Marie of Journeying Beyond Breastcancer alerted me to free tickets at the Life Lasting Success conference in Dublin and we decided to multi-task as both of us were free on Friday and meet for our first Tweet up and maybe learn something at the conference….

Well, it was basically quite a few hard sell sales pitches apart from one very inspirational talk by Sean Gallagher.  He spoke about his life, the challenges he faced being partially sighted and  coming through after a car accident, the goals he set himself for his life as well as those for each year and how he succeeds with them and reinvents himself and his business as required to succeed.  He spokely frankly, enthusiastically, plainly – told it as it is.

I had heard Sean speak at the Laois Business network launch and had been impressed by him there but this was a much longer speech and I came away inspired and motivated.  Here’s the 5 main lessons I took away with me:

1. One must define success before one can achieve it. – You must decide what you are aiming for and at what stage you decide you have succeeded and celebrate that success before you move onto the next challenge.

2. Decide on 5 things you want to achieve in your life – Create your Life Plan

3. Decide on 5 Key Actions to complete this year and each day, work out what you are doing to achieve those key actions. As Sean said, stress isn’t caused by what we do but by what we don’t do and boy, that is so true. Action empowers you and kills fear.

4. By starting your day by being grateful and thanking something out there for all you have, it buoys you up and prevents you becoming sucked into all the doom and gloom that is out there at the moment.  Sean was almost blind until he was 4 and although an operation restored his sight, it was never great. He is grateful for his partial sight, for being able to see, to walk, to talk, to hear and it goes on.  These are things we all take for granted but how bleak would life be if we couldn’t see our children’s beautiful eyes, the views, smell the sea, walk amongsst flowers, talk nineteen to the dozen and it goes on and on. 

5. If you can dream it, you can do it.

Sean got a well-deserved standing ovation at the end of his presentation.  Having seen other people chatting to him and getting their photos taken, Marie and I decided to celebrate our tweet up by getting our photo taken with him (not sure why I am squinting!!)

 It was great to meet Marie, we met through Twitter about 6 or 8 months ago, found we had lots in common and communicated via Twitter, our blogs and emails. We actually never spoke on the phone.  We had planned to meet on a few occasions but it always happened that one of us couldn’t make it.  I was a little apprehensive before we met – would we take an instant dislike to each other, would we be different to what the other had expected, would we actually get on each other’s nerves in real life? – but no, Marie was exactly the same as she was in cyber space and we got on like a house on fire!