Step into Your Moxie. Alexia Vernon
way of truly believing your Reframes. In your journal or worksheet, write the word Release, and list anything and everything that you are letting go of, once and for all. For me this would include a desire to publicly shame any of my childhood humiliators or to travel back in time and give an Oscar Award–winning presentation. Feel free to combine your experiences as you cull together everything you want to release.
In the final R, Reapply, you identify how you have carried forward and how you will continue to carry forward the knowledge awakened in the Reframe section. Try not to list just what you have done / will do (e.g., the behaviors or actions) but also the evidence you will look for, or perhaps already possess, that proves you are embodying your Reframe(s) in all spheres of your life. Writing this book is a huge piece of my Reapply!
QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION
• As you look back on your work in the five Rs, what are you discovering?
• What role have your stories played in the development of your inner and outer voice?
• What will the payoff be for holding your Reframes and Releases and committing to your Reapplies?
• What other truer, more self-empowering stories could you be telling?
• What would it cost you if you went back and lingered in the Recall and Relive of your old story (or stories)?
Make Moxie a Lifelong Habit
Once you illuminate the stories that have created a glass ceiling for your moxie, you have the power to shatter them. How? By making a new habit of telling better stories that reinforce who you are versus who you are not. Then and only then can you begin to address your self-talk, the sensation you experience when you speak up, and your actual speaking performance.
Just as I don’t remember the exact moment when I started to disappear, I also don’t recall quite when and how I started speaking up again. It happened in fits and starts. Having parents who told me I could do anything I set my mind to, and going to a progressive all-girls secondary school that every day reminded me that my voice mattered, certainly helped. So did winning that pageant and subsequently becoming a youth motivational speaker. However, without learning how to rewrite my self-narrative or correcting my poor speaking habits, I was unable to ten-thousand-hours my way to lasting, unwavering speaking confidence — particularly when I had an audience beyond my peers. The first time I locked eyes with a junior high boy who looked disinterested in one of my teen empowerment audiences, all the old gremlins came back. And they were on steroids.
And so it went, from my late teens into my midtwenties. As an actor, I could get onstage and do a one-and-a-half-hour one-woman performance of Joan of Arc. As a trainer, I could facilitate professional development for teachers. I was effin’ brilliant whenever I got to hide behind a character or my expertise. But in the moments when I was truly being seen by others, like when I’d strive to articulate a potentially unpopular opinion to a supervisor or introduce myself at a theater audition to a casting director, I’d become a bumbling mess all over again. And the real bumbling, of course, happened in my inner monologues when I rehashed, and then beat myself up, afterward. Over. And over. Again.
What I want, my precious reader, is for you to become the heroine of your own narrative. I’m not interested in whether you turn that idea, or anything else that I share, into a cheesy affirmation. I want you to possess the moxie to actually make it happen. I want you to learn, practice, and master the inner and outer work necessary to speak with confidence and competence whenever you open your mouth. And along the way, I want you to stop worrying about whether you are getting it right. Because a lot of the time, you won’t be. And that’s okay. What’s considerably less okay is replaying your flops at the expense of forgetting your successes. I speak what it’s taken me most of my lifetime to learn. And remember.
I also really want you to unhook from the persistent drizzle of anxiety you (if you are like most ambitious, overachieving women I know and serve) carry with you throughout your life. People may laugh at you. They may call you names. You may pee on yourself. Multiple times. And you will survive. So please, take a moment and answer this very serious question:
What’s the worst thing that could happen if you consistently spoke your truth?
And once you answer it, ask yourself the equally important follow-up question:
And then what would happen?
And keep asking yourself this same follow-up question (and writing down your responses) until you can’t go any further. For example, you might find yourself writing:
People would lose respect for me.
I’d be out of a job.
I’d struggle to pay my mortgage.
I’d have to move in with my crazy Aunt Zelda and take care of her seven cats.
I’d have to subsist on ramen noodles (the ones in a package, not the swanky noodle shop kind).
I mean, you pretty quickly realize that there might be some situational suckiness, but you’d survive, right? So tango with your worst truth telling, visibility, and speaking fears. By going to the worst-case scenario, you liberate yourself to start considering what else might happen.
What’s the best-case scenario if you stepped into your moxie? Or even the pretty okay, albeit not totally perfect, scenario?
You mitigate anxiety by calling out, and having a plan in place for, the potential fallout from speaking up. But your other equally important, delicious work is to invest your time, energy, and sweat into setting yourself up for all the beautiful things that can happen when you are able to listen to, honor, and speak from your moxie. Habitually.
In the next chapter, I’ll show you how to identify the specific voices you hear in your head — and help you discern which are empowering your moxie and which are sabotaging it. Then I’ll give you a foolproof process for evicting the voices that have overstayed their welcome so that you can fill your precious mental real estate with a more loving, moxie-inducing presence.
CRITICS, COPS, AND CHEERLEADERS…OH MY!
People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing — that’s why we recommend it daily.
—ZIG ZIGLAR
Two weeks before my sixteenth birthday, my grandma passed away from pneumonia. The year proceeding her death was one of the darkest periods of my life. I got my first B+ in a math class, due to missing several weeks of school while I sat bedside with my grandma hoping, in vain, that she would come off her respirator prior to her death. Integrating the reality that I may not be as Andrea Zuckerman 90210 smart as I’d been led to believe with the reality that I would have to live the majority of my life without one of my favorite humans, was a bullet train ride into depression for me. And as a theater student, I went big. I plotted what I could do with a bottle of over-the-counter pain pills I had in a medicine cabinet, went on a long drive (because I was too physically and emotionally depleted to consider running away from home), and was prescribed a series of antidepressants (and even a mood stabilizer) — none of which could pull me out of my funk.
Before this episode, I might have been typecast in the role of Sally Sunshinepants. (Don’t bother looking up that reference. It’s not a thing, but it should be.) Sure, I could slide into teen-girl angst from time to time, but overall I defaulted to seeing the positive in most people, places, and things — even while I trudged through some objectively awful experiences. But something happened after my grandma’s death. I stopped working so hard to manage the voices in my head. Instead, when life gave me lemons — in small, mundane ways like getting a mosquito bite,