Uncertainty has always been a dirty word for me. Even just the way it rolls off my tongue feels sticky and uncomfortable. Over the years, I’ve tried plenty of coping methods including obsessive exercising, marathon wine drinking, and even (cringe) excessive relationship “deconstructing” and “fixing”.

It’s only since cancer dropped the certainty is an illusion bomb in my lap that I began playing in the uncertainty sandbox. Like a toddler learning to share with a new playmate, there are still times when I want to stomp my feet and scream. It’s not FAIR. I want to know how this plays out and if the sacrifice will be worth it. Yet, when I lean a little less rigidly into the future, amazing moments have an opportunity to unfold.

If you’re anything like me, you might be thinking, That’s great for you Terri, but how the hell do I LEAN into uncertainty and what does that mean anyway?

Enter Fresh Thinker Jonathan Fields and his book Uncertainty. As part of our weekly series, I promised you less fluff and more insights to apply to your own life and I couldn’t think of a better topic for week #3 than Uncertainty. We all face it and wrestle with how to manage it.

In Uncertainty, Jonathan writes,

We are wired from birth to want answers and hard data. Uncertainty is okay, as long as it exists in someone else’s life or we don’t have to do anything about it. But as soon as we’re challenged to own it and act in the face of it, with rare exceptions we run from it. Because running at it terrifies us. We’re scared of the discomfort that comes with opening doors without knowing what’s behind them. Scared of being judged if it’s a monster. Scared of having to pick up the pieces and rebuild if we go to zero. Even scared of hitting the jackpot. And beyond the fear, we just plain hate the persistent anxiety that rides along with continually leaning into the unknown. Without intervention, we experience it as anywhere from discomfort to outright suffering.

Uncertainty Intervention

An uncertainty intervention? I love that idea. To truly understand what Jonathan means and to read the case studies and research he has to back up his theories, you’ll have to check out the book. But, until then, here are a few standout suggestions that resonated with me:

• Certainty anchors – Find an activity each day that grounds you. Something that you can lean on when everything else feels like it’s spinning out of control. For me, it’s the 20 minutes of writing I do almost every morning as soon as I wake up. Even if I can’t control or predict anything else in my day, those 20 minutes help me stay focused and grounded. 
• Look for heros or mentors. Find people who inspire you and even if you never meet them, you can follow their work. The insights they share will help you see your own life differently. I’m a huge fan of Jonathan’s series, The Good Life Project where he features in-depth interviews with thought leaders and world shakers. Jonathan and many of his guests continue to inspire me to step into uncertainty as a starting point for creativity. 
• Test and redevelop – no matter what you are working on, you probably won’t get it right the first time. Don’t beat yourself up so much. Sometimes our biggest mistakes lead to our greatest successes.
• Pull vs Push – Instead of always pushing for something to turn out the way you want it to, try pausing for a moment to see what is pulling you and why you are following a dream. As Jonathan says, “You need to have a strong sense of what you’re trying to build, who you’re serving, and why.” If you’re pushing your own agenda, take a step back and think about how you can better serve the people around you. The answers will appear.

All of this being said, I have learned that lessons are not like light switches. We don’t have a brilliant AHA Moment one day and then waltz through the rest of our lives gloriously evolved. Instead, we have an AHA Moment, move towards a path that feels more right for us, and then wake up feeling like we’re in the dark again until another AHA Moment brings us back on track.

When it comes to uncertainty, I don’t think any of us will get to a place where we love it all the time and we never feel afraid or overwhelmed by the unknown again. Instead we make a decision that feels right even when we can’t predict the outcome. We trust that we are never going to be perfect at it, but if we lean in, we might look back one day and see just how much we’ve grown.

If you’re contemplating a change and the uncertainty ahead terrifies you, here is a passage from Jonathan’s book that might give you a little comfort and a nudge forward.

“When you run from uncertainty, you end up running from life. From evolution. From growth. From wisdom. From friendship. From love. From the creation of art, services, solutions, and creative experiences that move beyond what’s been done before to illuminate, serve, solve, and delight in a way that matters. In a way that makes you come alive and that people will remember.”

As for me, I’m stepping through uncertainty again as I board a flight to San Francisco later today. I will be on the road for the next 3 weeks meeting with survivors, potential funders, and strategic partners for the Fresh Chapter Alliance Foundation. The uncertainty of it all threatens to paralyze me, but I’m working on taking it one day and sometimes even just one moment at a time.

If you want to meet up with me on the road, check out my schedule HERE. Or, if you just found A Fresh Chapter and want to have the Start Fresh series delivered directly to your inbox each week, simply CLICK HERE to join our Fresh Chapter Tribe.

Welcome back to the Start Fresh Series. Today we’re featuring Pasha Hogan and her new book, Third Time Lucky.

Each week, we’re building bridges between you and fresh ideas by sharing a soundbite or insight from a Fresh Thinker and then linking you back to the places and spaces where you can find  inspiration for your fresh chapter.

For the first time ever, we are sharing our own Podcast interview with you. At Fresh Chapter Productions, we love to push the boundaries of our storytelling capability and wanted to bring you into a conversation with Pasha so you could get to know her personally. The first five minutes of the recording I was a bundle of nerves, but it didn’t take long for Pasha and I to settle into an easy conversation about her Irish roots, her days of climbing the corporate ladder, and how her third diagnosis of breast cancer and an epiphany at a U2 Concert in Ireland helped her leave behind her old life and step into a brand new world.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD & LISTEN TO OUR CONVERSATION

When Marie of Journeying Beyond Breast Cancer first told me about Pasha and asked me if I would be part of this week’s blog book tour for Third Time Lucky, I was a bit skeptical. Over the last three years, I have become more open to holistic healing and spirtuality, but I still wondered if this book and its author would be too “fluffy” for me and for many of you.

I shouldn’t have worried because as soon as I opened the book, I was hooked. I immediately felt like I was having a conversation with a friend. I couldn’t believe that this Reiki Master, Yoga Instructor, Author, 3-time cancer survivor, and Psychotherapist had a story so much like my own.

What I love the most about Pasha’s book is that even though it’s wrapped around her cancer story, it isn’t really about cancer at all. Instead, it’s about the journeys we travel when something happens in our lives that forces us to wake up and see the word differently. It’s about how to cope with the loneliness of being single, the challenges that come with loving someone who isn’t right for you, and the slow and twisty road we walk when we’re  following a new path to happiness.

Thank you Pasha for reminding us to be open to the random events in our lives that can serve as our greatest teachers. Anything from a rock concert to a drive into the mountains can give us an opportunity and a reminder to let go of what we don’t need in our lives anymore and ‘walk on’ into a new future. 

Whether you listen to our podcast interview, read the book, or check out Pasha’s Creative Recovery program; you will see the authentic heart and soul she brings to everything she does.

Thank you to my storytelling partner-in-crime, Mark Halliday of Moonrider Productions. Mark rescued me from my technical challenges and provided the editing and support to make sure my conversation with Pasha didn’t stay trapped on my hard drive forever. If you haven’t checked out the new Moonrider Productions website, click HERE for videos, stills, and an instagram feed of creative goodness.

Stay tuned for next week’s Start Fresh featured change maker: Jonathan Fields. I’ll share how his latest book, Uncertainty, and his weekly series, The Good Life Project, have provided both comfort and perspective on my fresh chapter journey.

If you want to join the Fresh Chapter Tribe and get these posts delivered directly to your inbox a day before everyone else sees them, click HERE to sign up for free.

Where do you go when one big hairy audacious dream ends and you have to choose between setting your sights on the next giant mountain or retreating into the land of safety and security?

In April this year – after 18 months of different cities, faces, beds, and timezones – I rolled my suitcase through the door of my childhood bedroom and sealed the world out. In spite of the success of #Delhi2013, I felt unsure of exactly how to move forward and a big part of me wondered how it would feel to slip under the sheets and pull them over my head forever.

A few weeks of strategic planning, revising, and restarting later, I wrote the post When Is It Time To Throw In The Towel? If you have been reading A Fresh Chapter for awhile, you might have guessed that I often write what I most need to read.

The truth is that even though I talk about softening into uncertainty and living the questions, I’m just as terrified to do this as many of you are. I hate uncertainty. I loathe financial stress. I can’t help but look around for someone to tell me how the hell to move through all of the unknowns with grace and confidence instead of slipping into a catatonic state of fear and anxiety. In search of answers for how to know when to throw in the towel, I turned to Rainer Rilke – a long-dead, turn of the century poet for advice.

As Rilke said, when you know that you “must” do something, you have to find a way to move forward – no matter what. So, even though I debated putting all of the Fresh Chapter Alliance Foundation programming on hold and chalking this big dreaming “pause” up to necessity, the thought of stopping left me with blinding headaches, a constant state of nausea, and a daily dose of throat-tightening anxiety.

Hello Fear

When I finally took a long hard look in the mirror, I saw my fears staring right back at me. It’s one thing to dream big when you have a safety net, but it feels quite different when you truly go “all in”. Sometimes you have to cross over the financial line you once drew in the sand because you know that this dream was given to you for a reason. You also know that you have the potential to make a positive impact on other peoples’ lives if you can just bring yourself to keep inching forward. So, instead of retreating, you make a conscious decision to do the hard and scary work to keep going.

It’s not easy to sit down at a computer and hammer through budgets, strategic plans, and pitches for how corporations would benefit from sponsoring the foundation or how individuals can get involved in helping champion the cause. This kind of commitment comes packaged with a mountain of fear. Fear of rejection. Fear of failure. Fear that you don’t actually have the nerve to pull it off.

But, in spite of that fear and the instability of the path underfoot, sometimes you HAVE to keep going because you know that walking away would be even more painful.

Why am I telling you this? Maybe to dispel the illusion that you must first conquer your fears before you can take action. Or to let you in on the secret that we are all afraid. So, if the thought of NOT following your dream is making you physically ill, maybe you can think about doing one thing today that helps you inch just a little closer to your version of a happier life.

On The Road Again

On that note, on Monday I’m packing my bags and boarding a plane bound for the unknown. Even though I’m overwhelmed with all of the stars that need to align to get both our North American and International programs funded – here’s the link to what we have planned for San Francisco & India this year - the headaches have disappeared and the nausea has abated. I’m willing to invest in getting to Vancouver, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Portland, and Seattle if it helps me meet the partners and collaborators who have the power to join us in changing the lives of hundreds of cancer survivors around the world.

Am I scared that a month from now, I’ll come back with my head down and my shoulders sagging with the weight of rejection? Absolutely.

But, building the Fresh Chapter Tribe and getting the Foundation off the ground are the things I can’t not do. Giving up now would be letting fear win. So, I’m choosing to stare her down and walk past her into the ring. And here’s the truth…how can I sit here and tell you to follow your dreams if I give up on mine as soon as my fears reach a whole new level of scary?

It’s time to walk the walk and I would love you to join me.

If you want to meet up to talk big dreams in San Francisco, LA, Portland, Seattle, or Vancouver or if you want to get involved in helping us take the Fresh Chapter Alliance Foundation to the next level, email me HERE or leave your comments below. Or, if in the words of Brene Brown, you have some words of inspiration that have helped you “Dare Greatly”, I’d love to hear those too.

Stay tuned for Monday’s post and our first ever Podcast for the #StartFresh series. My guest Pasha Hogan will tell you how going to a U2 concert in an Irish field helped her leave her old life behind and “walk on” into a new future. If you want to sign up and have Fresh Chapter posts delivered directly to your inbox, click HERE.

Martha Beck’s insight changed my life and I hope it might change yours too.

Today I’m excited to kick off the Start Fresh series. In an effort to help you with your fresh chapter, each week I’ll be sharing a sound bite from a thought leader or world shaker that has had a major impact on me over the last three years. If you want to join our Fresh Chapter Tribe and have these posts, as well as a few updates from the road, delivered straight to your inbox, CLICK HERE.

I thought the best place to start is with a lesson I learned about changing the way I think about setting goals.

Goals & The Myths About Achieving Them

If you find yourself faced with a major transition (cue losing your job, being served with divorce papers, or picking up the pieces after cancer), you might be tempted to lock yourself to your laptop until you come up with a elaborate 3-5 year Plan B. In our action-oriented society, we often attempt to bulldoze through uncertainty by setting goals and game plans to get us directly from the uncomfortable present into a more perfect future.

However, in this 2010 article, Goal-Setting-Strategies-from-Life-Coach-Martha-Beck, Beck turns conventional wisdom on its head when she encourages us to think about our goals based on how we want to feel instead of what we want to achieve.

For example, you might be determined to have a baby because your biological clock is ticking and you can’t wait to experience that elusive brand of unconditional love OR  you might want to start your own business because you crave freedom from the 9-5 slog. These are both fantastic life goals, but Beck reminds us to consider the by-product emotions that come packaged up with these “achievements”. (i.e. A baby might bring plenty of happiness, but your bundle of joy will also bring sleepless nights and increased expenses and being your own boss might mean you can keep whatever hours you’d like, but now you’ll be saddled with the stresses of figuring out how to cover your mortgage payments on a month-to-month basis.)

Beck suggests that we envision achieving one of our goals and then while we have that picture of success in our minds, we immediately choose three adjectives to describe how we feel in that moment. Then, she suggests dropping the goal and instead turning our attention to those three descriptive words.

It is those words describing how we want to feel that become the driving force for moving us forward in our lives. Beck’s logic is that by focusing on how we want to feel, we”ll be attracted to people and situations that help us feel that way. Although our future may look different than we could ever predict, we might end up happier than we could have ever imagined.

If you’re thinking, this all make sense in theory, but where the hell do I start? Then, stay with me… First, I’ll tell you how this worked for me and then I’ll share an excerpt from the article if you want to try it yourself.

How Martha Beck’s Advice Impacted Me

On December 31, 2010, after reading the above mentioned article, I wrote a post called What Are Your Three Words where I proclaimed that in 2011, I wanted to feel healthy, loved, and inspired.

The next day I woke up more depressed than I had ever been in my life and if you’ve read My Story, you already know why. After a solid pity party about the shambles my post-cancer life had turned into, I pulled myself out of bed and slipped into my running shoes. As I followed the path by the ocean, I couldn’t get the word inspired out of my head. It was only day 1 of 2011 and I was already a failure.

I knew that if I truly wanted to feel inspired that year, I would have to do something BIG because I couldn’t imagine ever getting out of my current funk. Out of nowhere, the idea of volunteering in Africa popped into my head. It was immediately followed by a string of thoughts like, Don’t be ridiculous! and Have you lost your mind? Nothing about the idea seemed feasible. I hadn’t even finished my surgeries and I needed a plan for getting on with my life. I couldn’t just go galavanting off to Africa, in search of inspiration.

Or could I?

The more I thought about it, the more inspired I got. Volunteering in Africa would definitely be a bold step out of my cancer story and as I moved closer to making this dream a reality, everything in my life began to shift. As donations came in to help me cover my costs and I made plans to travel and connect with other survivors, I found myself feeling healthier and more loved than I had thought possible.

Since then, I have become a big believer in the power words have to change everything. Whenever I reach another cross-roads or feel lost about where to go from here, I come back to the exercise below.

How You Can Apply Martha Beck’s Advice to Your Life

Here is an excerpt from Martha Beck with some concrete steps for how you can put this idea into practice in your life:

“Step One: Pick a goal, any goal.

Think of a typical noun-verb goal, something for which you frequently hanker. Be honest rather than politically correct. Some people may have deep desires to establish world peace, stop global warming, and end poverty, but maybe you actually think more about, I dunno, reaching your target weight. And that’s okay. This is not a beauty pageant (those contestants can afford to wish for world peace; they’ve all reached their target weight). What I want you to do is fess up to your real desires. Now pick the biggest, most ambitious one.

Step Two: Gaze into the future.

You don’t need a crystal ball to see what’s up ahead; the three pounds of gray matter between your ears will do fine. Use your brainpower right now to imagine what your life would be like if you realized the goal you just identified. Create a detailed fantasy about it. Loiter there awhile, observing your dream-come-true with your mind’s eyes, ears, nose, skin. Then, clear your mind and your throat: It’s time for the magic words.

Step Three: Generate adjectives.

This is the heart of a really effective goal-spell. Begin listing adjectives that describe how you feel in your dream-come-true scenario. This is a simple task, but not an easy one. It requires that you translate holistic, right-brain sensations into specific, left-brain words. Author Craig Childs compares this to “trying to build the sky out of sticks.” Spend enough time in your imagined situation to let your brain leaf through its vocabulary, scouting out accurate adjectives. In goal setting as in fairy tales, the minimum magic number is three. Don’t stop until you have at least that many ways to describe those lovely feelings.

My clients frequently try to squirm out of the process by muttering, “It’s hard to explain,” or “Oh, I don’t know,” or “I can’t describe it.” Well, of course it’s hard to explain; yes, you do know; and if you keep trying, you can too describe it. Your adjectives don’t have to be eloquent; use simple words like energetic, focused, delighted, and fine. But you owe it to yourself to persevere until you’ve found some reasonably descriptive words. Three of ‘em. Write them down:

1.____________________

2.____________________

3.____________________

Step Four: Focus on anything that can be described with your adjectives.

Drop the fantasy situation you imagined in step two and concentrate on those adjectives. You might notice that these three words bring your stated goal into sharper focus. For instance, if your New Year’s resolution is to lose ten pounds—a noun-verb goal—but your adjectives are strong, confident, and healthy, you might realize that your actual aim is to get fit. You would see that the strategy you came up with to diet (i.e., eating your weight in hydroponic cabbage) might leave you thinner but also recumbent on a couch without the energy to leave the house—which isn’t what you really want. Thanks to adjectives, you can fine-tune your strategy: Swap a fad diet for a meeting with a nutritionist, and sign up for weight training classes at the gym.

Sometimes tweaking isn’t enough. Your adjective goal might utterly contradict your stated goal. Time to rethink that original target. For example, if you think you want to win an Academy Award, you may imagine your Oscar acceptance speech, and feel “valued, satisfied, and unstoppable.” If you think that only a night at the Kodak Theatre will lead to those feelings, you might spend years obsessively pursuing movie stardom, ignoring everyone and everything except your ambition. Odds are you still wouldn’t win an Oscar, but you’d probably get a rapacious ego that could inhale all manner of rewards without even noticing them. On the other hand, if you immediately begin focusing on aspects of your present life that make you feel valued, satisfied, or unstoppable, you’ll feel an instant lift. All sorts of things may happen. Sure, you might win an Oscar. But if you don’t find yourself onstage, blurting out that the statue sure is heavy, you’ll be left with…a pretty good life. You might even find that as you follow the things that make you feel appreciated, you’ve tripped into an entirely different career. So starting now, survey your life for anything (I mean anything) that can be described with any of those three words. Putting all your attention on those aspects of your life will make you happier right now and help you create future situations that fulfill your true desires.”

To read the full article, click here: http://www.oprah.com/oprahs-lifeclass/Goal-Setting-Strategies-from-Life-Coach-Martha-Beck/2#ixzz2VC2PMCJk

Share Your Voice

I’d love to hear from you. Share your three words in the comments below OR tell me if you think this strategy might help you reframe your current situation.

Then, stay tuned. Next Monday, we’re featuring Pasha Hogan who wrote the book Third Time Lucky. We’ll be talking to her about how she had to let go of who she was in order to step into the life she craved. CLICK HERE if you want this and future posts delivered straight to your inbox.

If you’re new to A Fresh Chapter, you might want to know where it all began. But, if you’ve been with me since the beginning, feel free to scroll past the first few paragraphs and jump down to see what’s ahead...

How A Fresh Chapter Began

Three years ago, I wrote a letter to Oprah that changed everything.

It all started with a walk. I was a few weeks out of the operating room and still nursing the pain of my double mastectomy. Feeling hemmed in by the four walls of my apartment, I slipped on my gumboots and slid out into the misty Vancouver air. As sea gulls dive bombed above me and a strong wind tossed the sea into a field of whitecaps, I stood on the shore and wept.

As I swiped my sleeve under my eyes and inhaled hard to steady myself, I struggled to admit that I felt wedged into a life that didn’t belong to me anymore.

My professional recruiting persona no longer fit, but my lofty dream of being a writer felt unrealistic and unattainable. Even as the chapters of a memoir appeared on my computer, I wanted to quit because I felt like a fool. Who was I kidding? I didn’t know anything about writing. I needed someone to pluck me from my situation and hold my hand while I figured out how to get an editor, an agent, and a publishing contract. I wanted certainty in a world whirring with unknowns and as I turned for home, I thought of one person who had the power to change everything.

Out of breath, I slammed the door of my apartment and didn’t even sit down before my fingers flew over the keys of my laptop. I wrote and re-wrote my letter to Oprah until I was sure that she would see my potential and help me launch my writing career. I pressed send and checked my Blackberry every few hours as I waited anxiously for a reply that never came.

Instead, I woke up the next day and my life felt the same as it had the day before: messy, confusing, overwhelming, and terrifying.

Not sure of what else to do, I took someone’s advice and started a blog and that letter to Oprah became my first blog post. I knew nothing about blogging, but when I pressed “Publish” for the first time, I felt the rush of doing SOMETHING. I kept writing and eventually a few people started reading. I made plenty of mistakes. I wrote too much about myself and I forgot the lessons I’d learned as a recruiter. My ability to make connections and build a network had set me apart professionally, but I had failed to carry this over to the online world or to realize that I needed to help other people achieve their dreams in order to get closer to mine.

A New Series on Starting Fresh

Along the way, my dream has shifted from writing a book to volunteering globally and creating a foundation for other cancer survivors to do the same. As part of this evolution, I have read countless books, watched endless TED talks and discovered amazing online resources that have helped me to feel comfortable with trusting moments of clarity amidst weeks of confusion.

Now, I feel like it’s time to evolve A Fresh Chapter and make it less about ME and more about YOU.

When I thought about how to do this, it seemed naive to think that a new reader to a Fresh Chapter would have the time or the inclination to sift through three years worth of blog posts in order to find insights applicable to his or her life. I know each of you has a unique story and a different reason for why you want to start fresh. Regardless of if you’re nursing a broken heart, feeling stagnant in your career, or coping with the devastating loss of a loved one, you might have reached a crossroads where you have to move forward because you can’t stay where you are.

Even though I don’t pretend to have all of the answers, I’d love to share the insights that have most helped me. So on Monday, I’m kicking off a new series called Start Fresh. Each week, I’ll open up the archives and share the most influential lessons I’ve learned.

In our fast-paced, information-saturated world, I want to be able to build a bridge between you and the ideas or people who might hold the key to your next step. Although I’ll still bring you on the road with me and share the evolving Fresh Chapter story, I look forward to finding ways for both of us to move our dreams forward.

So stay tuned. We’re kicking things off on Monday with a lesson Martha Beck taught me about how one word can change your whole life.

If you want to have the Monday Start Fresh series delivered directly to your inbox, click HERE to join the Fresh Chapter Tribe.

Chasing dreams is serious business. Whether it involves finding a soul mate, leaping in a brand new career direction, or starting a grassroots movement; turning a dream into reality is not a fairytale waltz into the sunset. Sure, it fills your life with passion and purpose, but it’s also liable to cause you occasional emotional upheaval, intermittent sacrifice, and maybe even a regular dose of financial stress (at least at the beginning).

Yet, in our polished for public consumption culture, we don’t talk about the hurdles that come packaged up with the highs. No one posts the gritty truth on Facebook about navigating the choppy waters of uncertainty. Imagine a world where some of our status updates looked something like this:

• What if I’m crazy to think I can find a way to get paid to do the work I believe in?
• My job is killing me a little more every day, but I’m too terrified to quit.
• I am worried I’m going to end up alone because my relationship isn’t working out the way I thought it would. 

Instead we share our successes and bury our insecurities. We gloss over the sleepless nights of strategic planning, or the string of bad dates, or the wish that someone (anyone) could help us know whether the path we’re on is the right one.

Last week, as I stood staring out over the sun-drenched fields of my childhood, I couldn’t help but wonder how and when other big dreamers decide to throw in the towel and opt for a safer, more comfortable existence. You know – a life with a steady pay-check, a home, and the ability to meet friends for drinks without needing to get on a plane to make it happen.

Four year ago, if you had told me that I would get diagnosed with cancer and then I would invest everything I had into a big dream, circumvent the globe twice, and then end up working from my parents (for longer than a weekend), I would have told you to smoke another one. I had a great life with a high paying job, an apartment near the beach, and the belief that flighty dream chasers should settle down and be a bit more pragmatic.

Then, life happened and I changed. I saw a vision for how I could use my love of writing, traveling, volunteering, networking, speaking, and connecting to build a platform and create opportunities for other people to write fresh chapters. Even if I didn’t know how to turn these passions into a new career, I knew I couldn’t go back to how life was. And so, the big dreams, audacious adventures and sleepless nights began.

Even now, with the memories of a successful first program, an inbox full of strategic plans, and a team of volunteers to help us grow the FCAF so we can provide programming for survivors both internationally and here in North America, I still wrestle with fears and doubts. I still feel the weight of reaching survivors who need support, selecting the right funding partners, and setting up the dominos correctly so we won’t miss out on the surge of momentum that is building. But if the thought of doing something else (something easier) crosses my mind, I think of this passage from Letters To A Young Poet:

You ask whether your verses are good. You ask me. You have asked others before. You send them to magazines. You compare them with other poems, and you are disturbed when certain editors reject your efforts. Now (since you have allowed me to advise you) I beg you to give all that up … There is only one single way. Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you write; find out whether its spreading its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have it die if it were denied you to write. This above all – ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night: must I write?..if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple, “I must” then build your life according to this necessity. ~ Rainer Rilke 

Even though Rilke is referring to writing, you could substitute any big dream when you ask yourself the question, “Must I ________?”

It’s truly that simple. If you fall asleep thinking about your vision; wake up already mentally entrenched in your plans to make it a reality; and can’t imagine doing anything else, then you can’t throw in the towel. You must find a way to keep moving towards that dream even when you’re overwhelmed by the sacrifices it takes to pull it off.

So instead of letting the fear consume you, you opt for the path with no roadmap. You decide to trust the visionaries who have gone before you and who have experienced their own struggles and strife. You choose to face every setback as an opportunity to learn, grow, and evolve. And you continue to remember the many people who have inspired you and the many people whom your work could inspire if you make a conscious choice to believe that this dream was entrusted to you for a reason.

Like Eric Dawson says in this piece - Building Cathedrals - ”Our work to heal a broken world isn’t easy, it isn’t always clear. But the cathedral builders’ concerns about finishing an unbelievable undertaking did not diminish their faith; in fact it enhanced it. And when we feel stuck, remember that we are not alone on our journeys. We stand on the shoulders of those who came before, hold the hands of the talented women and men who walk with us, and clear a path for those who come next.”

As always, we’d love to hear from you. What big dream are you working on? Who inspires you? Join us on Twitter or Facebook; Subscribe to our Email Tribe or leave a comment below. 

When is the last time you met someone so beautiful that you told yourself she couldn’t possibly be warm and genuine too?

We met online. I had just dipped my toe into the Twitter pool and hadn’t yet figured out the difference between a Tweet and a Follow. I can’t tell you exactly how the conversation started, but a few months later I found myself sitting in the audience at Gilda’s Club in New York City listening to her speak.

As she told the story of her Dad and his 8-year fight through cancer treatment, the memory of my own father in a hospital bed after a life-threating (post colon cancer surgery) infection made my throat swell with emotion. Although my Dad had since recovered, I knew how close we came to losing him and I instantly knew Britta’s “Safe Skincare Revolution” was about so much more than skincare. It was also about honouring her father’s legacy and bringing support to patients and caregivers around the world.

When we met again the next day at a mutual friend’s house in NYC, I had a chance to share my big hairy audacious dream of traveling around the world and volunteering on almost every continent. I explained how I wanted to lay the ground work for a foundation to help other cancer survivors do the same. At the time, my dream was still so new that most people gave me the one eyebrow raised, you want to do what? look. Not Britta. As a fellow cancer survivor and big dreamer, she instantly became one of my biggest champions.

Now, it’s my turn to share her dream with you. Inspired by her Dad’s battle, Britta has developed a safe skincare line and she needs our help to share these products with cancer hospitals across North America. Please take a few minutes to watch her story and share it with your friends and family so we can help her honour her father’s legacy.

So far the project has been 40% funded entirely by community. They want to reach $35k by Wednesday, May 8th at midnight. Yes, that is tomorrow. But, It’s not uncommon for crowd funding campaigns to double their donations on the last few hours.

At the core, Britta’s story is about a daughter who wants to honour her father’s memory and make a difference in the lives of other people facing what she faced. Britta is beautiful both inside and out and even though I never had the pleasure of meeting her father, I know that wherever he is, he is beyond proud of Britta for living her life “on purpose” and using her passion and her dreams to enrich the lives of others.

It’s not easy dreaming big and needing to ask for support, so please join me in giving what you can and sharing Britta’s story. To visit the campaign page, make your donation, and get some fantastic perks, click HERE. 

If you are on Twitter, please click to tweet one of the messages below to help spread the word or share this post on Facebook.

@afreshchapter is proud of @Britta_Aragon for dreaming big. Please support her in honouring her father’s legacy: http://wp.me/p1fcex-1TU

<38 hours left. @Britta_Aragon honour’s father’s legacy with campaign to deliver @CVskinlabs to #cancer hospitals: http://igg.me/at/cvskinlabs

Thank you for being part of our big dreaming community. If you want to nominate a big dreamer in your life who is living life “on purpose”, click here to contact us.