Meet the pulsar.

The pulsar is a neutron star which means it was once a great big star that went supernova, blowing a bunch of its mass into the heavens. What was left collapsed into itself, becoming a hyper-compact, hyper-dense objects. They are typically 12-14 miles in diameter (for context, Manhattan is about 13.4 miles long) and yet contain a mass greater than our sun. Can you wrap your mind around that? I can’t.

Let’s roll with it, though, as best we can. In space terms, they’re tiny. Wee itty bitty. All of that mass in such a tiny space creates a ton of gravity and makes them highly magnetic.

Okay, so these tiny magnetic things spin rapidly and with such consistency that you could set a watch by them for millions of years. And while they spin, they’re also emitting light from their magnetic poles and that light goes a ways. In that way, they look a bit like lighthouses, appearing to flicker or flash when it’s actually a constant beam of moving light.

Fun fact: The scientists who discovered them cheekily called them LGMs at first – Little Green Men – imagining that only a sentient being could create a light that flashed so consistently.

So! Wee tiny and highly magnetic, consistent, and visible. You might imagine standing on the coast of North Carolina looking west only to realize you can see a single grain of sand on Venice Beach in California. That’s not to scale for the over 2,000 pulsars astronomers have discovered but it’s the best I’ve got.

Why, then, did the man at my workshop feel such a kinship with these unusual astronomical objects? Is he a fellow space geek? Not so much.

Instead, he recognized himself in the description:

Wee tiny, as in one itty bitty human in a world that is rapidly birthing its way toward 8,000,000,000, in a stream of history with infinite time stretching both backwards and forwards.

Highly magnetic, as in able to draw toward him those who resonate with his work and his being.

Highly consistent, as in taking steps each and every day toward his bigger life and badder self.

Highly visible, as in utilizing modern tools to make his projects seen beyond the small town where he enacted them; as in allowing for his work, his impact to ripple from him like rings in a pond, reaching outward in a circle of influence exponentially greater than he could reach with even the most robust social media presence.

He, this performer turned arts promoter, is a pulsar. So are you.

And for him and you and me and all of the rest of us, living into our pulsarness is a function of authenticity. It is the radiant light of our true, unique selves that charges our magnet, drawing to us those who will appreciate and patronize what we put into the world; that same light will blind and repel those who don’t get it. Wish them well; there’s another light illuminating their way.

It is living into our own values and perspective that creates a virtuous cycle of consistency, turning the effort into the payoff which inspires more effort; the outcome becomes a cherry on top, not what makes the effort worthwhile.

And it is the good that we put into our communities, fueled by a sense of personal responsibility for making the world a better place (what we Jewish folks call tikkun olam), that radiates out in ways that can make us as individuals more visible, and absolutely creates a chain reaction of goodness.

Our gremlins, those inner voices of criticism and doubt, fear our power to make change in our own lives and in the world. Coaching is the tool to move the gremlins out of the way and crank your pulsarness to 11.