I received a happy one year anniversary message from WordPress today. Love Your Style is one year old. Compared to some of the more established blogs out there, this is not significant, but to me this is a big milestone. I heard many people, bloggers to be precise, say that blogging changes your life. It is true. Blogging slowly changed my life. It became my creative outlet, something I have allowed myself to do out of inspiration, rather than forced myself to write because I had to. It started as a project without specific targets and it has evolved together with me. Love Your Style has been my way of exploring what inspires and motivates me. It started off as something I did for fun, for myself and for the sake of expressing creativity, not impressing others, achieving something or receiving recognition. This was really liberating. Eventually, the blog has started to serve as a platform for sharing my views, life lessons and expertise and connecting with people long before I decided what I want to do as an entrepreneur.

A year later, after experimenting and exploring, my vision for the blog is much clearer. Love Your Style is a place where I will continue to share my inspiration, style ideas and travel stories and photography (“A picture is worth a thousand words”).  My professional website and blog www.nataliashpek.com, a resource for women in business, who desire to define success on their own term, will feature posts on how to present yourself with confidence and style, become more visible as a woman in business and work (and live!) in a way that inspires you. You can sign up for weekly newsletter here.

My intention for Love Your Style for the coming year is to bring more fun and inspiration into your lives. Next several posts will feature photos and stories from my summer travel destinations, some of them familiar, some quite unexpected (at least for me) and summer outfit ideas. There will be an occasional life lesson post – I can’t help it, I am a lifelong learner – but in general expect more photographs, stylish destinations, outfit ideas, lifestyle inspiration and who knows what else as the blog continues to evolve in its second year.  I would love to hear from you: what would you like to see/read about here?

Back to the fact that the blog has changed my life. I would like to share the lessons I learned from blogging over the past year that have created big shifts in my life:

1. Being creative, whether it’s taking piano lessons or doing an occasional life drawing class, or blogging, makes life more enjoyable, less stressful and can be a very healing experience. What is your preferred form of creative expression? Please share below.

2. Perfectionism is not a strength to brag about in job interviews, it is, in most cases, an avoidance strategy. The best way to deal with this state of fear (this is essentially what perfectionism is, as it turns out) that I have discovered so far is to be creative for the sake of enjoying, not thinking about the end result.

3. Sharing myself openly and allowing myself to be vulnerable is one of the scariest things I have done. Once I did it, it was incredibly liberating. The best way to get through the fear of sharing yourself for me is to focus on the intention of helping or inspiring at least one person.

4. One person telling you they love what create/write/photograph or that they are inspired by what you share is enough.

5. You don’t have to have it all figured out before starting something, a blog, a project, a job. Just know what your next step is and trust. Exploring is often the best thing we can do for ourselves in our achievement and target-oriented culture.

I would love to hear from you. What would you like to see more of on Love Your Style?