Anonymous said: New Bold Moves goal for the rest of the month: stop apologizing at work. I know my shit, I need to stop playing myself down! Thanks for the boost, DBN

I was just moved onto a different account this week, and in reply to a rather vague email, I asked a slew of questions regarding the origins, production timeline, creative approvals, etc. At the end I wrote, “thanks, and sorry for the learning curve!”

And then I thought, why am I apologizing for having a learning curve? I started on this account two days ago. Of course I have a learning curve. So I changed it to, “thanks for catching me up.”

There’s no reason to apologize for trying to do a great job.

Glad you’re gettin’ it done!

9:09 pm  •  16 October 2014  •  32 notes

Anonymous said: I am 24 years old and I quit my job to write my memoirs. There's some pretty raw shit. My deadline is halloween. Wish me luck!

If my mother wrote this blog, she’d ask if you have health insurance.

But I write this blog, so maybe just make sure you wear a helmet.

Write well, wild spirit!

11:35 pm  •  15 October 2014  •  22 notes

Anonymous said: I am loving these bold move posts. They're inspiring me to get off my ass. <3 Thank you.

Yes! Good! Because there will totally be more.

11:31 pm  •  15 October 2014  •  11 notes

This Bold Moves October, I’m featuring some women in my life who’ve been powering through. Second up in the series is Ava Mutchler. Ava heads up marketing at Fornash, a fashion jewelry company based out of Washington, D.C. Here’s her story. 

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I thought I was too good for my job. I was bored and wanted out. I had taken this job as a way for me to bide time before I moved to NYC and became a fabulous PR career woman. Two years later, I was stuck at a small company managing the retail and web sales.

So I decided I wanted out. When I sat down and wrote my resume, I realized I had acquired NONE of the skills I would need to land my dream job in marketing or public relations. MAJOR reality check. What had I been doing for two years? (Answer: Drinking lots of BareFoot Pinot Noir and complaining.)

So I decided to make the BOLD move and change something more important than my 9 to 5, my attitude. I realized no one was going to hand me the skills or opportunities I needed to become the professional career woman I had always envisioned myself to be. So I stopped making excuses and started asking myself: how could I create my dream job here at Fornash?

I saw an opportunity to create a marketing department at my company, and I decided to present it to my boss. I was scared. What if the Fornash Facebook Page only got 30 likes? What if no one ever opened any of my emails? What if my boss hated every idea I presented? WHAT IF I FAILED?

But failure is better than boredom, which is the root of all evil in life, whether it be your career or relationships. (Bold Moves October is a great way to combat boredom.)

And I did fail at first. I honestly LAUGH at the first email blasts I created and the things I posted on social media. I sent email blasts out at the wrong times, took blurry marketing pictures with my cell phone and used alcohol in a picture for one. (In my defense it was New Year’s Eve themed!)

It’s also one thing to put your name on your work, it’s another thing to put your face on it. I noticed customers were more likely to buy when they saw our jewelry on someone. I volunteered to be that someone.

I was embarrassed to be “the model”  and just wanted to get it over as quickly as possible. I was afraid my friends would think I’m conceited or customers would laugh at the girl who thought she could model. (We’ve all seen them – it’s called Instagram.) My first photo shoots were sad affairs taken around our office. One was literally taken in the Macy’s Furniture store.

After a few months, I started to realize how important a good lifestyle shot was to selling the brand. I enlisted my boss’s husband to be the professional photographer and my coworker to be the stylist. The results have been amazing [Editor’s Note: they seriously have!], and I still get a little shot of excitement every time a product sells because of one of those shots.

It was a steep learning curve, but after a year, I got the hang of it. We had reached over 3000 fans on Facebook, web sales increased 50% and I felt accomplished because the marketing was mine. I felt proud to put my name (and face) on something.

But I didn’t stop there. I pushed my boss to let me take charge and redo our website, which will hopefully be launching in two weeks. The project has been the most exhausting task I’ve ever undertaken. I’m once again terrified customers will hate the new look, that I’ve forgotten a key component, that it will never actually be over. But I am bold now. I can’t go back.

Now Fornash is at over 7000 fans on Facebook, 1500 on Instagram and web sales are up this year. It hurts to look back and see how complacent I was back then and I will never, ever be that girl again. And I don’t want you to be either.

Be bold. Stop making excuses. Play to your strengths. Make mistakes. And remember, attitude is everything. 

—

Thank you, Ava! I love you to the moon and back. Let’s go on a Career Women Do What They Want Vacation soon. 

And readers, be sure to check out the goods at Fornash.com. I’m frequently bejeweled in their goods and a constant liker of Ava’s face on Instagram.

2:51 pm  •  15 October 2014  •  41 notes

beautifuldaysish said: I just want to say thank you. Most would think resigning for a job I love to move to a place and experience the change my soul has been needing would be timed sporadically. In fact; it's not. I had a goal to move to NYC during Bold Moves October - so I've been saving, applying to jobs, and secured an apartment I'm moving into this weekend. Thank you for helping me find the courage to do so and put forth my bold moves into action. I make sure to take that boldness with me daily.

11:38 pm  •  13 October 2014  •  25 notes

Anonymous said: okay. BMO. i've been dating him for 9 months. it's fantastic. should i tell him i love him?

Do you?

Then hell yeah! 

This, for me, definitely falls under the life philosophy of “if I were to get hit by a bus…” 

Also, isn’t it funny that’s the most frequent ‘die tomorrow’ death? Buses, man. They’re wild.

11:35 pm  •  13 October 2014  •  15 notes

Anonymous said: How do you go about dating on Tinder? I'm not which guys are just after sex or dating... Is there a nicer way to ask "what are you looking for?" And saying "I'm not looking for a hook up"

You could remove “on Tinder” from this question and still have it be relevant. 

But riddle me this, what’s wrong with “what are you looking for”? What about that isn’t nice? I mean you could do something a little more roundabout and say, “what brings you to the Tindersphere?” or perhaps something a little more leading like, “have you gone on any good dates from Tinder?” But the people who react poorly to “what are you looking for” are not the people you want to date.

Using Tinder is like dating in the Internet’s comment section. You go into it only for the amusement of seeing how terrible some humans are, and then just hope to be delighted by one person saying, “I actually thought this article was well-researched and interesting.” 

Like! Swipe right. 

11:33 pm  •  13 October 2014  •  27 notes

jessa-bear said: On Saturday, I was feeling restless and lonely and rather than feel sorry for myself, I asked, "What would DBN do?" And in the spirit of BMO, I hoped on a bike and rode to the Lincoln Memorial. It's a short 3-mile ride from my place, but I felt so proud that I conquered my fear of biking on the road! As it turns out, I needed to be more worried about pedestrians than cars. Anyway, not much of a question but more of a thank you for being the person I channeled!

Super rad! (And a great observation that irritates most cyclists, too.) 

And I’ll channel myself a little jessa-bear in the morning when I go out for a particularly challenging ride. 

Thank you for this!

11:28 pm  •  13 October 2014  •  12 notes

You’ve got issues, darling. 

(Source: Spotify)

1:59 pm  •  9 October 2014  •  5 notes

This Bold Moves October, I’m featuring some women in my life who’ve been powering through. First up is my dear friend Katie Paxton. Here’s her story. 

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Last week, Kelton asked me to write something for Bold Moves October to the tune of “I was really scared to do this rad thing and then I did it and it was awesome.” Just the idea of writing for someone else’s blog is terrifying to me, not to mention a blog with such a beautiful following like this one.[Editor’s note: they really are beautiful.] So of course I had to say yes because it’s fun to do things that scare us…right? right!? After three infuriating days of letting resistance and fear get the best of me, I finally sat down to write.

I decided I wanted to be an actress when I was 15. I knew nothing about acting. All I knew was how amazing I felt onstage during the middle school production of Flapper. Shortly after, my mom took me to my first Broadway play and something just clicked. I would never go back.

I’d been told that life as an actress wasn’t easy, so, like the good little A+ student I was, I enrolled in drama class. I dedicated my life to learning everything there was to know about the craft of acting so I could one day thrive in the Mecca of young talented artists: New York City.

Shakespeare, voice training, singing lessons, movement classes, clown workshops, improv, on-camera acting classes, and three years as a company member at a professional repertory theatre while I was earning my master’s degree in acting. Yes, a master’s degree in acting. It does exist. All of this was to prepare me for a life in the arts.

You could say I was into it.

Twelve years later, I am finally living the life I’ve dreamed of since I was fifteen. Well, sort of.

After a successful industry showcase with my graduate school class, I signed with an amazing agent, packed up my belongings into a rented Tahoe and sat shotgun while my dad drove from North Carolina to Brooklyn, shouting expletives all the way up the honking New Jersey Turnpike.

Before I could even unpack, I began going on auditions. I was excited! I was nervous. I was always prepared and memorized…and I was “green,” said the casting directors.

“GREEN?!” I was devastated. Despite all my preparation, I was “green” meaning inexperienced, new, young. I was so desperate to succeed and it showed. After one week in New York, the confident, overachieving A+ student was brought down to harsh reality: I had no idea what the fuck I was doing.

Don’t get me wrong—I gained invaluable knowledge from my time as an acting student and gathered many of the tools and techniques I use every day. But I have learned more in the past 16 months about myself as an artist and a human being than I did in all of my years in school.

I moved to New York exactly one year and four months ago and I still don’t really know what I’m doing. I’m figuring it out along the way. Which brings me, Kelton, to the awesome rad thing I do every day that scares the shit out of me: get up and try again.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is this: there is no magic formula, there is only getting up every day and doing it again.

For example, auditioning. I did some math for y’all. I’ve been on 180 auditions in 16 months and gotten six jobs. That’s a 3.3% success rate. This is not complaining, this is reality; I’m happy with those numbers. Putting a percentage to it is a little silly since it changes so often and will change throughout my career, but I’m doing it to give you an example of what it’s like starting out. I spend hours preparing for an audition only to face rejection 96.7% of the time. And “green” is one of the more tame rejections I’ve heard.

I face constant rejection but I keep going out, putting myself out there. Why?

Because to me, the only real failure is giving up on what makes me most happy just because it’s hard. Because I don’t want to give up until I’m laying face down in what appears to be human shit for the 10,000,974,835th time and not even then! Because my heart refuses to be satisfied with anything else. Because auditioning is the only time I’ll get to act that day, the only time I’ll ever get to dive into that character. I do it because I love it. And sometimes, I get the job.

But it won’t ever get easier. Sure, maybe one day I’ll only get offers on projects and never have to audition. But the rejection will still be there, lurking in negative reviews, cancelled shows and nasty tabloids. Nothing is guaranteed, except that the most rewarding path is usually the one riddled with burrs and boulders and boogeymen.

And it takes bravery to stay on that path. Sticking with it even when the money runs so low my legs go numb after paying rent, the audition opportunities dry up, and the smell of hot garbage and human urine in the gutter makes me gag for the millionth time. For a feverish moment, I want to run to a remote cabin in the Catskills, sell pottery at the local Farmers’ Market and look back fondly on the years I spent as an actress, bragging, “I was even on TV a few times!” and maybe one day that will be my fate, but right now I’m going to keep working, learning to live and love and grow even when the soil is poisoned.

There is no magic formula, there is only getting up every day and doing it again.

Patience is bitter but it bears sweet fruit. —Aristotle/Canadian Proverb/Turkish Proverb(the internet is confusing).

—

Thank you, K-Pax! You’re rad, and I can’t wait to see what you do next!

To read more of Katie’s stuff, check out her Tumblr dontmindifido.  

12:46 pm  •  8 October 2014  •  39 notes