52/52

The Final Song.

I have so much enjoyed spending the last year with you.  I have appreciated your support, your encouragement, your feedback, your comments, your friendship.  All of you.

I have learned a tremendous amount about myself.  Last week when I reread all my posts, my very first post posed the question "what do I want to be when I grow up?"  And what I realized is that I like to help people.  Most jobs I've held have fulfilled that need, starting with my desire to be a firefighter.  Now that never happened, but I did become a training manager and I taught people how to be more effective, how to project and time manage and I loved every minute of it.  My job now includes a lot of help desk type activity.  I don't love that as much, but I do love to solve problems for people.

This last year I have been on a path of self-discovery.  Really digging deep, pushing past invisible boundaries in my head about who I was and who I wanted to be, and realizing that I should have done this years ago.  But time slips away - feeling overwhelmed by the busy-ness of life's demands and always putting it off until tomorrow.  And tomorrow never comes.

Until you develop a blog like this where you feel accountable - not necessarily to anyone but yourself.  Because you don't want to let yourself down.  You don't want to give up.  You don't want to feel like you failed.  But I really do understand now that there is a difference between trying something and failing and failing because you didn't do anything at all.  Mom is in Control's podcast host, Heather Chauvin says "When you take action, that's when the magic happens." And I can't agree with her more.

I would think about my blog and be inspired by something and the wheels would turn in my head. Ideas would float around for a few days and a theme would emerge.  The blog helped me start to see the world differently.  I would look around and really consider how things around me made feel, contemplate the meaning of words, and test theories I had about what I believed to be truth.  Many times I was unexpectedly forced out of my comfort zone, and realizing it wasn't so bad, it started to expand my comfort zone.

So when you start to put all those thoughts, ideas and considerations into action, things change.  You do things you've never done before, you start to trust the whispers in your head - you know - the ones that are there just underneath all the negative thoughts coming from the peanut gallery.  The thoughts, ideas and considerations you give the most focus to tend to be the ones that get stronger.  If you're focused on the negative thoughts and you feed them regularly, they grow stronger and take over.  But if you starve those negative thoughts and ignore them, they become weak and pathetic.  I spent too many years starving and dismissing my positive thoughts that they just plain moved out.  And so I could only get them when they came from someone else - and that's dangerous if it's the only place you are getting them.  So feed your positive thoughts with encouragement, support, and action (which by the way is the most helpful when it comes from YOU).  YOU are the only one that can make YOU happy.  And conversely, YOU are the only one that can make YOU unhappy.

And that reminds me of a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."

The biggest thing that I've learned this year is the difference between being a people-pleaser and being someone who sincerely likes to be helpful.  A year ago I would have told you that they are the same thing.  But here's what I've learned: A people-pleaser does things because they want people to like them, they soak up the praise and appreciation, they put a lot of emphasis on what people think of them.  A people-pleaser doesn't always consider the long term consequences of their actions.  A people-pleaser is terrified of judgment.  A people-pleaser can even get desperate for the attention or so caught up in the idea of what they "should" do that they do things they don't want to do.  A people-pleaser tends to, over time, lose who they are because they slowly turn into what they think other people want them to be.

A helpful person genuinely cares about people.  A helpful person sees someone who is hurting or is in need and offers support (which doesn't always equal advice).  A helpful person realizes that they are not expected to fix everyone and everything.  A helpful person considers the bigger picture and when they take action, they do so because they want to.  A helpful person is a friend, someone who listens more than they speak and can be counted on regardless if praise is given.  A helpful person is true to themselves.

So as my Project 52 ends, I want to say thank you for riding along on my journey.  Thank you for cheering me on.  Thank you for helping me see who I wanted to be.  So tell me, what was your favorite post from the last year? I'd love to know.  This was mine.

And that is my favorite post, I think, because it highlights the ideas of focus, perspective and feeling like you have no idea what happens next.  Do you know why I could never answer the "what do I want to be when I grow up" question? Because, for crying out loud, I didn't know what I wanted.  I only knew what I thought I should be and what other people thought I was.  I wasn't focused.  And if you think about that in terms of photography, everything else around me was clear, but I was fuzzy (like the barn through that dirty window).  You could kind of tell it was me, but the detail was missing.

Stay tuned later this week for the announcement of what comes next.  I'll warn you, it's going to be a little different than this last year's Project 52.  And I sincerely hope you like it.  But you know what? If you don't, that's totally okay.  I won't lose sleep, I won't try to morph it into something that I think you will like.  I won't even feel bad about it.  Because I'm doing this for me.   And because I can't please everyone.