Between the fact that I was bursting with love for The Holiday Council and my general babbling about fixing the assorted cracks and fissures in my life, I’ve been on a bit of a life-coach-blog-reading, someone-tell-me-how-to-person, quarter-life-crisis, oh-my-god-when-did-I-become-the-kind-of-person-who-uses-the-term-quarter-life-crisis? kick lately.
Enter, Cake For Breakfast. A 45 page workbook, audio sessions, and weekly journal prompts from the lovely Ashley Wilhite of Your Super Awesome Life.
When 20 Something Bloggers offered the opportunity for members to check out Cake For Breakfast, I was all over that. I’ve grown familiar with Ashley D from YouTube — both her personal vlogs during VEDA and her weekly videos as part of the Totes Awesome Channel collab project. She’s got an incredibly infectious, inspiring energy, and I had the utmost confidence that her sparkling personality would shine through in her coaching materials. Plus, weekly journal prompts? Excellent.
(I’m a 750 words devotee. Daily journaling is a big thing for me in terms of maintaining my overall emotional health. It helps me get all my thoughts/feels out there and get focused for the day. I enjoy handwriting in journals occasionally, but I find I am much more effective with with a keyboard. Journal purists will scoff, I’m sure. I can type much faster than I can write and even that isn’t usually quite up to the speed at which I’m thinking ALL THE THOUGHTS. Plus, I like the gamification. It’s silly because it’s for a thing I want to do anyway, but it was actually quite soul-crushing for me when, in late 2012, I broke a 300+ day streak. The gamification gets me, and I like that it helps me stick with it even on days where I’m not entirely sure what I have to say. Having journal prompts, then, is amazing because it helps give me focus.)
My favorite thing about the journal prompts is that they are actually arriving weekly. It’s not just a giant list of prompts, which would feel overwhelming and easily be the sort of thing I put off for the rest of forever. Getting that weekly email with the new question makes it infinitely more manageable.
And then, of course, there’s the workbook and the audio. Being newly converted to this kind of thing, let me say that if you’ve never tried a good self-help workbook, please let go if your hangups and give it a whirl. Taking the time to be guided through some introspective questioning is one of those things that can’t really yield much in the way of negative consequences but has the potential to bestow heaps of positive benefits.
I’m obviously advocating for this one right now, but sometimes it’s just a tone thing. It’s one of the things that struck me throughout Stratejoy’s Holiday Council interviews. Molly talked to all these women and everything they had to say was interesting, but there were several who were just coming from a place I couldn’t connect with. Then, of course, there were a few that sounded like my best friends.
That’s my lone caveat here. I strongly encourage you to check out Cake For Breakfast because I’ve loved all the materials I’ve gone through (still have most of a year’s worth of prompts left, though!) and I happen to be a big fan of Ashley’s particular energy. (She actually just wrote a blog post sort of along these lines for aspiring coaches — essentially emphasizing the importance of matching personalities. Same goes for choosing therapists or any other kind of professional who has to speak to you on an emotional level. Let me be clear that none of this YAY LIFE COACH stuff is meant to indicate that this is a thing that I ever plan on doing, but it’s interesting either way.)
Back to Cake for Breakfast: the overarching point of all the workbook and prompts is to get you thinking about what you want, focusing on it, and establishing the best path forward. Maybe you’re already super on your shit, organized, with big goals that you have no concerns about how to achieve. If so, AWESOME and maybe this isn’t for you. (Also, can I buy you dinner and ask you a million questions?)
If, however, you’ve got some clarity issues you’d like to work through, I highly recommend this. I’m super grateful for the opportunity to go through this workbook and use these fantastic prompts.
To be clear: I wasn’t paid to write this. I was, however, offered the materials for free and asked to blog about it. I could have just as easily said, “Hey, here’s this thing! Here’s where you can get it!” and called it a day, but I had some legitimate “YES, I LOVED THIS” to express. All of the thoughts/opinions/feels are, as always, 100% my own.
Go get yourself some Cake for Breakfast. And check out Your Super Awesome Life or Ashley’s Twitter, or the unrelated by still fantastic Totes Awesome Channel.
