Dream Job Blog

I hate, strongly dislike, enjoy presenting in webinars. I know they’re a highly effective way to share best practices—and that’s why I do them. But I hate not being able to see faces and draw energy from the room.

Last month I hosted a webinar. I created the slides, wrote a script, practiced and felt pretty good about it. And then something strange happened. I got a sore throat the day before—and not just a “oh it’s a little raw” feeling, but a “it kills to swallow saliva” feeling.

My first thought was that I was getting sick. But I also wondered if I was just stressed because of the webinar. It turned out to be the latter. I struggled through the webinar because it really hurt to speak, but by that evening my sore throat was completely gone. It baffled me. How can a little stress cause acute physical pain?

I shared this with my coach and she immediately said, “Oh you’re ready to UPLEVEL” and suggested reading The Big Leap by Gay Hendricks. I had no idea what she was talking about, but intrigued (because upleveling sounds pretty cool)—I dug into the book.

It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. Ever. It addresses and dispels the many fears and limiting beliefs that we have, but may not even be aware of.

Here are the key points that resonated with me:

We’re all amazing!

Every single person, including YOU, has the potential to create an extraordinary level of success. We can live amazing lives with love, money and creativity growing in harmony. We can make all of our dreams come true.

We get in our OWN WAY

But we also have an Upper Limit Problem. We have a limited tolerance for feeling good. When we reach this limit we do often do something that sabotages our jump to the next level.

Why do we do this? We do it because we:

• feel fundamentally flawed and because of this flaw, we can’t achieve greatness and we don’t deserve the ultimate success.
• are afraid that we’ll end up all alone, be disloyal to our roots and leave people behind.
• believe that success brings a big burden to others
• worry about outshining others, especially people we’re close to

We can make the big leap

We have the power to get to the next level. We do it by:

• being willing to increase the amount of time we feel good inside and allow good things to happen
• being aware of when we’re heading down a road of sabotage (e.g., worrying, criticizing, arguing)
• embracing your feelings and thinking through the true origin of them (often times from your childhood)
• understanding the falseness of your fears or limiting beliefs—they’re not based on the truth

When you do these things, you can get to the Zone of Genius. This is where you have a constant sense of purposeful joy. You are passionate about what you do and spend your time doing the things that make you the happiest. You feel more energized, creative and fulfilled.

I am fortunate to work with clients who are on their way to upleveling their careers and themselves. It’s an incredibly rich and rewarding experience to watch them evolve throughout their journey.

I’d love to hear what you’re thinking about! Connect with me on LinkedIn and share what your upleveled career looks like!