No Reservations

Tonight, after I finished my last post, I did some blog surfing. I read Debbie Rivers' Simply Inspired Blog where she talked about Yuki's "roadtrip" speech from Escape last week. It got me thinking....and I realized that, with respect to my crafting, I rarely have any reservations about my abilities. I look at things in that part of my life, and automatically assume I can do them. Some of them may be goals that take a long time, but I generally don't worry about how long it will take, or how my final projects will turn out. And most importantly, I think, I don't worry about whether I CAN do them. I just do. And the "just doing" of them without worrying , has lead to some wonderful success.

A perfect example of this would be Ranger's Melting Pot. At my first winter retreat with TAC in San Antonio, TAC hired Suze Weinberg from Ranger to come and show us how to use her Melting Pot. I was enchanted. I'd been eyeing it in our catalogue, but didn't know what it could do, and nobody I knew, knew what it did either. But I watched Suze, and then I went home and got one as a half price item from the catalogue. I'd barely had a chance to play with it when my upline, Pat, called to tell me that Michael's was opening a store three blocks from our houses and they were looking for instructors. She was going to be teaching papercrafting, but thought I might want to go and teach the Melting Pot. So, after only an hour or two of playing with my Melting Pot, I walked into Michael's, bold as you please, and told them I could teach classes on it. I came home, made up a poster-board of samples and took it in a few days later and suddenly I was a teacher. After a test run with the product, and an hour or more of observing Suze and reading her newsletter (she now has a blog), I was confident that I could teach it. No reservations. And I stayed at Michael's as an instructor until last spring when the organization decided that it was cutting out the classroom.

Today, I went to The Art House, a local frame shop that sells my cards for me, and picked up a scrapbook page that I asked them to frame. It just so happens to be of some very dear friends of mine at their wedding that I used as one of my samples for that original Michael's Melting Pot board. Check it out for yourself. (The Art House did an incredible job of finding a mat and frame that accent the scrapbook page perfectly!)




This whole idea of not worrying about what you can and can't do, and about what will or won't happen, fits perfectly with what Yuki talked about at our event. If you told her that she was going to leave her house for 2 months and drive 9,000 miles with all the trials and tribulations that happened on her trip, she'd never have pulled out of the driveway. But then she would not have seen the United States from coast to coast and visited places she'd never seen before and had so much fun. If you look at your various journeys, crafting or otherwise, and are concerned about what might happen, or what might not, you might be keeping yourself from doing something incredible! So I say (just like Nike did several years ago) "just do it" and see how high you can fly.