My Big Confession

Posted in Focused Living, Mindful Moment, Regret-Free Living | 7 comments

As I mentioned in my last post, the past year has been a challenging time for me and I’ve been hiding those challenges from the world. I’ve been hiding because of a fear that people would say: “Wait a minute…! You mean Patrick doesn’t have all the answers? Then why would I listen to anything he says?” (For more on why I was thinking that way – read Down from the Mountain.)

So today it’s confession time. Ready? It’s a big one.

I have not been living my own message.

It’s very difficult for me to admit. And the past year was so challenging because I was “preaching” one thing and “practicing” another thing. I feel like a fraud.
Somewhere along the way, I allowed myself to fall into a number of traps:

Trap #1 - Listening to “them” rather than listening to my heart.

In my heart, I always knew that The Power of Mortality™ was an intimately personal message for individuals. After all, I’m talking about YOUR life and death. Instead, I allowed myself to be swayed by other “experts” who tried to convince me that in order to “make it” as a professional speaker, I had to be speaking to corporate audiences.

This trap was like very slow moving quicksand for me. It kept me paralyzed for months and months as I tried to find the right corporate audience. There aren’t too many companies that will pay to you tell their employees that life is short and they need to live with power and passion. And I just couldn’t bring myself to twist my message to fit a corporate agenda that wasn’t in line with the ideals of the Power of Mortality™. (“Ladies and gentlemen… that’s how embracing your mortality today will help you sell more photocopiers!” – I don’t think so.) I wasted so much time and energy trying to find the right fit that I drained myself and began to allow doubts to creep in. Doubts about the value of my message and doubts about my ability to deliver it.

Trap #2 – Losing focus

After my first year of speaking, audience members kept telling me that I should write a book. So I did. And I’m thrilled that I did! I’m quite proud of What’s Your Expiry Date? It was a lot of fun and it allowed me to reach an entirely different audience. But the process of writing a book is no small task. I’ve often said that it is the closest that I’m ever going to come to experiencing childbirth firsthand!

Writing and publishing a book demands a lot of attention and energy. And I allowed myself to get swept up in that process and somewhere along the way I began to think of myself as “a writer”. I knew that something was wrong when I found myself worrying about my Amazon ranking. Then in the spring of 2006 my book distributor declared bankruptcy. They hadn’t yet paid me for all of my book sales through Wal-Mart and Chapters, so in an instant I lost a very large sum of money and I was without distribution.

It took a long while before I was able to regain focus and remind myself that I was a speaker with a book, rather than an author who speaks.

Trap #3 – Buying into my own hype

As I mentioned in my “Down From The Mountain” post, I had consciously set myself up as an expert – a “guru”, if you will. The more success I achieved, the more I needed. My ego was now running the show and the more my ego took over, the more difficult things became. I became very preoccupied with carefully orchestrating each and every move I made. I wanted to be 110% certain that any new action would be “properly” perceived and would contribute to my success. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I let things become all about ME, rather than all about YOU – the people that I set out to help in the first place.

I’m sorry.

(And the real irony of the situation is that by allowing that to happen, not only did I lost sight of YOU, but I lost touch with myself too!)

So now, with this new clarity and new humility, I am going to get back to living the principles of the Mortality Manifesto! I am taking ownership of my circumstances. I’m going to recapture my life again and I am going to live from a place that is more inline with my beliefs of a life that is FEARLESS, FOCUSED and FREE FROM REGRETS!

And I’ll start with freedom from regrets! As I said, I’m deeply sorry that this unfortunate turn of events happened, but I won’t waste any time or energy with regrets. As I say in the book, “hang on to the lessons and let go of the circumstances that brought them to you.” ONWARD!

ENJOY NOW!