Patty provides updates on the projects she has in the works. Her book (and why it’s different from what she originally planned) and her card deck are both in the final editing phases.
Find out what sent Patty to her go-to coping solution – chocolate! It’s related to putting yourself out into the world, and what she calls a “pleasure deficit.”
Patty’s perfectionist tendencies showed up in the book-editing process. Find out how this discomfort showed up for her. You’ll also hear how she realized that it’s all part of feeling safe.
How does this show up for you?
Discomfort is part of life – but how often do you commit to bringing comfort to yourself? Does thinking about this sound scary or fun? Sometimes it may be both! Patty breaks down how she addresses this and how you can commit to comfort in ways that are simple and easy.
If you are feeling stagnant or stuck there is likely something that you are meant to share with the world. Find out how you can address this in a way that will make you feel safe, and ready to take the next step.
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TRANSCRIPT
0:00:04.3 S1: Welcome to the space for magic podcast where people who are led by their hearts come to learn the secrets to receiving all the gifts the Universe has for us. I’m your host, Patty Lennon. I’m an ex-Type A corporate banker turned intuitive coach. Using a blend of common sense brain science and just a dash of magic, I’m here to help you create abundance in every area of your life and business. Welcome.
0:00:36.5 S2: Hey, there Patty here. Welcome to this episode of the space for magic podcast. Today, I’m gonna talk to you a little bit about what’s going on behind the scenes in my world, so I am in the process of getting my manuscript ready for publishing, so working with the publisher, the editors on the manuscript as well as really nailing down the details of our Oracle card deck that’s being released in July. So the book is gonna come out in October, and the oracle card decks coming out in July. And what I’m finding is putting ourselves out in the world, putting myself out in the world is bringing up stuff, and I always find this fascinating because I really try and be transparent, and I say try because there are certain things that I’m just at any given point, in time, I’m not ready to share. Certainly, if they have to do with my kids, I’m not going to share them, and so sometimes describing what’s going on for me is limited because it… Be affected by them. Right, so I’m not gonna share that. And then sometimes I’m not 100% sure yet, I’m ready to share.
0:01:47.2 S2: And the rule of thumb I use is something I heard Brene Brown say at a TEDX gathering a few years back, where she was asked, How do you know what you can share from the stage, and he said, If I need the audience to be okay with what I’m sharing, I don’t share it, I need to be in a place where whether the audience receives it and has an opinion about it and has a reaction to it is not… Doesn’t affect me. And so I use that same barometer, I thought it was an excellent guide post, and so sometimes I’m not sharing things because I don’t think I’m ready, it may just put me out just a little bit farther than uncomfortable being… And you know, I know there’ll come a point in time where I can share it or writing a book at the same time that I’m publishing an oracle card deck, to me, they were sort of complementary processes when I conceptualize them… Certainly the Oracle car deck and the journal that’s already out or meant to complement the book when it was originally envisioned. I had shared last year that I had finished the manuscript back in April, and what ultimately happened was it was a memoir, and there was too much in there that I wasn’t prepared for my children to read yet, so they had the time we were heading we’re just a month into the pandemic, they were at the time, 12 and 14, and I just felt like some of the stories, although they weren’t outrageous, I just felt like they didn’t need one extra surprise, and so with my publisher’s help, I restructure the book to be a non-fiction book, which is probably a better book anyway, because where the goal of the original memoir was really to say, Here’s the journey I took to get to this place from being this type A person, strict catholic, conservative, unconscious.
0:03:46.4 S2: To being in this place of really open to the space for Magic, and the goal of the book was really to give the reader in which I hope will be you a feeling of possibility and a feeling that you don’t need to have some… You’ll go into an Amazon jungle and drink some crazy stuff that makes you lose your mind to have an opening, a spiritual opening, and to suddenly have life start to become more magical because really it was everyday events, not common events, but regular people events. The death of my mother, the choosing to leave corporate and go out on my own as an entrepreneur, it was these fundamental shifts in my life that really created these openings, it wasn’t that I took a journey somewhere into a mountain or anywhere else that created this space for Magic, and so I thought the story of it would be helpful, but now that we’ve restructured as a non-fiction book, it’s really more helpful because rather than just telling the story, it gives the reader things to do along the way, things to think about, reflections on their own life. And I’ve done my best to model other non-fiction books I really enjoy, which are ones that don’t require a ton of homework, right.
0:05:08.0 S2: If I get to the end of a chapter in a book that I’m reading, no matter how fabulous the book is, no matter how much I love the author, no matter how much I wanna master the topic, if I’m doing 10 minutes of work at the end of each chapter, I’m gonna probably put it down after three or four chapters, that’s just how I am, or despite what they tell me at the beginning to do everything in the order it comes, I’m just gonna read the book and not do that work. So the books I really enjoy are ones that maybe at the end of a chapter might say, What do you think about this or have you considered this, or it just gives you a moment to pause and consider things and integrate information, but not make it a job. I never wanna produce a book that’s a job, and I think we’ve done a good job so far, there’s a lot of work still to be done on the manuscript over the next six weeks that we’re in the editorial process… For sure. Just to make it flow better. And the first step to that was to put it in the hands of what are called early readers, now, this is new for me, early readers can either be paid or the people who do this who don’t know you, and you just sort of ask them to read it…
0:06:19.6 S2: And you pay them for your time, or ideally, you get people who are in your community that can read it and give you honest feedback. Now, like I said, I really share a lot here, if you’ve been listening to the podcast for any amount of time, you know, I don’t hold a lot back. So I expected that the vulnerability that I know some authors feel putting their work out into the world really wouldn’t be the same experience for me. And boy, was I wrong. The minute, and you know, the publisher told me Go get early readers, I reached out a few people very lovingly said yes, and I appreciate them so very much, but the moment I had sent on the manuscript, I immediately started to have kind of that sweaty heart-racing feeling, I can’t say it was quite like a panic attack, but there was definitely a stress reaction in my body, and what happened for the few days following that day was I ate a significant amount of chocolate and… Why I’m sharing that is, first of all, chocolates, when I feel pretty much anything I feel stressed, I feel grief.
0:07:38.2 S2: Those people that have grief and can’t eat, not me, I talk in the olden days, I used to drink a lot of wine too, but I can’t really function too well with a lot of wine in my system or chocolate, I eat a lot of chocolate and by the I think it was the third day, I was like, Ah, something’s going on here, right? There is some need to give myself this particular form of pleasure, which is really what this chocolate is, it’s… Whenever I get to the… I talk about this actually, and the receiving school sometimes when people bring up weight and over-eating and over-drinking, I tell them those are symptoms of a pleasure deficit, and so if you’re trying to willfully stop yourself from making choices of overeating and over-drinking and making bad choices around consumption of stuff, you’ll be able to will yourself out of using them for a time, but if you don’t solve the pleasure deficit, the fact that you’re getting to a point in your day and the amount of base-level pleasure or comfort that you need to feel whole, if it’s not getting that, and you go through each day with a pleasure deficit, eventually you’re going to absorb a habit, you might go back to the overeating or over drinking if you have incredible…
0:09:00.7 S2: Will you’ll start doing something else, maybe like spending hours in front of the television, other things to counter-balance your pleasure deficit… and my go-to is chocolate. What I share on the receiving school is rather than focus on the overeating and over-drinking, is start with what’s causing the pleasure deficit and where can you fill the pleasure deficit before you get to your trigger point, whatever that point in the day. And for a lot of people, it’s at the end of the day after the final meal is over, and you know kind of the day is officially done, that’s when people start dipping into their backup pleasure source. But for some people’s 4 o’clock, whatever it is. So if you can focus more on building in systems that fill that pleasure well it’s why I’m such a big proponent of taking time off, taking long periods of time without agenda, because that’s a great way to fill that pleasure deficit, if you know your base level pleasure is at a level that’s consistent with what you need to feel whole, you’re less likely to even reach for that kind of back-fill pleasure mechanism and like mine is with chocolate.
0:10:15.1 S2: So when I got to that third day and my awareness was that I had to go out and buy a new bag of dove chocolates ’cause that’s my go-to Dove dark chocolates, and usually a bag will sit my closet for a very long time. The amount of times I go to buy a bag is so limited unless it isn’t… If I know, if I know where the sale pattern, if I have that recording in my mind, I know we’re in a crisis point, and I’ve gotta look at what’s going on, and sometimes a news and is… Sometimes it’s not super serious, it could just be… I’m working a lot more. It could be, I feel a lot of pressure. It happened a lot during the isolation period where I was just so concerned with my kids and just people I love, and… So there’s a lot of things that can cause it to happen, sometimes are out of your control, but what’s always in your control is kind of counter-balancing that and taking care of yourself, so as I stop to look at what was going on, that’s when I became aware of even putting this book in the hands of other people, and what was interesting is I don’t…
0:11:23.4 S2: It’s not the content that I’m concerned about them reading, it’s the fact that it’s not flawless, the fact that it hasn’t been edited by a structural editor, it hasn’t been content edited, it hasn’t been line edited, there’s things in it, I know me to be fixed, but the process is… You really just wanna get readers to tell you where big gaping holes are before you start fixing the smaller stuff, and that’s what this is about, but the fact that someone would be looking at something that I know isn’t yet well-written made me so uncomfortable. And that’s when I got to see, Oh, okay. So perfectionism is still a coping mechanism for me, and I just wasn’t aware of it, because a lot of the things I do in my business these days, I’ve been doing for so long that doing them well isn’t hard… Now, I am someone that will preach done is good enough, you can’t keep writing a blog post over and over and over again, in fact, even this particular podcast to record it, I was having such a time deciding what I was gonna share. I was outside, if I take my coffee outside, I’m trying to get all zen, I’m like, What is the topic that’s alive for me, I’m like, I can’t even get out of my own head around it, and I realized it’s because this week I’m gonna start sharing oracle cards with the receiving school member, so day-by-day, I’m gonna release to them images of the new Oracle card deck that’s coming and descriptions, and the thing is, this is something that has felt so alive for me and so…
0:13:00.7 S2: Right, to create this oracle card deck, and I know it’s the right thing to do it, and I know I’m so happy with what the graphic designer did on the images, and yet still the thought that it may not be perfect is really messing me up, and in fact, as what brought me to share this particular podcast episode was I was sitting outside, not even thinking I had taken an oracle card deck with me that I just got in the mail, and I just realized, Oh my goodness, in the last week, I have ordered three new Oracle card decks, which is a fairly robust ordering order for me, I usually order them when they appeal to me, I hear about them, but this is like I’ve been out hunting for deck, and it’s almost like I’m searching for decks that are gonna make me feel safe, that are gonna look like mine or feel like mine maybe, so I feel like I’m part of the club of oracle card creators. I don’t really know what I think I’m searching for. But when I looked down, I was like, Oh, something is up here. There’s something alive, and as I dove deeper into it, what I realized is that when I’m doing something new, figuring out ways to make it as good as possible and not in the good quality…
0:14:24.7 S2: That’s a great way to go about doing your work in the world, and I do… That is my goal is, but our great quality, but this is about making it perfect, making it beyond reproach, making it so that people can’t criticize it when we limit ourselves to things that are so boxed in, that we protected ourselves from criticism, our world that’s so so small, and now I raise a… In a period of growth that has come from me making commitments to produce certain things, the book, The Oracle Card Deck last year, the journal. And as soon as I put it out there to the world, I will make it happen. But it’s been so long since I’ve stretched myself like this that I forgot that this is what happens, that I get this paranoid feeling that people are gonna hate what I’ve produced and people are gonna ask for refunds by the droves, I mean refunds of a book for God’s sakes, this is where my mind goes. Right, and the thing that tamper that feeling is being perfectionist about it, it’s been so long since I did something like this, in fact, I would say the last time I did something that was this big of a stretch, it was my first conference, and that was years ago and yes, I need to sit in this discomfort, what’s wonderful is that this discomfort is really making what people in the receiving school are going through so alive for me, some of them, because some of them are stretching themselves and putting themselves so far out in a spirit of trust that they will be okay, that this really helps me connect to what’s going on inside, and so then that helps me build my tool kit on how I can help people through this, and so…
0:16:13.5 S2: Do you know where I went to is to counter-balance that kind of grasping for perfectionism or for comfort or for safety, and then shift my perspective of how can I bring comfort to myself through the common pleasure? One of the things I committed to doing was some deep stretching every day, I mean, it’s just the most delicious feeling to do deep stretching, and yet… And really, it takes like 15 minutes, and every day I get the end of the day and I’m like, Oh, I didn’t have time for that. I mean, I have plenty time. Didn’t have time for that, sitting outside on our beautiful patio, my husband opened the pool close to two months ago now, ’cause I love looking at the pool so much as opposed to a pool cover, and he does it early and partly just because we like looking at the open space and the blue water, and so if there’s a beautiful oasis outside, I haven’t been sitting out there, just doing common things, I went to a local… I found a new place that roast coffee beans, ugly, I love coffee, and so now I’m sampling different coffees, so there’s sort of this little surprise in my day, and so finding different ways to give ourselves comfort and pleasure in healthy outlets, it helps to ease that stress reaction that our amygdala sends out when it feels fear because what pleasure does is it actually tells the amygdala that you’re safe, is not crazy like the actual physiological experience, what happens with your brain chemicals, all of that, when we give ourselves comfort and pleasure in that way, it tells our brain, it’s safe, and so that is a really natural healthy way to counter balance that paranoia or that fear that comes up when you’re doing a hard thing.
0:18:06.9 S2: Now, what I will say is, if you are feeling stagnant right now if you are feeling like something is emerging that you’re meant to bring out into the world… And I know what that feeling feels like. And I realized I was having it, and I was holding off on doing these things that I’m just describing to really getting the book done and really getting the oracle cards deck done, but other times it’s been putting a conference out in the world or… While I won’t share, but there’s been things with my kids that felt like scary like it was moving away from what the common thought process was in raising your kids right now that I’m having them sleep outside and make it in a loan or anything crazy like that. Just different choices to make their parenting… My parenting of them more aligned with what I know is right for them versus what books might tell me, taking time away during a pandemic when my kids and my husband are still home and doing that for myself, all these things can put us on the edge of our own vulnerability, and I’ve put off doing this in past years because I wasn’t ready to be at this edge of my vulnerability or I was scared it…
0:19:24.6 S2: I can say that now, and I can tell you if you’re feeling stagnant or stuff, there is most likely something that is meant to come from you out into the world to change, to shift something. Maybe you’re meant to move or more locations, or change jobs, or change something, or create something, or put something of yourself out into the world that you haven’t done, and you can be telling yourself the time is not yet, but my guess is if you feel stuck or stagnant, The time has already come, and in fact, now you’re just dragging it on, and so rather than trying to get underneath what that is, what I wanna recommend you do is put some time and energy into what we bring daily comfort to you, what would bring pleasure to every day, make that your focus, because what that will start to do is it will really start to tamp down any fear impulses you’re having, and when those fear impulses start to be contained and start to slow and start to dissipate, what will emerge is the change or meant to do alongside the courage to take action on… I certainly hope that this is helpful for you.
0:20:29.5 S2: I thank you for listening. I think when I started this, I wasn’t even 100% sure what I wanted to come out of it. I just wanted to be honest with you, that stuff is going on for me that… It’s all good, right? Publishing a book, publishing an oracle card, all great, amazing things, but underneath it, there’s all this cornice and now we can have a vision for what we want to be, who we want to be, like my vision from a couple of years ago is to be an author, with books, multiple books, to have products that I use regularly, pendulums, oracle card decks, like journals, all these things, to have them out in the world, and it felt like the most amazing thing, but here I’m on the cusp of having all of this, and it feels so uncomfortable, and so just understand that the space between where you are and this dream of what is possible for you, that space in between is just filled with a lot of discomfort, and so when you feel uncomfortable… It doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong, it’s not your soul saying Stop. It’s actually proof that you are growing and expanding beyond the space you’re in, and that is a beautiful thing, and if you can just breathe through that discomfort and use the tool of adding pleasure back into your life…
0:21:52.1 S2: I know that you’re gonna find yourself in a really incredible place a month from now, three months from now, a year from… Well.
0:21:58.3 S1: And that is what I wish for you because that is the space of magic… Hey, thanks for listening. If you know someone who needs to hear this message, please share this episode with them, and if you’re feeling really generous, I’d love for you to leave us a review at your favorite podcast app, it helps us with many more people and it fills my heart with so much joy when I hear what you have to say about what I’ve shared. I’m cheering for your success, have an amazing day, and don’t forget… Always create space for magic.
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