“I’m giving birth to my creativity. For so long, I compared myself with my peer group. Since participating in the workshop, I am not trying to keep up with others. I am enough. I really am enough,” said Leslie Leonpacher in a recent conversation.
I asked her what aspect of the Designing Your Next Chapter workshop was most helpful to her. She said, “Looking back at my younger years and seeing things I enjoyed that I had forgotten about or put aside because money, life, or relationships caused me to think they were less important. For example, pursuing art as a living. The workshop helped me to reevaluate my vision of life.”
“Being introduced to Maira Kalman and her daily journals was inspiring and freeing for me - how she uses stories and pictures. It was like a spark. I now have the confidence to draw. I realized my drawings don’t have to be perfect; they just have to communicate what I feel. I am currently working on a rhyming book about dogs that includes my own drawings.”
Leslie is pursuing her art and writing with a greater sense of purpose and focus now. Other past workshop participants learned different lessons and are pursuing different goals. What they share in common is that they took time to focus on their life, to ask themselves questions, reflect, and share with other group members what they were learning and discovering about themselves.
If you would like to explore what your next chapter might look like, perhaps it’s time to take the workshop, work with me individually, or read the book, Designing Your Life: How To Build A Well-Lived, Joyful Life, and work through the exercises on your own or with a friend.
What will you design?