Yesterday kicked off a new 30-day challenge. Since February is commonly associated with Valentine’s Day and love, I thought about a challenge where I show the love every day to family, friends and strangers.
That’s something I already do fairly easily, so it didn’t seem like a challenge to me. The point of this series of 30-Day challenges is to do just that. Challenge me. Get me out of my comfort zone, adopt new behaviors and most importantly, grow.
I’ve got a decent list of challenges I’d like to do, many of which would be better in the warmer weather, but nothing was really grabbing me. I went to bed after 1:00 a.m. (already breaking my “Sleeping 9 to 5” rule) still not sure what I was going to do.
Then, as I was writing the previous day’s blog about Ramon from the insurance company at 6:00 a.m., it came to me. Trust.
My daily reminder. Note the message behind it “You don’t have to have it all figured out to move forward.” Trust. :)
As much as I generally trust people, I’ve discovered that in certain ways, I don’t and worse off, I don’t trust myself with a lot of things. Mostly decisions.
I have a daily reminder that pops up on my phone that reads, “Embrace the unknown” because I’m not good at that either. I don’t trust the universe to take care of things. I don’t really throw caution to the wind.
So this seems like a really good one to do and by the way, there was an element of trust in coming up with it. For the past two months, I haven’t planned out what I’m going to do for those challenges each day. I let things come to me, which for some who’s as ambitious as I am, is difficult.
But in a way, I love it and I love that this idea came to me in the nick of time.
So how did I apply it?
Two ways.
First, I had spoken to a member of my team about a video that was supposed to go up. I get emails every time a new one goes up and hadn’t received one yet.
She told me that it should have because she scheduled it, but that she would check it. I hadn’t heard from her and thought about going online to check it, but that would show that I don’t trust her (I completely do) and create extra work for myself (I’m a pro at that).
Later in the afternoon, I got an email from YouTube saying that it had gone up, so I’m glad that I didn’t waste time checking and waste time following up with her. I trusted she’d get it done, if she hadn’t already and she did.
The second way I tried to trust was with the word Wienermobile. I was pitching my story to some media outlets and put the word “Wienermobile” in the subject line. That might not seem like a big deal, but for years, I’ve always put an asterisk to replace the first “i” because of email spam filters. The word “wiener” is definitely ripe for junk folders.
I sent a quick test email to see how it looked both ways and because of this trust challenge, decided to send it off with the fully spelled out word. That’s what my gut said. Plus, I figured that the media gets all kinds of emails, so their systems might let something like this through. I mean what does Oscar Mayer do when they send their pitches out? You’d think I’d know based on my experience pitching media for them, but alas, I used to fax my press releases to the media. (Jealous?)
Wise words from Laverne. It’s trust in a nutshell.
Did it feel good to not follow up with my co-worker? Yes. Did it feel right to send the pitches the way I did? Sort of. I just didn’t want to waste any more time on it. No dicking around, if you will.
So that’s how I kicked off the new challenge and what’s funny is that last night I wondered if it was the right challenge for me because it reminds me of the “See Ya, Bucko” challenge. The mantra that led to it was “Believe, Trust, Let Go,” so I’m going to apply that here and see how it manifests for the trust challenge.
Now I just need a good name for it. Hmmm… Will it come to me? We’ll see.
“Trust me,” I’m sure I’ll figure out a good one.
Do you have a hard time trusting others? Yourself? What a website is telling you and more? Tell me about it below. I’d love to hear from you.