My Spark Was Ignited – A Recap from Attendee Deanne Winterton

After checking in and ping-ponging between buildings a bit, I found the room where Megan Sillito would be presenting.  The event’s founder and Illuminated Woman CEO, Angela Johnson, highly recommended this particular presentation.  Since I had 30 minutes to kill, I started reading the program guide.  In it, Megan was described as a transformational facilitator.  The description seemed a little ambiguous to my analytical mind, but I was up to figuring it out.

As I sat waiting, I met Tina, a friendly woman from Kansas City.  All the sudden, I didn’t feel quite so all alone.  She had attended the event the day before as well, and assured me we were in for a treat.  She said she was getting prepared to cry, as she had found herself doing at each of the presentations the day before.

After entering the room, we made ourselves comfortable and I met Sheila, a woman from Chicago.  I honestly was a little amazed to find women from across the nation at the event.  We exchanged pleasantries and dug in to our chairs.  But we wouldn’t be staying there for long.

**Megan Sillito

“This is about experience, not information,” Megan told us soon after being introduced.  “To live a genius life, you have to get out of your comfort zone.  If you want more, you have to go places that are not seemingly natural.”

Megan told the audience that our brains like to solve problems.  With every problem our brain successfully solves, it gets and a rush and craves more.  Unconsciously, we continuously create problems for our brain to solve.  But why waste precious brain power on negative problems?  Instead, she suggested that we feed our brain problems that we actually have control over, things we have the innate strength and ability to solve.

She calls it “play your strengths.”

“Ask yourself daily what strength you want to play that day,” Megan said.  “The universe will respond.”

For example, a flower can only be a flower.  A tree doesn’t know how to be anything other than a tree.  If we are a “flower,” we should not spin our wheels—or petals, in this case—aspiring to be a Spruce.  It just isn’t natural.

The problem is, we don’t often have a firm grasp on what it is we are designed to be.  We need helping seeing the blueprint we were created from.  Megan calls it our “genius” and “intelligence” that we are encoded with from conception.

“Most of our parents and teachers didn’t mirror our genius back to us,” Megan said.  “We grow in intelligence by recognizing strengths in others and being recognized by others.”

In her own words, what separates Megan from the normal person is her “capacity to see people’s natural intelligence.”

I was ready to test this gift, so willingly followed Megan’s directions to form a group with three other people.  Well, it was obviously Tina and Sheila.  Megan told us to get out of our seats and start our own improv while answering various questions to members of our group.  One person was to answer while the other two were to carefully watch in an effort to discover that person’s strengths.

“You are here to get an expanded perception of yourself,” Megan said.  “You can’t integrate information until you have an experience with that information.”

Sheila acted out what she loved to do when she was a child: reading everything she could get her hands on, including facts and stories from various foreign places.  Tina explained that sometimes, she just has to get away from the outside world to recharge.  I demonstrated that time flies when I write, even when my toddlers constantly interrupt me with their requests for hugs and drinks of water.

Tina cried, as promised, when Sheila and I told her that her strengths were knowing her limits and refusing to offer her loved ones any less than all she had to offer.  Sheila took notes as we explained her strengths of appreciation, learning, and sharing.  I took Sheila’s lead and took my own notes as my group members listed my strengths.

It is a cherished list: focus, curiosity, interpretation, understanding the importance of motherhood, balance, love of children, and ability to adapt.

Megan asked us to discuss what we had learned with our groups.  Tina, Sheila and I both discovered we all considered ourselves introverts.  I guess even on the micro-level, birds of a feather often flock together.  But we were each an introvert who was worried that we were somehow not O.K.  Needing our space, craving the quietness, and multi-tasking around children are not faults.  Just the opposite.  They are evidence of our strengths.

Several audience members echoed our experience.

“I listened for genius,” one woman said.  “It is a powerful place to stand, and helps me go to a deeper level with the compliments I give others.”

Another woman said of one of her group members, “I forgot your name, but I know your soul.  We are all connected in a web, and this cracked it wide open.”

Megan warned us against holding our loved ones in the wrong place.

“Where you’re seeing your boyfriend is where you’re holding him,” Megan said.  “Where are you holding yourself?”

Megan suggested mentally visiting that one moment in our life when we hit a peak.

As the audience members sat with eyes closed, taking deep breaths at Megan’s insistence, my mind went backward almost 15 years.  I was reliving the moment I won an important contest, my mentor encircling me in her congratulatory embrace and the walls of my high school auditorium reverberating with applause.  I realized that this was a peak because my peers were collectively pointing out one of my strengths.

“Make an agreement with yourself to live from this place,” Megan told us.  “Listen to your longings just a little longer.  Perfect your genius.”

She also encouraged us to share the day’s experience with those around us.

“Recognize your essential self.  Recognize the package we came in and sometimes forget to open.  Let someone help us open it,” Megan said.  “Teachers of all ages, be it Christ or Buddha, had the capacity to see beyond where a person sees themselves.  You don’t have to like other people, but where would your own expansion be if you could see the gifts in people?”

**Nicole Sherman

I was almost sorry to see Tina and Sheila leave for their next breakout session.  But their replacements quickly found seats next to me.  We were ready to hear Nicole Sherman’s advice on how to “align yourself with the energy of money.”

A bank executive with decades of experience, Nicole was a refreshing ball of energy.  She told the audience to let go of comparison, judgement and jealousy in order to create abundance in their lives.  The problem is, money is often the common ground to compare, judge and experience jealousy from.

“We give money energy,” Nicole said.  “Money is an energy exchange in tangible form.”

To keep that energy positive, Nicole suggested living by two equations.

First, divide your age in years by 2.  Then add a percent sign after the figure.  For me that would be 16 percent.  Save that figure from your income, “or any money that flows into your space,” in your savings account, 401K, under the mattress, or just for yourself, Nicole said.  The magic to the formula is that as you age, the percentage you are saving grows as well.

Secondly, give or “outflow” that same percent to others, either as tithing to your church, a contribution to charity, or some other worthy endeavor.

“Money has a flow to it,” Nicole said while constantly tracing a figure eight in the air.  “It flows in and out and it serves.”

When either the inflow to ourselves or the outflow to others is stymied, the cycle stops bringing us abundance, Nicole said.  It’s similar to a cough drop lodged in the windpipe, she said.  Just as we need life-giving oxygen, we also need a flow of money, both in and out.

“We are so used to having it all right now, using second mortgages, home equity, and credit cards,” Nicole said.  “You literally can’t have inflows and outflows because we’ve strapped ourselves to where we have stopped the flow of money.”

Nicole asked audience members to gather in groups of four to explore their fixed beliefs about money.  Sitting next to a middle-aged mother, conservatively dressed wife, and loudly dressed businesswoman, I explored my fixed beliefs.  And Nicole challenged each of them.

I watched as the middle-aged mother discovered she was using money as an excuse to distance herself from a strained marriage.  “I would rather take on an extra shift at work than face the problems I have at home,” she said.

I marveled at the businesswoman’s tale of a childhood spent living in buses and hopping place to place, “because money is only something you get if you are meant to, if you have the right name.”

But I think all three of us were taught more by the conservatively dressed wife, who admitted through tears that she was only staying in her marriage because she did not have the means to support herself without her husband’s help.

Other audience members related their fixed ideas about money: that it is something to be feared, something they were not worthy of having, something they need to be better stewards of.

“We have attached fixed perceptions all around money,” Nicole said.  “The things we spend our money on—homes, cars, clothes—only have the value YOU give it.  It doesn’t matter what you pay for things unless you give it energy to matter.  You’re in control of that energy.”

Nicole asked each audience member to draft their own partnership document with money, complete with a date and signature.  The document addressed two questions: What “money” can count on from me, and what I ask of “money.”  The partnering documents that audience members came up with were enlightening and varied.

“Whatever you give your energy to in life automatically expands,” Nicole concluded.

**Bridget Cook

Maybe the momentum had been building, or maybe it was because I have known Bridget Cook for years.  But my own breakthrough came during what was my final session.  Her presentation actually drew a tangible action from me, something I could actually get my hands on and run with.

Bridget is the author of many published works, including the best seller Skinhead Confessions: From Hate to Hope.  I am very familiar with her writing ability, but what I didn’t know until that day is that she is a domestic violence survivor.  The fact gave impact to her message that day.

“You were created on purpose,” Bridget told the audience as more and more women filed in, some sitting on the floor.  “We are not our history, or what has happened to us in the past.  We are a result of the choices we make.  It is our choices that make us special.”

Bridget spoke of the daughter of a serial killer who found the strength to discover her own greatness.  That woman is the central figure in Bridget’s book Shattered Silence: the Untold Story of a Serial Killer’s Daughter.

Women in the audience followed Bridget’s lead, speaking of domestic and sexual abuse that they had struggled to overcome.  They were extraordinary stories that called forth many tears.

Bridget wrote two words on the whiteboard, each word containing the same letters but in different order: CREATOR and REACTOR.  “Which will you be?” Bridget asked the audience, begging them to put pen to paper.

My pen flew to my paper, although I believe I failed to answer the exact question Bridget asked that day.  You see, I have always wanted to write a book, but not one that was just a fictional story.  That is the reason I looked up to Bridget: she embodied a goal I had set for myself, or in the very least displayed that a normal person like me could obtain a lofty goal like that.  Her books are about real people—real stories.  For a while, I thought I would do the same: find a person with an extraordinary tale to tell and help them tell it.  Being a journalist by training and trade, I was pretty confident in my writing and interview abilities.  I thought I just needed to find the right person.  Raising four small children, I don’t get out much or meet a lot of people with extraordinary stories to tell.

But that day, as I sat obediently taking notes, I met the person whose story I believe I was meant to tell.  I met myself, while admittedly looking at myself in a very different light.  Thanks, Bridget.

“You can be a catalyst for healing,” Bridget said.  “Where there appears to be no life, life can be reborn.  Women know more about birth and rebirth than anyone.  There are no weeds in the garden of life.  As women, we bring color where there is no color.”

I believed her.

Now, the words to my own story have begun flowing and are just begging to be told.  It is the start of my attempt to cope with the huge hole my estranged brother has left in my family, an attempt to document all the stages of grief and mourning as they happen.

I don’t know what my story’s future holds, but I do know where I wrote the first lines: at the 2010 Ignite Your Spark event.”