How am I going? Anywhere near my 10,000 hours yet?

. Blogging scared me and being in business frightened the heck out of me even more. And what about all these current new paradigms that are promising everything I absolutely love but which I find so hellishly hard to understand and practice. So you can imagine that reading about putting in 10,000 hours practice to master these difficult paradigms and these things that scare me, didn’t do my insecurities any good. Not one bit.

Women like me, whom I met on my way to my 10.000 hours

It left me with the question ‘Where am I at with my 10,000 hours in my quest for living life wholesomely different doing all these new things?
I’ve only just started, so how long will it be before I can see the results and more importantly how do I know I’m on the right track and doing the right thing for me?

It got me worried and unsure BUT . . . I realized that I’m becoming more and more skilled in one particular area, that’s for sure. I have definitely put hours of practice in observing others AND myself and those hours are paying off just fine right now, thank you.
So I say to myself; “Hang on a minute! Give up that dramatic tendency of yours and let’s NOT indulge in feeling timid and inadequate when assessing skills in new areas, such as blogging.  Get real here, take a leaf out of your own book and think about what you wrote in your last post. Let’s look, in earnest at what you’ve actually done so far.”

Take blogging, for starters.
I have been blogging for over 2 years now; that is roughly 50 weeks x 30 hours x 2 years = 3,000 hours. However my ’built in’ critic tells me straight away that it is not impressed with this number of hours.
I react; “Pardon me that hurts!”
But then I look at who’s talking, shrug it off and go rummaging to find out if I’ve done any more writing than I am aware of.
And I have!
I’ve actually done years more.

I have lots of years experience as a career consultant in which I observed people, heard their life stories and composed reports about my findings.
I loved doing it too. This work was better than reading any fiction; the twists people’s lives can take are phenomenal!
I got to see quite clearly that life was seldom a straight line from A to B.
Whatever plans these people had, I never once saw any guarantee that they would work out nor did I ever see any evidence that playing it safe was fool proof either.
This line of work shook my own beliefs around reality; what was real and who’s reality were we talking about here anyway?
For example the reality of a self expressed artist was completely different from a money orientated lawyers. Yet sometimes they ended up at the same cross roads asking the same question ‘Is there another way to do this?’
Why?
Because they’d realized that their hearts were not included in their future plans.
I have always admired this kind of honesty. Somewhere amid the turmoil of these realities their heart spoke up to seek another way and that’s where I came in. They’d come and talk to me.

So I asked myself “Is this not the same as what I am doing with my blog; observing and then reporting where it takes me to?
Needless to say, I am very pleased that I’ve clocked up a more sizable number of hours than I had originally thought.
If I take my experience in report writing, that amounts to 8 years x 48 weeks x 25 hours = 9,600 hours. That + 3,000 hours blogging supersedes 10,000 hours.
Wow. Who would have thought!

Next up for scrutiny are the hours I’ve spent understanding new paradigms by using questions, such as ’Is there another way to do this?’
In my working career this was always a very valid question and one that definitely opened new doors.
But it was not until 2004 that I became consciously aware of how useful that question really was for unlocking new paradigms in life.

In 2004, my partner John Channings started Trek Education and its Life Leverage Program and loving him, of course I became involved. And guess what? Learning about how new paradigms and explanation relate to our daily lives had me hooked, so much so that I began to live and breathe it 24/7
I talked from morning till night; John would call it incessantly.

So let’s look at the hours that I’ve spent questioning, learning new explanations and experiencing new paradigms in my life.
That’s at least 52 weeks x 40 hours x 4 years = 9,120 hours invested, hours in which I worked hard to make sense of this information that seemed so topsy turvy at first.
Of one thing I am sure; without putting in these 9,000+ hours, I would NOT be living in my Garden of Eden right now, living in this heaven on earth.
No way would I have known how to let go of the security of a job and city life and how to deal with the insecurity around being in business and generating an income.
Being a few hours short from the 10,000 is no big deal. So it’s fair to say that I’m doing mighty fine in this area too.

So far so good.
However I’ve kept the business area for last as it was something that I had a huge resistance to. I realized that I have put my hours in here too because I quit my job in 2004. Having said that I am still very confused in this area and I’m working through it.
I don’t like the insecurity around income, I don’t like the responsibility of self employment and I don’t even know exactly where I am putting my 10,000 hours in, to learn what exactly.
However what I do like, even love, is our business idea, our WomenLikeMe online learning community and that’s what keeps me going; willing to invest my hours and hours practice. I still get confronted.
Especially at times when I think that the success of the entire business rests all alone on my shoulders even though I’ve got Ann-Marie and John right there beside me.

This brings me to an area where I would be wise to put my hours in.
In learning how to play team and how to create a heart centered team within WomenLikeMe.
I know deep down that WomenLikeMe is a business made in heaven; it will have women, just like me, clocking up their hours, learning in areas that really matter to them and all the while playing team from the heart in a loving community.
How fantastic is that?
Although I am not even close to 10,000 hours, I will get there too. Absolutely. I’m practicing in WomenLikeMe and counting the numbers.

This has been an interesting blog post to write. When I started I had no idea where this would lead me.
For me it demonstrates how easily I underestimate what I am doing, what I have done, where I am at and where I am going.
So dare I say; “watch out Victoria Castle, Marianne Williamson, Glenda Green, Elyse Hope Killoran, here I come?”
However there is still a catch and that is next week’s post.