This episode of the podcast is the last two chapters of Dancing the Tightrope. We have reached the end of the book!

You might hear me be a little choked up at the end of this reading. There are so many layers to unpack as to why. First, when I started reading this book, I didn’t expect to get much further than Chapter 1. Just reading twenty whole chapters felt like a huge accomplishment. For those of you who encouraged me to read another (and then another), I appreciate you more than you can know. Second, when reading these chapters, I was reliving my experience in some ways. Reaching some of these milestones felt unachievable when I began this journey. Now, they are everyday occurrences. Take away for you? Whatever seems daunting at the moment is just waiting to become an everyday occurrence if you are willing to break it into small enough steps.

The conversation I’ve been having recently with several colleagues, clients and friends is about visiting the other side of fear. If you haven’t been there (and for years, I HAD NOT BEEN THERE), it’s impossible to understand how fear can squash us. It seems so rational to honor fear as the answer to the problem of the day. Until you look at it from the other side (get thee behind me, fear!), you cannot see it for what it is: information. Dancing the Tightrope calibrates the fear so that we can RESPOND rather than automatically react from what I call the “robot space” in this book. Just like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, we discover that the “great and powerful Oz” is simply our programming and conditioning, pulling levers like the little man behind the curtain. We’ve had the answers all along; all we needed was someone to show us the inner Tools we were granted at birth. That’s what I set out to show in publishing this book.

Reaching this point in the journey of reading the book, you may be wondering “what’s next?” I’m publishing Dancing the Tightrope as an Audible book in the next few months – timeline to be determined. The compiled version will include several things this podcast version did not. It will have the Introduction Chapter, which I did not include in this series. It will also include some “author commentary”, as I’ve come a long way since these words were written. It seems only fair to update the listener. I may also play with adding more quotes in the voice of the speaker where possible.

Dancing the Tightrope will not be the only audiobook I publish. After this one gets out, I will publish both The Delicate Art and The Elegant Pivot in Audible format as well. Yes, the woman who swore I would NEVER do an Audible version is reminded that saying “never” is just the first step! You’ll hear more about that in the podcast coming out next week, with Bernie Harberts, author of Two Mules to Triumph and star of Amazon’s The Lost Sea Expedition.