Have you ever felt like you missed out on so much because you were afraid to try?
Have you ever felt like you wasted so much time trying to be perfect and then nothing ever got done?
Or is that just me?
I made up a little guide for me to follow to make 2014 The Year of Living Wild for me.
Living Wild for me means:
- taking risks,
- not giving an eff about what other people think about me,
- following my wild heart where it leads me.
Here’s the 3 challenges I wrote that I wanted to share with you to make this year incredible:
1. Saying HELL Yes To A New Adventure in Learning Something Awesome.
I have been wanting to learn how to play guitar for the past year. But every time I thought about it, I would make excuses like – “I just don’t have the time” or “It’s going to take me forever to learn” or “Classes are just too expensive.” Then on January 2nd, the billboard at the local pizza shop had a small flyer ridden with holes and ripped off tabs – $7 group guitar lessons at the library.
No more excuses.
Last night, I rocked it out with my new classmates – two other girls and a guy. I came home and practiced until 2am. It made me feel alive.
2. Letting Yourself Be a Beginner – aka Giving Yourself Permission to Suck.
My first burlesque routine was laughable. I was shaking the whole time and almost forgot to take off my things. In other words, I sucked. But I watched the others around me, practiced a bunch, took classes, and within two years, my confidence was raised and I was headed off to tour. Then I wanted to learn how to spin fire. It had taken me so long to build up my confidence to do burlesque and feel like I knew I was doing – that I was actually hesitant to start something totally different and be bad at it.
Going into a new fire dancing class and hitting myself in the face fifty million times with a pair of sock poi while I tried to figure out arm movements was pretty pathetic. But then, I looked around at the rest of the class and they were all doing the same thing. No one cared what I looked like! They were all worrying about their own thing and learning how to do it themselves. When I started to laugh at myself, I gave myself permission to just have fun with it and that’s when I started to get better and figure it out!
3. Bare Your Soul. Share It With The World.
I can’t even tell you how many vlogs, videos of me playing ukulele, pieces of stories, songs that I wrote, photograph projects and cool ideas that I have had, created or made in the past that I’ve hidden away, deleted or shrugged off as not being good enough. I guess that old fear of being judged or being laughed at came up and I let that kill them.
I’m challenging myself to stop my own creative murders.
Last week, I stayed up all night with my friends, singing and playing music. We recorded this and that just to keep for ourselves, just having a good time, chilling on Josh’s floor in his living room. Josh is a huge Oasis fan and had worked out this slow guitar for their song “Wonderwall”. I didn’t even know the lyrics – but luckily that’s what the internets are for. And so we recorded this….late into the night, sitting in a circle on the floor, me reading the lyrics off my laptop….friends just messing around trying something new.
No one was ever supposed to hear it.
But then, you guys were asking for more ukulele songs, more videos and stuff like that – so I figured I’d be brave and share it.
Tell me what you are challenging yourself to do this year that you might have been too shy or scared to try in the past for fear of being judged.
Declare it in the comments.
Live Wild with me.
