Do Not Hide Your Own Light
"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage" -ANAIS NIN
We have reached a time around this planet that calls on our individual courage and creativity more than ever before.
Having some group or government help you make it through the dark night may be a successful political sales pitch, but it will be YOUR OWN LIGHT that leads the way for you.
Many people think that courage is an outdated concept that now only applies to the military or sports or the terminally ill. Others vilify the idea that the individual human being personally creates success or failure.
I have decided to form a group of people, a network, or a club, if you will ... a circle of individuals who stand for individual freedom. Freedom from what? Freedom from self-victimization. Freedom from the inner Velcro of thought clusters that coagulate into belief systems that have that individual use his or her precious mind for nothing but worrying about the anxious future. Freedom from being a constant victim of circumstance.
Freedom from fear. Freedom from the fruitless quest to impress others in order to get money and appreciation. Freedom. Freedom to create.
And then create again and again!
That's the freedom I want to inspire, so I'm starting a network for it, worldwide. A circle for individual success. I wouldn't mind if it grew to a billion people. A billion fearless people not afraid to reinvent themselves every single morning.
I wrote the book Reinventing Yourself with this in mind. Am I trying to sell you that book by saying that? No. Email me and I'll give it to you. It's a book about being a victim, and only because I wasted my life as a victim (for more years than most of you reading this have been alive.)
And to say you are a courageous individual does not mean that we are not all one. Both realities, when harmonized, lift each other to the heavens.
I want to devote my life to this group of individuals, who take individual responsibility for their success and happiness. And who are willing to, now, finally, after waiting so long, just wake up each day and GO FOR IT.
In Reinventing Yourself I talk about my experience years ago with my daughter Stephanie.
In order for us to learn to be owners of the human spirit, it helps if we know what being an owner looks and feels like. It helps to have a picture.
I remember a few years ago when I gave two of my daughters a picture.
Margie and Stephanie were both rehearsing for school singing assignments. Margie was in 6th grade singing a school choir solo of a song from Beauty and the Beast, and Stephanie was rehearsing for the junior high school talent show, in which she was singing a Mariah Carey song called "Hero."
Both girls asked me to listen to their rehearsals, and I did, and I told them that they sounded good enough musically. Both girls had good voices and were hitting the notes, but something was missing: the spirit-the vital principle-the animating force.
I told them it was okay to let loose a little. To really get into it. I recommended that they start to over-rehearse. To rehearse enough times to reach a state of ownership of the song. To get that feeling that the song was all theirs. Flowing out of them naturally, powerfully.
Margie pinned a piece of paper to the wall of her bedroom and made a mark on it every time she sang her song. She sang it over, and over, and over.
Stephanie also rehearsed more and more, and still her song was coming out tentative and prissy, held way back.
But they both pushed on.
Finally, Margie's concert came and she was great. She stood out when her solo came because she sang with fire and force, whereas the other girls and boys that night were like little cautious robots. The extra rehearsals had given Margie ownership.
Next up was Stephanie's talent show, and things still weren't right with her song. Her rehearsals still weren't taking it anywhere.
So I got an idea. I went to a video store and found a used copy of a musical documentary of Janis Joplin's life. It contained a concert performance that I had been lucky enough to be present at personally-her performance at Monterey Pop Festival with her band Big Brother and The Holding Company.
At the time of the concert I was stationed at the Presidio of Monterey in the U.S. Army. I was there that late afternoon sitting by myself in a fourth row seat when Janis blew a hole in the music world with her performance of "Ball and Chain." The moment is also captured in the film Monterey Pop as Mama Cass Elliot is seen in the same audience in a reaction shot to Janis Joplin, her mouth gaping in awe.
Janis Joplin was on fire that day. I never saw anything like it. None of today's feisty, angry female rockers quite have the exact spirit, because Janis wasn't as angry as she was, well, on fire.
I put the videotape in for Stephanie and Margie to watch, and I'd cued it up to the performance of "Ball and Chain." We watched together, and as usual, I got goose bumps and tears in my eyes when I watched it.
I got that same feeling I always get when I see the ownership spirit. I got it when I saw the early, young Elvis. I used to get it watching a lyrically insane football player named Chuck Cecil play football. I've gotten it watching Michael Jordan play basketball with the flu and still outplay the whole court. Or watching Alvin Lee and Ten Years After at
Owners of the spirit are beautiful losers. They risk all. They are losers because they have lost all fear of embarrassment. They have lost all inhibition. They have lost all concern for what other people might think.
Stephanie's eyes grew a little wider as Janis Joplin sang on. The passion and abandon and power in that one small woman was something that only a corpse would be unmoved by. When the song was over, the video showed Mama Cass mouthing the word "wow" just as Stephanie was saying, "Wow."
While I was putting the tape away, I told Stephanie, "There are times in life when you know you have a chance to really go for it. You are a great singer, so I know you're going to sing your song very well in the show. You have to decide for yourself how much you're going to go for it. You are never who you think you are. You can be anyone you want. When you're singing, you might remember Janis Joplin."
The night of the talent show was fun and lighthearted. I had all but forgotten about my Janis Joplin lecture with Stephanie, and I was just there to enjoy the show and see her sing.
After a few acts in which the performers showed varying degrees of talent and self-consciousness, it was Stephanie's turn. She had a compact disc of the background music and background vocals to the song "Hero" and she stepped out on stage in a black dress and began the song as her friends in the audience in the gym cheered and clapped to encourage her.
Her voice was a little weak and nervous at the start, although right on pitch as she softly sang through the first verse, looking out at the crowd and occasionally smiling with self-consciousness. As her song continued to build, I saw something start to change in Stephanie. She stomped her high-heeled shoe forward as the song took the turn into the last verse and she was no longer smiling. Her voice grew louder and louder and you could tell that the audience no longer existed for her. It was just the song. I began to get tears in my eyes and I could feel my heart race and my throat tighten, and I remember thinking, "She's going for it, she's going for it."
Stephanie rounded the corner into the last chorus in full possession of the song, sending it through her spirit and out into the auditorium in a way that I'd never heard her sing before. The kids in the audience jumped to their feet and raised their hands and started screaming, but Stephanie's voice soared beyond them, above it all, living only for itself as the song came to an end among the loudest sustained cheers of the evening.
Even grownups were on their feet at the end, knowing that they had seen a moment they themselves may not have lived in a long while-a moment of the human spirit on fire.
I turned to my friends and family and said, "Wow." I was inspired. I'd shown Stephanie Janis Joplin, and then Stephanie showed me Stephanie. The trick is to pass it on.
Oliver Wendell Holmes observed, "Most people go to their graves with their music still in them." He was right, most people do. But that's because they've never heard that music. They simply don't know it's there.
There was nothing in the CIRCUMSTANCE itself that caused Stephanie to find her spirit. The whole point of watching the Janis Joplin video was to show her that it can be invented.
You can tap into the spirit in yourself. Any time you want. It's always there. Stephanie doesn't have anything that you don't have. Janis Joplin didn't have anything that Stephanie didn't have.
The next time you see the spirit in someone else, don't just admire it; think of how to do your own version of it. Don't envy it; duplicate it.
Talk to yourself. Start thinking about it. Practice saying, "I can do that!" every time you see someone do something great. Most people say, "Wow, I could never do that."
They've built a deep neural pathway with that negative affirmation. By saying, "I could never do that," they deepen the illusion that they are stuck in something mediocre, that they are stuck being someone mediocre.
You can set yourself free by how you talk to yourself about your capabilities. The greatness you see in others is in you. I promise you that you can find it inside you, no matter who you are.
No matter who you've invented yourself to be. You can reinvent yourself. And I recommend that you do it daily.
Stephanie saw herself in Janis. You will see yourself in Stephanie. Someday I will see myself in you. The trick is to pass it on.
Here's the video of Ball and Chain...
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=mGJynZNr7rk
Steve Chandler, author of Reinventing Yourself
Copyright 2008
