Hello Everyone, I’m Juliette; mykagami’s newest team member. I’m managing our social media and writing blogs.
Actually, I’ve been trying to write a blog for a couple of months now and have had pretty limited success, it was only in a meeting with Yo a few days ago I stumbled across the reason!
We like to keep things personal here at mykagami, and think that talking about real experiences and the skills that we’ve had to develop to overcome challenges is far more useful to everyone than another lifestyle blog telling you to get up at 4:30 to do 3 hours of yoga in order to live your best life (not that I don’t love yoga). Frankly, we don’t know what’s going to work for you, but what we do know is that mykagami is going to help you develop the skills to work it out for yourself!
Why do I know this? Well, that’s exactly what it has done for me, and why this blog has been so hard to write.
Since starting working with mykagami I’ve come to some really uncomfortable realisations about many of the decisions that I have made. I’ve realised that there is a big difference between being active and passive in your journey.
Going into my third year at university I had a great graduate job lined up and seemed to be on the “right” track, but came to the sudden realisation that I wanted something very different. As a result, I changed my goal to pursuing elite sport (that’s a story for another time). Whilst trying to write this blog I thought I’d talk about sport and what motivates me to get up and train every day, but it all seemed a little hollow - deep down I think that I’d realised that when I chose to do sport it was blind luck it was the right decision for me.
You see, all through school and university I’d done things because they seemed like the right thing to do, other people told me to, or I could follow a clear path. When I chose to break away from that to row I made a lot of decisions based on practical choices, how would I make money? Where would I live? Who would I train with? All the things you would expect someone who was making a big life choice that broke away from the path of least resistance to ask. But I failed to really look inward and think: Why do I want to do this? Why does it fulfil me? What would success look like? What about sport motivates me?
Working for mykagami, and maybe the time lockdown has afforded me to be a little more reflective, have given me the chance to look at how I made that decision. Fortunately, 3 years down the line I still think it was the right one, but I’ve also realised that when making these big decisions the inward motivations are as important as the outward practicalities. I knew I didn’t want to take my London job, and I thought I wanted to train full time, but I really didn’t know why I wanted to do one more than the other, both were hard work, but only one paid me! To be honest, I think I’m only just starting to work it out and I certainly have much more to learn from working at mykagami !