All About You FRIDAY – How to Be Unstoppable

Man In Wilderness Alone On Mountain Top Summit With Light Rays

I love order. I love organizing shelves and making sure everything has its own place. When I was younger, I would write out lists of things I would accomplish. I had a picture in my head of who I was going to be when I grew up. And when I grew up, I was certain what my successful life would look like.

As a young adult, I devoured self-help books. And when I discovered the Franklin Covey system of planning, I thought I had found the holy grail. Each year, I couldn’t wait to crack open my new planner and begin writing down goals that would get me to my vision.

I knew exactly the life I wanted and I knew how to get there.

I would get my degree, get married, work a few years, then have a few children. Then I would raise my children to be successful, motivated upstanding pillars of the community. I would work hard at being the best physical therapist I could be and then retire by the time I was 40. (I graduated with my Master’s degree when I was 22.) By then, I would have launched a successful, large sports physical therapy and performance center with lots of people working under me while I watched from an executive office with a view of the action.

The name of my business (The Michigan Institute for Human Performance) reveals the vision I had. Dream it and you will become it. That was my philosophy.

But there is a time in everyone’s life that nobody wants to talk about. The moment you realize the life you have doesn’t look anything like you planned. It starts out subtly.

One little thing skews from the norm. No worries, I have a fix for that. Then life deals you another blow. I have a fix for that too. And then another. And another. Before you know it, the energy you spent planning your perfect life gets diverted to putting out fires.

I remember going down into the basement of the old 1950’s bungalow we had just purchased in 1996. I saw a small hole in the wall where a tiny stream of water was seeping in. Being an industrious problem solver, I headed to the local hardware store and bought a small tub of putty. I plugged the hole. And right before my eyes, another sprung up next to it. I plugged that one. And two more sprung up a foot away.

By the time my husband came home, my tears were mixed with the water collecting on the basement floor. My tub of putty was empty and holes were springing up around me. If it was a cartoon, it would have been funny.

I’ve felt that desperation several times in my life. When my perfect son was diagnosed with autism. When my loving husband committed suicide. When my business floundered and didn’t even come close to the vision I had in my head. When I went on over 100 first dates and found myself still single.

Most people would call this failure. But Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, called it something else. He felt the people who felt most lost and most unstable were the ones standing on the precipice of personal power they had never imagined.

The tragedy is most people never reach it. Because they retreat before the transformation has taken place.

My mentor, Bob, used to describe these times using a fence analogy. “Imagine a knothole in a fence,” he would say. “You look through the hole and you see people who are living great lives. You want to be on that side of the fence but in order to get over there you have to squeeze through the hole.”

Squeezing through the hole is no small feat. In order to make it through that hole, layers have to be scraped off. Layers of expectations. Layers of the polished exterior built by our expectations. Layers of the person we thought everyone else should see, burying who we are at the core.

The journey through the knothole is painful. But when you get to the other side, you find the secret to being unstoppable. And you find people there who have figured it out as well. You look back through the knothole and see people you love, family members and friends. You want to coax them to the other side, to the life that feels lighter and freer and more authentic. You can help them, but you can’t do it for them. They have to enter the knothole and start the journey.

Uncertainty is often seen as weakness. Confusion as incompetence. But after years of studying myths, dreams, religion and human psychology, Jung made one of his greatest discoveries. Disorientation comes before growth. Chaos precedes transformation. Before illumination, there is darkness. What feels like falling apart may actually be your personality reorganizing itself as a higher level. And therein lies the secret:

An unstoppable person is not someone who controls life.

An unstoppable person is someone who is no longer controlled by fear.

My life is not at all what I thought it would turn out to be. But in many ways, it is beyond what I imagined. The love is deeper. The success more satisfying. It is a life that feels alive.

There is a moment that comes to mind when things get tough. On the day of my husband’s funeral, I had just gotten out of my car when I ran into my office manager in the parking lot. She put her arm around me and said in earnest exasperation, “Why does all this crap happen to you?!”

Without hesitation, I replied, “Because God must have something really big planned for me.” I don’t know how I conjured up those words in that moment. But I utter them now when life gets challenging.

“God must have something really big planned for me.”

Stay the course. Eyes wide open. Don’t retreat before the transformation takes place. Let go of the fear knowing Someone bigger is in control and He’s got your back. You don’t control everything. You can’t.

Thank God for that.

It’s been a long week. Don’t forget to celebrate. After all, you are unstoppable.

Until next time…