What I learned from King Richard

Last weekend, our family ventured out into a movie theatre to take in King Richard. It felt so good to be seeing a movie outside of Netflix - woohoo! And the theatre was more full than we’ve seen it in years. It was so fun to laugh, gasp and cry with other people. Delicious.

The movie was based on the true stories of Venus and Serena Williams and their family, particularly from their father’s view. It was so powerful - highly recommended if you haven’t seen it yet.

A central theme of the movie was the idea about making plans and following through with them. 

One of the prominent sayings in the Williams’ family was the good old: If you fail to plan, plan to fail. 

There was a very interesting dynamic going on underneath the surface with that theme and it had to do with masculine and feminine energy. 

Both masculine and feminine energy are good and important. AND, if we tend to focus on all of one while excluding the other, things get a lot more challenging. 

Consider a river. The masculine energy is the river banks and the feminine energy is the flowing water. We need both energies; without the banks, there’s a flood and without the flowing water, there’s a drought.

Back to the plan. Without going into a step-by-step plot breakdown, Richard Williams, the girls’ father, wrote out a very detailed plan for how the girls would become tennis superstars and he spent years attempting to follow it to the letter. In other words, he really leaned into the masculine energy.

In some ways, that worked well, and in other ways, it didn’t allow for enough freedom, so things went awry, like Richard’s relationship with his wife, for example.

When making plans, I’ve learned that it’s really important to honour both the masculine and feminine energies. If the plan becomes too disciplined, or you have to put on blinders to follow it, ignoring signs and intuition, you’re going to be working too hard, or you might just completely rebel against the structure, ending up exactly where you started. (I speak from experience; I’ve done a lot of rebelling against my carefully laid out plans.) So too much of the masculine doesn’t work so well.

Conversely, if there’s not enough structure, the wild freedom and creative spirit of the feminine might take over and that means you get nothing done. It’s fun, but it leaves you feeling unfulfilled because you just kind of float around from one thing to the next without completing anything. (I speak from experience; I’ve done a whole lot of nothing at times. Fun for a while but then not so much.)

Being productive is a big part of feeling like you’re living on purpose, and you want to make sure that you’re accomplishing things that really make a difference to you. If you’re just doing busy work to get stuff done and it doesn’t have a deeper meaning, that doesn’t feel good either. (I speak from experience; I’ve done a lot of work that I thought was meaningful but was really just masquerading as fancy ways to hide from doing what really would have made a difference.)

In the movie, along with the characters’ journeys, there was also the navigation of learning when to follow the plan and when to let go and trust. It wasn’t until there was some sense of surrender that success could really unfold for each of the family members. It was beautiful to witness. 

The other element that was so powerful in the movie was the sense of absolute faith that the girls had in themselves because of their parents’ beliefs. Richard and his wife, Brandy, constantly told all their girls that they were destined for greatness and the girls believed it. They knew they were supported no matter what. 

Tying it All Together

People ask me all the time how I get so much done and stay sane while doing it.

I think it really comes down to four things:

1-Create structure with masculine energy, but not too much

2-Flow within the structure to allow the freedom and creativity of the feminine to be expressed

3-Believe in my ability to carry out my plans (which takes practice)

4-Trust that everything is unfolding perfectly, even if the plan totally falls apart or goes sideways

One of the most significant aspects of planning that changed everything for me is the Sacred Success Sunday Review. I started this weekly practice several years ago and it truly changed everything for me. I went from double booking myself, feeling stressed often and flailing all over the place to being able to plan my time effectively and (most importantly) to follow through with it. It didn't happen all at once, and that’s why it’s been a practice. 

I highly recommend taking time once a week to look back to your previous week to gather information and celebrate yourself and then to use that information to effectively plan the upcoming week. It actually saves time when you map out the whole week at once and then you just follow your plan. (Unless life happens, in which case, you jigsaw your top priorities and fit them into new times.) 

The Sunday Review also helps you cultivate relationships with the masculine and feminine energies because you honour them over and over, and find out just how much form and how much flow works best for you.

If you’d like some structure, accountability and community around getting the Sunday Review to happen in your life, I have great news. My intuition kept telling me clearly to lower the price, lower the price, lower the price! So I did :) 

(Even when intuition makes no logical sense, it’s so important to follow it.) While inflation continues to climb an invisible ladder, here at Courageous Self-Care we’re going in the opposite direction, because - well - intuition and also, counter culture feels very good. 

Should you wish to check out the Sunday Review, its new price, and all that it entails, click this link. 

If you want to develop your own process, by all means, go for it! My top recommendation for ultimate success is to check in with yourself and your plans every week with a method that looks both back and forward. That way you can develop true presence (which is what we all really want deep down). 

Top 3 Action Steps

1-Go see King Richard (it’s so uplifting!)

2-Start doing a weekly review, either on your own or in community

3-Trust that everything is happening for your highest expansion and evolution, even if things don’t go according to plan

I hope that’s helpful for you. 

Wishing you divine harmony between your inner masculine and feminine energies.

With flowing love and harmonious courage,

Christina

>Creator of Courageous Self-Care

>Still mystified about the scoring system in tennis

>Feeling so good about always asking my kids what they learned from movies, even though it resulted in many eye rolls, because, guess what?!? Richard Williams did it too! And things turned out pretty well for his family.

PS - So many of you signed up for the upcoming free community Body Awake Yoga class I’ll be leading on February 18th. Hooray! If you haven’t yet and you’d like to join in the fun, click here to register.