There I was in my family’s half-finished basement, surrounded by my friends. It was the mid-1970s at the end of October, in a small town in Ohio and my mom was throwing me an epic Halloween party. We had just finished a game where we sat in a circle on the old rug that barely protected our bottoms from the cold linoleum basement floor. My mom started telling us a scary story that involved body parts and, as the story went along, she would pass the ‘body parts” around the circle. It was pitch dark in the room and we could only use our hands, not our eyes. Ice cold hands (water that had been frozen in rubber gloves, a heart (peeled tomato), and eyes (peeled grapes) were solemnly passed around. My friends and I were around eight years old at the time, so we tried to laugh off our fear, tried to remind ourselves it wasn’t really body parts that were being passed around, but I think we were all relieved when the story was over, the lights turned on, and cupcakes started getting passed...
I've been thinking a lot about my career. I have been everything from a financial controller and business consultant to an artist and now a writer. I've spent the past couple of years developing my writing chops and figuring out what I'm going to next. Lately, some very exciting opportunities have come up and with them, the old demons of fear, self-doubt, and self-sabotage. As I've aged, the patterns of my past are becoming clearer-just before I am about to level-up in my career or business, I pull back. I use the easy excuses of wanting to care for my family, to be home with my daughter. Such excuses sound so honorable. And they are. I convince myself that I am not walking away from an opportunity because I am afraid. No sir. I am walking away because my family needs me. It makes it easy to say no when opportunities arise. Yet plenty of woman are able to raise children and have successful careers. Why didn't I believe I could too? Letting go of my art business in...