The Art of Underwhelming Yourself

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where you:

1. Completely blew it.

2. Allowed your baser self to show its ass.

3. Handed over your personal power like it was chump change.

If so, welcome! You're in good company. I have personally excelled in all three categories, sometimes with an enthusiasm that really should have been reined in.

Let's begin with completely blowing it.

You know those moments when opportunity knocks and, rather than rising to the occasion, you treat it like a limbo contest to see just how low you can go?

This was me in third grade, when I got the starring role in the Nativity play and didn't bother learning my lines. Did I mention my dad was a minister? Yeah. Five decades later, I'm still ashamed.

I had front-row seats to others' attempts at underwhelming themselves when I was a school counselor. Some students occasionally skipped class, while others approached avoiding an education with the determination of a honey badger trying to escape an enclosure. Years later, once wisdom had arrived, they'd call me wondering how to undo the damage and finally get a diploma.

I always tried to help them because I knew that no one's path is without painful growth opportunities.

Then there's allowing your baser self to show its ass.

Good heavens, where to begin? Social media alone offers enough examples to fill the Library of Congress.

Recently, I got mad at my puppy, Frankie, and uttered some words entirely inappropriate for such tender young ears. Her crime? Chewing something I had left within her reach.

Was it her fault? Nope.

Fortunately, Frankie has forgiven me and resumed her disemboweling stuffed animals.

And finally, giving away our personal power.

If this were an Olympic event, I'd have a gold medal, a sponsorship deal, and possibly a small statue erected in the town square.

My specialty? Allowing other people's opinions about my decisions to outweigh my own feelings. And here's the ridiculous part: I'm usually the one soliciting those opinions!

I nearly came home with Frankie's sister because the person accompanying me preferred her. Never mind that I had already decided I liked Frankie best. Apparently, I was prepared to outsource the selection of my own dog.

There's nothing wrong with seeking advice. In fact, it's wise. But there's a difference between listening to someone's perspective and handing them the steering wheel.

Good personal leadership means trusting yourself enough to make decisions, including the occasional spectacularly bad one. After all, confidence isn't built by always getting things right. It's also built by getting things gloriously wrong and discovering how to do it better next time.

Which brings me to something I've recently come to understand in a new way.

Life is a series of evocations.

Evocation is the act of bringing something forth. It's drawing out something that already exists within us. Think of our emotions as possibilities that can be stirred by different experiences. What matters is becoming aware of what's being stirred and deciding how we want to respond.

Much of what gets evoked in us happens through relationships: our relationships with ourselves, the people we love, our past, our future, money, substances, and even the stories we tell ourselves.

And this is where personal choice and sovereignty come in.

Sovereignty is the recognition that you are the rightful authority over your own life.

Not your parents. Not your partner. Not your boss. Not the Russian bot on Facebook who is remarkably oppositional about everything.

You.

It means recognizing that while you can't always control what you feel, you can become more intentional about how you respond and how much influence you allow others to have over you.

I recently heard Teddy Swims' song The Door, whose refrain 'tonight I saved my life when I showed you the door' captures the power of reclaiming your life by showing someone or something unwanted the door.

Because personal sovereignty is about taking responsibility for what we continue to invite into our lives.

Who gets access to our time, attention, and energy? Whose opinions do we elevate above our own? Which habits, loyalties, fears, and old stories have we allowed to take up permanent residence?

And perhaps most importantly, who do we ALLOW ourselves to become in their presence?

We cannot always control what life brings to our doorstep, nor can we completely control what an experience evokes within us.

But we can become more conscious of what's shaping us. We have the power to stop returning to situations and relationships that diminish us.

We can even show the door to older versions of ourselves that we've outgrown.

So here's to underwhelming ourselves every now and then. To the mistakes, the missteps, and the puppies who evoke our worst. Every experience offers us a chance to decide what stays, what goes, and who we want to become.

And perhaps that's the greatest freedom of all: knowing that no matter what life brings out in us today, we get to choose what we bring into our world tomorrow.

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