Part 1 -- It's summertime. You'll never guess what I've been up to....
Trying to find my bliss while living my brand!
Dammit..."Finding my bliss" ....That sounds so flipping woo woo!!!! But I literally cannot find better words to describe what is happening right now.
OH WELL! Here we go.....
So way back during my first launch of my Launch your Brand Program I ended up having success that I had never experienced before. I sold out two programs, and I had more money in my bank account than I have ever had before.
I had been working for THREE years to achieve this and finally I had launched. My dream appeared to have come true, but then I looked around and realized. "NOW WHAT?!" I had achieved my financial and professional goals, but my personal life was sort of in shambles....
I was still living with my mom (we were both recovering from breakups)
I was living in a city that wasn't inspiring me the way I wanted to be inspired
My dating life sucked big time
I wasn't achieving my health goals.
I wasn't seeing friends very often
So in one way I was feeling happy and grateful for my successes, in another way I was feeling completely miserable and incomplete.
So being the adventurer that I am, I thought to myself, well I just need to travel more. If I would travel more that would make me happy. So I started planning trips. My first big trip of the summer was to do a one month sublet in Portland, Oregon, which is basically my other home. I lived there for a decade, two years ago, and go back often because all of my college friends and friends from my 20's live there.
Fast forward to now, in the last month, all the above issues have been addressed and figured out, and I'm feeling like I'm on the path to some serious bliss making!
I finally feel some sort of content satisfaction. I feel inspired. I feel my best work is about ready to be born.
And I did this by making a commitment to myself to start "living my brand." I would think... "What would pinup Jenna do?" or better yet "What would Amelia Earhart do?" all of my problems started instantly solving themselves.
I will show you how I did this.
What Would Amelia Do?!
WWAD!? Amelia Earhart. That vivacious, strong independent, thought leader.... That fantastical superwoman!!!!
She was the inspiration for my brand, an adventurer like myself. She was the groundbreaking first woman pilot to fly across the Atlantic by herself. She was a professor and a woman's right activist. (Both things that I am too!)
She was even an associate editor at Cosmopolitan magazine. (Amazeballs!)
This girl was living her bliss and breaking ground doing so. She fell in love with something she was passionate about, and it lead to her getting paid a lot of money to do it. She even saved up $1,000 to learn how to fly (which was an insane amount of money at the time.)
She had the passion, and she had the drive. She wanted to influence people and be a good influence for women. This is why I love Amelia.
Her first attempt at the 1937 world flight was on my birthday. That bad-ass bitch is my hero!!!
People followed Amelia because she went into the unknown, she embraced adventure, she lived a life that wasn't common.
If we could learn anything from Amelia, It could be that the more interesting, inspiring, passionate and real you are, the more likely it would be for people to want to follow you. A lot of people followed her then, and people are still fascinated with her today. We could say she has a pretty successful brand for being a dead lady, don't ya think!?
When you think about your brand, Do you want to just be known for selling shit on etsy, or doing something you only sort of care about....
OR
do you want to be.....legend.....(wait for it).... dary???
Don't just be outside the box, be out of this world!
Over the next five days, you will be learning 10 Lessons, how to "live your brand" and "find your bliss" by following the lessons I learned on a crazy road trip I took this summer and my attempt to be a little bit more "on brand." The process is simple, it requires some introspection, some adventure, and it requires to to be okay with thinking differently than the status quo.
From my personal philosophy, living your personal brand is living your dream, creating the life that you want with your passions and interests, to in turn, inspire others to do the same for themselves.
When you live your life by example for your ideal client -- you become more interesting. When people remember you, they feel like they know you, and therefore want to do business with you.
My Aha-- You need to live your bliss to become infectious!
I thought to myself --- How can I inspire and invigorate others others, by becoming my sexiest pinup, most well-balanced, most interesting, most adventurous, hysterical, bliss-living version of myself?
But even more importantly, how can I do this for myself....? for my happiness...? and to quench my insatiable curiosity?
How do I become legend.....(wait for it)....dary.....?
Lesson #1 - Travel with Almost Complete Strangers to Make Things More Interesting
So the adventure begins........My summer road trip started with plans to leave sunny San Diego for the summer and drive up the coast on an adventure with some "Perfect Strangers" I had met on the internet.
Yes this was SORT of like an episode of the 80's tv show "Perfect Strangers." We did meet some long lost cousins along the way, and we were getting to know each other while living together for a week.... (As a side note, I do wish Balki Bartakumus would have come on the trip, he would have been so fun! I totally would have done the dance of joy with him!)
Who would be crazy enough to travel for 18 hours with, not one, count them two strangers?!
One of my travel companions was a b-school mate, and the other a student of my Launch Your Brand program. Yep, I totally become friends with my students!!!
Now traveling with strangers is not something I can recommend for just anyone, you must be game for the unknown. You must be ready to get to know a WHOLE lot about people in a very short period of time.
It's sort of like a marathon reading of someone's diary, you see the raw parts of someone's existence when you've shared crazy stories. You live and breathe with these people as though they are family, or friends you've known forever, and in reality, you are on what is like a very long weird date. (You eat together, sometimes snooze in the same space together, share family and friends together, and you don't know each other...) It's a TRIP!
Pun totally intended.
What comes out of the end of it is hopefully, some great friendships, some great memories, and some blog worthy moments! All of these things achieved. But let's start at the beginning.
The fabulous Miss Nicole Marietta
First Mate
Nicole Marietta (Launch Your Brand Graduate / Fellow B-Schooler), lives in San Francisco... We had never met before but she was my online student, and a killer one at that. She's a copywriter and newly developed her passions and skills for becoming a professional designer through my program....Her websites are Write Brave and Nicole Marietta both are which she developed and became a professional designer from doing my LYB Program. Her design site to be released soon. (FYI If you like her sites, she's accepting new clients!)
Second Mate
Miss Angelica, (Fellow B-Schooler and LYB Blog Reader) who is a 21 year old entrepreneurial prodigy.
The Trip Itinerary
The goal was to hit up the scenic route on Highway 1, hit Santa Barbara, San Francisco, and make it up to Portland, Oregon where I had a sublet to spend the month of July. Angelica gets picked up in Santa Barbara. Nicole gets picked up in SF...and the adventure really begins.
Lesson 2. Get a bigger rental car to fit your stripper pole.
It was the first day of the trip, I got a economy rental car that was entirely too small to fit a month worth of my things, and two other people with their things. But the worst part about this situation was terribly frustrated that my stripper pole did not fit in the trunk.
In case you didn't know, (I'm not a traveling stripper) I am however an avid pole dancer for exercise and cannot get enough of it! Having my stripper pole was really important to me, because I need to dance. It's my form of self expression, exercise and stress relief. I almost didn't pack clothes and decided to just buy clothes as I traveled, I wanted to bring that pole so badly!
The suitcase I had packed was too big. I had to dump the whole thing out and start over again.... I literally had to shove everything into a small suitcase. Even Picasso (my boston terrier puppy) was TOO big for his carrier.
Trying to put him in his carrier was like trying to get a cat into a sink full of water!
I had my huge Imac desktop computer, my laptop, my Canon 7d, and was ready to get the heck out of town. I was VERY sad to not get to bring my pole, I had all these plans to set it up in random places and dance all over the West Coast, while listening to Lana Del Rey's song called West Coast...
The lesson learned here is Amelia Earhart would have rented a bigger car, cause nothing would have gotten in the way of her dancing dreams. In any case, I through my pouty face out the window. I got on the road and the adventure began!!!!!
