring. True, I have been very fortunate in that there have not been a lot of "tests" since the Job Years, that stretch from 1992 with colossal amounts of illness, death and the Trifecta of Worry, relationship/job/money strife. Since 2002, I've mainly dealt with garden variety annoyances like fear, heartbreak and petty illness. (Well, except for the Crohn's onset, my dad dying, his widow doing a little creative redistribution with our inheritance under cover of night, and a subsequent two-year lawsuit. But hey, into every life etc., right?)
So I've gotten to a place where my world is full of good challenges and lovely people. But in a lot of ways, I now understand that I've done it by making my world smaller, especially my ambitions. For most of the past five years, all I've focused on is being healthy and being happy: what those two things meant to me, and what the best ways were (and weren't) of getting there.
Over the past 10 or 12 months, things have started shifting. Now I can no longer deny that my ambitions have grown, and if they're not the same stupid ones as "make a sh*load of money and VP by 30" or "become beloved film superstar and host SNL", they're no smaller, in some ways, at least, from where I stand now.
I've gone on record as saying I'd like to be earning my living with words in five years: mostly writing, with some speaking mixed in. Moreover, I want to do it without giving up the freedom I have now to pick and choose the jobs I want, so in some ways it's an even more insane dream than obscene corporate or theatrical success. I mean, any major dude will tell you that writing books is a fool's game, and according to Eventful, people aren't exactly clamoring to hear me speak.
But I have a vision, a goal, and even a location! (see above), so by gum, I'm putting Team Communicatrix on the case. Yesterday, Greg took me on a journey to see what that end result might look and feel like; today, he made me a recording so I can start working on the goal from the inside out as well as the outside in.
Because here's what I know about goals: the more you connect the place you want to get to with the passion that drives it, the faster the obstacles fade away.
What's your dream? Where do you want to go today? Tomorrow? In ten years...?
xxx c
Image of me in paradise by The BF, released under a Creative Commons license.