Last fall I attended a retreat, a Leadership Development Intensive, were we worked on understanding ourselves and what really want in life as well as constructive ways to communicate and interact with others. One of the things I left with was my Greater Purpose Statement which is; "Acting without regard for other perception of me, I voice my true opinion & chose to create a life of balance & contentment".
One of the key points that I realized through this intensive and I suppose something I have been thinking about for awhile now, is that now that I'm not worrying about things like getting out of debt or whether I will meet the right man and getting married, I am concerned that I'm actually living the best life for myself. Basically I want to be confident that I'm making decisions that will leave me feeling HAPPY.
This doesn't mean that I don't have more trivial concerns on a day to day basis...need I remind you of my mini meltdown to crazy over the last week when it came to taking pregnancy tests? But what it does mean is that I'm confident with where I am in my life and I am no longer thinking that the grass is green on the other side of the fence or spending hours day dreaming about things that are far out of my reach.
I mentioned in a previous post about how I planned to set monthly resolutions for myself and one of the categories was Motivation. Under this motivation category I had mentioned that I wanted to start a book/women's club where we met regularly to discuss books that we read that helped keep up inspired to reach our goals and challenge what we think of as Happy. I wanted a positive environment where we could feel safe to talk about our problems and dreams. The problem was I had NO IDEA who would want to commit to something like that. Most of my close friends aren't really interested in sharing their innermost thoughts in front of others that would probably be strangers to them, nor do you want to just have the same women that you usually hang out with be the only ones to get together because it would become just another social gather which could quickly break down into just another night out with friends or be demoted as not a priority, or the few friends that I could think of that would really have the same commitment don't even live in the same province, let alone the same city.
Then I thought of my two female coworkers that I attended the LDI with. I consider them friends at work but we don't socialize alot outside of our office so I was hesitant to ask them, thinking that they would be put off by it and tell me they weren't interested. I finally decided to email them after I had a conversation with one of them where I had encouraged her to take advantage of our employee assistances program at work to help work through some family issues she was having. The three of us had shared a lot of our personal lifes with each other on our retreat, they know about my issues with some of my (ex)friends, my miscarriage, problems with my brother and so on, and I know that their personal lives aren't nearly as smooth as they appear at work.
The next morning I received replies back from both of them before I got to work and when I finally read them (yup I put it off for a few minutes thinking that I would be disappointed when they both said no) I was pleasantly surprised that they were both IN! So long story short we have scheduled our first get together for March 1st afterwork at my house.
Our first book is The Happiness Project - by Gretchen Rubin which I also mentioned in my previous post about resolutions and goal setting.
I think this experience should reinforce to me that I shouldn't always assume what others will think and then not do something for fear that that assumption will come true. I decided to ask even though I thought they would say no and now I was proven wrong and am very excitted!
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