Here’s your mantra for the week! This week’s card is from my The Sovereign Success Oracle deck. You can get it here or here.
Today’s card – I have nothing to prove – comes with a bit of story, one I thought to share with you today.
Originally, that card read ‘I am proving them all wrong.’ I’d based this card on a picture I’d once found online when I was truly struggling with the gap between what I wanted to do and what people expected me to do. The picture was of a mural of a typewriter with the words ‘Prove them all wrong.’
For the longest time, I’d carried that picture with me, using the phrase to light a fire under my arse and start doing what I wanted to do with my life. It became my ‘Fuck you’ to everyone telling me I couldn’t be who and what I wanted to be.
Because it’d been such an influential mantra for me for years, and because it’d helped me embrace my own sovereignty, I just had to add a version of it to this new deck I was creating, which was all about being your own sovereign self.
And then I received feedback from my editor, who’s also a good friend of mine, who I’d hired to copy edit both the deck and the book it served as a companion to: Tarot for Entrepreneurs. This is what she had to say about this particular oracle card:
It just doesn’t fit the vibe of the others – it feels too bitter, not positive and self-affirming like the others.
It took me about two seconds to agree with her. It took me another two seconds to remember that, each time I read through the affirmations I had created for The Sovereign Success Oracle, ‘I’m proving them all wrong’ was the one that kept tripping me up.
I’d known something was off about it, but I hadn’t known what that was, not on a conscious level. Until my editor pointed it out. And that’s when I realised that the phrase no longer aligned with me.
‘Prove them all wrong’ had worked perfectly when I first started rebelling against other people’s expectations. It fuelled my rage and gave me the confidence to tell all the naysayers to take a hike.
But I wasn’t that person anymore. Not only do I actively surround myself with dreamers and visionaries these days, I also stopped caring about the naysayers’ opinions somewhere along the way. What they thought of me no longer influenced my thoughts and actions, so I’d stopped feeling that burning need to prove them wrong.
I was no longer doing it for them. On the contrary, I’d been doing things for me, and me alone, for quite some time already.
As an alternative, I offered my editor ‘I have nothing to prove’, and she immediately agreed this version of the phrase was much more empowering and self-affirming and had none of the bitterness she’d picked up on in the original.
And that was that. I changed the phrase, that one phrase that hadn’t felt quite right for the deck, and The Sovereign Success Oracle was born.
What can I say? Sometimes, you don’t know how much you’ve grown until your editor friend forces you to reflect on it ;)
Happy creating this week, and don’t forget you’ve nothing to prove <3
Mariëlle
Your heart knows what it wants, but do you?
This special Kickstarter edition of Listen to Your Heart: A 31-Day Tarot Challenge to Embrace and Follow your Wildest Dreams and Desires is designed to help you figure out just that.
In my sixth tarot challenge, I invite you to sit with your heart for thirty-one days to unravel:
where you’ve been listening to your heart and where you haven’t,
how your heart relates to your body, mind, and soul,
how these relationships can be improved on, and
what your heart truly wants of and for you, now and in the future.
If you’re ready to start listening to your heart and embrace the path it so wants to lead you towards, Listen to Your Heart is the perfect tool for you.
The campaign for Listen to Your Heart goes live tomorrow at 2 p.m. GMT/UTC and will run until the 21st of March.
Love this! Growth shown in wording.
Yes! That's such a major step to take, pivoting from basing your worldview on other people's expectations to basing it on your own inner desires and needs. Thank you for sharing your journey. It definitely resonates.