There are rules. I've followed my whole life about how to be liked, how to be good, how to be long. But recently something inside of me snapped and I realized I don't wanna be gray to make other people comfortable. So this week I'm breaking the rules. Hello everyone. Welcome back to the A Life and Color Podcast. This is episode five. I'm so excited to be here with you. this week I wanna talk about something that happened to me at work a couple of days ago. basically how did we get here? How did we get here? We've talked about the grayness. We've talked about trying to find our colors. We've talked about why it is important and, how we lose track of some of our most important parts. But how did we get to a place where we are always feeling so muted and devoid of excitement and cheer and passion and color. So here's what happened. I was at work, I work from home a lot of the time. I was on a video call with people that I haven't worked with before. everybody on the call was extraordinarily, ugh. Passionate about what we were talking about. They were just getting very heated and, you know, sharing information with each other. A lot of it was assumptions and rumors and they were really into this and I was sitting there thinking like, man, this is getting very heated and also. I don't care about this at all. Like I, but okay, so I was not feeling passionate and heated about that topic, but I was feeling pressured to look like I was, to make faces to not along, to smile, to laugh at some people's jokes, and it all felt very, inauthentic. I felt like I was performing and I also was watching the clock and waiting for it to end. No wonder. And I really just started to wonder like, how did we get here? Because I am positive that the people on that call, were not actually that excited, but they have indoctrinated themselves so thoroughly into this role that they're playing, that their energy feels like it is spinning around this one role, this one job. And so they were all in, and I was sort of all out. Maybe I should have been in. It just didn't feel like an important call. It didn't feel like a conversation that was going to go anywhere, and it didn't feel like anything worthwhile was gonna come out of it. And yet there was all of this energy being poured into this one interaction. So I was just thinking like, how the hell did we end up here? Let me tell you a little bit about my story. So I started out as a music major, but one year in all of the ear training and the, all of the technical training that you have to go through to be a music major, it's very challenging. It trained my ear in a way that I couldn't just listen to a piece of music and enjoy it. I was hearing all of the details, potentially flaws, and I couldn't just back away. It became challenging to kind of back away and just hear the song for what it was instead of hearing all of the small parts, and I didn't wanna lose that joy of music. I switched to business for a semester, but that wasn't really, I felt like I could do business no matter what I majored in. So then I chose psychology because I was very interested in psychology. But then it occurred to me you can't do anything with psychology unless you go to grad school. But you can still go to grad school for psychology if you major in something like math and statistics, which is what I ended up doing. My family, we are all musicians and they're all english and history majors and so when I said I wanna major in math, I think everybody's eyes crossed. And they were like, what are you talking about? Why would you do that? But I did, and I also enjoyed that. People seemed to be kind of impressed when I said I was gonna be a math major. Once I graduated. I went to work for my dad and his company for a few years. Um, it was a kitchen remodeling company. It was totally different from anything I had ever done before. I didn't have any business experience and I was helping to run the business, so I learned a ton. It was really a crucible experience trying to learn all the aspects of running a business. And I was surrounded by people who were different from me. It was just a bunch of men out in the shop building and finishing kitchen cabinets, and it was a little like working with a bunch of sailors. They did not, speak in a way that I heard people speak before. They did not behave in a way that I had seen people behave before. They didn't treat me like anyone had been, treated me before. So I learned a lot in all directions during that experience. I think that was a very humanizing experience for me. Then I went into finance after that. And then I ended up in, consulting, which led me to data science and ai, which is what I've been doing ever since. All of those experiences taught me so much, but every single one of those experiences gave me a box to sit in to fit myself into in order to belong. So at the kitchen company, I had to sort of shed my scared little girl who didn't know what to do with the dirty, smelly men who were yelling at each other in the shop on the other side of the wall from my office. I had to get comfortable being in a space that was physically dirty because it was just sawdust everywhere and it smelled like lacquer thinner. And it was just a different world and I wanted to fit in. In some ways it was very freeing because I let go of a lot of parts of myself that I think were holding me back a bit from enjoying life. I had a lot of preconceived notions about what was right and what was wrong I had a lot of ideas in my head that were not put there by me so that experience definitely broadened my horizons in so, so many ways. And then I was in finance. It was a suit job. It was a job where I was dealing with customers, sometimes wealthy customers who expected me to look and sound a certain way. In sales training, they teach you to mirror the other person's body language. It becomes something that you do unconsciously. I still do it. I don't mean to do it, but it's like physically impossible for me to not do it now. it's something that supposed to put people at ease and make them feel like you are the same as them. so yeah, I learned to pay more attention to what everybody else was doing rather than paying attention to myself and how I wanted to sit and how I wanted to feel. that started a big shift, and then when I went to work for, the company that I ended up as for consulting, every client is different and they all have a different expectation for how they want you to sound, how polished you're supposed to be, what you're supposed to be wearing. it all becomes very external facing, external focused. I am always thinking about what is the appropriate thing for me to be doing or saying or thinking right now. In any interaction that I'm having. And so I end up here in a place where I am mirroring the people that I'm talking to, where I am spending almost all of my energy thinking about how I am supposed to be behaving, how what I am supposed to be saying. I am not thinking about. Me and I don't feel free to express how I feel and what I wanna be doing on any given day or at any given moment throughout the day. recently in these meetings, something snapped. I sort of just felt like. No more. No more of this. Like this box is uncomfortable. I don't wanna be squished into it. It doesn't fit me. It's not the right shape, square peg, round hole. Enough enough. I matter too. There's enough going on inside of me that is different from what is happening outside. That it's time. It's time to start exploring that. for me personally, that is how I got to where I am, but I think about all the things that led up to that. I mean, think about when you're a kid, for me it started off with a lot of, oh, she is so lovely and so positive all the time, or she is always so kind and so friendly, or somebody saying directly to me like, you're, you're always so confident. How are you so confident? I don't feel confident. I remember thinking that every time someone said that to me, like, woo, I must be doing a great job pretending. But every time someone said those things about me or to me, it felt good. I like to hear those positive things about me, and I wanted to keep it going So then I would start to try to be those things all the time. Not just when I was naturally doing it or naturally feeling it, but all the time I wanna be kind, I wanna be friendly, I wanna be lovely. Who doesn't wanna be called lovely, right? I want to seem confident because I love to have an identity that feels like something I want to be, even though it doesn't feel like something authentic to me. But slowly over time, that meant that I was, I climbed right into that box on my own, all by myself. I climbed right in and sat right down like, this is the role, this is the the cage I wanna be in. I'm choosing this one. And once you're in it, you can't get out. Right. You're just stuck. There's nothing to be done. Right? No. No, that is not true. You can climb right out of that box in the same way that you climbed into it. People might react. There's always a reaction when you try to change something. That's okay. You'll react if you don't. So take your pick. You are not stuck. You are not stuck. You don't owe anybody any part of yourself, period. You don't owe that to anybody. There are parts of you that are important to share with the world, right? Once you are clear on who you are and how you feel and what you wanna be, it's important for you to find those passions and find those gifts, and find ways to share those with the world, because our collective needs everybody to be participating fully in order for all of it to work. We all need everybody's gifts, but there are parts of yourself that are just for you. You don't have to share those with anybody else and who you are and what you feel and what you're passionate about, and what gives you energy, your light, your character, your values. Your health. These are things that belong exclusively to you. You get to decide what those look like. You get to own those. Keep those for yourself. You do not have to share those with the world. I remember the first time I figured this out, I went to a therapist. One of the first times I went to see him. We did an exercise where he had me, get into a meditative state and breathe deeply and get in touch with my body. And then he had me visualize like a really bright light, coming from inside of me. And then envision it filling up every part of my body slowly bit by bit. And by the end of it, it felt like light was shooting out from under my fingertips and my toes. Like, you know that scene at the end of Beauty and the Beast where the beast is turning back into a man and the light comes out of all of his appendages. And even though he was handsome or as the beast, I'm gonna go on record and say that, it felt like that. I felt so rejuvenated. It just felt like light was exploding out of me. And I remember that he had this look on his face when I opened my eyes after all of it was done, he was like, how do you feel? And I was like, I feel like I wanna go out into the world and just spread light everywhere. And he sort of stopped me and he was like, what if you just keep that for yourself for a while? What if you don't give it away and you hold it and keep it within you? What would that feel like? What would happen? And it was, like jarring to me because my instinct is always give it away. what can I give? What can I go and contribute? It was the first time that I had really thought about keeping something that was part of me for myself, not because of anybody else, not because somebody else asked me to or told me to, but because it belongs to me. It feels good within me and I wanna keep it for just me. It felt kind of selfish. It felt sort of anticlimactic, right? Like that's boring. There's no resolution there. I wanna do something. I want there to be like a, an ending where there's someone else involved. And it took me a minute to understand that that is a resolved storyline. It's okay to have things just for you. That are yours. You don't need other people's input or opinions or approval or praise or even their eyes on it. No one else needs to be involved at all in something for it to be valuable to you. When you're showing up for anything, really, your children, your family at work, at the grocery store, at church, at wherever, one, you don't have to carefully consider what it is that you are going to be or how you're gonna show up. You can just show up as you, that's okay. At every juncture in your life, at every interaction, you should keep all of those things that we talked about, your values, your boundaries, your health, your wellbeing, your energy. Keep that at the forefront of everything that you do, and it will provide a backbone, a foundation upon which everything else that you do wanna give to the world that you should be sharing with everybody else, it can perch on top of those things so that you're not sacrificing yourself in order to give to everybody else. Both of those things can exist. You can maintain yourself and you can give to the world. In fact, it is very difficult to give to anybody else if you are not maintaining yourself and keeping your own foundation sturdy. It's so important that you keep for yourself whatever it is that you need to be you. And for a lot of us, for myself included that concept of me, like what I need to be me, what I need, that I, that me was undefined for a very long time. I knew what other people considered me to be. I knew what I wanted to be. I knew how people reacted when I wasn't the things that they expected me to be and whether that felt good or bad. But the idea that there was a me, that could just be what I wanted without anybody else's consideration. That took a very long time for me to wrap my head around that and then to define that for myself, and now I hold it so dear. And now I know you can say, she is so kind and so lovely, and I am very kind and I have boundaries. I can be kind and when you cross a boundary of mine, I will tell you that that's not acceptable. I will tell you in a kind way, if you receive that as unkind, that's on you. You can still be kind and have somebody understand that you will not budge on certain things. I don't ride rollercoasters. This is a really dumb example. I don't ride rollercoasters. I don't ride any rides. I don't like them. Like Tower of Terror, people go on Tower of Terror specifically to feel that feeling in your stomach of the drop. I hate that feeling. I hate it with a passion. I don't know why anybody would pursue it, but I understand that other people love it and that's fine. Just recently, my family and I went to King's Dominion and everybody else had a great time and I held their stuff while they all went, and I went to the gift shop and I, got drinks for everybody waiting. I had fun. That's fine. I'll take some time to myself and I'll hold your stuff. I don't mind, but I'm not gonna ride a ride. This is a boundary. I'm not getting on that rollercoaster. It's just a no. And I'll tell you kindly and I will walk away and you might feel like I'm ignoring you or I'm not doing what you want me to do, and that's on you. I can be considered confident and still have days where I'm really insecure and I'm experiencing imposter syndrome. People can still consider me to be a confident person. Maybe I'm confident enough to admit to everybody that I'm not feeling confident I feel like I am, doing a job that I'm not qualified to do, or I'm about to give this presentation and I don't feel ready for it, or I feel like I'm gonna fail at something, or maybe I feel like I have failed at something that happens frequently. Confidence isn't always projecting confidence at every moment. Confidence is feeling secure in yourself so that you can just be you in any given moment. This is how you can be all things. You are not locked into that box. Climb out of that box. I had a dog named Finn, and when he was a puppy, you could lock him in a room by lining the doorway with shoe boxes. He was a German Shepherd Husky lab chow mix. Okay. Even as a puppy, he was pretty big and he could jump six feet in the air. Like when the delivery guys would come to deliver a package, he would go to the front window and literally jump the full height of the window. So this dog was not stuck in that room because you put one layer of shoe boxes across the doorway, but he thought he was, you would put them there and he would stop in his tracks and look at them and look at you like, mom, I don't know how to get over. Like, how am I supposed to get out of this room? I don't know what to do. We used to laugh so hard. He obviously eventually figured it out. But this is what it's like for us. We feel stuck in these roles and stuck in these rooms. We're not, just walk out of it, climb out of it. And if other people react to that, that's for them to handle. That's not on you. You deal with your feelings, your wants, your needs. And if you change your mind week to week on what kind of person you wanna be. Fine. You'll eventually settle into yourself. That's up to you. That's between you and yourself. Please don't let anybody convince you that you have to be one role or another role just be you. Now, there is a difference between masking where you're trying to be something that you're not, and you're trying to fill a role that you've been given that doesn't fit you. There's a difference between a mask and a filter. I am not suggesting that every part of yourself is appropriate for every moment that you find yourself in, in your life. it is important to filter yourself. When you're around children, you don't talk about all of the same topics that you would if you were around a group of adults. When you're in a professional environment, you don't talk about certain topics that are just inappropriate for a professional environment. That's a filter. But that doesn't mean that you have to become something that you're not when you're there. Don't mask yourself. It's okay to filter yourself. Now, I am not suggesting when I say that we all climb into that box ourselves, that I climbed right into that box and I closed the lid all on my own because I wanted people to think a certain way about me. I am not suggesting that we choose to mute ourselves when we do that. You're not choosing to mute yourself on purpose. you're not selecting that as a way of being. I'm saying we've basically been handed a manual that's called How to Be Okay In This World, and most of us follow it because we are hoping that it will help us to belong, that it will help everybody to like us, that we will be accepted into the group and we won't have to deal with rejection or conflict or judgment or any of those things. I think this is why it happens. This is how we got here. Everybody is just trying to belong. We are trying to follow the rules that we've been taught slowly over time throughout our entire lives, from when we are children, to our first jobs, to all of the careers that we've had, to all of the roles that we are filling. They come with rules, they come with opinions. And we are all just trying to make it through every day, on every level. We are just trying to make it through and it's complicated and it is difficult and sometimes it's painful and it's usually uncomfortable, but this is where it happens. But here's the problem. The danger is that it's not just gray. It's not just dull and numb and boring. It's that we start to forget that color and joy can be fierce. Softness can be strong. We're allowed to be different. We're allowed to be loud and radiant and tender and unpolished human. We're allowed to be human and I think we forget that when everything goes gray, we start to think there is one way to be. There are one set of rules. This is how everybody expects all of us to behave and to be. And so we'll be that and that way we'll belong, this is how we end up in a world where we are holding everybody to unreasonable standards. And maybe we are ridiculing and ostracizing and exiling people for not following those rules when those people are just showing up in a different way from us. it's dangerous. I think gray makes us spectators in our own lives. I think we check the boxes. I think we smile. When someone says smile, we nod along as they're talking and they're asking questions, and we do everything that we're supposed to do, but underneath it, we're gone. We're gone. Where is the color? Where is that life? We're not alive. We're palatable, but we don't recognize ourselves, and that is the cost. Like I said, something inside of me has snapped. Something in me is screaming no more, and it's not allowing me to just melt back into the role where I can sit on those conference calls and just smile and nod and be okay with it. I can muster a smile, I can nod along, but on the inside everything is screaming. Stop it, cut it out. That is not real. That is not you. Here are 10 other things you could be doing with your attention right now. It's not this, I do think that your body speaks to you. And I think it's very quiet at first, and if you're listening you can hear it, but you have to be listening very closely. And if you don't listen, it gets louder and louder and louder until eventually it's basically screaming at you, not hear, not this, not these people, not this role. Stop doing what you're doing. Find something else. So this is where we are now. This is where I am now. I am definitely in some kind of a transition from one career to the next, hopefully in a way that will allow my days to look more like I want them to look. That's really what you're asking, right? When you're trying to figure out what your career should be, what your job should be, it's what do you want your days to look like? Start to finish, what would the perfect day look like? I've been thinking a lot about that. That's a big question, and it feels like a big decision. All I have right now is that it's not this. And that doesn't mean it's not these activities that I'm doing, it's just not showing up the way that I'm showing up. It can't be that my body won't let me do that for very much longer. So here's what I have decided. Because I will no longer show up in a way that is not authentic to me. I no longer want to be doing things that don't come naturally to me. And I definitely don't wanna be doing things just because somebody else expects me to be doing those things, or based on someone else's expectations. So here are the rules I will no longer be following. This is a decision that I have made. I think it's a decision my body made for me. These are the rules I will no longer follow. These are rules that I was taught. Over time, I've been collecting these rules my whole life. I will no longer believe that productivity is proof of my worth. I am not gonna base my value on how productive I am or how quickly or efficiently I'm reaching someone else's goals. I don't have to be producing something. I don't have to be achieving something. I don't have to be crossing something off of a list to be worthy and valuable to this world, to myself. I'm not doing that. I will no longer contort my voice just to be palatable for other people. I will be kind. I will be as respectful as I can, but above all else, I will be me. I will show up as me no matter who I'm with. And I'm going to pay less attention to how I am being received by the people around me. I will not be disrespectful. I'm not gonna be inappropriate. I'm not going to be offensive, but I am not going to try to be palatable. I'm just gonna be me. My voice will be what it is, and I'm gonna have faith that I, the person that I am on the inside, right down to my gooey core, is a good person. I am thoughtful and smart and interesting, and I have a lot to offer this world, and I'm gonna have faith in that, and I'm going to stop policing it. I will no longer wait for permission to live a beautiful life. I'm just gonna let that sink in. I am not gonna wait for permission to choose beauty over productivity, over toil, over responsibility. I won't do it. These are things I want. These are things that I deserve, that we all deserve just by existing. We all deserve beauty, and I do think that beauty is a form of resistance. I think that it's a way that you can push back against the forces that are asking us to do things that don't feel good to us. I don't need anyone else's permission to go sit in my garden. I don't need anyone else's permission to spend time painting. I spent my whole career doing finance and math and data science, and I am starting a company that is based on color and light and art, and beauty, and music, and books, philosophy. These are things I wanna spend my time on, and I'm not gonna wait. I don't need permission. I don't need a certain amount in my bank account. I'm gonna trust the universe because this feels right. This is where my energy wants to take me. I'm gonna follow it. I will no longer believe that softness is weakness. Softness is one of the strongest and hardest things that we do in any moment. When anger rises, when frustration rises, when you feel like you need to rise up and be strong, the ability to soften in a moment of conflict being kind to both sides of the issue is not weakness any more than when your child comes in and is yelling and being disrespectful at you, kneeling down and just giving them a hug. That's not weakness. That's what they need in that moment. That's strength. That's showing up in a different way and solving a problem. Just because I'm not yelling back at you does not mean I am a weak opponent. I will no longer confuse the two. And finally, I am no longer going to put numbness before color just to fit in. I'm not gonna show up and pretend to be gray, just so that people won't make fun of me, or just to make friends or just so that there won't be any kind of reaction. Nope. I am gonna be me. I'm gonna be colorful and a bright and shining, cheerful light, who also is sometimes angry and sad and tired and anxious, and not confident. Am gonna be all of those things, every single color. I am not gonna put numbness before color just to fit in. I wanna know what rules are you ready to release? Those are my rules that I'm not following. What rules are you gonna release? If you're willing to share, send them to me at Laura at a life in color.co, L-A-U-R-A, at a life in color.co. But if you're not, that's fine. Write them down. Burn them. Bury them in the soil. Paint over them, color over them with a sharpie. Rip'em up. Listen to your body. Check in with your body. Listen to your body when you're in certain scenarios and figure out which rules you're following that don't feel right. You are not stuck. The shoe boxes are not real. You're allowed to walk right on out of the gray and into something radiant and imperfect and totally alive, and I hope you do. Alright, I think we're gonna wrap there this week. Thank you again for showing up for this episode of a Life and Color, the podcast. I'm so grateful and I can't wait to see. This new world that we're gonna create when we all show up with our authentic selves. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful week, and I'll see you next time.