Living The Dream

Last week I held my debut workshop ‘Shooting with Soul‘. A dream of mine that’s taken me almost seven years to come to fruition. It had taken me so long for a number of reasons, confidence, time and fear. You see, whilst I have always loved sharing my knowledge, I’ve only ever wanted to guide creatives how to create like them, to be authentic.

It’s taken me a lot of blood, sweat and tears (literally) to find my creative voice, my spirit; I’ve invested thousands of pounds in my creativity over the years and over two decades of my life.  Sharing the techniques on how to develop the soft skills in creativity is where my passion lies. Yet it’s not an area that is widely explored in our industry and what I wanted to create was certainly quite different to anything else that I know is out there. Whilst I KNEW this was the one workshop I was supposed to create, I was afraid, afraid I wouldn’t live up to my own expectations and of course that of my dream, but most of all I was afraid no-one would want what I had to offer. There, I said it … that age old fear, I was afraid of not being good enough.

So what did I do? I felt the fear and did it anyway!

Wednesday saw me play full out with everything I hoped I could ever create. I wanted to hold a space that brought creatives together to connect to their own fears and limitations and push through them, to create from them. To connect to their creativity as a source of inspiration and create. To use intuition, surroundings, emotions, each other as a source of inspiration, to harness group creativity, authentic creativity, to use silence and stillness as a powerful tool and on top of all that to get out there and physically create images from a space they’d not accessed before or had forgotten how to get there. It was emotional, for me, for them. It was real, it was eye opening and heart lifting, it was impactful.  It was the stuff dreams are made of, my dreams and the dreams of others. It was liberating.

I recorded a short video of how I felt just before I stepped into my dream. I wanted to reflect how far I’d come. After so many years of measuring my success based on other people’s perception of that success, I chose instead to celebrate the steps it had taken to get me to here, the moment before the leap. How often do we acknowledge what it’s taken us to get to where we are now? All too often we determine our success by the final outcome, a pass or fail, the perfection, the thumbs up or down; we measure our success by a list of end results and validations. Of course those end results are important, as are the lessons we learn from them, they are imperative to our growth. Yet stopping to give ourselves a moment of recognition of how far we’ve come in any given moment, is as equally important to anyone chasing a dream, building their future … dancing with destiny. It’s where we remember our why, where we honor ourselves as dream makers and where we walk into those dreams empowered acknowledging the courage it took us to get to that moment before we take flight.

By taking that moment and choosing to walk into my dream celebrating where I was, have fun and not focus on where I wanted to be and the final outcome, changed everything. It changed my experience and the experience of the delegates. I gave myself permission to do a whole heap of things … including making mistakes, being a success and everything in between.

So to all you dream chasers out there who are waiting for that right moment to celebrate your success, stop. Press pause on the outside world and just take a few moments to look back over your shoulder and remind yourself of everything you’ve gone through to get you here, celebrate your courage, celebrate your dedication, your passion, your tenacity, celebrate your vulnerability, your ability to learn and keep on learning, celebrate your devotion and determination and even if you’re not feeling it … celebrate your brilliance and give yourself permission to be perfectly imperfect just the way you are. Celebrate YOU.

Life Lesson 2057 : You are enough