I called my dad the other day from Wisconsin while I was working on a consulting job for one of my businesses, and thanked him. I had flown to Wisconsin to help a woman who hired me to help her transform her large farm into a profitable petting farm. When you take these kinds of jobs you really don’t know the person that you will be spending a week with, and to my surprise, this women was the owner of two of the most infamous strip clubs in the country. By now, many of you are falling out of your chairs thinking, what the heck is Dianne Linderman doing helping someone in the business of sin?!
This is where a big thanks has to go to my father because his gift to my soul, while I was growing up, was to help me keep the real me fully intact and grounded like a concrete pillar. I realized, as I stood alone in my hotel room, that I felt nothing about my situation. I felt no judgment and I was completely comfortable with myself. In fact, the woman was decent and someone I would describe as a survivor and an incredible entrepreneur. She was no hypocrite, and even described herself as a better person than most of the churchy people that lived in her community! I knew exactly what she meant, and I agreed with her!
The principle that I am seeking to share is the most valuable principle of them all—feel no judgment and you will always remain completely grounded and balanced. I would like to remind you that I was alone, thousands of miles from home, away from my family, and I was among people who live in the underworld, and I had a blast! Yes, it was fun being thrown into a world that in all my life I never thought my path would take me, but the fun part was that I felt no different than if Jesus himself were there. A free spirit feels no awkwardness, no comfort or discomfort; you only know that you are happy in this moment. A free spirit does not allow the anticipation of anything; no box can keep you in and no fear can dictate your life’s forward moves. Free spiritedness is the spirit of living in the moment and dealing with what has been put before you instead of trying to will yourself to succeed. You look at everything as an adventure no matter what!
Most people live their lives trying to be artificially proper and successful, and they judge others for not being the same. They spend their whole lives looking down their noses at the imperfections of others. This is where my new friend, the woman with the naked business, was very much like me. She was not a hypocrite, pretending to be something she was not. She was only moved by what she saw in the moment. She did not answer to the call of fear, was completely herself all of the time, and called it the way she saw it.
The most interesting part of this story is that as she scanned me for my defects and weaknesses, she saw nothing but my realness. My realness met with her hardness and suspicion, and I had the upper hand, called fairness! My fairness pulled her out of her world into mine. This is the moment of truth for many people, and you never know what effect this precious moment has on a person. I don’t want people to think that I take credit for this, I was not even aware that it was happening. The moral of this story is that when you have the spirit of freedom and you are grounded and don’t judge others because you feel that you have arrived, only then will you affect others in a real way. This will in turn open up a window so that they can view their own future of endless possibilities. I call this faith.
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