Brené Brown talks about ‘God moments,’ Oprah calls ‘em ‘Aha moments,’ but I like the phrase ‘truth bombs.’

Whatever floats yer boat, amiright!?

Anyway, I had one of these moments of realisation - or rather, re-realisation ‘cos it’s not my first rodeo - yesterday.

My truth bomb was the dawning (re)realisation that I’ve been engineering my own smallness, a phrase I first heard from the aforementioned lady genius Brene Brown in her Netflix Special The Call to Courage.

If you’re not familiar with the term, it’s pretty much as it seems: deliberately playing it safe and not expanding your comfort zone because of the fear that if you push yourself into the spotlight or dare to take up space, you or your offering might be negatively received and criticised.

Obvs there’s much to unpack here, but there’s a couple of things in particular that Brené (I’ve decided we’re on a first name basis) said in her talk that I come back to:

1: The Theodore Roosevelt quote that Brené refers to as her ‘God moment’

(Pssst…please insert ‘woman’ alongside every mention of ‘man’ in the text below!)

““It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.””

2: The importance of separating yourself from your offering

Your offering might be your work, your art, or something else entirely but the reality is, as Teddy so eloquently points out, that there are lots of cold and timid critics in this world who’d rather point out how the strong (wo)man stumbles or how you, the doer of deeds, could have done them better. This means that inevitably you’ll be criticised for anything and everything you ever do, somewhere along the line. Firstly, see this post I made about unsolicited opinions, and secondly, remember this: even if your offering is a catastrophic failure, that doesn’t mean that YOU are a catastrophic failure. It means you were in the arena covered in dust and sweat and blood, doing your best regardless of the outcome and cementing your place as a warm, brave (as opposed to cold and timid!) human being.

Can you relate to any of this!?

My truth bomb exploded yesterday during a convo with a close friend when I realised that recently I’ve been throwing my time and energy into other people’s projects rather than focusing on my own. When I ask myself what really lies at the root of this, it’s simple: a lack of faith in my own ability to create something amazing. I was so busy believing in the amazingness of what other people around me were creating and in seeing their huge potential that I completely forgot about my own.

So today, instead of asking myself ‘who am I to create something amazing/write this blog/wear this outfit/insert your truth here, I’m asking myself - no, re-realising - ‘who the fuck am I not to!?’