WOTW: 8. Hope

The 8th chapter of the WOTW book is titled Hope and says: “The act of going for something brings you closer to knowing yourself. It elicits growth and transformation from within the process…not from the outcome of the process. In the process of training for a race, writing a manuscript, or working toward a goal, we discover who we are and what we are made of.” This made me immediately think of the current process I am in now, that is to get to know myself better through writing various posts in my blog. I am doing this to discover exactly who I am deep down inside, all in hopes that I will learn to accept and love myself fully. While still in the beginning stages and no where near being able to say I’ve achieved my desired outcome, I can see and feel the changes, growth and transformation that has already begun to take place inside of me.

I’d like to elaborate on this a little more through the next quote, which states: “Transformation is possible because free will exists. Every day, we have the option to choose…how to engage…whether to dwell on a life-taking thought pattern or to reach for a life-giving one.” In my previous WOTW posts, I talk about my predisposition to negativity and living my life based on external expectations rather than internal factors. Within the past month and a half, I have made minor progress to evolve those tendencies. While I still have a long way to go, I find, at least on occasion, focusing on the small steps forward.

As an example, the past week has been a challenge for me, having several other things to get done and feeling more tired than usual, due to less sleep. This has caused me to struggle with finding the energy and motivation to publish more content. However, if I consider how I was 3 months or more ago, my thought process would sound something like, “Ugh, why should I even bother writing and publishing more posts when there are barely 5 people reading them or listening to the podcast episode?”

But because my mindset is focused on doing things that bring me joy and my goal is to blog gibberish to find myself, passions, purpose and doing this for my own benefit, not for others, I ended up writing anyway. Taking a peek into my drafts folder, I realized I have drafted 10 different blog posts that are all at least 75% complete in the past 5 days that have yet to be published. I published 2 others in that same timeframe, which means I have written 12 posts. I acknowledge for myself that, that is a lot!

More importantly, I recognize that the act of writing, no matter the topic, has become my form of live-giving therapy. It just feels good when I’m making concerted efforts to spend time on the things that matter to me, which not only relieve the stress from my day job, but brings me happiness and gives me a sense of fulfillment. I have done so many things my entire life for other people or because it is what I think is expected of me, and my default way of thinking in the past, of writing for others and using the excuse of having hardly any readers as a reason to give myself an out from doing it, no longer works.

I have said in my From GGibberish to Purpose post that I am doing this for my own purposes in mind. So today, I am taking a moment to focus on the fact that in the past week I didn’t revert to my old ways of thinking. While doing something simply because it is enjoyable may seem like standard protocol or minor to others, this is actually a big deal for me and something I consider a win. This is a clear sign in this particular situation, I transformed my thinking and did what I wanted without worrying about external factors.

The next quote is “We are free to choose…a new way of looking at…ourselves in the mirror. Bring to mind a current situation or area in your life where things come easily. Acknowledge how your hope is not lacking here and you can easily see yourself successful in said endeavor. Don’t overthink it. When you are about to do something out of your comfort level bring this vision to mind to strengthen your resolve and balance your perspective.”

Coming up with an area of my life where it is easy was not a challenge for me and not at all surprising that it is writing! While I may not publish a blog post every day, it is not necessarily because I did not write, but rather that I did not have a chance to finish editing one of the many drafts that I have started. In fact, as of this blog posting I have over 70 drafts in my folder that have yet to be completed, or in some cases it is because I have not recorded the draft as a podcast yet. Some of my shorter posts are only about 500+ words, but a lot are closer to 1500 words or more. That means I have been writing about 30K words worth of content in a month’s timeframe, which in itself is impressive for me since in years past, my posts were much shorter and far less infrequent. Not only am I doing all this writing, but I’m editing it which I feel sometimes takes twice as long as the actual writing and recording them into podcast episodes that also takes significant time to do. To think that I am able to do this while I am working a full time job that usually takes at least 9 hours a day, while doing other activities related to my spiritual journey and regular life stuff, I realize that I am quite successful in this area of my life.

The last part of the quote speaks to when doing things that stretch and make you uncomfortable, to think about the thing that comes easy to help build confidence and put things into a better perspective. I did a little bit of that when I started the podcast aspect of my blog. Before and while I was starting to figure out how to create a podcast, I can tell you that I felt extremely overwhelmed and doubted my own abilities to not only learn but successfully execute on this endeavor. Going back to recall how I created a blog and my process to launch it is what helped me get through the start up process with the podcast. I did a lot of research on all the equipment, various hosting platforms so I could decide which one to use, how to navigate and use various software to record the audio and ultimately connect it to my blog and publish both not only through the blog website but on social media platforms as well. Coupling my experience and knowledge gained with launching my blog and a lot of encouragement from my boyfriend enabled me to keep putting one foot forward to take steps until I eventually figured out the basics to podcasting. Now I find myself knowledgeable enough to produce audio clips much more quickly than when I first started.

The last quote I want to touch on reads: “Become a genius. Genius is just attention to a subject. We become what we repeatedly do…and think.” There are so many subjects that I want to “become a genius” in that I have started to learn, but feel inadequate with my knowledge still. Even though I am fully trained and certified with Feng Shui, since it is so complex and there are so many layers and information within it, I don’t feel confident because I constantly have to refer back to the materials and notes to confirm things. I have spent an incredible amount of hours reading books, watching videos and doing online research on astrology, yet feel like I could spend the rest of my life trying to educate myself on that topic without ever reaching genius status. Same thing goes for many of the other things that I’ve touched on in my blog from numerology, crystals, meditation and other spiritual practices.

A few days ago, my boyfriend made a point to bring to my attention to a moment when I confidently challenged someone on a topic who had been in the field longer than I have about a piece of information that I knew was incorrect and providing what I believed to be the correct information. I was able to immediately point to a credible source to verify my answer was, in fact, correct. It didn’t even dawn on me to give myself credit for the knowledge I had on the subject, which I know stems from my “not being good enough” mentality. It only makes me that much more grateful for my boyfriend to bring those things front and center to my attention as it is only helping me on this journey to correct the negative thoughts and self-talk, helping me course correct my moments of self-doubt by giving myself credit when it really is due.

To end this post, I’d like to circle back to the first quote. It mentions training for a race, writing a manuscript and working on a goal to discover who we are and what we are made of. As a way of holding myself accountable, I am revealing each of these here in this blog post. I am planning on doing all of these and completing them before the end of 2022. I am scheduled to run a 10K the second week of December and have only consistently struggled to start my training and running on regular basis thus far in the past few months. I know I am literally running out of time to physically prepare myself for this race and will be forcing myself to get on track very soon so that I can complete the race with ease, which is my ultimate goal.

As for the manuscript, November is considered National Novel Writing Month and there is an international challenge of writing 50,000 words in 30 days. I have thought about writing a book for almost a year now, but have yet to even jot down a single word related to my book idea. Considering that I mentioned earlier that I have written approximately 30,000 words in the past month, I am taking this challenge on. I have chosen to do this despite my already packed daily schedule because I want to further drive myself to pursue one my greatest passions, which is writing while pushing myself out of my comfort zone by writing fiction and NOT a short story. I’ve only written a few fictional short stories and never attempted to write a novel, so I am really excited to see how the process will be.

That being said, I am sure that my blog will be affected, with less posts published if I will be dedicated to writing approximately 1700 words a day, but I am determined to try to not let my blog entirely drop off and do at least a couple posts a week, instead of almost daily as I have been. I still have my Bucket List goal of publishing 111 blog posts by the end of calendar year 2022 and currently I am halfway there! If I can finish the 70+ drafts I have in my folder, I will be able complete it!

As for my next goal that I have set for myself, I have already decided to launch another podcast focused on my short story fiction writing which is my main passion, but I haven’t put effort into starting that idea yet since I’ve been so focused on writing for my blog and would like to have several stories written before I create that podcast. And while I already feel a bit out of my comfort zone with that idea, predominantly because it is something I really put my whole self into and would feel much more vulnerable to potential criticism, plus knowing I plan to monetize that through a subscription model, it is by thinking of how I’ve executed on my blog and podcast recently that I know I ultimately have what it takes to launch that endeavor as well.