Feel Good Friday 17

You guys, it has been a week over here… and I mean that in the best sense!  I have a couple of super exciting things going on behind the scenes and I am going to tell you about those as well as some other fun things today. This weekend is going to be slightly chaotic as I work to get some things done around this house to prepare for some of the excitement coming my way.  Read on to find out what! Let’s get right into it, shall we? (This blog uses affiliate links, and I am an Amazon associate.)

Investing in Yourself– I took a giant leap this week and put a lot of money towards a course I’ve been wanting to take, Marie Forleo’s B School.  For a long time, I have felt pretty stuck and unable to grow, but I know in my heart that I have a mission and I want to see it through.  My mission?  Why it’s to empower people like YOU to live your very best life, create your most beautiful and personal home, and do it all without feeling like you’re going into debt.  I want to empower women to understand that fulfillment comes not in spending money on things and stretching ourselves too financially far, but that it comes in caring for ourselves, our people, and our home in a way that only we can.  When you come to my blog or my instagram page, I want you to feel excited to go try things in your own home, or tune into a podcast I shared and let it lift you up like it did for me. I never want you to feel discouraged by what you don’t have or falling into the comparison trap, as can often happen in today’s world.  With that in mind, I took the leap and purchased the course and am ready to grow my reach.  After I enrolled, I watched a live stream of people who had previously taken the course and was so inspired.  My favorite story came from Emily Fletcher, founder of Ziva Meditation and author of Stress Less, Accomplish More. She said, “When you say yes to yourself, everything changes.” She went on to say that she was able to donate $120 thousand dollars to the Nature Conservancy last year.  WOW!  I want to be able to do incredible things in the world like that!

Enjoying the Wait– Speaking of the comparison trap, and feeling stuck, a local friend of mine, Sarah Johnson, just published a book that is available for pre-order now, called Now Waiting.  I grabbed an early copy from her directly, and I started it just the other night.  It’s all about thriving in the messy middle.  Our current culture teaches us to always be looking at what other people are doing, and in turn that can make us feel like “our turn” isn’t coming fast enough.  Raise your hand if you’ve ever felt like that!  My hand is WAAAAAAAY up.  I remember when we were trying to get pregnant with Wilder, and I was having miscarriage after miscarriage, and everywhere I turned other people were successfully having babies.  It was a hard place to be in, and I wish this book had been around then. It will help you learn to lean into the wait, and trust in the plan that is meant for you.

Creative Workshops– I am all for learning new and especially easy skills! I love simple workshops that can be taken in just a few hours (as opposed to a class every week for 6 weeks or so.)  Just last week, thanks to a friend who invited me, I had the opportunity to take a hand lettering workshop with Magnolia Pen & Paper. Next week I am actually going to share a project I created based on what I learned from the hand lettering class. I absolutely love that this was such a simple skill that can be applied to so many other parts of my life, such as addressing envelopes, creating art (as I did with Emmy this past weekend.)  If you have the opportunity to take a creative workshop of any sort near you, I highly encourage you to treat yourself… feed your creative spirit and learn something new! (By the way, above is my workshop creation on plexiglass- our family has a little inside joke about baguettes, so it was meant to be humorous and sweet for all of us.)

A Sweet Article– I came across this article the week of Valentine’s Day, and it had me in tears… in a good way.  If you have a few minutes to read it, I strongly encourage you to hop over. It’s written by a teacher who recalls facing cruel treatment from her peers when she was a child.  She writes,

“‘Well, it ruined Valentine’s Day for me. It shook what little faith I had in myself for a long time after. But I survived. And now I refuse to cede this holiday of love to the meanness of one rotten boy. Instead, it’s given me the motivation to undo the malice of David.’ I smile. ‘And that’s why we’re going to have a party. A party that celebrates kindness instead of cruelty.'”

Gosh, it’s got me tearing up again, but it’s just a beautiful reminder to treat others with kindness.  Don’t let the anger or malice of others be reflected in you. Instead, you take that cruelty, and you shine back in kindness.  In doing so, you’ll change the world, or at least make other people’s days much brighter.

A Goal Getter’s Club– This past Monday, I invited a small group of local friends to get together and write down and share our goals.  I wanted to have a little group to do it aloud in so that we could encourage one another and hold each other accountable. I brought a roll of butcher paper, rolled it out onto the table, and I gave them each a permanent marker and told them not to hold back and to write it all down.  I wanted them to use those markers so that there would be no room for erasing, or second guessing.  We ended up talking for 2 hours, and I learned so much about my friends and I am excited to watch them go for their dreams and do whatever I can to help them.  One friend told me afterwards that I had awakened something in her that had gone to sleep….. chills!!!!  If you have a local group of motivated friends, get together and do this activity with them!  You will all leave so pumped up about what you are going to do in the world, of course, but even more excited to help them achieve great things!  Team work makes the dream work, and having a group to have your back and keep you going is a game changer.

Excitement Here– Well, if you follow me on instagram you know we painted our living room, so that’s exciting!  I will be sharing updates next week.  Secondly, I am thrilled, and honored that mindbodygreen is coming here next week to film a little video home tour for their website.  I honestly don’t know how they found me, but I was thrilled when they did because their website is exactly in line with everything I believe in.  From their site, “mindbodygreen. One word. Here you’ll find a 360-degree approach to wellness that weaves the mental, physical, spiritual, emotional, and environmental aspects of well-being together, because we believe that these pillars of health are all interconnected.” YES!  I was talking to a friend about that just the other day… it is all connected.  Anyhow, I will let you know when it’s live on their site!

That’s all I have for you this week, but I hope that you leave this post today pumped up for the weekend, excited to take on your goals with your friends, and say yes to yourself.  You deserve it and the world needs you!