“#Trust30 (Self-Reliance) is an online initiative and 30-day writing challenge that encourages you to look within and trust yourself.” Today’s Challenge: Overcoming Uncertainty
Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Write down a major life goal you have yet to achieve or even begin to take action on. For each goal, write down three uncertainties (read: fears) you have relating to each goal. Break it down further, and write down three reasons for each uncertainty. When you have three reasons for your fear, you’ll be able to start processing the change because you know where the fear stems from. Now you’ll be able to make a smaller changes that push you towards your larger goal. So begins the process of “trusting yourself.”
Being told to write all of this down is making things feel very ‘thoughtful’…I find taking a leap and just doing ‘it’ is far better (especially for someone like me) than lists and reasons and thinking.
“#Trust30 (Self-Reliance) is an online initiative and 30-day writing challenge that encourages you to look within and trust yourself.” Today’s Challenge: Alive-est
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. If we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
When did you feel most alive recently? Where were you? What did you smell? What sights and sounds did you experience? Capture that moment on paper and recall that feeling. Then, when it’s time to create something, read your own words to reclaim a sense of being to motivate you to complete a task at hand.
This one I can’t answer quickly…I will most definitely come back to it though.
“#Trust30 (Self-Reliance) is an online initiative and 30-day writing challenge that encourages you to look within and trust yourself.” Today’s Challenge: Personal Recipe
I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Think about the type of person you’d NEVER want to be 5 years from now. Write out your own personal recipe to prevent this from happening and commit to following it. “Thought is the seed of action.”
“#Trust30 (Self-Reliance) is an online initiative and 30-day writing challenge that encourages you to look within and trust yourself.” Today’s Challenge: Call to Arms
The secret of fortune is joy in our hands. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
What if today, right now, no jokes at all, you were actually in charge, the boss, the Head Honcho. Write the “call to arms” note you’re sending to everyone (staff, customers, suppliers, board) charting the path ahead for the next 12 months and the next 5 years. Now take this manifesto, print it out somewhere you can see, preferably in big letters you can read from your chair.
You’ve just written your own job description. You know what you have to do. Go!
(Bonus: send it to the CEO with the title “The things we absolutely have to get right – nothing else matters.”)
I just wrote myself a love letter and said a prayer for anyone who feels stuck and unappreciated at their job.
“#Trust30 (Self-Reliance) is an online initiative and 30-day writing challenge that encourages you to look within and trust yourself.” Today’s Challenge: Most Ordinary
Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
We are our most potent at our most ordinary. And yet most of us discount our “ordinary” because it is, well, ordinary. Or so we believe. But my ordinary is not yours. Three things block us from putting down our clever and picking up our ordinary: false comparisons with others (I’m not as good a writer as _____ ), false expectations of ourselves (I should be on the NYTimes best seller list or not write at all), and false investments in a story (it’s all been written before, I shouldn’t bother). What are your false comparisons? What are your false expectations? What are your false investments in a story? List them. Each keep you from that internal knowing about which Emerson writes. Each keeps you from making your strong offer to the world. Put down your clever, and pick up your ordinary.
The only fallacy that resonates with me is ‘false comparisons’…the others I don’t struggle with. Perhaps because I haven’t truly made it past the first? My comparisons are not to other creators specifically, but to my own ideal. I have an expectation of what my final work should look like, sound like, taste like, smell like, and feel like. If it falls short of those expectations, typically, I throw it out and start over. That is, until now. I’ve been working very hard on accepting my work as it comes through me…not trying to make it just so, but allowing it to be real extension of myself. It’s difficult at times to send things out into the world in less than ‘perfect’ shape, and yet, it seems that when I do, I get the most genuine responses.
Here you will find the spoils of random conversations held between us, ourselves and we. Some of our interests are constant - others are constantly changing. It is our hope that you will find a topic of interest or, at the very least, get a chuckle from all of this rambling.
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Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking. Albert Einstein
