Ep. #88 Lessons Learned from 21 Days of Silence
Transcript: Intro: This is words that move me, the podcast where movers and shakers, like you get the information and inspiration. You need to navigate your creative career with clarity and confidence. I am your host master mover, Dana Wilson. And if you're someone that loves to learn, laugh and is looking to rewrite the starving artist story, then sit tight, but don't stop moving because you're in the right place. Dana: My friend, my friend, Dana here, let's do this. This is my first podcast recording in over a month. Y'all if you are a first-time listener, I am recovering from the vocal cord surgery. This is my new voice. Holy smokes. If you are an avid listener, then you know that I prepared you with a lot of good stuff over the last several weeks. Uh, I, I backlogged before my surgery and wow. It is very interesting to go back into, listen to old voice, um, and even older, older voice, and to listen to this one, and I'm telling you what my friends, it is just gonna get better from here on out. I am so excited to talk to you today. Thank you for being here. All right. Now I start every episode with wins and since it's been so long, I kind of don't know where to start a lot to celebrate in my world. So I'm going to go with the obvious and celebrate my successful cyst removal surgery, and a very compassionate road to a full recovery, which I am still several weeks away from. But, um, I've been speaking lightly for a few weeks. Now I'll be recording this episode in small bites, over a long period of time and, um, yeah. With, with the help of therapy and good old mindfulness. Oh, and I got this new headset microphone thing that I wear, um, that has like a purse looking speaker connected to it. I am basically the tour guide of my life. Uh, and I simply love not throwing my voice. I love keeping it close. And so that is my win that's what's going well, no, you go. What's going well in your world. I'm so glad that you're winning. Keep crushing it. Okay. Now I am going to try to use as few words as possible. I journal. You better believe I journaled the crap out of my 10 turned 21 days of silence. I yielded about three pages of stream of consciousness writing every day. And as you can imagine, that turned up quite a few things. It got messy in those pages. So as an exercise for myself and to gift to my future self and to all of you, I have decided to organize those pages, organize those notes and share my lessons learned from 21 days of silence. And a few weeks of limited talking, I should preface. I am a person who laughs at myself a lot. If you are an avid listener, you know, this, there will be some changes around here. Instead of my normal belly laugh, the guttural laugh, my doctor has suggested, uh, “tsst Tsst” type of laugh. So you might notice, um, so hard for me to not burst into uncontrollable laughter. Okay. In episode 82, Vice Chief talks about uncertainty. By the way that entire episode is mandatory listening. I am really resisting the urge to like recite the entire transcript to you now, but voice. So here's the point I want to focus on. He says, quote, if you're in this uncertain situation and you don't know the right thing to do one way to approach this is to think of what is the worst thing I could possibly do. How could I absolutely ruin this and then base your next decisions on avoiding that as much as possible. Going into surgery, I knew I wanted to make the most of my recovery time, but I was actually uncertain about a lot, obviously uncertain about how the operation would go, how long it would take to fully recover if I would work or not. If I would treat this as a vacation, if I would use sign language or a dry erase board or an app, or if I would simply refrain from communication altogether for a short period, I considered going on a silent retreat. Um, but here's what I knew. I knew what I wanted to avoid. I knew what would ruin