Have you ever had the experience of someone asking you a question that just stops you in your tracks and sets your life in a new direction?
Recently I had the opportunity to express my thanks to someone who filled that role in my life.
His name is John, and he’s a longtime producer currently working on a TV show shooting in Chicago. When we reconnected, I reminded him about the last time we spoke, almost 18 years ago. It was over lunch at an upscale restaurant in Los Angeles.
At that point, I had been acting in Chicago for more than a decade, appearing on stage and in commercials, television shows and movies. For years, those in and out of the entertainment industry told me that I should head to Los Angeles since that’s where so much of the action is at.
Along with my husband, I decided to re-locate to Tinseltown and step up my efforts. From the moment my plane touched ground, though, it didn’t feel right. (The first sign, no kidding, was when I burst into tears when the jet touched the tarmac of Los Angeles International Airport.)
By the time I met John, a few days later, that heavy feeling had only grown. Despite the restaurant’s posh surroundings and fine menu, I had zero appetite. I was just miserable–and John told me that I looked the part.
“What do you want?” he asked me. “What are you going for?”
His follow-up questions dug deeper, going beyond any career goals. And my answer revealed my priorities.
John saw that the life I was describing was incompatible with the life of someone pursuing an acting career in L.A. And he was honest enough to tell me so.
“This is not where you need to be for that,” John replied. “You can do that in Chicago.”
When I heard those words, I was filled with relief. They were “the right words at the right time,” a phrase popularized by Marlo Thomas in books by that title.
For the first time, someone was asking me, in effect, “How do you want to live, Bridgett?”
To that point, the predominant question drowning out all others was, “What do you want to do?” Of course, we all know the unspoken end of that question: “…to make money?”
In my mid-20s, I was fortunate to recognize that it was such a limited viewpoint. What about my current (and potential future) family? How about other interests that I have? In short, how does my work affect the rest of my life?
John helped me hone in on the totality of my life–and not just what I wanted to do to make money. From there, my heart and soul were freed to explore other options.
This holistic mindset was a key reason why the Amway Business opportunity through World Wide DreamBuilders (WWDB) appeals to me so much. In explaining the business concept, WWDB emphasizes this two-step process: consider how you want to live, then find a vehicle for making money that supports that lifestyle.
Typically, we are trained to adopt the absolute reverse approach by parents, educators and other “authority figures.” They urge us to identify what we want to “do” and then everything else follows from that.
As a result, we either determine or, more often, sort of “fall into” a way of making money and that decision becomes the driving force behind so many other decisions. From there, those myriad options—how we educate our children, where we live, with whom we associate, how we spend our free time—can prove extremely limited.
And it’s all because what should be viewed in a bigger context but is often considered narrowly, our way of making money, has become a dictator over all other aspects of our lives.
Lost in that traditional process is a thoughtful assessment of what we truly desire and what is truly important to us. I don’t know that I would have been smart enough, on my own, to have reached this insight.
So thank you, John, for alerting me to the upside-down state of my prior thinking, and for pointing me to the path of living authentically and fully.
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