“It’s summer time.  The sun is beating down on your head and you have ‘California Girls’ running through your head … The southern girls with the way they talk, they knock me out when I’m down there … then it happens! The sticky sound you hear when you realize that you have stepped in gum!

Someone has carelessly spit their gum out onto the pavement leaving it behind for some unsuspecting soul to step in it! And that soul was you! You scrape your shoe on the pavement, on the grass. You even take a stick to it trying desperately to get it OFF … only to find that some of it comes off and the rest is just there quickly turning dirty brown as you continue on your way … even sometimes still feeling the stick-stick-stick to the pavement.”

I heard this phrase from a friend of mine recently. It suddenly made so much more sense beyond the irritation of the literal … gum on your shoe.

How often do you go through life with ‘gum on your shoe’ only to find out that it wasn’t your gum? It was other people’s … their thoughts, their voice, their behaviors that you decided over the years to make your own. All of those conditioned thoughts and behaviors that you don’t know what to do with and you don’t want … yet you still have them stuck to you! Your mother’s voice, your teacher who said you wouldn’t amount to anything, your boss who decided that you were ‘just fine in the position that you are in’ … all of that ‘gum’ stuck to your shoe and getting dirtier by the minute.

You go to retreats and walk on fire. You attend leadership courses and sales training. You do lodge sweats. You change jobs. You move. All of these things you do so you can get the ‘gum’ off your shoe.

Get new shoes!

These shoes with the gum on it are no longer the shoes you want to wear. They are not your shoes.  They used to be as you can remember the shoes without ‘gum’ on them. Then one summer day, you stepped right in it and have kept going with those gummy shoes accepting them as yours sticking to the ground and getting dirtier with each step.

This is what happens when you decide that other people’s stories of how things are supposed to be … for them and for you … become your own. I did this when I was very young. I decided that my grandmother and my best friend had to be right about me being ‘fat’ as they told me enough times. Or my boss who complained (in a constructive manner) that I was too sensitive and needed to be more corporate.

These have been my ‘gum’ moments that have stuck with me most of my life. I’ve worked on getting those new shoes so no GUM is stuck to  me. 

What about you? What ‘gum’ do you have stuck to your shoe? Are you ready to get rid of that ‘gum’? I got rid of mine and am loving the summer days where I sidestep the gum on the pavement … as it is not my ‘gum’.

  

PS … If you’d like to learn more about getting gum off your shoes of life, come coach with me!