We Have Liftoff!

In my experience, when life convenes to prevent you from doing things you absolutely love to do, it’s usually because you aren’t listening to the little whisperings from The Universe telling you there is something else more important that you need to be focused on.  If you continue to not listen or are simply being stubborn for too long, life has no choice but to cut you off.  A few months back I wrote about feeling stuck and where my thoughts were going while I was sitting in the middle of all that grey, but apparently life decided that either I still wasn’t listening hard enough or I was flat-out ignoring what it was trying to tell me.  So it cut me off.  Shortly after I pushed publish on that post life went all kinds of sideways, forcing me to really get to grips with what I needed to do to move forward.  Life literally took a bunch of things that I was doing off the table, leaving me with only one viable option.  I can take a hint.  Eventually.

While I pondered why life had brought me to this point – which frankly made not a jot of sense from where I was sitting – I kept thinking about something that our fearless SANE instigator, Mr. Bailor, told me when we first started hanging out right around the publishing of the inaugural and fabulous SANE tome, The Smarter Science of Slim.  I didn’t understand where he was coming from at the time – or for a really long time afterwards – but this year as I mused on where I needed to be headed and where I could add most value, his wisdom started to make sense to me.  Sometimes I can be really slow for a smart girl.

Jonathan told me that I shouldn’t put my energy in promoting the SANE brand, but that I should put my energy in promoting the Carrie Brown brand.  This made absolutely no sense to me.  Why was he encouraging me to promote me instead of him and his life-changing works?  Not only could I not figure out why he would do that, but I have never ever sought the center of attention.  I entirely dislike the spotlight and have spent my whole life trying to avoid standing in it.  Just ask my {day job} boss, who gets in deep trouble every time he tries to publicly recognize me for anything.  Or ask my mother who went up on stage over and over again during my graduation ceremony to collect all my trophies and awards and honors as the Top Student in the country for my graduating year.  I’ll give you a hint: I didn’t go to the ceremony.  I like to be cheering others from the sidelines  “GO, Jonathan!  GO, Jonathan!”  It’s where I am comfortable.  I couldn’t stay in the comfortable if I focused on the Carrie Brown brand.

The all-knowing Mr. Bailor, however, recognizes that the greatest value that I add apart from the gift I have in the kitchen to create SANE recipes, is making SANE real and doable for other people through my own journey and down-to-earth approach.  The real-life how-to and ability to relate to the struggles that people face at home in their real lives.  He always values the challenges that I face – especially the health ones – and how I overcome them and have SANE success despite them.  He is my biggest cheerleader.  He always encourages me to be open and share my whole story with the world – not just the perfect bits – but the yes-I-still-get-cravings-and here’s-how-I-deal-with-it and the I-had-a-hysterectomy-and-take-medications-that-are-famous-for-making-people-fat-and-SANE-still-works-here’s-how.  We did a 4 show series on exactly that, and produced a Creative Live event after my fat-loss transformation where we talked about all the reality I had faced on my journey.  JB knew from the get-go that SANE doesn’t need ‘perfect’ people to represent it, it needs real people showing that despite the challenges life lobs at us, this SANE thing is doable and sustainable to achieve fat loss and greater general health. It needs real, not plastic, and real is what you get from the Carrie Brown brand.  It’s personal, relatable, transparent, and real.  The world needed SANE, but it also needed Carrie Brown to be Carrie Brown, not an extension of our beloved Jonathan Bailor.

Jonathan knew there was an abundance of power in the Carrie Brown brand because it isn’t driven by revenue.  It’s driven by my wholehearted belief in SANE, the fact that I live SANE, and that SANE works.  Nobody paid me a bean to do any of it and I have no ulterior motive.  I do what I’ve done for the last 4 years because I am passionate about it, I have an altruistic nature, and I have skills that can really help people put it into practice.  No one continues to spend a bunch of their own money out-of-pocket to promote something they don’t believe in or live.  That would be all kinds of weird.  Not to mention dumb.  There is enormous power in enthusiastically recommending the life that you actually live as opposed to recommending it because you get paid to; or maybe worse, getting paid to recommend a life that you don’t actually live.  Nobody owns Carrie Brown.

However, for 3 years while Jonathan was doing an amazing job of promoting Carrie Brown (for which I will be forever grateful, on top of sooooooo many other things I am grateful to him for), I was standing on the sidelines singing, “La la la la la la la!”

At the start of the year when I was lamenting my stuckness to my therapist – bless his long-suffering soul – he was annoyingly clear about why I was stuck and took his usual no-holds-barred approach in telling me.  He said, “You’re stuck because everything you do going forward needs to be promoting the Carrie Brown brand, which is entirely uncomfortable for you.  So you’re stuck.  The only decision that you have to make is are you willing to step into the spotlight in order to keep doing this work to help other people lead healthier lives“.

My immediate response was, “Oh hell no.”  But since my therapist is always right (I hope he’s not reading this), and since I care deeply about helping all the lovely people who come to this space, I thought a lot about what he had said.  I ummed and ahhed endlessly about whether Carrie Brown alone was enough.  I wrote my Unstuck blog post and you kindly answered that question for me: Thank you!  And yet I continued to sit there stuck.  Then The Universe clearly had enough, because as I was still sitting there vacillating on what to do, life cut me off.  And voila!  I was suddenly provided with plenty of enough that only Carrie Brown could share.

It turns out Mr. Bailor was right all along.  Duh!

So the last almost 3 months have been pretty darn exciting over at the Brown House.  Over the coming weeks I am going to share just how life cut me off and how that has led me down some amazing new paths of discovery and knowledge, making it easy for me to see very clearly how Carrie Brown can be enough and how I simply cannot NOT share all of this with you.

We have liftoff!!!!

PS. You’re all awesome.  Thank you for being here.  You let me know I can.