This is optimal living daily episode 31-20, who's editing your life story? Dr. Kelly Flanagan of Dr. Kelly Flanagan.com and we're narrator Jossa-Malk.
Welcome back, or welcome to the first time of your year. This is where I read to you every day of the year from some amazing articles with the other's permission, all in an effort to make your and my day, even just a tiny bit better. So that was get right to our next article as we optimize your life. Who's editing your life story?
Right, Dr. Kelly Flanagan of Dr. Kelly Flanagan.com. Every writer needs an editor.
Rough drafts are rough, and writers need another set of eyes to create something beautiful and meaningful. We need this in life as well. Each of us needs an editor. Someone we trust enough to tell us what needs to be revised about the story we were living.
Last March, around the time, the river and beer in Chicago were turning green and the leprechauns that replaced a cube in the seasonal section of Target, was stealing a quiet hour on a Saturday afternoon. I lay on the couch reading Father Fiction by Don Miller. When the idea for a blog post hit me, I sat up right, I grabbed my phone to record the idea. I told my wife, I was going to write a post about how important it is for people to be assured they are strong.
She looked at me and told me, who's a horrible idea? And she does that. A lot. She told me some people do need to hear they are strong, but other people know they're strong.
They've spent most of their lives being strong and courageous, and what they need to hear is it's okay to be weak sometimes and do not have it all together. Deep down, I'm far me new. She was right. Well, be honest, there was a little kid in me who wanted to talk back.
I can't remember how exactly I responded. But I'm pretty sure there was pouting and grumbling involved because I love ideas. I love forming them on the page. I like to get them right the first time, but I don't like to revise.
In the same way, right in our life stories with passion and band and in can feel electric. Dying gets to worry with our lives when written in flesh and blood on the paper of time is getting us and joy. But revising the story of our lives is especially difficult to work. Because we have to admit, we may have been wrong the first time around, and we're not used to doing so.
So often we're raised in homes in which authority was maintained with a heavy emphasis on right and wrong. And the big people always seem to end up on the right side of the divide. So life became like an education and important procedure. The terrible twos were like an opening argument.
I had a lesson in the tedious process across examination and defense, and we lived the rest of our lives like one long closing argument. So we populate every corner of the world with people unwilling to revise the stories we are living. Daddy's overreact, and it feels like pulling teeth to get them to reverse the knee-jerk punishment. Waiters rarely fess up to an error.
They get them answered instead in the page room because the free appetizer. If a doctor confesses to a mistake, she exposes herself the lawsuits that make pressure career insteal her livelihood. If a politician admits to an error, he risks plummeting poll numbers. And people at faith take centuries to admit that they acted out of hatred born of certitude rather than grace born of love.
Why is this so painful to embrace our errors? I think facing our mistakes can feel like a condemnation of all the good things and best intentions in us. They can shake our confidence in ourselves, they can crack the lens through which we view the world. They can mess with our heads, and make us wonder what is real.
But most of all, it equalizes us. Whatever pedestals we sit on in that trophy room of our minds, hit kick out from underneath us when we embrace our mistakes and start to make revisions. Suffice it to say most of us will not claim our errors happily and willingly. We will tend to go on right in our lives, start on the confidence in our authority and authorship.
That's why every single one of us needs a trustworthy editor. In the spring of 1998, I just wrapped up my junior year at the University of Illinois. The day after finals found me and two Michael's friends crawled out on the quad, soaking up the soothing rays of a spring sun and dodging wavered frisbees. And we were debating.
At that time in the University of history, it was in vote for students in Urbana Champaign to exercise their bloody liberal arts and political skills by debating whether or not chief Illinois was a racist mascot. And I left a debate. As I found it away, the argument that I sensed I was wearing my friends down. My new husband went, and then my good friend looked at me in the eye, has all sadness in hers.
And she said, you know, Kelly, it's not fun to talk about this stuff with you. Not really. I think I smurched pretending she was talking about losing argument. But inwardly, I felt like I'd been punched in the gut.
Because I knew I could be brutal. I knew I usually put being right before treating people right. Yet, her edit was so powerful, not just because it was true, but because I trusted her. We had met three years before on the very same quad during freshman orientation.
When I freshman home sickness had been bad, she was the one who showed up and invited me to parties. She was the one I ate dinner with in the cafeteria and the one who gave me eating advice and the one I set up with my best buddy. She was the one I could trust really, truly cared for me. And she was telling me I needed to change.
See, King says, write the first draft with the door closed and the second draft with the door open. As we write our life stories, everything is a first draft. And we need to open the doors of our hearts to people we trust enough to tell us where we've gone wrong and how we need to be changed. We need people who will save the hard things.
People who will serve up the hard medicine, people for whom we will swallow it because we know they are serving out of love and caring and respect. And there is healing in the medicine. Because when we open ourselves up to our errors, when we invite someone into our mistakes and release the need to be right to the first time, we're no longer alone. We discover it is better to embrace our faults and to be embraced by a caring other than to sit steadfastly on our certitude and to sit alone.
As we become open books, open to revision, we open ourselves to editors who are loyal and true. We walk through the world a bunch of rough drafts making mistakes as we go. And we just really need to surround ourselves with people who love us enough to live with our mistakes, who value us enough to tell us the truth. And to believe in us enough to know we have a revision living somewhere in our hearts.
You have a beautiful story to tell with your life. It has purpose and meaning. It needs to be told to a world confused by noisy numbing narratives. But the beauty of your story will only be complete and its purpose will only be fully realized when we have submitted it for editing.
So go find your editor. A spouse, a friend, a pastor of therapist, find a safe and trustworthy space where you are not alone. And find a place where beauty and meaning can erupt out of your errors. You just listen to the post titled Who's Editing Your Life Story?
I got you on your client again of Dr. KellyFlandingon.com. It'll be right back with my commentary. They get it, Dr.
Flandingon. An interesting metaphor that I don't recall if you're on the show before. It reminds me of the work I do every day actually editing this podcast and our other ones too, I added a bunch of the shows in the optimal living deal network. When I'm recording, I'm not really nitpicking certain things that I know can be edited.
Like I might leave a very large space for some reason or another and then it can be edited down. It's more about how I'm saying the words, but then when it's done and it's time for editing, the other things like pacing come more into play. And something I do realize after years of doing this is that having an outside opinion is really helpful because editing ourselves is not easy. We have our own perspective and biases, but having a trusted person serve as editor.
Well, now bigger, more meaningful and more impactful changes can be made. And it doesn't have to be a significant other or friends, like you said, it can be a professional mentor. Whatever works for you. But you're struggling to find a person, keep looking, it can be an awful agent of positive change.
So thank you, Dr. Kelly, for this one. Thank you for being here and listening every day. Have a great weekend and I'll see you tomorrow where you're optimal life.