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.

This episode of the podcast is Chapters 16, 17, and 18 of Dancing the Tightrope, the last of the self-awareness chapters, or as I call them the “C” chapters. In these chapters, we cover courage, congruence and clarity. Over and over again, I come back to these chapters to find what’s missing when I find myself stuck.

My favorite quote from the Courage chapter is this one: “The beautiful thing about welcoming pressure as a catalyst is that we no longer allow the end goal to define us. Winning the game is nice, but it’s not the point. The point is the opportunity to cultivate our courage, or perhaps a better word is to unleash our courage.” I’ve even come to call the process of raising the pressure threshold “couraging” because we are building our courage.

From Chapter 17 on Congruence, I like this quote: “Like a tangled ball of roots, Rules wind their way into our guidance system, blocking the pathways to our personal truth. The interference makes it very difficult to find our voice. And here’s the strangest part of all of this. We are not aware that our Rules are interfering. Because all of these Rules have been with us for so long, they feel like a part of us. As they direct us out of our awareness, our Rules feel as if they ARE us.”

This quote sums up Chapter 18 pretty well: “Clarity starts with removing that which does not belong. Whether creating a simple picture for how my day is going to go or a picture for the horse on a trail or a vision for my life, the art of subtraction makes room for what is real and true. I can only afford to remove my protective armor when I’ve come to own my true inner strength and acknowledged my true nature.”

We are nearing the end of the book! Next week, I’ll share the last two chapters of Dancing the Tightrope. Because I tackled this project Frame by Frame, step by step, it’s actually been fun. Hard to believe I dreaded it!

This episode includes Dancing the Tightrope Chapters Fourteen Commitment and Fifteen Curiosity. These are the first two of five chapters in the book outlining the building blocks of self-awareness. If you have listened this far, you have certainly heard me talk about the value of these inner “tools.”

I decided to highlight the five building blocks of self-awareness at this stage of my story, because I found myself not always showing up in pressure situations the way I would have liked to. It was clear to me that sometimes I could reach for my tools, and other times I had to reach for my rules. Awareness was the difference, but there was something more. For several weeks, I became more and more aware of my awareness.

It was through this focused attention that I began to see that I “fell off” at different points. Sometimes it was at the level of being committed. Sometimes it was lack of curiosity, or one of the other three layers, which I dive into in the chapters to follow. I revisit the lessons in these five chapters over and again, because they help me fine tune my awareness when I get off track – and the nature of the game is not being perfect all the time. It’s about having lots of ways of getting back on track.

Speaking of curiosity, this podcast was created because of my budding curiosity to have a different kind of conversation, and you will hear about one of my early podcast guests Warwick Schiller, who has also been on a journey of self-discovery. Chapter fifteen has a special surprise in it.