Sometimes we are afraid to express ourselves because we know we can offend someone in the audience. But a few days ago, while I was watching Rick Gervais’ comedy show about his Twitter messages and its effects, I realized once again that we could not leave everyone happy and we cannot be responsible for what people think. You must have faith in yourself and express yourself.
Marie Forleo has been repeating it consistently: your voice matters. And those words of yours have immense power to create the necessary change.
Nevertheless, we still must be responsible for our message and think well what we say. For me, this is a powerful realization.
It all came together at once. I lost an important account at my company from a large tour operator after I made changes to their stressful schedules. I also graduated at my mid 40s from a master degree in business after two years of dedication, stress, health issues, endurance and doubts of what I was doing in a classroom sitting next to student half my age. And then, with my business partner we decided to expand my sustainable tourism agency in the Netherlands just before the corona crisis.
So in this period, I reflected about myself and asked myself why if I worked all my life towards sustainability, honesty and transparency, why was I frozen to leap of faith to express myself?
Maybe because I was told so many times not to do so and when a partner says so, it has a powerful impact. In Untamed by Glennon Doyle, I read about the liberation process of a human being. The same canon is supported by other authors such as Lisa Congdon in Find your Artistic Voice, Cat Rose in The Creative Introvert. And also by Gary Keller & Jay Papasan in Do One Thing, Shakti Gawain in Creative Visualization, Jen Sincero in You are a Badass, Catherine Huang & A.D. Rosenberg in The Art of War for Women. After all the reading, I started to gain more confidence.
One day, I went to visit my son, who is nowadays a university student. I like to go. I drive 250 km one way, we spend a couple of hours together, and I drive back on the same day. My son is also a musician. A while ago, he was looking for a singer for his beats as he explained to me, but he could not find the right one. So on that occasion, when we were drinking mate in his kitchen, I saw a microphone, and I asked if he had found the singer. He did not. Therefore, he decided to sing himself. He explained o me in a very straight forward way how he did, just plugging the mic and recording himself with his text. And he said, you just have to do it.
Because if you wait for the perfect singer or till I get myself the right tone, it might take forever or maybe it will never be done. He recorded himself, and his song was on SoundCloud.
On that day, I drove back the 250 km, and once I arrived at home, I finally accepted to join the SINUP2020 online conference about the circular economy as a speaker. This event will happen next week, and I am excited because I am going to tell my view of tourism and sustainability in public to a vast audience. I took the leap of faith to express myself.
Meanwhile, my son sold a beat to a well-known Japanese rap artist who liked his songs.