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September 20, 2012 by Kat

Message Received

To put our art, our writing, our photography, our ideas out into the world with no assurance of acceptance or appreciation – that’s also vulnerability.
— — BrenĂ© Brown in Daring Greatly

I now know why I needed to hear the message from the universe yesterday. Why I started reading Daring Greatly this week. I’m having one hell of a vulnerability attack at the moment.

Let me explain…

This weekend is the Corvallis Fall Festival. After months of planning and preparing, I’ll be putting my art out there in the public eye, for sale, in a completely new way for me. It’s from the safety of a shared booth (4 other photographers along with me) and the safety of being close to home, but as I wrote out the email last night inviting friends and neighbors to visit me in the booth during the festival, I started to feel the fear. I started thinking, Why am I sending this? I don’t want to bother anyone with more emails. Will they even care? What if they don’t like my work? Maybe it’s better not to tell anyone. But I pressed send on the email anyway, despite my fears, because I know that most of these people want to see me succeed and will come by and support me even if it’s with a quick hi in the booth.

As I was reading this morning I realized where this feeling came from. I’m making myself vulnerable, by putting my art out there in a new way. And no matter how much I want and crave connection with people through my art, I also fear it. No amount of planning and preparing can eliminate that visceral response that comes from somewhere deep inside. The place that fears that I am not good enough. The place that fears rejection.

This vulnerability attack is made doubly strong by my trip to England next week. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve been stressing over what to wear for my workshops. I’m realizing now this is just a substitute worry for the bigger fear of putting myself “out there” in such a spectacular way. Want to know how the workshops happened? Earlier this year I said to myself, “I want to go to England and visit my friends! It would be cool to teach a couple of photography workshops at the same time.” And then started working on it. Once again, the planning and the preparing are the easy parts. It’s so, so easy for me to create a plan, a list of things to do, and check them off one by one. It’s a lot harder to deal with the emotions that come along with the actual event. Here I am, travelling by myself, staying with friends I know mostly from online interactions, offering workshops in a foreign country. Vulnerable? You bet.

With every step I take outside of my comfort zone, I open myself up to uncertainty, risk and emotional exposure. It just so happens that is exactly BrenĂ© Brown’s definition of vulnerability. I get it. I feel it, at my core, right now. Thankfully, these kinds of fears and emotions usually don’t come until I’m already committed, well down the road where it’s too late to turn back, so I keep putting myself out there in new and crazy ways. As I’ve said so many times in my writing here before, each little step you take expands your comfort zone. Whether it’s liberating your art as a postcard or in an art fair, it all takes courage and a willingness to be vulnerable.

I know intellectually that everything will be fine. Regardless of whether or not I sell a lot of my photographs at the festival, regardless of whether or not my workshops are full, I will have a good time. I will learn something in the process. I will grow.

Knowing it will all turn out ok doesn’t eliminate the feelings that exist today, right now, in my gut. But understanding where they are coming from, why being vulnerable has this impact on me, certainly helps. Thanks to the message from the universe yesterday, I was prepared for the panic attack of today. (Sort of. Talk to me about it tomorrow.)

Filed Under: The Kat Eye View of the World Tagged With: Albany, allowing space, balloon, Brene Brown, Daring Greatly, Oregon, personal growth, risk, sky, vulnerability

August 14, 2012 by Kat

Warning Signs

Imagine you are walking down a path and you see this warning sign:

What do you do? Do you turn around and head home? Do you continue on, taking every precaution? Or do you wing it, figuring that you’ll be ok? We encountered this sign on one of our hikes in Glacier National Park. There were several options available to us, to avoid bears:
1. Don’t hike, because then you are sure to avoid bears.
2. Get a bell and make lots of noise, to warn the bears of your coming and scare them away.
3. Purchase the bear repellent spray for $49.95, to spray a bear if it comes near you.

Since we weren’t doing any serious back country hiking, just short hikes popular with the tourists, we opted to purchase a bear bell and continue. We already have our own noisemaker with us, in the form of an 11-year-old boy, so we figured we would be ok.

Bear Precautions: An 11-year-old boy and a bell

We were fine. No bears sighted on our hikes! Some beautiful things sighted along the path though, like gorgeous wildflowers and light dancing on the leaves. Experiences we would have never had, if we stayed in the developed areas bears avoid.

Fireweed

We could have been warned away by the sign. We could have avoided any chance of meeting bears by not going down the path. Hiking in bear country is a good analogy for living your life. Do you avoid any chance of danger, by not going down the path at all? Or do you weigh the options and risks, and move forward down the path with some precautions?

I especially love the phrase on the sign: “There is no guarantee of your safety when hiking or camping in bear country.” Really, there is no guarantee of your safety anywhere.

There is one absolute guarantee though, if you decide to avoid the path, you will miss some wonderful views.

Filed Under: The Kat Eye View of the World Tagged With: bear, flower, Glacier National Park, hike, path, risk, sign, wildflower

July 23, 2012 by Kat

Taking Risks

Risk has been much on my mind lately. You can take risk across all areas of your life: Professionally, personally, artistically. Or you can avoid risk, wrap ourselves up in a cocoon of perceived safety, trying to avoid any downside. But with real risk, there is always a downside, to go along with the upside of real reward. With real risk, something of real value must be put on the line. That could be something tangible, such as money, or intangibles like time, reputation, or even ego.

There have been some big issues at my corporate job, as I alluded to last month, and the situation has only grown bigger as some deadlines loom. This has gotten me to thinking about risk… We are dealing with these big issues because we took big risks. We took big risks, seeking big rewards. When you take big risks, they don’t always work out positively. Were there mistakes made along the way? Sure. Hindsight is always 20-20. Is it a failure that things aren’t working out as planned? I don’t think so. We are still much further along the path to achieving our goals than we would have been. The issues are more about responding to new information as it comes in, rather than completely starting over. The only real failure is if you fail to learn from the situation.

I think of risk as flipping a coin. There are two sides to that coin – heads or tails. There is no inherent “good” or “bad” in a getting a head or a tail, it’s just the outcome of the toss. If we took uninformed risks, there would be an equal likelihood of either result with the toss of our coin. You can move the odds in your favor though, by being smart about taking risk. Smart risk taking involves getting as much information as you can, making a decision and committing to a path. It involves keeping your eye on the situation as you move forward and making adjustments as necessary. Smart risk taking is like working to change the results of the coin toss to be heads more often. But it’s still a coin toss, and it still could come up tails. That’s always a possibility with real risk. If there were no possibility of the coin coming up tails, you aren’t risking anything.

And if you aren’t risking anything, you are not growing. Growth, be it in business or in life, requires risk. It requires stepping out of the comfort zone, moving into an unknown space. Even though I talk about taking “smart risks” and getting the information to move forward, you will never, ever have all of the information you want or you need. If you are taking real risks, you will never have a perfect record in the outcome. It’s called the “unknown” for a reason. You have to take the information you have, along with your desire to reach out for that big reward, apply judgment and intuition, and then go.

We often shy away from risk, because we are scared of failure. We don’t want the discomfort or pain of a “bad” result. So we stay stuck. We don’t move forward, we don’t expand, we don’t grow. We don’t reap any new rewards. We might tell ourselves we are waiting until that next piece of information comes in, for that next door to open up, for the perfect moment to step out… but the reality is there will never be a perfect moment, a perfect opportunity, a perfect decision. While we hesitate and wait, we shrink. We may try to avoid risk at all cost to avoid pain, but life has other plans for us. Life hands us things to which we must respond. Things like health issues, loss of a job or loss of loved ones. We are much better equipped to respond to the pain and discomfort of these unforeseen events if we’ve been pushing ourselves out there, taking risks and learning to deal with the downside.

I’m living the results of real risk right now… At my corporate job with the resolution of these issues, sure, but that’s only one tiny example in the course of my life. There are so many places along my personal journey and career I’ve taken risks and they’ve paid off: Taking the assignment in Italy, sharing my art and my heart here online, starting Kat Eye Studio. Those are just a recent few. If I look back at my life journey, I can see every big, important, positive change in my life has come when I’ve taken a risk. A real risk, where something of value is on the line, and I’ve stepped out into the unknown.

Are you avoiding risk somewhere in your life? Are you stuck, trying to create a cocoon that will protect you from discomfort? I encourage you to take a look at those places carefully, take a deep breath, and flip the coin. Heads or tails, you learn and grow. And with growth, you always win.

Filed Under: The Kat Eye View of the World Tagged With: Astoria, comfort zone, Oregon, personal growth, plants, pot, risk

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