I have been
wanting to run a motivational workshop/retreat for as long as I can remember. I’ve
attended so many of them and would carefully pay attention to how each one was
lead and organized. I obtained numerous ideas for how I would run my own
workshop and eagerly wrote them down in my journal. After at least ten years of
thinking and planning and ruminating about my workshop, my idea finally came to
fruition this month. Well, sort of.
I decided
that my workshop would be for people of a certain age who felt that they couldn’t
achieve new goals and dreams because of their age. After much thought, I came
up with a great name for my workshop: “Achieve Your Dream at Any Age or Any
Stage,” and found a picture of a tall mast of a sailboat stretching endlessly
upward toward a magnificent sky that I had taken this past summer that I would
use for my promotional image. I rented a space in Watertown to run my workshop
and paid the venue $50 to market it. I carefully planned and put together a
wonderful workshop filled with a PowerPoint, interactive activities, songs and
reflections. I was all set!
And then it
didn’t happen. Just like that! I had to cancel my workshop because I only had
one person interested in attending. Talk about feeling defeated. After all of my
hard work and planning over so many years, how could my dream end up in
disaster like this? In all of my imagining about my workshop, it had never
occurred to me that no one would come.
So I had a
choice to make: give up on my dream, which was my immediate reaction. “It was a
stupid idea,” I thought. “What was I thinking?” Or I could pick myself up and
try to think of other ways to do my workshop. I chose to do the latter. I guess
either I’m insane for believing that I’ll get different results from doing the
same thing or I’m an eternal optimist. I like to believe that I’m the latter.
The night that
my workshop was supposed to run I went to the gym and the owner said, “Why aren’t
you at your workshop?” Gulp. “Well, it didn’t run due to low enrollment, I
sheepishly admitted.” She then told me that I could use her gym space for FREE
to run my workshop and offered to promote it in her classes. What a boost I had
just received! Almost instantly, after feeling so defeated, the Universe had
conspired to push me forward in going for my dream.
A lot of
times when people experience a setback or failure in going for their dream,
they tend to give up, thinking that their idea must have been stupid or that
they didn’t do it right. They might even beat themselves up for it and feel so
dejected that they can’t see any hope and then quickly abandon their dream.
The path to
success is riddled with failure. There are countless examples of people who
made it big whose path to success wasn’t always smooth. When you experience a
setback in going for your dream, try to turn your thinking around from “I’m a failure
or my idea is stupid,” to “I need to take a new look at my idea/dream and determine
what adjustments need to be made.”
I just came
back from a retreat where I got LOTS of ideas for my workshop that are really
going to enhance it and make it so much better. Now I believe it was meant to
be that my workshop didn’t run so I could gather all of these great new ideas.
The Universe, in its infinite wisdom, guided me to this retreat to make my
workshop even better than before!
It takes a
lot of courage and you make yourself vulnerable when you put yourself out there
to achieve a new goal or dream. Give yourself credit for that! Don’t let a
silly setback stop you. When you understand that failure is an expected and
normal part of the journey to success, you can be poised to expect failure and
accept it as part of the journey. As with my experience, your setback might
just make your dream even better.
