How to Find A Sand Dollar
Back in September I was visiting my PLP Betsy. Betsy lives 4 hours away from me at the beach in a sleepy coastal NC town, Beaufort. Because I’m not married, and live alone Betsy and her family are my covid pod. During this particular September beach visit I was having lots of anxiety that was reaching an uncontrollable tipping point and, in an effort to reign it in, I took a short drive to Atlantic Beach for a long walk in the sunshine. I knew I would need to give my mind something to focus on other than the thought loop that was contributing to my high-flying anxiety.
Since I was spinning out about cash flow I thought to myself “I think a sand dollar would be a good sign, I really want to find a whole in tack sand dollar”. Now you should know, I didn’t grow up visiting the beach, I didn’t physically see or visit the ocean up close until my 19th birthday. That quick trip on my 19th birthday started a quiet love affair with salt air, strong waves, the mystery of tide cycles and hours of beach walking, but I’m a newbie with a lot to learn about the magic and mysteries of the coast. As I was looking for a new focus for my brain to interrupt the thought loop it was in I began to search for sand dollars. I combed the beach looking for a whole intact sand dollar and after 3 hours of walking and looking I’d only found broken halves of sand dollars, I didn’t feel as anxious as I’d been, but I now felt pretty defeated.
When I got back to the beach house I asked Betsy about it. Betsy practically grew up at the beach and I’m convinced she’s actually a mermaid living among us. She let me know that it’s practically impossible to find a whole sand dollar at Atlantic beach, that’s just not the right environment for them. She let me know I needed to go out carrot island or to one of the sandbars to find them. It clicked, it’s not that I wasn’t doing a good enough job of looking, it’s just that I didn’t know where to look!
How often do we get it in our heads that we want to do something like, start a business, change jobs, make a big life change or begin a major creative project and then when it doesn’t go as planned or doesn’t work out we beat ourselves up? Often, we need to do research and talk to people who have been in our shoes, we might even need to hire a consultant, coach or specialist that has already done what we want to do. We don’t know what we don’t know, and often we have a lot of blind spots.
Yesterday back in Beaufort we spent the afternoon on Carrot island and as we were walking from the creek facing end of the island to the beach facing end of the island I declared that I would find 2 whole sand dollars on this trip. Once settled in on the island I set out for a slow and sandy 4-mile run. Then towards the tail end of this run I started to look for sand dollars as I ran. Within 2 minutes of actually looking “Oh There’s one!” I squealed, grabbed it and kept running. I wanted two, so I kept looking and within a minute I noticed another, and then without even trying to looking I found a third! All it took was a little good advice, going to the right place, setting my intention and looking.
Where in business or life could you benefit from talking to someone who’s already been there and done that? If there is something you want, if there’s a transition you’re trying to make, a business you’re trying to build then schedule a free 30-minute discovery call with me. Your work ahead might be easier than you thought. What took me 3 hours without yielding results took less than 5 minutes when the right guide told me where to look.