In this vlog recorded on August 1, 2024, the creator shares a day in the 30‑day "Following My Dreams" challenge. She reports waking to thunderstorms, a brief outing for groceries, and a surge of motivation after her daughter sent a contest link. She has rewritten 20,000 words of a novel originally 90,000 words and submitted the first 5,000 words to a literary‑agent contest, planning to revisit the "Save the Cat Writes a Novel" guide for direction. She also discusses updating her Insight Timer Secrets online course and creating a second course, emphasizing a promise she made to deliver them within two weeks. The vlog pivots to a reflection on personal promises: how breaking a self‑made promise feels like a betrayal, the rarity of missing her own deadlines, and a question to viewers about their own patterns. Mary Schiller expands on this, critiquing traditional to‑do lists and proposing the concept of "heart callings"—activities aligned with true desire that become personal promises. She invites viewers to list their heart callings in the comments. Finally, she mentions an upcoming trip to Luxembourg with her husband, promising to film and share videos from the visit before returning home on Sunday.
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Hello, bonjour! It is day 25 of 30 Days of Following My Dreams. It is the 1st of August 2024, le 1er août 2024. Woke up to some thunderstorms, but as I'm looking out the window, I can see only clear skies, which is great for all of the Olympians who have outdoor events today. It is still going to be quite warm, so I am going to get outside today, but probably just briefly to go to the to the supermarket and back. Something kind of cool happened this morning. Last night my daughter texted me a link to a contest where you could submit the first 5,000 words of your novel for review, and if you win the contest, you get some prize money plus your entire novel will be looked at by literary agent type people. So I was very excited to do that. Happy that I'd been spending the time that I'd been spending to rework this novel that has been sitting around on my computer since— well, I started it I think in 2011, finished it in like 2014, 2015, somewhere in there, and it's just been sitting ever since. So it was so much fun for me to submit the first 5,000 words of this novel for them to look at because I felt really good about it. I'm actually up to 20,000 words that I have redone. The whole novel in its original state was about 90,000, so I may, you know, get to that 25% mark before this challenge is done. The section that I'm in right now, oh, it's taking a lot of energy and effort. I have to admit, I'm a little bit stumped, so Today I'm going to go back to reading the Save the Cat Writes a Novel book and see if that can help me get some direction. The other thing that I'm working on today is not French, although I know I need to do that because now I've officially signed up for the exam. But I am in the process of redoing my Insight Timer Secrets online course. I'm also creating a second course to go along with it. So those are another priority of mine over these next 2 weeks because I have promised people that they will have them soon. So I need to fulfill that promise. And that brings me to something that I just wanted to touch on briefly here, which is how often do you break a promise to yourself? Because for me, that is so major. Like, if I say I'm going to do something and I don't do it, even if no one knows about it but me, that feels like a betrayal of myself and of what I am trying to do in this world. I don't have a lot of judgment around it. I know I use the word betrayal, so that sounds very heavy, and it's not really like that, but it's more like, okay, Mary, you can do better. I know you can do better. So, you know, when I set deadlines for myself I really stick to them. It's very rare that I don't hit them, even like I said, if no one knows about them but myself and my calendar and, you know, my computer. So that's a question I would like to ask you today, is how often do you break promises that you've made to yourself, and what can you do today to turn that around if you see that that's something that you do fairly often. All right, I'm going to get on with my day here and make some progress on things, and I will catch up with you in just a moment.
I am taking a little break from my projects today to get outside. It's not as hot as it has been, but it's still pretty warm. And I was thinking some more about the topic that I started this video with, which is how often we break a promise to ourselves. And again, I want to reiterate that this isn't about a judgment It's not about that. It's more about noticing any trends that we see. So if you find yourself breaking a promise regularly that you've made to yourself, that's something to notice and then correct because you can change it. You can stop doing that. I think that there's a problem with to-do lists in that We write a to-do list as a list of what our promises essentially, and then we don't follow through with them, and that to-do list just keeps getting dragged to the next day and the next day and the next day. And I would rather see us get rid of the to-do list and instead ask ourselves what we truly want to be doing with our time. Not things that we have to do or that we're supposed to do, but what do we want to do? So for instance, as I mentioned in the first part of this video, I want to make an updated version of my Insight Timer Secrets course. So today I mapped out all of the videos and some other materials that I need to make for this update, and I set a deadline for when it's going to be ready to publish. And that isn't a to-do list, that's a I want to do this, so here are the promises that I am making to myself about when this project will be completed so that people can take advantage of this course. And if you start living more from what you want to do every day, you will find that you don't need that to-do list so much anymore, that it becomes irrelevant, and that when you hear something within yourself you are much more likely to act on it instead of ignoring it or saying, oh, you know, I'll do it later, or I'll do it next week. To me, those nudges from within, those heart callings as I have described them in the past, those are promises. Those are promises that we are making to ourselves. Like, I really want to rework this novel, and now I'm doing it in 2024. That's a heart calling that has also become a promise to myself. So if you were to list out some of your heart callings in a comment on this video, what would they be? And can you now see how they're actually promises that you're making to yourself and that you actually can keep? And not only that, you can make them happen a lot faster than you may realize. I had no idea that I would get through almost 25% of my novel rewrite during this 30-day challenge of 30 Days of Following My Dreams. I had no clue, but that's where I'm going to end up, and maybe even further than that. I don't know, it's not over yet. So tomorrow morning I am getting up very, very early, very early. I have to leave the house by, I don't know, 5:30 AM or something like that, because I am going to see one of my wonderful relatives who now lives in Luxembourg, and we'll be there just for a couple of nights, my husband and myself, and then coming home on Sunday. But in the interim, I'm going to keep going on things as much as I can. I will certainly make some videos for you while I'm there and show you a bit of— oops— and show you a bit of Luxembourg. So Stay tuned. Let me know your heart callings and your promises in the comments, and I will see you tomorrow. A bientôt!
