Silliness and Showing up in the World as a Kid
By: Myriam Ben Salem
Tags: Self-awareness, Leadership, Inspiration, Self Improvement, Self

To come back to our bench, I introduced the topic and specified the difference between ‘acting childish’ and ‘being childish’: the former is the outcome of having set ourselves free from the conditioning while being a responsible and accountable individual. The latter, though, is the proof our emotional maturity stopped at the toddler’s stage despite all the adulthood ‘masks’.

Dennis had the kindness to share two videos, afterwards, of my silliness in two different contexts:

A technical issue during my dancing class special session (Halloween party): the music was interrupted several times; thus, triggering a general frustration that I was observing on people’s faces.

A professional gathering, and most precisely an awards’ ceremony where most of the audience were too serious. All that mattered was to take a picture of the award and post their ultimate proof of success on social media. I couldn’t witness it without doing something about it.

Should you be interested to see the videos, they were shared here:

“Why do you think I acted silly?”

This was the first question I asked following watching the silliness manifestations. The group folks shared some interesting feedback. One of them hit home and made me think of the ‘former emotionally imbalanced perfectionist me’. She was craving her stolen moments from the universe where she could re-connect with her inner child…

The answer was from Chris Ward, and was stipulating, “Silliness is a return to your true self, and discovery of your lost self.” The most hilarious of my stories aligned with this truth goes back eleven years, most probably.

I was in Paris on vacation. We went out to celebrate one of my friends’ birthday. We decided to eat at “Chez Léon Champs-Elysées”. It is a restaurant chain famous for its delicious variety of mussels. The waiting line was huge, and we were getting impatient and started feeling hungry. Thus, we checked the menu online so that to decide upstream and be served immediately. We were a group of ten to twelve people. An important detail to mention here is that it is common to share — or at least taste — your companions’ meal! At that time, I was very religious and never drank a single drop of alcohol (prohibited by my birth religion). After tasting my friend’s dish, he informed me it was prepared with wine. Interestingly, even if the scientific me knew undoubtedly that, when cooked, the wine’s alcohol is evaporated, the little girl somehow tricked my brain to believe I was drunk and trigger some unstoppable giggling. Dennis shared during one of the sessions the following laughter. You can multiply it by 5 times to get the picture! It was so contagious that the whole restaurant joined us, including customers and staff.

From the author’s YouTube channel

Little did I know that my reaction would reveal ten years later that my inner child was surviving in a virtual prison her whole existence, and that she needed to be harshly abused by a malignant narcissist who took care of destroying her self-esteem before leaving her in the darkest places to wake up and set herself free through re-writing her subconscious program.

Some other feedbacks that resonated the most with me, nurtured my soul and that will stay with me forever because of their accuracy and, most importantly, how seen and validated they made me feel are:

Chris Ward (again): Demonstration of being fully self-expressed.

Paula Goodman: Immediate connection exists in the smile of silliness.

Catherine Fitzgerald: I think you were silly because you are very self-confident and not worried about what others think. Also, you are very connected to the energy in the room, and that you reflected it back to all.

What was the purpose of my silliness?

The feedbacks above bring us to my answer to the question. For the dancing class context, it was implicitly inspiring my friends not to take themselves too seriously when life throws hardship at them. The technical issue was something we couldn’t control and letting it get the best of us would have done no favor.

When our program is anything but our friend, that is full of emotional scars, unprocessed feelings, trauma flashbacks, mental patterns — you name it, there is no space between the stimulus and our response. Furthermore, our inner peace is volatile since depending on the external world. Result? We are easily triggered and defined by our circumstances. That was my life up to my re-birth.

I know that it not only takes time to do the inner work (for some insecure attachment styles a lifetime especially when people are stimulated by a self-centered goal) but also tons of humility, honesty, openness, bravery, and consistency. Also, it seems to me that the pre-requisite of breaking the denial circle to access our self-awareness endowment is highly challenging for many people.

Hence, by showing up in a silly way, I am hoping to offer a break to people’s anxious mind, and it gives its fruits with the kind souls who are not judgmental, open to receive others’ light, not threatened by random manifestations of joy.

When it comes to the professional context, I was motivated by my inclination to model servant leadership: your real success is not your achievement/award that you are so eager to share with the world instantly to get some external validation. It is who you are as a person: a cheerleader who can be genuinely happy for others’ success!

Which legacy do I want to leave?

I was interviewed lately by a lovely lady going by the name of Gurpreet Dhariwal. She is a fellow writer from Medium, the author of “My Soul Rants: Poems of a Born Spectator.” Her eBook is now available at Google PlayStore, Amazon, and Kindle.

One of her brilliant questions was “Why do you hope for? Does it change something within you or around you?”

“Ahaaa! Well, it will bring us to my legacy! Contributing to reversing the imbalanced, selfish, immoral, manipulative world in which we’re living through educating the kind-hearted people, and getting them to realize they are the secret weapon whenever they decide to break the denial circle, become self-aware and pay the transformation’s price. Also, implicitly inspiring change through modeling servant leadership or even making a person’s day a little brighter is more than enough to make me feel beyond fulfilled!”

For those of you who might be interested in the whole interview, you can find it below:

And, since I mentioned the word ‘fulfilled, I would love to share that Sarah Ratekin made a fantastic point by linking silliness to our happiness hormones! I am such a fan of the topic and explored it about a year and a half ago here:

In summary

One of the numerous outcomes of rewiring the subconscious program adventure is changing what fuels our silliness manifestations:

While it is exclusively self-satisfaction (some stolen moments of reconnection with the discriminated inner child) when we are still diving into life with an invasive program, being silly is an automatic strategy that servant leaders tend to use to implicitly inspire change.

Last but not least, Dennis shared such a powerful quote during our call: