Our Fight Club experience
Last December we went to Fight Club in Denver, Colorado, organized by Jeff Jochum. Now don’t be fooled by the name! It was a workshop for photographers, finishing with a presentation about our business, broadcasted to a live internet audience.
Talk about being confronted with yourself… Deep down in our core, we felt exactly what we stood for in life, but somehow we couldn’t express ourselves properly without watering down our message.
While we were trying so hard to define what it is what drives us, it became clear we had lost ourselves in the process. When Jeff told us we seemed to have a stick up our ass during our presentation, it hit us: we were not being spontaneous at all. Pretty terrible when you love being spontaneous and being around like-minded people. By not living true to our own message, we were setting ourselves up for failure.
By not living authentically true to our message, we were setting ourselves up for failure.
The same was true for living unconventionally. Being unconventional, doing our own thing, being independent, is what we want to live by. A part of us is already doing it: we did quit our jobs, we did move across the world, we did quit jobs again and we are walking a very unconventional path with our business.
But until today, we are fighting our demons from the past: deeply ingrained fears about being judged, holding us back, whispering that we might say the wrong thing or do something “stupid”.
One of the things Jeff said at the workshop and that struck a chord is: “You are worth it.” We are worth to live true to our values. And that’s what we now remind ourselves of. Every day.
After a couple more weeks of digesting what we learned, we decided on a whim to travel to Oregon Coast. Because on our bio page, we proudly state that it’s not adventure travelling if you book hotels in advance, but we didn’t take a single holiday in 2014. It was time for a change.
Back home, we decided to throw out our desk and drive to Ikea to get loungy chairs and give ourselves a “zen corner” at home. It’s what our gut told us to do.
Fight Club brought us more than clarity about our message. It made us hear that we are enough and don’t need excuses to live spontaneous and unconventional. And neither do you.