It’s Thursday, so I’m Crafting my Life! Today I’m sharing a guest post from Audra Costello, about standing on the diving board and being afraid to leap. If you’d like to share a story from your own Crafting my Life journey, drop me a line and let me know!

The summer I was five, my parents said I had to take swimming lessons until I passed “Beginners”. It took me awhile, but I didn’t mind the lessons on the first, second or third time through. I enjoyed splashing around in the water and the teachers were nice. The part of every trip to the local pool I dreaded was the moment when the lesson was over. My class was taken to the diving board and, one at a time, we took turns jumping off. I watched as each child in front of me stepped onto the low board, walked or ran to the edge and pushed themselves into the water. Some bicycled their legs for the fraction of a second they were in the air while others made their bodies go completely stiff as they sliced through the water. The instructors were waiting nearby to help anyone who struggled in their swim to the safety of the ladder. It was foolproof and I knew this. In my head. Try as I might, I couldn’t make my feet jump off the diving board. I was paralyzed by my own fear.

This is the first time I felt this way, but not the last. My life has been full of these moments where, despite my extreme desire, I just can’t move myself to action. I can see the disconnect between where I am and where I want to go, but I can’t push myself to get there. I’m on the board and I can see the ladder, but the uncertainty that lies between is just too scary.The worst part is knowing that I am the only one holding me back.

The experiment that evolved into my blog, Little Tiger and the Milk Belly Princess, afforded me more opportunities than I could have imagined back on that day in August of 2010 when I decided to see what would happen if I stopped buying toys for my children. I learned about sourcing craft materials at Zero Landfill and began a really rewarding teaching experience at a local arts center. Every week I work with a fantastic group of six-to-eight year old girls who are excited about what I have to teach them. Yet, those opportunities have raised difficult questions. The things I look forward to only make up a small fraction of my time and lately that has me questioning the choices I’ve made and continue to make.

Why is the part of the day I’m most excited about only an hour or two at the very end? Why is it that all I find fulfilling in my life–raising my children, crafting, blogging–pushed to the margins? I’ve been teaching high school English full-time for 14 years. I’ve never done anything this long before and lately I’ve been thinking that this part of my life has run its course. For a lot of reasons that I won’t get into here, I can’t muster the enthusiasm I once had.

I can see where I want to go, but I’m back on the diving board again and I can’t jump. What am I afraid of? Disappointment? Failure? That I can’t even comprehend the extent to which I might experience these? That my dad will yell at me?

Growing up I was repeatedly told to “keep [my] options open,” but it was simultaneously communicated to me that playing it safe was the way to go. At the end of my senior year at The College of Wooster, I was offered an opportunity to stay on campus for an extra year to run the college’s writing center. When I called home and told my parents about this, they pretty much said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, that’s flattering and all, but it’s really not going to get you anywhere.” Despite what they said about options, they both believed in playing it safe. To this day they still believe if you don’t know precisely what you’re doing, jumping will make you very, very sorry.

My word for 2012 is authenticity and I want to embrace living an authentic life. I know that this is not achieved by playing it safe. I can see where I want to go, but I need to make the jump. And I’m terrified. What’s the next step?

Audra Costello began blogging at Little Tiger and the Milk Belly Princess in 2010 when she decided to see what would happen if she stopped buying her two young daughters toys for 16 months and made them instead. It turns out that only good things became of that little adventure as she and her children grew more creative together.

It’s Thursday, so I’m Crafting my Life! Today I’m sharing a guest post from Amy Lee, about a conversation she had with a stranger. If you’d like to share a story from your own Crafting my Life journey, drop me a line and let me know!

Have you ever had a conversation with a complete stranger that helped you realize your life purpose? This happened to me.

Four months ago, I had the greatest conversation with a practicing counsellor from Los Angeles. For two hours, we talked about the emotional consequences of our jobs.

This lady counsels troubled children. All of them grew up in neglected and abusive environments. She finds it emotionally challenging to counsel them because most of their stories break her heart.

Since ‘the system’ only allows her to help the children until they improve in school, usually a few months, she doesn’t have enough time to help them work through the issues and move on with their lives. She knows most of them will eventually join gangs, use drugs to cope, or use their sexuality to find acceptance.

This counsellor reminded me that we humans are social beings. One of our basic needs is to want to be connected with other people. The connection with the ones who created us (mother and father) is the primary connection we seek. When this basic need isn’t satisfied, we will seek it else where, even if it’s self destructive to our being.

I thought about this afterwards. A lot.

During our conversation, I felt so lucky. Lucky that I was born into a family that cared about me. Lucky that I chose a profession that allows me to witness and feel love in its most elemental form. That conversation made me realize how important my job is. I provide mothers and each of their children the experience of feeling loved and being loved. I create a space for them to connect with their hearts and strengthen their relationship.

During a photography session, I feel the love the mother has for her child. I feel her joy, her pride, and their shared happiness. I see truth in them and they move me. Every mother and child I work with, whether the child is young or grown, inspires me to be a better mother, and a better daughter.

My conversation with the counsellor also made me realize how important my job is as a mother. I want the best for my children and I want them to live meaningful and purposeful lives. My duty is to love, nurture and guide them. My job is to help give them opportunities to find their strengths to realize their full potential. I want my children to live the life I envisioned for them because when they do, they will change the world.

This is my dream for my daughter. This is also my dream for all children and so this is my promise:

I will provide mothers with experiences, tools and resources to inspire us to love, nurture and guide our children to live meaningful and purposeful lives.

Photography is one of the tools to get to this bigger place.

With photography, I document the love between a mother and each of her children. I provide children doors back to the memories and the emotions of the relationship they have with their mother. These children will grow up knowing why they are loved, why their mother is proud of them and what dreams are bestowed upon them. I believe this is food for their souls.

I know what I’m doing is changing my world. It is also changing the world of the people I touch.

Amy Lee is the founder of The Connection We Share. She is in the process of building a blog to inspire mothers to raise children who will change the world. In the mean time, you can visit her Facebook page for her photography work. Amy has an 18 month daughter, Elle. She is proud of her daughter for being a fearless explorer. Her favourite memory with her daughter is hanging out in their backyard picking strawberries and smelling flowers.

It’s Thursday, so I’m Crafting my Life! I’m hard at work editing the Crafting my Life e-book, so today I am welcoming guest blogger Jolene Galbreath, who shares her personal and professional journey. If you would like to chime in and share your own story, please drop me a line – I’d love to have you!

I have lived with passion, enthusiasm, integrity, joy, depression, exuberance, painstaking organisation and wilful spontaneity. My highs have always been high, my lows have been unexpected and mean and all of it has been accompanied by the sense that I may be a fraud and that at any moment I could lose it all. Lose myself, even. It was not until I stumbled across Amber’s blog that something clicked into place. I realised that I was not living with intention.

As the daughter of a serial entrepreneur, I am inclined to believe that the drive to reach for the next big thing, to have a wandering eye for opportunity and the desire to try all things is partially genetic. I also feel that we, particularly women, receive a lot of messages telling us that we should be grateful for what we have and to just ‘be a bit more realistic.’ I think that phrase can be safely interpreted as a directive to lower your expectations and stop making waves. I’ve railed against such directives for as long as I can remember. I railed. Railing is exhausting–even when done well. Fundamentally, railing is reactive, it stems from a place of frustration and disenfranchisement. You have to plan so many contingencies when your life is a responsive one and even with good planning it can feel as though you are falling from one calamity into the next. What could I possibly gain from carrying myself as though I was lurching through life? I can see, now, that the drive to do as much, see as much, give as much and live as fully as possible was leaving me feeling like I was just hanging on, instead. My life was not so much crafting as it was a toddler’s attempt at collage.

Something had to give before I gave.

Finding Amber’s blog was important in giving words and focus to what I was trying to do in my life. It was such a relief to find that I wasn’t the only one going through these transformations; that it wasn’t all handwringing, navel gazing and self indulgence. Looking through the posts, it was clear that Amber wasn’t treading water like I felt I was. My husband would tell me that he couldn’t work out what I really wanted to do. He couldn’t see why I was spending the energy holding onto Plan C, Plan D or Plan E when it had to be Plan A or Plan B. It felt like treading water to both of us and I had been doing it for so long that it threatened to take me under.

During this time, I was already training as a breastfeeding counsellor with the National Childbirth Trust (UK). A large part of the course is about reflective practice and being congruent. It was this process that prepared me to think about living with intention and crafting my life. I have always wanted to be a doctor. Well, except for the year when I was seven when I wanted to be a stewardess (as they were called then). The calling has always been there and as a student I had prepared accordingly. At seventeen, I was certain that I would be a physician working with the most vulnerable. The world was black and white and I was prepared to fix the problems of those who came to me. At university, I quickly realised that I knew very little of the world and I realised that I was in no way ready to be a doctor.

At eighteen I was living with intent. I set about becoming a scientist to learn not just about life’s what’s and how’s but also its why’s. I moved from the US to the UK. I completed a PhD in Biology, taught at a university, took up causes, relearned how to knit and sew, picked berries, canned jam, had children, and moved around. But somewhere along the way, the intent was washed away by the realities of just living. I still held the dream of someday being a doctor but was also keeping as many plates in the air as was possible–some because they were interesting and others because I felt an obligation to them. Each plate seemed important, I could think of none that could be put down. By the time I was a post-doctoral researcher with two children, an allotment and some chickens, my life was a full, sticky decoupage jumble.

Around this time last year, when we were still living in Aberdeen, Scotland, I knew that the autumn entry round would be my one shot at medical school. In each of the summers prior to it, I had considered whether the time was right, yet. Each time it was clear that I was not ‘there,’ yet. I visited and planned, contacted admissions, checked my qualifications. Plans, I had them. In the end, it was a case of the best laid schemes and all that when my husband accepted a post at the University of Bath. At the end of the summer of 2010 we moved to Bristol, England. A new city with new challenges and opportunities. Time for my one shot. I aimed at the moon, and as they say, I landed among the stars–at King’s College London (about 100 miles from our home in Bristol).

So, here I am. A mature student facing the challenges that so many women face when they have experienced a period of time from work, want to improve their education or attempt a change of field. As a non-traditional student, traditional sources of funding such as tuition loans are not available to me and the high street banks have recently withdrawn professional development loans for medical students. Like many women who have stayed home to care for children of other family members or who have otherwise experienced a career break, I am finding the lack of accessible funding a real barrier to returning to education. To get there, I am pulling out all of the stops and drawing on all of my experiences along the way. Time has become my most precious resource and I am grateful to have had a year of practicing living intentionally. Owning my choices and also my responses to situations beyond my control. Situations ranging from playdates that fall through losing time alone to get things done to coping with discriminatory funding policies. All that I have absorbed about living with intent, making considered choices, prioritising honestly and being congruent is coming together so that I might rise to the biggest challenge and opportunity of my life. I know that the time and energy I have invested in creating a social network over the past year will mean that our children will continue to have a relatively normal life. We will miss the endlessness of time that we have had this year but the quality of our time will not be diminshed.

And all that reflective practice? It will come in very handy when blogging about my experiences. I have been toying with the idea of committing to writing a blog for a few years. However, it has always seemed like a big commitment-it is one thing to generate early posts when you are full of ideas but to sustain it with new and maturing content seemed more than I was quite ready for. Now, I am thrust into a situation where I am hoping that my writing will support and enrich my dream. All of a sudden, I’m telling my story to anyone who will listen. I tell it with a sense of urgency because a dream that has been decades in the making may slip from my grasp if I can’t overcome a the age-old barrier of money. All of the work in reflective practice has helped me learn how to relate my experiences to the experiences of those I am in contact with and to explore their relevance and in the wider context of our lives. In many ways, blogging about my journey will be a great form of reflective practice because there will be opportunities for others to give feedback and I will also regularly be faced with revisiting what I have done.

Now I can see that being a Jolene of all trades is congruent with being someone who lives with intent. I do not have to choose one or the other. It will still be messy and I can choose how I cope with the mess. A well crafted life does not have to be a narrow one. Perhaps best of all, a life lived with intention can be fluid with room for growth and change and, perhaps most importantly, changing your mind. I’m ever so grateful for having stumbled across Amber’s blog and, as a consequence, the other blogs that it has led me to.

Jolene is a student and scientist, mother to TheCollective and wife of TheOtherDoctor. She seeks out gezelligheid and strives to live in a state of hygge. (Also, she made me look up the definitions of gezelligheid and hygge.) Someday, her downfall will be precipitated by her utterance of the phrase, “Hey, I could do that.” Through necessity, she is crowdfunding her way through medical school, relying on the kindness of strangers. She blogs about her experiences at www.whitecoatbluestocking.co.uk.