Why I question, and break, the social "shoulds"!

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I am a change agent. A thought leader. A bright older woman who tried the traditional modes of employment...and failed. Who tried the untraditional modes of seeking my purpose...and failed.

I am not only a change agent now - in businesses, business teams and with individual women leaders, but I have always been an unintentional change agent. I have been the kind of "big energy" that causes problems when I try to work in offices with anyone who fears for and endlessly protects their position of power. The fear is that with energy like mine, I want what the powerful have.

The truth is that I have never wanted their kind of power. I don't even see it as the true kind of power that transforms, elevates, solves, and saves.

I have never wanted to be a part of a pack and find my place of security and just squat there, never quite satisfied. This has proven to be an adventurous path to walk, but walk it I have. I do make conscious choices to do so, but I still have moments or months where I wonder if I have any say in it at all.

And I do. I have chosen to walk a path that leads to me being all that I am, right out loud.

It started with simply being "opinionated". That was the word my mother used. "You are too opinionated," she would say. And I - at a precocious 12 years of age - respond, "Too opinionated for what?"

In my 30's, I would become a professional actress, lured and enraptured by the live-wire experience of walking out onto a stage, being emotionally naked, and courting at any moment the complete loss of the script in my head. It is free-falling, and it is one of the more alive places in life you can safely inhabit!

I became a jazz singer. Put me on stage anywhere, hand me a microphone, and I'm happy. I just want to connect with you, with the audience, and share authenticity, warmth, encouragement and joy - and that is what happens when I am on stage. 

In an effort to combine my creativity and my need for security, I became a Marketing Virtual Assistant, teaching myself social media when it first emerged on the scene. 

I became a writer - self-publishing what will soon be three books - and an artist, painting designs on everything from paper to chairs, and offering my artwork online.

I became a public speaker (of course); remember, put me on a stage anywhere, with a mic, and I'm happy...

I also became an Acting Coach, a Self-Expression Coach, something else I called being an Emotional Linguist™, and I started coaching Women Leaders in the kind of empowerment that is experiential and personal.

So, what was the core of these experiences? What could I safely "call" myself?

I am a change agent. I see the good and the bad of the systems in which we live, and how we are invisibly held captive - struggling against the bonds that stop our courage, our considered risks, our efforts to try to be something new, someone new!

I see where individuals are bound. I see the possibilities that call to us - those of us in business who want to do better, in a newly defined world. But I don't believe we should define it as we have done up until now. That time is past.