Stephanie O Custom Photography

Lately, I’ve been running around blurting out to everyone who will listen that my life has changed completely. That I feel like a brand new person. That in the months since Dane Sanders visited Calgary with the Fast Track Roadshow, I have experienced a profound and lasting shift in the way I approach my life.

The day after the Roadshow, I wrote a note on Facebook that ended up being shared with more people than I ever imagined would read it. But I realize now that I never put it here. I won’t post it in its entirety, but this is a snippet:

 

You see, I’ve been really good at isolating myself. I just find it simpler to stay inside my warm safe space and not venture out. So I haven’t made a new friend in ages, until these last few months. However, over the last year, my family has been struggling with my son’s diagnosis of Asperger’s, and I discovered something that really freaked me out – I had no one to turn to. I didn’t feel like I could pop up out of nowhere to my friends and let them in on this heavy thing I was going through. I could talk to them on a very surface level, but I didn’t feel like I could call them up crying and tell them about all the grief and fear and anguish and upheaval we were going through. So I nestled down deeper into my hole and isolated myself even more, and the problem then was that I had no vision at all of what coming out of there would be like.

So I fully expected that I would come to the workshop, sit silently in the corner for awhile, and that would be it. Because that’s been my status quo for the last year. Sit silently, not reaching out, holding it in.

 

That is really it in a nutshell. I was isolated. I isolated myself. I found early motherhood, nursing , and my struggle with post partum depression to be the loneliest place in the world.

At the end of the Roadshow, Dane asked if anyone would be willing to lead a local photographer’s group here, and I surprised myself by speaking up and saying that I would. So along with 7 other people, we formed a small team that started hosting meetings every month for new and experienced photographers alike, to continue the building of community and the concepts of being there ‘For Each Other’. The intense shared experience of taking the workshop together forged some great new friendships, and I discovered I kind of liked being outside of my lonely little cocoon.

 

High above the clouds, and just soaking in the green grass, leaves and general lack of snow that is California in January

In January, I had an opportunity to further this new learning and discovery of myself, when I attended Quantum Leadership training in Newport Beach with Dane. I wrestled with the guilt of leaving my family for three days, just after we had moved into a new house, of ‘abandoning’ my husband to deal with Noel while he struggled with the transition of our new home but in my heart I knew it was something I needed to do.

We arrived on the first morning unsure of what to expect, but knowing that we would probably need a lot of Kleenex (Dane’s like that!). How surprised I was to discover that in the assigned seating, I was placed right beside Dane, at the ‘front’ of the room, the complete opposite of where I would have put myself if given the opportunity (Old habits die hard, and I was still a back of the room sort of gal.)(Well actually, not that surprised, but … challenged. Maybe challenged isn’t the right word for it, but it made clear for me that I wasn’t going to get to rely on my old habits in this room.)

Ami Davenport, Leila Jones, Jenn Gaudreau, and Jen Disney

There is more that happened in those two days than I can ever explain here. 12 people sat in that room and laid themselves bare. We opened up our hearts and minds and stories to each other and learned how to be leaders in everything we do, from our jobs to our personal lives to our work with Fast Track. I learned so much about myself it was like a bright light burst into view inside my head. So many obstacles that I’d found in my path I had placed there myself. And those things I was doing were reverberating in every aspect of my life.

But of course, none of this means anything if I don’t take what I’ve learned home and actually apply it. But one of the key messages of Quantum Leadership is that this is about transformation, not just a little bit of change here and there. The best explanation for it is metamorphosis – a caterpillar doesn’t simply become a faster, stronger caterpillar. It becomes a butterfly, something wholly new and spectacular. And attending the training almost helped me to really see what the future ‘butterfly’ of me was going to look like. Surely, it is nothing I ever planned for, dreamed of or imagined. And truthfully, it’s a bit scary, these new ideas and desires that have suddenly come up inside of me. But, while staying this way would certainly be tempting in it’s simplicity, I am craving a shift, a change. I want to be the person I found inside of myself in Newport Beach. She has been hiding out for a long time, but I know that if I let her out, great things will happen.

Karen Stott, Jenn Gaudreau

I’ll put a bit of it into words here, but the things I really want to do include but are not limited to narrowing the focus on my business so it becomes about what I really love  – showing girls and women the power and beauty that they uniquely possess, by continuing to shoot maternity sessions and creating a new style of session designed specifically for teenaged girls (watch for this in the next couple of months, it’s gonna be much fun!), being more actively involved in the Calgary Fast Track group to ensure that we are really putting the For Each Other message out into the community, and helping new and experienced photographers connect and share, and continuing to work on myself, through every avenue available to me. (ah, that’s scary to put out there, but there it is!)

Dane Sanders, Ginger Murray

As an added bonus, not only do I now have an idea of who I really need to be,  but I also connected on a deep, lasting level with the people who I shared the experience with. These people suddenly take up a huge space in my heart, I think about them almost daily. I’m eager to watch how Quantum Leadership resonates in each of our lives. It’s gonna be big.

On the 2nd day, we were given the task of branding our team, with a name and a mission statement, and then creatively presenting the brand. We chose VERITAS: Community, Vision, Truth and we had a blast creating the letters of veritas with our bodies. I hate grass, but I gave it a chance, and I gotta say, California grass is about 10000 times nicer than Calgary grass.

If you’re interested in learning more about the people who participated in this training, you should go visit them – Stephanie Leblond, Jenn Gaudreau, Jen Disney, Karen Stott, Ami Davenport, Zeena Gregg, Charla Blue, Jeff Youngren, Leila Jones, & Ginger Murray.