Go Confidently into This Good Year. My grandchildren gave me a very important gift one Christmas. That gift was a mug with these words printed on it. “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you’ve imagined.” I’d pointed that mug out one day at a Barnes & Noble where the kids and I were indulging in a much beloved pastime – book buying.
The Dread Begins. I coveted that mug from the moment I saw it, but now I actually had one. Sitting in my writing corner, that day and every day, holding my coffee and my trepidation. Sometimes, after a sip of the former, I would put the mug back down with the words facing deliberately away from me, in order to avoid confrontation with the latter.
A Helluva Assignment. Truth was, I didn’t feel equipped to Go Confidently anywhere. My first great critic, next to myself, was my mother, and I could hear her speaking from beyond this material plane, plain as day. “You always take on more than you can chew.” She’d said a mouthful of unchewables, and I had no smartass response. Would you? Well, we’d best get one.
We Need a Plan. That’s a pic of me standing at a podium, like I did for 30+ years, hardly ever appearing to lack confidence. Want to know why? Look at what I’m doing. Checking my notes. When I need to look, and maybe even be, confident, I make a plan. I write that plan down. Then, with a few smartass digressions thrown in, I follow it. We need to do the same now. In writing. With lots of specifics. Make a plan for how to Go Confidently into This Good Year.
What is “the direction of your dreams”? What do you want to accomplish right now? By which I mean, over the next 3 months. Grab a paper product or device you can write on. Don’t ponder much. We’re brainstorming, not brain-straining. Remember what I said about specifics. List anything that comes to mind, as long as it’s a concrete action. And write really fast,
Map Those Directions for the next few miles. New page(s). Still in rapid-response mode. To each item on the above list, add 3 specific actions you might take to make that accomplishment happen. Don’t edit or judge or compare the validity or practicality or whatever of your original list items just yet. Simply whale away into that brainstorm. No self-harpooning allowed.
Refine Your Route. During that last exercise, my guess is you found yourself responding more enthusiastically to some of your original dream accomplishments and less so to others. Go back over your combined list now – dream achievements plus specifics to get there. Asterisk the dream categories that excite you most. Once again, don’t ponder. Follow your gut.
Prioritize Your Trail Markers. Draw a big circle around each of your asterisked achievement categories and the how-to’s that go with each. Still fast-tracking. Rate those circles in order of importance to your career as you see it right now. Or in order of which ones turn you on most. Number them. And there you have it. A Plan for Your Next 3 months. After that time has passed, simply grab a tablet and your stormy brain and repeat the above exercise for the next 3 months, then the next, and so on.
Now – Here’s the Kick-Start Kicker. If you did what I asked. If you moved ahead fast as gangbusters. If you short-circuited any and all temptations to edit/judge/second-guess the storm gusts your brain was gifting to you. Then my guess is you experienced little or no self-doubt during this entire slam-bam process. You were Confident about what you were doing.
What Comes Next. Whether you realize it or not, you have made a bold move toward “Living the life you’ve imagined.” But don’t dwell on that too much just yet. Celebrate instead. Because you did it. You made it. You are now ready to Go Confidently into This Good Year.
P.S. These two pics are years-back shots of our grandkids. Maya after winning a Tai Kwan Do Championship she didn’t think she should even enter. Julian, well, ready to take on the Hulk. They must have Go Confidently mugs of their own. In fact, Grandma is confident that they do. Alice Orr – www.aliceorrbooks.com
A Wrong Way Home – Alice’s Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Book 1 – is a FREE Kindle eBook HERE. Enjoy!
Alice’s latest novel is A Time of Fear & Loving – Riverton Road Romantic Suspense Book 5. Available HERE.
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A Christmas Carol Sings to Me Because, as a storyteller, I long to decode its secret. I need to know why it has remained the narrative star it is for so very long with such a vast audience. What exactly did Charles Dickens create that keeps us coming back year after year to be absorbed yet again by this tale?
A Christmas Carol Sings to Me Because it is essentially a ghost story, filled with things that go bump in the night, most literally, in Scrooge’s case. In the old Alistair Sim film version, which I favor, the gloomy black and white medium, the booming apocalyptic sound effects, Ebenezer’s perpetual scowl. All of it draws me back again year after “rolling year.”
A Christmas Carol Sings to Me Because, as a human being on the path of my life in this world, there is a wound in my heart. It is a deep hole, bored by the continual dropping of hot coals of malice or neglect onto that spot when I was very young. This hollow place begs, every day in every way, to be filled, and the only way to fill it is with love. But this love must be received and absorbed, and the problem is that the heart surrounding the wound has been singed by those hot coals into believing itself unlovable.
A Christmas Carol Sings to Me Because Ebenezer offers us an answer. He points us toward a road to take to a place where healing can happen, and that place is within ourselves, within each of our hearts. Action is required, of course, as is always the case where redemption stories are concerned, and Scrooge’s story is about redemption for sure. That action is love, in its active verb form. Please, indulge me if I now relate that call to action to myself.
Gratitude Attitude Writer’s Style. “At this time of the rolling year,” as our great storytelling mentor Charles Dickens wrote in A Christmas Carol, gratitude feels obligatory, or maybe just appropriate, if you are more comfortable with that.
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