Tricia’s Click

I’ve connected with Tricia through the Owning Pink Posse.  I’d read some of her blog posts on the Posse and intended to ask her to write for me.  When she sent me a Facebook request a few weeks ago I immediately asked her to write for me.  She sent me the following story and I was pleasantly surprised by the similarities in our journeys.  We’d both opened up and changed our life as the result of a particular episode of a TV show and we both enjoy a similar hobby.  I have been extremely inspired by Tricia and can’t wait to get to work on some ideas I have thanks to her!  Here are all the places you can find Tricia and her art work:

http://www.seeyourvisionart.com/

http://twitter.com/trishlee1969

http://www.cafepress.com/visionartdesign

http://www.image-is-us.com/visionartdesigns

http://www.image-is-us.com/visittwinports

I’d spent twenty years working the trucking industry as a dispatcher and operations manager.  The last five of those years, every day, I would fantasize about hearing, “Sorry, Trish but times are tough and we’re going to have to let you go.”  I knew it wasn’t my destiny, I knew I was no longer fulfilled, and I knew I just didn’t care anymore if that pallet of water heaters made it to New York or not!  Even though, I was paid well, appreciated, could wear jeans, never had to worry about parking, AND had free time to read on the job.  The first 8 of the 10 years I worked there I read an average of two books per week.  Sorry corporate!

One day on Oprah, she was featuring, “The Secret” and it sounded so interesting that I ordered the DVD with the last $30 I had.  While watching the DVD, eyes huge, mouth open, I just couldn’t believe that after every self-help book I’d read under the sun, that this particular wording or phrasing had never clicked the way this did.  What stuck out the most was, “We always think about what we don’t want!”  DING!  I immediately thought of my list of “don’ts” in the dating world…then it spread out further into the way I’d thought about most things!  It just seemed so simple and so profound at the same time. This began a 3-year (ongoing) journey.

I had to know more.  I’d watched “The Secret” in March and soon after was the garage sale season.  The very first garage sale I went to I found, “The Power Of Positive Thinking” and I picked it up and read it right away.  Every sale, every Goodwill, every Salvation Army had books of the similar genre and very soon I had a library that I became obsessed with reading cover to cover, doing all of the exercises, and stopping to ponder over the ideas and philosophies expressed by many different authors.  I had my nose stuck in a book for two years straight.  I’d always been a big reader but THIS was something different.  Suddenly, I understood the books I was reading about physics! Physics!  In high school, to give you some perspective, I took classes like Home Economics, Shop, study hall, anything easy just to get by.

One of the exercises was to make Vision Boards and being the literal-minded person I am, I found a stack of magazines and started crudely ripping out anything that interested me or anything I ‘wanted’.  I made over a dozen vision boards about all areas of my life.  One in particular was about a romantic relationship that I wanted and there was something about the way I had taped flowers resting against this lady’s cheek that rung another bell loudly in my heart and soul.  DING!  I wasn’t just patting myself on the back on how pretty it looked, but I thought, “I really like that.”

Then my best friend was having the hardest time of her life and I thought if my vision boards make me feel good, perhaps if I made one for her, she would feel good too.  So I made one for her, put it in a frame, and gave it to her as a gift.  While making hers, I connected with her in my mind and picked out the perfect sayings and images that I thought would appeal to her the most.  I was right, she was very touched, and another bell went off.

One after another I made what I began to call “Vision Art” for every friend I had, even shipping them off to Omaha, Fargo, and Raleigh as a surprise.  There was something so deeply meaningful and purposeful while making the individual “Vision Arts” even though they took hours and hours to make, my heart-mind-soul had never sung so loudly and clearly.  Every fiber of my being said, “YES YES YES!!! You have something here!”  It felt so good to put myself into their shoes for the 3-7 hours it took to make, dreaming their dreams and intuitively knowing what they wanted to improve and strive for in their lives, I just knew it was special.

Then came the reactions! The tears! The joy!  One by one, my girlfriends expressed to me how they felt gazing upon their framed pictures saying things like, “I look at this every day and it makes me feel so good!” and “I start each day and end each day looking at this to put myself in the most positive frame of mind” and “Every day I see something different!” and “HOW did you know??”  Tears were common, something in each had touched them so deeply and in return touched me that when I actually heard the words, “I’m sorry Trish, but we’re going to have to lay you off…” (my poor boss, I thought HE was going to cry…he said this to me elbows on knees and head down) and it was stunning.  All I heard was “lay off” and I said “who?” and he said “You.”  OH!

I began packing up my belongings and box after box was filled with all the books I had picked up about positive thinking, the law of attraction, doing what you love, a purposeful life, etc and told my boss, “I didn’t read all of these books for nothing.  Don’t worry about me, I’m going to be just fine.”  Every thing I packed had NOTHING to do with my job, ringing yet another bell.  I was FREE, released, been given a tremendous gift, and it wasn’t too long before I was in my car, tears streaming, doing my happy-clap dance, shouting, “I’M FREEEEEEEE!!!”  It was truly a defining moment in my life.  I knew my attitude meant everything, how I looked at this was going to make or break me.  Guess what? I’m not broken.