A More Awesome Me

Editors’ note: Today’s the last day to pre-register for 52 Weeks to Awesome. Tomorrow, we close registration until January, all the early bird bonuses go away, and the price goes up. If you’ve been thinking it over, today’s a good day to decide whether it’s right for you.

And now, a super-sweet guest post by Rachael E. C. Acklin, the Caffeinated Elf.

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When Kyeli asked me to write about my experiences with the 52 Weeks to Awesome program, I almost jumped right into the internet to say yes, I was so excited.

(You think I am exaggerating, but I am so not.)

I looked back through my folder of emails, all my precious 52WtA emails, and I was intimidated. How can I begin to express the kind of small-yet-huge changes that happened in my life this year, supported by those weekly messages of love?

Not only that, how can I write this post when I didn’t even read every single mission? (Oops, I wasn’t supposed to say that.)

And then it dawned on me.

The more I looked at the list of emails, almost fifty of them now, I noticed that the ones I had opened, the ones that I had needed, were around pivotal moments in my life this past year.

Like that time I checked my email as a way to escape from the marathon of arguments I’d been having with my husband. I sat there, sifting email, bitterly replaying the last few scenes over and over in my imagination, angry with him for saying it wrong, for doing it wrong, for something I don’t even remember now, and there it was: a mission about having a discussion without starting an argument.

Do you know what it feels like when you’re slapped in the face with love? Yeah. That.

Pace and Kyeli’s faith in me to be a better, more awesome person in the face of adversity, in the face of what might have been (and probably was) my own stupidity, was the catalyst I needed to change. To be more awesome. To love my husband better. To let go of all those words I thought I needed to say, and instead to say the words he needed me to say.

I could tell you so many more stories.

I could tell you that the second mission, way back in January, changed the way I saw myself – and by extension, it changed the way I saw and moved through the world.

I could tell you that in the second half of the year, there was an email about understanding your own limits that coincided exactly with my own self-discovery of my boundaries, and what that meant for me and my business and my family and everyone else I touch.

But my favorite story is the one where I learned to be more awesome not just to myself alone, but to the man who has my heart. After all, what good is love if it is not shared? What good is change if I don’t change the world? And what good is changing the world if I don’t start in my own home?

Being more awesome is about more than a set of instructions.

Being more awesome happens when you are supported, and loved, and encouraged to think deeper thoughts about yourself and your motivations. Being more awesome happens when you can see and love who you are, and see and love who others are too.

Being more awesome is a shift in your consciousness – it’s a state of mind.

And because of my sweet friends Pace and Kyeli, you can experience that too.