They looked at me, they looked at each other, they looked at the puddle, and then back at me again and I was relieved to see that I might just be able to spin my way out of this one realizing that if I didn’t, I would be doomed to be the girl who wet her pants that day in kindergarten.
Imagine.
I worked hard to convince those kids back then that I was innocent no matter what it looked like to them and no matter how effectively the evidence stacked up against my desperate alibi. And, in an effort to survive and move on, I convinced myself at five years old, and choose to believe to this day, that they bought my story of the little man flying around my head with a bucket of warm water, hook line and sinker. Maybe I could have humbly confessed to my accident. Maybe I should have asked my teacher for help. At five years old however, that was an option I didn’t know that I had.
And you?
You’ve been caught in the spotlight of an embarrassing moment, trying desperately to figure out how to maintain your elevated status in someone else’s eyes, haven’t you? Have you ever lied, even just a little bit, to save face so that you could show your face again when it was all over, said and done? Maybe you felt like you had no other choice.
We’ve all been there and we’ve all done that, working overtime to avoid messing up somehow because let’s face it, we will do whatever it takes to maintain the image that we’ve got it all together, which just sets us up for the inevitable fall because remaining on a pedestal; sustaining admiration and high regard, is a delicate balancing act that no man has ever mastered.
There will always be that unexpected “crack in the sidewalk” just waiting to trip us up! But, it’s not about the fact that we’ve fallen that threatens to make us look bad. It is about how we deal with the fact that we’ve fallen. It is about how we choose to get up that will ultimately determine who we are and that will allow us to live our lives powerfully and on our own terms.
When we are trusting enough to allow our flaws and imperfections to emerge unopposed; courageous enough to accept “looking bad” for a minute, by owning the truth, we open ourselves up to the possibility of accessing the kind of power and influence that can only come through the magic of being fully ourselves.
