What's Your Story about Who Success Belongs to?

I walked up to the front of the store to find a cashier line. My two littlest demanding things incessantly at my hip. A lady stopped her cart blocking mine from getting through and stared with a mouth-wide open, right at me.

Her face flushed. "Do I know you from YouTube?"

I smiled, "Maybe? What's your name?"

"Linda," she said with an almost nervous excitement shaking her up from the inside out, "What's your name?"

"Stacy," I said. And she followed up with...'Stacy Hoch.'

My kids whined and pulled at my legs begging for unreasonable things while Linda told me she's wanted for years to talk to me.

She told me that she went through a really hard time, and did a bunch of recovery work that she felt was missing something, and as the Universe, which she called the Brain, would have it, she came across my work on YouTube. She told me how she found it more helpful than what she was already doing, and relied on my channel as a free but priceless resource to her.

How does this relate to you?

Well...

My cart was filled to the brim with organic foods in a discount foods store. My kids hair was almost in dreads while they for some random reason, passed Troll's Gummy worms through the register after begging forever and being told NO...forever. It was a messy, but a wildly real scene, as it usually is in my life during this chapter.

So...

Do you ever think you have to be perfect, have everything buttoned up tight in your life to ENJOY your life (and consider it an overall success)?

I've had a few primary stories about "if I had this" then I'd have the resources to be "in full bloom."

...If I had supportive parents

...if I had a rich husband

...if I was resourceful enough to build an off the grid community

...if I was skinny...

..then, I'd finally be allowed to call myself a "success." A blossom of myself, if you will.

I also really, really believed I'd need to be otherworldly wealthy to make an impact. And I pretty much thought the only impact I could make was finding a way to get water treatment facilities to the entire world.

Whose gonna respect someone whose owned and worn her one and only jacket for almost two decades, usually has her shirts on inside out, shops at discount food stores before hitting up Whole Foods, and who parties intermittently while homeschooling her kids?

I'm colorful, disorganized without shame about it, and usually find ways to leave my shoes at random places. My mother-of-four minivan is a disaster, and likely, maybe, just maybe, I brushed my hair today.

(Old me used to think) successful people, people who are important enough to "matter" (I was taught) are people who brush their hair, drive a Range Rover (or a government official car), have resources to entertain their kids all day, and who wouldn't dare let loose in the name of fun. Their fancy cars are clean and they walk tall in all their chemical polish while I’m allergic to chemicals.

My picture was that they're disciplined to the borderline point of sterility. Which, grossed me out.

This is literally the vibrational picture of who I thought I'd have to become to be "successful." And this was who I was supposed to aspire to be (according to my mother...which later was an overwhelmingly bitchy voice in my head demeaning any semblance of actual Selfhood I exhibited).

But here I stood, as my messy self, this woman, shaken by her sense of my stardom, moved by her disbelief that she was actually getting to talk to me, stirring in her desire to connect over her gratitude for how my inner success, impacted hers deeply and vastly.

I could see her belief in my success, despite the tornado swirling around me as we smiled at each others smile, and I felt it.

I felt the reality that no...I don't have to become a different person to consider myself successful at my own definition of what "success" means.

Success actually comes from being comfortable in being exactly who and where we are, and allowing that who and where...to change when the winds of Soul, come to shift your sails.

Point is, this beautiful mess that is my life has been impactful enough on the planet that a complete stranger went ghost white when she saw me in the flesh because...I was real.

NOT because...I was perfect.

Just because I don't look how I thought I was supposed to when I was in bloom, doesn't mean, I'm not in bloom.

What about you?

What do you think you need before you can be "successful?"

Who do you think you'd need to become to be "allowed" to feel like your life is allowed to be considered a success?

Answer these questions.

Right now.

Actually...do it.

Answer these questions; and know that the answers are likely the problem (for you right now), not the solution!

All my love,

Stac

PS For more exploratory prompts like this, invest yourself in Soul Centering After Toxic Shame which I hear even years later, is a continual level-up for its students. It's the least expensive course I'll EVER create, here for you now. Dive on deep.