267: Keeping your eye on the prize

Today Betsy talks about keeping your focus even when it appears from the outside that everything is falling apart and inspires you to believe that if your dream is still alive, it can still come true. Transcription: Hello, today’s episode is called eye on the prize, how shifting your focus changes how you experience your environment. It’s really interesting because I have been sitting here for an hour, like sitting here for an hour, staring at the screen. Starting stopping, erasing, starting stopping erasing starting stuff we read, I think, maybe five times. Then I went and got an English muffin, got a Red Bull. And then I came back and I stared some more. And then I got on Instagram, you know what I’m talking about, you know, those days, right. But when I was journaling this morning, that was the title I on the prize, which I find hilarious, since I could not get my eye on the prize, which was actually recording this podcast, you know, usually what I do, is I get like an idea. And then I come in here, and then I start recording, and then I just shut my eyes. And then I just talk. And today is like really interesting day is a day of completion in a lot of ways. So today, my daughter is moving into the dorms at scad. I know and maybe you’ve been through that, or maybe you’re looking forward to that. Or maybe you’ve seen a lot of friends that are moving their kids into the dorms at whatever school they’re going to and I have to tell you that that it feels it feels so I’m gonna pause for a second. Unbelievable. It feels unbelievable. And here’s, here’s what I’m going to talk about. So you know, if you listen to I think was Episode 253, my daughter was on. So you may have heard her story, she wanted to come on and tell her story. She suffered with extreme anxiety and depression all through high school, junior high, it started high school, to the point where she couldn’t attend school. And we did a lot of things, you can listen to that episode and hear more about it. But ever since she was a little kid, like little kids, she loved to draw. And she was amazing. I remember like seven or eight years old, she would draw stuff and I would hang it in my office like in my cube when I worked. And people would ask me, oh, did your daughter color that. And I was like, it’s not a coloring page. She drew it. And then she colored it. And they would be like, what? And then like she was seven years old, you know, like little her whole life. She wanted to go to scad scad is the Savannah College of Art and Design. And we live in Atlanta. There’s an Atlanta campus, there’s a Savannah campus, and there is a campus in Paris. There used to be a campus in Hong Kong, but I think that one has closed. So her whole life, that’s what she wanted. And then when she got sick, you know, I felt like that dream. I mean, she had no dreams, you know, everything fell to the side and all the things that had been important to her no longer work during that period of time. And she stopped drawing. I remember that was one of the things that made me feel the most sad. She used to draw, and then she would think they weren’t good enough. And so she would crumple them up and put them in the garbage. And I used to put it on Facebook that they were like, garbage art. The garbage art was amazing. It’s incredible. I still have a lot of it. But people would be like, Oh my god, she threw that in the garbage. But she was always wanting to learn and get better and so nothing else seemed good enough. I remember at Christmas time it was like she would get so many gift cards to Blix, which is on the Savannah campus. It’s like amazing art store like with I mean it’s huge, you know,