"Pseudoscience at Best"

Earlier this year I got to sit face-to-face with an angry client telling me that what I practice “is pseudoscience at best.”

Not a fun conversation.

I owned that I hadn’t communicated clearly throughout our work together in a way that was in-sync with his needs, while standing solidly behind my work, and we came to a mutual agreement that we were not a good professional fit for each other. So, we ended the relationship.

Difficult, yes, and I ultimately felt really good about the conversation. The big-boy pants were definitely on that day.

But the “pseudoscience” remark was particularly insidious. It bored itself into my head for quite some time and hit right up against a huge wall of incredulousness, triggering lots of these kinds of thoughts in my head:  “*#@**&*!!”  Anger definitely came knocking more than once as I processed the conversation.

And interestingly enough, it completely down-shifted the momentum and energy in my practice, despite the success of the conversation and what was really a positive outcome for both of us. What I gradually realized was that this was one of those huge kicks in the ass from the Universe designed to shake you up and force a reckoning. Time to put up or shut up basically.

I eventually understood that his comment stuck around in my head for so long not because it was rancorous and over-the-top, but because it shot an arrow directly into a deep, inner-critic part of my psyche that didn’t, in fact, believe in what I do.

So I had to sit in that space, a lot, and dig in to rediscover the vision I have for what it is I do in the world, and my deep-seated belief in that vision. I had been resisting doing this for a long time or half-doing it here and there. But this was a big, loud kick in the can from the Big U. to get to it already.

What this comment struck into was a layer of resistance inside me, a previously-undiscovered barrier to moving my life forward in an even bigger way than I had been. There was a ‘No’ in my subconscious keeping me from my personal evolution and growth, and it looked like my own skepticism about the value of what I offer the world. This loud kick in the ass finally illuminated that for me.

To continue my forward momentum I had to reckon with that barrier. So I did some deep work. And ultimately I was able to walk gently through that resistance. Now, just a few short months from that conversation, I can already look back at it as a critical turning point in my journey, both professionally and personally. There’s some tenderness in there still, but I now have some gratitude for the person and the experience.

And most definitely to the Universe for yelling loudly at me when I clearly needed it.