I LOVE MY LIFE!

Wow my mind is still spinning from this weekend! On fri/sat I attended a very intense conference for a company I work with and WOW was my mind BLOWN! I have to say that I am one of the most blessed people to have had such an amazing experience and to be able to go through that with 700 other people and connect with so many new friends was such a joy. I was constantly inspired by ever single person who graced that stage with their presence. Being as one of my greatest passions is to change lives and inspire people all I could keep thinking was how next year I wanted to be up on stage. One of the people who I feel in love with because she is such a beautiful person inside and out was a woman by the name of Woodson Gardner. Her story of overcoming the challenges life threw and her and how she managed to still become the person she is today was just tear inducing. Two of my favourite quotes from her were "If you don't know your worth and value, then do NOT expect someone else to calculate it for you." I believe this one speaks for itself but if you need help understanding, BE WHO YOU ARE and love who you are FIRST before all else. If you're waiting for someone else to validate how "awesome" you are then you're missing the point. They wont think you're awesome if YOU don't think you're awesome. The second quote was "Rip off your rear-view mirror! If you're going to the front it doesn't matter what's going on behind you!" Thanks you Woodson for giving me such inspiration for life, you made my heart sing this weekend. Many of the others were very inspiring as well and I'm so grateful for the experience. These are life lessons that I will be taking with me for the rest of mine.

I also learned one very important thing, and that is that I don't need easy, I just need possible. I use to make up what I thought were really reasonable excuses for myself to have not met my goals. I've now realized that I'm never going to meet those goals if I keep rationalizing my failures with excuses. I'm the only one holding me back and even though I have been doing LOADS of work in this department I can still go further (you can ALWAYS go further). A great belief that all leaders in life must hold is "feel the fear and do it anyway." All great leaders have fear. It would be silly of us to believe they didn't have fear. Fear is the thing that tells us we really care about something and thus we care about the outcome. The difference between leaders and others is that leaders feel that fear and do it anyway. Life is not always going to be peaches and cream and you will be challenged with things that scare you. But if you can find it deep within yourself to push through your life can become things you never even dreamt possible. The fact is if you are comfortable, you aren't growing. To grow you must constantly be uncomfortable and pushing yourself more and more to learn those lessons of life and seek new ones once the current ones have been overcome. We all have the power within ourselves to overcome but too many of us let our stories get in the way. Things like "but I was born like this, you don't know my family, I'm not outgoing like that, my life has been really hard, I don't know how," hold us all back. Well those are all just stories you've made us and have decided to stick to. The fact is we aren't BORN scared, fearful, shy, ignorant, etc, these are all things that we learn over time and choose to either hold on to or let go of. As a child I was told I was shy...well turns out I'm not! And it's because I made the choice to no longer be shy. Was it scary, yes, because it was new for me to act a different way but in the end I was so much happier because I was finally starting to live my authentic life. We all have the power of choice and to choose the life we want, so stop wasting time and get going already!

With Gratitude,
Calan

My Gratitude journal of the day...
I'm grateful for...
1) My inspiring weekend with Vision Canada!
2) The new friends I made this weekend
3) The lives I have been able to change and the joys of giving someone hope again
4) Write off's (seriously, if you don't own your own home business DO IT! Saves you SO MUCH on taxes)
5) My dreams, for I know far too many people who have all but forgotten about theirs