This post is inspired by several people with whom my interactions lately restarted some thinking processes in me. The first person is my close friend Hagar Shafrir, who I had the pleasure of spending much needed quality time with in the past weeks, despite our living countries apart. With both of us being at crossroads in our professional lives, we had a lot to talk about. Being trained in coaching (me) and in NLP (her) we found ourselves coaching each other and using various means such as coaching cards to see what went wrong, what is stuck and how we can create flow and movement again in our life. For me it was a wake up call and a reminder to “get back to the basics”. To go back to my coaching notes from when I studied and was being coached and remember my own core values, vision and powers.
But I still felt like a Fairy whose wings got clipped. Cue in another friend, whom I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting face to face, but who inspires me on a daily basis: Karin Sebelin. Karin Noticed from our interactions on Google+ that I am stuck in a place I don’t know how to get out of. She offered that we talk (skype or phone, meaning a voice conversation rather than just chat). We set up the call and ended up talking for 2 hours! We probably could have gone on and on 
Several things that Karin emphasized and gave me the “green light” to do are: NEVER Go against your CORE values, Always be yourself no matter what other people think, do not be afraid to upset others! Write about your passions, tell YOUR story and people will follow, because people need to connect and follow and find other people with a similar narrative to theirs. In other words, buzz words are cool but only if their genuine in what you do, love and believe in.
And then there is Seth Godin… I don’t know him personally (though I’d love to! if he ever reads this…) but I’ve been following his blog for a while. I already had an idea of what to do with this site and how to go about making a change through my writing but I still put it off… I guess the fear of failure is in all of us to some degree. Yesterday a friend posted on Facebook a quote from Seth Godin: “Instead of wondering where you next vacation is, maybe you ought to set up a life you don’t to escape from”. That sentence hit the nail on the head. It sent me (after sharing it on Facebook of course!) flying to my email to search for my old coaching assignments and papers (and thank you Google for being such a great backup!) and I almost cried when I read them. It’s been 5 whole years since I last laid eyes on these documents. I had allowed myself to forget who I am, what I want and how I want to do it.
Path finder, Explorer and Discoverer, guiding others along their way to discovery and success, teacher, mentor, illuminator
My vision was clear. And I buried it! But no more!
How is it connected to Community Management and to this website, you ask? What does it have to do with my career? EVERYTHING! The mark of a good community manager is connection, engagement, listening, telling a story and making the community re-tell it to their friends, thus creating more and more communities! And this morning I was reminded of the following TED talk Set Godin gave on “The tribes we lead” and I am now sharing it because everyone should dedicate 20 minutes of their life to understand that we all have stories to tell. I am going to tell my story from now on, and I can tell others’ stories as well. It is time to make a change by creating movement and connecting communities.
