Talking With Your Hands: Learning to Accept Your Uniqueness to Amplify Your Life

Have you ever caught yourself off guard, either in a store window reflection, or in the background of someone’s Instastory or heard what your voice sounds like on a recording and wanted to cringe, untag yourself and hide? This happens to me all too often and what I know for sure is the only way past this is to go through it. At the age of 39, it’s time to shed some sabotages behaviors before I bring them into the next decade of my life.

Being a creature of two truths, I often find myself in a struggle to authentically arrive at my goals without fighting the war in my mind. One truth is that I thrive on real interaction (I love a just-keeping-it-real moment) with people and the other truth is, I like to hide from the world when I feel I am not my most manicured, curated self. I realize this blocks me from so many of life’s amazing gifts—and from staying present. We will get into this deeper in a moment, but I imagine that many of my friends, family, and community are often plagued by their own two truths, and maybe they can join me in talking about it, embrace it and lean into it with me.

I call this “Talking with your Hands… Learning to Accept Your Uniqueness to Amplify Your Life” because I am a public speaker who can’t stand to watch himself speak in public, because my hands do all the talking and it’s as much a public dance as it is a speech (I’m Italian AF). I am a writer and teacher who is a horrible speller (Yep, guilty as charged— I am that person that they makes memes about Facebook for confusing there/their/they’re & your/you’re). I struggle with body positivity and weight management yet, for 2 months I was a fitness guru through Beachbody because I dropped 30 lbs. in 21 days on a cleanse—wait, that’s a blog post in itself. My point is that I live in multiple realities and duplicities and instead of running away from them, avoiding reflections, not watching my own TED Talk, and staying indoors during the summer, (depending on where I am on my weight journey, I can gain and lose 25lbs on any given month—I’ve even coined myself the “fluctuator”) because I may never be satisfied on where I will land, despite the vast range of sizes in my repertoire. So this blog is about accepting who you are today by embracing the things that make you cringe in order to amplify and increase your life experience.

Now, let me be super real and transparent: YES this is another blog of an entrepreneur who is trying to build a business that also happens to be called Amplified Events (Booking all events now for the Spring and Summer ‘19) so this is certainly an angle to bridge who I authentically am while offering content related to the business, but more importantly how that relates to real life.

As an event producer and designer, we are charged with taking a vision and curating it; I find the most successful events are always those that tell a personal story. Whether it’s that of a couple or a non-profit’s fundraiser, every event tells a story that should connect to its guests. This is the intersection where event producing and writing meet up for me and drives me to do what I do.

My hope for this blog is to do the same. To tell the stories of people’s experiences that color the world in which we live. To ask our friends, family, community to go deep in their journey so I (we) can learn from them. Part of my uniqueness has always been asking people around me 10,000 questions. Some questions may be a little intrusive or taboo and I am sure there were many questions that have annoyed those around me. I assure you I am not nosey, just inquisitive.I want to know your path, so I can form my own path. If you know the meaning of life I want it, but I promise I will share it. Unless it’s a secret, then it’s safe with me… well, unless I’m drunk. I have been known to have I have been meaning to write this first blog for a very long time but was stuck in that internal battle between great ideas and doubt. We all have been there! It wasn’t until one late night on my couch in the midst of real deep life talk, my cousin-in-law said, “…just tell your story authentically… and you should call it ‘Talking With Your hands’” (Thanks Anj). So, here I am, telling my story while talking with my hands in the attempt to Amplify My Life… I hope it helps you do the same.