This episode of the podcast is the last two chapters of Dancing the Tightrope. We have reached the end of the book!

You might hear me be a little choked up at the end of this reading. There are so many layers to unpack as to why. First, when I started reading this book, I didn’t expect to get much further than Chapter 1. Just reading twenty whole chapters felt like a huge accomplishment. For those of you who encouraged me to read another (and then another), I appreciate you more than you can know. Second, when reading these chapters, I was reliving my experience in some ways. Reaching some of these milestones felt unachievable when I began this journey. Now, they are everyday occurrences. Take away for you? Whatever seems daunting at the moment is just waiting to become an everyday occurrence if you are willing to break it into small enough steps. 

The conversation I’ve been having recently with several colleagues, clients and friends is about visiting the other side of fear. If you haven’t been there (and for years, I HAD NOT BEEN THERE), it’s impossible to understand how fear can squash us. It seems so rational to honor fear as the answer to the problem of the day. Until you look at it from the other side (get thee behind me, fear!), you cannot see it for what it is: information. Dancing the Tightrope calibrates the fear so that we can RESPOND rather than automatically react from what I call the “robot space” in this book. Just like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, we discover that the “great and powerful Oz” is simply our programming and conditioning, pulling levers like the little man behind the curtain. We’ve had the answers all along; all we needed was someone to show us the inner Tools we were granted at birth. That’s what I set out to show in publishing this book.

Reaching this point in the journey of reading the book, you may be wondering “what’s next?” I’m publishing Dancing the Tightrope as an Audible book in the next few months – timeline to be determined. The compiled version will include several things this podcast version did not. It will have the Introduction Chapter, which I did not include in this series. It will also include some “author commentary”, as I’ve come a long way since these words were written. It seems only fair to update the listener. I may also play with adding more quotes in the voice of the speaker where possible. 

Dancing the Tightrope will not be the only audiobook I publish. After this one gets out, I will publish both The Delicate Art and The Elegant Pivot in Audible format as well. Yes, the woman who swore I would NEVER do an Audible version is reminded that saying “never” is just the first step! You’ll hear more about that in the podcast coming out next week, with Bernie Harberts, author of Two Mules to Triumph and star of Amazon’s The Lost Sea Expedition. 

This episode of the podcast is Chapters 16, 17, and 18 of Dancing the Tightrope, the last of the self-awareness chapters, or as I call them the “C” chapters. In these chapters, we cover courage, congruence and clarity. Over and over again, I come back to these chapters to find what’s missing when I find myself stuck. 

My favorite quote from the Courage chapter is this one: “The beautiful thing about welcoming pressure as a catalyst is that we no longer allow the end goal to define us. Winning the game is nice, but it’s not the point. The point is the opportunity to cultivate our courage, or perhaps a better word is to unleash our courage.” I’ve even come to call the process of raising the pressure threshold “couraging” because we are building our courage.

From Chapter 17 on Congruence, I like this quote: “Like a tangled ball of roots, Rules wind their way into our guidance system, blocking the pathways to our personal truth. The interference makes it very difficult to find our voice. And here’s the strangest part of all of this. We are not aware that our Rules are interfering. Because all of these Rules have been with us for so long, they feel like a part of us. As they direct us out of our awareness, our Rules feel as if they ARE us.”

This quote sums up Chapter 18 pretty well: “Clarity starts with removing that which does not belong. Whether creating a simple picture for how my day is going to go or a picture for the horse on a trail or a vision for my life, the art of subtraction makes room for what is real and true. I can only afford to remove my protective armor when I’ve come to own my true inner strength and acknowledged my true nature.” 

We are nearing the end of the book! Next week, I’ll share the last two chapters of Dancing the Tightrope. Because I tackled this project Frame by Frame, step by step, it’s actually been fun. Hard to believe I dreaded it!

This episode includes Dancing the Tightrope Chapters Fourteen Commitment and Fifteen Curiosity. These are the first two of five chapters in the book outlining the building blocks of self-awareness. If you have listened this far, you have certainly heard me talk about the value of these inner “tools.” 

I decided to highlight the five building blocks of self-awareness at this stage of my story, because I found myself not always showing up in pressure situations the way I would have liked to. It was clear to me that sometimes I could reach for my tools, and other times I had to reach for my rules. Awareness was the difference, but there was something more. For several weeks, I became more and more aware of my awareness. 

It was through this focused attention that I began to see that I “fell off” at different points. Sometimes it was at the level of being committed. Sometimes it was lack of curiosity, or one of the other three layers, which I dive into in the chapters to follow. I revisit the lessons in these five chapters over and again, because they help me fine tune my awareness when I get off track – and the nature of the game is not being perfect all the time. It’s about having lots of ways of getting back on track. 

Speaking of curiosity, this podcast was created because of my budding curiosity to have a different kind of conversation, and you will hear about one of my early podcast guests Warwick Schiller, who has also been on a journey of self-discovery. Chapter fifteen has a special surprise in it.

This episode includes Dancing the Tightrope Chapters Twelve The Froth is My Friend and Thirteen The Art of Living. These chapters mark a turning point in my journey of making friends with pressure. To this day, I still find it difficult to explain how different this approach to pressure – and to life – is from the typical approach espoused in high performance coaching elsewhere. Rereading these two chapters several years later, I’m still pleased with how well these two chapters explain the “pressure as a catalyst” approach. However, it’s dang near impossible to understand it if you haven’t experienced it.

The best analogy I’ve come up with is what I call the “fish story.” Fish don’t know they live in water. Water is all they know. On the other hand, dolphins are aware of world of water and of course they are aware of air, since they must surface to breathe. Learning about the unseen forces that impacted the way I dealt with pressure was a little like being a fish who discovered there was a whole different world. In order to break the surface and breathe the air of life., I had to ask myself some tough questions along the way. 

These two chapters break down the distinction between pressure and the thing causing the pressure, and also those tough questions, which I believe apply to anyone seeking the signal of a genuine life amidst the noise of the modern world.

In this episode, I’m reading Chapters 10 and 11 of Dancing the Tightrope. If there is a theme in these two chapters of my journey, I have to call it “stuff happens.” I’m going along, expecting things to go as planned, and instead, something unexpected turns everything on its head. Of course something unexpected happened. That’s how the world works. Why would I think it should go any other way? As I say earlier in the book, this journey showed me that many of my assumptions about pressure, balance and how to develop mental fitness were upside or backwards. These chapters not only capture some of the stories that helped me see things differently, they also capture exactly what I was seeing in my mental process and how I changed it for the better. 

In this episode of the podcast, I am reading chapters 8 and 9 of Dancing the Tightrope. I'm starting to put things together, as you will hear when you listen. At the very beginning of chapter eight, I had a wild experience going out and learning the negative-positive poll in a completely new or deeper way. 

Let me tell you something that's interesting about that particular super tool as I call it. It is eight years later, and I am still BEGINNING to understand just how powerful this mechanism inside of us is if we learn to use it. If there's nothing else I have for you for this podcast, pay attention to that story and see how you can start using it for yourself, because this one is powerful. 

I'm also beginning to find out all the holes in my training and all the things I thought I knew that I didn't really know. Because if there's any distinction, especially around this time of the book, but maybe for the whole book, there is a big difference between knowing something and having the wisdom to know how to use it in the right place and in the right time.

I hope you enjoy these chapters of Dancing the Tightrope. 

In this episode of the podcast, I’m reading Chapters 6 and 7, The Decision – Sort of, and Imbalance is a Good Thing. As you will hear, at this stage of the journey, I’m somewhat flailing. Looking back on it, I’m still surprised that I took the path I did. Some part of me saw the promise of taking the more difficult path – something that was typically not my norm.

It has been fascinating for me to go back and read these chapters several years later. I typically can’t remember what I wrote last week, much less four years ago. In that way, it’s fresh. It’s also a little bit like reading a personal journal. I’m reminded of what I went through. 

I hope you enjoy these chapters – they will keep coming every week until we get through the book, and then my podcasts with guests will resume. 

This episode of the podcast features chapters 4 and 5 of Dancing the Tightrope. If you haven’t listened to the first 3 chapters, I suggest listening to those first. It will help make sense of what’s coming in these next few chapters.

When I listened back to Chapter 3, where I read the sidebar blog “Where’s My Choice Here?”, it was somewhat stunning to me that many of the threads that I pulled together for Dancing the Tightrope started well before the accident that lays the foundation for the book. I was already onto the themes of dealing with fear, adrenaline, pressure and uncertainty. In some ways, I had been bumping up against the glass ceiling of my beliefs; the pivotal fall from the horse offer me a way to shatter those beliefs if I chose to open myself up to seeing things in a new way.

What’s standing out for me in this process of creating an audio version of the book are the pivotal moments, where a seemingly innocuous choice created huge change. The small choice to go trail riding could have just as easily been the choice to give up horseback riding for good. The small choice to call Bruce could have just as easily been something I never got around to doing. 

The choice to go back for a second visit to Bruce was both a mystery and a big damn deal. In the world of the way I had done things up to this point, that second visit would not have happened. Yet it did -  in this new world I was discovering.

Chapter 4 talks about our second visit to Camden to understand what this somewhat strange approach to life, horses and learning to live in nature’s world was all about. Chapter 5 shows you where I began to use what I was learning – somewhat naively at the time. In fact, reading it back now sometimes feels like I’m reading someone else’s story.

In Chapter 5, I’m still deciding if I should ever get back on a horse – something that’s difficult to grasp, given that I’m riding all the time these days. Think about a decision you’ve made that now seems so obvious – or a decision you are grappling with that may someday become obvious. Maybe these chapters will help you sort through the risks and rewards with an improving mindset.

This week’s episode is – drumroll – Chapter 3 of Dancing the Tightrope. I’m just going to say it – you were right and I was wrong! I’m speaking to those who’ve been telling me for a long time that they would appreciate an audio version of my book. 

Not only have I been getting great feedback and gratitude for providing the book in this form, but I have also surprisingly enjoyed reading it myself. After all, I wrote this over 4 years ago. It’s given me a fresh perspective on the themes and principles I began learning and refining after my fall from the horse – and it’s also shown me how far I’ve come. For example, if you had told the 2020 version of me that I would be riding with Stevie Delahunt at an endurance boot camp a mere five years later, I would have laughed in your face. But that’s where I was in early March when Chapter 2 of the book came out. It just goes to show you that you can teach an old – dare I say it – dog new tricks. 

This chapter sets the stage for so much of what I’ve put into practice in the last five years. It chronicles my first visit to Camden to work with Bruce Anderson. To say that I was resistant is an understatement. So was Jen, as you will hear in this Chapter 3 of Dancing the Tightrope. 

In my last episode of the podcast, I started an experiment by reading the first chapter of my book Dancing the Tightrope. My promise was that if I heard from my readers and listeners that it was valuable, I would do more. Secretly, I did not expect anything to come of it. Of course, I was wrong!

You have spoken (at least some of you!) and I am listening. This episode of the podcast is Chapter Two of Dancing the Tightrope. It covers a lot of ground, both about my recovery from my accident and my waterskiing. More importantly, it sets the stage for many of the gold nuggets to come.

Something else happened when I read the book – especially this chapter – that I did not expect. I felt like a first-time reader in many ways. This chapter was written four years ago. Reading it now - out loud - is giving me new perspective. Something I dreaded doing is now becoming a useful practice. Who would have thought? 

It’s reminding my WHY I wrote the book. Here’s a quote from Chapter 13: If pressure is a test to show others we are good enough, we are doomed to live at the mercy of those whose approval we seek. If pressure is a catalyst to unleash our true nature, we can truly live while we are alive.

The worst accident of my life showed me how to live while I’m alive. Imagine giving up the need to prove yourself. Imagine truly living. That’s why I wrote the book. 

Stay tuned. More chapters to come. 

And I’m still seeking feedback. (Thank you to those who’ve already shared your insights.) What do you like about hearing me read these chapters? What would make it easier for you to listen? What gold nuggets are you taking away?