Original

Last week I went to the Original Conference, a movement that started 10 years ago by Jen Deweerdt and a group of women in the Midwest. The conference has grown from 124 to thousands of women from across the globe who gather together every year to get inspired, challenged, and encouraged to live an original life.

This is my second time at the conference and as we were celebrating Original’s 10th year, I also started to look back and remember all that has happened in the last ten years of my life.

It’s been exactly 10 years since I left my parent’s home to live in the US for a year. After that, I got my dream job (at the time), left my dream job to get married and moved to Denmark, started a new career path, went back to my home country, worked like crazy managing a consultancy office, had a burnout, took some rest and started working again in the innovation department of a bank. On this road, I’ve also met brilliant people, made new friends, travelled, and I could keep on listing.

It’s very rewarding to look back and to see how much I’ve done, but it also makes me wonder what the next ten years ahead are gonna be. The messages I heard at the conference were timely and very powerful. It made me realize that at some point we stop planning, we stop having hope, we stop going after our dreams, we stop being who we want to be and life simply just happens. We end up getting used to the life we have — done with college, already checked some of the travel destinations from our wishlist, own our home, maybe the comfort zone is too comfortable.

During the opening session, Jen had a doorway on stage and she illustrated what we might be feeling when we know that we are not living the life we were meant to live. We don’t know how or why, but sometimes we find ourselves full of doubts and fears, we don’t want to disappoint anyone, we feel insecure, we believe in labels that are put into ourselves, we don’t want to fail, and we keep on living an uninspired, boring life. But, she challenged us to walk through the very door that looks the scariest to get through. We will probably fail sometimes, but when we decide to go through, we also leave the door open for others to come too! How good is that? We can not only start living what we were meant to live but we also help others to leave their fears behind and enjoy their lives to the fullest.

Since I’ve decided to have a break from my promising career to take care of my son and my family, all the confidence I used to have was switched to doubts, fear, labels and comparison. It took me some time to overcome all my insecurities, all the pressure from other people, all the pressure from society and start looking for some ways to accept what I really wanted and to live a meaningful life.

This message made me think about some questions:

• Am I happy with the choices I’ve made for my work, or my health, or my family?
• Am I being fully present where I know that I need to be?
• Am I using my time well?
• Am I happy with all that I have achieved so far?
• Am I living the life I wanted to live?

We need to be honest with ourselves. When I became content with my choices and with the life I chose to live, I started being more confident about it and I didn’t need to care about what others are thinking about me. We don’t always know the whole picture and sometimes we wish we could live someone else’s life or we judge because we think that we are making better choices. The truth is that we don’t know! We are responsible for our decisions and we need to overcome our fears, we need to ask for help, we need to go through what seems impossible in order to enjoy the freedom that’s on the other side. It would be very sad to wake up one day and realize that years have passed by and I wasted my time doing things that I don’t really like, that I don’t agree or just don’t care. We have this one and only life to live what we were meant to live. We need to discover what it is and plan for it, even though it doesn’t always work out as planned.

Plans are useless but planning is everything — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Jen’s message was very deep in a sense that we need to have faith in what we believe. We need to start having hope, again, in things that someday have mattered to us but along the way we just forgot or gave up. Deep inside of us we know that there is a closed door full of negative signs that we need to open and go through. We know some of the fears we have to overcome…

I hope that sharing a little bit of what I experienced at the conference will also help other women who couldn’t be there to be somehow reached and find true freedom.