Heads up! Early-bird pricing on the Queen Sweep Master Class ends TODAY at 3pm PT!

So if you want to get more done with less effort, work toward your true goals, and do it all in a way that is elegant and gorgeous, get your sweet self over here right now and save yourself $738!

Have I mentioned that my brain is broken?

Really.  It can’t perform most of the useful functions one expects from a brain:

Remembering people’s names NOPE
Remembering appointment times NOPE
Remembering to turn the stove burner off NOPE
Remembering how old I am NOPE

But the worst thing about my brain is that it has this terrible habit of paying very close attention to the BAD things, while merrily ignoring the GOOD.

I know I’m not alone in this because I get to spy on other people’s brains every single day. It’s called life coaching.

Basically, our brains are programmed to make us miserable.    

Not because they’re bad brains.  They’re just scared, deluded little masses of neural circuits doing the best they can.  Our brains are trying really hard to keep us safe, and they’ve been trained by generations of evolution and culture that the best way to keep us safe is to guard ALL THE TIME for things that could go wrong.

This was probably pretty useful when the Vikings invaded, so we should all thank our long-gone ancestors for passing down their neurotic and anxious propensities.  But the problem is, when you live a cushy life like we do, where we encounter so very few axe-weilding maniacs, this means that the MAIN DANGER we face is residing between our pretty pretty earrings.

This is why in The Queen Sweep I am relentless about forcing people to notice and celebrate their accomplishments.  Even the teeny teeny tiny ones; ESPECIALLY the teeny tiny ones.  They have to do wee brags and celebrate and preen.  This isn’t just to make them feel better, though it certainly does do that; my nefarious secret agenda is to deliberately retrain their brains.  Most of us have our brains set to magically delete our own accomplishments from our mental hard drives about every twenty minutes and to add big flashing red arrows to every single thing that is troubling, a problem, or still needs to be done.

This is why I can get on the phone with an EFBA client and she’ll start the session off by saying, “This week was such a wash.  I mean I didn’t get ANYthing done.”  Then she sighs a deep sigh of sorrow at her own sloth.

Usually at this point I have a little seizure and pluck my heart out of chest and yell, “Are you fucking kidding me???  I have your check-in update right here in my hands, and it shows me 74 things that you got done.”

“Oh, well….yeah but besides THOSE things, I really didn’t get much done.”

Yup.

This is how we do.

And this is why I almost died of mortification this afternoon.

See, I got an email politely telling me that the time listed on one of my sales page for a class is actually incorrect.  And then, while I was dying a thousand deaths and planning who would watch my daughter when I jump off the bridge, I clicked over to my own website and found–I shit you not, dear reader– a typo in the very top paragraph of my very top blog post.

A MISSPELLED WORD, people.

How should I go ON???

The mortification!!!!

And then I felt such deep shame, such intense embarrassment, that I finally had to laugh at myself.  Because I am ridiculous sometimes.

And just like my clients, I am human.

And sometimes I fuck things up.  I mean I really bollocks up the big things sometimes, people, but this was just a little thing in comparison and yet I was just a few deep breaths away from rolling on the floor and writhing.

Because ridiculous.

It’s crucial to know how to pull out of a Shame Spiral.

Here is the cure when you find yourself gripped with deep horror because you did some human thing that you wish you could be perfect enough not to do:

Look at the good things.  Seriously, take stock of the things you DON’T mess up on a daily basis.  I mean, look at the credit card debt you did NOT go into today.  Look at all the yelling at your kids you could have done that you DIDN’T do.  Look how you totally did NOT start swilling martinis under your desk at work even though martinis were clearly called for!

This will feel scandalously self-indulgent and decadent and SINFUL at first.  You will be like BUT WAIT WHAT ABOUT MY HAIRSHIRT.

But it’s none of those things.  It’s just a healthy counter-swing to the crazy skew your brain has toward ignoring the positive and focusing on the negative.  And when you do it for a while, you realize something quite interesting: when you’re keeping track of the good things, you start to feel better.  (This is why gratitude journals are more ubiquitous in self-help literature than ladies doing yoga in fields; it’s because the gratitude journals are SO MUCH MORE effective than yoga in fields.)

But even more powerful than paying grateful attention to good things that come to you is this: tracking all the ways you’re totally rocking out your life right now.  After watching hundreds of women shift their brain patterning in this way, I can tell you that all the data clearly shows that when they deliberately focus and celebrate what they’re doing right, that they eat statistically fewer numbers of twinkles and have more sex and better closets. That is some GOOD HARD SCIENCE, folks.

So here is what I want you know:  if you’re ridiculous sometimes too, like me, that’s okay.  When you feel your most lame and embarrassing is when you actually need to be most fiercely loving with yourself.

Now that’s not to say that it won’t be totally embarrassing.  It WILL, loves.

But you will survive.  And people will forgive you.  And you will find ways to make your mistakes right.

And it might even turn into a pretty good story one day.

So go forth and BE RIDICULOUS.

much love,
Anna

P.S.  Darlings, early-bird pricing ends TODAY for The Master Class.  This is where I show you how to set up lean mean systems so your life can just GO– while you sip umbrellas or write books or kiss your babies or run for office or do whatever it is you long to do.  These systems are why my life runs and even has beauty blooming, even though my brain is certifiably broken.  (And yes, clearly I need a Queen Sweep system for double-checking my sales pages!)