Your Unicorn Must Be Rubbing Off On Me

“Your Unicorn Must Be Rubbing Off on Me”

Two messages have influenced my choices. The first, I rebelled against. The second, I listened for too long.

The first message was that I needed to be “realistic” in my aspirations. Big dreams were for other people. I needed to choose between happiness or money, love or career, Jesus, or fun. I rejected those messages. I thought it made more sense to try and see where things could go. How could I have my cake, and eat it too?

The second message, sadly, influenced me for too long. It was that showing my soft and gooey side would make me be taken less seriously. Someone noted this about Chocolate Psychology. If I built this platform, it needed to be completely separate from my professional identity. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be taken seriously as the badass executive coach that I am.

The messages that I needed to extract and present the smart side of me, and tamp down the loving and colorful side of me, were consistent throughout the years. I stayed true to my values, but I internalized a consistent message that I needed to choose. This greatly impacted my decision-making about presentation and marketing as I shifted from a more traditional counseling role into that of an executive coach and business psychologist. 

A few years in, I watched a movie about Mr. Rogers, an old television show. I never saw the show, but the movie portrayed Mr. Rogers as a person who saw past the outside of people and sought to heal their inside hurts. He wasn’t naive, nor immune to his own humanity. He simply cared.

I cried the whole way through it. I cried for hours afterward. I cried the next day.

I didn’t cry because the movie was sad; I cried because it reminded me of who I am. I cried because I’d suppressed the most core part of my identity–I deeply care about people. I believe they are worthy of love. I believe that love heals.  I believe in beauty. I believe in hope. I believe that inside most people, there are childlike needs to be seen and celebrated.

I believe that my intelligence can help solve problems, but I believe that my love can heal people’s hearts.

These beliefs are not absent from of the ugliness in the world; rather, they persist in spite of it. 

The movie challenged me to walk out my identity instead of minimizing it. After the movie, I actively decided to bring all parts of me to the table and let the chips fall where they may.

I don’t know if anyone really noticed the difference because I didn’t start dancing down the street with big heart flags. But I did start taking more emotional risks—gave more emotionally to my clients, sent them funny things to make them smile, spent less time worrying about whether my warmth would come across as unprofessional.

One of these clients and I have a bit of an inside joke about unicorns. I don’t know if we know exactly what the joke is. I send texts of happy unicorns, and he desecrates them with crass images or “wrong” responses. He’s seen the dark side of a lot of people and life. His job was to help people kill possibilities; my job is to help people create them.

Yesterday, he spoke about a business idea that involved holistically helping people, working to integrate his professional expertise in a context that would build, repair, and heal. He said, “I don’t know, does that makes sense? Maybe it’s a moonshot. Your unicorn must be rubbing off on me.”

It was the coolest thing that someone said to me this week.

If you’ve been told that you are too much, too happy, too unrealistic, too sunny, too warm…that people won’t take you seriously if you like unicorns, remember that unicorns can change the world.