Today I shared a bonus episode of the Power Your Platform Podcast. In the episode, I do an unboxing (and taste testing) of Lucky Elephant Pink Candy Popcorn, a throwback to my younger years. I even discover a prize inside!
This episode is a reminder that inside every one of your life experiences, there’s a prize. Sometimes it’s hidden, but it’s that knowledge nugget you take away that makes you say, Here’s what I learned”. AHA! I get it now.
Maybe it was a good lesson. Maybe it was a bad one. But either way, it was a lesson. SURPRISE! If you’re lucky, the surprise is a DELICIOUS ONE and it’s something you can well, really chew on. And as you do, the true flavour starts to come out, am I right? Especially when you get to the kernel of truth inside the lesson.
Ok, ok, enough with the popcorn puns!
Here’s the thing though – not everyone looks for the prize inside their story journey.
And that’s too bad. Because frankly if we don’t get the prize the first time, we often find ourselves repeatedly opening box after box of popcorn without enjoying the prize inside.
What’s more, when we find the prize inside our story journey and we take it out of the box and we take off the wrapping, we usually examine it and we turn it over in our hands, and if we’re really excited about it, we show it to someone else. Right?
When I’m speaking with my clients, we often talk about the knowledge and expertise and life lessons they’ve collected throughout their lifetime. And here’s the thing – we all have a different story path that we’ve experienced.
So they have story prizes that they can share me and I have story prizes that I can share with them.
The thing to remember is that there are SOLUTIONS inside the prizes we’ve collected over time. And those solutions can provide a shortcut to other individuals who are looking to save themselves time, money and energy by learning from what YOU have learned and the prizes you’ve collected.
Now a true prize inside a story journey is the one that has a personal flavour, but also a kernel of truth with a universal application.
We actually talked about this back in Episode #11 of the Power Your Platform Podcast, so if you missed it, be sure to go back and download that podcast episode.
I also wanted to mention here that it’s very typical for a prize to be at the very bottom of your popcorn box. It would be great if it was right on top so you didn’t have to do any work. You would just open the box and see it and say, hey, there’s my prize!
And the same thing is true with your story journey. It would be AWESOME if the lesson we were about to learn was shared with us at the start of one of our difficult seasons, -- wouldn’t it? Because it think it might make any pain or suffering more bearable if we were well-aware of the prize we were getting out of the experience.
But life doesn’t work that way.
The truth is that the prize is usually buried. And again, it might be buried underneath something DELICIOUS or it might not.
But you’re the one who’s going to the work to uncover it. We don’t know what the prizes is until we come THROUGH the experience – but that’s what makes it valuable. We’ve earned that prize. It actually wasn’t free after all.
Just like my box of Lucky Elephant Pink Candy Popcorn was actually $1.99. So was my prize really free? Mmmm, not so much.
So my challenge for you today is to dig to the bottom of your pink candy popcorn box.