The answer? Anything you set your mind to.
But first you’ve got to get over this battle with comparison. Because, friend, if you can’t get over your fear of not doing it as well as they do, you’ll never have the opportunity to be a trailblazer for someone else.
As I work through edits on this book, I’m in the process of creating something that many, many people have done before me. I also have exactly zero qualifications to take on something this massive. About a month from now a documentary we made about my women’s conference will be in movie theaters throughout North America. I mean, who in the actual heck do I think I am? Well, I’ll tell you who I am not. I’m not a filmmaker or a movie industry insider, and when we started on this project I had no idea how we would pull it off. It’s the biggest thing we’ve ever attempted to do, and it will live in a space—in theater events and later streaming services—that are insanely oversaturated. Not only that, but there are people who are experts in this field and sometimes even they fail at it, so what in the world makes me think we have a shot? Well, frankly, the project being successful wasn’t what made me want to do it. In fact, I believe if I had focused on whether or not it would make money, I would have started to obsess over all the ways I was ill-qualified to take it on. Actually, what motivated me to try and work on something so outside my wheelhouse was, well, you.
As we were planning our conference last year, I received thousands of emails and direct messages from women saying how badly they wanted to attend Rise and how much it would mean for their hearts to have an opportunity to be in our audience. The problem wasn’t their desire to attend; the problem was their finances. It’s expensive to attend a conference because of travel and hotels and the price of tickets required to cover the cost of renting out a space so large. Many women didn’t have it in their budgets, and I took that to heart. For nearly a decade I’ve been creating content and giving it away for free, and the idea that you might not be able to access something I believe in so passionately really hurt my heart. I spent months trying to figure out a way to bring the conference and the power of reaching for personal growth to women at a price they could afford. Then one day on a random conference call I heard about event cinema, which is a fancy term for putting a live event (like the ballet or a Justin Bieber concert) into movie theaters on a limited run. Dang it, I thought. If the Biebs can do this, I’m pretty sure I can do this! I asked myself a what if question.
What if we made a movie about Rise weekend?
What if I could find someone to partner with us to help get it into theaters?
What if I could give the tribe the chance to create a girls’ night out in their own community?
I hope you can understand how insane this idea was. We didn’t know how to make a movie or how to get it in theaters or the literally hundreds of steps between there and here. We were the worst kind of dumb—we didn’t know what we didn’t know. But I didn’t spend any time worrying about our lack of knowledge, and honestly, it didn’t occur to me to care about who had done it better or how it might be received. I wasn’t focused outside myself; I was focused on my why. My why was powerful; my why made me feel passionate enough to figure out my how.
If you find yourself worried about the idea that someone else has already done it, you need to flip the script on whether that’s a bad thing. If someone else has done it, you can research and model behavior and test out your own theories using their road map as some kind of guidance. You can combine their how with your why to create something epic.
EXCUSE 8:
WHAT WILL THEY THINK?
I started boxing.
And just so we’re all clear on this, I don’t mean boxing at the 24 Hour Fitness. There’s nothing wrong with boxing at your local gym. I just want to make clear the distinction between performing boxing-style moves for cardio at your usual workout spot and going to a real-life boxing gym that’s dirty and smelly and blasts Metallica like it’s required for the sport. I’ve only been to a few sessions so far, so for all I know it is required for the sport. My point is, I’m getting real training from someone whose job it is to teach actual fighters how to throw a punch.
The gym I’m going to for this training isn’t pretty by any stretch of the imagination. The workout is grueling, and I often feel like I’m going to die or puke up my breakfast smoothie all over the ring. I don’t fit in. Imagine a dirty room full of Minotaurs and then me, all five feet, two inches of me with my long, long extensions and my overly dramatic fake lashes. There I am, a thirty-five-year-old mother of four, trying my darndest to slide away from punches lest my trainer knock me upside my head. I’m not exceptionally good at it, though truth be told I’ve never seen any kind of boxing match, so I’m not totally sure what the end goal is supposed to be. So why do I do it? Why do I keep showing up to try something amongst people who are so much further along than I am? Why do I hang out in a room I don’t fit in and keep attempting to learn something I’m not particularly skilled at, all while others watch and judge and draw their own conclusions?
Because it makes me happy.
I like throwing punches and working out to Jay-Z and flipping my hat around backward like a proper tomboy. I love boxing, and I love pushing myself to try something new. Here’s the kicker: I don’t care what anyone else thinks about that.
But maybe you read that and think, Okay, big deal! You’re comfortable at your boxing gym. I don’t know how that’s supposed to help me find the courage to start a business as a wedding photographer! Well, how about this? There are two types of people in the world. Nonjudgmental people, who aren’t ever going to think badly of you for anything you do regardless of the outcome, and judgmental people, who are jerks. These jerks are probably working through their own issues and we’ll pray for them, but, at the end of the day, judgmental people are going to judge you no matter what! If they’re going to judge you either way, then you may as well go for it. You may as well live your life. You may as well be true to who you are and what you value and let go of how it will be received.
On Mondays my kids have karate. On other days there is baseball practice and piano practice and then karate practice again. We might have an audition for the school musical. We might have a dine-out night to support the PTA. We might have playdates or dentist appointments or simply need to make the trip (for the millionth time) to get everyone’s hair cut. There are so many things to keep up with when you have four kids, and I don’t always remember them, no matter how hard I try. Yesterday the school called to tell me that Ford is the very last child (out of all the incoming kindergartners) who still needs to turn in his paperwork.
You guys, I didn’t even know what paperwork she was talking about!
Which brings me back to karate practice. Karate practice takes two hours (not including drive time), while first my youngest and then my big boys try to work their way up to the next belt color. Those two hours happen during a weekday afternoon when I should technically be working. But I want the boys to have the opportunity to do something cool, to not be held back by my schedule, which is something that happens more often than not. So, if I can make it work, I get off early and take them to practice. Then I sit down on the blue carpet amongst water bottles and flip-flops, and at some point, I open up my laptop and start working through emails, or book edits that are due on Friday, or the timeline for one of our live events.