Hi everyone.
What are you committed to in 2018?
To be honest, this time last year, I thought I was going to be committed to psychiatric hospital, given how "off my head" I was feeling with the whole menopause malarkey. However, thanks to the wonders of HRT, things are a lot better this time round.
My commitment for 2018 is to be a designer. I realise this might be a strange thing to say in a writing blog post as I should probably be saying that my commitment for 2018 is to be a better, richer, more productive or more frequently published writer.
Actually, in a funny sort of way, I think I am saying all those things but not in the way you would expect.
To cut a long story short, as my late father was fond of saying, I feel that I have been "faffing around" (to put it politely) with my designing career since I made the decision in September 2015 to change direction career-wise once again and become a designer.
I thought it was lack of time, lack of confidence, health problems, the menopause, my age or my financial situation that was holding me back and preventing me from really moving forward with my new career. It turns out that it wasn't any of those things. It was simply a lack of commitment.
Is a lack of commitment holding you back?
I honestly thought I was committed. I'd made the decision, told everyone I'd made it, developed some of the skills I needed, set up the website, blog and Social Media pages, made contacts in the industry, added lots of products to my Etsy shop and filled a very fat book with all the things I could do to help me achieve my designing goals.
But I was wrong. I wasn't actually committed. I was still committed to being a writer and a crafter. Designing was something I was fitting in around those other two things, not to mention everything else in my life.
Many years ago when I first became a writer, I had a very clear picture in my mind of a glass jar. The jar was filled with lots of large round stones and all the spaces between the stones were filled up with sand.
What are the stones in your jar?
To me, the stones represented writing which was at that time the most important thing in my life and the thing that took up most of my passion, time and energy. The sand was everything else, ie stuff that had to be in the jar but was far less important to me than writing. Because of that "commitment" to writing, I was able to forge a pretty successful career as a freelance journalist, given that I'd never had a day's journalism training in my life or been employed in a staff job first.
It was coming across an incredibly helpful blog post at the beginning of 2018 about the huge importance of commitment in career change that made me wake up and smell the ink on my designs. The line that really jumped out and hit me was "If you're not taking action toward your career change commitment, then you're still committed to something else."
I suddenly realised that the stones in the jar could no longer represent writing, they had to represent designing, otherwise another year was going to have passed and I would be no nearer to becoming the new Zandra Rhodes than I was in 2015. Yes, there could still be sand in the jar in the form of some writing and some crafting, but I knew I had to "get on the bus and stay there" as the blog post advised.
What are you committed to in 2018?
To be honest, this time last year, I thought I was going to be committed to psychiatric hospital, given how "off my head" I was feeling with the whole menopause malarkey. However, thanks to the wonders of HRT, things are a lot better this time round.
My commitment for 2018 is to be a designer. I realise this might be a strange thing to say in a writing blog post as I should probably be saying that my commitment for 2018 is to be a better, richer, more productive or more frequently published writer.
Actually, in a funny sort of way, I think I am saying all those things but not in the way you would expect.
To cut a long story short, as my late father was fond of saying, I feel that I have been "faffing around" (to put it politely) with my designing career since I made the decision in September 2015 to change direction career-wise once again and become a designer.
I thought it was lack of time, lack of confidence, health problems, the menopause, my age or my financial situation that was holding me back and preventing me from really moving forward with my new career. It turns out that it wasn't any of those things. It was simply a lack of commitment.
Is a lack of commitment holding you back?
I honestly thought I was committed. I'd made the decision, told everyone I'd made it, developed some of the skills I needed, set up the website, blog and Social Media pages, made contacts in the industry, added lots of products to my Etsy shop and filled a very fat book with all the things I could do to help me achieve my designing goals.
But I was wrong. I wasn't actually committed. I was still committed to being a writer and a crafter. Designing was something I was fitting in around those other two things, not to mention everything else in my life.
Many years ago when I first became a writer, I had a very clear picture in my mind of a glass jar. The jar was filled with lots of large round stones and all the spaces between the stones were filled up with sand.
What are the stones in your jar?
To me, the stones represented writing which was at that time the most important thing in my life and the thing that took up most of my passion, time and energy. The sand was everything else, ie stuff that had to be in the jar but was far less important to me than writing. Because of that "commitment" to writing, I was able to forge a pretty successful career as a freelance journalist, given that I'd never had a day's journalism training in my life or been employed in a staff job first.
It was coming across an incredibly helpful blog post at the beginning of 2018 about the huge importance of commitment in career change that made me wake up and smell the ink on my designs. The line that really jumped out and hit me was "If you're not taking action toward your career change commitment, then you're still committed to something else."
I suddenly realised that the stones in the jar could no longer represent writing, they had to represent designing, otherwise another year was going to have passed and I would be no nearer to becoming the new Zandra Rhodes than I was in 2015. Yes, there could still be sand in the jar in the form of some writing and some crafting, but I knew I had to "get on the bus and stay there" as the blog post advised.
So I made my decision to really "commit" to my designing career on January 2nd 2018 and although at the moment, I've no idea how I'll get any writing or crafting done as well, what feels really important to me and has brought a surprising sense of relief and well-being, is to have made that decision.
Interestingly enough, the blog post included a quote which I had blu-tacked to my office wall many years ago and had forgotten all about until I saw it again in the post. It is attributed to the German writer Goethe:
"The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favour all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.”
So I'll ask the question again. What are you committed to in 2018? What are the stones in your jar?
Interestingly enough, the blog post included a quote which I had blu-tacked to my office wall many years ago and had forgotten all about until I saw it again in the post. It is attributed to the German writer Goethe:
"The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favour all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.”
So I'll ask the question again. What are you committed to in 2018? What are the stones in your jar?
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