Here’s the pattern I’ve been wrangling with lately — tell me if you relate:
I have an idea for something I’d like to share / try / do.
For example:
Living A Creative Life with Melissa Dinwiddie
Happiness, Self-fulfillment, Creativity, Productivity, Practical Inspiration, Mentoring, Life Design for Creatives and Multi-Passionate People
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Here’s the pattern I’ve been wrangling with lately — tell me if you relate:
I have an idea for something I’d like to share / try / do.
For example:
Back in May, I got a gift subscription to the Calm app — a little perk of being a Kaiser-Permanente member.
For about five weeks I used it (almost) every day to do a 10-minute meditation.
I “discovered” meditation years ago, thanks to Susan Piver’s Open Heart Project. I’ve fallen off the wagon, and gotten back on, many times in the intervening years.
[Read more…]Originally published on Valentine’s Day 2011, this is one of my all-time favorites. It felt appropriate to bring it out again for another Valentine’s Day, in which I’m celebrating over three years being married to Miracle Man, and seven years since the day he swooped back into my life after I passed him over for other guys twice (that’s a long story for another time). Enjoy! xo,Melissa
Today’s post is my contribution to the Love Sparks Blogging Festival, started by Jasmine Lamb. All across the blogosphere, participants are posting blogs about love, in response to Jasmine’s request.
I’m staying close to home on this one, sharing something rather personal. Something I’m a little shy about revealing. But it’s what’s been on my mind, and what popped into my head when I got Jasmine’s invitation, so it’s what I’m sharing today. Hope you enjoy it.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s a brilliant ploy by the flower, card and candy industries rather than any truly meaningful moment in annual time.
This year, though, is a little different.
One year ago I had just been unceremoniously [Read more…]
Dear Person Who Is Considering Creating a Virtual Summit:
Before you check “host virtual summit” off your list of goals for the year, I offer you some friendly advice.
First, kudos to you for taking on this big project and huge organizational challenge!
Since most people who host online summits do so as a tactic to grow their audience size, as you go about selecting the “experts” who will speak/present/be interviewed for your summit, it’s likely that you may be looking for [Read more…]
If you’re a mom, Happy Mother’s Day!
If you’re not a mom, Happy Day for Giving Thanks for Your Mom (or Whoever Raised You)!
I’m so grateful to have my mom a short drive away, and I’m grateful for the love and support and encouragement she’s given me my whole life. I know I’m lucky — not everyone got that kind of love.
Moms like that rock!
Me, I’m childfree by choice.
Let me assure you, before you jump to conclusions, that childfree by choice doesn’t mean child-disliking. I absolutely adore kids (did you know I taught nursery school and was a nanny in my 20s?), but I’m “mom” only to a fluffy diva of a kitty, who keeps me sane when she’s not driving me crazy.
I love my life, and would not trade it, but getting to a peaceful resolution to the question of whether or not to have children was not an easy journey. A journey intimately tied to my journey toward a Big, Bold, Creative Life.
Some of my friends knew from early on that they didn’t want kids. Childfree by choice from birth. I envy them.
For me it was a painful struggle for a long time, and although I finally got to clarity and peace and closure with my ultimate decision a number of years ago, that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes get wistful.
I also have friends who are childfree not by choice, for whom Mother’s Day must pack a mighty wallop. Even for those of us who are childfree by choice, though, Mother’s Day can tug at you…
Someone very intuitive recently asked me something about my children, and when I said I didn’t have any, she paused a moment, then nodded and said,
“Ah, yes, your work is your children.”
It was a very perceptive way to put it. In fact, I sometimes wonder if part of the reason I’m so passionate about making a difference is that my work is my way of leaving a legacy.
Would I be so driven to build Living A Creative Life if I had children?
Of course there’s no way of knowing, but I often wonder what my life would be like if I’d had kids.
I grew up assuming I’d be a mom
It was a given until I was in my 30s and newly divorced, because I love kids, and well, why wouldn’t I be a mom?
But life, as John Lennon put it, is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.
My life has turned out wildly different from the way I imagined it would be, in many more ways than ultimately being childfree by choice. It’s richer, deeper, definitely bigger, bolder and more creative than I even knew was possible.
I have an awesome life!
And yet I do sometimes think about the other life, the “sister life” that mine would be now, had I stepped through different doors and made different choices than I did. Had I landed at this age with a kid or two in tow (or maybe in college!), in addition to a fluffy diva kitty.
I recently read a wonderful book, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar, by Cheryl Strayed, a compilation of luscious, gut-wrenching, compassionate, and soul-baring letters from an online advice column. (Seriously, read it! I couldn’t put it down!)
One of the letters Strayed (as the anonymous Dear Sugar) wrote, was to a man in his early 40s, who was wrestling with the question of whether to have a child or not.
He asked many of the same questions I asked myself, as I wrestled with the “to kid or not to kid?” question for several years in my 30s.
Strayed refers to the “sister life” we didn’t choose as “the ghost ship that didn’t carry us.” It’s neither better, nor worse, just different.
Every choice you make in life means an infinite number of other choices that you didn’t make.
I choose to spend this moment writing a newsletter to you, which means I am not using this moment to paint, or check email, or walk by the San Francisco Bay with MB, or call my mom, or play my ukulele, or…
Had I chosen to be a mom, there is no question that I would have spent my time and energy very, very differently than I have over the past couple of decades.
None of these choices is inherently better than any other, but they are all different, and they are (with few exceptions) mutually exclusive. (Yes, I could call my mom while walking by the Bay with MB, for example, but it would make that walk a totally different experience.)
As Strayed puts it at the end of her gorgeous Dear Sugar letter,
“I’ll never know, and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore.”
I’m saluting now.
PS – Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!
Every so often I dig into the Living A Creative Life archives, and pull out a classic article that feels worthy of reposting. This is one such Living A Creative Life Classic, originally published on May 6, 2010. Enjoy, and let me know your thoughts! ~M
When I got divorced, one of the things that got me out of bed in the morning was knowing that tonight (or the next night, or the next) I was going out dancing.
Dance was my first love. I’d been on a career track as a modern dancer, and only stopped when forced by an injury (a good thing in the end, but that’s another story). Now, years later, even though I could have physically handled going out dancing, I never did while I was married.
Why? Because my husband didn’t like to dance. And because he was so jealous it didn’t even enter my mind to go out alone.
A big, important part of myself, one of my core Blisses, was effectively cut off for years.
And it was 100% my own fault.
The truth is each of us is 100% responsible for our own happiness, and I didn’t have to let my husband’s jealousy and lack of interest determine my choices. It felt like I had no choice, but in fact that was just me playing the victim and not taking responsibility.
When I finally “rediscovered” dance during my divorce, I was insanely grateful to “get dance back,” and insanely annoyed with myself for ever letting someone else’s preferences dictate my choices.
I swore I’d never do the same thing again.
Yet in my last relationship I did just that. You’d think over a decade of personal growth would have made a difference, but no.
This time the Bliss in question was music, singing jazz to be exact, and before I met my ex, my habit was to get out to a jam session or two at least every week or so, where I could get a microphone in my hand. But during the year-plus of my last relationship, I only went to jam sessions a handful times.
Why? Not because my ex forbade me from going, but simply because he didn’t like jazz, and wasn’t willing to learn to like it. So I was left with the choice of either following my Bliss, or spending time with him.
Now, I’d worked long and hard to find this relationship (57 dates in a 2 1/2 year period, in fact). I thought this man was my life partner, and our relationship was a huge priority in my life. Plus I just plain liked spending time with him! Then there was the fact that, unlike my ex-husband, he did go out dancing with me, even subjected himself to the sometimes excruciating challenge of learning Argentine Tango so that we could dance together.
The man was clearly willing, just not when it came to jazz. (Did I mention he also left the room when I played guitar? You’d think that would have been a clue…)
At the time, my choice to spend time with him rather than following my Bliss seemed tolerable. Now I’m not so sure.
Think about it: much as we don’t like to believe this, relationships come and go. Blisses endure. Perhaps the fact that this man couldn’t muster up enthusiasm for my Bliss was a clue that it wasn’t going to be a good match for the long term.
Are there people in your life who are less than supportive of you following your Bliss? Take a good, hard look. Are those relationships really going to serve you in the end? If there’s a niggling voice somewhere inside, you might want to pay attention to it.
I’m not telling you to break up with someone, but I am telling you, as one who knows, that cutting off an important part of your creative self is not the route to happiness.
You are 100% responsible. Seeking happiness is your birthright, and your Blisses are key to that happiness. Don’t you deserve to have people around you who will support you in your efforts to follow your evolving Bliss?
You bet you do. Don’t settle for less.
PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!
I got sad news on Monday. Someone who meant something to me took his own life.
Kind of a weird opener for a Valentine’s Day post, I grant you, but bear with me. There’s a relevant point here. (And if you’re looking for something more romantic, you might enjoy this post instead.)
John was young — just 27 — a talented musician whom I’d known since he was only 18 or 19. He earned his chops, worked like mad to build on his talent and become an incredibly respected drummer, and — this is an even bigger deal when it comes to calling musicians for a gig — he was always 100% reliable.
Not just on the bandstand, either. His drum kit was always set up before I even got to the gig.
When I made my CD, Online Dating Blues, back in 2009, we recorded it live in his garage studio, and he not only did all the recording and let me use the space for free, but he spent hours with the sound engineer, overseeing the mixing and mastering with us into the wee hours.
Didn’t charge me a penny for that, either.
John bent over backwards to do his best for you. He was my #1 Go-To A-List drummer — the one I always called first for a gig. His students adored him. Everyone adored him.
I didn’t know him outside of playing music together, but I adored him, too.
Jake, my #1 Go-To A-List pianist, was in that studio with me and John, and Doug on bass. (I think Jake and John might have actually met through me, when I played a live gig on Stanford radio back in 2007, and asked them both to be in my band. Then they hooked up with Doug and gigged for a couple of years as the Big Beat Trio.)
Jake called me on the phone yesterday to talk about John, and how steamrollered we are. “I always thought we’d all play together again, that maybe you’d make another CD with us, that we’d have more gigs together.”
Yeah, me too, Jake. Me, too.
I’m still reeling. John was so young. So beloved. And he seemed like the most grounded person on the planet — an old soul. The last person I would have expected to lose to his own hand.
Yet here we are.
All of this has made me think about the ways in which we touch each other.
Really, I barely knew John. We played a bunch of gigs and recorded a CD, but it’s not like we talked on the phone about life or anything. We were part of each other’s circle, but one of the outer layers.
And yet his loss sears like a hot knife.
The world without him just seems so terribly wrong.
It’s funny, I’m reminded of when I discovered the writing of David Foster Wallace.
Oh. My. God. I fell madly in love with his voice, the way he thought, his way with words (and his use of parentheticals [which so accurately reflects the way I, myself, think]).
After reading one essay I was practically a DFW groupie.
Only later did I discover that he’d taken his own life, probably only a few months before I first encountered his work.
It astonished me how devastated I felt. How much I grieved for someone I’d never actually met. My chest hurt to realize there’d be no new writings from him, that I’d never have the “someday” chance to go to a reading or a book signing.
The world without him just seemed so terribly wrong.
I get emails from strangers pretty regularly. Notes out of the blue, from people I’ve never met, who were touched somehow by something I wrote or said, or some video they saw.
I touched them in some way, and the brief notes they send me touch me, in turn. Those notes keep me going sometimes, when it all seems like a slog, when being an evangelist for creative expression feels like an exercise in futility, and my big dreams seem impossible to achieve.
People in Congress have some kind of formula to figure out how much to weigh people’s opinions. If one person writes an email, they know there are many more who feel the same way, but just didn’t take the time to write. I figure the emails I receive, the comments on posts, the rare letters sent through the mail (yes, people still do that sometimes!) are representative of many other people who’ve been touched by me as well, but just never took the time to let me know.
Well, God bless the ones who take the time.
I don’t know that it would change anything, with the kind of illness that John and DFW had, but I still wish I could go back in time and somehow let them know that, dude, you touched me. You mean something to me. Without you in it, the world would just be terribly wrong.
You might have made somebody’s day today. A smile or a joke in the checkout line might have shifted someone’s lousy day to the positive. Something you said ten years ago and immediately forgot about might be the mantra that keeps someone else going.
I know John probably couldn’t have taken it in — I don’t know that any of us can — but it feels important to say it anyway.
After all, each other is all we really have, in the end.
So you, you reading this post, please know that you touch people in ways you cannot possibly know, just by being you. Please know that the world without you would just be so terribly wrong.
Then let the people in your life know that they’ve touched you. It could make all the difference in the world.
Go out and spread the love. Happy Valentine’s Day.
PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!
I won the lottery!
Well, okay, not the gazillions-of-dollars lottery. I only got twenty-five bucks cash, but I was enriched nonetheless.
Here’s what happened:
A few weeks ago I got a letter in the mail from a professor of Sociology at NYU, saying I had been randomly selected for a sociological study of work and life. Would I be willing to get together for a couple of hours to answer some questions and basically have a fun conversation?
(The $25 cash stipend was irrelevant to my decision, though it was a nice bonus. :))
On Wednesday, I met the professor, whose name is Kathleen, at a cafe across from my yoga studio, and pretty much talked about myself and my life for 2 1/2 hours (without once feeling like I was dominating the conversation, because me talking about myself and my life was pretty much the whole point of our meeting).
The best part, though, was that it gave me an opportunity to look back across the years and really see how far I’ve come.
Most of the time I’m so focused on the here and now, and on the imagined future I’m working hard to create for myself, that I lose track of the distance traveled. I forget that where I am now is pretty freaking awesome.
I get bogged down by things like my mountain-of-debt, which is still a few years away from being paid off.
And the fact that my business isn’t yet where I want it to be (and that my Pledge to End Workaholism is going to keep that trajectory a lot longer and slower than I’d like [while admittedly keeping me a lot happier and healthier in the long run]).
And the fact that the CD I’ve been wanting to complete (and for which I’ve already got 7 mixed and mastered tracks!) is still on the shelf.
And the fact that there is scads more clutterbusting to do around here.
And the fact that I still haven’t managed to get myself out to a tango milonga (Argentine tango party) since coming home from the World Domination Summit, despite the best of intentions.
And the fact that there is just so. much. to. do. and I always feel behind.
And on and on and on.
But when I sat down with Kathleen on Wednesday, it was like watching 2 hours of flashbacks of my life:
The year I spent in New York City, horribly depressed because I was there to dance, but I had a raging case of tendinitis in my ankles and it was painful to walk, let alone dance, and my bulimic behavior spiraled out of control, and I gained more weight than I’ll ever even know because I refused to weigh myself, and I was miserable and desperate and lonely, not to mention COLD all the time.
The five years after coming home from New York, on the quest for the Miracle Cure for my dance injury, during which I met my now-ex-husband, who was so good for me (and such a critical piece of my healing myself from the bulimia), but really only for about 6 months because he also (I can see now) did everything he could to make me utterly dependent on him, because he needed so desperately to feel needed, and I let myself become dependent, and how that ultimately led, eleven years later, to me leaving our marriage at least 2 years later than I would have, had I either had the means to support myself, or the confidence to know, for sure, that I could.
The summer after our wedding, when I was “trying to be a writer,” spending most of my time reading about writing and lamenting that I wasn’t a brilliant writer instead of actually (ahem) writing, and how (I can see now) I completely gave up because of a very fixed mindset and a lack of understanding that writing (doh!) is a skill like any other, which can be learned through the doing of it.
The years of feeling utterly lost, a blank page, without a fully-fleshed-out identity of my own, until I discovered that (lo and behold!) maybe I could make beautiful things with my hands and paper and ink and paint (not to mention teach), but I still couldn’t refer to myself as “an artist” for at least two years, followed by more years of hard, hard, HARD work, allthefreakingtime, to build up my ketubah business after the divorce.
The years of lamenting daily (several times a day) that “I don’t have time to make art,” because I was struggling so hard to make a living from my art, and channeling my stunted and starved creative energies into music (which was, I freely admit, a very rich silver lining) because sitting down at my drafting table felt like a “busman’s holiday” and I had lost the joy that used to be there, but really I was just playing the victim and not making the time to make art because I was stuck in a fixed mindset and terrified of only ever being able to create anything mediocre, or even crap, and therefore proving everyone wrong about my “great potential,” so instead I spent years NOT doing the thing that gave me so much joy.
I could go on.
And on Wednesday, I did. Two and a half hours worth. Holding the painful past up to the light, and marveling at how amazingly different now is from then.
Not that now is perfect, but it is pretty much awesome.
Because I finally understand that my joy comes in the pursuit, not the achievement, of my goals.
Because I finally feel a sense of enoughness in who I am that eluded me my entire life.
Because I’m actually living a truly creative life, not just giving lip service to the idea.
The upshot: when Kathleen asked me where I’d like to be in 5 years, I said simply that I’d like my business to be more fully fleshed out, continuing to evolve (no doubt in ways I can’t foresee right now), and I’d like to be making more money.*
And when Kathleen asked me how likely I thought it was that I’d get to that 5-year goal, she said, “I get the feeling that you’re pretty confident you will.”
And I said:
“Yeah, I am, because my dreams are not of the ‘I’ll be “discovered” and suddenly become America’s next Top Model’ variety; my dreams are for things that I want to create myself, and that I have the power to create.”
Wow. That is quite a change from the me of twenty years ago, who didn’t even know who she was or what she wanted to create, let alone feel a sense of agency around it.
And when Kathleen asked “Many more years ahead, when you’re looking back at the end of your life, what will it take for you to say you led a successful life?” I said:
Kathleen nodded, smiled, and said “It sounds to me like you’ve already done that.”
I smiled back. “Yes, you’re right,” I said, nodding, “I have. I’d like to do a lot more, but yes.”
And that was when I allowed myself to revel in the awesomeness of standing on a very high summit, seeing across the valleys and swamps and tar pits and many miles I’d journeyed to get here.
That was when I allowed myself to acknowledge how very far I’ve come, and to feel a sense of gratitude for all those miles and tar pits and swamps and valleys, because I needed to slog through them in order to get where I am.
It gave meaning to all the frickin’ awful stuff in my life, because it’s how I’ve gotten through the awful stuff that has forged my character and lit the fire of passion in me to make a difference in the world.
So.
In the 6-month program I recently completed with Tara Mohr, Playing Big, one of our early sessions was on the importance of owning your own story. Because story is how we relate to the world, it’s what draws us in, it’s how we learn.
We tend to think that in order to play big we need to hide our stories, but in fact it’s quite the opposite: it is through owning and sharing your story that you will connect and make impact.
So.
All of this is running around in my brain. None of it is really new — after all, I started Living A Creative Life specifically to chart my journey, to share the story of my life as it evolved — but my way of looking at it all is… expanding… It feels very important to the big work I want to do in the world — somehow combining all of my creative expressions in order to share my story, to touch people, to have impact, to make a difference.
Something is brewing.
Though I guess it’s really just the next step of the brewing that’s been going on for over four decades already.
I now turn my gaze away from the path behind me and toward the summits up ahead. But I will not forget to turn around every so often and look back.
Our lives, while we’re living them, are just our day-to-day lives. It’s only when we look back at them that we can ascribe meaning to them, and they become stories. And it’s only when we look back that we can appreciate how very, very far we’ve come.
That’s what I call winning the life lottery.
What do you see when you look back at the path behind you? How does that illuminate the present moment for you?
PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!
* Yes, I have lots of other goals, lots of things I want to create, but when I think about it, they’re kinda interwoven with my business, because every creative expression I pursue is part of my living my creative life, and modeling that YES, it can be done! Which is, after all, what my business is all about.
Have you been making your way through the Day of Genius workbook? If you haven’t already downloaded parts 1, 2 and 3, go do that now.
Then come on back, because I have another one for you!
It has tickled me no end that the worksheets have been downloaded hundreds of times over the past few days (special thanks to Susannah Conway for including a link to the Life Balance Compass in this post.)
(And yet nary a comment on the posts with the most-downloaded worksheets — funny, no?)
Still, if the download numbers count for anything, apparently a lot of you are finding them useful — hooray!
I’m co-producing a day-long virtual retreat, the Day of Genius on January 8, for which I’ll be presenting a seminar called Your Map to Happiness in 2012.
Being a Creative, who likes to make colorful messes and get her hands dirty, I’ve designed the seminar as a little bubble of creative time: we’ll get out the crayons, scissors and glue stick, and make a vision map — a colorful, intuitive kindergarten map of your dreams and visions and plans for 2012, to inspire you throughout the year.
But making a truly effective vision map requires a fair amount of advance work.
Who are you? What do you really want? What is the next step to getting there? What’s in your way?
Sometimes the real answers are not what we might see on the surface…
Hence the workbook, which I created for Day of Genius ticket-holders and decided to also share with you, my blog readers, as what my mom would call a “just ’cause I love you present.” 🙂
Creating these worksheets — and working through them myself — has been part of my 2011 Annual Review (thanks to Chris Guillebeau for a large dose of Annual Review inspiration!)
As you play with the worksheets, stay open to insights, revelations and epiphanies.
Earlier this week, for example, I had the realization that, hey, I loveloveLOVE to teach — particularly in-person classes — and yet I haven’t taught an in-person class in a year!
The Mind Map to Happiness worksheet, along with today’s worksheet — Your Love & Time Inventory — helped remind me of my passion for teaching groups face-to-face, and ask myself what’s stopping me from doing it?
The answer: Mostly physical space. I can teach calligraphy around my dining room table (and have done many times), but what I most want to be teaching right now requires a lot more space. Space to move around, space to paint broad strokes and make big, colorful messes.
The worksheet helped me pinpoint tiny first steps I can take toward bringing teaching back into my life the way I most want it: I’ve started letting my friends, family and acquaintances know that I’m in search of the ideal workshop space, and and I’ve started identifying organizations to contact to see if they either rent space themselves, or know of someplace that does.
I’ve even opened up to the possibility of renting permanent space, something that seemed so impossible as to be ridiculous just last week. But which now feels almost obviously inevitable.
Perhaps not in 2012… but who knows?
These are the ways that big dreams and goals come to fruition: one tiny step at a time.
(Meanwhile, I’ve already got an in-person retreat on the calendar for next fall, one where we’ll get to move around and make big, colorful messes, but someone else is arranging that space, and it’s faaaaaaaar away, way too far for even the most die-hard commuter… But more on that another time…)
Download Your Love & Time Inventory, print it out and spend 10 or 15 minutes with it. Then hop on over to the LACL Facebook page and share what you figured out!
Have fun!
REMINDER: You could win a ticket to the Day of Genius! Head over to Facebook and share your insights to any of the blog posts here that reference the Day of Genius, along with your reasons for wanting to attend, AND share and/or tweet the post, and you’ll be entered to win a full-day pass.
After the New Year, I and my panel of partial judges will pick one winner from among the commenters to join us for free. (Yes, commenting on/sharing of multiple posts will weigh heavily in your favor — we’re looking to add participants who really want to be there, so quality AND quantity will be taken into consideration.)
PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!
I’ve got my troubles, which I won’t bore you by listing out here, but the fact is they’re mostly troubles of privilege. “First-world problems.”
The fact is, I grew up in a middle-class family, in a privileged neighborhood, in a rich country.
The fact is, I was born to parents who valued education (and love) above all else, and though sexism was (and is) still rife (no matter what the media might have led you to believe), my mom and dad did their best to offer me a future filled with opportunity.
The fact is, I grew up with music in the schools, and after-school art classes, and moms who volunteered to bring creative writing into the classroom (god bless them!)
The fact is, I faced challenges and oppressions, to be sure (you did too, no matter who you are, or what the media might have led you to believe), but in the scheme of things, I had it damn good.
I still do.
I have the luxury of thinking about problems like what do I really, really want out of life? And how do I get past the resistance to follow my Blisses and do my creative things? And how can I best help other creatives follow their own Blisses?
And I’m incredibly grateful.
I’ve had opportunities that Addis, forced into marriage at age 11 never had:
I’ve had the chance to follow my dreams, unlike Kidan:
It turns out that girls are the key to getting entire communities out of poverty. Here’s how (have some tissues handy – I cry every time I watch this!):
Want a concrete, real-life, flesh-and-blood example of what happens when girls are educated? Here’s what Shumi created, thanks to the Girl Effect:
This is how the Girl Effect played out for Sanchita and her family:
Share this blog post. Share the blog posts here. Join the conversation. Write your own blog post about the Girl Effect and post it here.
Spread the word. Wear it on your sleeve (or on your computer, or in your office). Donate if you can.
The Girl Effect is a viral movement. Many tiny movements, in fact. It depends on you. And me. And all of us.
From the Girl Effect website:
Through the movement, many organizations have received the funding needed to make a huge impact in the lives of girls in developing countries. For example, the Berhane Hewan program in rural Ethiopia opened community dialogue and used incentives like school supplies to help over 11,000 girls delay marriage and stay in school. The Binti Pamoja program in Kenya is another example, offering a safe space for girls to connect with other girls and learn about reproductive health, finances and other basic life skills – through funding, the program has grown from 40 girls to over 1,000.
Let’s keep it going.
Tell me, what will you do to help the Girl Effect?
PS – If you liked this post, please tweet, share, like and/or send it to a friend you think might like it too.
What ripples are you creating?
Did you ever see the movie Pay it Forward? Or read Catherine Ryan Hyde’s novel?
Every day, you pay it forward, without even realizing it. Not necessarily with money or physical things, but that doesn’t mean you’re not making an impact.
So what kind of impact do you want to make?
Favorite negative emotions, you ask? What the- ?
Yep, it’s true. Call them Emotions I Hate to Love, if you like. There are a few of them that I’ve learned are very, very useful, once you get past the icky-feeling part.
Envy’s one of my all-time faves! (Okay, okay, just a slight note of sarcasm there. As a 4 on the Enneagram, envy’s a core issue for me. Funsville!)
But seriously, watch the video to find out what’s to like about Envy. Then let me know in the comments what you’ve learned yourself from that green-eyed beast.