Yikes. I hate cold calling at the best of times. But I sucked it up, said I’d do it, and hung up the phone. Over the next few days, I worked my way down the list of numbers. Again and again, I encountered people who were kinda pissed at me for calling. I’d interrupted their day and was trying to sell them something they clearly didn’t want.
You see, up until that time, I had life pretty much mapped out (haha, or at least I thought I did). I was running a business that I assumed was going to be a lifelong career, I was in a relationship that I assumed was going to last forever and I had a neat little plan of how everything would unfold for me.
And when it all fell apart (in a pretty spectacular fashion) I was left dealing with 2 things. The pain caused by all the chaos, and the bonus pain caused by the complete void left in my life where all my well-laid plans used to be.
Suddenly it felt like I was peering into a big black hole of nothingness.
So here I am, almost a month on, after a whirlwind trip. Back home and in need of finding that stillness again. Wanting to connect to the grounded feeling that the universe has my back and that I’m exactly where I need to be. So I figured I would explore that moment again: The window of time when I shifted from total anxiety to total presence. From panic to happy stillness. And try and understand how it happened so I can remember it like a favourite recipe whenever I need it.
As you may, or may not know, earlier on in my entrepreneurial journey, I dealt with a pretty massive failure. The business I was running fell apart, and the impact was um, catastrophic, to say the least. That might sound like I’m being overdramatic, but trust me, it was every bit as awful as it sounds — bankruptcy, losing investors’ ( some of whom were dear friends and family) money, bad press, having to sell my house & ultimately, the loss of pretty much everything I held dear.
So yeah, it was bad.
Often people mistake Campbell’s words ‘Follow your bliss’ to mean that you should just do the fun stuff. But in reality, the fun stuff and the stuff that lights you up can look quite different. Don’t get me wrong, I’m having a great time, but following your bliss is not always the easiest option. It is, quite often, the scariest option. The option that requires immense courage.
I remember sitting in a meeting one day, with the event crew, looking around the room thinking ‘I don’t even know half these people. They don’t know me. I’m working on an event I don’t even recognise and building something that doesn’t resonate with our brand whatsoever’. We’d gone from running award-winning boutique eco surf music festivals to producing 15,000 capacity shows with commercial lineups & massive scale infrastructure that was about as far away from ‘intimate’ as you could get.
It felt like a runaway train. Like we were too far down the track to do anything but push on.
So I’m sitting here at a surf camp in the middle of the jungle in Java. My arms are aching from this morning’s surf, my belly is full of the banana pancakes I had at breakfast and I’m hanging out with a super nice bunch of surfers from all over the planet.
In short, life is pretty damned good right now. Days like these make me wanna press pause. Because seriously? This is as good as it gets.
The tide is too low to surf right now so we’re all kicking back and soaking this awesomeness in.
This little gem of wisdom came from Lucy, a friend in the live events industry. I’ll always remember the day she told me about it. She was working as our event manager, and we’d just run a kick-ass festival.
It was the day after show day, when the adrenaline buzz has worn off and you’re left with an overwhelming sense of exhaustion, mentally & physically. We were eating lunch and talking about the event. I was questioning everything… Was it good enough? Did anyone even like it? Maybe we could have done better?
