If I announced I was giving a Ted Talk…

What topic would you automatically assume I would be speaking on?

I thought this was a fun social media experiment. I posted the below image with this message on Facebook and Instagram:

The responses were pretty interesting.

Ball Room Dancing as a Metaphor for Google’s Algorithm
SEO landscape
Working out
Swing dancing
Talk about the economic shifts of e-commerce from retail and how buyer trends are transforming our lifestyle/business as we know it
Positivity and how you can channelize positivity to achieve your dreams
how to live a life of intention and joie de vivre

I love all of these and I appreciate the perspective my friends bring. I’d like to address two specific ones below because, I feel they’re similar in nature and relevant to the current state of where we find ourselves this March 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

So, while all of California (and New York) is at home under shelter in place, let’s feed our minds some mental positivity.

Positivity and how you can channelize positivity to achieve your dreams

I think my personal sense of positivity has been instilled in me from different things throughout my life but especially, early on, it was from my parents. My dad is an Eagle Scout. My mom is a registered nurse. Between the two of them, my twin brother and I were basically prepared for almost anything and on the lookout putting safety first.

Positivity comes when your other needs are met. When your bills are paid, you have a roof over your head, you have clean clothes, food in the refrigerator, clean water (or wine!) readily available. When your basic human needs are met, your mind and energy is opened up to a new level of being. You have a more positive outlook.

That’s the foundation. Channeling that positivity into achieving your dreams is…where the magic happens.

I don’t feel I’ve necessarily achieved all of my dreams yet, so I can’t tell you the secret.

But, I can tell you a clue about what I’ve learned along the way: know what you want but be open to how you get there. Success is rarely a straight line.

Another quick thing I’ve learned: you define what success is for you. Don’t look at what other people are doing with their life, or their business. Especially don’t look at Instagram and compare yourself to that (goodness, no! That’s a recipe for feelings of inadequacy and self sabotage). Get quiet and define your version of success and you’ll be happy. If you’re not, now you know you’ve got room to improve.

How to live a life of intention and joie de vivre.

To me, this is similar to cultivating positivity because I think you need an optimistic perspective in order to pursue happiness and have a zest for life.

Intent was a nebulous thing for me for a long time. But when I started looking at it like this, it changed everything for me: who do you want to be today?

We all have our heroes. You see someone in real life or maybe a character on TV and you want to be like them. When you crystalize those characters and have them at the ready, it can be a powerful tool to call up when you need it.

To me, living with intention means being who you most want to be like.

A good exercise, I’ve found, is to go through these archetypes and hero figures and define them. Candidly, at one point, I made a power point deck where each slide had a picture of my heroine and the traits and qualities I admired in her and aspired to have in myself.

Every now and again I look through it to make sure I’m living up to the role models I’ve chosen for myself. And I add to it when I come across a new badass lady.

I’ll leave you with a couple great books on this subject that I like:

Be well & kind to each other!

The opinions, thoughts and perspective expressed in this post are my own. While I am a representative of the company, these are not necessarily the views of my employer.

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