Last week was the 14th anniversary of Emerge Positive®.
It’s honestly a little hard for me to believe that fourteen years have passed since I sat down at my computer and published the very first Emerge Positive post on Facebook, especially when I think about how different my vision for the company was back then compared to what it has become today.
When I first created Emerge Positive®, the idea was pretty simple. I wanted to share positive messages and affirmations that might help someone start their day feeling a little more inspired, hopeful or connected to themselves.
And because I like to be prepared, I took this new idea very seriously.
For weeks, I went through books, journals and notes I had collected over the years and cataloged some of my favorite inspirational quotes. I knew I wanted Emerge Positive to post something every single day, and committing to that felt much less intimidating if I knew I already had plenty of content ready to go.
So before I ever shared Emerge Positive® publicly, I had three full months of daily posts prepared.
I was ready.
Or at least I thought I was.
On August 19, 2012, I published the first quote on Facebook, officially launching Emerge Positive® into the world. I remember feeling excited and proud that I had finally taken this idea I had been thinking about and actually done something with it.
And then, almost immediately after I hit “post,” I heard that familiar inner voice.
You’re supposed to be writing these yourself.
Not sharing other people’s quotes.
Writing my own.
I can still remember the feeling that washed over me when I realized what that meant.
Pure horror.
I had just announced Emerge Positive® to everyone I knew, told them I was going to be posting something positive every single day, and now the three months of content I had so carefully prepared suddenly didn’t matter.
What in the world was I going to post tomorrow?
And even if I somehow came up with something for tomorrow, what about the day after that? And the day after that?
I had absolutely nothing prepared.
Sometimes the Plan Changes After You Begin
After a short-lived panic, I decided to do what I had already been doing every morning for years.
I meditated.
The next morning, I sat quietly and simply asked what I should write that day. I didn’t try to come up with a month’s worth of ideas or figure out how I was going to keep doing this indefinitely. I just asked for the message I needed for that one day.
And it came.
I wrote it down, posted it and then did the same thing the next morning.
And the next.
That became my practice for years. Each morning I would meditate, listen for the message and then share what came through.
When I look back at that experience now, what strikes me most is that the path I had so carefully planned wasn’t actually the path I was supposed to take.
But I couldn’t have known that until I took the first step.
If I had continued planning and preparing for another three months before launching Emerge Positive®, I probably would have created hundreds more posts that I ultimately wasn’t meant to use. It was the act of actually beginning that showed me where I needed to go next.
And I think there’s something really important in that.
We Want to Know Before We Go
Most of us would love to know exactly how something is going to unfold before we begin.
We want to know that the new career is going to work out before we leave the old one. We want to understand how the business will make money before we start it. We want to know where we’re going to live, how the relationship will turn out, whether we’ll be successful and preferably how long it’s all going to take.
We want a map.
And I understand that desire because I certainly have it too.
But fourteen years of building Emerge Positive® has taught me that some of the most important parts of our lives simply can’t be mapped out in advance.
Sometimes we don’t get the next piece of information until we’re willing to act on the information we already have.
That’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately because I’m once again in a season where I don’t have everything figured out. My husband and I are thinking about what retirement looks like for us, I’m building Emerge Positive® in completely new ways, and I’m spending a lot of time thinking about what I want the next decade of my own life to look and feel like.
There are a lot of things I know.
And there are still plenty of things I don’t.
But I’m learning to be okay with that.
Because I don’t need to know exactly how the next ten years are going to unfold in order to begin creating them.
Neither do you.
Action Creates Clarity
I’m a big believer in dreaming, envisioning, planning and taking the time to get clear about what we want. In fact, that’s a huge part of the work I teach through Design Your Next Decade™.
But there comes a point when thinking about the life we want has to turn into actually doing something to create it.
We can spend years thinking about changing careers, starting a business, writing a book, moving somewhere new, prioritizing our health, traveling more, making new friends or finally pursuing something we’ve quietly wanted for ourselves.
We can research it. We can make lists about it. We can talk about it with our friends. We can even create a beautiful plan for how we’re going to do it someday.
But without action, nothing changes.
And perhaps that’s the piece we sometimes forget.
Action doesn’t have to come after clarity. Sometimes action is what creates clarity.
You take a step, learn something you couldn’t have known before, adjust your direction and take another step.
That’s how Emerge Positive® began fourteen years ago, and when I look at everything that has grown from that first Facebook post, I realize how little I actually needed to know when I started.
I didn’t need to understand what Emerge Positive® would become.
I didn’t need fourteen years of content.
I didn’t even need three months.
As it turned out, I just needed tomorrow.
How to Take Your Next Step.
Last week, I asked you to think about what you want the next ten years of your life to feel like.
And perhaps that question opened something up for you. Maybe you have an idea of what you want, or perhaps you’re simply beginning to recognize that you’d like something to be different.
You don’t have to know exactly how you’re going to get there.
Instead of trying to figure out the entire path, ask yourself a much simpler question:
What’s one step I can take?
Maybe it’s sending an email you’ve been thinking about sending, researching an idea, signing up for a class, having a conversation, putting something on the calendar or finally beginning the thing you’ve been telling yourself you’ll get to “someday.”
Whatever it is, take the step.
You may discover that it leads exactly where you expected it to go.
Or, like me fourteen years ago, you may take that first step and immediately discover that you’re supposed to go in a completely different direction.
Either way, you’ll be moving.
And sometimes that’s all life needs from us to show us what comes next.
You don’t need to have it all figured out. You just need to be willing to take the first step.
Positively,
Deanne
