Re-Versioning Your Life

Go Be Alice

2011-07-22T14:06:00.002-06:00

"'Curiouser and curiouser,’ cried Alice… ‘Good-bye, feet!’”

Good-bye, indeed.

(I don’t like the look of human feet. They make sense in keeping us upright and walking, I know; but they are just so odd.

Cat’s toes: sweet little jelly beans. Dog’s feet: handsome and rational. Horse hooves: Strong, thorough, capable. And then we have two blobs of flesh with five wigglies handing out at the end of them. They are definitely curiouser.)

It’s curiouser I’m interested in today. In meditation, I thought: move from a place of curiosity. The place we all inhabited when we were Alice. Not a solving curiosity; not a frantic curiosity; not the selfish curiosity that sees the Other and declares them Freak. Just Alice’s “curiouser and curiouser” attitude, watching to see how far away our poor Feet will go as we nibble the “Eat Me!” cake.

“Curiouser” takes us to a place of wonder, as it did Alice. “Curiouser” watches, and listens, and experiences, and isn’t afraid of what might happen next because something is bound to change. It lets us see new connections, try new things, and simply be part of whatever is happening as our lives unfold.

On weekends, I often give myself a day like that: when my husband asks what I will do that day, I say, “I am going to unfold.” They are always lovely days, because I give myself the gift of curiouser and do whatever happens to come next.

It’s hard to let ourselves unfold in life – or it was for me – because I was told to Have Dreams, Set Goals, and Achieve. It got me pretty far for a while; but then every goal seemed overwhelming, every dream seemed unattainable or silly, and achievement translated into making a living for the daily bread.

I’m on a new track now: unfold. Stay in the curiouser. See what happens; experience it. Of course, it comes back down to trust: whatever I get curiouser about, whatever rabbit hole I’m willing to go down, Something Interesting will happen.

Right This Minute

2011-07-20T10:44:00.003-06:00

As I sit this morning, in meditation, a thought – an old thought – pops into my head: What’s wrong, just this minute? I see it, notice it, hear it said by that little voice that’s mine but not mine, in my head. And I think: why not turn that around? What’s right, just this minute?

It’ a lovely summer Wyoming morning. Cool. Birds chatter at the feeders. Our neighbors a half mile away raise sled dogs, and it’s breakfast time: 70 dogs yelp in happy – unalloyed happy – anticipation of the Great Chow. I’m about to ride with my best riding buddy; we are each taking both of our horses, ride one/lead one, just to get them out and exercised.

And tomorrow I leave for California, to a cousin’s husband’s memorial service. It’s been years since I’ve seen most of my family there. There are few of the “older” generation left; in fact, we, the cousins, are now the “older” generation. There are grandchildren, and great-grands. And we all still feel as if we are still growing up in the heat of Southern California.

But right this minute: tea, a cat on my lap; I can breathe well this morning, the asthma is managed; I’m beginning to think better as the tea manages my late-rising brain; I don’t have much work, but I’m fine with that: I’m still seeking what it is I want to do when I grow up, and seeking something different from the years of writing training programs to teach people how to sell stuff.

Stuff lost its thrill for me when my office burned down, a few years ago. Now I want to work, not to help people get more stuff, but to help people realize the stuff isn’t it. Stuff isn’t life. Life is much more than stuff.

It’s what is right, right this minute.

When Failure Can't

2011-05-27T09:24:00.006-06:00

I’m beginning to look at my past “failures” in a whole new light, since I’m redefining goals in their entirety. I used to have “thing” goals – get produced, get into an art show – instead of “being” goals – experience something via art, connect with the deep part of the world. I still have some “thing” goals, like be able to pay my bills, but I’m even coming to believe that these aren’t all that important – one can always pay one’s bills, somehow. And if you can't -- well, something else will happen.

I learned that at 26 when I completely ran out of money. Rent was due, I had $6 in my checking account, no car, an old mattress on a board for a bed in my studio apartment in San Francisco, a few books, and a teddy bear from childhood. I huddled there all weekend, with my big Monday plan being: Cut up the teddy bear with scissors and walk out to see what would happen. Poor Nice Bear must have been shaking in his teddy bear shoes!

Monday morning at 8 am (I kid you not!) a prospective client called to say yes, they loved my proposal for the newsletter, yes they wanted to start immediately, and where did they send the check? I was saved by the world. Or rather, by the seeds I had planted.

I learned that when you run out of money, nothing happens. You don’t get spit out of the universe like a watermelon seed. You’re there, and you have no money. And somehow you get out of it if you don’t panic. The seeds you planted grow and fruit. They just grow on their own timeline.

I’m glad I didn’t cut up Nice Bear. He’s still around at 51 (his age), and I think of that moment every time I look at him. As well as all of the secrets he has in his teddy bear head from childhood.

* * * * *

So maybe even “thing” goals like “pay my bills” are the wrong place to start.

What would a “being” goal “failure” look like? Well, pretty much if one remains mindful, one can’t fail. A “being” goal failure is a gremlin, a false perception. It's beating yourself up mentally for not “being” something in this instant that you’re not. When really, all you can do is be where you are, experience what you are experiencing, and trust the process. Plant seeds.

It’s funny: changing this perception of goals has changed my perception of how I might contribute. I was in a "visioning" course this past December, and when I was asked, “What can you contribute?” I thought, well, nothing, I don’t contribute anything to anyone. (No gremlins there, eh?) Now, in thinking about “being” goals, I see that it all contributes, only you can never know how. If I am present, and “indulge” my creativity, and create something cool, and spread it around, that is the gift, whether the Thing is art, a business or personal tool, an idea, a comment. That's the seed.

* * * * *

I love studying complex systems, because they are so unpredictable. And because they represent real life: you never know where you contribution will go, how your seeds will sprout, because you aren’t privy to the impact.

For example, in 1985, I wrote a play about Nelson Mandela called "What Is To be Done?" My "thing" goal: get it on Broadway. It got locally produced; it didn't hit The Big Time (almost, but not quite; I made sure of that by having a nervous breakdown before it could be finished). My thought at the time? Failure. Not just the play, either; Me.

I lived with that failure, blaming myself, for 20 years, long after I stopped writing plays.

Fast forward to Google: it's true, I Google'd myself, and discovered that a copy of the play landed up in the African National Congress collection at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. How did it get there? Who has read it? What do they think now? What did it spark them to do? I have no idea, no answer to any of those questions.

* * * * *

A "being" goal means trusting that, if we are true to ourselves and the world, to kindness, joy and love, then our impact will be positive. We don't have to make it so. We just have to let the world know. We just have to plant a seed.

Arriving At Now

2011-05-26T10:33:00.002-06:00

For the past 20 years, I've read and re-read "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind" by Shunryu Suzuki as part of my meditation practice.

Today, the following sentence leaped out at me and made sense:

"We should appreciate what we are doing. There is no preparation for something else."

Suddenly, even as I sat there, the expectation of future experience stopped intervening in the actual experience, and I sat at peace for some time. I'm floating in and out of it now, in the face of what my unfolding life today brings, but I can access it when I stop and realize it again:

There is no preparation for something else. This is it.

_______

Since December, I've been in a dark place, struggling to re-version my experience of living, struggling to figure out "what I want to do when I grow up," even as I approach my 58th birthday in a few weeks.

With a good therapist, with a good life coach, with a journaling community, and with a lot of work, I've finally learned a few things:

- Let go of controlling emotions. Let them be, look at them with curiosity, and see what you can learn from them. You are not your emotions.

- A goal to achieve a thing is different from a goal to achieve an experience, a state of mind. The former are stepping stones to achieving the latter -- and, at the same time, results of achieving the latter.

- All there is, is this. The rest is residue of the experience.

I feel ready to re-version now. No. That's not right. I am already re-versioned. There is no preparation for something else. From now on, it's about experiencing and exploring and creating -- and trusting the process and myself.

Stealth Re-Versioning

2011-03-15T09:36:00.003-06:00

Yesterday, a reader's comment brought me back to this blog, after a hiatus of two years. Has much happened in the interim? Yes and no. I'm still struggling, after a fire destroyed my office in 2008, with what I want to do when I grow up. It took a deliriously deep turn this past December, when I blissfully started a class on visioning and strategic planning for my art business and found myself wondering: what DO I want? Since then, it's been a struggle, emotionally, as I find I've spent a lot of my life laying big plans, aiming for big goals, yet not really doing what fed my self-soul.

So this morning, after meditating, I thought it's time to come back and continue here. After all, I've discovered, re-versioning happens even when you don't have big goals and dreams driving you down the road. Maybe especially then.

*****

In meditating this morning, using a meditation for unpleasant or difficult emotions, I realized that I can often hold two different emotions in my body at once: both the loving-kindness peace, and whatever negative emotion – in this morning’s case, anxiety – separately. They manifest in different parts of my body. The loving kindness, when I can maintain it as the focus of my attention, helps calm the anxiety a bit, or at least lets me feel anxious without anxiety taking off and taking over. And I thought: if I’m not completely the anxiety, and I’m not completely the loving kindness, what am I? And I clearly experienced that I was not these bundles of emotions and thoughts, but something else.

That “other,” that self, is a mystery. It’s not my body, my thoughts, my emotions, my actions; and yet it is. I remember a question/koan I learned a long time ago: Who is it that watches my thoughts and emotions when I sit and meditate? Who is it having the thoughts and emotions?

In the Buddhist tradition, that one watching is the Whole, the One; the part of us that is connected to the whole. In fact, there is no “part of us,” there is no separation from the whole. We create and imagine that separation because we cannot, in out little minds, do otherwise and (in the way-back days) survive the beasts out to eat us. We had to differentiate: flower from food, pack animal from lion, self from other. Yet it is a type of fiction, an amazing and incomprehensible fiction, because it seems so real.

I’m reminded of when my depression kicks in and I am struggling with it: it always seems so real, and yet I have learned to not make big decisions during the episodes until I figure out what’s going on, because the next day – the next moment – it all vanishes like a ripple in a stream.

Which means the feelings of loving-kindness are also a fabrication, an attachment, the Buddhist teacher would say. What is eternal is what is beyond that attachment and all of the others. What is eternal is the mystery.

My affirmation for today: I am a person who expresses the wonder and joy of life – at the mystery – in as many moments as possible. I hope many others may do the same.

*****

I realize that, in light of what the people of Japan are experiencing now, that this meditation seems elitist and ephemeral compared to very grim realities. Yet I hope the same peace and joy for every person there, in the midst of earthquake/tsunami/radiation realities. As a teacher once said, pain is real, and inevitable; suffering is optional. May the people in and of Japan suffer as little as is humanly possible.

The Hammock

2009-01-09T10:47:00.005-07:00

It’s been a long time since I’ve been here. For, well, good reasons. Listen to my journal from August, 2008. (Maybe the memory of summer will help warm you, too.)

***

Beautifully warm in the shade of the willow, sherry on the side table, Sophia the cat lounging in the grass beneath me as I drift in my slowly swaying hammock. She plays with my fingers when I let my arm drop over the edge. A breeze sings in the cottonwoods; monarchs tack left and right in the shade. Summer is as it should be. I’m warm and lazy and feeling the experience. And feeling this is life.

During the past year, I struggled to make changes in my life, my work, my passions. I started off not bad: I took advantage of an opportunity to teach horseback riding at a local community college. Certified as an instructor, I began teaching private clients on a borrowed old school horse, Ben. That was the first half of 2008: so far, so good, but teaching riders isn’t a living wage, and I’m not making any progress with my painting.

Then the world tires of my whining, I guess. Change forces itself onto me.

It began when my mother-in-law, Barbara, became very ill, an old cancer metastasizing into her very bones. My husband and I spend ten days at a time with her in Colorado, a day’s drive away, several times, once me alone, helping her cope with treatments and then hospice. I don’t know how long she has to live. It is a privilege helping her – she is stalwart, kind, and loving even in her pain. She even laughs, sometimes.

But her far-flung sons can only tag team so long – she’s unable to manage the multiple drugs hospice provide, much less feed herself – so we convince her that it’s time for assisted living in a lovely facility not three blocks away. We travel down on a Thursday to help her move, with help from an Idaho-based brother.

On Saturday, with most of her belongings placed in the new home, she tires, takes a long nap, and dissolves into incoherence. As if, in her heart, she has decided assisted living is the beginning of the end, so why not end now?

Slowly confusion gives way to comatose under the loving care of hospice, until a week later there is a day of labored breathing, erratic and irregular, one long last breath, and she who is Barbara slips from the body.

It was hard, but gratifying, to help her through the transition – she who, in only a few short years, was kinder to me than my own mother. Already I miss the idea and the reality of her kindness and generosity.

Exhausted, my husband and I drive home on Monday.

That Friday, my office building burns to the ground.

The fire destroys all of my writing – electronic and hard copy – from the past 40+ years. And virtually everything I’d collected in my life: artwork by college buddies and family. Windup toys. Childhood trains. An antique desk. A 1950s school map of the US with Wyoming’s features impossibly situated. And hundreds, hundreds of books – nearly every one I owned.

I shut down that night at the bar. The next weekend we drive back to Barbara’s for the funeral. Another week of denial, and then reality hits.

Thursday night I cry, Friday I am on the edge, so I take my horse DJ to the mountains, up the Middlefork trail, for a long, four-hour ride.

I love riding, because it engulfs me completely, body and soul. Not today. I begin to cry, to mourn for Barbara, for my lost work, my lost life, my “wasted” efforts at writing, destroyed with very little to show for it. No fame, no fortune, marginal success. What, then, had it been for? And I finally, finally realize – accept, experience, grok – that life is in the living.

We are not what we used to be, what we aspire to be, even what we want to be. We are – our meaning – is in what and how we do. Not in terms of other people’s reactions to us, to our work, or to our results. Life is how we experience our actions. All the stuff around us, even the things we create, are merely the residue of that experience.

I stop crying. I enjoy the ride: the miracle of a thunderhead, the joy of the one being that is DJ and me. We truly are linked – one soul in two places. Pretty, talented, goofy, neurotic. Yep, that’s us. I begin to sing, finding old songs, singing the parts I remember, to DJ and the mountains around me: “Born in East Virginia,” “Eddystone Light,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” “Cool, Clear Water.”

I talk openly, to DJ, my partner. His head nods serenely as he carries me home.

I arrive to the usual conflicts with my husband – the daily things that rub both of us the wrong way. But now, I just want one thing: to be joyful as much as possible.

Leading to today. Now. Cat time in the hammock. The wind rises, the shade moves, and suddenly I’m hot in the sun. Even Sophia has moved to the shadier part of our willow. It may be time for a new hammock location.
A cloud puts off the decision. Finish your sherry, Cat. Go from there.

Learning to walk

2007-11-07T09:42:00.000-07:00

Well, absence makes the heart grow fonder, so I’m hoping you’ve missed me a little! I haven’t been ignoring this blog, just caught in the throes of change, as many of us are.

Change is neither simple nor easy. In the past six months, I slipped below the surface of my own life, and probed into the same dark, messy questions over and over again. The answers never seemed right. Too selfish. Or too silly. Too impractical, or too monumental.

In other words, I judged everything before it was even fully conceived, much less running. This isn’t the way to You 2.0. This isn’t exploring: it’s chaining your legs together before you take your first step.

Along the way, I had to take a break from You 2.0 and focus on my new marriage. Living with people, especially after 30 years of solitude, is a challenge in and of itself. So my personal growth and change needs gave way to those of my new family. That’s love for you.

It hasn’t been an easy path. But this morning, my head popped into the light, and I came out of the ground. I stood on my own two feet, and tottered a bit, ready to learn to walk.

(I wonder if it’s a coincidence that I also began meditating again two days ago. Pesky Buddhism.)

But here’s the real deal: judging yourself and your ideas before you actually do anything is not only indulging in your parents’ well-intended but misguided admonitions, it’s hobbling your legs together because you don’t think you and your ideas are good enough. So ok, my daily mantra is: no judgment. Think of this process as a brainstorming session that will last a couple of years.

Next: The same passions kept running into my heart no matter how I phrased the question. After my (human and otherwise) family and friends, they are horses, art and sustainable living.

The Voice Of (Un)Reason: How the hell are you going to make a living out of that?

Oh I don’t know. That’s not the point today. The point is to act on what I love, as much as I can, whenever I can. The point is to learn to walk with these things. Sure, I have to make a living: that’s what my consulting business is for. But there are a lot more hours in the day than those I spend in the office.

And I might even learn to spend less time and energy at work. Take that, John Calvin!

Much as I didn’t want to admit it for “practical” reasons, my three passions just won’t go away. And no matter how I reproach myself about their usefulness, their practicability, their selfishness, they keep on prodding me forward. So I have to pay attention to them. Maybe that’s part of You 2.0, too – fight your leg chains (read: preconceptions and judgments) until you figure out that you can just step out of them.

Ideas gushed out of the part of me that’s been waiting for a commitment. Buy a horse to train and sell. Get my physics poetry book on the web. Research my 12-month greenhouse (in Wyoming, no less, but I think it’s doable – we have a lot of sun in the winter). Paint more horses, the subject I love most. Get my watercolors on the web, out there, for people to see, to see if I have anything useful to anyone else. Put insulation into the attic now! Find a tank so I can store biofuel at home. And as my husband and I plan our new kitchen to be done this winter, find sustainable materials and practices that will reduce our energy use and footprint on the land.

Here’s my outstanding question for today: not so much when, but which one first? And how? Should I put all of these webbable things here, in You 2.0? Or should I start other web sites and leave this for the change process itself?

I may experiment here, at first. But I’d love to hear what you think.

Because the other thing I’ve learned in the last six months is that no one is alone – and we can’t create anything – art, change, family, love – without everyone around us. Someone has to help us take the first step.

That’s what it takes to learn how to walk. Time for lots of running later.

*****

OK, OK, I can't wait: Here's my best watercolor so far, of my great horse. It's called DJ Running. Hope you like it.

The Man Who Walked

2007-04-13T11:04:00.000-06:00

It’s been weeks since I’ve managed to blog here – sorry, regular readers. I got caught up in a common phase of re-versioning: listening to the “no, you can’t”, “what’s the use?” voice. The defeatist voice. The one that, once you start down a new path, tells you: it can’t be done. This is too scary. Too uncertain. Where will it lead? Stop now. Don’t waste your time. Go back to the devil you know.

Never mind that your new path could lead you to a life you can’t even imagine today.

When I need stuff, I bless the Internet (I live in a small town hours from any mall). When I’m leaning to procrastination, I curse the Internet. Too easy to spend hours doing “research” and “important stuff” when I don’t have the emotional wherewithal to put fingers on a keyboard, never mind write something.

But something cool did happen during Internet avoidance, this time. I learned about a man – a walking man – whose self-talk many of us would have ignored, or laughed at, or seen a psychiatrist about.

His name is John Francis. In 1971, he protested a Bay Area oil spill by refusing to ride in cars – ever. The resulting arguments with his friends about whether this action or any one person’s actions could make any difference at all inspired another wild idea. He would stop talking. He would shut up for a while and stop his outer voice until he could figure out what was what. He ended up NOT riding in vehicles for 22 years and NOT talking for 17 years while he figured himself out, walked (literally) across the country, earned a few degrees (including a PhD), taught at a couple of universities and then, finally, realized he was past the quiet man stage, started gabbing again. Good gab, this time. Ended up writing water pollution regulations for the U. S. Coast Guard. And being appointed Environmental Ambassador for the United Nations. Besides being a professor.

One person, indeed.

John Francis was ahead of his time – a walking environmentalist. And he was an expert re-versioner: taking the chance of making a commitment to an inner voice that said, “Yes, you can.”

John Francis’s journey was believing one person could make a difference, even if all he did was walk everywhere and stop talking about it. John believes that each of us has such a journey – to make a difference – within ourselves. And anyone can make a commitment to it.

So now, I’m listening to the “yes.” I’m committing to this journey – and committing to exploring my painting, my horse training, all the “other” interests I’ve always wanted to do and never made the time for.

And documenting the journey, the re-versioning, so maybe this person’s path might help others commit to the “yes” voices they haven’t been able to trust – yet.

*****

For more information on John Francis and his PlanetWalk organization, check out www.planetwalk.org.

Do You Believe?

2007-03-08T11:46:00.000-07:00

“Believing the opportunity is possible – that’s the most intimidating thing in the whole world.”
- Anthony DiMaio

Here’s the fun part of being an adult: You can do whatever you want.

Here’s the catch: You have to imagine it, first. Dream it. And believe it.

The challenge? Tell your pesky internal mother/parent/voice that orders you around, insisting you can’t do it, reminding you to get a real job: Stop. And let your imagination take things over.

There’s that (adult-sounding) inner voice again: Dreams won’t get you anywhere! You can’t eat your dreams! No one will pay you for your dreams! Get realistic and do something practical! Dreamer!

Know what? Dreams make life happen. Dreams are all there is.

If you want to get technical, actually, all there is is what we want to measure. That’s the only thing that manifests itself in front of us. No, I’m not getting woo-woo on you; it’s the latest physics theory that really smart people with lots of letters after their names and the ability to do the math are beginning to think is Reality: What we’ve thought to measure so far.

But we’re Re-versioning right now. We’ll measure later. For now, let’s use our imaginations, set up our dreams, and believe we can do it. Maybe not tomorrow, or next Tuesday, but as a client of mine used to say: There are no unrealistic goals, only unrealistic deadlines.

I’m in Utah this week for the Junior Olympics – technically, the Junior Nationals – in cross-country skiing. My stepson Luke and a slew of his buddies are on our region’s team. They’re competing with the best youth in the country. They’re wowing their parents’ socks off, even if sometimes they themselves are disappointed with how far they’ve come since last year. With how each race goes.

Among them is George.

George looks like any high school junior. Growing. Funny; silly sometimes. Laughs a lot. Goofs around. Last Junior Olympics, as a freshman, he was on the Wyoming ski team, but finished way back from the front of the pack: in the 20s, the 30s, the 40s. Along with a lot of other skiers.

Something else happened last year. George looked around. He saw what the front runners had that he didn’t have: stamina and strength. (He didn’t notice they were long and lean – unlike George, who’s built like a bull terrier.) He imagined what it must have been like to stand on the winner’s podium with the fastest racers: the best in the country. The best of the best. He dreamed that dream until he could taste it.

And then George set a goal. One he believed he would reach: The best.

Ever since that last Junior Olympics, George has worked like a beast: Skiing. Learning technique. Lifting weights. Tracking progress. Cross-training, all summer long, when the thought of snow in Wyoming was as remote as good sushi. Always with the dream in mind, always with the goal, always believing he could do it, that he deserved to be there, that he could be the best of the best. And with a lot of fun, too, by the way. All the way up through fall and winter and the school’s cross-country ski season and a mess of races throughout Wyoming. Which George, incidentally, rarely won. Oh he did well, you betcha – but he wasn’t always on the podium.

Fast-forward to March, 2007: Soldier Hollow, Utah. Hundreds of the best skiers in the country. Some have Real Olympic Coaches. Some are in high schools that focus exclusively on cross-country skiing, year-round. Some ski in Europe internationally, fer hevvins sake! Most are simply the best their state has to offer. Each of these skiers already is the best of the best in the U.S.: every last one of them. This is Real Competition.

But Innocent George still has his dream. And he believes in it. Believes that a high school junior from Podunk, Wyoming, formerly in the Back Pack of every national race, can suddenly stand on the podium – especially a kid built small and muscular and tough when everyone knows most front runners in cross-country skiing are long and lean. Poor George. We hoped he would break into the top 10. We hoped he wouldn’t be disappointed.

The races begin. During Monday’s 1K sprints, George skis to the front of the pack and never looks back. In every heat. He skies for the gold. He gets it. The dream comes true for the 1K sprints.

Wednesday: the 5K race: George paces himself, lets a few other guys figure they are faster than that damned sprinter from Wyoming, then on the last big hill, George does what he does best: muscles by them up the hill, tucks like a peanut on skis for the downhill, screams to the front of the pack – and achieves a second gold medal.

What an innocent!

Friday’s another race. Saturday’s a fourth. I won’t predict any of those results, because I’ve been a sports competitor, and here’s the truth: every competition is its own reality. Anything can happen. There are no sure things. It ain’t over ‘til the fat lady sings.

I will predict one thing, though: You can’t make anything happen, until you imagine it. Dream it. Taste it. Believe it. Want it like you want nothing else. And do what it takes to make it come true.

We’re Re-imagining, still exploring, so we may not have our dreams set in gold yet, like George did. We have more than the year George had, though, if we need it. And we are adults: we can do whatever we want. Whatever we can imagine.

Whatever we can believe.

Here’s the downside of being an adult: we’ve dreamed dreams, we’ve hit some rough spots, we’ve felt some failures. We “know,” unlike innocents like George, that you can’t always get what you dream. Yeah. Like we “know” that the Real World is made of real stuff we just haven’t measured yet.

Guess what? Every race is its own reality. Every attempt is its own reality. Failing once doesn’t predict failure always. Or ever again. Failure is only experience to apply to the next race.

Here’s what will stop you way before you get out of the gate, though: a dream, a goal, a finish line you don’t believe you can reach. I’ll guarantee you: you’ll be right. So I dare you, me, us: let’s not only explore. Let’s Dream. Imagine.

Let’s believe. In ourselves. Now.

Just like George.

**********

In 2007, George Cartwright of Lander, Wyoming, a member of Wyoming’s High Plains cross-country ski team, won three gold medals in the J2 division (high school freshmen and sophomores) in the 1.3K sprints, the 5K skate ski race and the 5K classic ski race at the 2007 Junior Olympics in Soldier Hollow, Utah. In 2007, he is the best of the best from across the United States in these three events.

Let Go of Control

2007-02-20T14:10:00.000-07:00

“Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.”
– Robert Heinlein

Exploring is hard work. Sometimes, it can put you in a funk.

For instance, I lost all of my physical energy yesterday afternoon. I mean all. Pretending it was a cold, I hied myself to bed and slept 12 hours of bad-dream-induced sleep. Woke up wondering why. Why was I doing all this change on purpose and to myself? Where was I going? What was I doing? What was the point?

What do I want now?

Peace. An easier life. Less mental struggle. More creativity.

I started with all of my own “saws” to keep me going: The path is in the doing. The path is in the experience, in the intent of the action. The path is in how you seek, not what you seek.

The path is in love of self – compassion for self.

So I gave myself a little compassion.

And I wondered: When you give yourself compassion, who is it that gives? Who is it that receives? Isn’t it all the same old you?

Here’s what I saw: The giver is the One, the greater self within yourself. The receiver is the Other. That's you, too.

The path, I saw, is with the giver. The path is the creative force. The path is not the result: the clean house, the new career, the healthy family.

The path is the One who seeks to give peace to the Other.

Here’s the challenge in our (Western) world: we are taught to identify with the Other in ourselves. The accomplishment (grades, job, house). The power (parent, owner, manager). The rewards (prizes, acknowledgment, love).

When you are Re-versioning, the path of exploring is with the source of all that. The One within you who, today, now, says Yes. The inside-of-you One who has compassion for your Other, for your foibles, fears, losses, all of the (negative) Other who thinks it is in control.

But what if our Others are not in control? We have to be. Otherwise, the world will crush us like bugs, no?

No.

I’ve ridden horses for over 40 years. That is, a 70-150 pound Lesser Being perches on top of a 900-1,200 pound Big Being and says, Let’s go over there.

And the Big Being usually does just that.

“What’s it like to control a horse?” ask my non-equestrian friends.

I reply: You are never in control. The horse is always in control. The horse is, physically, ten times your size and strength and could kill you with one well-placed hoof so fast you wouldn’t have the wherewithal to say Hey.

Control is not the issue. If you’re thinking in terms of control, you’ve already lost.

Here’s the truth with Big Beings like horses: You are never in control of the horse. You are either in agreement with the horse, or in disagreement.

If you agree, the horse carries you where you want the two of you to go and how you want the two of you to go down the path you think you want to go.

If you’re in disagreement, the horse makes all of those decisions. You, the lesser of two beings, have two choices:

Talk to the horse about doing something else. Or just agree with the horse already and go along for the ride.

The first time a horse ran away with me I was 11 years old. He was heading home, fast, through a grove of trees, assisted by my violent screams and my pulling on the reins with all of my 11-year-old strength, which he thought was just a dandy way of saying Go Boy!

He was way in control – as usual. And we were way in disagreement because a paved road was coming up too fast and all I could envision was him hitting the pavement at 30 MPH and his shod hooves sliding out from under him and him falling on my lesser, small, screaming, panicked self.

I realized there was nothing I could do. He was in control. My panic died. I took stock of the situation at 30 MPH.

I was on the horse. He was running, yes. But he wasn’t going to fall. He would stop, eventually. He wasn’t stupid: he knew the road was there. He had been on this trail with me a hundred times. He would no more slide out on that road than he would run off of a cliff.

So I hung on and went with the ride and began to talk to him quietly, with my voice and my weight and my legs, and pretty soon he slowed to a cantering 20 MPH, and then a 12-MPH trot, then a walk. And we walked quietly home on the paved road.

We were back in agreement. Although I’m still not sure exactly whose idea it was.

Here’s the thing, though: when I realized the horse was in control and I let go of my being in control and the very idea of control, I got home really fast. The horse took care of me.

When you’re exploring and Re-versioning, think of the path as the horse. Let the path be in control. Try to be in agreement with the path, but if you don’t understand where the path is leading, where the horse is going, don’t panic and saw on the reins. That just gives more control to the horse.

Just agree with the path. See where it goes. Hang on for the ride. Wherever you’re going, you’ll get there a lot faster than if you try to get back in control. Which you never were. And never will be. And it’s all right. That is the thrill of exploring. That’s the thrill of being alive.

Time to Explore

2007-02-15T15:36:00.000-07:00

No doubt your Board of Directors loved all of the hard work you did to prepare – the favorite things, the skills and interests, what you are not – and had a lot of great ideas and comments and insights into who you are and how you can be in the world.

And they all talked like mad people and you took notes and when it was over, they all thanked you and clapped their (virtual) hands on your shoulders and said keep in touch and hung up the phones/left the bar/went home to their Happy Versions O’ Them, and there you were with a scribble of words on a yellow pad and no earthly idea what to do next.

You don’t even know if it was helpful, do you? Not yet. It will be.

Welcome to exploring, the second phase of Re-versioning.

Explore without goals

Exploring always seems like the most “fun” phase of Re-versioning. But in fact, it’s difficult. And it’s not always a good time.

True exploration shows us places we’ve never seen, plays sounds we’ve never heard, prompts emotions we’ve never felt.

When we’re in it, it seems like it has absolutely no shape or form, no rhyme or reason, and yet here we are trying to make something new of ourselves and not even sure if it will work, much less if it will result in something wonderful.

But we have to be lost to explore, don’t we?

Yes and no.

When we’re lost, we have no idea where we are and we want to be Somewhere Else and we can’t figure out a) where Somewhere Else could possibly be, and b) how to get there.

When we explore, we have no idea where we are either. But we don’t care. Because it’s pretty danged interesting right here and now. And the point is to follow our noses/stick to the hunches/trust in our instincts (read “interests,” “skills,” “abilities”), and See What Happens.

Fruitful explorations, in Re-versioning, come when we explore without goals. It’s not exploration if we know where we’re going. That’s called a vacation.

Exploring doesn’t always mean experiencing new things. It means seeing familiar things with unbiased, unassuming eyes. It means really looking. Really listening. Really experiencing.

We explore when we let our natural curiosity, passions, and interests sway our actions and draw us to experience things in a new way. When we don’t expect anything out of the experience.

There’s only one rule in exploring.

We have to show up.

We have to be there. We have to pay attention to our ideas, thoughts, emotions, to the world Out There and the world In Here. So we can answer the one, truly, bottom-line, important question to this whole process:

What is the world asking of me?

Believe me, the world is asking. There’s so much we all need to do, and we can’t get it done without every one of us sticking our talents and skills and loves and passions into the mix and helping out.

That doesn’t mean you follow someone else’s exploration into the latest Most Important thing, whether it’s global warming or poverty or education or (or.. or.. or). Not that those things aren’t important. They are. But the real question is, what is the world asking of each of us, specifically, given what we each know and love and believe in?

Ask the right questions

I believe there are ways to ask the world this question and get an answer that makes sense. In fact, asking the right question is important, because if we ask (and then answer) the wrong question, we may end up rejecting a part of ourselves that the world really, really needs to have.

My Board Member Jim Kenefick introduced me to www.asmallgroup.net. It’s a group of people in Cincinnati, including the urban poor, who are committed to restoring and reconciling Cincinnati. Their number includes Peter Block, a biz guru who is also a citizen of Cincinnati and, in an interview on the web site, said a couple of key “grown up” thoughts (I paraphrase):

- We are inclusive, and put people in charge of their own futures.

- We declare that we are responsible for this world, and we will stop being victims.

- We are the cause as well as the effect. There is no one to blame.

I took that to heart in Re-versioning. And after a little thought, I asked myself three questions that seemed to be the right ones:

- What makes me feel most whole? Most purposeful?

- What have I done that I do well, better than anyone else?

- What does the world need from me today?

I think of these questions as a set of interlocking rings, one for each question, like this:

The intersection in the middle, the place where all three of the answers converge, is what You 2.0 will be.

The “next” won’t end up being specific, like “Get a doctorate in physics from Yale University.” (Although that would have been a fun “next,” I think!)

The intersection can provide a bit of guidance about what “next” might entail. At the risk of sounding uppity, here’s what I found in the intersection of my three circles/three questions – what I needed to do next:

Guidance. Wisdom. Kindness. Compassion. Strength. Direction. Ideas. Beauty. Laughter. Confidence. See, look, feel. Observe. Experience.

It sounded pretty pretentious, when I first wrote it down – it still does, if I think of each of those things as the Be All And Do All For The World.

But when I think of those things in terms of who I am, of what I can do, I know there’s a little of each of those things in me, in little areas, in what I can offer.

Of course, “next” needs a structure. I had no idea how that would happen. Or when that would happen. But in the spirit of exploration, I decided to just sit with it for a while. And let all those “next” things talk to one another and work things our before they turned to me to say, “Hey.”

Keeping the Faith

2007-02-08T15:13:00.000-07:00

“Be the change you want to see in the world.”
-- Mahatma Gandhi

Keeping the faith

Chaos theory was all the rage a few years ago.

The (lay) physics world was fascinated by it. Fractal geometry. Initial conditions. Small changes, small actions making all the difference in the world. The butterfly effect.

Movies emerged. Books appeared. The secular world, floundering for something “real” to believe in, finally found something that kind of made sense of God.

It was all faith, really.

Not to say the mathematics of chaos theory aren’t interesting – damned amazing, actually. Branches of trees follow the same geometry as branches of our veins as branches of our rivers. Come to think of it – and I did think about it, a lot – damned weird.

But what did the mathematics mean? What did it refer to? Did it reflect the thing out there scientists wonder about and we interact with and call “reality”? Did anything reflect that?

No one could say.

It was all faith, really.

Same goes for the actions we take to re-version ourselves. Or to save the world. Or not.

We each believe in our personal heroes – Gandhi, or Martin Luther King, Jr., or Muhammad Ali, or any of them – the ones who represent for us the things we want to be – the version we want to become – and we can point to actions they took that changed the world and say, see, it can be done. But you have to be someone great to do it.

(Subtext: And I’m not.)

(Sub-subtext: So it doesn’t matter what I do.)

But what did our heroes’ actions change? What effect did they have?

They changed us. And millions of people like us. One person at a time. And all because our heroes had faith in their actions, and in themselves.

Re-versioning takes a lot of faith. Especially when you’ve questioned all of the things you’ve done in the past and the dreams you’ve won and lost and the people who’ve come and gone and the ideas that you believe might maybe be the ones that, this time, will take you out of yourself and into the world and become real enough that you believe, that you have faith, that will result in actions that matter to more than your mother and your cat.

It's all faith, really.

Sometimes, when we’re re-versioning, things get dark. It’s difficult to reinvent. It’s difficult to honestly, lovingly say: ok, where are the holes in me? Where are the bugs in this version that are stopping the flow of information/action/effectiveness/love/faith? And, instead of going deep into therapy – which, sometimes, some of us have to do anyway – re-versioning says, forget how the bugs got there. Just fix ‘em.

And in our darkest re-versioning hours, we ask: But what difference will it make? What if this version has as many (but different) bugs as the last one? (It will.) What if I have to create version 2.99999? (You will.) What’s the point of that, anyway?

The point is the path. The point is what happens while we build version 2.99999.

Once you get older, with enough time under your belt to actually have friends for decades, a funny thing happens. People – sometimes people you’ve known lightly – will say, “I remember when we did X, you said…” And they go on to describe some experience you had together and some words you (evidently) blurted out and how much it meant to them and thanks and for the life of you, you won’t be able to remember even knowing them that long, much less anything of the experience or the so-called “wisdom” that popped out of your mouth.

You never know when what you do will change the world.

It’s not the Big Things that do it – the achievements and the wins and the stuff (house/boat/car) and the times your mother says I’m so proud of you – although those things, too, affect the world a little.

It’s the small stuff. Both good and bad.

And you have to have faith that, if you move and think and love and act and talk from that honest, open, exploring, believing, trusting part of your soul – the one that says, yes, you are here, yes, you are part of this, yes, you are integrated, somehow, someway, into the human race, and yes, what you do every moment does matter – if you act from there, the world sighs and gathers you in its arms and passes on the word and someone somewhere listens from their trusting part of their soul and acts accordingly. And you’ve changed the world.

But you never know it.

That’s the part that requires faith. That’s where chaos theory comes in – where we have to believe that the smallest breath of air, the smallest words we utter, the tiny, effervescent touch of kindness we offer to a bird, a child, a person in pain, ourselves – goes out and says, hey. There is kindness in the world. There is honesty. There is the way to be the change you want to see.

I could do the math for you, if I had a PhD in calculus. But we don’t need the math. Besides, even the mathematicians and the physicists and the chaos theorists aren’t sure if the math reflects anything that’s out there “really.”

All we need is faith. Because the world really needs a kind word from your heart.

Thanks, Anthony DiMaio

*****

Who are some of my heroes? Gandhi, because he believed non-violence and love could conquer violence and hate (and it did – his beliefs freed India from one of the world’s strongest governments); Martin Luther King, Jr., because he believed in a dream that would happen whether he lived or died (and it did and is still growing); Muhammad Ali, the world’s biggest, strongest, toughest boxer, because he defied his war-mongering government and followed his Muslim beliefs and refused to kill another human being, going to prison instead of war – even though it cost him the Big Thing: the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship (and it did – but he showed them and got it back later).

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Who Am I? #5: The fun begins

2007-02-06T16:50:00.000-07:00

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”
-- Confucius

In the beginning of re-versioning, I suggested you create a Board of Directors, and gave some ideas of how to select people who could help develop You 2.0. Since then, we’ve been answering a lot of questions related to “Who am I?” -- favorite things, skills and interests, the things we do well and always wanted to do, even who we are not. If you’ve done all this, you’re ready to meet with your board.

Meeting with your cool Board is easy. Here’s some tips.

• It’s Re-Day! Set a date and time when everyone – or most everyone – can play. You may have to set up more than one meeting if your board is bigger than three or four people. That’s ok.

• Confirm, confirm, confirm. Call or email after the meeting is set up, and remind everyone the day before, with purpose, time, length, and place. (If you’re meeting virtually, check out the affordable services at SaveOnConferences.com.)

• Write an agenda. Start by restating your purpose, and how long the meeting will take. As efficiently as you can, without seeming to rush, get the general scope of your “Who am I?” answers on the table. Then ask your board for their ideas, and end by restating any conclusions and things they can expect next.

• Prep information and/or visuals. This can be PowerPoint stuff – keep it simple and visual please, not a million lines o’ text – or handouts, photos, pictures – whatever you want. Have some fun – your Board will appreciate that you took the energy to make it fun for them, too.

• Test your equipment or conference call service. Ask someone to be on the phone for 2 minutes if you need to ensure everything is working.

• The day before the meeting: confirm, confirm, confirm!

• Run the meeting. Stick to the agenda and the length you promised. Listen! Take notes. Thank everyone and go home.

You’ve just run your first Board of Directors meeting. Take a bow.

But what do we talk about?

Your Board will be so excited to help you through this process that you’ll wonder why you even thought of this question. But you can guide your discussion a little anyway.

I asked my board for straightforward answers to a couple of questions.

• What did I do well that I hadn’t identified for them already?

• What did I not do well that I should avoid?

• What other ideas did they have for exploring?

• Who did they think I should talk to/check their blog/write/email/experience?

I was amazed at two things from my board: how open and stimulating they were, and how excited they were for me to be going through this process. They all wanted to know where it would end up. They all had ideas for how to move forward. They all had opinions on all of the questions I asked.

And, happily, you’ll discover that people who like you, also like to talk about you – with you in the room. They like to imagine things for you. They like being part of your process. They’re excited to see how baby-seed ideas will grow. It’s fun, it’s exciting, and it’s something you will not only never forget – you’ll never know exactly how to thank them enough.

Here’s a hint: keep them in the loop.

As you make progress after your board meeting, keep emailing successes to your board. Let them know what’s happening. Don’t be shy about asking for more advice. Lean on them a little. They know you’re beginning a scary exploration, and that no one knows what will happen.

Let them help you. It’s allowed. It’s a great gift – one we often forget to give.

Who Am I? #4: Who am I NOT?

2007-01-31T17:51:00.000-07:00

“Neti, neti.”
“Not this, not this.”

- The Upanishads

That ol’ question, “Who am I?” prompts a lot of nervousness in we re-versioners. It is hard, when we’re trying to figure out a new path out of the cave we’ve dug ourselves into, to take that first step. Seems dangerous. Scary. Sure, there may be success there. But There Be The Failure Dragons, too, and a lot of us respond to “Who am I?” by reaching the other way: by defining who we are NOT.

“Not” is an important start. It closes the paths we don’t want to explore. It helps define what we might want to do.

Here's the rub, though -- it leaves "billions and billions" (apologies to Carl Sagan) of options from which we still have to choose. And sometimes, we’re so busy pushing away from what we are “not,” we neglect to embrace what we are. Hard to land a foothold in emptiness. Leaning on “not” means wandering the world like an Indian sadhu/holy man, murmuring “Neti, neti” (“Not this, not this”) at what you see/feel/think/experience until you pretty much have clobbered everything but god out of your life.

In India, people expect men who have raised their families and achieved their adult goals to chuck it all and sadhu for a few years, doing the “neti” thing. It’s a holy, an honorable, a good path.

In the West, not so much.

There is another way – a way that uses “neti, neti” to find what is YES (as opposed to what is NOT).

Think about what you are “not.” Say it. Write it. Define it. Then turn it around: Look at everything you can imagine standing around that “not”: What do you see? What IS there? Why are you so determined to define yourself as a “not”? What can you grab outside of the “not” that is a “something” instead of a “nothing”?

The source of “not”

Some “not”s don’t come naturally to us, but are pounded into us by our well-meaning others. A million years ago I met a very successful attorney in a “new careers” workshop. She did corporate law, made a ton o’ bucks, highly respected, written up in the law reviews, etc., etc., etc. Yet here she was trying to re-version herself, way back then, with all us little folk – who were nowhere near as “successful,” according to the world.

The instructor led us through a close-your-eyes-and-dream-while-you-listen-to-this-music exercise, which promptly made me impatient (in those days, I steered clear of the touchy-feelies – too many hippie experiences, I guess). As we went around the room, “revealing” our dreams to strangers (another thing I couldn’t muster), we came to the corporate attorney.

“And what did you dream, dear?” asked the workshop leader.

The attorney burst into tears.

“I want to draw bunnies!” she cried.

All righty, then. We all sat pretty silent.

But here’s the thing: the woman loved bunnies. Had always loved bunnies. Always wanted to draw their cute little tweaky noses and flitchy ears and soft curvy backs. Wanted to do the Beatrice Potter thing. Wanted to fulfill a childhood fantasy that her parents always said was NOT realistic, NOT doable, NOT a moneymaker, NOT something people cared about and why would she want to draw them?

She listened to all that “not” for a long time – through law school and the reviews and the corporate stuff and the success – until she discovered that getting successful in what you are “not” not only doesn’t make you happy – it brings the “not” into even more relief and makes you want to do it all the more.

The attorney quit her practice. She started drawing bunnies. She built a highly successful greeting card business where she was paid big bucks to draw her bunnies until they came out of her un-bunny-like ears.

Using the “not”s

So here’s a few things to remember when we try and define ourselves through our “not”s instead of our “I am”s.

• Turn your “not”s inside out. See what they ARE. Write those things down, touch them, feel them, play with them. Who knows? Your re-version may be hiding right around the edges of a little “not” you’ve been avoiding for a long time.

• Some “not”s are pressed into us by others. You can’t squelch those “not”s – sooner or later, the bunnies come back. Why put it off if the bunnies are going to haunt you anyway? Besides, how old will you be in five years if you don’t draw your bunnies?

So check our your “not”s. Turn the real ones inside out. Embrace the bunnies, and see where they lead. And if they point down a path you don’t want to explore, why, change your mind. It’s allowed.

You 2.0: The new revolution

2007-01-25T11:18:00.000-07:00

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

- by Maryanne Williamson as quoted by Nelson Mandela in his 1994 presidential inauguration speech

The most amazing thing is happening right now in the world:

People are generous.

In the nanoseconds I’ve been blogging, I’ve discovered a world of new, kind, generous friends. They’ve linked people to Re-Versioning. They’ve taken time to comment. They’ve listed this site. They’ve sent me stuff. They’ve introduced me to places I never dreamed existed, where the new revolution is happening, where people are sharing freely, to change things.

And the world is giving everything back in return.

Here’s the funny thing about generosity: when the world gives to you, you want to give back. And, even funnier, you find you can give back.

Why we don’t give
What is sad about our present culture – or at least, about our professional culture as perceived by most of us who have been trampled on by capitalists without morals, bosses without sense, and fear-filled colleagues – is that it actively squelches generosity. It focuses on money. Success (= money). Rampant Individualism (= money). Celebrity (= money). Be Somebody (= money).

It tells us that we can’t afford to be generous. Generosity won’t make us Money.
So we start hiding things inside, to “protect” them: Ideas. Suggestions. Answers. Creativity. All our ideas to save the world.

And we tuck them into a dark, safe spot so hidden that even we can’t find them. Because we’re afraid that someone, somewhere, will find them and take them and there won’t be anything left for us. Of us.

Or that all of our protected, saved, "best" ideas won't amount to a hill of beans in this world.

The world feels this darkness, this black hole of fear, and stops being generous for us. This is no “woo-woo”: When we live from our fear, we stop experiencing what is out there. And we neglect to listen for the things people want to give us.

Conquering fear
Conquering our fears is one of the most difficult things we face in re-versioning. What if it won’t work? What if I can’t do anything else? What if this is all I cam become?

What if it were another way? What if we are so rich inside, so powerful, so amazing that if we just opened the dark spot a crack, the world rushed in with a big yell of “Yeah!” and started pouring generosity in?

Years ago, I was struggling to find a way to forgive my mother for a lot of unkind things. I had just begun practicing Zen. One day, I sat/meditated. I read a lesson from Shunryu Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, on a very simple concept that, at the time, I didn’t believe:

You cannot practice compassion for others until you have compassion for yourself.

I was (fortunately!) young enough, and in pain enough, that I meditated that day just on finding compassion for me. Here’s the phases I went through:

• This isn’t going to work.
• My mother doesn’t deserve compassion.
• I feel fine about myself – really.
• I don’t deserve to focus on myself.
• If I focus on myself, I’m being selfish.
• Now I’m REALLY being selfish!

Then it happened: I felt deep compassion for myself. I forgave myself for being mad at my parents. For feeling broken. For not being “successful” enough. For not being perfect.

For being afraid.

My tears watered the world that morning. And in a few minutes, compassion for my mother, my father, my whole family gushed out. And I was able to be generous with them, forgive them, build something with them.

Creating generosity
Change isn’t really difficult – especially if you really want to do it. Compassion isn’t difficult. Generosity isn’t difficult. Trust isn’t difficult.

What’s difficult is doing all that for our deepest selves – first.

Re-versioning, if it is to take us to 2.0, needs to start with our deepest selves. All of the exercises I’ve been posting only work when you go to the place that’s true. That can be hard to do, because we’ve been told not to go there. We’ve been “saving” it. We’re afraid of it.

Here’s a big “What if” for us:

What if Nelson Mandela is right?

Imagine what we could do for the world.

Let’s take a chance. Let’s be generous with ourselves. Let’s be clear with ourselves. Let’s trust ourselves, give ourselves compassion and kindness and generosity – and open the door to that dark place inside.

And give it to the world.

__________

After over 30 years in prison, Nelson Mandela was inaugurated as the first president of a demonstratic South Africa in 1994. In his acceptance speech, he used this quote from Maryanne Williamson's book A Return To Love:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our Light, not our darkness, that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small doesn't serve the world.
There's nothing enlightening about shrinking
so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It's not just in some of us -- it's in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.

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Who Am I? #3

2007-01-23T15:51:00.000-07:00

“Who am I? Where’s my car?”
-- Los Angeles, CA bumper sticker, circa 1990

I found the car. Where’s the map?

In the last exercise, I outlined my skills and interests, based on favorite things. It was a nice list. But it didn’t resonate – really – with clues that might help me move Into The Future. I still needed something.

Then I realized: you can’t move effectively from The Present to Your Future without beginning at the beginning – defining some kind of a road map. Otherwise, anything you did would be the right thing – even if you didn’t like doing it.

I knew that there would come a time when I would want to travel into the future without a strict set of directions or a firmly defined destination. But I wasn't there yet. I had my Board of Directors to think about. I didn’t want to draw conclusions yet about my future path, but I definitely needed to identify for my Board of Directors the directions that had real potential for me. That meant looking at my raw material from two points of view: the positive, and the negative.

In this blog, I’ll work through the positive, and leave the second half of this exercise for next time.

Identify what has worked

Once again, I reviewed what I had written down so far. I realized that what I had done well, I did because I liked to do them. That was an obvious place to start: Things I like to do/do well.

It’s no small thing to identify only the things you do well that you like. For example, I was touted by my 5th grade piano teacher as a kid who could Go Somewhere in the world of classical music. You know – Julliard, concerts, record contracts, the works. Since music was a dream of my mother’s, I was set on that path – to the tune of practicing four hours a day on weekends.

There were two problems with their approach to building me a future in music:

1. I wasn’t challenged by it. I guess I was good, but the things I did at the piano seemed obvious and I sure the heck missed playing outdoors on summer weekends. Besides, I didn’t like practicing, and I hated that metronome!

2. I didn’t like performing. Everyone around me forgot to ask me one simple question: “Do you like playing for people?” I hated it. The stage nerves, the inevitable one-note mistake, my mother’ chilling gasp when she heard it, being forced to play for my parents’ friends at parties – and knowing it bored them – added up to anger and boredom with the whole thing.

Those two things killed my desire for music. I quit as soon as I had the chance. And I still don’t play – unless the spirit moves me to play (badly) the few things I still like. (It’s ok – there’s no one else in the house but the cats.)

Thus the importance of identifying the things you do well that you like. Besides, if you like doing it, you’ll do it more, and pretty soon you’ll be better at it than anyone else, and someone is going to have to hire you!

So – first list this time: the things you like to do/do well.

Identify what you want to work

Somehow in listing all these things – favorites, skills, interests, things I liked – an important question came up. Whatever happened to all my childhood dreams? Like most little kids, I “grew up” and forgot about them.

I sat for a while and remembered, way down the road I had already traveled, back to those auspicious (or arrogant!) moments when I declared what I was going to be “when I grew up”: a jockey! (that died when I hit 5’7”); the first woman rider at the Spanish Riding School! (no horse); a model! (the American Everygirl dream); a writer! (that one actually worked).

Remembering was fun. But I wasn’t a child anymore, and besides, I had a lot more dreams to add to the list. So I answered the big question:

“I’ve always wanted to…”

I listed the first things that came to mind – then the second, and the third. I wrote it all down – without editing.

Your potentialities

Now I had two more lists: 1) Things I like to do/do well. 2) “I’ve always wanted to…”

I put the two lists side by side. They definitely pointed down a number of roads I could imagine from this point. But something in me was rebelling.

First, there were too many roads – my Board of Directors would have to help with that. However, I didn’t want to waste my Board’s time, so I decided to close off all of the roads that I knew were not going to be fun. That’s the subject of the next exercise.

Who Am I? #2

2007-01-19T16:23:00.000-07:00

What does it all mean?

In the last re-versioning exercise, I explored my favorite things, and found some surprises on my list: professional projects from 20 years ago; new (and old) passions; vocations and avocations; places I’d seen and explored around the world. Even things I tried a little of and always wanted to do more of, but never “had the time.”

As we say in the training biz, I “compared and contrasted” my favorite things, and I noticed something: there were skills that many of the things had in common. And – surprise – there were elements of the things I’m consciously most interested in everywhere.

My “favorite things” list came out of playing and thinking about the past. But before I could step forward into the future, it seemed like I needed to take stock of What Is Now. This is that exercise.

Skills and interests

I looked at my list of favorite things I’ve done – work, personal, interactive – and compiled two more lists: a list of skills, things I think I can do well; and a list of interests, things I knew about or wanted to know more about, or “always wanted to do.” It was pretty “listy,” but you already know I love lists and words.

The “skills” list helped me condense a lot of the ideas that had been floating around in my head into some concrete, simpler things that I knew about myself: creativity; listening; organizing (lists!); planning.

The “interests” list was more subject-like, almost a list of college class titles from an Ideal University of You: learning to watercolor; mental health and physiology; ancient and cultural history. They weren’t all “egghead” things, either: horses and dressage were in there, as well as how things work and engaging in my community.

At this point, I felt like I was done already with raw material. It was time to head for the future.

I hear you: "But I hate making lists!”

If you feel frustrated sitting by yourself and listing all this stuff – or if your lists aren’t too satisfying – here’s an exercise to help you find your skills and interests.

You’ll need at least three people to do this exercise.
• Friend #1 is your Recorder. This friend will time this exercise, ask the questions, and write down or otherwise record your responses.
• Friend #2 is the Reality Foil. This friend will work with Friend #1 first, then with all three of you, to complete the exercise. Both of these people should be very good, honest friends (See “Choosing your Board of Directors”). (You may have more than one Foil if you want, but I would start with one first.)
• You.

You will also need:
• Paper and pens OR a voice recorder
• A watch with a second hand and an alarm or a stop watch or alarm clock that can mark brief periods of time (like 2 minutes)
• A place for you or your Reality Foil to sit without being able to hear the others. Doesn’t have to be a recording studio – if you’re sitting inside the house, have the Foil go out in the yard, or vice versa.

Here’s the exercise.

STEP 1:
1. Sit in a quiet space or place with the Recorder. Have nothing in your hands or around you to distract you. Sit for as long as you need to relax, to stop thinking about what you need to do next. You need to do this now.

2. The Recorder sets the timepiece for 2 minutes, prepares to write, and asks you: In simple words or phrases, how would you describe yourself?

3. Answer the question, with the first thinks that come to your mind. Don’t stop. The point of this isn’t a “right” answer; it’s to access some stuff you may not be aware of.

4. The Recorder writes everything down as fast as possible, using a short hand if necessary. No talking about your answer: the Recorder simply records as neutrally as possible.

5. If you stop talking, the Recorder will tell you, “Go on.”

6. If you’re still going strong after 2 minutes, the Recorder will let you go.

7. You can stop any time after the alarm goes off.

You’re done. Go sit and relax, and send in the Reality Foil.

STEP 2:
1. The Recorder repeats the exercise with the Foil, asking, “In simple words or phrases, how would you describe [You]?”

2. Foil: No talking about You. Just record the answers as neutrally as possible. And same rules on the timing: Keep the other person talking, and end after 2 minutes.

3. The Recorder brings You into the room. All you have to do for now is look at the two lists, and ask the Recorder or your Reality Foil any questions you have about the content, if you have any.

4. Keep the lists, thank your friends, and go out for coffee to celebrate.

OR:

This next part of the exercise you can do immediately after the steps above, or you may want to take time to think about it before you share your thoughts with your friends. Or not.

STEP 3:
1. Look at your list. What surprises you about the order in which you described yourself? What did you “forget” to state that you think is obvious now that the exercise is over? What do you want to add? (If you add anything, use a different color pen or otherwise indicate, “These words came later.”)

2. Look at your Reality Foil’s list. What surprises you about the content of the list? The order of the descriptions? How do you feel looking at this list?

3. Compare the two lists. What do they have in common? What is different? What does your Reality Foil see that you want to be more of? What does the Foil not see that you want to make more obvious?

4. Think about all these lists and words and questions. What does it tell you about how you see yourself in the world? About how the world sees you? What does it tell you about how you want the world to see you in the future – and how you want to see yourself?

5. Given the answers to the questions above: What most interests you in the world? What skills do you bring to the table?

I hear you #2: “But my friends won’t help!” or “I can’t ask my friends!” or “I don’t have any friends!”

We’ll work on some of those issues later. Meantime, here’s another fun way to investigate your skills and interests.

Presto! You are now the President of an amazing institution: You University (a.k.a. You U).

As I am the head of You U’s Board of Directors – your Virtual CEO, I guess – here’s your assignment:

Write the foundational curriculum for all new You U students who enter the university.

What’s in a curriculum? I want to see a couple of things:
• Department Titles: What are the main areas of interest where we need to hire professors, do research, enlighten students? Start with those.

• Required Classes: In each Department, what subjects, skills, and attitudes that you think each You U student must achieve in order to be successful in this world? In short, what are the basics that you feel are most important?

• Elective Classes: Now, what are the subjects and skills and attitudes that You U students might also want to learn? What else might be helpful for our students’ success?

• The Head Professor’s Resume: Write the job description for the Head Professor who will be able to help run You U. Now, secretly you want to apply for the Head Professor position, so write the job description including all of the skills that you already have. That way, when the position is filled, they’ll have to select you! (ha-ha-ha evil laughter here)

Now, this is your first draft, so don’t feel like you have to write the whole course catalog. But spend enough time on it to be able to show something substantial to your board.

Done? Leave it be for a few hours/days. Then head back and look it over. Make two columns on a piece of paper, one headed “Skills” and the other “Interests.” Use your curriculum information to identify both and create your lists.

The past, the present – now comes the fun part: the future.

Watching For Foxes

2007-01-17T11:11:00.000-07:00

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Benjamin Franklin

“When we’re still learning, we call it practice.”

Laurie 2.0

This post departs from a bit from the previous ones, but it's important in your process of re-versioning.

This is a meditation about pain.

How do people change? In nature, we ask, “How does change happen?” and consider it a natural tendency of the physical world. But since we’re “conscious, intelligent beings with free will,” we ask, “How do I change?”

I’m thinking the two are not unrelated, since we are nature and the physical world. And our change – the change of any sentient being – is sparked by an experience, an interaction, with the Real World Out There.

For example – my darling horse, DJ. Like most horses – wait a minute, like me, too – he is a creature of habit. 9 am: I whistle “meal time,” and he neighs “Good, I’m starved!” After breakfast, it’s out to the fields to Kaffee Klatch with the neighboring horses. Then – yikes, 11 am! – time to come in for “elevenses” and a drink. And since the water tank is right by the shelter, well, a little nap is a good idea in the heat of the day/cold of the morning. Then, 1 pm, time for a little something out in the field. By 6 pm he’s watching for my truck to come home, listening for the whistle, ready to neigh for dinner and literally run in: hay and crunchies. And every time he goes through his routine, he walks/runs along the same little pathways he’s created in the middle of the field. You can see them.

That’s his life. It’s a good one. It’s always the same.

Until it’s not.

What makes it change?

- A fox leaps out of a clump o’ grass during his morning walk to his elevenses. Presto, he starts a new path away from that clump – forever.
- I come out one day in the early afternoon. Shoot! Riding time! He ignores my calls at first, but eventually a resigned horse wanders in from the field.
- The neighbors ride their horses around behind our house. Yoikes! He runs out to the fields, races back, snorts, throws his tail over his back – what the heck is going on over there!?!?!

And he’s ever after different.

We’re the same way. We think we’re “in charge” of change, but really we just practice our stuff trying to get better and better until “better” doesn’t cut it anymore. All of our neighbors find our secret “back way” to the highway, and it’s too crowded to use. There’s no more surprises at work. Our mate stops listening to our excited rants about new ideas – wait a minute, we have no more excited rants about new ideas.

In short: our “practice” becomes “insanity.”

We start to feel pain.

Now for DJ, “ pain” usually means “surprise.” He doesn’t like those. He likes a nice, safe, predictable world where his hay and his naps and his crunchies all appear on time, safely, and comfortably.

All of us are like that. Only each of our definitions of “on time, safely, and comfortably” is different. So each of our definitions of “pain” is different.

Contrary to our “natural” reaction, pain is a good thing. Welcome pain: it’s the catalyst for change. It will transform you out of the world of “insanity” into the world of a new practice, a new way of being comfortable in the world. Pain is not the “necessary evil” – pain is a message from our un/subconscious bodies to our conscious/emotional/mental ones. Pain says, “Don’t do that.” Pain says, “Do it differently.” Pain says, “Try something else.”

Sometimes, it takes a while for us to recognize conscious/emotional/mental pain. Because sometimes it’s not as obvious as a fox spurting out of a clump of grass. It sneaks up on us – and we say, oh that’s ok, that’s not really pain, I’m just out of sorts today, I ate a bad apple at lunch, I’m getting a cold, my back hurts, my boss is a nut… In fact, all of those things are the fox leaping out of the bushes – the beginnings of the message from our un/subconscious selves to the top of the stack: time to change.

So watch for the foxes – even the little ones. Does it mean that, the second you feel a cringe of “something’s not right,” you drop everything? Burn the house, sell the horse and move to France? (my favorite escape fantasy) Of course not. But it does mean paying attention: Hey. There’s a fox jumping out of the bushes. There’s people and horses running over there. I wonder what that’s about? I think it’s time I go check it out.

This is a meditation about pain. Pain is a message. Listen. Accept. Explore. And trust that your instincts will keep you safe in the long run.

And you can begin to “practice” something else.

Who Am I? #1

2007-01-12T15:59:00.000-07:00

Find Your Future In Your Past

I formed my personal “Board of Directors” to help re-version Laurie 2.0. They all accepted! Now I was committed: I had to act. One of my meetings would be “live,” in the small Wyoming town where I live. The other would be virtual, with people from California to New York talking together in a conference call.

I needed to make the meetings fun. But what to show? What to tell them to get their straightforward, creative, fearless juices flowing?

In the next few entries, I’ll show you exactly what I did.

A list of your favorite things…
Whatever Laurie 2.0 looked like, it had to be fun. But what was “fun” for me, specifically?

I needed a baseline, a foundation, a list o’ stuff that I could think about and use to define what I had been doing all of these years, and why it wasn’t working any more.

I began remembering “my favorite things” and asking myself questions about them:
• What had I done that I would describe as the best moments in my life? The peak experiences?
• Why were they fun? What about them made them spring into my mind, seem important to me, create fond memories and feelings?

By now, you know I love to deal in words. So I made a list. Specifically, What the projects were and Why I loved them.

It was fun: a little trip down the ol’ Memory Lane, and a big pat on the back for the things I did well – which happened to be many of my favorite things. Hmmmm – cowinkidink? More on that later.

So that’s the basic raw material: What you love to do, and Why you love to do it.

I hear you: “But I Can’t Write!”

Sure you can. But I won’t try to convince you of that here.

Here’s two alternatives to lists that even I use when words didn’t seem to hold enough:

Dream:
Get a big piece of paper – at least 11” x 17”. Bigger if possible. (Newsprint in the school section of your local discount store is good.)

Get something that marks paper – and can’t be erased: colored pens. Colored crayons. Colored markers, if your paper is thick. Colored pencils. Colored chalk. Get the picture? Colored stuff that marks indelibly. Don’t worry – There Are No Mistakes in this process.

Sit down in a quiet space where you have a chunk of time. Pick anywhere on that beautiful blank sheet (what will you discover?). Think about your favorites times in your life. Pick up a colored thing. Make a mark. Continue it. Fill it out. Label it. Make a stick figure around it. Draw around it. (“I can’t draw!” Well, this isn’t for art class – it’s for you. Let go of how it looks at the end, and get into what it can tell you today.)

Pick another place (anywhere on the paper, I mean). Repeat.

Take as long as you like, but I suggest a couple of long sessions in pretty quick succession so you can really get into it (as opposed to lots of quick starts-and-stops with weeks in between).

See What Happens. You’ll know when you’re done.

Put the paper somewhere you won’t see it for a few days.

Set aside a quiet time, as long as you can. Then get a cuppa your favorite (are we seeing “themes” here?) and look at what you’ve done.

Really look: as if someone else had done it. What does it tell you about the things you most like to do? Write your thoughts down.

I hear you #2: “But I Can’t Draw!”

You can do that, too, but that’s a goal for later. Here’s an alternative.

Collect:
Think about your favorite projects. And poke around your house: in the attic, in file cabinets, under the bed, in your mementoes box(es), in the backyard.

Pick things to represent each favorite experience. A teddy bear. A coin. A button. A mug. Or from outside: A leaf. A flower. A pile of good dirt. A handful of grass. Whatever truly represents to you specific projects or activities you’ve done that make you smile still, after all these years.

When you’re done (you’ll know when), clean a flat spot in an out-of-the-way place (not the dining room table)—even a small corner of your bedroom will do.

Place your collection there, in an arrangement that makes sense to you: First things at the back? Favorite things at the front? Small groups of related objects/experiences? Whatever makes you happy.

Now, Go Away for a while – maybe a day or two (if your collection is where you can’t avoid seeing it, put a sheet over it).

Ready? Set aside a quiet time and sit down and look at your collection: What does it tell you about the things you most like to do? Write your thoughts down.

You 2.0

2007-01-05T17:06:00.000-07:00

Things begin: The Crash of v 1.999

I’d been bored for a decade and unhappy for a year in my job – as an instructional designer and training consultant for B2B corporations – and didn’t know what to do about it. From the outside, I had “everything”: my own business, flexible work hours, good pay, lived in a nice little house in a nice little town in the country, great community and friends. But inside? I hadn’t enjoyed my work for a very long time.

Finally, a really bad week got me going. I needed a New Me. I needed an updated version of what I wanted to do. I needed to create Laurie 2.0.

I needed a personal Board of Directors.

Selecting the Board

I needed opinions – from friends who knew me well, from colleagues I had known for literally decades, from clients who had seen my work and benefited from what I did best. But how to pick them?
Here were my criteria:

1. STRAIGHTFORWARD:

My first thought was “honest,” but I meant more than that. Of course all my friends are honest. But would they actually say what they thought?

I needed people who would have the gumption and courage to tell me the truth – but still be supportive, productive and generous. I have a lot of friends who, as kind and honest as they are, either can’t give a straight answer to an uncomfortable question (like “What don’t I do well?”), or are TOO strong in expressing their views – and not open to allowing others to build on them.

I needed kindness and honesty: my definition of “straightforward.”

2. CREATIVE:

My Board needed people who already had “out of the box” thinking and doing evident in their own lives. People who didn’t settle for a “status quo” of expectations in their jobs or their lives. People who were actively managing their professional and/or personal lives. People who could take an idea – theirs or someone else’s – and run with it.

3. FEARLESS (APPARENTLY):

First I thought “optimistic,” but the people I needed weren’t afraid of change, or at any rate, acted in the face of it.
Change is hard and disconcerting and unpredictable, but it’s also exciting, creative, sometimes mind-blowing, and certainly necessary.

All of my Board members had faced and handled change, sometimes daily, and weren’t afraid of it.

4. FRIEND:

Everyone has different kinds of friends in their lives: personal friends who share hobbies or common friends, professional colleagues who turn into friends because of common interests or a simple ability to get along, or a good history of working well together.

In my case, I also had clients, who knew something about my private life but whose primary experience of me was through my work.

Since “Laurie 2.0” was going to be a wholesale change in the way I live my life, I needed people from all three of these areas to contribute their ideas. In short, I called in some chits.
• Ah yes, the clients: I selected clients very carefully, since they were definitely in the training business with me, and I didn’t want to let it out that I was aiming out of the arena. So for that group, I added “discrete,” knowing that they would not spread the word among other clients and associates that Laurie was “out of the business” until I actually was, in fact, changing course.

5. LAUGH LOVERS:

Laughter is a big part of me: my life, my being, and my ability to cope with stress. So all of my Board members had to be able to laugh – at silly ideas, at jokes, at how strange life is to lead us to where we are now living, and even at the meaning of life. Deep laughers. Fun laughers. Kind laughers. People who liked my big ol’ loud, from-the-belly laugh that is (apparently) my trademark and that helps people know I’m in the movies, restaurant, party or theater.

Should you get a bunch o’ laughers for you? Not necessarily. But look at how you like to “be” with people: Seriously? Quietly? Slowly? Rat-ta-tat fast? Ask yourself: If my Board reflected my favorite way of being, what would it be? Then go with that.

The Big Step

With these definitions in mind, I mentally ran through the people I thought would be interested. I called ‘em up and outright asked them if they would take an hour to talk about the new me: “Laurie 2.0,” as my Board Member/friend Paul Ryder said it.
All agreed, and, to my surprise, all were excited. We scheduled it for a few weeks out. Short enough to put on a little pressure, and enough time to think.

Ooops: now I was committed: time to act.

AFTERTHOUGHT: How Many Is Too Many? Or Too Few?

Too many people: comments can be stifled because people don’t want to fight for airtime.

Too few: ideas stall because everyone has to work to keep the conversation going.

Just right: you, plus 4-5 friends per conversation. If they all know (or know of) each other, excellent.
How many meetings you hold is up to you. I did two group ones, and a few private conversations. I’d say that’s the minimum for me.

You know best, but beware getting too many conversations going – more can create confusion after a while. Plus it puts off the Big Enchilada: actually deciding to make a move towards change. Don’t cheat!

FOR YOU

If you want an easy organizer to help you select your Board of Directors for your transition to the new you, give me an "e": LazyL@wyoming.com

It's Your New Year!

2007-01-01T15:42:00.000-07:00

What is Re-Versioning?

Re-versioning is learning to evolve and change, to grow with the flow (sorry, 1960s!), to move from the past into a future that you want, that you can imagine, even that you can’t imagine. It’s exploration at its most intense: the exploration of the inner, limitless world in order to function in our outer, sometimes apparently limited one.

As I go through this "re-versioning" process, you can join me in the experience -- by using my ideas, games, and efforts with what's important to you. Here's one of the first exercises you might want to try. If you like it, leave it, love it, or hate it, don't hesitate to comment or email me -- I would love to hear what you think!

Words of...

Wisdom? You tell me. Here are some of the things I discovered today, using the process below. I hope at least one of them will resonate for you, and send you forward on your re-versioning experience.

What is an experiment? A new way of seeing the familiar.

Change = Growth. Commit Today – Now.

Just feel the ride.

Passion creates Enthusiasm. Find it in what you do – today.

Act as if you have Freedom To.
It gives you Freedom From.

Trust yourself first.

Kindness (to yourself and others) > Compassion > Forgiveness > Ability to act > Peace.

Follow your heart. The rest will follow.

What is it you’re after, anyway?

This exercise is more about enabling change instead of “trying” to change and setting ourselves up for failure. It’s a process I’ve done for the past 3 years, and every time it gets more profound (for me) in terms of who I am, what I want to change or achieve, and how I can get there. Its success is in trying to let go and access the things you can’t or won’t think about most of the time, so you can anchor your next action in something that will move you forward to your new version.

The key to this is to select a method that is the polar opposite of how you usually think about “things”:
· If you write words, draw or paint with color.
· If you paint, journal or sculpt or build.
· If you use your hands most of the time, write down key words.
· If you talk all the time, be silent and do something where you don’t have to speak.
· If you are a quiet person, speak out loud into the tape recorder.
· If you aren’t physical, dance for the video recorder. Give a live commentary as you do so.
· If you talk to yourself routinely, set up an audio recorder while you do whatever it is you do.
· If you’re good with words, colors, and the physical world, do all three at once.
· If you’re detail oriented, push the limits on how messy you can be.
· If you’re messy, see how neatly you can organize this.

The purpose: Access your sub/unconscious by doing something unfamiliar.

The point: There Are No Wrong Answers, Actions, Colors, Shapes, or Forms. Sorry – you can’t do this and be wrong, bad, or unsuccessful. Whatever comes up is valuable stuff, and will tell you a lot about what’s going on in your life. Guranteed.

The How

Get started.
· Gather your materials (paper and pens or computer, paints and paper, “stuff” and glue, comfy body and videocamera, voice and audiotape recorder)
· Get into a quiet space where no one will disturb you for at least two hours.
· Start doing without thinking about what you are going to achieve, or how “good” it will be. It will be perfect.
· Paint, write, sculpt, gather, dance, whatever, and record whatever happens. Go.

The only “rule”: put things in positive terms.
· Instead of saying, “I am too fat,” transform it into “I want to eat more healthily/reasonably/creatively.”
· Instead of saying, “I never want to work again!” (who doesn’t who is re-versioning?), write, “I want to work with my real passions/what’s important to me.”
· Instead of writing, “I’m a failure,” try “I have not yet achieved/discovered what is important to me in life. I want to do that.”

Challenge yourself on this: Everything you can say negatively can be put in positive terms. Everything.

Don’t stop doing.
· Don’t do the dishes, answer the phone, judge what you’re doing, try and figure out where it’s going.

I hereby give you complete freedom for these two hours to just do without goals.
· Without judgment.
· No one else will ever see this stuff.
· This is For You, From You.

Do it...
for 2 hours minimum, longer if you have the energy.

Take a break.
Not too long, depending on how you feel: from 5 minutes to maybe an hour. Don’t let yourself “forget” what you meant by avoiding looking at what you’ve created here.

What just happened?

Now, take your product in hand/on the TV/in the tape player.

Take a deep breath and listen/look/experience without judging quality. Go for meaning.

Review what you did. Look at the content of your work.
· What did you learn?
· What did you say that you’ve never said before?
· What did you do that opened your eyes to something you want, are, was?
· What surprised you? What seemed to “come out of nowhere”?

Pretend you are a stranger looking at someone else’s work. Look at the arrangement of colors and images on the page/the order of your words or dance movements/the emphasis in your sculpture.
· What is in the center?
· What is most important to this artist?
· What is on the periphery?
· What does everything have in common?
· What is unique on the page/dance/piece?
· How would you describe this to someone who doesn’t know the artist and never saw the work?

Moving forward

What you’ve just done is take your mental and emotional “temperature” today. You’ve accessed the stuff that, sub- and unconsciously, is the most important to you. It’s where you are today. It’s what’s important now.

Now you do need a piece of paper and pen/cil. Now you’ll set goals for the future based on this self-assessment of what you want and are.
· Look at any results or goals you may have described. What’s the most important about each goal? What can you do first to achieve it? Second? Third, et al?
· Find the things you don’t want to do again, if any. Compare to your goals. Identify any contradictions or conflicts, and find a way to resolve them.
· Prioritize your top three goals that encompass most of the things important to you. And I do mean First, Second, Third. Stop at three for today. If you have more, set a date in a month or so to review your goals and add/subtract to the list.
· Congratulate yourself on all of this work, which isn’t easy but infinitely important.
· Go have some fun!

Congratulations! You've completed the first step

None of this work – the original, the meanings, the lists – needs to be shared with anyone, ever. None of this means you are a good or bad creator, or a good or bad person. I suggest you don’t destroy anything, but put it in a private place to review tomorrow, next week, next month, and/or next year. Use it as long as it feels useful to you. When it no longer means anything – feel free to repeat the whole exercise. At the least, though, do it next year on or before January 1.

Enjoy your New Year!

Laurie 2.0

LazyL@wyoming.com