A Story of Starting Over
Listen to Episode 03 of Celebrate Confidently the Podcast or read the script below.
A big part of my why behind the podcast comes from a place of being a recovering perfectionist. Now I want to pause right here to make sure I'm clarifying that I'm saying recovering perfectionist not recovered. It's still work in progress, and I've got a long way to go. But I’ve made a lot of progress in this area in the past couple of years and I'm quite proud of that progress. Also quite relieved from the progress.
Let me elaborate. I’ve always wanted to host people in my home and I wanted to be a good host. But I also wanted to be known as a good host. There's a difference there. Being a good host is others-focused, while being known as a good host was me-focused. I’ll talk more about the me-focused approach to hosting in future episodes, but the others-focused part was modeled to me from a young age.
I had grown up in a home where people always felt welcomed. There was always some gathering or party going on. I watched my mom and my grandma and the women around me celebrate other people really well, in both the big and small ways, and hosting well was early on ingrained in me. I also think that it is just the heartbeat that God gave me here on this Earth, which is another part of why I feel so compelled to talk to each week about this subject. I want to provide encouragement for the person who doesn't feel confident in their hosting to maybe feel a little more confident and equipped to be able to host people and acknowledge their celebrations big and small.
So here's my story of starting over and how the Lord is continuing to teach me that doesn't need to be perfect to be good, having a heart that is others-focused is the end-goal, and that we can’t let the fear of getting it wrong keep us from giving it a try.
If you’ve listened to episode two where I detail the process of getting this podcast from dream to concept to name, brand and episodes, you know that this podcast was a group effort from my Creative Brain Trust last July, in the midst of the pandemic when the world was just starting to open back up. That March I had been furloughed from my full-time job. I spent several weeks with a very lost identity. My full-time role is Director of Marketing for a national location-based entertainment company and I have since returned back to full-time work with this role. But there was a long period through the spring and summer where I was unemployed, staying home with my precious daughter, and I was resetting at a much slower pace. And it was wonderful. I was really able to realign with my why. I was really able to dig in to who I am and why certain things affected me in certain ways. It was overall a really healthy reset.
Let’s fast-forward, I got the idea of starting a podcast. I invited a few friends in to help me build idea into workable concept. The fall was a full one for me with hosting a variety of engagement, birthday and bridal parties and showers, not to mention helping plan and coordinate my brother-in-law and sister-in-law’s wedding. Each gathering I hosted and planned, I felt more and more compelled to share this message of celebrating well via the podcast platform. But I was so busy actually celebrating, that I couldn’t give my attention to launching the podcast just yet. By the end of October, I was full of excitement and ideas and my recording equipment had finally arrived. We were turning a closet in our basement into my little recording studio, but while that was still a work in progress, I decided to push past what I thought in my head was right (the proper recording atmosphere) and just “go for it.” So I set up my equipment inside my master closet and there amongst my shirts, dresses and shoes, I recorded the first episodes of my original podcast, Celebrate Accordingly. I had scripted the first three episodes and once I started recording the words started flowing. So much so, that I felt confident to freestyle the rest of the episodes.I love to talk and words don't normally come hard for me, so I cranked out a ton of episodes -- pretty much the full first season. I had it all saved on a flash drive.
And yes, you can stop me right here and say “Cassie, a flash drive? Those still exist? What about the cloud?” Yes. I've been asking myself that same question almost every day since December. Anywho I had it on a flash drive because my computer had so many programs and files from work that it didn’t have the space to house my podcast audio files. So, here I was carrying around these precious audio files, graphic design files and more on a flashdrive, editing and preparing for my presumed launch around Thanksgiving.
One day I sat down to finalize the files and upload them to my podcast hosting site to prepare to launch the next week. As soon as I plugged it in, I knew something was wrong and sure enough, the flash drive had corrupted and was wiped clean. Everything was gone. Podcast audio. Cover art. Social media graphics. All of it.
I sat there in that moment and cried thinking of all the hard work that I'd been doing and all that I had been building up towards and all the words that I had recorded and all the times I pushed past self-doubt to get started. It was all gone and I wanted to quit. I’m a perfectionist and the thought of trying to do it again and do it the same was overwhelming. I was ready to be done and never pick it back up.
I told my husband and my creative brain trust I was done. It was too hard to rebuild, felt like too much and I was too tender. I already was fighting for pockets of time to do this on the side and I was too tired to try to start again. And they all told me the same thing. You can be sad for as long as you need to. But you can’t quit. This is God’s idea and His call on you. You have to push through.
I knew they were right. I took the break I needed to mourn the hard work being lost and face the fear of restarting, rerecording, and rebuilding. I was headed into another busy season with the holidays and gearing up for one of my best friend’s wedding and all the celebrations we had in store with that.
And in the midst of doing real life and real celebrations with the people I love, I was reminded of how my heart beats fast for celebrating all the things, big and small, joyful and hard.
I knew that the Lord did give me words to say and he gave me a heart for something that I think is really important. I was also welcoming the belief that my content can be better this time around. And as you listen here, you will never know the difference, but I do. And I can sit here with confidence knowing I'm talking exactly about what I'm supposed to be talking about, saying the words I'm exactly supposed to say.
And here is where this episode was originally going to wrap up. I had it recorded and loaded to be set out as a teaser-package for my first listeners for my launch mid-April.
Two days after I announced that I was launching my podcast, I was messaged by an acquaintance from college informing me that the name of my podcast was infringing on the brand of a project that she had been working on for the better part of six years. And while I was completely ignorant to the overlap and that the name my friends had coined for my podcast directly conflicted with her ambitions, in good faith I couldn’t press forward under Celebrate Accordingly. When I read her message, God immediately gave me Philippians 2:1-4. Here it is for you real quick --
“Therefore if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, 2 then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. 3 Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, 4 not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.”
So I called her. Apologized that she had felt hurt by my podcast launch, explained that I was ignorant to her project, had done my due diligence and would have never proceeded under ill-will or flagrant disregard to her. She is my sister in Christ and I know that there is enough space in the Kingdom of God for both our messages and our hearts for celebrating. And that God doesn’t care about the name of my podcast, but rather the heart behind the words.
So I’m starting over, again. But I know that the promise of Philippians 1:6 is mine for the taking, and yours as well.
“And we have confidence in this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.”
Friends, we can celebrate confidently without having to do it perfectly, because celebrating others and ourselves is God’s idea. And it’s a good one. And He will be faithful to carry it out. So let’s lean in to trying new things -- encouraging someone in a way that may feel awkward at first, hosting a gathering when you don’t feel equipped, going above and beyond when you’d rather just stay in your comfort zone, being willing to humble ourselves and start again. We have confidence in something that is outside ourselves and isn’t that good news for the perfectionist in all of us?