“Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinions of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.” -Katherine Mansfield

I am quickly running out of days on this yearlong positivity quest, and amazingly here I am still learning to go for it. Three thousand copies of my book will soon be headed towards me in a Mack truck and here I am, on the fence over promoting my ideas. It isn’t like I haven’t learned a few things about how sales happen and what makes distribution turn in selling Good Clean Love products. But now I have ramped up the sales objectives, moving from selling products to promoting my ideas.

It isn’t that I don’t fully adore my new book, Love that Works, which is by far the best collection of my ideas in the most beautiful package I could have ever imagined; but still I struggle to shake off these tendrils of doubt. Sometimes the doubt looks like this steep learning curve on book distribution, but more often it is this little voice that wouldn’t dare speak out loud, but insists on whispering in my ear: “Who do you think you are anyway? What makes your ideas so special?”

This is an old echo of a girl who longed to be seen while simultaneously was terrified of being seen. I know her well. So I speak patiently to her and remind her that she is worthy of the space she takes. I remember that this message of love that fills pages and pages of my life is one that deserves the space it takes up. I gather her up and roll her around in the confidence I have been building and start to act. Usually the distance between success and failure in life isn’t measured by how much better one person’s ideas or talents are over another’s, but rather by their willingness to risk and the courage they find to act.

T.S. Eliot said, “Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” This has got to be the mantra of these days. There is no more time for asking permission, and in fact someone said to me the other day that more success has been born from the freedom of not asking permission, than any other single factor. People that aren’t afraid of what other people will say and that don’t even care whether it works or not are the ones that succeed.

Today I started doing something. This has been my answer for years. Stop thinking about it and start acting. Start anywhere. Set a goal and then figure out how to do it. The goal is allowing my voice carry my ideas as far and wide as it can. The goal is to talk to as many people as possible about how to love, how to keep choosing love, how to not give up on it when it is difficult.

Seneca, a great Roman philosopher backs me up when he wrote: “It’s not because things are difficult that we dare not venture. It’s because we dare not venture that they are difficult.” Years ago an old friend when I was living in France told me to get moving and to not stop moving until I find what I am looking for. Still it seems some of the best advice I have ever been given.