As a child, I assumed this had some obscure reference to the Pilgrims and Plymouth Rock. Like, these people escaped religious persecution, got on a boat called the Mayflower and in the month of April they weathered a lot of storms to land in North America. Not quite. I then figured the adage prophesized the month of April as the rainiest of the year, and thus all the flowers would bloom in May. This is probably closer to the actual origin of the saying.

Now at the ripe ol’ age of 30, I find “April showers bring May flowers” to have a different meaning. 

I was able to spend some time recently centering myself, which I am sure sounds hippie-dippie-trippy, but I’m being serious. March was, for whatever reason, not my best month in a lot of ways, particularly when it came to achieving some pretty lofty {but hear me, completely doable} goals in my skincare + cosmetics business. I had quite a few wins and high moments, but when March 31 rolled over to April 1 at midnight, I realized what Cinderella must have felt like as her glitter carriage morphed back into a pumpkin. On the plus side, I still had both shoes on my feet.

I digress.

Let me explain. You’ll typically be able to find a weekly or daily sudoku puzzle in your local newspaper. There are nine big squares of nine little squares each, and the goal is for each of your nine big squares, each row and each column to contain the numbers one through nine once each. For most of my life I never bothered to try because I told myself the story that “I am bad with numbers.” Granted, math is not my strong suit, especially in the realm of a classroom, but I didn’t know what I was talking about. I also, fun fact, spent about 15 years calling it “soduku,” pronounced like Count Dooku. So I extra was telling myself a story here.

Tonight as I did my “focus practice” as I’ve been calling it, I pulled out a recent puzzle from the local Athens independent newspaper, Flagpole. My method is to examine each square in detail and see, based on the numbers that are already put there, which numbers could be in that square. I do this for every open square. Then I go back through: Is there any square that could onlybe one number? Over and over again, then crossing out possibilities in other squares. 
​
I’m sure someone out there has a different way to do sudoku, but this is my way and I’m cool with it, so calm yourselves. 

I fill one square in — yes! A win! Then spend a few minutes going back over the entire puzzle, looking for the next one. Crossing out the ones that won’t work. Back and forth, up and down, over and over until suddenly, YAAAS! All the pieces start coming together. One number goes in that clears four squares that clear six more and it keeps going and going until the puzzle is completed.  Such a feeling of accomplishment!

Isn’t it interesting how momentum builds, and then all of a sudden everything just comes together?

I could have easily put the puzzle away when it was frustrating. And trust me, when I have gone over rows and columns and squares and can’t seem to find either my error or the next clue, I want to ball the dang paper up and hurl it across the bathroom and open up a book. But because I focused, because I didn’t even let my very cute cats distract me, because I did the work to set the things up and I didn’t stop following up on my work until the thing was done, the thing got done. 

Y’all, I spent two straight days in March at a conference for my company and heard about a dozen entrepreneurs talk about building momentum, and it took a dang sudoku puzzle and a silly old wives tale to hit my mindshift. The teacher appears when the student is ready, amirite?

Last May through this March I was planting seeds. I wasn’t particularly focused about it all the time {hello, last August, October and this January and kind of March}, but I still trudged forward. And now that I’m aware of what a truly focused mindset looks like, I’m going to make it rain all over those seeds in April. That’s called momentum. 

And those showers? They’re going to bring May flowers.

During the early months of 2018, I started following Trysten Molina on Instagram. Molina owns the independent (indie) yarn dyeing and knitwear design brand Dragon Hoard Yarn Co. I was enamored with her yarn from the get-go — lots of speckles, and color themes that played right into my fantasy fiction-loving heart! I bought her “Christmas at Hogwarts” yarn advent for myself last Christmas and delighted each day in December as I opened a tiny new skein of yarn. I was gifted a gift certificate to use in her shop by one of my closest friends, and within a few days of 2019 I knew precisely what color I wanted.

Necromancy is a mottle of greens and grays that bring to mind lying down on a moss-coated forest floor next to a bubbling brook, listening for the faint sounds of Tom Bombadil’s singing to come over a hillside. Or perhaps that’s just my mind. Regardless, I fell in absolute lust with the colorway! There are lime greens and emerald, Kelly and hunter and nearly hidden flecks of bright red. It’s part of Molina’s yarns inspired by the Netflix original show “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,” which is an excellent show, although far more macabre than the Melissa Joan Hart version of my childhood. 

Spellman Pullover is a cropped sweater with cables and bobbles (think little knitted balls) on the shoulders and sleeves. I had an excuse to get my Necromancy!
 
>> falling short of the cohort
 
As excited as I was to cast on my sweater {knit in a mohair and fingering weight yarn, both in Necromancy}, I was already way behind. I committed to starting the sweater Jan. 11 and finishing it by Feb. 11, and I ordered my yarn on Jan. 9. Then the USPS held it hostage for an extra day or two, and due to some other things going on I didn’t prioritize casting on right away when I got a moment.
Being in a group chat with all the other test knitters, that was hard. I was constantly getting notifications on Facebook Messenger with other knitters speeding along: showing off their yarn a week before I’d even ordered mine; two sets of bobbles done on the shoulders the day I sat down to review the pattern; tossing out edits and suggestions about design terms that were completely new to me.

I almost didn’t start.

I saw all these knitters doing so much better and so much faster and yada yada yada than me and I was embarrassed. There was actually no way on God’s green Earth that I was going to finish a sweater in the given timeframe with how much else I had happening. I was ashamed that I didn’t know some of these terms and I’d never knit a bobble before in my life, and truth be told that I didn’t have much to offer in test knitting this pattern other than helping confirm stitch counts. I sat on my yarn once it came for at least a week going through all this in my mind, continuing to watch the group chat and sitting quietly.

I knew I had the skills to knit this. Like y’all, I design my own patterns all the time and don’t think a second thought about it. It takes me less than a week to knit an entire pair of socks. This is not actually hard to someone who’s got 11 years’ experience putting yarn to needle.

I knew I wantedto knit this. These two yarns held together are so squishy and soft and I already planned out the outfit I would wear in my post-bind-off photo shoot.

I had skills. I had vision. I had passion. Heck, y’all, I even had a deadline! All of the key things one allegedly requires to reach a goal!

So what was my hold-up? The comparison trap. 
 
>> stitching through 
 
What’s the comparison trap? It’s a thing that a lot of people today find themselves falling into, or digging themselves out of, usually thanks to social media. For whatever reason, we have this idea of what we should look like or should be, or the level we should be at, and we beat ourselves up for not being “that.” In my case with the Spellman Pullover, I was comparing my skeins of yarn to the half-completed sweaters on the group chat; and comparing myself to the knitters with said half-completed sweaters.

While stuck in this delightful life-sucking trap, I heard a training from Audrey MacDowell, who is a top director in my skincare + cosmetics business. Now, Audrey MacDowell doesn’t know me from Adam, and I doubt she knits, so this had nothing to do with anything … and yet wham! It had everything to do with everything. In this training she says that comparison is the thief of joy. And while we’re out here comparing ourselves … the people we’re comparing ourselves to are out
w-e-r-k-i-n-g. 

No wonder these women had half-finished sweaters. They weren’t sitting on the group chat lamenting how they hadn’t started yet. They picked up their dang needles, cast on and worked every spare second they had.
​
After that gut-punch, I intentionally made a few changes in quite a few places in my life and business, and of course, my progress on the Spellman Pullover. What mattered wasn’t how fast I knit or how much I knew about negative vs. positive ease . Who cares what these complete strangers thought about my knitting skills? We were all knitting the exact same pattern. It wasn't any kind of competition. What matters is that I enjoyed what was being worked on and was pleased with the direction in which it went. What matters is that every day I could I picked up my yarn and needles and worked a few rows. 

>> weaving in the ends
 
By changing a couple habits — namely not checking the group chat every time I pulled up Facebook and choosing to knit nearly every night — I did finish the Spellman Pullover in about a month’s time. Molina extended the deadline to March 1, and at about 2 a.m. the next morning I bound off my last stitch on the final sleeve. 

I missed the deadline to be featured in her pattern and on the Ravelry pattern page. That kind of stunk. But it taught me an important lesson: if I’d spent the time I spent comparing knitting, I’d already be finished and wearing the sweater instead of wondering how many musicals it would take to finish the second sleeve. In case you were wondering, it took me the entirety of the TV versions of “Grease” and “Footloose.”

I love how the sweater turned out, and the first day it was sunny enough to get photos, my boyfriend and I went in the woods and he got some great shots that show off the color variation in Necromancy and the details in the Spellman Pullover sleeves. I felt so accomplished and like I could conquer the world — er, OK, maybe more like conquer my goals for the rest of March. It’s a great feeling, and I know that feeling came about because of the action I took!

Whether I’m knitting a sweater actually or metaphorically, these things I learned through this process will be so instrumental, and I hope they are for you, too:

• Avoid the comparison trap! Instead, look how far you’ve come. Eleven years ago I could barely pull of a wonky-arse scarf, and here I am making bobbles like I’ve done it all my life.
• Remember what Audrey MacDowell said — those people you’re comparing yourself to are working while you’re not. So whatever it is you’re not doing to get to where those folks are, do it. And if you’re working, you won’t have time to compare {see above J}.
• Daily consistent habits are more valuable than a burst of sudden action that’s never backed up. If your goal is to finish a sweater, set aside some time to knit each night or morning or lunch break daily instead of working for 16 hours straight on it, then putting it aside for something else, and suddenly it’s 2020 and you realized you never finished it.
• Empower yourself! If you don’t understand something, don’t sit there and complain about how you don’t get it. Ask someone. Research. Watch 17 tutorials on bobble knitting. 

You can do anything you set your mind to, ladies and gents. But first, you have to set your mind to it. And second … you have to do it. 

I'd be shocked if I'm the first to tell you this, but what you focus on, you create more of. And I don't mean in the sense of stare at the owl sitting in your mom's front yard focusing on it delivering your Hogwarts letter (sheesh, finally!), but I mean, in order to be a champion you have ​to first champion your mind. Second, champion your schedule. We're gonna talk about that first one today.

Ever waffled with the idea of putting your business "on the back-burner," which is code-word QUIT?

You know what quitters don't do? Win. What's the best way to keep from quitting, so you can start putting #winning on all of your posts and texts to your mom? Remember those goals and commitments you made like, IDK nine days ago? If you want to quit quitting, stop starting over and keep going, you have to stay excited. 

Excited you does things. Miserable or waffling you does everything to keep you from doing those things.

When I buried my business, goals and desires under other stuff [read: putting 200 percent effort in my full-time job at the expense of everything else], I was cranky. Angry. Frustrated. Not fun to be around. Liable to stab you with my knitting needles. I complained about everything because I felt like my soul was being sucked from my very body for 60 hours a week and I was so mentally exhausted all I wanted to do was a big, fat nothing. It was miserable. I was miserable. And when you are miserable and all you're thinking about is misery ... y'all, they don't joke when they say "misery loves company."

It was vital not only to my business, but to myself, to find a way to break that cycle; to get and remain excited, and to excite other people while I was at it.

​​For example: Let's examine Miserable Dallas from a few months ago (or honestly, at many points during the past decade, but that's neither here nor there). Miserable Dallas woke up frustrated about her job. She then stayed in bed until the last possible second because she didn't want to go to the place that made her miserable. Sometimes she would wake up with such anxiety it caused her to become physically ill. Miserable Dallas would eventually go to her job, spend the next however many hours were required of her there, talking to other people who were miserable or angry. She got in her car to come home and called her mother, boyfriend, best friend, someone she worked with who wasn't there that day, to fill them in on what misery occurred. She was so mentally exhausted after being miserable and dwelling in her misery that eff it, she was going to not do anything productive because she was no longer excited about anything ... and if there was a glimmer of hope, she sabotaged herself and squashed it. Do you think this Dallas was a champion of anything except perhaps amount of days she could go without washing her hair?

This is why Cheryl Fulcher's, who is a top leader in my company, words were like a "ohhh shoo," gut-punch moment at her event this month.

I don't care what your business is — skills only take you so far. Seriously. Once you got the "how to" down, then you gotta do. It's the doing of the skills that moves you forward, and the not-doing that keeps you stuck where you are or moving backward. Take any class you had in high school or college: you probably learned a skill, maybe a certain lab technique, running two miles in PE, the Pythagorean Theorem, music on the trombone, whatever it was, in order to get better at it and more confident about your ability to do it, you had to perform the skill over and over. If you didn't do the skill, or convinced yourself you sucked at said skill, well, so be it. But if you committed (ha, there's that word again) to doing the skill repeatedly, you were the one breaking records in your high school cross country meets and being all Lindsay Lohan Mathlete about your life. Stop focusing so much on the "how to" and focus on the "let's do!"

​The entire time I was so miserable I had the exact same skills I do today, but I wasn't committed to working them. I knew how to book appointments, make sure those appointments were going to take place, make women feel amazing and at home, ensure if they chose to shop they loved what they got (and if they didn't, figure out what worked better), share my job with others. That did nothing for me when I was doing nothing. 

Are you there now? Are you afraid of going down that rabbit hole? Allow me to share with you some of the ways I force myself into a better mindset.*

• Exercise. Every day. In the morning. I force myself to run Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and lift free weights Tuesday and Thursday. 
• Affirm as I exercise. I sound like a hokey maniac telling myself everything amazing quality I possess and all the great things I'm going to accomplish that day. 
• Listen to speeches + podcasts of people who I admire. Y'all, I say this one, but let me caution you. If you're in a comparison trap, and listening to people you see as successful talk about being successful is going to drive you bonkers and cause you to talk negatively about yourself, skip this until you're ready. I suggest listening to positive pump-up music that excites you instead. 
• SPEAK UP. Find a mentor who you trust. Don't complain to them; they're not your therapist; but chances are, they've been either exactly where you are or in a similar position, and may be able to offer advice. Wallowing in your misery blows. Talking it out in a constructive manner helps you figure out what's going on and how you can change it. 
• Do whatever skill it is that you've been procrastinating doing, and do a lot of it. You will get better. Your confidence will increase. Your excitement will increase. And because you're doing more of this and focusing on it, you'll start to reap the benefits more consistently, for, as Cheryl Fulcher also once said ... you cannot pray for it and then just sit on your couch.

*Please note that I am not a therapist, not a licensed mental health professional, and I deal with depression/anxiety without the use of medication. These are things that helped me. If your rut seems more severe than just being down in the dumps, there is no shame in seeking help. Seriously. 

On the first day of 2019, two significant events occurred. I found a four-leaf clover (more on that in the coming days) and I watched the Georgia Bulldogs lose a bowl game.

I may not have been at the Sugar Bowl, much less playing on the field, but there's a lot that can be learned from what happened in those four quarters, especially when it comes to what you plan to tackle in the new year. 

As a fan, I went into this bowl game with a muted mindset. Though I know my usual gameday traditions are 100 percent personal superstitions that do not affect the team one iota, I woke up yesterday morning, excited for the new year and completely forgot college football was happening at 8:45 p.m. My typical gameday attire that I am so careful to put on; the regular Saturday traditions I go through as a lifelong Dawg fan ... nonexistent. 

Our big game of the season was over. Kirby Smart & Co. worked their tails off in a game that wasn't meant to end in red and black victory, and then the nation saw the "calibre" of teams that were selected to go on to the playoffs. They were high-ranked and deserving teams, but those teams that had a National Championship spot to play for showed lackluster performances compared to what was expected of them. Georgia fans, remembering what a season 2017 was and how we still performed incredibly well in 2018, putting up more points and almost pulling off both a Natty and SEC Championship victory against Alabama, were annoyed that the "four best teams" included two that looked like they weren't even trying to win a National Championship.

Having achieved all that, this bowl game was "meh" in comparison. At least some members of the team weren't all-in it to win it, or so it seemed from the outside looking in. As I mentioned already, my fan mindset wasn't all-in either. The 2019 Sugar Bowl Dawgs looked like those teams its fans said didn't deserve a spot to vie for the Natty. The team made mistakes its players are usually more careful to avoid, and it was clear Texas was ready to take this one home. 

They did.

So, what does this long, drawn-out story have to do with you entering 2019? 

It shows that if you're not bull-headed and committed to whatever it is you want to achieve this year, this week, this season of your life ... you're likely going to flail about and not get the results you're looking for. The Dawgs wanted to win this bowl game, I'm sure, but at least one player somewhere wasn't putting in the work to minimize mistakes and keep on track.

In my career, this is something I've struggled with as well — especially when it comes to setting a new year resolution! You see, a resolution is essentially lip service. There's not much accountability to it. There's usually not much strategy. It's a whole lotta talk and like, zero walking. This is why for so many people, a new year's resolution lasts about 2.7 seconds. I've had a skincare and cosmetics business for going on seven years now, and for the better part of six of those, I was real good at telling people what I wanted in my life and significantly less good at putting a plan in place to get what I wanted. I was even worse at committing to working the plan.

I adopted, without realizing it, the same mantra that Georgia sports fans seemed to be annoyingly cursed with adopting for football, baseball, basketball ... pretty much everything except soccer. Thank goodness for ATL United for reminding us that this mantra isn't reality, it's something we let happen to ourselves. 

"There's always next season. There's always next year."

Not to be a Debbie downer over here, but like. Y'all. Yes, there is always going to be another football season/another year because that's how the clocks work and that's how sportsballs work. However! What if something awful happens to you before your "next season"? Furthermore, imagine what your "next season" will look like if you stop bullsh*tting and become bull-headed about making those changes you keep talking about!

Stop with the new year's resolutions. Start with a new commitment. This was a hard, hard mind-shift for me to make, because I'd been stuck in that procrastinating "there's always next season" mentality for just about everything I wanted in my business. Moving up our career path in leadership; earning a free car; maximizing my financial resources; etc. Excuse my French, but who the EFF does that?! Who says they're going to make more money doing X, Y, Z or Q and then allows themselves to get overwhelmed with moving forward so they make a hard 180 back to where they were before, or they veer off in a completely different direction that's not getting them any closer to where they want to be, but instead puts them further in some kind of drag-me-to-hell-hole?!

ME. That's who. And I'm willing to bet a few of y'all as well. It is a mind-shift I struggle with D A I L Y.
I wake up in the morning sometimes [transparency note: I struggle with anxiety and depression on the regular, which is normal and OK but what's not OK is to do what I used to do and wallow in it] and it is an act of God to pull myself out of bed. I would make excuse after excuse as to why I wasn't going to work on my future that day. It's no wonder that some aspects of my businesses looked about as stand-out as the UGA Sugar Bowl performance!

This year will be different. I've got not only my own version of the Sugar Bowl to crush, but a National Championship to work toward. You do, too. 

That's why I bit my tongue, stopped stopping and decided to launch Dallas Anne Duncan, LLC, or DAD LLC for short. It's a tad self-reflective and I hope you'll find it inspirational and helpful as you read and learn from what I've done, and from the journeys of those I admire. I'm not the super-rich media mogul with a picture-perfect styled natural light photography headshot who sponsors ads all over your Facebook feeds. I'm a real human, pretty salty and snarky and eggscellent at puns. I write, I knit, I enjoy beer and whiskey, I have two cats and a black lab and an amazing family and a supportive boyfriend and more baggage than I can fit in my Honda Fit. I've done things and made business decisions I'm not proud of. But what I learned is that it's possible to fail forward if you're willing to take the risk, make the commitment and do the work. 

Remember what I said earlier, that whole commitment-instead-of-a-resolution thing? Commitments come with resolve. They come with strategy and planning and accountability. If I've got a handful of folks who are able to take away something positive from watching me work, seeing me jump hurdles, hearing from others who knocked down every obstacle to get to the hella exhilarating place and people they are today ... then I'm committed to work, jump hurdles and tell these stories in the hopes that it will help you write your own.

The lackluster mindset I had during the Sugar Bowl (and off and on for the past six years) is purposefully being cut off. There's so much goodness coming our way this year that NEXT YEAR will be absolutely insane. I'm calling it 2020 Vision, and the only way that's going to happen is being all-in and committed in 2019. 

I think these words from former Bulldog Tim Worley sum it up pretty well. Feel free to save this one for inspiration as needed: