How to get your dream on the road when you don’t have enough experience, time, or likes. A simple how to list of 4 tips to get you on track for 2017.
I feel very chuffed to have been invited to join this circle of creative Empresses. Thank you Bridget!
So for my first solo post… I gather the idea is to find a seed of inspiration from the last Empress’ post, which was not hard at all – fellow mama Amber has published a children’s book!
As a new stay-at-home-mum, determined to still do my ‘thang’, but struggling every single day to juggle it all, I am always looking to mamas-that-are-rocking-it for inspiration.
One such mama is writer/activist/love-warrior, Glennon Doyle Melton. In this ‘Magic Lessons podcast’ (hosted by the incredible Elizabeth Gilbert and a MUST for anyone who wants to live a more magical life), Glennon tells us how she went from being a drunken bulimic and drug addict to writing New York Times Bestsellers and hanging out with Oprah. All while raising 3 little rascals.
If you can spare your ears for an hour, please do listen to this wonderful podcast. If not, I’ve distilled the conversation into 4 seemingly counterintuitive tips on how to finally get your ‘thang’ going in 2017, even when you don’t have enough experience, time or ‘likes’:
1. START BEFORE YOU’RE READY
The Catch-22 that keeps so many dreams stuck on square one is that we think we can’t start unless we’re ‘good’ at it, but we don’t get good at it unless we start…
Despite feeling like the ‘worst candidate for motherhood on earth’, a positive pregnancy test became Glennon’s invitation to get up off the bathroom floor and start showing up for life. ‘We’re always holding some kind of invitation from the universe’ she says, and we are arguing with the invitation. We’re saying I’m not ready, I’m not good enough, I need to lose 10 pounds, I need to do more research, I need to be more like her… We are deeming ourselves unworthy of invitations instead of just trusting the inviter’.
I love the bit in the interview where she recalls sharing a painfully revealing ’25 things you didn’t know about me’ Facebook post (that resulted in an inbox jam-packed with ‘me too!’ emails), and telling her husband that she’d figured out her thing in life is to be a ‘shameless truth-teller’. To which he replies, ‘Dammit! Do you have any other marketable skills?!’
Nope. She says. This is all I got. And so, with no experience, no marketable skills, and not enough time, Glennon used the one thing she had, her soul-baring honesty, to begin what has now become the wildly popular blog, Momastery.
