People make commitments to get involved in every manner of personal and professional deals, relationships, activities - you name it, all the time. While the experience is novel, engaging, fun, intriguing, challenging, or giving you any feel good vibe a positive adjective can provide (shout out to Donna Talarico of Words. Words. Words) most people ride out the endorphin rush as long as it lasts.
On the flip side, when anxiety, grief, boredom, danger, or anger hit, people start to re-evaluate priorities and make value decisions about staying or walking (or running) away. It's all about the perks and bennies of staying versus the loss of emotional, physical, or financial pain by getting out and letting go. Face it, even after calculated appraisal, we sometimes make commitments that need to be broken. Reward vs punishment. I could restate it and spin it a multitude of ways but I'm becoming redundant, so why would I do that?
Engagement and change come through vision, passion and commitment to imagine the future, build a great supportive community, recognize and enlist talent, project manage and produce outcomes, and the ability to maintain a high level of commitment.
The yearning to achieve fraught with angst has generated timeless idioms a la Theodore Roosevelt -
Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty… I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.
Entrenched in family and all the trappings that come with them, demanding work and often inhumane schedules, other passions, community service, wedding planning, logistics and geographics, mysterious rashes and a year's worth of other competing priorities, my two partners at NEPA BlogCon, Mandy Boyle and Michelle Davies prove that when you have vision and passion along with a high level of commitment, engagement and change happen. Thanks for another successful year ladies!
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