Planning, Taking Action and Catching Up
For most of my life I made plans, big and small. I was great at it. Dreaming, imagining and making plans were what I was good at.
But, that’s all I did was plan, imagine and dream. I never took sustained action.
At the end of 2008 I decided that 2009 was going to be different. I decided that taking action would be my motto for the new year.
I had a vision and a heart full of long held dreams, but I didn’t have a plan or a map. I was afraid that if I spent too much time thinking and planning I’d get hung up on the all the little details and another year would pass and I’d be no closer to what I wanted or who I wanted to be.
This year I started moving forward and taking action and I never looked back, but, I never looked too far ahead either.
So what did I do?
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*Took an online personal essay writing workshop.
*Started writing and never stopped.
*Started a Woman’s Creativity Circle – we met once a week for three months. It was something I wanted to do and I did it. It has since ended, but was a great learning experience.
*Joined Twitter. (great decision!!)
*Started sending short emails to friends and family sharing quotes, books I’d read and links to inspiring and interesting stories.
*Started The Dreaming Cafe blog at Wordpress.com. (free set-up)
*The short emails evolved into The Dreaming Café weekly newsletter…45 weeks straight and still going.
*I re-launched my blog/website as a self-hosted Wordpress.org site. (I pay to have this site hosted.)
*Created a Facebook account.
*Deactivated my Facebook account.
*Re-activated my Facebook account.
*Took my first art class as an adult.
*Announced my first online journaling class.
*Then had to teach my first online journaling class.
*Teaching my fourth online journaling class right now and loving it!!
*Held my first teleconference.
*Created The Dreaming Café Facebook Fan Page.
*Committed to learning, attending workshops, traveling and having fun…visited Denver-CO, Cleveland-OH, Dodge City-KS, Wildwood-NJ and Chaska-MN.
*Oh yeah, I almost forgot…I quit my day j-o-b. This did include plenty of saving and planning, but it happened sooner than I expected.
2009 was about committing to my dreams and taking action. It was, without a doubt, the best decision I ever made.
But, now I’ve swung too far to left. First, I was way over on the right, planning and planning, and now I am way over on the left, acting and acting.
Even though I skipped a few things and I have to go back and clean up a few details, I wouldn’t have any details to clean-up if I hadn’t taken action and began to move forward.
So, what didn’t I do? What details do I have to clean-up?
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*Business set-up – I conveniently forgot to register my business and tie up all my legal loose ends. I am in the process now of getting all my paperwork together to file.
*Record-keeping – I failed to keep track of all my business related expenses. Now I have to backtrack for the whole year and try to organize it all. I am not going to do it all myself. I will be enlisting the help of a tax accountant who specializes in small and home based businesses.
*Website design – I choose the first, free Wordpress Theme that looked pretty, but it doesn’t meet all of my needs. Now I am in the process of having to redesign and revamp my site.
*Clear focus – People should now what to expect when they visit The Dreaming Café. For awhile I was trying on all the hats I ever wanted to and writing about anything that I wanted. But, now it’s time to focus. Focus doesn’t mean that I won’t be writing and talking about a wide range of topics, because I will. It’s who I am. But, I want people to have some idea of what to expect. (I’ll be writing more about this in the coming weeks.)
*Clarity- For me, there is no separation between my work and my life. They flow together like a river. The vision that has guided me this whole year has become too small. Since I have started moving forward and taking action my vision suddenly expanded. I am still in the process of coming to grips with all the possibilities.
*Planning – I hit the road and just took off. Now it’s time to decide where I am going and what I need to do to get there. It’s time to create a map, a super to-do list with goals and action steps for each day, each week, each month.
*People – Since I quit my job I am missing the daily interaction with others. I didn’t plan for this, so now I have to. I am looking into joining a few local business organizations and creating a woman’s entrepreneur mastermind group.
One activity that has really helped over the last six weeks is my vision/dream board. I have taken my time working on my vision board and it is offering up a lot of surprises. I’ll share it with you later this week.
From now until the end of the year I’ll be going back and cleaning up all the details I skipped and creating a vision and a plan for where I want to go, and what The Dreaming Café will become.
2010 will be about living in the middle – about planning and acting.
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Where are you? Are you still in the dreaming phase? Planning or acting? Are you too far to the right or left or right where you need to be?
