More Lemonade
Digging Deeper with Allison LaMarr…
I must start off by saying THANK YOU for sharing all of your responses to last week’s discussion on our Perfect Imperfections. I love hearing your personal insights, and I wasn’t sure if I should laugh or cry at some of your stories. I’m so glad to know that we’re all on this journey together.
I don’t know about you, but this week promises to be another crazy, wild week in the LaMarr household. Tomorrow I begin a seven-day stretch of teaching workshops across North America, and I’m so excited about the material we’ll be covering and the people I’ll get to spend time with that it honestly can’t get here quickly enough. But yesterday, I was reminded yet again that things seldom go as planned.
Around 2 o’clock yesterday afternoon my throat began to hurt and within thirty minutes my voice was completely gone. For someone who talks for a living, this is not good. I had to cancel an entire day of coaching calls, which I absolutely loathe doing. In fact, I think I’ve only ever done it once before in the past seven years. All the while I’m thinking, “I absolutely can not get sick right nowI’ve got too many people counting on me over the next week.” Then around 8, I began to feel even worse, with cold chills and body aches. As I laid shivering in bed in my long PJs and socks, under a 40-pound blanket with a winter scarf around my neck, Vick’s Vapor Rub in all the wrong places, cuddling my bag of Hall’s like it was a teddy bear, and watching the steam rise from the humidifier next to the bed, I couldn’t help but laugh. What a contrast between this scene and the one with my little black dress on the red carpet with James just a week before. 
So far today, I’ve tried a hot steam shower, herbal tea with honey and lemon, cough drops, and gargling salt water to try and kick this throat and voice problem. I’m not sure if it’s the pollen in the air or that I caught my son’s cold, so I’ve been going back and forth between allergy and cold medicine just to make sure I’ve got my bases covered. None of them seem to be working as fast as I need them to, so if you have any proven ideas, please send them my way!
This morning, as I sat here with my hot cup of lemon tea getting ready to start typing, I thought, “Ok, Allison. Time to take this big pile of lemons and make some lemonade.” And it reminded me of one of our past Digging Deeper discussions on that very topic, and I’d like to share some of it with you again today.
I want you to know that it’s OK to acknowledge the fact that life isn’t perfect, that you’re not perfect, that your situation may be a mess. Whether you created the mess or you had absolutely no control over the mess that was handed to youeverything is going to be OK. In fact, things can be better than OK, fine, or alright. Things can become greatbetter than greattruly phenomenal in your life, either once again, or for the first time ever. Even if you’re feeling paralyzed by fear, apathy, or doubt. Even if you’re having trouble believing that true, long-term change is even really possible because the speakers in your mind are blaring the same old defeating broken record of your past at such a loud volume that you can’t even seem to concentrate on anything else. You can move on to a new song, a great song on the soundtrack of your life. But it’s time to make lemonade.
It’s time to take those lemons in your life and create a new recipe for the most delicious lemonade you’ve ever tasted in your life. In fact, this new lemonade recipe is going to be so good that you may be able to sell it for a fortune. What kind of lemons are you starting with? Are they some of the ones we’ve just discussed? Really evaluate your situation. There are several types of lemons out there that make absolutely legendary lemonade. Maybe you’re starting with regret lemons—regret over a lost relationship or opportunity. You could be staring at lost-time lemons. You know the typeyou’re not exactly a spring chicken anymore and you’re beating yourself up for not getting your act together sooner. Lonely lemons are a special hybrid, you could be absolutely all alone and want someone to share your life with more than anything on earth, or you could be surrounded by supportive loved-ones and still feel like a stranger in your own home. Then there are guilt-lemons—you’re struggling with a sense of guilt over something you did, or something you should have done but didn’t. Are you familiar with burden-lemons? These come when every thing is riding on whether you make this workwhen everyone around you is counting on you to succeed. Or, you may have mourning-lemons—you’ve lost someone very close to you and the pain is so unbearable that you can hardly breathe. There are also anger-lemons. You may be consumed with anger—either at yourself or someone else for a terrible decision. Finally, there is a very special variety of lemon called the what’s-wrong-with-me-lemon. If you’re not familiar with this one, it’s the one where everything is fine in your situation. There is literally nothing holding you back. It’s the “there is no reason on this earth why I shouldn’t be succeeding, but I just can’t seem to make it happen” lemon.
Once you’ve identified the ingredients to your new earth-shattering lemonade recipe, then we can start to make the magic happen. So, here is what I want you to do. Between now and next Wednesday, I want you to make a list of the changes you want to create in yourself. Literally, starting from the inside-outwhat would make you a better you? This isn’t goal setting; we’re not making dream boards or envisioning what our perfect world would look like. We’re deciding who we want to be and become within this less-than-perfect situation we’re living in. We can’t control the weather, the economy, or even the state of affairs in our own home all the time, but we can control who we are and how we respond to the world around us. And that will oftentimes become the catalyst to every other result that has seemed to elude us for so long. Here are a few examples to help you get started. Maybe you want to develop patience for people and situations. Perhaps you want to wean out judgment, negativity, and criticism of others and replace them with kindness, compassion, and genuine love. It may be time to stop taking your own frustrations out on the people you care about most. Are you getting the idea? Hopefully a few of your own are popping into your mind as well.
If you’ll accept my challenge this week and really dig deep into who you want to become, then next week we’ll do a little reverse engineering. This is going to be fun. Making lemonade is always fun. We may get sticky, and it may sting a little in the open wounds, but the end result promises to be very profitable.
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