Sharon Mendelaoui: Pursuing Your Dreams

Sharon Mendelaoui is a travel writer, passionate photographer, and graphic designer. She is the creator and publisher of dailydream360.com, a travel and lifestyle website featuring travel destination guides, fashion and beauty tips, and a selection of lifestyle articles to help her readers live a balanced dream life.

I met Sharon more than 15 years back as we both worked for the same company on Bay St. Sharon has been super friendly in answering a lot of my questions about blogging. A couple of months back we sat down again and talked about life, our own path through the corporate world, where we are and where we are heading. I told her I will send her some questions and to put that in writing. Sharon is real, vulnerable and a lot of wisdom shared here.

Sharon, it is a pleasure knowing you for the last decade, please tell my audience a little about you?

I’m a dreamer born and raised in Toronto Canada. I’ve had a passion for writing and art since I was a young girl, but the responsibilities of school and career took me away from that passion. I am a graphic designer and have been doing this for over 15 years mainly for financial firms, one of which was where I was lucky enough to meet you!

I know you were in the corporate world for a while. Why the change and how has blogging helped you and shaped you?

Working in crazy corporate offices was stressful and I was always dreaming about leaving and working for myself. I started blogging in hopes of finding ways to make money online. I had built at least 4 websites all trying to do this as I worked in jobs that really didn’t inspire me at all. Google crushed my dreams with an update known in the web world called Panda.

The premise was that bad sites geared to getting traffic without good information were removed from search ranking. The updated hit all my sites except one, my hobby travel blog. I kept working on this hobby which I devoted my weekends too. It was like taking a vacation every weekend and made having to go into work during the week a little more bearable.

I don’t know why but I was surprised when I started to notice brands take notice of me. I didn’t quite believe that this hobby could somehow really be a business. I dreamt about it constantly, but it just didn’t sink in.

By 2012, I was on many Ontario Tourism Boards’ radars. On my very first press trip, we went treetop trekking. It was a hard course and after two obstacles I realized I wasn’t going to be able to complete it. I swallowed my shame, disappointment, and fear as the crew set up a high angle rescue. I had to lean back and let the harness carry all my weight as they winched me down a tree. About halfway down I had this overwhelming moment of pure joy. I knew I was the only blogger on the trip with this story and also, I knew in my core, this is what I was meant to be doing. I found my passion.

That was when I really started to take the website seriously. I also spent every spare second at work learning about running a business, planning my business and figuring out how I was going to take the plunge away from the corporate world.

In 2014, I was downsized from my corporate job. I took this as a sign. I could find another job that made me miserable and pays the bills or I could take this opportunity to chase my dream of running my own graphic design business and do the things that really inspired me. It was the scariest time of my life, but the combination of fear and joy was something I can’t even describe in words and it pushed me to share that dream in my website Daily Dream 360.

What is Daily Dream 360 all about?

Daily Dream 360 is the evolution of a hobby travel blog into a travel and lifestyle website built to inspire women over 40 to transition through big challenges with a 360° approach to their life.

What I discovered in my travels was that facing my fears and doing things that challenged me and then conquering those fears was a powerful feeling. That combination of fear with sheer joy that comes from accomplishing it was something that fueled me in my life. The smallest dream moments could add fuel to this little fire inside of me which inspires and moves me to the next moment.

What is unique about it and why should we read it?

There are a million places online to get inspiration, life coaching, travel advice, etc. Some of these sites are good and others are just nonsense. My goal with Daily Dream 360 is to really create a community where women like me are going through a big transition maybe divorce, being downsized, or chasing a dream-like starting their own business. My end goal is to create a place (maybe a Facebook group) where we can help one another with information, support and just knowing that we are not alone in this.

At the moment I categorize posts on the site into Dream Travel, Dream Life, and Dream Home. My focus is to talk about these as a Dream it, plan it, and live it approach, which is the way I live my life today. Every dream starts with an idea or pleasant thought, however, you have to make a plan and set an intention to fulfill that dream and then be aware when you are actually living it out.

This past year I focused on rebranding the site with this focus, a huge undertaking where I had to face the fear of breaking the travel site or losing my audience by trying to build something bigger and more balanced with Daily Dream 360. Thankfully the site is doing great and the response has been terrific, so now I’m focussing on building a Facebook community and connecting more to my audience so that we can inspire one another to dream every day!

Name some of your favorite places you have visited and why?

I have such a hard time with my favorite questions because I’m always looking for places that inspire me, challenge me to do something new or outside my comfort zone, and continue to add fuel to my dream flame. I have been so fortunate to find this in just about every trip I take. The memories and experiences add up and it is so hard to choose just one but here are some that just really wowed me.

Horseback Riding at Painted Bar Stables in Finger Lakes NY: The stable is run by a woman named Erica who has a passion for all things horses that just lit me up. I had never been horseback riding; I was absolutely terrified, and she just made this the most amazing experience ever. Never in a million years would I have imagined riding through a forest with water running down a creek on horseback – but I did it thanks to a woman with her own dream and business plan. An area is a great place for a woman’s road trip, wine tastings, little boutique hotels, great parks with hiking trails I highly recommend it.

Quebec: I have discovered a lot of the province and I have to say that every trip I took in the province had some crazy dream moment in it. From hugs with Bonhomme Carnival in winter carnival, a soak in a Scandinavian spa in the dead of winter, visiting the ice hotel, walking the white sand beaches of Iles de la Madelaine or a helicopter ride over Charlevoix – there was always a dream, a challenge, and amazing food and people.

The last time we had coffee you told me you found your faith through traveling let us talk about that?

This is a hard one to answer. I have had a lot of challenges in my life growing up. Being the redhead, fat kid, with braces and the ugliest headgear you could imagine you’d think was enough – but being that kid in a private Jewish school of rich kids who took it upon themselves to remind me that I was not like them every day of my childhood life was a lot. I was born into an immigrant family, my mom was a teacher and my dad a contractor. My parents wanted me to learn about my faith and to learn to speak Hebrew a language we spoke a lot at home.

When you are in a private Jewish school and you have no faith in your religion because you are miserable all the time, well that is a very hard thing for a child to go through. When my father later got diagnosed with a brain tumor and left us, I didn’t get any comfort from my religious faith. I just felt empty and really angry at God.

It was Oprah that brought me out of my anger believe it or not. I discovered later in life that God or the universe or that energy that seems to be flowing through us and dictating things that happen in our lives is not something you can be angry about because it is inside you. If you are angry at it, you are angry at yourself. When I let go of that anger and started chasing the joy that was when I found my faith.

In a way the traveling was me chasing joy – a walk on a beach, sounds of the ocean and other sounds of nature all fuel that dream and that joy.

If I do something out of a place that starts with feeling good – it usually leads to fulfilling a dream. Travel is a great place to find that joy feeling which at home and during the crazy in our day to day lives is just harder to find.

You have been blogging for a long time. Give some advice to those who want to become a blogger?

I can’t believe it, but I just started my eighth year of blogging. As a graphic designer, I have a lot of clients that want to start blogs on their business websites or to make money as my site does. The problem with this is they don’t realize the technical side of blogging and just how many things you have to do just to maintain and run a website – before you even start writing an article.

This is a loaded question because if you want to start a blog or website my best advice is to make sure it is set up correctly, is updated and maintained, and that you have plenty of security measures in place. An out of date plugin on a WordPress website can lead to a disastrous hack. Back when I started, we just wrote, and no one worried about algorithms and plugins and site speed and mobile-friendly. So, making sure that you either have a great web designer to help you with the technical side of things or that you are willing to learn all about this is going to be very important – before you even start writing your blog.