Tags
Abroad, adventure, black business, business, dream big, dreambig, dreams, driven, ecuador, ecuadorians, entrepreneur, entrepreneurship, esl, esl teaching, expats, expats in Ecuador, female business, female business owners, female entrepreneurs, goals, imbabura, new business, small business, tea, tea bowls, tea house, woman traveler
A dreamer dreaming dreams is me looking in the mirror and hearing my inner thoughts.
“Dream” is a word I often shy away from using. It’s the writer in me that makes me picky about word selection. Family members have complained about how I contemplate phrases before speaking; they think I’m over analyzing things and being manipulative with my words. But the reality is I think words are important and people should keep their word and say what they mean and mean what they say.
So why be cautious of “dream”? Because it means a hope that may not come true, and really it is more likely not to come true, so it is something one holds in the mind to make it feel less like your soul is dying in the monotony of living. “Dreams” also don’t require people to take action and make a plan to get shit done. Dreams hold the space between winners in life and bench warmers. I much prefer the word “goals” because that means there is a likely change of obtaining it if I work extremely hard (and y’all know “I work hard for the money, so hard for the money”).
But this year I have adopted the #DreamBig2016 slogan. It feels right to use the word “dream” in reference to my entrepreneurial goals for the year. It encourages me to dream big about what I want to do in life, and this is what the successful entrepreneurs say to do in the YouTube videos that I watch daily.
Maybe I’m also thinking about “dream” bc it’s Martin Luther King Jr.’s holiday in the USA. I just posted on Starbucks’s FB page asking why they didn’t honor MLK with a pic or something on its page that has 36 million likes. Someone actually responded to my post immediately, which was impressive but the answer why they didn’t honor him went unanswered.
“Dream” is also on my mind as I work right now on my first professional development workshop that I will give tomorrow. I recently took an online course, “Training of Trainers,” with TESOL. You see, my second business that I’m working on is a teacher training program to help the English teachers in Ecuador. There is a great need to improve English teachers’ ability to effectively teach English out here. Tomorrow I will implement the final project for this online course in the form of an on-campus action research workshop for my uni colleagues.
I have a mixed bowl of feelings about this workshop. But I know this is a necessary step in building my writing school and English teaching consulting agency in Ecuador. So I push on and put my best effort into revising my final project to create a dynamic, two-hour workshop that will be beneficial to my teaching colleagues. I also want to know if this new educational job — teacher trainer — is right for me and how I can make it a successful business.
#DreamBig2016: a teahouse, a writing school/consulting agency/teacher training program, tea bowls/candles, and bruinbutterfly indie publishing. These are the four businesses that I am working to develop. It might seem overly ambitious, bitting off more than this rookie entrepreneur can chew, but I’m off my 5-year-break-from-life, so that training that I received in the public educational system of the great city of L.A. has prepared me to go hard for these dreams. It has taken me 17 years to get London on my travel itinerary, but I’m going. (I booked my flight yesterday.) So it may take me longer than the 2-year-grind that I have given myself to make my businesses succeed, but I’m all in. There’s something about being fired while doing your job well that gives you a freedom to say, “Fuck it! Let’s do.” and “YOLO!” and “I’m Doing Me.”
A dreamer dreaming dreams is me looking in the mirror and hearing my inner thoughts, and saying “hell yeah! I got this!” And even if I do get it all, I’m getting something this year. #DreamBig2016