Meet Janice Radomsky, Brand & Business Strategist & Founder of the Blog "The New York State of Mind"
Meet Janice Radomsky, the founder of “The New York State of Mind Blog”.
What messages have you had to confront (internally or externally) to pursue your personal & professional path?
“Like so many others I know, I was handed a very significant document at birth. This document would shape my life and dictate the script of my personal story. That is, until I made the choice to rewrite my story.
You see, the day I was born, I was handed a pre-scripted blueprint for life. It went something like this: go to school, go to university, travel, get a job, find a boyfriend, marry said boyfriend, buy a house, have kids.
To be clear upfront, I have no issues with these so-called life milestones. I have fulfilled, or still aspire to fulfil, many of them. The issue I have is that for most of my life, I treated them like items on a to-do list.
So, when I found myself 40'ish, with many of the items still unchecked, I naturally thought there was something wrong with me. Not once did I stop to think that maybe, just maybe, the problem wasn't with me, but with the blueprint I was blindly following.
Looking back, I was working off an incomplete script. And I say incomplete, because it was missing a few instructions. It didn't tell me what to do when I hadn't achieved certain outcomes within the prescribed timeline. It didn't teach me to ask questions about what I wanted in and around life's checklist. It didn't really encourage me to dream. In fact, my blueprint was missing a key factor. Me.
In the absence of chasing dreams, I continued to wriggle my way into my pre-determined script. From the outside, I would have looked like a toddler trying to fit the green triangle into the red square of a Fisher Price toy. The harder I tried, the more it didn't fit. And the more it didn't fit, the more frustrated I got.
When a toddler is defiant, stubborn in proving the mismatched shape will fit, something eventually has to give. Either the toddler has a tantrum or the toy breaks! As an adult, when we're not aligned to what we should be doing, life usually delivers us a whack to the head that forces our own breaking point.
I consider myself incredibly lucky. My wake-up call came in the cliched form of a break-up, at the cliched age of nearly 40. I call it my break-up, my break-down and my break-free.
Like an architect reviewing plans that aren't going according to plan, I rolled out my blueprint and began to break down my old story. But, the real game-changer happened when I woke up to the fact that I could write a new one.
With a blank piece of paper, I started to dream again. I reconnected, not with unchecked items on my to-do list, but with long-forgotten dreams on my wish-list.
The irony isn't lost on me that one of those buried dreams was to live in the city built on dreams and by dreamers. As some very bold decisions collided with moments of magical alignment, I marched myself out my comfort zone to start an entirely new chapter of my life in the Big Apple.
Many say I'm living the dream. But really, now that I'm writing my own blueprint, I'm just getting started!”
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