Simply Authentic...Your Soul Voice is Calling. Be Your Own Biggest Fan

Be Your Own Biggest Fan Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from. –Seth Godin I didn’t know who Seth Godin (American writer, speaker, entrepreneur) was when I first saw that quote. To date I haven’t read one of his books or heard him speak. Yet I immediately wrote that quote down and tacked it up on the bulletin board by the desk in my home office…as a reminder. Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, maybe you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from. Writer Robert Louis Stevenson once said, “There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world.” So, why is it many people neglect their own happiness? Raise your hand if you like being around miserable people. (Maybe if you’re a shrink, right, because then you get to try and help them and make money at the same time…?) Yet I’m guessing if we were in a room together, no hands would go up. What I mean by be your own biggest fan is you’re giving other people a gift by choosing to honor your own happiness. In the home, happy parents help create happy children. Let’s take it to a global level. Unhappiness is at the core of terrorist activity and war. One country won’t likely attack another unless it is deeply unhappy about certain treatment or social structures. I love Sarah Ban Breathnach’s Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy so much I am going through it for a third time this year, as I’m writing this. I start every morning by making a cup of tea with two tea bags – one a black British blend, the other a mint. I’ve learned this is one of my favorite ways to make tea. When I have fresh peppermint, or better yet spearmint, in my garden plot, it’s especially delightful. Then I sit down with my book and read my daily Simple Abundance excerpt. In this wonderful book, which is partially what inspired me to start writing one like it of my own, Ban Breathnach emphasizes the importance of learning, knowing and living one’s own preferences. She writes, “Most women know what makes their parents, partners or children happy. But when it comes to an awareness about the little, specific things in life that bring a smile to our faces and contentment to our hearts, we often come up short.” I know a woman whose husband became huffy at the dinner table when she decided to make a portobello mushroom dish she favored for dinner one evening rather than cooking a family favorite as she usually did. Yet ignoring our own preferences, needs and wants serves no one in the long term. At the best we squander a precious lifetime without getting to know ourselves well – at the worst we become resentful, angry and bitter. And no one enjoys being around resentful, angry, bitter people. I point you to the very end of Chapter 21, in Elizabeth Gilbert’s luminous Eat, Pray, Love. Thankfully, this precious scene also made it into the movie with Julia Roberts: “I walked home to my apartment and soft-boiled a pair of fresh brown eggs for my lunch. I peeled the eggs and arranged them on a plate beside the seven stalks of the asparagus (which were so slim and snappy they didn’t need to be cooked at all.) I put some olives on the plate, too, and the four knobs of goat cheese I’d picked up yesterday from the formaggeria down the street, and two slices of pink, oily salmon. For dessert—a lovely peach, warm from the Roman sunlight. For the longest time I couldn’t even touch this food because it was such a masterpiece of lunch, a true expression of the art of making something out of nothing. Finally, when I had fully absorbed the prettiness of my meal, I went and sat in a patch of sunbeam on my clean wooden floor and ate every bite of it, with my fingers, while reading my daily newspaper article in Italian. Happiness inhabited my every molecule. Until—as often happened during those first months of travel, whenever I would feel such happiness—my guilt alarm went off. I heard my ex-husband’s voice speaking disdainfully in my ear: So, this is what you gave up everything for? This is why you gutted our entire life together? For a few stalks of asparagus and an Italian newspaper? I replied aloud to him. ‘First of all,’ I said. ‘I’m very sorry, but this isn’t your business anymore. And secondly, to answer your question…yes.’” This (while you may not need to get divorced to experience it) is what it means to be your own biggest fan. Your happiness is not a frivolous, expendable luxury. The pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right guaranteed by the Declaration of Independence. But we have to be willing to pursue it. Ultimately, genuine happiness can only be realized once we commit to making it a personal priority in our lives. This may be new behavior for some of us and a bit intimidating. Be gentle with yourself. It will all unfold. Today you may not be familiar with the happiness habit. But like any new behavior, happiness can be learned. –Sarah Ban Breathnach Authentically Yours, Laura