Clicking Publish

For a long time I have felt like I am at the edge of greatness. I try to surround myself with really smart people and big thinkers, hoping to soak up just a little of their awesome. I was around greatness, but just far enough away from the epicenter of greatness to not consider myself great (maybe just good-ish). I haven't really felt like anyone would care what I had to say or care about what I was doing.

I currently have no less than 10 draft posts that I have written over the past couple months. Most of them are completely finished just waiting for me to hit the publish button. But something has been holding me back from sending them out for the whole world to see. For a while I had convinced myself that these posts that I had written weren't good enough or would not be well received.

I spent today at #EdCampLdr Chicago, again surrounding myself with greatness. Overall it was a good day filled with thought provoking conversations. I started my afternoon in a session called "Moving Beyond the Status Quo" lead by +Jimmy Casas and +Jeff Zoul. We took a few minutes at the start of the session to introduce ourselves to the people sitting around us and then we took some time to answer these three questions on our own: What will I start doing next year? What will I continue to do next year? and What will I stop doing next year? I started to reflect on the year that had passed and what my goals were for the upcoming year. After a few minutes a couple people shared their answers to those three questions. As people were sharing I (as I'm sure many of the people in the room did) started to notice a theme.

image from www.brenebrown.com/my-blog/

Like a little first grader I almost started bouncing in my seat and raising my hand ... I had a connection between what was being discussed in this session and the book that I'm currently reading - Daring Greatly. Almost everything that people were talking about had to do with fear or vulnerability. The conversation was focused on how fear keeps us from doing things because we are worried what the status quo will think, more specifically in the realm of blogging. Matt Coaty said something that really stuck close to home for me, he said that we need to give ourselves permission to change and grow. That is when the 10+ draft posts popped into my head, I was holding them back and in turn holding myself back. My commitment issues and fear of being less than great were stopping me from hitting that publish button.

I'm not going to go back and publish all of those old posts, that's not really the point. The point is that I'm going to work on building courage and confidence in what I have to say and in what I do. I am going to Dare Greatly, because as Brené Brown says, "I am enough."