Hello friends, and welcome to this month’s Joyinmovement newsletter.
September is my birthday month, and I’m doing something REALLY different this month. Something I’ve never done before. Something very personal!
This will be a two-part letter. In this first one, I’m going to share with you my philosophy. It’s partly about life and partly about why I do what I do professionally. After all, I’ve been at this health and fitness wellness thing for, oh I don’t know, say 35 years! So there must be some underlying values that keep me going, right?
Part two of this month’s newsletter will reintroduce you to my two websites (I’ve spruced them up and made lots of changes) and I’ll also share with you just how I create income from them.
But with me, it’s philosophy before business, so let me start by sharing a part of my personal journey with you.
It’s about……….Turning Sideways.
It was 2006 when I started to create my websites and online presence.
Choose a niche and own it. That’s the dominant advice of the land, both then and now, if you’re building a business and parts or all of it will be online.
And if you think about it, this is nothing new: we’re encouraged to stake a claim and focus from early on in our educational careers. Don’t be a jack-of-all-trades, be a king, or in my case, queen of something. Mastery is the goal, and spreading yourself too thin will prevent you from achieving the concentrated understanding that proficiency demands.
There’s nothing at all wrong with mastery, but I disagree that one must focus on something, to the exclusion of all else, in the pursuit of it.
I further disagree that a person can master only one thing. Who came up with this advice? Someone who has little faith in our capabilities, it would seem.
I’m pretty sure I’d die of boredom if I could only ever talk about health and fitness for the rest of my life. Same if I could only talk about travel. Or minimalism. Or the blessings of being organized. Or writing. Or whatever.
None of these areas of interest preclude me from investigating, enjoying, and achieving some level of mastery in the others, so why should I be expected to put all my seeds in one jar? Doing so ignores the fact that if you intentionally use those seeds, expending them on things that interest you and keep you alert and awake and engaged in your explorations, you tend to generate more and more of them. An ever-growing, ever-regenerating jar of seeds to plant.
That is to say, interest isn’t a finite resource. Time absolutely is. As is effort and energy. Attention, likewise, isn’t something you can stretch infinitely.
But interest? Curiosity? The will to keep learning, to keep investigating, to keep exploring, to keep improving oneself? These are pursuits that don’t use up seeds, they multiply them. Following your curiosity is like planting seeds and ending up with a forrest of little trees!
There was a choice I made about a year into creating an online presence, back in 2008, that I wasn’t going to flatten myself for the sake of this new career path I was on.
As I mentioned, the dominant advice was to own a topic and a category. I was setting myself up to be the health and fitness gal, and I was producing content that backed this up. I was emphasizing these aspects of my life. I was on my way.
But I had a moment of clarity in which I realized, holy moly, what if I want to stop teaching fitness classes at some point? What if I don’t want to talk about diet and food anymore? What if I want to, I don’t know, write a book? Or start a podcast about travel topics? Or move to Hawaii and learn Japanese?
I wouldn’t be able to do these things, because the life I’d built for myself would be too mono-dimensional. Too focused and flat.
Yes, I would look very big and sturdy and impressive when viewed head-on, but if I turned sideways?
I’d disappear. Like any flat thing turned sideways.
The idea that I’d already invested so much in something so flat, so fragile, was discouraging. But the possibility that I’d only be able to talk about, write about, care about one thing for the rest of my life? That was scary.
I started to spin, rounding myself out.
I came up with side projects to ensure I was continuing to grow, and redirected my main project, www.Joyinmovement.com, so that I was talking about more than how to eat and exercise. A lot more.
I started talking about neurology and the importance of maintaining our movement map. I started writing about aging well, and the more spiritual and energetics side of life.
I lost some readers. A chunk of my newsletter readers unsubscribed, confused and disoriented by all this spinning, by my no longer focusing exclusively on only the topics of food and exercise.
But new readers took their place. And then more joined them. People who wanted to spin with me. People who were curious and engaged, who didn’t want to put all their seeds in just one jar.
Folks who were keen to explore and get excited and be curious, together. People who wanted to go deeper, explore further, be rounder.
Today, I find that I can turn in any direction, start walking, and there’ll be people right there with me. That I’ve been able to cobble together something this resilient still makes me grin with wonder sometimes, because I can’t always clearly explain what I’m up to and what I hope to learn. I haven’t invested myself completely in one thing to the exclusion of all else.
By many standards, I’m doing it wrong.
And yet it’s never felt so right!
During my birthday month I always take time to reflect, give thanks, and offer up gratitude for all the support and encouragement I receive each day from my Joyinmovement family.
I’d like to share with you this poem from Pablo Neruda. It so encompasses my philosophy and how I live life!
See you tomorrow in Part 2 of this September newsletter!
shelli
You start dying slowly
if you do not travel,
if you do not read,
If you do not listen to the sounds of life,
If you do not appreciate yourself.
You start dying slowly
When you kill your self-esteem;
When you do not let others help you.
You start dying slowly
If you become a slave of your habits,
Walking everyday on the same paths…
If you do not change your routine,
If you do not wear different colours
Or you do not speak to those you don’t know.
You start dying slowly
If you avoid to feel passion
And their turbulent emotions;
Those which make your eyes glisten
And your heart beat fast.
You start dying slowly
If you do not change your life when you are not satisfied with your job, or with your love,
If you do not risk what is safe for the uncertain,
If you do not go after a dream,
If you do not allow yourself,
At least once in your lifetime,
To run away from sensible advice…
-Pablo Neruda
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