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Changing My Life’s Trajectory In 6 Easy Steps

posted 26th March 2012    Written by: Arielle    CATEGORY: Arielle, Job/Career/Work, Love/Relationships, Season 6

While I’ve never thought of myself as a lazy person, when I think critically about my life and why certain aspects of it leave something to be desired, I find a common theme.

I love the path of least resistance.

Who doesn’t? It protects you from getting hurt and lets you watch countless episodes of 30 Rock instead of doing…anything.

It’s also boring and unfulfilling, and I refuse to continue on this way. So here I am in the Frost-ian yellow wood, and I’m choosing my own personal road less traveled.

In order to keep myself focused and away from the road that will drain me of all ambition, here are some goals that I’d like to stick to for the coming months.

Get a job that I don’t hate.

While I sincerely hope to find a job I absolutely love, I would be willing to settle for something that doesn’t make me miserable.

No job is perfect, and I realize there’s a give and take between the different aspects of any position. I’d accept a lower salary to work at a really awesome company. I’ll commute further for an amazing boss. But I refuse to settle across the board.

Develop healthier habits

I’m purposely keeping this vague because I want it to be both realistic and permanent. When I tell myself that eating a cupcake means I may as well just starve myself until the following day because THERE GO ALL MY ALLOTTED CALORIES, I’m wasting my time.

The fact of the matter is, I’m a big drinker with a major sweet tooth and a passion for finding the best burger in New York. I’m not saying any of those are particularly great habits to have, but I also know that it’s unrealistic to try and suppress them completely.

Instead, I just want to come out of this feeling like I’m making more responsible decisions. You know, like choosing to eat yogurt instead of cookies for breakfast. Baby steps.

Attend one adult gymnastics class

I was a competitive gymnast until the age of 14, and I’m dying to feel that springy floor beneath my bare feet again.

Initially, I put “gymnastics class” down as the ultimate weight loss reward to work towards. After losing 10 pounds, I would get a massage. 20 pounds, I’d buy a new watch. When I had lost enough weight to be perfectly happy with how I looked, I would finally allow myself to go to gymnastics.

I fooled myself with this line of thinking for a long time.

Eventually I realized that I wasn’t putting off gymnastics because I wanted to earn it. What kind of bogus, ascetic life am I leading here? Here’s a thing that would make me happy, and I mean soul-satisfying happy, not just new-episode-of-America’s-Next-Top-Model happy. All I need to do to is show up and pay $28. And I won’t do this…why?

Because I’m scared of what people will think, that’s why. Putting this class as the light at the end of the weight loss tunnel was a convenient way of ensuring that I would never have to go until I was thin, and then, woohoo, no one could judge me.

That’s some bullshit. Gymnastics makes me happy.

I’m going.

Learn the Single Ladies dance

This is so not even remotely a joke.

In the spring of my sophomore year of college, I discovered TDC (Tufts Dance Collective), an on-campus dance group that accepted anyone who wanted to join, no auditions necessary. I was a devoted member through graduation, and it was through TDC that I found my real enthusiasm, if not always talent, for dance.

So now I’m going to bust out my black leotard and weird robotic hand, grab 2 friends for backup dancers, and have a total Beyonce moment.

Volunteer twice a month

I attended orientation awhile ago for New York Cares, a group that can put you in touch with about a billion different volunteer opportunities in any given week. Yet I have volunteered all of zero times. Boo.

Be more proactive about men/dating/trying to not be single for the rest of my life

If you were under the impression that, as a single New York woman, my life is a whirlwind of dinner dates with handsome investment bankers and groggy Sunday mornings trying to remember the name of the guy next to me in bed, I’m sorry to disappoint. I’ll let you in a little secret:

I have no game.

None. At all. I cannot flirt my way into or out of any situation. It’s pathetic.

That being said, I could still try a little harder.

I recently went on a St. Patty’s-themed pub crawl. I ended up talking to a guy, similarly decked out in green, who was cute, smart and nice. He mentioned that his friends wanted to hit up a different bar. I mentioned that I wanted to hit up the 45-minute bathroom line. Since he would be long gone by the time I returned, I said:

“Why don’t you take my number? Maybe we can meet up later.”

If you aren’t in total shock at how I could possibly say something like this, clearly you don’t suffer from the same fear of men that I do.

Telling a guy to take my number was an exception, but I want things like this to become more of the rule.

So there you have it. A few goals, ranging from the necessary to the ridiculous. I hope that in 5 months I will have made at least marginal progress on all of these.

The path of least resistance can eat my dust.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo credit: theilr

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I followed My Plan. And Then It Blew Up.

posted 25th March 2012    Written by: Sarah    CATEGORY: All Posts, Family, Job/Career/Work, Love/Relationships, Quarterlife Crisis, Sarah, Season 6

sarah bagley

I started my career in county government as a camp counselor.  Charged with a dozen five-year-olds, I spent my summer leading sing-a-longs, helping chubby fingers hold paint brushes, and making sure no one drowned at the local pool.

I loved everything about that job.  The kids ate me up, vying to sit in my lap, wanting to know if I could move in with them and their families.  After that summer I knew I had to get serious about a profession, so I lapped in all that goodness and tried to hold onto the fun and responsibility of my summer camp career.

Soon enough I found myself on the verge of graduating and an uncertain future.  So I did what any good undergrad from U.Va. did.   I entered a Masters program.  I powered my way through my Masters in Public Policy while balancing my second job with the county: working at a teen and community center.

I adored working with the teens.  Sure, they were surly and kind of rude.  And forever making trouble.  (Here’s a tip: when you see a group of teenage boys walk into a bathroom with pool balls from a billiard table, call a plumber right away.)  But they were also full of energy and spunk and challenged me to constantly think of new ways to entertain them.

As I wrapped up my Masters degree, I knew it was time to move on.  Obviously I couldn’t stay.  I got my Masters in Public Policy to, well, write and analyze policy.  Not run a teen center and help 8th graders with math homework.  So I applied for a job at the county’s budget office.

And I got that job.  I looked just like every one of those analysts in the office.  A BA in government and a MA in public policy/administration.  I could write, analyze, and use Excel.  It would seem I fit right in.

Right away I felt underwater.  Everything was complicated.  I tried and tried and tried but nothing clicked.  And the more it felt like I didn’t get what was going on, the worse I felt about myself.  I clunked around the budgeting computer system, trying to find the missing hundreds of thousands of dollars I mis-entered.  The agency budgets read like Chinese.

I felt defeated.  Wasn’t I supposed to be good at this?  This office was the next logical step.  It was in the plan.  Why am I so bad at this?

Tears stung behind my eyes most days.  I wanted to do a good job.  And I so wasn’t.  I tried my best, always giving everything I had.  But each day felt like I was jamming myself in a hole that didn’t fit.

About a year into my job, I found out I was pregnant.  I assumed I’d go back to work after my daughter was born.  I never thought I’d be stay-at-home-mom.  But as her due date approached and still no child care on the horizon, my husband and I decided to tighten our budget and for me to stay home.

Since I knew I wasn’t the world’s best budget analyst, I didn’t feel sad about leaving my job.  I assumed it was for the best.  But a couple months into my stay-at-home gig, I realized I wasn’t all that good at this staying at home thing either.

Then everything started to blow up.  I felt alone, isolated, like I was the only one in the world feeling all misshapen and out of place.  Clearly, I wasn’t built to be a budget analyst.  But I wasn’t doing so great at mothering all day either.  This signaled to me that I’d never be good at anything.

Around this time, I happened to find the Stratejoy blog.  I’m not exactly sure how I got here.  I think amongst the Twitter and Facebook and blogging rabbit hole, I found the Stratejoy community and thought to myself these people are my people.  I think they get me.

It seemed I wasn’t the only one struggling.  Whether it was motherhood or marriage or being a single girl or divorced or whatever, there was a lot of struggling going on.  But also a lot of earnest.  A sense of grasping for joy, a happier life.

That resonated with me.  Yes, I am struggling.  True, I am feeling identity-less.  No, I’m not sure where I’m going.  But, absolutely yes, do I want to live my best life.  My blog is called Sunny Side Up.  Because no matter how down and out I’ve been (or will be), I am certain there’s a path to a better way.

So here I am at Stratejoy, sharing my story in the hopes that something will resonate with you.  So you won’t feel alone.  And I won’t feel alone.  And together we can come to terms with struggle and instead of letting it eat us up, we can work through it to live a life on our terms.

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Figuring It All Out

posted 16th March 2012    Written by: Camila    CATEGORY: All Posts, Camila, Job/Career/Work, Love/Relationships, Money, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 6

Introducing: Camila

“Love-wise I couldn’t be better. I just have a wedding in August to think about and I thrive on planning events. Career-wise I’m an absolute disaster”

“What are you?”

This is undoubtedly the question I get asked the most frequently.

I know what they really want to know though. They want to know about my ethnic background because between the cowboy boots I’m wearing, the ring in my nose, my coca-cola-foam-colored skin, and the brightly embroidered clothes I’m wearing, they simply can’t place what I am. Sometimes I give the simple answer of “I’m a Mestiza.” Other times I give the longer answer:  “well… I’m Spanish from when the conquistadors came to the Southwest in the 1500s, Mexican, Swiss-German, French, Italian, and Ute.”

Behind both of these answers, however, there is the truth that I am a mutt, a smorgasbord, a convergence of crossroads. Growing up between the free-thinking art town of Santa Fe, New Mexico and my family’s gorgeous ranch in conservative small-town Colorado was simply a part of life for me.

Being a nomad was the norm. I was accustomed to dropping everything at my dad’s declaration of “time to go to the ranch”, packing up and heading northward for feeding cattle, irrigating pastures, baling hay, and going on cattle drives (yes, I do mean like cattle drives in the Westerns) with my wonderful younger siblings and lovely parents. I was used to working my curvaceous Latina butt off to excel in all my classes at Catholic high school in Santa Fe. I was used to striving for excellence at everything I did.

My main philosophy throughout my youth was You should always bite off more than you can chew because you can always spit some of it back out. At least this philosophy got me into a prestigious university in upstate New York that I loved for four glorious years before I graduated… thought I knew what I was doing… and then it all kind of came undone.

When my friend Hala told me that after graduating from college I would experience an existential crisis, I thought she was kidding. I should have know better that life crises are often true. I mean… when my parents reached mid-life crisis time they got divorced, my dad became a woman and my mother moved in with her boyfriend and began expressing ideologies I scarcely knew she possessed.

For the first year after graduating college I happily declared to Hala that no, I had not yet experienced my quarter life crisis. Instead I was ecstatically working for poverty wage as an AmeriCorps member with an organization I strongly believed in. My day-to-day focus was on inspiring young people to create social change. How could I possibly go wrong?

Slowly though, the stress of working for $800 a month while paying off hundreds of dollars in student loans and hundreds more in living expenses became overwhelming. I was living in a living room with my only furniture being a bookcase… I didn’t even have a bed. The youth I worked with were amazing and constantly inspiring. They were great. The only problem was I only really got to see the results of my office work twice a year. For the remaining 360 days of the year, the feeling that I was not appreciated in my work place began to make me feel a little worthless and to question why I was continuing to do the work I was doing. Then, this Fall, I found out through the grapevine that my job ceased to exist.

That was the bad news for Autumn 2011. The good news was that my incredible, creative, compassionate boyfriend who bought me a piñata (yes a piñata!) for our first Valentine’s Day proposed to me in a castle after hiking up a quiet mountain path and having a homemade picnic!

Love-wise I couldn’t be better. I just have a wedding in August to think about and I thrive on planning events. Career-wise I’m an absolute disaster. Currently, I’m working at a socially conscious coffee shop making latte leaves and emptying coffee grounds. It’s a job that I enjoy well enough; it encourages me to be in the moment. This isn’t what I want to do forever though.

I want to be a doula/midwife and bring life into the world. I want to return to school and study the impact of folk art on women artisans and the way artists use recycled materials in their creations. I want to be an outstanding wife and eventually a fabulous mother. I want to journey the world with my husband-to-be and have conversations with random people. I want to be a poet and a novelist. I want to breathe in contentment knowing that the footsteps I leave behind on this earth are meaningful. I know I can do it, I just need to figure out how in the world it’s going to happen.

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Getting Back in the Driver’s Seat of My Life

posted 13th March 2012    Written by: Caitlin    CATEGORY: Caiti, Job/Career/Work, Quarterlife Crisis, Season 6

Introducing: Caiti

“I was living a life that wasn’t mine. It was society’s. The expectations and opinions of certain influential people around me. Fear-avoidance. I had become a passenger in my life, simply along for the ride instead of owning it.”

I don’t know why most of my emotional breakdowns occur while driving my car. Perhaps it’s the fact that I’m in charge of 3000 pounds of metal and mechanics that have the power to potentially kill me if mishandled, yet I barely feel like I’m in the driver’s seat for my own life.

My subconscious can’t seem to handle the irony.

Until recently, I have been a “by the books” kind of girl. Midwestern born and bred. Top of my high school class. A scholarship to my first choice college (University of Missouri), where I majored in something that seemed practical and responsible (journalism/strategic communications). I fell in love, attended grad school, got engaged the very day I finished my Master’s degree, and promptly moved in with my mister. How about a job related to my major? Planning a wedding and getting married? Buying a condo? Moving on to jobs #2-3, complete with a nice salary bump? Check, check, check and CHECK. On the road of life, I was cruising along and passing all the major milestones right on cue.

Here I was, with everything I want–scratch that–with everything I thought I should want, yet I only felt numb. An incredible amount of time was spent glassy-eyed, zoned out of the world around me. It was all I could do to get through the days without crumbling into a pile of flesh and tears. Work was a blur of time bookended by forced morning conversation at the coffee maker and counting down to 5:00. The major I chose in college for its practicality led me to an industry that was slowly suffocating me with its sea of gray cubicles, florescent lights, and people who seemed all too comfortable with the status quo. Even the parts of my life I claimed to love– my relationship with my husband and my friendships– were just shrug-my-shoulders fine.

During the long drive home from work on a day much like every other, I had to brake quickly in the stop-and-go traffic, a completely routine annoyance. But for a moment, the fog lifted. I looked out the windshield over my white knuckles gripping the wheel and saw the highway in front of me for what seemed like the first time that day, that week, that month. How did I get here?

No, really, how did I get here?

Had my life really turned into a series of beige blurs between Point A and Point B, stopping only to check the box next to each “accomplishment” on the List of Things to Achieve to Have a Solid & Stable Life? Wait, who the hell wrote that list anyways? It surely wasn’t me. Where were the check boxes for passion, for the people who are so smart and funny and creative it makes my heart hurt, for the projects I could get lost in for days? Where was the adventure and traveling and learning about the world?

I was living a life that wasn’t mine. It was society’s. The expectations and opinions of certain influential people around me. Fear-avoidance. I had become a passenger in my life, simply along for the ride instead of owning it.

My quarterlife crisis in a nutshell: I can’t keep living half alive.

After enough stress to cause an ulcer ten times over, I made the one change that was weighing on me most heavily. I quit my job. With no plan. With no real idea of what I want to do professionally. But somehow, in the process of grabbing the wheel, I’ve been able to start to steer myself down a new road that doesn’t seem so bleak. Within the first month of this year, opportunities that seemed like pipe dreams have lit me up– from the chance to feature my artwork in a magazine to steadily growing my blog.

And in a crazy turn of events, my life will literally be hitting the road as my husband and I relocate to Dublin, Ireland, through October.

It’s time to feel alive again, to feel the fire burning in my belly for my work, relationships, and new experiences. My “by the books” life will become a life worth writing about, and I can’t wait.

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From Barista to Writer: Building a Business out of Thin Air

posted 20th October 2011    Written by: Dusti    CATEGORY: All Posts, Dusti, Job/Career/Work, Season 5

I never had any intentions of being an entrepreneur. Really I didn’t.

I thought I was just starting blog. Harmless, really. Then, it was a month-long course on blogging. No biggie. Then, I made my first affiliate sale. Oooh, that was pretty exciting. Then, I was writing and marketing an ebook.

Okay, so it was a slippery slope.

Who am I kidding? I showed all of the telltale signs of the would-be entrepreneur.

The inability to stay at a job I couldn’t stand and couldn’t change. (Seriously, I’ve had 36 jobs.) I had to stop participating in student council, because I blew a fuse or ten when I realized all they did was fundraise for parties and dances. So much for wanting to get the curriculum updated and get the school more active in the community. That may have also been why I was voted most likely to be a politician… in 8th grade.

I joke about it, but honestly, stepping into this new role has changed my life in ways I struggle to describe.

Let’s jump back to the summer of 2010. I was working at a Starbucks, slinging coffee out a window to people more or less unhappy with their lives. (The only notable exception to this was Phil Knight and his wife, two of our regulars.) Life was okay. Except that I knew I was handing a false answer to their problems out the window.

When I wasn’t making coffee, I was online. I’d started blogging in my spare time, downsizing my life, and doing more of what I loved. And what did I love? Writing. Sharing. Even when only an hour of my day could be devoted to this secret passion, it lit me up like the 4th of July.

When I first got started, I did it all for the love of writing. All of these thoughts and ideas had been building up with nowhere to go, and when I started blogging, it was like the floodgates opened. My heart soared every time I penned something. Little pieces of me scattered online and throughout the world.

Now it’s October 2011, and I have built myself a job and the makings of a business. In the past year, I’ve written about half a million words. No exaggeration. Between college, writing for pleasure, and writing for business, the flow of words has been more akin to tsunami force than that of the steady river metaphor I had considered using there.

With no qualifications, I wrote ebooks that real people bought. I offered my services as a branding coach and a copywriter – and real people paid me with real money. Danielle LaPorte says the universe speaks in cashflow, and it certainly did to me. The whole thing still blows my mind.

It’s amazing on so many levels, but entrepreneurship is not easy, especially if you’ve got workaholic tendencies. It feels like your work is never done. There’s always this inner conflict going on. How should I be spending my time? How much time with my daughter is enough? How many hours a week should I work? How many would I like to work? How many do I actually have to work to pay my rent?

We take the structure a workplace provides for granted. The thing with being the one calling shots is just that – you’re the one calling the shots. There’s no one else to blame. It’s all on you. Every decision you make about your schedule, your rates, everything. I’m a fan of bootstrapping, but now I dream of the day I can hire my very own virtual assistant. (I could be wrong, but I’m pretty sure the heavens will open up and angels will sing.)

Have you considered starting your own business? I’d love to hear about your ideas, and if you have any questions about how I made the transition, I’m happy to answer them! (Molly and Hannah, I want some input here from you guys, too!)

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