Grin and Bear It: How to Be Happy No Matter What Reality Throws Your Way (14 page)

Yet each and every one of them—despite their limitations—were happy. They were pursuing their dreams, with hope and determination, of changing the world.

I realized, yet again, this is what we all should strive for in life.

It was a necessary reminder that even though there is always going to be some kind of challenge, we can do anything if we put our mind to it. I fought against that for so many years when I should have embraced it.

Instead of wondering, “Why me?” it was time to shift that attitude to “Why
not
me?”

Studies have shown that from the time we are born until we are eighteen years old we are told, “No, don’t, stop, quit and you’re going to fail” 180,000 times! I hate to brag but I am sure I have logged in over a million.

It took me a long time to understand that my pain and insecurities did not have to define my thinking process. Look at all of the people out there in the world who have problems and are living life to the fullest anyway. I wanted to become one of
those
people—but I didn’t have a clue as to how to get started. I needed to take responsibility for my life once and for all!

Many times over the years, Kathleen told me to “work, don’t worry” and that I was “always throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” I never really understood what that meant, so I looked it up. The expression
“implies that an entire idea, concept, practice, or project doesn’t need to be rejected or discontinued if part of it is good. The baby, in this sense, represents the good part that can be preserved. The bathwater, on the other hand, usually is dirty after the baby is washed and needs to be discarded, just like the parts of the concept that are bad or useless.”
I was throwing everything out when things weren’t going the way I wanted.

Putting together my
Old School Kids Beats
CD had become a passion project that most everyone around me told me I shouldn’t do. There were lots of people saying it was a terrible idea. They warned me that if I followed through with the project, I’d never be taken seriously in the business as a rapper or an actor ever again. Jeff told me if I released the CD, he thought it would be a passport for me to replace one of the Wiggles, because he heard there was an opening in the group.

For as long as I have been rapping, I have received lots of criticism for my love of rhyming and fresh beats. No one could understand what my attraction was, especially to old-school rap. I grew up listening to Will Smith, LL Cool J, Young MC, Digital Underground, and many others who influenced me from the moment I heard them.

If you’re a fan of
Watch What Happens Live,
Kathleen and I cowrote the theme song for Andy Cohen’s very popular television show. Word up, homie. That’s me on your TV when you hear, “Andy Cohen’s got the 411…”

The first time I realized the song had gone viral was after I landed in Burbank and a couple of people on the plane turned on their phones (one was a man in a business suit). I did a double take when I heard their ringtones were “Andy Cohen’s got the 411…” It got so popular that Hoda Kotb sang it when Andy appeared on her and Kathy Lee’s show. The entire audience chanted the song when WWHL taped at South by Southwest Film Festival. It has even been played by the Tonight Show Band. Some of the biggest beat artists and songwriters in the business approached Andy to redo his theme song after his show took off, but he said “no way.” He was loyal to our song and I am forever grateful and appreciative for his support.

What you say and the words you speak have a profound and powerful impact on the outcome of anything you attempt to do. My
Old School Kids Beats
CD was released in 2013. It was purchased by Toys R Us and was on sale nationwide in November 2013. I believed in the album. No matter how many times someone told me what a crazy, stupid, awful idea it was, I just smiled and said, “I don’t agree” or nothing at all. This kind of strong will and perseverance didn’t just happen overnight. It took some undoing and reprogramming of the way I approached everything in my life.

When I shot my first television commercial for Secret antiperspirant, the campaign’s theme was “Outlast.” The deodorant certainly does and for the first time I felt I could too.

My first Secret commercial was unlike anything I have ever done. The stunt work was challenging and the shoot took
thirty hours.
Whenever my energy would start to fade, Kathleen, who was on set, fed me small pieces of bacon. It was like she had a pocket full of tiny dog treats for me that kept me going. She whispered in my ear, “Hey, it works at the Westminster Dog Show!”

For much of the shoot, I was strung up in wires suspended from the ceiling. When I shot the scene that had me coming off a revolving dry cleaning rack to meet the man of my dreams on the top of a building, it took several tries before we got it right. On the second take, I fell flat on my face. I won’t lie. It hurt. I got a little too much momentum and
smack!
I hit the floor. Every actor on the roof of the building was still posing in character, as if nothing had happened. Did they not see the flying Greek girl blow past them and ram her head into the ground? Thankfully, I was not hurt. In a strange way, while lying on the floor, I finally felt like I had certainly come a long way from Captain Coconut. I left the shoot black and blue from head to toe, covered my body in Icy Hot, and thought,
My dreams are finally coming true!

Aside from airing the commercial on national television, the campaign was set to be a giant presence through the Internet and social media outlets. I was given two hand puppets requiring different voices and seven different scripts to memorize for the shoot. I was in the middle of finishing up filming for the sixth season of
Flipping Out,
and was exhausted but still had to stay focused, present, and bring my A game.

A lot of people walk through life half checked out. They walk down the street, texting, listening to music, doing their own thing, tuning out the world along the way. It takes an effort to be fully present—at work, at home, in your relationships, and with yourself. Just showing up is not enough. When you are fully engaged, the end product is always better because you are giving all of yourself instead of merely some. This is what I had to do while working on the Secret ad campaign. I was finally embracing the work and not the worry.

This realization had a profound impact on every area of my life. For example, when I am at work, I am now 100 percent committed to being present—I am dialed in to the business side of things in ways I could not have been while my attention was diverted. There were a lot of years when Jeff accused me of not being present, of being somewhere other than fully focused on his business.

If I’m the Better Player, Why Can’t I Win?
is a book written by Allen Fox, who was the tennis coach at Pepperdine University. It is about mind-set and the psychology of competition. It took me three years to finish the book—not that it wasn’t interesting, I just wasn’t interested. What I discovered, though, is what people are conditioned to focus on is extremely important. If you go into a performance with a focus on the outcome, winning, losing, making a mistake, what’s at stake, you inevitably set yourself up for failure. Your focus and concentration is on the wrong thing, which can make you nervous, uptight, and unable to perform at your peak. To be consistently at your best, you have to be in the moment—every moment. As a competitive tennis player, I totally understand that if I allow myself to get upset over losing a single point, I will lose the match. The second I allow my thoughts to get preoccupied with the win or loss of the match, I am no longer in the game. My attention is diverted and the likelihood that I can regain my focus is very low. Tennis is a mental game, one which is not just based on skill but also mental rigor. The book helped me understand that I had been my own worst enemy on and off the court.

My never-ending pursuit of perfectionism was a no-win battle for everyone involved, especially for me because I wasn’t doing the work needed to achieve my goals and worse, creating excuses for why I couldn’t without ever trying. It took time, but I finally admitted there is no such thing as
perfect.
There is no
perfect
job, no
perfect
partner, no
perfect
boss and no
perfect
me (or you, for that matter!). We are all works in progress.

Case in point: The Bravo A-list Awards helped me throw my focus on perfection out the window. Jeff and I were presenting and I bought an expensive designer gown that had to be altered. When I was packing, I discovered a hole in the delicate fabric of the dress. Up until that point, I would have let that little hole have the power to ruin my entire evening. Despite this, I decided that nobody would know the hole was even there. The night was the best of Bravo and I was happily present, flaws and all.

These days I approach everything I do with an appreciation that things happen. When you are so consumed with the perfect outcome you can’t be present in the process. Learning to let go of my need to be perfect set me free—like an athlete who can work through the pain wall. Runners sometimes hit these during long races. They train themselves to work through the pain and keep running. I finally learned to work through my pain wall of perfection.

If you were lucky enough to grow up feeling loved, worthy, supported, and good about yourself, then you will believe that is who you really are.

If, however, you grew up being told you aren’t good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, talented enough, that you’d never amount to anything, then you will believe that is who you really are. It is almost as simple as computer in, computer out.

My mother never said negative things to me in a direct way. They always came in the form of love-filled mixed messages, like, “When did your ankles get so fat?”; “Are you sure you want another helping of mashed potatoes?”; or “Why can’t you find a job
I
can be proud of?” She was never trying to be mean. It was just her way of communicating.

It’s important to understand that your acceptance of negative images of yourself doesn’t make them true. Henry Ford once said, “Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right.”

One theory to discontinue negative thoughts is to cancel them out as soon as they enter your brain. In fact, someone taught me that when negative thoughts or self-beliefs rear their ugly head, simply say “Cancel, Cancel” out loud. This simple action could take away any power that negative thought has over you. It also allows you the chance to take a step back from your negative talk and consciously learn a language that focuses on the positive. It’s not easy to become an observer to your thoughts, but it’s far better than drowning in them, if they’re negative. Take it from me, I know!

Want to get a glimpse at what your life looks like to others? Get on a reality show and put it all out there for the world to see, judge, mock, and adore. Believe me, you’ll want to change the channel … forever. The television that had been my babysitter turned into a truth-telling therapist.

There were so many times I watched
Flipping Out
and felt as though it was like one giant wake-up call. I could see what everyone else watching the show saw—a woman who appeared to have it all together on the outside. I had to learn what it meant to be authentic and fast. Only W-O-R-K was going to make this happen.

W—Willing

O—Organized

R—Ready

K—Keep the “can’t” out of the mix

Once I began learning a new positive emotional language, my work and my life got a lot more interesting and fulfilling.

9

Top 10 Surefire Ways to Fail

What’s the most dreaded
F-word in the world?

In business and in life, I think it’s
failure.

I can pretty much confess that I’ve done
everything
wrong along the way. I’ve only gotten through it all by kicking and screaming, believing I was right. Boy, was I wrong!

I failed at marriage after two separations with the same guy and I thought we were happy!

I failed in my career. I wanted to become an actress but instead, I ended up starring in a reality television show about my day job, which I hoped no one in Hollywood would know about. My mom reminds me every chance she gets that I have spent the last seventeen years with my best work “on the cutting room floor.” When I finally did get a show on TV, she said, “Your breasts look bulky!”

I failed at keeping my car and apartment clean.

I failed Spanish at UCLA.

And even
Flipping Out
has been something of a failure because my boss, Jeff Lewis, constantly reminds me how badly I screw things up.

Many of us hold onto the idea that failure is a negative experience that should be avoided at all costs. Sure, failure can be frustrating, maddening, hurtful, and even depressing, but it can also be a positive experience to learn and grow from. Fearing failure makes us less likely to take risks, which can lead us to success.

The more mistakes I made, the more I realized there was nothing to fear and only positive experiences to be gained. The trick to gaining something positive from failure is to find the reason why you’ve failed, learn from it, and then eliminate one or even twenty more things that have been obstacles. Look at failure as a teacher rather than something that defines you negatively.

When you fail, take a few minutes to think about what happened and why. And then ask yourself what you learned from the experience. There’s always something good that comes out of trying and failing.

The most successful people I know, respect, and admire all have war stories and major battle scars from their failures. I know you’ve heard this before, but it’s true: It doesn’t matter how many times you fall down. It only matters that you get back up.