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Love Your Life, like Gerdi Verwoert
Quote of the Day: “Be a mountain-seeker. Most of us try to avoid mountains, but what’s so good about that? Think about it: flat tires, flat hair, flat returns, and the ultimate, flat lining. Life happens on mountains. They’re opportunities to prove to yourself that you’re stronger than you ever imagined. If you never attempt the ascent, you’ll never know what it’s like to be swooshing down on the other side.” –Self Magazine
Guest of the Day: Gerdi Verwoert was a project manager and consultant in the Dutch corporate world for over seventeen years, and she left corporate life for the mountains of Austria. Her relationship with the mountains inspired deeper relationships with people that then inspired her to become a certified coach who coaches people while hiking. Guiding people on the mountain and guiding them in life is Gerdi’s goal.
Passion: Gerdi’s passion is the outdoors, more specifically, mountain-hiking. She has become a mountain-hiking guide in Austria.
Challenges: “…I spent years thinking about: I would love to do something else. Not knowing what that something else was, but definitely knowing it was something else.” She watched as others she knew did this and looked at them with “admiration and awe,” but never thought she would walk away from her pension, home, and security. She says, “…I think the fear of insecurity of not knowing where my next, in my case, euro was going to come from was what held me back the most.” Gerdi also had no idea, since she had been with only one company her entire career, what her “worth in the marketplace was going to be.” Physical symptoms, such as being overweight and having sleep apnea, were the determining factor.
Learned About Self: “What a really important lesson for me was the fact that I found that I could live with all the insecurity that comes from freelancing, and from not knowing where your next paycheck or your next euro or your next dollar is going to come from.”
Suggested Resources:
- The Art of Possibility: Transforming Professional and Personal Life by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander
- TED Talk: The Transformative Power of Classical Music by Benjamin Zander
To live a life that is passion-filled…
Envision: Pick your mountain tip – real or virtual. Do the Go-Do! Visualize your goal.
Explore: Research the talents you already have, analyze the capabilities you possess, and determine what experience you need and where to get it. Gerdi says, “…it’s sort of like if you’re going to hike to a mountain top, you’re going to get the maps, and you’re going to go to the Internet, and you’re going to study the root you’re going to take. And if you don’t know, yet, how to read a compass and how to read a map, you’re going to learn that because you might need it.”
Execute: “And then you, literally, take the first step. You go out and you start walking.” Expect an uphill climb, valleys, and obstacles that may cause you to retrace your steps. “But, like it is in the mountains, it is in life: You will always be able to find a different trail that will take you to that mountain.”
Advice to Listeners: “I regularly tell myself to abandon all fear, to dare greatly, and to be a mountain-seeker. It’s sort of a mantra I tell myself when I am looking at something…or I’m going to do something or I want to do something where I am afraid, because it’s new, it is something outside of my comfort zone. And lately, when I tell myself: ‘Just abandon all fear, just do it,’ it almost always is not as bad as I thought it would be.”
Motivational Go-Do!
Make a list of twenty careers you would have been interested in as a child. What is the common thread between them? This is your passion.
How Motivate Me! Ultimate Support System can rally around Gerdi Verwoert:
Website: www.daregreatlycoaching.com
Facebook: Gerdi Verwoert
LinkedIn: Gerdi Verwoert
And, as always, on the Facebook page: Motivate Me! Ultimate Support System
CLICK HERE to listen to Gerdi’s interview.
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