A budding lifestyle guru, whose goal was to empower women, set up shop in this county a couple of years ago. It must have seemed a good, growing place for she and her husband to build a practice that could get bigger, blossoming into something that would take her national.
I volunteered at one of her events this spring, one that she had to downsize before it ran. I saw the limits of the event, though needing to take care of my sister pulled me away.
This fall, though, she made an announcement. She and the husband are pulling up stakes and heading back to Los Angeles, following their own marketing advice and focusing on success in a place where they know it can be had.
Now, as a lifestyle guru, this is a positive choice, moving forward, but it is also a negative choice. This area just was a lose for her, unable to give her back the spark, the element, the audience she needed to grow the way she needed to grow. She needs people to share her dreams, to populate her dream world, so it can expand and gain momentum & presence.
Some of her local staff are staying, building a new and smaller scaled organization to service the audience that she did get in the area, but their dreams are much smaller, much less ambitious, much more limited.
Human nature is the same everywhere.
Human culture, though, the collective priorities, traditions and energy, are not. The group dynamics differ and are very difficult to change.
It is very hard to get into the flow, to catch the energy, to follow the power lines if they are very, very weak where you are. You can’t light a fire if the tinder is all wet.
Watching a bright, young, marketing savvy couple come to the area and then leave again when they realized it wasn’t nurturing their dreams in the way that they needed is certainly something to note as I wonder about the possibility of nurturing my own dreams.
The solitary nature of my own path makes big moves very hard for me, but it certainly can be argued that only big moves can make any change at all in my circumstances. If I want an audience that gets the joke, need peers who get the nuance, need friends who open with compassion, something has to give.
New Year, New Commitment, New Life, as I said in 1997, 18 years ago now.
New seems required, still.
May you have a prosperous, joyous and enlightening 2015. Happy New Year to you.
Callan 