I attended the Zillow Marketing Summit a number of weeks back. Zillow saw the value of enriching the lives of its Realtor client-base and brought in Robert X. Fogarty’s organization, Dear World.

Dear World started in New Orleans as Dear New Orleans on Superbowl Sunday. You can read about the overall concept here.

Everyone has a story. Stories of success, failures and the triumphs over adversity. The Dear World team was set up at the Zillow conference and I felt pulled to find my story and tell it. They help you reflect on the internal perspective of your life and help you find moments that define you. When you start the process they have you write down three things that happened in your life that you know may have changed you forever and help define the person you are today.

That moment could be positive or negative, yet was the moment your life was transformed forever. Within this process, I found my moment.

For me, it was a moment while I was in high school. It was PE and as we were playing a game of flag football, the athletic field had lots of potholes of water and mud. I had several girls in my PE class that had bullied me recently and while playing the game, I fell face-forward into a patch of mud. I was about half covered in mud and the girls that had been bullying me snickered and laughed amongst themselves. To make an embarrassing situation worse, the entire men’s football team was also at the field and swa me fall. This situation was getting more devastating by the moment.

I had a decision to make right there. Sit in the mud and cry or get up, not caring what they thought and move on with my life. My inner voice said, “Get up and don’t care”.

This was what helped define me to get through the rest of high school and has guided me in life.