Living the Vision

At the end of July, I attended a workshop with a beautiful and amazingly talented artist named Shiloh Sophia McCloud. She is a member of our church and many of her paintings are on display around the building. She is the leader of a monthly women’s spiritual and bible study group called “Holy Cow” (council of women).The purpose of this workshop was to build a vision plan for our future vocations. This is similar to writing a business plan; however, it incorporates more of what our life style will look like, not just our business. This is especially good for women since we seem to have our energy put into many different areas and all areas seem to flow in and out of our personal lives. Any teacher will tell you that you can’t leave school at school. Lesson plans and ideas come to you at the most random times, you think and even dream about your students. You are a teacher, even when you’re not teaching your subject area. I’m sure this is true for many other career paths that women choose to take.

It has been almost two months since taking the workshop, so I decided to re-read my vision plan and see how I was doing. I was pretty surprised to see that things are starting to fall into place, just like Shiloh said they would.

When I was visioning my vision, three career paths were swirling around my head. So I decided to include all three in my plan.

1. Leading Backpacking and camping trips for inner city youth and women of all ages. There would be a focus on educating people on how to backpack, a spiritual component with meditation and journal writing, and in addition to the hiking, we would practice yoga to get into our bodies.

2. Teaching Yoga to inner city youth and people of all ages. I would provide free classes for impoverished youth at their schools on a regular basis. Grants would pay for my time and the equipment. Then I would also rent studio space (or start my own studio) to teach classes to paying customers.

3. Jewelry Design. I have been interested in jewelry since my junior year of high school. I started out stringing necklaces and bracelets. Since Christmas 2006, I’ve been collecting supplies and tools to start creating more pieces for myself to wear. Eventually Grant and I want to get booths at arts fairs to sell his prints and my jewelry.

It’s hard to work on all three while still maintaining a full time job. After our successful backpacking trip with friends in July that Grant and I planned, I wanted to plan a women’s weekend trip this fall but it has been very difficult to find a weekend that everyone who is interested can go, and I haven’t been that motivated to plan.

The jewelry design has been put on hold for awhile since my desk currently has my sewing machine on it and several other projects that would first have to be moved. I also feel like I need to take a few classes to help my skills. I’ve read about techniques (such as wire wrapping) but it might be better to have an experienced person show me.

I'm proud to say that I'm working really well on #2 (as you could tell from the previous post). In addition to teaching my own class twice a week with my students, I am enrolled in a 200 hour advanced studies / teacher training program at a local yoga studio. I'll talk more about that in the next post!