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Hi, I’m Erin, an spiritual adventurer, tech marketer, and wife and mom of 2. I’m here to share the insights I learn, the joy I find, and hope to help others find a way to seek more magic in every day.
Erin McMahon: [00:00:03] Hello and welcome to Seek the Magic. This is Erin here. It is a lovely Friday afternoon in North Carolina in the summer, but it's not yet as humid as it usually is. We are enjoying the dehumidified air while we can. Today I wanted to talk about waiting and being in the period of limbo or in between when things are happening. In parts of our life we have, you know, a moment where we decide we want something or we find out there is an issue or a decision to be made or a decision to be made by us or others, and in between the period of deciding or finding out the problem or identifying something that we want and getting to the conclusion, there's usually a period of waiting. And I have faced this before and currently facing this in a few areas of my life. And, you know, I've certainly faced this before. And so I wanted to just talk about it a little bit and, you know, discuss what is the point of waiting? I have to tell you, my mind is always like, I need to know right now. I want to solve the problem. In human design I'm A51 and one of those elements of it is solve the problem right now. Get to a resolution. And in astrology, I'm a Leo and a Virgo rising. And so it's very much like let's put energy towards this. Let's come to a resolution.
Erin McMahon: [00:01:47] And throughout my spiritual journey and moving from the mind to the centered self, I've come to realize how important it is to wait and to appreciate the gap and time between what is and what we want to be. And you know, when we find out the result of something or the way something is going to go in our life. This is very frustrating for my mind. And since I've started meditating and doing breathwork, I've certainly taken these practices to help calm my mind about this. In my personal life a few years ago, I wanted to get into the Web3 space, so I had been marketing leader at a small AI startup that I still do consulting work for, but I fell into Web3. One of my friends said, oh, you're going to love this space. You should learn more about it. And I did, and I said, I want to work in Web3. I want to work in Web3 right now. And I think I determined that I wanted to make this shift in career direction in March or April of 2022. My son was about nine months old at the time, and I thought about it, and I started looking for jobs and I was like, I immediately want to switch. I've made this decision. I'm really enthusiastic. All this excitement in me is just bursting and let's make a change happen right away.
Erin McMahon: [00:03:21] Positive aspect of my personality is that when I get excited about something, I really get excited about it and I totally leaned into it. Which, you know, speaking of human design before is characteristic of a manifesting generator, which will link to human design basics if you're interested. But basically, this personality and blueprint means that if you get inspired by something, or if manifesting generators get inspired by something, then they really get into it and they get into it and they go, go, go. And that is just characteristic of the personality type. And usually they're going in interested in a few things or maybe other people would consider many things. So in this situation wanted to switch job, wanted to dive in immediately, and wanted to find the perfect company. In the Web3 space obviously there, well, maybe not so obviously, in the Web3 space there are a lot of small startup companies. It's very fragmented. There are lots of innovative types of technology happening in all different levels in hardware and DeFi and infrastructure, many different areas. And so there's a lot of different opportunities, and it's important to look and find the right one and really get a sense of the landscape. So, you know, I knew this, my mind knew this, but my mind also had this, you know, fiery sense of moving forward. And I had to wait and sort of both do my research and also feel from my sense of self what felt right and what felt like the right company to work for.
Erin McMahon: [00:05:08] As I was going through this process, we, of course, as one does with small kids, have a bunch of small kids books. And my toddler and I were reading a book by Mo Willems called 'Waiting Is Not Easy'. So as the title indicates, the lesson, the story goes that one of the main characters, Pinkie, brings a, has a gift or a surprise for his friend Gerald. And he goes, Gerald, I have a surprise for you. And Gerald goes, that's great. I'm so excited. What is this surprise? And Pinkie goes, the surprise isn't here yet. And the whole book goes through back and forth between Pinkie and Gerald, saying, you know, Gerald says, I really want to know the surprise. And Pinkie goes, it's not here yet. You're going to have to wait. And then he goes, can I guess, can I guess what it is? And it's a really adorable book. At the conclusion of the book, Gerald is completely frustrated and says, Pinkie, it's getting dark. We've been waiting all day for the surprise. I don't even want it anymore. What's the point? And then Pinkie goes, look! Look at the sky! And his surprise is the beautiful night sky that they can share and enjoy together. I love this book for the overall message it brings, certainly for young kids, because their sense of waiting is much different than adults, but also for adults and specifically for me.
Erin McMahon: [00:06:41] I need to be reminded that waiting is not easy. But you know what? It is and it can be beautiful. Because in that gap time you have a sense of wonder, a sense of mystery, sometimes getting that immediate surprise, in Gerald's case, he couldn't have gotten the surprise immediately because Pinkie first mentioned it during the day. So he couldn't have necessarily seen the stars. But also he appreciated it so much more when it got there. In the case of my job search two years ago, I started looking in March and, you know, investigated a bunch of different opportunities and, you know, bigger Web3 companies, smaller Web3 companies. And I finally landed on the right company in August. So it was quite a few months after I initially began looking. And I ended up at a wonderful company that I'm at now called Anchor, and I was hired as head of growth and content, leading a team of people and working with all stars in their areas of expertise, including Web3, social content, SEO, etc. and learning from a great founding, group of founders of the company, including a brilliant CTO who came from Amazon and is really making innovative strides in basically any area of Web3 judges. So that was very fortunate and it was absolutely worth the wait.
Erin McMahon: [00:08:19] It was my looking at the night sky after months and months of waiting. I think this is something that comes up quite often, even after a lesson like that, that, you know, it's been several months, what is the outcome going to be? Even though that took a few months to learn the lesson, that that was the right thing to wait and to land in a position that makes sense. But still, now that that happened nearly two years ago, there are other areas in life, things my kids go through, like what school they should go to or decisions that we're looking to make as a family about, you know, moving or vacation or like many different things, waiting still is not easy. And I still have to pull out that book and remember with my kids that that is the case. This really connects spiritually, as I mentioned before, because I think the main aspect of my personality and my mind that is really, really wants to know the answer is the ego self and the mind that just thinks I need to know right now. I want to solve right now, because the mind is always looking to solve the problem, to be in a safe space and to not be in a space of the unknown because unknown could lead to potential scary outcomes or to more uncertainty.
Erin McMahon: [00:09:52] And, you know, going back to primal times when we were concerned about, you know, where to sleep at night and being in a safe space, it's always, the mind is always looking for the safe solution. But in a holistic sense of self, the essence or the spiritual self knows the things that are going to be okay and that it's okay to wait. I was trained as an inner voice facilitator in 2023 and via Bella Lively's program. She's got an amazing podcast. If you have never listened, the whole point of the inner voice is to quiet the mind and connect to what your essence is saying. And there's various exercises that you go through to do that. You know, going through meditation and sort of quieting the mind is another way to do that. But if you're interested in specifically getting in touch with your inner voice, I can, there's facilitators such as myself that are trained in that process. But what it really helps you do is quiet the mind and allows your more spiritual central self to speak. And quite often that self will say it's okay that you don't know right now or it'll be okay, either, you know, either way. You know, quite often a question is, do I need to know right now or what do I need to know right now? And the inner voice will usually tell you something you need to know immediately, but won't necessarily reveal the overall path. But the message will be that it is okay and that you will know in time.
Erin McMahon: [00:11:32] So it's a beautiful practice. And whether you reach through it yourself or through a facilitator, it's certainly something that I recommend, particularly if you have a mind like mine that's just, you know, always says, what's gonna happen next? What's going to happen next? Why don't we know the answer? Why don't we know the answer? And this is really important in, you know, business, as I mentioned, with jobs or, you know, when making business decisions, I think as you move forward in business, there's not necessarily a right or wrong answer or a 100% you should go in this direction or in that direction and going and being in that state of uncertainty, but feeling confident and trusting that following your spiritual instincts and your calm self is the right way to go. So I think that's really important, and it certainly helped me, as I said, not only making decisions on career, but then also, you know, in working in the startup space, making decisions about what sort of campaign to run, where to make a certain investment in time or people. It's important to know that you're not going to know the outcome for sure, but it's okay to trust and you know that is a form of waiting and following your instincts, knowing the best step, but not necessarily knowing the answer or the result, as much as you would like to know that the direction you're going to go in is going to be an absolute success.
Erin McMahon: [00:13:19] So that's the main thing I wanted to cover today. It's certainly top of mind and something that I've explored quite, with many different tools, meditation being one of them, speaking to my inner voice, which you can do either by meditating or by automatic writing. You know, asking your inner voice a question via writing, either in a notebook or on a computer. Some people say that it's better to do when you're writing with your physical hand, because it connects to a different part of your brain, but all these things are helpful. So I would encourage you to practice these things and see if they're of interest, and use it as a tool to stop from needing to know the answer or to help appreciate and cherish that gap in between time, between, that gap time between deciding you want to go somewhere or encountering a situation where you need to know an answer and then getting to a solution. So I think that's all I have for today. It's certainly going to keep that in mind this weekend, and I'd love to hear your thoughts either on Instagram or in any comments. Take care. Bye.