Taking a Leap of Faith & Sharing My Dreams……

I’ve often heard it said that the first step to making your dreams a reality is to share your dreams – to put them out there in the “universe”. But sharing your dreams with others, whether in a public forum like this one, or even sometimes just with the people in your life, can be a really scary thing – What if people laugh?  What if people tell you it’s unrealistic?  

As a blogger, and a “public figure” here in my own little corner of the blogosphere, I’ve certainly received plenty of negativity and even personal attacks over the years about things I have done in my business, choices I’ve made, directions I’ve taken, etc.  As someone who needs work in the confidence arena (as I shared in my last post), it’s been a tough journey to teach myself not to take it personally. To shrug it off, and to keep on keeping on.

Surrounding myself with people who are positive and encouraging is what has really helped me keep going, and slog through it all, and I am blessed to say that my husband and family have always been behind me 100% of the way. But I also want YOU to know that I feel blessed and thankful for your support and encouragement. It may sound kind of cheesy, but I really do treasure each and every one of your comments, and it means a lot to me that you take the time out of your busy schedule to visit me here and leave your comments.  Whenever I’m having a rough day, I often come back to my blog and read through my comments, finding it just the lift I need. So thank you!

So getting back to our dreams….as I mentioned yesterday, my guiding statement for 2012 is “Face your fears…Reach for your dreams”. So what are the art-related dreams that swirl around in my head when I lay awake thinking at night? {deep breath}

• To get my work published. The top two publications that I’m going to aim for are the Somerset Studio magazines (i.e. Art Journalling, Somerset Studio, Somerset Memories) and Cloth, Paper, Scissors magazine.
• To start teaching mixed media courses online
• To travel around the world teaching at mixed media events like Julie Fei-Fan Balzer or Donna Downey (two of my “art heroes”)
• To get my artwork licensed and reproduced on various products (i.e. with a company like Demdaco)

Now some of these are short-term goals (the first two in particular), and others are ”someday I really, really hope so” goals (i.e. the last two goals).  And truthfully, it feels almost ridiculous putting these goals in writing – particularly the last two goals – because they feel almost out of the realm of possibility (for me anyways), but then one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in life and in business so far is that BIG DREAMS yield BIG RESULTS while little dreams yield little results.

So now that some of my dreams are “out-there”, I’m feeling accountable to making sure I don’t just dream, but actually DO.  Any of you want to join me in this and take the leap by sharing your dreams, and putting them “out-there” into the “universe”?

Here’s the art journal page that I shared a sneak peek of in the photo above – it was a writing-intense layout starting to dive into my dreams. You can click on each picture to take a closer look.