On my business coach Tiffany's podcast this week she talks about something she calls quiet bravery. And she asks her listeners what that means to them. I love this idea and I've been thinking a lot about it, so Tiffany, here's my answer!
Quiet bravery for me is: letting my blogging find its own rhythm again, after posting nearly daily for three years on my last blog, Dream Big Cape Breton. And what "finding its own rhythm" means is: I'm trying not to get all bent-out-of-shape up inside my brain about how often I'm posting (or not posting), and trying not to worry that I'm not posting enough and that I'm losing followers. Because the best way to lose followers is actually to post all! the! time! whether you have something to say or not. The best way to lose followers is to give them a watered-down, exhausted version of yourself.
Quiet bravery for me is: Taking Keltic Drive to work instead of the highway, so I can drive a bit slower, and look at all the apple trees, and glance at people's yards. And doing this drive without music, without podcasts, so I can just be with myself.
Quiet bravery for me is: Spending my evenings (as much as possible) off social media and away from email, so that I'm present in my house, with my family. And, trusting that that is enough, that the social media will be there when I get back to it. My ego and my sense of myself get quick, addictive hits of pleasure and validity from checking social media, so it's kinda hard to step away from it. But when I do... it feels oh so good.
Quiet bravery for me is: Being OK with not sharing publicly the process I'm going through, just yet, with It's Business Time. The other day at an event I was at, someone who follows me online said, "It seems like you're just remaining open right now," and I said, "There is actually a lot happening behind the scenes!" And there is: so much good stuff, introspection and group calls and writing our first offers and really sinking my claws into the meat of starting a business, into the act of pulling a real live business out of dreams and hopes. And I definitely want to write more about it, but where I thought at the start of it that I might do a diary sort-of-thing as I went along, well, I've realized it's pretty private and that I don't want to share it all just yet.
But then, because, you know, life works like that, I read Elise's post today about developing your ideas, and she recommends talking and sharing your ideas. And I happen to agree. I think we don't develop ideas alone, in a vacuum, and that the more we put stuff that we love out there in the world, then the more people around us know we love it, and then they come to us to talk about those things. I wrote about this last year on the Dream Big blog here.
So quiet bravery for me also means talking out loud about the new ideas, even if it's not in perfect-packaged-diary form. Even if it's just talking it out to see what I love and what I don't. Especially if it's those things.
So in essence, quiet bravery means slowing myself down. To listen to my own voice. To see how it has changed over thirteen years, and what it's changing to next.
Bravery actually takes less energy, because it means being who I already am. But it takes bravery to say, "And that person? Is a damn fine person."