A Stripper With No Goals
1997 - Learning to dance full sets while jamming in Winnipeg.
I was a stereotype. My upbringing was poor. I had a broken family and an absent father. My mom was on social assistance. I didn’t have any healthy role models in my life. Some people might draw a straight line from my birth to the day I first took my clothes off for money, like it was inevitable. I was the poster child of the stereotypical sex worker. I was a stripper with no goals.
I had ideas for goals. None of them included travelling the world as a feature entertainer. I looked at stripping as a job, not a career move. I thought, maybe I could be a university professor one day, teach English Literature. Or perhaps I could become a journalist. I knew they didn’t make as much money as English professors but it sounded more exciting. Truthfully, though, I didn’t know what I wanted to do “one day.” I was a rudderless canoe. My direction was wherever the winds of chance blew me.
Front page news of my college newspaper. Full page, centerfold spread.
The winds of chance blew me into having three unplanned (but deeply appreciated) children with two different fathers. Being a mother led to a Public Relations program. I wanted to put my babies to bed every night. The Public Relations program led to sex worker activism. I learned how to write and send a press release. Activism led to frontline support work in harm reduction organizations. I worked mostly with women struggling with addiction. I almost had goals, then.
For a minute, while working in a transition house, I had a peek at what my life could be. I loved my work. I was marrying my second baby daddy. I began to imagine a future working as a Community Support Worker, earning medical benefits and a pension. I saw myself buying a house with my soon-to-be husband, and having another baby. I could already envision it all in my mind and I spoke excitedly about my plans to my friends and family.
The future seemed bright for a minute.
Those dreams were crushed before they’d barely begun, when two weeks after my wedding, I was suddenly disabled from a pharmaceutical injury. I spent the next ten years with only one goal: To be grateful for every pain-free moment and to live those moments to the fullest.
It wasn’t until about five years ago, when my health had been relatively stable for some time and my children were now more independent, I began to imagine my future again. Instead of allowing the winds of chance to take me where they may, I decided to consciously choose my path.
At first, I didn’t know how to do that. I asked myself, what do I really want. What should I strive to achieve? Two dreams came to mind, but both felt completely out of reach.
I wanted to own my dream home on a lake, where my children and future grandchildren could come whenever they needed peace and stay as long as they liked.
I wanted to fund programs and initiatives I believed in, that would help people. For instance, I dreamed of opening a detox center with a guiding philosophy to correct people’s diets as they recovered from addiction.
I began to study how others have set and achieved goals. One particular book I came upon was called “Think and Grow Rich,” by Napoleon Hill. Hill interviewed over 500 highly successful people, including Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford, asking them how they became successful. Some of their responses included: perseverance, faith, autosuggestion (affirmations), and the ability to be decisive.
Hill emphasized that we cannot achieve anything of value without a burning desire to achieve it. I thought about my dreams. Could I nurture a burning desire to achieve my home on a lake and enough money to make a charitable difference for others? Yes. I definitely could do that. I had never gotten my hopes up that high before because of the way I thought and felt about money.
Hill’s book taught me that the first thing I had to do was change the way I think about money. I had a poverty mindset towards money. I was contemptuous towards people with a lot of money. I stereotyped them as heartless, greedy snobs. I also considered money to be something that is very hard to get. I believed that the generations of poverty before me practically guaranteed that I would always be poor. If everything I believed was true, then I would never reach my dreams. Hill made me realize that my poverty thinking was pushing wealth away from me. I wanted to attract it instead.
Hill also taught me that highly successful people fail hundreds, if not thousands, of times before they become successful. That meant I would have to try over and over to reach my goals. It wouldn’t be easy, but it would be exciting and challenging. “Think and Grow Rich” was so inspiring that I started to believe I could really reach my dreams. The book was not a business guide, like I’d expected but a spiritual guide to help us succeed in business. With the help of that book and other books like it, I turned my dreams into goals and began the journey that has led me to this moment.
Implementing the power of goals is about more than writing down a plan. It is about how we think and how we grow. Jim Rohn says our goals are “not about what we achieve, but who we become” by achieving them. I’ve become a happier, more fulfilled person who is living on purpose. I’ve become someone who desires to help others become happier, more fulfilled, and on purpose. Every day, I wake up looking forward to what I will accomplish towards my goals.
This week at the Fearless Living Academy, we are talking about turning our dreams into goals. Become a member and access resources and materials to help you set goals you’ll be excited to shoot for. Wednesday night, we will have our zoom check-in. I hope you consider joining us.
Love Annie
If you enjoyed this article, please scroll down and subscribe for future articles.