Harry Styles is a placeholder.
You heard me.
Multi-platinum recording artist, multiple Grammy nominated, first man solo on the cover of US Vogue, Harry Styles, is a placeholder.
There is no shortage of people out there who will say, THIS THING worked for me and it MUST work for you too. And the more hyped the modality is, the more I think it’s supposed to work for me.
Spoiler alert: lots of things don’t work for me in the ways they work for other people. But it’s taken me a REALLY long time to get to a place where I can say, yeah, that’s ok.
For a long time, I just figured there was something wrong with me.
What matters most to me is that you feel like you have permission to imagine what works for you, not that everything that works for me also works for you.
So, when I say to you, Harry Styles helps me get my needs met, I’m going to guess that you don’t think you’re broken because that may not be true for you. If it IS true for you, you should definitely come sit by me ;)
Imagine instead that I said, meditation helps me get my needs met. Or yoga. Or religion. Or nature walks. Or a specific diet. Now, there is no shame in any of those ways of getting our needs met, but most of them are pretty mainstream. And in many of those cases, I start to feel less-than for not being a yoga person.
I doubt that folks feel less-than when they say Harry Styles doesn’t help me get my needs met. Instead, they think, what is MY Harry Styles?
So, Harry Styles is a placeholder and an invitation.
Here’s how it works: I ask everyone I work with to think of a place (real or imagined) where they feel like they belong, where they feel safe, and free. Click here for the worksheet.
For me, one of those places is a Harry Styles concert. So I keep pieces of those experiences close at hand for when I feel down or isolated. I have Concert Harry photo widgets on my phone and live audio from a 2018 show in my iTunes. And believe it or not, those reminders help.
So my question to you is, what, or who is your Harry Styles?
