Have you ever done something so daring you thought you were going insane?
I don’t mean jumping off a plane, although, I have paraglided before, and that was pretty daring!
I’m talking about that daring that impacts your day-to-day life, your relationships, your finances, and sometimes your sanity. It leaves people wondering if you’re crazy, and it leaves you wondering the same, not to mention when self-doubt creeps up and the stories you tell yourself really feel real.
My mind felt as if in a daze as my fingers obeyed the commands of my heart as they ferociously stroke each key on the keyboard.
My heart was pounding and my mouth was dry. Ever get that feeling in the pit of your stomach that you just can’t shake?
As I reached the end of the letter and read it for clarity, the words seemed to make no sense to my rational brain that wanted nothing more than to protect me. By that point it had gone AWOL.
Three years ago this July marks the end of an era and the beginning of something that was completely foreign to me – entrepreneurship.
That letter was my resignation. After 12 years working for the same company and quitting two other times before, I knew this was it. I was letting go of something that I knew very intimately and felt very safe, for something I knew nothing about and felt very unsafe. It didn’t help that I had no plan, no savings, and wasn’t even sure what I was going to do as a business!
But… I jumped… At first it all felt like a big adventure! I was excited and the pieces slowly came to me. If you’ve been with me since the very beginning of my journey, you remembered that I started out doing intuitive readings, which I later added a healing component to it. I thought that I would strike gold and I would just take off flying and never have to hover close to or touch the ground. Little did I know…
A year or so later, I had not only hovered close to the ground, I had crashed into it. By the middle of 2013 and into the first half of 2014, I had not only gotten myself into a pile of debt, but I had also started tapping into my children’s savings account so I could keep up with my credit cards bills. It was a very low time in my life. I felt the bitterness of shame eat at me. The crippling doubt debilitate the belief in myself. The waning of my faith tearing my heart. The shattering of the belief I had that I could do anything I set my mind to.
How did I get so far down? Yet, something inside of me didn’t give up. It kept reminding me that I had a dream and that every dream comes with a price. Was I willing to pay it? The price was consistency, painstaking effort, increasing my faith and trust, surrounding myself with people who genuinely cared about my happiness and my success and who saw my value when I couldn’t see it for myself. The price was loving myself till the very end and forgiving myself for the judgments I had placed on the one person who could get me out of the hole – ME!
It takes Courage…
All the great people we hear about from history and the grand things they were able to achieve in the world did not come from people who remained in their comfort zone, wishing for great things to come to them without taking risks and making an initial investment. You can’t get a tree if you don’t plant the seed.
And so I passed the test, my own test – do I trust myself? Do I have faith? Do I have what it takes to go through the fire and come out the other side with more wisdom, more passion, more resilience, more courage, and more strength? Yes, I do! And this year has been my best year yet and we’re not even half way through the year.
How about you?
Is there a dream for you that you’re working so hard to actualize, but it seems impossible? It can be anything – attracting the perfect relationship, buying that house you love, moving up in your career, starting your business, losing the weight and taking better care of yourself, being a greater parent than you are now? Whatever that is, do you have what it takes to keep going? To keep believing? To keep making efforts? Believe that you can, build your support system, increase your faith, love yourself and eventually the fire won’t feel as uncomfortable as it used to; not because it diminished, but because you developed a fire-resistant skin.
You are stronger than you think you are, and as Eleanor Roosevelt has so eloquently said, “We gain strength, and courage, and confidence by each experience in which we really stop to look fear in the face… we must do that which we think we cannot.”
So, my Friend, are you ready to keep moving? Take my hand and I will walk with you.
Write Your Way to Self-Love Tele-class
This was wonderful, Jackie. I remember quitting my high paying job in the 80’s to open my own business. I ran that business for about 7 years and at one point I was on the verge of bankruptcy. I got a part time job and I kept running the business until I knew it had run its course and I needed to make a change.
I went back into the work force and had another really good job and gave it up to go back into business. I ran that one for 10 years until I retired.
Every bit of it, the highs and lows and successes and failures were all good. I learned some great lessons from those jobs and businesses.