Follow your passion by starting where you are (Ask Megz)

Hello FemCentral community!

It’s Megz, back with another 5 post series. This series will be focused on the process of transforming your ideas from being a brain wave within that wonderful powerful mind of yours to a real authentic dream with a life of its own! But there is a catch.

The Catch

In my previous series, I have more or less posted what I thought would be of interest to you. But I wanted to do things a bit differently this time. I want you to tell me what you want to know more of within the proposed framework (below) and I will work to bring to the table what I can gather around that. For logistical reasons, I am doing the first two posts beforehand. But if you have any questions/ topics around these two posts, I will try to accommodate them in subsequent posts.

The Framework

I want this series to be directed towards tools and techniques to help you start with your own venture/ blog/ book/ whatever it is that you really want to do.

For the sake of structure and flow, I am dividing this into five parts:

1. Start where you are
2. Know Yourself
3. Decide what you want to do
4. Creating the Blueprint
5. Implement the Plan

Through this series, I also want to understand where the real difficulties and issues are and see, if I can provide any support to help you get started.  So, please feel free to interact through the series and in the end, we might have developed a customized powerful “Living your Dream” plan for you.

So, let’s go on with the first step.

Start where you are

Three things I want to take back with you and mull upon are:

• “You can’t hire someone else to do your Push Ups for you” ~ Jim Rohn

Your mom served you food and in the younger ears, probably even shoved it down your mouth but even at that stage, you had to do the chewing for you. Life is not served on a platter. You need to go out and create your own opportunities for you.

End of last year, I was sorely missing having real friends as most of my friends had moved away, relocating to other cities/ countries.  On the suggestion of a friend I even posted a wonderful affirmation on my Vision Board saying “I am thankful for all the new creative friends wearing different hats appearing in my life” with picture I’m featuring in this post.

I am not sure that what happened next , would have still happened , if I had just sat back and waited for my affirmation to come true.  I took action, and created a closed group on Facebook of 10 women with whom I interact regularly. This group has since blossomed and become a kind of Spiritual Sorority for over 35 of us who come together to talk and thrash anything that we want to share within those closed walls.

So, the message here is not just to dream and wish but also to take some concrete steps, whatever we can within the resources and constraints provided.

• Take 100% responsibility for your life.

We are the one creating our life the way it is. Our current life is a reflection of our past actions. While we cannot control all that happens to us, we definitely have the power to control our response to the stimuli to ensure a different final outcome. Our whole perspective on life can change once we start taking responsibility of the outcome we are creating in different spheres of our life – career, relationship, lifestyle, money, health and society

Event + Response = Outcome

If there is a particular area of your life where you are regularly facing negative outcome, maybe it’s time to go into a observation mode and unbiasedly review your response to the event and determine what can you change to get a different outcome.

A quick exercise:

Meditative Journaling (Fundamentals of this is based on Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, Freeing the Writer Within)

For this you will need:

1 – a pen or pencil

2 – paper

3 – a periods of 30 minutes, when you can write uninterrupted

4 – a timer (optional)

I want you to pick a time when you can sit down and write a stream of consciousness answer. Write by hand (not on the computer). Don’t worry about grammar or complete sentences. DON’T CROSS ANYTHING OUT. Don’t stop writing. Keep moving. Try to do this for 30 minutes, but if that’s difficult, do it for a minimum of 15. Don’t stop during this exercise. Don’t answer the phone or go to the bathroom (do it before you start) or eat. Just answer.

1. Think of a successful time in your life that you feel extremely satisfied/ elated about and write what factors contributed to the success? What was your contribution? What was your attitude/ state of being during the process?
2. Now contrastingly, think about a stressful time which you label as failure and write what factors contributed to the success? What was your contribution? What was your attitude/ state of being during the process?

Feel free to share your results below!

“You can’t win the raffle if you don’t buy the ticket.”  —Ally McBeal

Megha Tara Sardana’s (Megz) burning desire is to help women empower themselves, become financially independent and leave a blazing path behind them. Over last couple of years Megz has been helping friends and colleagues better manage their own money and the desire to reach out to others has been growing stronger with time.  Academically, Megz is a Commerce Graduate (from Delhi University – 2000) who went on to Post Grad in Business Administration (2003) for one of the A level institutes in India – Symbiosis Centre for Management and Human Resource Development, Pune. She specialized in Finance and Marketing at both levels. Professionally, over 8 years, she has evolved from being a Process Analyst to Workflow Designer to a Project Manager.

Read Megz articles on personal financial management both at FemCentral and at her blog.