Hey everyone!
Welcome back to Lavendaire.
It's Aileen.
Today I'm going to do a Q&A for the Dream Life Series.
Hopefully you've been following along.
Today I'm going to try to make the series a little more interesting
since I'm going to San Francisco.
My flight is in about an hour, just finished packing.
I think I'm going to answer your questions as I take you guys along with me.
Shall we?
Alright, let's go.
Hey guys!
So we made it to San Francisco and we're in our hotel room right now.
Basically, last night we got in really late so I didn't feel like continuing the vlog.
Right now I'm about to get ready.
I have an event to go to.
I'm speaking today, so I'm going to answer some questions while I get ready.
Let's do it.
The first question I'll answer is from Trynidy Williams.
The question is: "If we're still in school and working towards our goals of a certain career we love,
some of this goal setting is hard since it's just 'Finish school'.
Anyway, tips for this series when you're a student working hard to do what you love?"
Well, first of all, I don't think you have to worry
since you're already in school for doing what you love.
I think the problem is when you're in school doing something
other than what you love or what you want to do.
And I don't think you need to worry about knowing all the steps after school just yet.
It's okay to just focus on your current goal which is 'Finish school'.
And don't worry about all the other goal setting.
You can actually wait a bit to do that later.
I mean, if you have ideas, you can obviously jot them down,
but it's not a priority to focus on right now.
That's why I think school is a little bit easier,
because all the rules are kind of laid out for you.
You know how to do well, what success looks like, because it's all measured.
So just do your best with whatever's in front of you,
and don't worry too much about planning really far ahead into the future.
You'll get there when you get there.
If you don't have all the answers now, that's fine.
Just focus on school and the rest will come in its own accord.
I haven't told you where we're going.
We're going to LinkedIn.
I'm going to give a workshop for an hour on productivity and success hacks.
So I just finished speaking at LinkedIn and I'm in this public area.
I know it is pretty loud, but hopefully you can hear me.
I'm going to answer one question right now.
So this question asks:
"How do you handle people who are in the way of your dream life?"
It can be hard when there's people in your life who don't believe in you
or don't want you to pursue your dreams.
In the cases that those people are close to you,
like they're your family members, it can be tough because there's a conflict.
But you have to remember that these people, they see you as a reflection of themselves.
So they maybe don't want you to pursue your dreams
because they are afraid that you're not going to succeed,
they're afraid you're going to fail.
And so they kind of project their fear onto you.
And in that case, you have to learn to shed that care.
Learn to care less about what people are thinking and saying, and you just have to do you.
There's no other way around it.
You have to accept that you're not going to see eye-to-eye and that's okay.
So you just have to do your best to focus on your own path.
Sometimes it does mean distancing yourself from those people.
Maybe you just don't update them on what you're doing
because any time you bring up your progress,
it might cause an argument so you do have to deal with things like that.
In my personal experience, any conflicts with my family members who didn't see my dreams,
that didn't see eye-to-eye with me, it was a tough period of –
we just didn't get along, we couldn't really communicate about this,
until the point where I finally found success in my career.
I realized that that pacified everything.
I think after they see you succeed and they see that you're okay,
your relationship will become better.
In a way, it dissipates their fear because their fear of you failing and getting hurt,
now the reality is something different.
I do notice that things will change as you go down your path.
Okay, so we are back at our hotel now.
I've changed and we're kind of just chilling, so I'll answer another question right now.
This one is from Bibi Joey.
She says she's a student in school and her school will end in two years.
She says, "I don't know how to start now.
I'll be honest with you:
I'm super lazy and I will try something and end up being lazy again.
Please help."
To be honest, most people go through this.
Most people start something and then they either lose motivation or momentum
and then they get lazy and they stop.
And that's why they don't get very far.
And if you don't want to be like most people,
you want to learn how to keep going, there are certain things you can do.
#1 is focus on your small wins.
Try to get some small victories under your belt.
It doesn't have to be a big achievement.
It could just be something small.
Celebrate that, because once you celebrate all your small wins, you build confidence.
And then once you have confidence in something,
you build more motivation to keep going with it.
It's kind of like, "Huh, I did this well and it motivates me to do more."
I have a full video on building those confidence chips that I'll link down below.
It's actually my confidence story.
Another thing is to remember that you want to be exceptional.
You don't want to be like everybody else who gets lazy and stops trying.
What sets those successful people apart is that they keep going
and they have that inner drive that pushes them forward.
First of all, you have to make sure that what you're doing
is genuinely what you're excited about and genuinely what you're passionate about,
because you really need to have that inner fire to push you.
You can't force yourself to do something that you don't like or that you don't really want to do.
So you gotta really love it, and then you gotta push yourself.
Count those small wins, celebrate those little victories.
The rest of it is learning to build the habit of picking yourself back up
and continuing to try after you get lazy, after you fail.
This is not to say that you'll never, ever feel like getting lazy again
because even I get lazy too.
Even I don't feel like do anything sometimes,
but it's having the habit of self-motivating yourself to start again.
It's being a self-starter.
And when you find yourself falling and getting lazy,
remind yourself why you want to do this in the first place:
knowing your why and then having the habit of self-starting again,
not beating yourself up over stopping.
You fall off, [woop], jump on ASAP.
Keep going, keep going, bring yourself back up no matter what.
Alright, right now we're at this museum called the Exploratorium, I believe.
And we're actually sitting in this spinning thing, but I thought it'd be nice to sit down
and answer another one of your questions.
Another question is by Colleen.
She says, "What if your fear is a reality?
That you have no or less talent to achieve your dream.
I'm an artist/into drawing but seems that I'm no good.
I barely have followers, moreso likes on my posts.
I can barely see the light of having a bright future as an artist."
Colleen, first of all, what you're feeling is the fear of not being good enough
and that's a very common fear for artists to have.
We don't think that we're good enough to succeed or to even call ourselves as artists,
but I just want to share this one quote:
"Every artist was once an amateur,"
meaning everyone is born and we're not perfect.
We're not an amazing artist when we first start out.
Everybody starts somewhere and usually they're not very good.
Everybody that you look up to that you see as successful, they had to work on their craft.
They had to improve at getting better,
and they basically started out probably wherever you are.
They didn't have much skills, they had to develop their skills on their own.
So I would say you have to just believe in yourself, believe that you can do it
and then put in the time to work on your craft and really just improve.
If you don't even believe in yourself in the beginning, then you're not gonna go very far.
So you do have to be positive and just understand it's a growing journey.
You don't start out being an amazing artist.
You don't start out having a lot of followers or likes.
Everybody starts at zero followers, zero likes, okay?
It's not about that anyway.
Basically, you grow over time, you improve over time,
and you just have to get through those parts.
Alright, so we just got back to our apartment in LA.
We just flew today from SF, so I feel pretty tired, but I'm excited to relax today.
It is a Saturday, so I thought I'd answer one last question for you guys.
This one's from Jerry: "How do you keep up with your routine when you have to travel?
Or, how do you adjust your mindset as well as routines when your original plans fall apart,
or when you're not progressing at the rate that you expected?"
Travel happens, life happens.
Things always come up out of nowhere.
I feel like, my life, I can only plan so far ahead
before I have to adjust everything and shift everything around.
So I think you definitely have to be flexible.
You have to be okay with things coming up and ruining your schedule a little bit.
You basically have to learn to adapt and change your plans, change your system as you go.
And you have to have that mindset of not being so strict on
"Okay, I have to do this this way," because things will come up and you have to –
like I said earlier in my videos, self-forgiveness is important.
You have to forgive yourself for not sticking to
the exact plan that you had for yourself because things will change.
You have to stay flexible, learn to adapt quickly to new situations,
and let yourself go and be okay with that.
Be okay with not progressing at the rate that you expected.
It's not about how fast you're going,
it's not about how on-time or according to plan you are.
It's about just being agile, doing what you can, moving around obstacles,
shifting things around, just making it work with what you got.
So yeah, of course it's always good to have a plan to know
what you want to do and set some sort of timeline for it.
But it's also very important to learn to adapt quickly to changing situations
and be flexible and be okay with that.
Don't be so strict and rigid with yourself.
Alright, those are all the questions I'm going to answer in today's video.
I hope that it helped.
If you have any other questions about the Dream Life Series,
feel free to leave it down below and I'll do my best to answer as many questions as I can.
But I'll see you in the next video which is going to be the Dream Life Series wrap-up
which I'm excited about, so see you then!
Bye!