Your life isn’t a TED talk, even if you suspect it might be.

I am a fitness professional, and my TED talk a few years ago would have been standing on a stage and delivering a rather mundane, if not entertaining, speech dispelling health and fitness myths. People people find it fascinating to know that you don’t need to drink 8 cups of water per day or that walking 10,000 steps doesn’t actually make you fit.

By profession, I made people feel better in their bodies. I could have added some drama to my talk by way of sharing my path to my profession: in high school, I remember crying in the PE teacher’s office because my PR grade was pulling my average down. I didn’t want to lose out on a scholarship because I was inept at ball sports. How I would have been an easy candidate for “least likely to have a future career in fitness” in the high school yearbook I edited.

Life has a funny way of turning out.

Society tells us that we are experts in one thing: we are to hold our professional face in the spotlight stand on our own personal TED stage with professional polish, sharing our singular gift to the world.  In the course of this TED talk we are to hide our personal feelings and demons in the dark closet where they belong, their ugliness only to be revealed if the ending to the talk is “and it was all worthwhile.”

What was happening in the closet of my TED talk?  I was lone parenting and barely hanging on to figuring how to exercise in the chaos that had become my life. A fitness professional struggling with her own workouts is not something I thought anyone should stand on the TED stage and discuss.

I thought it was a “work-life balance” problem.

We societally hammer home the idea of “work life balance,” which most of us believe in and are toiling away at getting just right.

My work-life balance resulted in imbalance in both, chronic pain in my body that I didn’t have the ability to solve.  Yet I thought the TED talk must go on. I worked harder to try to find the balance, akin to editing punctuation on my speech rather than scrapping the whole thing.

In retrospect, it’s now unclear to me why the pinnacle achievement of our adult lives is described as a kind of teeter totter, with this precise linear fulcrum point.  Teeter totters are subject to hitting either the ground or the sky with the presence of a slightly heavier element on just one end vs the other.

In those days, mine was either in the sky or on the ground most of the time, with either my business or my home life suffering for the other. I dreaded the judgement of colleagues who write lengthy Facebook comments judging anyone who can’t “walk their talk,” as if it is either realistic or desirable to never struggle, or fail.

At that time, I thought my role was to go to work and shine as a professional under the spotlight I had created for myself.

Now I wonder: is there a single one among us who has ever found this balance and maintained it?

Work-life balance implies that we have perfected our TED talk, packaging up the messiness of life and tucking it behind the curtain and are balancing with success into infinity. It is at this fulcrum point that our proverbial TED talk emerges, for here, we are professional, crisp, and polished.

And here’s what I learned: what most of us actually needed is a less flashy single talk and more robust series of mini talks, exposing our own flaws and errors. Our lives are generally less like a teeter totter and more like a circle, and slightly crooked circles at that.

My body was in pain from trying to force a circle into a line.

From trying to create a single TED talk when what I was was a series of lectures on a variety of topics.

We can’t separate ourselves into “work” and “life” brains.  Our one brain and one body processes and holds events and emotions process from absolutely everything that happens, whether you stick it in the work bucket or try to hide it in the home one.

Our body senses this lack of alignment in the story we tell ourselves and others.

What we shove down to present our professional faces on the TED stage ends up in our bodies as pain, discomfort, or injury.

So how could I tell my clients to life a life of alignment if I was not willing to do so myself? My TED talk was part of my life.  But so too was the story happening in my body. So too was the narrative about my life as a single woman or the one about my child. My whole story is walking around on my body, my whole self was on that stage.

What we need is not to be told to “balance” our work and our life but instead to integrate them. To understand that decisions in one impact decisions in the other. To see life as a circle and not a line.

Our  TED talk matters to our health. But what matters more, or at least equally, is the quality of our relationships, our creativity, our your home environment, our food and connection to it, our self confidence, our intellectual stimulation, our connection to spirit.

If our body tells the story of a life that is linear rather than circular, we will have pain, aches, discomforts that may have no medical cause.

We don’t need to unpack your messy secrets on the TEDx stage.  Start in your living room.  Ask yourself hard questions about where your time and energy is being allocated. Do you have passions and are you living them? What’s one thing that you could do today to be more in alignment? What does “alignment” mean to you? What does “integration” mean to you? Something is always going to be out of “balance” on the work-life worksheet so can you live with what you are giving up? If you hate your life, what’s one change you could make today to tolerate it more?  Do you feel like you are a free agent in making your own choices in life?  Are you being honest with yourself and others or are you putting on your “giving a speech” face and getting through it?

Our body isn’t going to lie about those answers. Our body is walking around with the truth.

The TED talk I would give today would be a very different one.  I would scrap the professional mask and tell more of the truth.  I would share with you what it’s like to hold two truths in my hand: of helping clients rid themselves of pain and be trapped in my own pain cycle.  I would talk about the root cause of that pain: loneliness, an identity lost when I became a mother that still hadn’t been re-found, struggles and challenges of trying to build a community when there was none to be found.  I would tell the story of how it wasn’t just exercise alone that solved the problem, it was integration and alignment that I could be both successful and hold struggle. How I could take tight aim at one thing and still miss the target in another. A story about how I was stuffing emotion in my body with no place to go because I thought I had to be perfect.

We need to tell stories in chapters, and not wait for the invitation to the TED stage.

We need to stop are destroying ourselves trying to be the one thing they show the world. That is what the world teaches us to do. We are not one thing: we are whole, complete beings.

Your life isn’t a TED talk, and if it is, your body is going to overrule your talk and tell its own stories anyway.