Friday 18 September 2009

Do be brave, Do be happy

I am currently finding myself rather dumbstruck at the magnitude of awesome things that are going on in my life right now. Today seems to have completely gone off the awesomeness scale and is carrying right on up through the stratosphere.

First of all it's payday ... which might not seem all that awesome but it means that I can pay back one of my Do-nators. Paul Carruthers (@paulcarruthers) blew me away when he donated £100 - firstly because we'd only recently met on twitter when he made the donation and secondly because he was doing his own fundraising at the time and training to cycle from Lands End to John O'Groats! The doodle I did for Paul is below {well it would be if blogger was uploading the image! in the meantime you can see it here} and will be winging its way to him as soon as possible :-)

Second of all I found out that my application to the Leadership Unleashed programme was successful!!!! It made my day when I saw a tweet from Michele Taylor (@mou5e) to say that she'd found out she was accepted to the programme ... when I checked my email and found out that I was accepted too I burst into tears of joy! You'll see from my recent tweets that I was far from confident about applying:

"writing my application for a leadership programme is tricky when I don’t see myself as a leader :-("
"… my application can be condensed to 5 words: “take a chance on me” … please keep all fingers and toes crossed until further notice"
"in a rare moment of bravery I’ve just submitted an application to the Leadership Unleashed development programme: http://ow.ly/oFhQ … gulp"

The next 12 months look set to be somewhat of an adventure - I'm looking forward to [i.e. feeling mild terror at the thought of] having my preconceptions of who I am and what I'm capable of stretched to their very limits.

Thirdly, I went for my first singing lesson in about a month. I started lessons about 3 months ago and I'm completely loving it. Turns out that I've actually got a pretty good voice - I just need to learn how to control and amplify my instrument :-) If you've ever fancied learning to sing then I insist you find a singing teacher or join your local community choir ... whether I spend the lesson singing scales, humming like an angry bee or singing the 'Tale As Old As Time' (from Beauty and the Beast) I always leave my lesson on a complete high ... and it only costs me £16 for each lesson!

Fourthly, and finally, I had the privilege of spending a transformational 30 minutes chatting with Duke Stump (@skratta) on skype. Duke was one of the Do Lectures speakers who I was lucky enough to connect with ... in an irreverent piss-taking kind of a way ... and he offered to give me a bit of coaching after the Do Lectures dust had settled. Despite *slight* technological difficulties (all at Duke's side of the Atlantic I'm fairly certain ;-) it was a deeply thought provoking and challenging conversation that ended up with quite an extraordinary revelation ... it's a bit early for me to spill the beans but I promise that as soon as I can put it into words I'll share my 'big audacious hairy goal' with you. I'm so grateful to Duke for sneaking up behind me and shoving me over the edge of the clifftop ... I'm sure it won't be a wholly graceful descent but he's certainly got my '100 days of Do' off to a high velocity start ... and hopefully I'll find my Doing wings on the way down :-)

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