Jen & Company

I am having the most fabulous time these past few days.  I am finishing day 2 of a 3 day workshop with the lovely and talented Creative Career Coach, Michelle Ward.  She is such a sparkly, inspiring ball of energy with an inextinguishable enthusiasm for helping creative women find their dream career.

There are eight of us in the class and I have to say each woman is an absolutely adorable and uniquely fascinating person.  We came to the class with different interests and personalities but a united desire to gain clarity around that age old question, “What Do You Want to Be When you Grow Up?”  I, of course, wanted to run a pizza fire truck catering business, but alack and alas, Michelle said someone was already doing that…sigh.  So I went back to drawing board, comedy gum ball machine? Taken, Online Dating Profile Writer? Taken.

Okay, let’s be honest, I have already declared my passion, my life’s work, my magnum opus…it is to be right here writing my little heart out and reminding you that we are in this thing together.  That we are already awesome, magical warrior princesses with the ability to create happy lives that we are tickled pink to get to live.

In class, we had to do this very scary and uncomfortable exercise today where we had to confess the deep, dark, mean and really quite rude things our inner critics (or vampire voices, as Michelle says) say to us.  You know the voice, the one that tells you that you aren’t good enough, you can’t make a good living and that you suck at doing the things you love to do.  To that voice, we learned to say, “Screw you! You ugly little beast!  I have had quite enough of your lip.”

Michelle asked us to draw our vampire and disarm her by making her weird, silly and so clearly harmless that to listen to the criticism would be ludacris.  As Jennifer O’Connell told David Bowie in Labyrinth…”You have no power over me.” And just like that, the maze shatters and David fades away into the abyss.

I love being reminded of what a lame-o bully that vampire voice is, so desperate to keep us in a super uncomfortable, but familiar place…the comfort zone.  You know?  That place were everything stays the same…Where you may not be perfectly happy, but you know what to expect.

As Joseph Campbell says, “The big question is whether you going to be able to say a hearty yes to your adventure.”  To this I say, “Hell yeah!”  In the immortal words of my creative live classmate, Stacey Monique, “Why NOT me?”

 

 

 

xoxo,

Jen

 

Dream Career, featured, Michelle Ward

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