Be A Voice, Not An Echo

So, guess who had a week’s worth of great new content planned, but hasn’t had a moment to stop, schedule and execute it? Yep, this girl. Hey there!

Between moving out of one place and into another, trying to settle and unpack, and preparing for the upcoming semester, this week has already been a lot –and it’s only Tuesday. But that’s not why I’m popping in to post today. This isn’t a “sorry the post schedule was thrown off” check in. I wanted to pop in to talk about something that happened to me yesterday.

I sent out a special offer to all of my email subscribers. It was a limited offering that would only be available to the first five people who took advantage of it. The week before I sent the email out, I emailed Kory, an amazing friend and blogger expressing how fearful I was to send that email, and offer up this service. It was the first time ever that I would be offering a service for profit… my palms were sweating, and when the time came for the scheduled email to be sent, my heart was pounding.

Fear pushed countless negative and unwarranted thoughts into my mind –what if I come off too “salesy” and lose subscribers or readers? Is the price point too high? Too low? Was I really ready to take this step? (Fact: ready isn’t real).

I swallowed all of those false notions and fearful thoughts, proof read my message one last time, and scheduled it out.

And then I took a huge deep breath, drank some coffee and tried imitate the seeming simple deep breathing techniques from my favorite yoga videos.

Once the email was sent, I figured one of two things would happen: I would feel wildly successful or like a huge failure. Now, 24-hours post bungee jump, I not only feel successful, but incredibly proud; and on another level, insanely valuable.

I’m in no way saying that the campaign sold out in seconds, or that everything went according to plan. But pushing myself off the mountain, unchaining myself from the standard and putting myself in charge of my destiny did provide an incredible rush of adrenaline.

I’m overjoyed with myself.

I feel stronger than I ever thought I was, braver than I ever knew, smarter and even more creative. Even if the campaign would have failed, by my terms, I have a strong feeling that I would still feel this elated. How many ever go far enough to know the beauty of the other side?

If you’re holding back, waiting, wishing you could go to greener pastures –take a leap. The barrier is you, so tear it down.

(original image via, Emma Dime)