It was the Monday after Thanksgiving, my first day back in the office after the long holiday weekend. I opened up an email that alerted me to the potentially devastating blows the proposed tax bill would inflict upon my 18-year-old business. Let me rephrase: The colleague who forwarded the information indicated those changes would essentially shut down the business I had created from nothing and nurtured successfully for almost two decades.

After calls to my tax guy and financial consultants (who counseled me to wait it out a bit), I braced myself for what should have been curled-up-in-bed panic. But I didn’t feel panicky. I felt excited. Excited about who I might meet, where a conversation might lead, what the next chapter of my life might reveal.

For if I was honest with myself, I had been “tired” for a long time. Tired of the battles I waged that had little to do with the work I loved doing and more to do with running a self-employed business, tired of feeling constantly distracted and discouraged by all the “noise” in the news, tired of feeling passion-less and direction-less.

This is not to say that my life wasn’t good: I had an amazing community of friends, my health, a career and long-time clients that I loved, a home, a dog, and a wonderful husband. This didn’t feel like a mid-life crisis or a crisis of faith. Rather, I felt a strong calling to get back to what’s authentic for me. I’d been comfortable and complacent too long, and that was not a happy place for me. In the past, I thrived when I took leaps of faith and jumped without a net; at my core, I am a risk-taker. Not a jump-out-of-an-airplane kinda gal, but someone who tackled life’s challenges with outside-the-box creativity. It was time for me to nudge myself out of my little nest and do…I didn’t know what.

I searched for some kind of book, class, or program that would allow me to explore and expand, that would challenge me to embrace change. I ended up creating my own, with a variety of tasks that inspire creativity, push me out of my comfort zone (they should be uncomfortable), shake me out of routines, force me to do some self-care (I suck at this, as I almost always put others’ needs first), and have fun doing it.

Here are my “rules”:

• Create a list of 52+ tasks. Cut them into strips, scrunch them into wads, put them into a bowl.
• Every Sunday, for 52 weeks, pull a new challenge from the bowl, to be completed in the coming week.
• I can pass and re-draw only 4 times (and I’ll report in, so you can keep me honest).
• To the best of my ability, tackle the chosen challenge, and nudge myself.
• Take note of what I experienced and what I learned.

I kicked it off with:

Break a rule.

What I did and what I learned about myself are written up in the first post, so I’ll let you read it on your own.

Then, if you feel so moved, I’d love to have you join me. Follow along and add your observations in Comments, join me each week in attempting the chosen task, create your own list and work concurrently, or just pop in every so often to see how I’m doing.

It’s all good. Let’s do this.