Graduation season seems to be the time of year when people are all spouting off one tidbit of advice or another. Celebrities and other notable folks are paid the big bucks to perform commemoration speeches at colleges around the country. With summer on the horizon, it’s kind of difficult to take on anything requiring much effort right now. My comfort zone is just so, well . . . COMFY!
I have so many ideas swimming in my head all the time. Ideas to grow and improve my business. Ideas to cultivate more quality time with my family. Ideas on how I can best possibly juggle it all. Ideas on how to raise my girls into well-rounded and polite young ladies. Ideas to redecorate my porch (true, some ideas are completely frivolous!). The point is that they will just remain ideas until I actually DO something about them, languishing in my head. Sometimes I’m too tired or lazy to execute the idea (sure, pinwheel sandwiches and fresh fruit kabobs in the girls’ lunchboxes SOUNDED like a great idea at the time), but truthfully the reason that I haven’t done a lot of these things is that it’s kinda scary to try something new.
You see, I’m a Type-A planner (aka “control freak” according to my husband) who doesn’t relish spontaneity and needs to be prepared for every eventuality (you should see the inside of my purse). New and unknown outcomes are just NOT easy for me to handle! But what I have learned from my three-plus decades in this world are that the most amazing things have happened when I have put my fears aside and just had faith. Faith that things would work. Faith that things would be okay. Faith that nothing catastrophic would happen. Of course, things don’t ALWAYS turn out the way I thought they would – sometimes much better, and truthfully sometimes not-so-hot – but never anything too horrific to survive.
So my FREE advice to all those 2014 Grads (but mostly a reminder to myself) is “Don’t be afraid!” If you never try something new and scary, you may never fulfill your dreams . . .
.png)