Change Management, Workplace Culture, Culture Inspiration, happiness, inspiration, joy, support, work, trust
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by Svetlana Saitsky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4jPxZyQLNU&feature=youtu.be
I’d like to admit something. The Inspiration Gal, fell off the wagon. Yes, I'm talking about myself. I promised myself that I would enter this year and sparkle every day and guess what? I lost my sparkle. Have you ever felt like you lost your sparkle? Well then please read on…
Entering 2013, I felt more inspired than ever. Looking back at the last year I felt a sense of pride. In 2012, I fell in love, made professional headway, and tattooed my life word Inspiration onto my arm when I realized that to inspire was my purpose in life. I was riding the inspiration wave and feeling on top of the world. And then much to my own surprise, I crashed. And when I say I crashed, I mean that both literally and figuratively.
I left a job that was not making me happy and while I was proud of myself for being fearless, I found myself with no source of income. As if financial instability is not scary enough to deal with, the person who I loved most decided that he was going to love someone else the most. My heart was broken worse than ever before. So here I was with too much free time to think about my broken heart. It was around this time that a friendship spanning a decade fell apart and some of my best friends left San Francisco leaving me feeling heartbroken, uncertain and abandoned. Now was the perfect time for me to have a bike accident, and then a running accident, making it hard to do the thing I love to do most: take walks. Typically when I got sad or confused I could walk it off, but now it hurt to walk and I must admit, this is around the time that my mind went into major drain-circle maneuver and I caught a cold which made me quite sick for weeks.
How could this happen? How could I, the Inspiration Gal end up feeling so alone and beat up? I had thought that I opted out of fear, suffering and guilt and here I was doing all that old stuff again. Where had my inspiration gone? I certainly was not feeling it and so I began to really question things. Maybe I was wrong all of these years? Maybe listening to my heart was a mistake? Was all this inspiration work true? Did I know anything about inspiration after all? If I did, how could I be feeling so uninspired? What would I do with my Inspiration tattoo? Oh my!
As someone who has recently had every single aspect of life shift and who has genuinely experienced loss and confusion when it comes to love, friendship and career all at once, I’d like to share the greatest lesson I have learned:
The time to trust yourself the most is when everything seems to be going wrong.
The difficult times define who we are; they inspire us to move forward and discover genuine inspiration unlike ever before. I have no regrets about leaving my job because the opportunities that are now presenting themselves to me are so much more aligned with who I am and what I love. My heart is healing too and while I miss the friends who moved away, they are only a phone call away. The best part is that throughout this time that I felt so lost and lonely, I've actually created a whole new supportive, creative and incredible community in a city that is very much my home. I stopped trusting myself briefly, but deep down I always knew that this time would pass and that somehow I would be better, stronger and more inspired than ever and guess what? I was right.
About Svetlana
Svetlana Saitsky is a Creative Iconoclast who strives to inspire through her work as a photographer and writer. With her entrepreneurial spirit, business school education, corporate experience and artistic savvy, Svetlana combines left-brain intellect with right-brain creativity and resides in San Francisco, CA while working on her first book on Inspiration. A modern day Renaissance woman, Svetlana believes in exploring a variety of passions daily and when she is not taking photographs or writing, you might find her salsa dancing, singing, eating avocados and hanging out in coffee shops all over town. To explore Svetlana's work, please visit her here!
