NAMING RIGHTS

A couple weeks ago, I had tea with the CEO of Women Lead Change. Tiffany offered to help me with my speaking, marketing, and my overall message. I was so grateful! I feel like I’m a little lost when it comes to selling myself and getting out there, especially as a speaker. I was ready to soak up all of her knowledge, and I thought some of my questions would have concrete answers. I was looking for the black and white “right” answers.

I was wrong. Thank goodness.

We looked at my LinkedIn profile and website while we talked. She said I was way more than the “writer/speaker” description I gave myself. I hadn’t listed all of my accomplishments. She listed several other descriptors I should consider including. As a CEO, she would be looking for more before hiring me for a conference or other event. I shouldn’t sell myself short, she said.

While we were talking, I thought of writing warrants in the Secret Service. I remembered an instructor at training calling one of the first parts of the warrant the “I Love Me” clause. It’s the section of the warrant where the preparer essentially shows that he/she is trained and qualified to investigate the crime in question. It was the place to brag a little bit about one’s training and experience. Let the judge who’s signing off on this know you know what the heck you’re doing.

My LinkedIn and website weren’t the best “I Love Me” clauses, and I often don’t know what I’m doing (for the record).

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how tentative I am about labeling myself as something I want to be good at because I’m afraid I won’t be able to deliver. I’m hesitant because I think I’m just not good enough or that I’m nobody special and even a little egotistical to think anyone would care what I have to say.

It’s the usual underlying tones of fear of failure and fear of rejection.

I asked Tiffany about what I should wear at speaking gigs and how I should do my makeup and hair. Were there any “rules” or things I should avoid (like maybe cut-off jeans or hats or a certain kind of makeup). That sort of thing. How should I look?

“However you want, ” was her answer.

I control my look. I control my “brand” and how that’s portrayed. There are no rules.

In my head, I thought I should always look professional or at least speak in a business or business casual clothing style. All I really know in the “business” realm is the look of an ill-fitting business suit with a jacket 1-2 sizes too big to account for all the gear around my waist as I worked. Outside of the Secret Service job, I worked in the fitness industry where athletic wear was the norm.

So… what is my look?

What is my brand?

What is my message?

What is my label?

Maybe it was coincidence (or maybe not), but amid all of this social distancing due to COVID-19, I came across the YouTube “church” service for Hillsong Church East Coast. The pastor is Carl Lentz (no known relation). I’ve read Carl’s book Own the Moment, and I liked it. In general, I have had a love/hate relationship with church (not necessarily with faith) for a long time. I am not always a regular attender of church, but I did listen to Lentz’s sermon entitled “That Label Doesn’t Fit Me Anymore”. Let’s just say it was good timing.

I am not one to talk a whole lot of politics and religion. Both topics are annoyingly controversial in today’s world, and I think, like most people, I am not as educated in either topic as I’d like to be. It’s hard to get past political and religious labels and actually learn from “the other side” sometimes.

The sermon was about labels, obviously. Carl Lentz talked about how labels do matter. They can free you or become your prison. They can marginalize you or set you free. They can change things overnight.

But labels can create excuses not to change. Labels can be used as a shield. Gut punch, Carl.

My personally-assigned labels/shields/excuses:

Shy

Awkward

Lost

Broken

All of those labels are convenient excuses NOT to speak out and assume I have nothing to offer because I don’t have it all together.

My book Agent Innocent got a bad review recently. The reviewer said, “… apparently because she’s a woman, we’re supposed to believe that the story of her struggles needs telling.”

First of all, this review is a load of sexist crap written by a man who likes to read military-style memoirs. It really doesn’t matter if he liked or hated my book. But those kinds of comments make it easy to use my personal labels as a shield. People won’t have anything to criticize if I don’t let them see me as the train wreck that I am, I tell myself.

Here are some other nuggets from Carl Lentz’s sermon that I found particularly convicting:

I control the narrative of my life experience. I cannot always control what’s happening in my life or what’s going on around me, but I can control what I call it. How I label my life says a lot about where I’m going.

“Maybe you have been giving up the microphone way too much to a spokesperson that has no right to speak into your life any longer.”

In other words, I have the naming rights to my life. What am I going to do about it?

The sermon also addressed labeling our life’s seasons correctly.

“Sometimes we need to label things as they are going to be, rather than what they are right now.”

COVID-19 has taken away my work for the time being. It’s easy to label this “season” as a low one, a season of depletion, financially and emotionally. But it could also be a season of opportunity and reevaluation due to extra free time. It’s a time to reassess where I’m at and where I need to go. It’s an opportunity to rebuild.

That’s what this season could be, but not what it really feels like right now.

But I have the naming rights, right? It’s a big responsibility that shapes where I’m going. It’s nothing to be taken lightly. Also, my labels don’t have to be permanent either. In fact, they probably need adjusting from time to time.

If I choose to label this current season in life as an opportunity to take a big leap forward, I suppose establishing new labels for myself might take some getting used to, too. Change is uncomfortable, and it’s easy to revert back to the past. At the beginning of 2020, many of us wrote “2019” when we needed to date something. Eventually we got comfortable writing “2020” and embraced the new year.

I’m comfortable labeling myself as a writer because it’s something I enjoy. I’m uncomfortable labeling myself as a “motivational speaker” because that scares me. I think of those old “shy and awkward” labels which were labels I self-assigned but also labels reinforced by others. When I was younger, I was minimized and shamed because of an “innocent” label. In law enforcement, my opinions were often disregarded because I did not have “military,” “law enforcement,” or “experience” within my labels. But like the sermon suggested, I am the spokesperson for my life, and I can’t hand the microphone to anyone else.

Little did I know that the combination of a tea date with an awesome, empowering CEO, old warrant-writing lingo, and a pastor with my last name would be so helpful in this unexpected season of rebuilding/rebranding. Life is funny that way, and I love when these things happen.

I’m still working on the “I Love Me” aspect of my LinkedIn profile and website, and I’m not going to pretend I suddenly figured all of that out by listening to a sermon. I have some labels I still need to remove and others I need to start embracing more. That’s the tough part. Sometimes the new and better labels are scary.

I am not a business suit kind of woman anymore, and I don’t see my “look” or “uniform” being anything like it. If I disregard any perceived rules or norms, my preferred work “uniform” isn’t going to involve a dress or slacks. It’s probably going to be jeans, crazy shoes, chunky jewelry, and, quite possibly, some sort of top knot hairdo. Who knows? Maybe I’ll change that up too. I’ll figure out my look, and I’m definitely going to own it.

Maybe that’s precisely the takeaway I needed from all of this:

Always retain your “naming rights,” choose labels that reflect where you want to go, and then OWN IT! And above all, keep moving forward! None of us have it all together.

Embracing the typos till next Monday-ish,

Mel

P.S. Click to listen to “That Label Doesn’t Fit Me Anymore.” (The sermon starts around the 21:00 mark.)

March 15, 2021

The MySpace Series: Part One

Last week, I was searching for an email to prepare for a podcast interview. The keyword search produced a handful of emails, one of which had the subject line “myspace blog posts” and myself as the sender/recipient.

Apparently, a few years back (or eleven), I copied all of my old MySpace blogs from college into an email (probably before I deleted everything on MySpace). I don’t remember sending this email, nor do I remember writing any of the posts.

As I read through them, I realized I’ve matured a lot since then, but I also realized I might need to revisit some of the “wisdom” my young adult mind was spouting on MySpace.

I guess I’ve been blogging badly longer than I thought.

March 8, 2021

The Way Up

Well, I’ve had to make some more big changes in my life. For the last month and a half, I’ve been burning the midnight oil, stuck between finishing up the old and getting started with the new. For the first time in a long time, I fell behind on the things that matter to me a lot, and it’s not like me to let that happen. The Type-A in me was (and still is) horrified.

January 11, 2021

The Little Things

Last week was quite a week, wasn’t it? I found myself saying aloud, “What is happening?”

What is happening? A lot, to say the least, and enough to leave anyone in a state of sadness and despair. What a mess. An important, troubling mess that needs sorting and fixing. Anyone on all sides of the table can probably agree with that.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s to come, both for me and for the country. I think I, like many, secretly hoped for clarity and change as the New Year rolled around. A clear path to the future.

When I know I need to make a change, I delay the decisions and hope for a “sign” that it’s the correct one before I make it. I’m sure many can relate to that. Big decisions are scary. Change is scary. But risk is necessary sometimes. Like I’ve been saying for a long time, I can’t move forward without getting uncomfortable.

But a sign would be nice, sometimes.

I suppose clarity and answers are often present if we stop and listen long enough to see them. There’s something to be learned everywhere, even if it’s in the little things.

That’s what I want to share today… a few little things.

December 28, 2020

Notes to Self

Last week I went through my Book Box, a big decorative box I used to store book drafts and ideas when I was writing Agent Innocent. Talk about a trip down memory lane. Wow. Those early book drafts were rough, not to mention very angry and depressing.

I was happy to send most of the contents of the box to the shredder.

I had forgotten, however, about some of the random contents I’d tucked away in there.

Sprinkled throughout the Book Box were post-it notes with quotes in my loopy cursive, torn pieces of paper with scribbled quotes from movies or television shows, and torn pages from magazines with quotes on them.

As I read these, I smiled, picturing myself in my little one-bedroom West LA apartment scribbling quotes and notes in the wee hours of the morning. The night owl in me was alive and well those days.

In my final Bad Blog of 2020, I’m going to go back to those late-night notes and share a few of them here. I remember the circumstances and reasons for some of them. Others I don’t. Either way, it was good for me to revisit them, and I hope some of them are encouraging to you as well.

Here they are!

December 14, 2020

12,000 Steps

“Why are we like this?” Ah, we’ve asked this question many times.

I thought about the days of old, the ones before Apple Watches and activity trackers came into my life. I thought of the college days when my pink flip phone took crappy pictures and I had to hit the 7 button four times to type an S when sending a text. I trained for half and full marathons like this and had no idea what my pace was during these long runs. I just made a route ahead of time so I knew I’d gone the distance and didn’t worry so much about pace. It was about the experience, not the inner competition with a watch.

November 23, 2020

Throwing Stones

As a kid, I liked to collect pretty rocks. The shinier the better. The more misshapen the better. Sometimes I’d even find a dull looking rock and crack it in half with a hammer to see if the inside was shiny. I’d be delighted if the insides sparkled.

Today I still have pretty rocks, and, to some, random rocks around my house might look a little peculiar. But, then again, I’ve never claimed to be “normal” so perhaps visitors chalk it up to my eclectic taste in décor.

I came by some of these stones while living in West Los Angeles. Others were picked up after I moved to the Midwest.

The new rocks are healing stones.

(Now relax, family and friends. I have not taken to worshipping inanimate objects and I’m not delving into devil worship.)

November 16, 2020

Character and Characters

I’ve decided to write a novel. Well, perhaps I should rephrase. I’ve had a trilogy “planned” for about three years now. I just haven’t done anything about it. I recently figured out why that might be the case.

I’ve had this grand plan to write an exciting story with the “usual” Secret Service assassination (or assassination attempt), complete with a complex execution plan and a hyper-observant batch of agents saving the day at the very last millisecond. Also, it wouldn’t be complete if the first book didn’t end on an extreme cliffhanger where someone has died and we won’t know who until the second book.

I had a general outline of the story for each book. I just needed to write it.

But I didn’t write it.

Every time I sat down to write the story, I failed.

November 9, 2020

September 12, 2001

This election was the first time I voted at an actual polling location. Since election days were usually travel days for me in the Secret Service, I was always an absentee voter. This time, I participated in early voting at a local shopping mall. I was excited as I stood in line. It felt like my first time voting. I sat in the little booth smiling like a little kid as I filled in my bubbles, smirking at the fact that Kanye West was actually an option on the ballot. I thought it was joke when others mentioned it. Guess not. I grinned from ear to ear as the lady stamped my ballot and handed me the “I Voted” sticker. #American

“I don’t want to talk about the election. I stay away from political topics.”

This is usually my answer when people ask me about politics, and, specifically, this election. I think this country has morphed into a place where those conversations are unlikely to remain civil, especially if they occur on the Internet where anyone and everyone behind a keyboard can become a rude, sniveling pile of hate to one another.