#lovethejourney
Hello everyone! January ended up being a crazy month, so I am starting this year off with a blog post that is less about The Cardinal War and more about life.
The inspiration for this blog came from a pre interview task I had for The Cardinal War with Tuning IN (with Jeff). Keep an eye out for that interview, but I was asked to come up with an Action Step for the listeners. After thinking about my past few months and even last year, I came up with #lovethejourney. I realized how important not focusing on the destination/goal/dream can be. By this I don’t mean forget about it but rather don’t forget to enjoy the steps you are taking to reach the destination. Following a dream or reaching to a goal can sometimes seem daunting, as publishing The Cardinal War was for me at the beginning. But if you focus on one step at a time and remember to fully embrace each step you may realize you have made more progress than you realized. My original goal was to publish a book, that was it. But now I realize it’s so much more as I have learned about my writing style, what I want in a cover and on top of that I have met some amazing people and had some wonderful opportunities.
Pulling away from my publishing goal, I wanted to share with you readers another example of #lovingthejourney. For the longest time, I have suffered from depression and anxiety and recently I discovered a big part of it was because of the view I had of my body. I have tried many things to lose weight/tone up, but nothing was sticking because I was not enjoying what I was doing. And you may be thinking that its exercise and eating right, how can that be enjoyable? But what I learnt is to chose small ways to make it enjoyable. For example, I was not enjoying the workouts I was doing, so first step was realizing I couldn’t do it alone, I needed a community to help lift me up. I found a small gym for this with the challenges I needed and the motivating staff to help me commit. I also wanted to try something new and unique, so I took to google and found circus classes, specifically aerial hoops and trapeze. Yes, at first, I was not as strong as some of the others and it seemed it wasn’t going to help me reach my fitness goal. But slowly I did get stronger, and it motivated me to do extra workouts at home to get even better. Because I was LOVING the class. I was loving the challenge and I was loving the people. Suddenly it didn’t matter as much what I weighed, and I stopped weighing so much, because I KNEW I was getting stronger. I could see it and I could feel it in each new move I tried. I have not forgotten my goal, but I have found new, more enjoyable ways to get there which has lead to a stronger commitment to my goal.
You may be reading this far and still wonder why I’m writing a blog post about this. Really, I want to encourage you all to keep following those dreams, but don’t let them become overwhelming. Break things down into steps that are manageable and full embrace each of these steps. Meet new people, reconnect with old friends and try new things to get where you need to go.
Keep reading, keep dreaming, and remember to #lovethejourney
