Have you ever struggled with getting support?
Do you feel like you’re never really done with a project because you keep trying to make it perfect?
The concepts of support and perfectionism come together in a unique way. It’s not always so obvious and that’s what Patty’s sharing today.
Hear how Patty went from getting good news from her book editor (it’s done and ready for final review!) and concluded that the editor had not done a good enough job because it “should have taken more time.”
Accepting that it was in fact, good enough and ready to publish didn’t even occur to her. She interpreted it as a poor effort by the editor and a lack of support from the team.
She realized she hadn’t read it all the way through since changing from the original memoir format to a non-fiction book. Then it hit her, this is the book. The version that everyone will read.
After she read it through, she was surprised at how good it is. Patty (still) has a hard time saying that out loud about her own work. Can you relate? Yet, how many times are we our worst critic?
Is that happening to you? Do you look like you have it all together, so no one knows that you need support?
Hear how you can cultivate grace for yourself in those moments when you have to appear on top of everything? Patty breaks it down for you so you can first be aware, then make changes.
“Part of what keeps people from realizing what we need, is our fear that we’re going to let them down.”
It’s okay to need help. It’s okay to not do all the things, all the time. It’s okay to let others know how to support you.
Note: The book will be ready for pre-order soon!
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TRANSCRIPT
0:00:04.5 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.
0:00:36.7 S2: Hey there. Welcome to this episode of the space for magic podcast. I’m your host, Patty Lennon. And if you have ever struggled with either getting support or feeling like you are done with a project because you’re always trying to make it just a bit better, you’re never sure it’s quite complete, those may seem like two very different problems support versus perfectionism. They come together in a really interesting way, and I wanna talk to you about how this just happened for me. By the time this podcast reaches your ears, my book will already be in the process of being laid out and printed because it’s got to be available pretty soon, and late September will be available for pre-sale, and then on the hard copy of available in October. And the book Make Space for Magic is really a journey that I’ve taken over my life to get to this place where I can let magic in because I couldn’t always… And when I decided to write the book, my main mission was really to give you an understanding of where the dips and high points happened along the way, so you could see how very ordinary most of the experiences were that ended up creating extraordinary breakthroughs and that you don’t need a burning bush or an angel to appear to you, or for a treasure to land on your doorstep for your world to open up and be filled with the sense that you are protected and loved by the divine…
0:02:24.1 S2: By the universe, you know that everything that you desire in your heart is possible, and then how I made that happen along with stories of other people as well. So when I originally envisioned the book, I saw it as a memoir because I thought I was gonna tell the story of how I got here, once the memoir was written, which was last year, and I read it through for various reasons, didn’t feel like it was the right, book. And so we ultimately… Me and the publisher decided to re-write it, I would re-write it as a non-fiction book, the difference between them, more non-fiction is memoirs, I was essentially just story-telling, the non-fiction book, I have stories interspersed with tools and do this and this is sort of the story that supports how that worked, so it’s more of a… There’s a greater ability to take action inside each story if you choose to do that, but something that was really important to me when we shifted out of memoir into a non-fiction was that it didn’t become this kind of book where at the end of every chapter you would have to do something before you could move on.
0:03:42.9 S2: Those books really, I find for myself, are irritating for a lot of reasons, sometimes I’m just not in the mood to do something when I’m reading a book, maybe I just wanna read a book, and the books that I love the most are the books that are non-fiction, they don’t really require you to do something per se, but in the way that they’re written, they transform you, so very little for you to do and more they create these shifts of awareness of how you go about your day, and it’s those shifts of awareness that really start to shift things for you, two of my heroes in this genre, Martha Beck is the person I first learned from, and she’s the person I got my coaching certification from, but I found her long before that because I found that her books did that forming that she wrote in a way where she was giving tools, but there was a last story that brought the tools alive, and then Tosha Silver who writes in both forms, but she’s just the queen of being open and surrendering to the divine. And so when I pick up a book from either of those authors, it always takes me on this journey, and I wanted that for my book.
0:04:54.9 S2: So through the book writing process, what I found was, I was never in my heart experiencing my book like that, to meet in the beginning, it almost felt like a chapter taped to another chapter, tape to another chapter, literally held together by tape and glue. There wasn’t a flow to it, and in some cases, the editor felt that I was being really hard on myself and in other cases, the editor could see what I meant and gave me feedback and so were making adjustments. It’s been a five-month editing process, but in the last couple of rounds of edits, I hadn’t read the book straight through from start to finish, because the windows to get the edits done were tight in the midst of everything else I was doing, I was creating the oracle card deck, running, first the receiving school, and then my Mastermind. So to stop, sit back, read the book, I just didn’t have the time. So it arrived. My last round of edits, the book arrived to me and my team leads… So this is Kam, Kam is the person that coordinates all the people involved in the book, my team lead sent me, the next round of edits, and it was supposed to be copy edits then line edits then copy edits kind of fix the structure of the paragraph, and then the line edits would happen to fix the grammar mistakes, and she said, Hey, the book was in such good shape, the editor was able to do copy edits and line edits all at once, and my mind went to this horrible place, this place where…
0:06:31.5 S2: Well, did the editor give it enough time, it can’t possibly be in that good of a condition, like this idea that the book was in good condition was not something that felt right to me, and so immediately went to is the editor supporting me properly, so I sat down with the book and we just, by the way, completely unfair, because all the editors that I’ve worked with different editors through the publisher, they’ve all been wonderful, and there was no reason for me to conclude this, but this idea that it was good enough, it wasn’t… Available to me. So the only conclusion I could make was that somehow the editor was deficient, and this is, by the way, one of those ways where we see people not showing up for us enough, is we’re not getting the proper support is we can’t conclude that things are enough as they are… We just assume they need more fixing and therefore we need more support, so I down with the book and started to read it from start to finish, because at this point there was very little for me to do in the book and all of a sudden I was like, Oh, this is the final version.
0:07:40.4 S2: This is what’s gonna go out to people, and in my mind, the way I just… I’ve described it to a few people, it felt like the book was if you could picture a train and each chapter was a section of a train, like an automotive, you know, a choo-choo train, some of the cars of the train were really beautiful and sleek and modern-looking others were kind of painted and they had flowers and they were pretty and they were cool looking, but there were other cars that look kind of rusted out, and if you saw this train sort of traveling around across the horizon, you’d question. What are those rusted out cars doing amidst that training that all those cars don’t match each other, and that was sort of how I felt the book was gonna read, I read it and I was in shock that the book is good and it’s really hard, even right now, for me to say that to you, that the book is good, not just that the book does a good job teaching, but that if you were to pick it up and read it, that you’d enjoy the process of reading.
0:08:50.4 S2: I’m someone who reads a lot, so almost at any given time, except for the last year during the pandemic, I stopped reading non-fiction, it just… I couldn’t pick up anything that required, any sort of linear thinking from me, but I was mostly reading fiction, but I’m usually reading about three books a week, so I consume a lot, and so I have a high level of judgment. I know what feels good and what doesn’t, and I didn’t think my book would fall into a favorite book category, and it felt like it did, and that was so surprising to me, even now with all the work I’ve done on my journey, it’s hard for me to believe that I produce something of this quality, and I’ve shared that story with a few people, friends, a couple of people, clients, and they’ve all given me the same feedback like, Of course, of course, you did. Of course, we did, but it’s not enough course experience to me, I’m still probably my harshest critic and I’ve definitely gotten a lot better, but it’s still a journey. And there was still a piece of me that was like, Is it this good? I think it is.
0:10:07.1 S2: And for the first time, I put the book in the hands of someone who hadn’t read any version of it, this was an author, a friend of mine, who I asked her to do an advance read and if she liked it, to give me an author testimonial for the back of the book, and we still have a couple of weeks to get those blurbs back from the author, so I didn’t expect it quickly… But she emailed me the next morning and she was like, Oh my God, it is so good patty. I’m already making a change to something that was going on for her, and specifically, it was like, I really know I have to give myself more permission to rest, and this is one of the biggest messages in the book, is that so much of the magic… Even as I’m telling you this clearly I need to learn it, so much of the magic that’s available to us comes when we just stop trying so hard and we just be… And I know she wouldn’t have minced words, it was a legitimate excitement about the book, and I felt exactly the same way when I read her book eight years ago.
0:11:13.1 S2: And so I know it’s that feeling of knowing the person and then also objectively knowing they just created something good, it’s an exciting feeling, and I could feel that excitement in her and know what was so interesting was that one of her big takeaways from the book, this is a message that I put throughout the book is, for me, one of the struggles I’ve had walking his journey and letting in magic, especially when it comes to the magic of support, is that that’s always been a learning edge for me, I don’t get supported properly and I always am afraid I’m not gonna be supported properly, now, that story is changing a lot from me, but I’m still on that path, and what I’ve realized on this journey, and I talk about in the book is that part of the reason I don’t get support first of all, from the divine in the universe is just ’cause I’m still always leaning into a new level of trust, a new level of trust, but because the humans around me don’t always… Give me the support I need is because I don’t let them know that I need it.
0:12:15.7 S2: And this came through over and over and over again, and I told a story where I was at dinner with friends and my husband, and they said over and over again to me, Patty, you don’t understand, you always look like you have it all together, and that was shocking to me that happened… That dinner happened while I was writing the book, so I was very alive for me, and these people had all seen me, in very deep lows, and I was just so dumbfounded by that, and I tell you that because you… I was suspect are in a similar situation. If you don’t get the kind of support you need, what’s likely happening is you put… You may think you look like a hot mess, but to everyone else, you look like you have it all together, and this friend who has known me for so long, there’s all their friends said… She goes, I Patty that. I felt that. I do feel like you always have it all together, and always, over and over and over again, when I hear this message, it shocks me, surprises me, but also frustrates me because it feels like I need to say something or do something, and I feel like I’ve done it so differently, these last couple of years, I’ve been so transparent about all the struggle, and especially for you listening here, I want you to always understand that we’re all learning this together, there is no finish line, right, there’s not some mountain top that some of us get to…
0:13:44.9 S2: And we get freed from the human condition, and I just feel like the… I have it all together is so different than my experience, what I feel like I’ve gotten to at this point is I don’t have it all together, but I know how to… I know how to bring people into my life that will help me fill the gaps I can’t fill for myself, and I also have grace for that, the fact that I don’t have it all together where I used to not have grace for that, I used to think that there was a better version for, of me, waiting in the future that had it all together, but I’ll tell you to stop right now and just ask yourself, do you expect yourself to have it all together at least part of the time if you do… And you also feel like you don’t supported properly. I’m gonna tell you that one of the challenges that you’re facing is that If you prioritize or if you find value in having it all together, you are most likely putting forward a front… You don’t think you’re doing it, but you’re doing it that’s leaving people believing your far more together and therefore in less need of support than you actually are, and I can’t give you a clean process to help you break through this ’cause I’m still in the process of breaking through it.
0:15:10.0 S2: But what I can tell you is how does be honest with the small stuff, and what I mean by that is, if you are supposed to make dinner tonight for your family, and it just feels like it’s exhausting, you just… You can make it happen, but it just feels so hard to tell them that and just don’t make dinner, it let them eat cheerios or something, let them figure it out in the fridge, because part of what keeps people from realizing what we need is our fear that we’re gonna let them down, and you’re going to have to get used to letting a few people down or experiencing the thought that you might let them down to actually let them see where you need support. Now, that doesn’t mean you’re gonna actually let them down when you have to understand, is the way our brains are structured, like you and I, if you’re hearing me and this sounds like you, the way our brains are structured is we consider any time, we don’t need any need of someone we love, or someone we feel responsible for in the exact perfect way that we’re letting them down, when in fact, we may just be caring for ourselves and that’s okay, but we don’t understand that, our brain doesn’t understand it, so it just concludes we are letting people down, and that seems terrible, but if you could start to give yourself permission to let people down in small ways, in exchange for taking care of yourself, you will give them the ability to start to see through this…
0:16:42.9 S2: I’m really excited. I don’t have a page to give you yet for you to order the book, but I would love if you’re feeling that you would like to get your hands on this book, just understand it’s coming just a few weeks away. And for now, if you feel like maybe you don’t have enough support, end. Or you feel pressured to hold it all together, I want you to know I get you, you are not alone and I’m cheering for you, and I wrote this book for you.
0:17:12.5 S1: Much love… 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 reach 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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