How to be bold?

“Next to Resistance, rational thought is the artist or entrepreneur's worst enemy. Bad things happen when we employ rational thought, because rational thought comes from the ego. Instead, we want to work from the Self, that is, from instinct and intuition, from the unconscious.

A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. Its only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.” - Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

So this quote was emailed to me today, June 6th, for the Trust 30 writing challenge.  It's about being bold and doing the thing that I've been hesitating on.  I doubt myself.  The writing challenge asked what I want to accomplish but am afraid to try?  How do I rationalize it away?

Today I went to the MATC adult learning center for a "Dislocated Workers" program.  The career counselor urged us to get into a program that could help us get money for classes.  I have thought about going to MATC for a while now.  I still don't know what I'd like to study.  I found out today that there are waiting lists for most of their degree programs. I don't have the money.  I haven't been in school for a long time.  As I already mentioned, my placement test scores for math were bad.  Those are my doubts and obstacles to going back to school.

I'm pretty good at thinking about my obstacles and not deciding that I can do these things.  I hesitate & doubt myself.  Deep down I know that I'm more capable than I allow myself to be.  I think it's time that I start investigating things.  I'm going to take some steps. 

Travelin Girl

So it's been a few days since my last Trust 30  post. The writing prompts are thought provoking. I haven't been that inspired to write, though. Maybe I should just trust myself and write!

The writing exercise for June 4th is called Travel. The exercise writer assumes that we all have a desire to travel. That's true for me. I'd love to go to Europe. It's been so long since I studied French in high school. I would be pretty rusty, but I'd love to check out Paris.  I've heard that Eastern Europe is beautiful.  I know very little about it, so I want to learn more and maybe visit.  I don't have the money to travel to Europe right now.  I do wanna go, though.

I love this video of Dwele & his band performing the song Travelin Girl.  He's a great songwriter.  I like his style & voice.  The horns are hot!  His iPhone Chronicles videos are funny.  He's a clown.  (Go to Dwele's Youtube page for the IPC videos.)  His homemade music videos look professional & are really creative.  I'm gonna have to blog about a few of em.

I wonder if this is Dwele's apartment or his studio?  By the way I love how his dog Rockstar shows up in most of his homemade videos! Hey Rockstar!

Yesterday's Today

I skipped the Trust 30 writing assignment yesterday. I just reread it and it's more interesting and thought provoking than I thought. Yesterday's writing exercise is called "Today". It's another wide open task, asking me to "describe today using one sentence." What's meant by today? The literal 24 hour period? Can today be more abstract and refer to the society that we live in with its values, behaviors, etc.? Should I use yesterday June 1, 2011 as the day in question? That was the day I received the email prompt.

Liz Danzico, the author of yesterday's writing prompt, brought up an interesting idea when she wrote "If ‘the voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tracks,’ then it is more genuine to be present today than to recount yesterdays." I don't know anything about sailing a ship. I guess the ship has to zigzag because the water is always moving around it. It moves back and forth in response to the water, but still gets to its destination. In the present moment it's going toward its destination, even if it just zigzagged.

I've spent a lot of time dwelling on my past. My previous writing assignment shows that. I was kinda depressed in the past because I internalized the insults and negativity of the past. At any point in time things weren't that bad. But I criticized myself for things I said or did in the past. Thanks be to God, I'm getting out from under that negativity.

Ok, so after all that, I haven't written a sentence to summarize today. I'm going to refer to today, June 2, 2011. I went to MATC to take their college placement test. I'm trying to get into a job training program with funding from the county job center. So, to summarize that experience in one sentence, I would say:
Today I found out that I'm not very good at algebra, and I'm ok with it.