April Progress Recap

Hello from Arizona (at the time of writing this)! I know this is a week late, and this roadtrip that I’m on, is no excuse. On a similar wavelength, while trying to search for something I wrote in a previous recap, and realizing that I couldn’t find it — because if you haven’t noticed, these things are like 7 mins long ;).

the breathtaking Horseshoe bend (and me blending into the background)

It’s made me think more about what I want my recaps to be, and as a celebration of one year of doing these recaps 🎉, I’m changing up the format. I hope that you’ll enjoy this one more too.

High level overview:

• Highlights: co-working from San Diego with a dear friend (all the 🌮s), finishing the Advanced course at Landmark, and launching the video version of the action plan for May Project Program.
• What could’ve been better: I focused so much on creating the course videos that I got sidetracked from my goal / vision of consistently having 10 people in each program cohort so that it could be a community.
• April project: The focus was strength training — I did all the exercises except for the last week, so I would say it’s not 100% complete. It’s something that I could’ve done better (and still feeling resistance to doing sole physical exercises).
• Major update: Seeing love as something that is abundant versus scarce.

Lessons:

On life:

• The past couple of weeks I’ve been struggling with finding meaning constantly wondered: “What is the purpose of all this?”. What I realized is that fulfillment seemed to elude me because my whole focus was on me me me (what can I do to make myself happy). Now I’m approaching it from the angle of “What value can I contribute to the world?” and it feels so fulfilling.
• I’ve also realized that I’ve been pretending to be in “exploration mode”, when really the entire time, I’ve been half-committing to things because of fear of rejection. I’ve been playing small in my life. And when I do that, what’s missing is any sense of trust or confidence in myself. Now, I’m creating a whole new possibility and fully committing to a life filled with love + inspiration, and helping others get closer to their own fulfillment. I hope you’ll keep me accountable to it too:)
• “It’s so hard to forget pain, but it’s even harder to remember sweetness. We have no scar to show for happiness. We learn so little from peace.

On business:

• I just wrapped up my first cohort — the April program! The biggest takeaway (and surprise) from running the online program is that the most valuable thing I can do as a coach for these students is serve as emotional guidance when roadblocks come up. Connection and the human touch is incredibly important.
• While filming the May program, while editing the videos, I realized that the audio had a lot of noise, so I had to record the voice all over again. Which took up a lot more time than expected (8 hours~). If I had to do it again, I would make sure that I had a clip on microphone (literally the best investment ever in this case) and do everything in one go.
• Taxes for individual small businesses are pretty difficult to navigate (who knew employers took care half of your taxes for you?!), I’ve added learning different taxes + how they are withheld on my to-do learning list. In the meantime, if you’re a millennial and is looking to understand your finances better, my awesome friend made this awesome guide to saving + investing (complete with comics and puns)!

On careers:

• Wait but Why came out with an amazing piece on how to pick a career that actually fits you: there’s so many goodies in here that I plan to do a recap summary on it. In the meantime, I learned about chefs vs. cook (one who comes up with the recipes vs. following the recipes), the YEARNING octupus aka how each of these desires pull you in different directions for the career you choose (personal, lifestyle, practical, moral, social), and your strengths as not something that’s existing, but something that you can focus on and get better over time, etc. This whole piece is SO good, you can read it here.

Favorite discovery:

• Adding cream cheese and spinach on a bagel, it’s really delicious and quick easy snack — whether you’re at home or on the road 🌱

Next month’s goals:

• One Month Projects: my goal as a coach for the May cohort is to be an active resource of support as well as personalized guidance for whatever barriers the students run into. I also need to start working on getting the word out for the June cohort.
• Monthly experiments: for May, I want to learn about and read screenplays, especially because it comes at the intersection of writing and videography . scenes. p.s. I created a series on all the monthly projects that you can check out here.
• Writing: ah, my love. I’m committed to writing more in May, currently working on an epic guide on the top experts in learning + side projects. I also want to especially write more pieces for my personal newsletter, because these people are really important to me 😊

Thanks for reading! This is #12 of my monthly progress reports (yay one year!)

If you have thoughts on the new format, I’d love to hear about it in the comments below 👇🏼