surround yourself with good
Happy Monday! If you didn’t get a chance to check out last week’s post, I wrote one entitled “find your why,” which focused on finding your purpose or why you do the things you do. Everyone has his or her own reason for doing something, which is why it’s so important you find your own motivation: your life is your own and not anyone else’s.
It’s so important to surround yourself with people who bring out the best in you and who want to see you succeed. Knowing who to surround yourself with also involves knowing yourself and what you want out of life. It’s finding your tribe and then supporting and encouraging each other’s growth.
A very fun thing has happened recently in my life because 2018 is literally already so amazing. I’ve been invited to join three separate improv teams, two of which are all-female improv teams: one musical and one non-musical. The practices for the all-lady teams have been especially fun because there’s already a pre-established common ground over which we can bond.
When I was in boarding school, the highlight of each year for me was a themed 1980s dance. My girl friends and I would all go to the local Goodwill or raid someone's mom's closet so we could find the perfect outfits to look totally ridiculous in while we danced the night away to synthesizers and my constant requests of “Sussudio” and literally any Hall and Oates song (I am a Philly girl after all).
Have you ever met someone you just knew right away was going to be important in your life? That’s the feeling I’ve gotten from these two all-female teams. To be clear, the teams I’m on with my guy friends are amazing because I am so lucky and have the greatest teammates around across the board, but sometimes (outside of a team environment where trust has been built) you run into scenework with guys who don’t listen well enough to relate and respond to what’s actually happening. It's better to ask someone to repeat himself than to fill in the blanks yourself.
The most recent practice one of the teams had included an exercise that hyper-focused on listening. It was amazing. The scenes were funny because they were simple, relatable, and free. And that practice ended in one of the greatest ways imaginable: with a group of incredible women having a conversation about the dynamic teen girls of the early 2000s where we were all agreeing on the different movies, TV shows, songs, and scenes we loved from that era.
Surround yourself with likeminded, fun, silly, kind, hardworking people. You don’t always find them right away, but the more effort you put into something, the more you eventually get out of it!
Thank you so much for reading, and, as always, if you have any pressing questions or if you want to discuss something further with me, please subscribe below, follow me on Instagram or Twitter, or reach out to me on the “contact” page. I’m so grateful you're here and that I’ve been getting a lot of really challenging questions and even better feedback from a community all over the world. I couldn’t do this without you! So THANK YOU! I’m here for you, and I love hearing from you, too! You’re the best, and you have everything you need inside of you! Please believe it! Starve your ego, feed your soul - and follow your heart!