About

Short Version :

“Do one thing that scares you everyday.” – Eleanor Roosevelt.  I am adapting her quote into my life for 180 days and you can follow my stories in this blog

“Who are you not to take charge of improving your own life?”

This blog is Steph’s playground, started because she was plain sick of letting life bypass her and living in her comfort zone. After finding out that the Latin root of the word ‘Initiative’ means ‘Daring’ and ‘Opening’, she decided to turn her life 180 degrees around and start facing her fears and opening the doors.

Inspired by the immortal words of Eleanor Roosevelt, I’m doing one thing everyday that ‘scares’ me…for 180 days. This blog isn’t about just doing the scary. It’s about the doing. And the doing itself can be scary enough. Or more. But oh.. it’s so WORTH it.

The Longer Version of this Story :

After 20 years of taking up precious oxygen, I was tired of my sheer complacency. I was tired of letting the world pass me by and close the pockets of opportunities almost as fast as I had ‘planned’ to take them up.

In fact, I’ve always been banging my head against the wall in pure angst for not recognizing the immediacy of an opportunity or the sacredness of a self pledge or promise to others.

Regret is an invisible poison that one shouldn’t have to taste. It shoots through your heart and damages all the vital organs, leaving you completely devoid of hope for change.

So I finally decided, after a string of frustrated ( and somehow related ) events, that I wasn’t going to let my lack of initiative get the better of me anymore. That I would go the complete opposite direction and start instilling an Initiative Lifestyle instead.

What am I going to do?

1. Dissect my fears one by one. This essentially means (for me) going outside of my comfort zone and out of my way to do things that I normally wouldn’t do. My challenges will consist mostly of finding out ways and means to turn my fears 180 degrees around, making them into something that I’d love doing rather than fear doing.
2. Complete my to-do list. I am a great procrastinator; if I could have delayed this blog, I would have, trust me on that one. What a better way to get them all done by giving myself a deadline of 180days?
3. Research on the history of fear, determination, and great displays of personal courage. I think it’s extremely helpful to learn from history and from someone else’s successes or failures; it also motivates me to keep on going knowing that I’m not the only one who has gone on this road before.
4. Blog without self judgment.  I don’t consider myself a bad writer but I do consider myself a highly private person who recoils at the slightest idea of baring out her soul in the public realm. Blogging counts..and honestly, blogging about my daily Initiative Stories are every much as fearful to me as going sky diving.

( Update : Blogging is hard. When I first started out, I was blogging everyday. But I was self editing everyday too. So I’ve decided to blog 4x a week and keep self editing and self judgment to a minimum )And with that, I leave you this quote :

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us most.”

We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and famous?’ Actually, who are you not to be?