Possibility Mindset

Karlovy Vary is magical.  I was there in 1999 while I was studying abroad in Prague.  Clear water below foot bridges, buildings and castles that I wanted to eat because they were so pretty, a winding hill, healing hot springs, quiet.  It felt like a dazzling secret, tucked away in a part of the world that few had seen.

When the 2006 movie The Last Holiday came out, set mostly in Karlovy Vary, I was also charmed.  In the movie, Queen Latifah’s character lives in a small town and works as a salesperson at a department store when she learns that she has a terminal illness. Tired and fed up with her so-so life, she opens her Book of Possibilities and starts living it. 

Yes, Queen.

As a coach, I witness moments when a person is finally willing to live in their Book of Possibilities.  This might start with a deep exploration of understanding what you want.  It might be a call to live with more purpose and lead with your values.  It might mean a career change, starting an initiative that deeply matters to you, standing up for something you care about, leading a team to do something unique, or living free of self-sacrifice. 

It is possible. 

Seeing new possibilities often happens from moments of challenge, and the desire to reflect, assess, investigate, and reimagine. 

When you stop seeing the status quo as the obvious choice, you start to make more conscious choices, and this can be counter-culture.  You will inevitably face resistance – both internally and externally. 

 Oscar Wilde said,

“Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”

There’s a magical element to seeing what others cannot see, and breaking through your own thinking to imagine something new, different, and invigorating.  And you might be the first to see it.

So, how do you take on a possibility mindset?

Possibility. 

Noun.  a thing that may happen or be the case.

Possibility starts within. 

Self-Awareness

Our inner world is created by our unique life experiences, our unique constellation of feelings, our unique survival traits, our unique relationship to ourselves and others.  Culture, identity, and social norms also shape the prism through which we view the world.  Our inner world reinforces what it knows by inviting or barring certain kinds of thinking or experiences into our lives.  We can get into the loop of static thinking.

Imagining new possibilities means that we consciously and willingly need to invite new perspective into our lives and work so we can expand.

And it’s hard to expand.

I heard this story from psychologist and meditation teacher, Tara Brach. 

Mohini was a tiger who lived most of her life in a lion house, a 12x12 cage with iron bars and a cement floor.  She spent her days pacing her cage, most likely feeling bound and stuck.  When she was moved to the Washington DC National Zoo, she moved into a replica of a natural habitat - acres of grassy hills, trees to climb and scratch, a pond, and diverse vegetation.  But Mohini spent the remainder of her life in a corner of that habitat, wearing down a 12x12 patch of grass. 

At times, we are Mohini.  We are majestic and strong humans with amazing stories of love, triumph, genius, transformation, and beauty.  We’ve been in restrictive environments, relationships, and situations that makes us long for freedom, expression, bigger ideas, bigger lives, more meaning, more understanding, more love, innovative and impactful change – and yet we can be bound and stuck.

When you consider possibilities for transformation, how much or little do you relate to Mohini’s experience of staying bound in a boundless place?

To unlearn the cage, we first need to see that we’re in it. 

Self-awareness gives you a ground to stand on, and gives you power to make choices in how you want to be in the future. 

Possibility mindset is about stepping into “I don’t know space”, to imagine something beyond what we know today, beyond what we see today, beyond what we feel today. 

How can you hold a vision of peace for the world when you see strife?  How can you think bigger about your business when you feel scared you won’t meet financial goals?  How can you create more ease in your life when you feel overwhelmed?  How can you lead a cross-functional team to bring a product to market when the team is in conflict?

Often, our go-to thought is – it’s not possible.  I’m asking too much of myself.  You’re asking too much of me.  I’m asking too much of you. 

This is the rub.  Wanting transformation means doing things that our old ways of thinking can often keep us from doing. 

We can’t get there with the tools we have here.  If we are to expand, create, innovate, then part of us needs to die. 

Compassion

Years ago, I dated someone who told me about all the boxes she puts around herself, and her boxes had boxes around them, and then she puts boxes around other people.  Oh boy.  I was listening to her share this on a work trip in Miami, looking out on the ocean, feeling the sun on my skin, and feeling wrecked that another beautiful person couldn’t take the sunshine.

Usually, self-imposed constriction is a move to feel more emotionally safe.

That safety might be protection from others, or from unhelpful thinking we’ve internalized.

Often, dreaming is followed by fear.  We start yearning and dreaming, and we shut it down immediately because we’re afraid we’ll fail, afraid we’ll waste our time, afraid of taking a risk, afraid of making an effort.

To expand feels unsafe.  So, let’s offer ourselves and each other compassion.  Offer gratitude to that old self.  Give yourself permission to let a part of you or your beliefs die.  Allow a new version unsteady version of you to emerge. 

 A chick born from his or her little egg has got to feel scared out of his or her tiny little mind.  Their cozy small world is cracking open, light is coming in, and it’s scary. 

So little chicks, be easy on yourself as you expand, and know that you are a little chick among other little chicks. These little chicks are your managers.  These little chicks are your CEOs.  These little chicks are on your team.  These little chicks are people you are in conflict with.  These little chicks are people who you love.  They want to feel safe.  They need resources.

Compassion the hell out of yourself and each other.  

In Atlas of the Heart, Brené Brown defines compassion as “the daily practice of recognizing and accepting our shared humanity so that we treat ourselves and each other with loving-kindness, and we take action in the face of suffering.”

Humanity feels longing and pain; happiness and darkness; love and fear.  To move through the shadow thinking and negative self-talk that comes up when we start to think in possibilities, offer yourself love and take action. 

Easy does it, but do it.

And please, don’t do it alone.  We have shared humanity, and humans are wired to connect. Allow yourself to be witnessed by friends, family, a therapist, a coach, a community. 

Perspective Shifting

As you practice compassion, allow your mind to expand to possibility with some perspective shifting activities.

 Perspective shifting starts with asking yourself,

 “How do I know what I know?”

What life experiences, systems that you live within, cultural influences, identify factors, and beyond shape how you think?  From there, we can play around with our frames to open up blind spots and see from new angles.  We shake up our automatic thinking, and open to new possibilities.  This can also help us shift others’ perspectives, open minds, and make change.  

I’ll share some perspective shifting exercises that you can adapt and scale for yourself, your team, and for bigger systems – all for the purpose of shifting to possibility thinking. 

·      Daydream

·      Retreat

·      Inspiration

·      Cross-Pollination

·      Rebel

·      Support

Daydream

A dear friend lovingly suggested that I daydream about a thing I was grappling with. 

 How would I love for it to go?

 I felt my shoulders sink.  I felt my body settle.  I saw and felt possibility. 

Allow yourself to daydream.  Visualize the possibility as an everyday practice.

Set aside time for your mind to wander every day.  You can start with 5 minutes while you drink coffee or take out the trash.

 Grow that to 30 minutes once a week.  For a longer session, you might daydream while looking out a window, showering, walking, chopping vegetables, driving, or staring at a wall. 

Daydream with all of your senses.  What music, scent, tactile sensation, tastes, mood, location, feelings, and other elements of the environment conjure the possibility that you wish to explore?

Create a new world with your senses as you daydream.

Retreat

Expand the 30 minute daydream to a full on retreat.  This could be an afternoon, a long weekend, or a sabbatical.  Go to a new environment.  Do something new.  Learn something.  Allow your mind to unfocus.  Mull things over.  Give yourself thinking time.  Our culture is often focused on doing, achieving, checking off the boxes.  Retreat is an oasis for being and thinking.  It’s a supportive environment for reimagining.

 Ideas for a new business might emerge.  Ideas for a new career might emerge.  A sense of openness and excitement for a change might come to be.  A decision might become clear.  Retreats support us to know what we want. 

Retreats also work for teams. 

Who are you? 

What matters to you now? 

What are your challenges?   

How will you work together to face the challenges?

How do you want to develop? 

How do you want to be together?

What values matter most to you?

What future do you see for your team and your company?

Giving your team space to share and grapple with time to snorkel or sit by a fire opens up possibilities.

Inspiration

What person, work of art, place, concept, social movement, and beyond move you, make you feel alive, fill your soul?  Think about this deeply.  Allow yourself time to explore this.

Think of 6-8 sources of inspiration – your muses - and write them down.

What characteristics does each have?  Write that down.

What qualities do you aspire to in your muses, and what qualities do you already have?

 When you notice who or what inspires you, go back to them for inspiration.  Have a possibility that you’re considering? Apply one or more of these muses to this possibility.  It’s a WWJD moment, but you choose who Jesus is.

You can do this with your team, too! 

I love facilitating these conversations – it gets fascinating, deep, connected, and invigorating.  When you know who or what inspires and enlivens your team members, you will have a more inspiring, enlivening, engaged team open to creating possibilities together.

Cross-Pollination

We often see from our perspective only. We come from a certain discipline.  We are marketers.  Product people. Engineers.  People people.  Strategy people.  Experts in a financial sector. 

Bring different disciplines, perspectives, and worldviews into your thinking, and see your possibility from different angles.  Allow cross-pollination to create new possibility.

You might seek out different perspectives about an idea you are pursuing.  Set up calls with 5-6 people who are different from you, and have conversations.

You can cull the perspectives of people on your team.  This can be as simple as asking people on your team,

How do you see this?

Other perspectives?

 Asking “other perspectives?” is one of the simplest and most powerful questions you can ask to open dialogue.  You will see from new angles, understand an idea more richly, and expand how you can solve a problem. 

Rebel

People resist change, including ourselves.

Sometimes it’s an internal thing, and sometimes it’s because we or others are thinking provincially, when you want to think galactically.

When and if you get resistance, doubt, or pushback…

Rebel.

In 1962, after an audition with an exec at Decca Records, the exec told the Beatle’s manager that they didn’t have a future in show business.

Rebel.

Keep going until you fully explore the possibility.  Use controversy, conflict, or friction in a healthy way to generate something better than the status quo. 

Find others’ who will support your vision.

Fuck the data.

Listen to Bozima St. John, Chief Marketing Officer at Netflix. Her Ted Talk explores intuition.

This takes us out of the realm of probability, and into the realm of possibility.  The statistics might not be in favor for a person who grew up poor to become financially free, a formerly incarcerated person to become a tech exec, or a serially monogamous person to find a lasting love later in life. 

But belief isn’t about how likely something is.  It’s about knowing that it’s possible, and going for it (with the help and tools).  This moves us out of letting the world as it is guide our actions, and moves us into shaping our lives with our beliefs and imagination.

Stop thinking about probability, and think about possibility.

Imagine radical future scenarios.  Then, refine this to what you want and imagine it to be.

Be impractical, take contrary actions, and see what you discover.

One way to rebel is to look for positive deviance.

Scan the environment for examples of what you want to be possible.

Who has created this possibility?  Ask around.  Read.  Explore.

Once you find out who has lived or created the possibility that you seek, notice patterns. 

What supported this possibility?  What factors were in play?  Does this help you see what resources you have or need to create this new reality? 

Focus on what works, and deconstruct that so you can reconstruct it for your possibility.

Support

Create systems to support possibility mindset.  Surrounding yourself with others who have or want possibility mindset will help you lift each other higher. 

Consider to whom you bring ideas, conundrums, and possibilities.  Develop relationships with other believers.

Ask for help!

What do you need?

Dazzle

What if what you thought was impossible was actually possible?

What do others think is impossible that you think is possible?

I believe in the power of the seemingly unlikely and impossible to take up space in this world.  I want to feel open to mystery.  I want to be in awe of creativity and the creative designs and stories of other human beings.  I want to live with others who are imaginative and own their part in creating their future. 

I want to see people rise up.  I want to see light in the inevitable darkness.  I want to see people who were once struggling with something learn how to thrive with the thing. 

I love seeing people inspired by their own internal compass.  And…I don’t believe in holding onto old ideas, ways, and structures if they’re not working.  I believe in transforming difficulty into a better future, a new story.

"Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled - to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.  I want to believe I am looking into the white fire of a great mystery.  I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing - that the light is everything - that it is more than the sum of each flawed blossom rising and fading.  And I do."  ~ Mary Oliver, House of Light

What do you believe?

I am a Lesbian

To honor Pride, I have created a special coaching offer for LGBT+ leaders to work with me.

Click here to do that, and read my story.

When I was 17, I was into a girl from Idaho.  We smoked Camel Lights under staircases, listened to Dylan, and road her green pickup truck up mountain roads to see the stars.  We talked about our dysfunctional families and the small thinking of where we came from.  I never thought about kissing her.  I just knew that I wanted to be near her. 

 That was a summer in Colorado in 1996. 

When I was back home in Cleveland Heights, we wrote letters to each other.  I unfurled my life and feelings to Sam. She wrote me her secrets.  My mother was suspicious. 

In that letter writing season, I woke up in my twin bed to the birds chirping and my mother entering my room.  She didn’t knock.  With a groggy head, I listened to her rampage. “You are crazy.  You think you’re a lesbian? You’re just like your father.  I’m going to put you in a mental hospital.  That’s where you belong.”

She read my journal.  It was green and yellow with a soft cover. I didn’t use the word “lesbian” at that point.  I didn’t know who I was. I just knew how I felt about Sam.  I called my sister, crying.  She was a freshman at college, and I thought that since she lived in New York City, she’d be ok with the gays.  I thought that since we both knew of our mother’s histrionics, she’d empathize and support me.  When we spoke, she was tepid.  She wanted to be in her new home - not where I was. She was away in college when I found out about my dad.

My father isn’t a lesbian like me; but he is gay.  I had discovered this a year before meeting Sam.  My parents were getting a divorce, and as my mother was sifting through his things without his permission, she discovered correspondences with men that indicated that he was pretty gay.  I walked into the house as my mother was sorting through this “evidence” on her office floor, taking photographs of everything in case it would pertain to their divorce. 

I remember feeling that this was not my mother’s story to tell, not my mother’s right to do this.  While I could understand that she felt betrayed, I also saw felt that she didn’t have the intimacy with herself or my father to navigate the complex and layered emotions swirling around.  I walked into my parent’s room and sat on my father’s side of the bed, absorbing everything. 

Could this explain the mens’ fashion magazines, him crying over martinis in the basement, the Justify my Love VHS hidden between Cabaret and The Sound of Music?  Could it explain how he thew a television against the wall once?  Could it explain how he was so brilliant but also singular and isolated? 

Unraveling this mystery lead to the big questions that I explore endlessly through my work.

How do adults love themselves, especially the parts they want to hide? 

How do we live an honest and authentic life without letting others dictate that for us?

How do we work with the fear that our authenticity will be rejected and we will be separate?

How do we surrender to the internal battle, and integrate all the complexities and paradoxes of who we are?

What worlds do we create in our wholeness, fullness, aliveness, and connection?

I am a curious person.  I want to see the deep gleam of light in the darkness so I can love that gleam. I want to unlock locks and rip doors off hinges. I want emotional freedom for us.

As an adult, I know that my father being closeted doesn’t explain all of the pain of my childhood, but it’s a big part of it.  The shock of my father being 50 years old and not living fully as himself that entire time implored me to live fully as myself. While I didn’t totally know what that meant then, and I still don’t know what that means, I am committed to the exploration, the not-knowing, the shakiness, the discovery, the dynamic nature of self and the world. This is self-exploration, exploration of truth, exploration of intimacy, exploration of fulfillment, exploration of desire, exploration of beauty, exploration of exploration itself.   

I grew up in Cleveland Heights and went to an all-girls school in Shaker Heights.  My first girlfriend grew up in Shaker Heights.  She was the first woman I loved and who I kissed.  Shaker is where Little Fires Everywhere was set.  Did you read this book or see the series?  In my experience, Shaker Heights was externalized perfection and internalized unexpressed secrets. 

My first girlfriend externalized herself beautifully.  She painted her Honda Accord!  It wasn’t exactly to my taste (all primary colors), but you have to understand, nobody in Shaker Heights did anything so different and badass as my girlfriend.  She was unabashedly herself. And I learned from being with her that I could trust my body. Nobody taught me how to express love physically or emotionally.  There were no immediate cultural references or representations of people like me that I could emulate. But I knew how to express love with her.  That made me feel right in my body. I could trust myself. I had a deeper knowing that transcended external direction. 

I came out to my gay father at Hunan on Coventry restaurant, because I had heard you shouldn’t shock your parents about being gay while, say, driving a car.  Over pickled cabbage, I told my father that I was a lesbian and had a girlfriend.  He told me that he wasn’t surprised, but also that he was sad that he wouldn’t have as many grandchildren as he had hoped.  Isn’t that ironic?

Putting that aside, I was both pleased and confused about him not being surprised about me being a lesbian. Maybe I was right! Maybe I was, indeed, a lesbian. How did he sense it?  I was and still am feminine, and I look like the girl next door.  I WISH I could signal myself as lesbian more so I could feel more connected to my people. I suppose writing this is a pretty big signal to you, my reader.

When my sister graduated from college, my family was still speaking to each other.  So we came to New York to celebrate her.  Graduation weekend also happened to be my birthday weekend.  My father and I decided to walk around the West Village, as a lesbian daughter and gay father would do.  We got a drink at the Stonewall Inn.  As I sipped on a martini that he bought me, I asked him about the last time he had been there.  He said about 20 years ago.  That day happened to be my 20th birthday.  I listened.  I absorbed.  I imagined my mother giving birth to me in her green nightgown and heavily made-up Boyd’s face while my father go-go danced at the Stonewall.  That’s not actually what happened.  But I do know that when secrets abound, we make up our own stories.  I also know that having secrets and lack of trust is not intimacy.

Neither is spin-the-bottle with the Oberlin women’s Rugby team, but I did that, too.  I loved kissing girls in college.  I loved exploring sexuality and sex.  I loved the politics of the body, identity politics, and I loved making my mother feel uncomfortable.  If my mother had been comfortable with me, that would have meant I was living a mediocre life.  Discomfort abounded!   I would not hide who I was to perpetuate the family history of shame.

Those were the early days of me coming out, of discovering that I could claim my body’s desires, that I could claim my desires of all things, that I could and would be myself despite the void of support. 

I moved to San Francisco after college because that’s where the lesbians were in the late 90s and early 2000s.  Poets and musicians and hairdressers and pre-school teachers made up my community.  We got each other jobs and hosted potlucks and slept with each other and had picnics in Dolores Park.  As the separation with my immediate family continued, I formed close relationships with people who became my family of choice.

I worked for the National Center for Lesbian Rights for nearly five years, too.  As a fundraiser, I got to know San Francisco lesbians and lesbians all over the country.  I worked for and with lesbians, and I was easily and naturally honored for being who I was – without having to explain or come out over and over again. 

Others don’t immediately know that I’m a lesbian, and there’s nothing stereotypically or visibly identifiable about me as a lesbian.  For me to be seen as whole, I have to bring myself into the space, and that’s not always comfortable or natural. But there’s no other option for me to feel whole.

This is some of my story of being a lesbian. It is my subjective experience.  It informs how I show up in the world. I love being a lesbian. I love my friends, my communities, self-invention, evolution, defining who and what a beautiful and meaningful life is to me, weaving my own love.

Being a lesbian wholeheartedly informs my work as a coach. Your story undoubtedly informs who you are as a _____ and a ________ or a _______. It’s illuminating to see the major moments of our lives and see how that has left an imprint. Your life has meaning on your character and leadership and decisions and choices, too. Here is some meaning I’ve gathered from my story, so far.

Before I identified as a coach, I was a person navigating the world and making sense of it. I still am. Before you were a leader, a visionary, a creative - you were a person, too. You’re still a person. Nobody has this all figured out. Nobody.

I love to understand stories of origin, secrets, and revelations. I am interested in what people express and don’t express, and to whom.  Maybe it’s a secret. Or something you don’t love about yourself that you want to hide. Or something that you do love about yourself but that you think someone else won’t understand. Secrets could show up as covering an identity. They protect. Secrets could mean hiding or withholding something you don’t feel you’re that great at. Secrets are soaked in your vulnerability. It is usually what makes a person utterly and beautifully unique.

Love is healing. I want unique people to build relationships with other unique people who are genuine, supportive, interdependent, loving, and transparent – like a family of choice that lots of LGBTQIA+ people have and need.  Some might call that networking.  I call it love. How can we create symbiotic relationships and systems of support of people who know who each other and what moves you. How do we surrender to rooting for each other, giving each other attention, sharing our thoughts and feelings, and helping when we can? 

Lightness and Darkness are there. Wholeness is life force energy, connection to something bigger.  Societal and cultural norms flow through the family and can get stuck inside of us.  I don’t say that lightly.  This is big. It can feel like we will be annihilated if we show up in a way that defies others’ expectations or doesn’t meet their needs.  If we examine what makes us feel stuck, we can start to unravel that fear, and show up more whole and wholehearted, more boundaries, and more striking in our differences. 

Difference is beautiful. Learning from each other’s different perspectives, experiences, thinking, and feelings is E X P A N S I V E. This is creativity and learning and connection that feels fully alive and dynamic. I love combining different anything and seeing what unexpected brilliance will emerge.

Pleasure is good. I consider myself a pleasure activist.  Your body KNOWS!  It knows what sadness, despair, joy, anger, and all the other emotions feel like.  What gives you vibrancy and energy? What turns your mind and your body on matters a great deal.

Transparency and specificity is fun. Let me be real.  In my experience, lesbians know how to communicate what feels good and what doesn’t feel good, and we know that what that is is different for every person.  We also go outside the norms in what we consider to be beautiful, what feels like love, and all the many ways we can feel that and share that.  We can be very specific. I have had countless frank and non-judgemental conversations with straight friends who feel astonished at how we can speak openly about pleasure and pain and feelings and needs and desires. I don’t even know that I’m doing it most of the time.  It’s how I am. It has been suggested to me that I teach straight people about healthy communication through the lens of being a lesbian.  Maybe! 

Knock: When I meet someone in a vulnerable space of self-discovery and self-expression, I ask for permission to enter.  If I don’t have permission, I don’t enter. I allow people to have their own process in their own time.  I’m not going to read your diary.  You share what you want to share. Trust matters in our relationships, and also impacts how effective we can be at creating change.

There is a link between authenticity and well-being. This is the foundation of my work. I know what hiding and shame and secrecy looks like, and I know the ripple effect of those feelings. I know deeply the journey, feelings, and tools to make it through those feelings and states and into wholeness and well-being.

Mining my subjective experiences roots me in who I am.

In honor of Pride Month, I am offering LGBT+ leaders to mine your story with me to understand your roots, your wisdom, and what matters to you. Work with me to understand yourself more as a leader, understand that you’re like this because of that then own it more, work through a secret, show up more whole, defy expectation, experiment with something new, and learn from the wisdom of this lesbian.   Share your story with me, and we will untangle your values, uniqueness, resilience, fears, beauty, and wisdom.     

If you are an LGBT+ leader and want to work with me, get it by the end of June 2021. Click here for details and to begin. XO

A Podcast Interview with Jairek Robins - The World Needs More Love

Watching the sun rise over the valley from Mount Batur in Bali

What the World Needs More of…Love

The conversation started about a year ago, in an ordinary restaurant in Lower Manhattan.  I was at a dinner party with an interesting array of entrepreneurs and artists, and as usual, eschewed the best practice of looking people up to know who they are ahead of time.  I’m more in favor of seeing who I genuinely like to have a conversation with, and letting interests emerge through good old fashioned curiosity. 

I had a memorable conversation with a photographer who was planning to be immersed in a lion’s den in a lion-tooth-proof suit (fingers crossed). Later in the night, as people moved chairs, I struck up conversation with a man from Florida.  He knew about my field, organizational psychology and personal development, so it was a fun conversation.  We talked about South Africa where I had just been, forgiveness practice, and then got into the subject of family. 

We were on.  His father had overcome a lot of adversity.  My father had a lot of adversity in his life, but I’m not he sure overcame it.  I wanted to understand the difference between our fathers.  What makes the phoenix rise?  He said that his father made a very dedicated study of personal transformation.  He decided at a young age that he was going to learn and study how to be your best, and he made this his quest. 

Maybe my father is on a quest - I’m not really sure. We haven’t been in touch in years.

My quest is love - self-love and love of others as we really truly magnificently are.

After dinner and over peach shopping later that night, my then-girlfriend told me that this guy’s father was Tony Robbins. 

A few days later, Jairek asked me to be on his podcast. 

This is the interview.

We talk about love, connection, understanding people, moments of quiet, awe, and my greatest fear. I shared some of the experiences that shaped my values and my life.

My business is my self-expression – it comes from the story of my life – what has mattered to me, the transformational moments, the highs and the lows, the decisions that have led to a cascade of change and growth.

My invitation to you

What’s your story?  It’s the story that is deeply you – the major influences in your life and how that has shaped your values and what matters deeply.  Often, your story is shaped by challenge.  Often, it is shaped by awareness of contrast and difference.  It can be a quiet story of your inner landscape, and it can be a loud story of emotional expression and actions with conviction.  It surely includes both darkness and light, love and loss, mystery and decisiveness. 

I invite you to share your story with someone who you’d like to create deeper bonds with, and ask them about their story. 

This helps create connection both personally and professionally, and I have seen it this week already multiple times with my clients:

• For a leader creating a new initiative who is starting to get buy-in - what is your story? This is the “why”. Personally, what has the impact of what you are creating and scaling been to you? What do you envision will be the positive transformational impact on others? Invite others to consider their story and why this new initiative might matter to them. Sharing your truth authentically and connecting to others builds connection and commitment.

• For a new leader with a new team, sharing stories of who you are and what matters - on a personal and professional level - starts a working relationship off with true connection. Who are you, how do you lead, and why does that matter to you. How do you like to be managed, and why does that matter to you? This is forming the basis of true connection and trust at work.

• This week I kicked off group work with two groups of leaders. We started by sharing our stories. Powerful. Stories say so much about our values, what we need in our work to be aligned, where we need support, and what matters to us. It’s the foundation of understanding your leadership style, in building connections of support, and remembering who you are. When we remember who we are, and who we are not, we become more and more confident in valuing and nurturing those qualities in ourselves. We grow confidence in ourselves and our styles, even when others challenge us or are different from us. Knowing who you are and truly owning that is so powerful. That knowingness will lead you to a cascade of aligned actions and relationships.

So, practice sharing your story, and relaxing into your authenticity. Deeply listen – to yourself and to others you share your story with.  Listening and feeling heard are the powerful roots of relationships.

From the story you share, pull out the pearls of what deeply matters to you, and ask yourself if you can nurture just one pearl today. Notice and affirm what you are great at.

For me, a pearl from the stories I told Jairek was my love of my gram - Gerry Powers – whose 97th birthday is TODAY.  Happy birthday, my dearest sweetest funniest most loving gram.  I will expand this love in my heart for my gram by talking to her on the phone.  I’ll also send her love, good health, ease, and peace in my meditation.  And I will cultivate her delight in people’s stories and the details of life by relishing in the details of life in the people I am lucky enough to encounter today.

My gram impacts how I lead and coach others because deep in my heart I believe in the power of storytelling, and honoring our stories. Listening and asking curious questions to understand who a person is, and supporting them in being themselves in life and in business, is my true delight. Telling stories, like she did for the neighborhood kids in the 70s and 80s, is the warmest way to gather. I love to hear who a person is and where they came from. I love to listen in for values and strength and heart.

Your turn, please.

Economic worldview -> Sacred worldview

I love to lose myself in Chinatown – chandeliers, mushrooms of every variety, cherry bark, tobacco, jasmine pearl tea, rambutans, so many fish.  I hear sounds that I don’t understand.  It’s another world, and if you know me, you know I love feeling immersed in sensory stimulation and other worlds.  

I also love Chinatown because my great-grandfather Morris, who died in 1975, walked these streets and the streets of the Lower East Side with the dust of Lithuania on his shoulders.  I can feel his energy and his presence through time.  I imagine us walking under the same sky. 

Spatially close but sometimes worlds away, some people eat squid in Chinatown while a few blocks away other people eat celery root pot pie on the Lower East Side while decades ago my great-grandfather ate a pickle.  

Our lives are full of so many possible permutations. Metaphorically speaking, you are so close to the other worlds of possibilities that you have in your mind. If you have begun the energetic work of imagining and beginning, it is already taking shape.

Morris’s world took shape exactly as it was laid out for him by his father - and I know this because my family has decades of letters between worlds - the old world; the new world. His vision - honor God, find a woman, have children, and trust that your livelihood will be taken care of. All of this came into being. It was the life imagined, and then lived.

We live inside our worldview. It is usually unconscious; we simply live inside our world as we see it. Our worldview is shaped by time, cultural conditioning, our personal stories, and our inner emotional landscape.

Our worldview shapes our vision of what could be. It is the roots of our actions and the way we go about things. Our worldview shapes the possibilities and outcomes of our lives.

Consciously working with our worldview can reshape the outcomes of our lives and work if we want.  We can explore what our worldview is rooted in and then make a conscious choice to expand or shift our worldview if we wish.

Just as we step onto planes in one place and step out of them in another place, we can shift our worldview, and become more conscious of our habitual choices. We can time travel by shifting our worldview.

What is your worldview?

Sacred Worldview + Economic Worldview 

Your vision of the future world reflects your worldview. 

What do you believe?  

What world are you living inside?

As I crave more space for slow time, connection, collaboration, pleasure, expansion, love, I have become interested in the kind of world these experiences can thrive within - along with the emotional roots that create different worlds.

The Economic Worldview

The Economic Worldview says that anything that can sell and have economic gain is meaningful and valuable, and anything that can’t sell is without value.   

This worldview establishes relative value between people and things.  We turn what is evolving and pulsating - life, learning, rest, desire - into a commodity.   

The push is to maximize economic gain, to measure worth in numbers, and to seek validation relative to how others view us rather than through our relationship with ourselves.  That frames how we pursue opportunities and make choices in our lives. 

Reward and punishment, low risk, and low self-expression abound.  We care about what will sell.  This is a transactional worldview; a world of promotion. In my observation, it is rooted in fear.

At best, an economic worldview can spur continuous improvement, innovation, and growth.  At worst, the Economic Worldview creates disconnection.

The Sacred Worldview

The Sacred Worldview values all life, and this inspires feelings of love, compassion, and responsibility. Appreciation for life turns your learning, your activities, your self-expression into a relational creation, rather than transaction.  The Sacred Worldview sees the world as symbiotic and interdependent, naturally right.  We are all integral parts of a larger unified whole.  We all have intrinsic worth, regardless of what we sell.

Wholeness, becoming, consciousness, bliss, awe, mystery, reverence, joy, dignity, rapture, amazement, abundance, collaboration, and connection are supported in the sacred worldview.  We tap into the natural abundance of the world- our rich and sacred flow of creativity, service, experiences, conversation, feeling, learning, relationships, spiritual transformation, and visibility.  

In this Sacred Worldview, enrichment, wealth, and money are all part of natural flow and abundance.  Rather than possessing, we allow money to be part of our energetic flow, like blood flowing through our veins.

Service, wealth, and love are intertwined.

As Kahlil Gibran said, “Work is love made visible.”  Work, he said, is “turning the voice of the wind into a song made sweeter by your own loving.”

Let your love permeate your offerings.

The Sacred Worldview nurtures collaboration and connection - but without the tools to work with our emotions, it’s really hard to live with this worldview.

Emotions and Worldview

We all want to survive.

Most of us want to thrive.

We want to feel worthy.

We all want to love and feel loved.

We want to self-actualize.

But fear is rooted deep inside our DNA. Our primitive minds have a survival brain that has a negativity bias. To survive on supposedly scarce resources, we scan our environment for danger. We think we need to be on guard, and seek destroy invaders who are different from us.

As we have evolved, we have developed a frontal cortex that can get the messages (of danger, threat, fear) from our survival brain and then know how to work with that.

But if we’ve been deeply hurt through trauma, as most people have, it is very normal to engage the limbic system, and fight, flee, or freeze for our survival. And when we are emotionally hijacked, sometimes we do things that hurt others - through devaluing them, harming them, lacking compassion, promoting shame and hatred, “othering” people, competing, and creating false hierarchies of worth.

Sometimes exploring your worldview means stepping on a plane…or a boat. Often it means exploring your inner landscape of emotions, and becoming more aware of your thoughts, feelings, and needs - as they are now. Time travel can happen without physically going anywhere else.

Befriend All of You

If you are feeling the drive for survival drive in your business or career, sometimes that gets you to improve your performance. Go deeper. Is your drive to survive rooted in fear or love? Become aware of what’s happening in your thoughts.

Befriend fear. Notice and accept the presence of fear without pushing it away. Allow yourself to notice it so you can come to understand it more.

Feel into your heart. Allow your heart to soften, and explore your feelings underneath the fear. How are you feeling vulnerable? What parts of yourself are you seeing that you don’t like or don’t want to accept - guilt, shame, feeling not enough, feeling wrong or bad?

Ask your most vulnerable self how you need to nurture and love yourself. Perhaps you need to offer yourself forgiveness, release some tears, hold yourself tight in a blanket, dance, breath deeply, or tell yourself that you are loveable exactly as you are.

As you heal yourself, you can heal the world.

It takes conscious commitment to know and nurture yourself to move into compassion, collaboration, and natural abundance. It also takes repetition, as life is fluid and dynamic, and new circumstances arise that help us continue to cultivate our self-love.

Imagine who are and what you will create in your vision for your future when you are consistently bringing love - rather than fear - into your soft heart.

Practices

1.    I invite you to look at the world of emotions, ideas, and beliefs that have created the world you inhabit.  What is the worldview inside of you?  What emotions is your world rooted in? What emotions would you like to consciously cultivate?

2.    Who are you inside the Sacred World - a world of collaboration, natural abundance, safety, and love? What do you create?

3.    What helps you move between worlds?  For me, it’s walking in a new neighborhood, stepping onto airplanes, meditating, swimming, floating, drinking tea, drinking cacao, sex, talking to strangers (not in that order), breathing deeply, seeing the stars, forgiveness practice, singing, reading, talking to kids or old people, sharing an emotion with a person I trust, writing letters, or being in deep appreciation and gratitude.  How do you travel between worlds? How would you like to travel between worlds today?

Offerings

Explore worlds inside you in this 40 minute guided vision meditation that starts with resting in your body and then seeing your vision.

If you’ll be in New York, join other luminous visionaries tuning into truth at the next Multi-Vision Lab on September 5th, 5:30-7:30PM at the gorgeous Assemblage Park Ave. South. Check out photos from the first Multi-Vision Lab.

I’m forming new masterminds for the fall, beginning mid-September. There is magical power in a group of supportive big vision people holding space for each other’s dreams in a worldview that welcomes collaboration, self-expression, and love. Book time with me by September 13th to explore masterminding this fall, getting ready to expand into 2020 with a community of support and accountability.

Borderless, Boundless Butterflies and Vision

Visioning is about seeing the world you wish to create in the future, and being the hero who creates that world now - sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly - and always with tons of support and community. 

Your vision has its own life-force, and wants regular contact, love, protection, and patience to move forward.  It comes into being when you give it space to be, honor its dynamism, grow it in community, and choose aligned actions that bring it to life on this earth.  That’s a more poetic way of saying that repetition of positivity will help you create new neuropathways for your brains to say yes to your vision.

 The visioning process that I teach is about exploration, experimentation,  and infusion – and spaciousness envelops the whole process.  In my community, you have space to explore, to try on a vision as if you are playing dress-up, to discover other people and muses who turn you on, to allow your body to communicate your fascination, to go deep and envision a life and life’s work that is soaked in you and what you love, magnificent on your terms.

That also means celebrating the magnificence of others and their vision (as long as they are actually being magnificent, and are not promoting hate). 

Butterflies on Concrete

On my way to pick up lunch on Wall Street last week, I saw three women crouched low on the sidewalk.  I joined them.  What were we looking at?  It was a little butterfly standing on the concrete sidewalk in the finance capital of the world.  

Four women, all strangers, united in a mission to admire and protect the butterfly.  It started with one women who was awake enough to notice this tiny creature amidst the towering buildings and tailored suit crowd.  It took some coaxing for him to fly away into the trees, but he did.  

Beauty and connection is everywhere if you look for it.  When I slow down, I can more easily notice and connect to the gold that is already inside and around me.  There are so many riches within and around.  

Your Butterfly on Concrete Contemplation

What is beautiful and miraculous about your life today?  

What are your riches? 

Many Different Paths to the Butterfly 

Just as there are many different paths to your vision - your big dreams, desires, and what you have to express in the world - there are many different ways to be a butterfly.

Canadian artist and photographer Raku Inoue creates insects (including this butterfly below) with flowers, stems, leaves, and twigs.

Gorgeous. 

It’s a butterfly unlike any other.  It came into being unlike previous ways of butterfly creation.

You are a creator, an artist, a designer.  If butterflies can be made out of flowers then the particular vision can be made out of anything you desire.  

Anything.

You can make your dreams out of marigolds, leather, love, clouds, hairspray, continents, snake plants, the flute, the Aegean Sea.  You can craft your vision from that gold that is already inside you and around you.  

Borderless, Boundless, Movement

We are living on a miracle planet filled with colorful life and suspended in darkness.  We are borderless from space.  

Your vision is a gift, natural and abundant like water deep in the ocean, like blood that flows effortlessly through your veins, the earth spinning without having to think it into spinning.

The miracle of fire, light, color.

Your vision explores and survives like the monarch butterflies migrating from the Midwest to Mexico.   

We go where it’s warm, where there is food.  We move to survive.  I am writing this from Brooklyn, but I was not born in Brooklyn or this building (I was born in Queens). My parents weren’t born here, nor their parents.  All of my ancestors have moved to find home, to find warmth, to find love.

Butterflies. Humpback whales. Birds. Salmon. Wildebeests. Humans.

Both survival and vision need transience, fresh ideas, fresh water, discoveries, weaving in new experiences.  If we stay still, we get stagnant – our bodies, our ideas, our possibilities.  Vision means not always standing still, and that means a lot of different things to different people. What does it mean for you?

I’ve been a regular participant of Cacao Ceremonies the past few months.  I’m going tonight!  It’s all about heart opening.  I love it. Last week, an elder who spoke Spanish came and shared blessings for quite a while, and in Spanish (which I don’t understand).  I got it, though.  I felt it. I felt his intention.

I also felt sad at the thought of not feeling this.  My vision of the world is one where we are strengthened and enriched by difference. I also know it’s other people’s vision to gravitate towards sameness, to cage the butterflies, to push strangers away. I don’t want to be in that world, and if you’re part of my community, I think that neither do you.  

So let your vision roar. Not everyone will understand it, but those who need it will feel it. 

Daily Contemplation

• What is my vision, expansive, saturated in me, full of the feelings, sensations, experiences that I desire to have and share?

• What world am I creating with my vision?

• Who am I asking myself to me in this vision?

• How is my vision borderless, boundless, open to discovery, and freeing?

• What is one question, decision, action, conversation, experience, experiment or beyond that I can choose today to align to my vision.

Cats Eyes, Incense, and Hustle Porn - What is Time, Really?

Cats Eyes, Incense, and Hustle Porn - What is Time, Really?

You are afraid of it slipping by. The more it elapses, the closer you are to death, deadline, judgment, completion, and meeting the expectations of others.

It is your friend. It deepens flavors, develops character, illuminate insight, allows for evolution, and ages wine just right.

How ominous. How exquisite.

Your relationship with time creates different realities and experiences in your life. At both extremes, your relationship with time can cause breakdowns or breakthroughs for different reasons. 

What is your relationship with time?

There are at least two ways to look at time.

1. We can see it tick by in uniformity in clock time.  A minute always equals a minute.

2. We can feel it slowly.  In felt time, time can feel like it stops, drags, slows down, or speeds up.  

If you can identify and differentiate both experiences of time, this will empower you to consciously choose how to use both constructs for good, and avoid breakdown in favor of breakthrough.

Clock Time

Clock time can motivate you, push you to master your craft, and provide boundaries for achieving your goals.  It is certainly important to work well in the time you have, honor your time, and know that your efforts lead to outcomes.

I love the thrill of working hard and reaching a goal.  It builds my confidence.  When Britney Spears’ Work B***h starts playing on my Spotify playlist when I’m on a 6 mile run, I pick up the pace. 

But taken to the extreme, pushing yourself to achieve all the time means making choices that can neglect your relationships, health, and connection to yourself.   Speed can take you out of conscious and strategic choice and into reactivity. High achieving business leaders and entrepreneurs who have big goals can easily fall into this pattern.

Have you heard of Hustle Porn?  It’s a raunchy term that Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian coined last fall to describe the drive to grind, hustle, and work endless hours in order to get ahead. Hustle porn celebrates the martyrs who suffer to create something astonishing in business. 

But overwork and self-neglect is not actually that astonishing (or sustainable) for you or for business.  It can lead to health breakdowns, heart problems, memory loss, dropped IQ, loss in focus, loneliness, and performance decline.  Overwork and self-neglect can also lead to lapses in judgment (think Elon Musk smoking pot on air and Tesla shares plummeting). Overwork and self-neglect can actually make you lose your edge. 

Feeling Time Slowly

Can you imagine measuring time by looking into your cat’s eyes?

In Eastern cultures of the past, people told time by looking at the shape of their cat’s pupil. Time was also marked by the burn time of incense crafted to have a uniform burn rate.

Imagine the shifts in our culture if we all marked time by breathing in fragrant woods and flowers. Beautiful breath and inspirational markers of time would move us through connecting with others and creating our work. Consider that the Latin root of inspire is spirare, which means to breath.

Being in the material world is not just about linear clock time, being industrious, thinking rationally, being productive, and having a focus.  Life and work is also about elevation of the spirit, presence, energy, purpose, and conscious connection. 

Your time can be a conduit of beauty, inner peace, and connection to awe.  You can move through time while breathing deeply and making eye contact - while you work and while you step away from work.

In felt time, you think by feeling, as Theodore Roethke writes in one of my favorite poems, The Waking.  Time slows, and you are absorbed and open to what is.  

In felt time, you can move into what positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as flow.  Flow gives you a natural high and a feeling of oneness. 

In the space between boredom and high stress, there is flow.  If you have so much mastery over your work that it’s not challenging, then you’ll get bored.  If you’re not great at something, then you’ll feel stressed out.  Finding flow slows your inner experience of time.

Slow time is a host for creative and strategic thinking. 

A broad sense of time creates an internal environment where you are more capable of creative thinking, according to positive psychologist Barbara Fredrickson.  Positive feelings (and not being in a heightened stress response) broaden your perspective and builds your social, physical, and mental skills.  In contrast, speeding through work can trigger the stress response.  In stress, you go into fight, flight, or freeze mode, and that narrows your thinking.  In tunnel vision you have focus, but you can’t see the bigger picture. 

Slowing time also helps you to get things right. 

Slowness allows you to move down a path with wise action, and doing things right so you minimize gargantuan course corrections.

Consider a research study from the University of Texas at Austin in which classical piano majors from Julliard learned three measures of Shoshtakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1.  The researchers found that the most successful pianists slowed down during practice at the right points.  They intentionally paused to get the piece right, and they avoided learning the wrong notes.

This is known as strategically slowing down.   You can’t always learn by speeding up and getting things done fast.  That method reinforces the wrong notes.  If you put all of your resources and time in to the wrong notes (your decisions, relationships, products, and services) that’s a big opportunity cost.

Choice

You have a choice in how you relate to time. 

Knowing that clock time can motivate you to stretch your capabilities and achieve big results will help you to choose the clock time strategies that work for your goals, while also avoiding potential pitfalls.

Knowing that slow time is great for creativity, flow, strategic thinking, intimacy with your work, and learning will help you slow your experience and allow yourself slow time when your goal calls for it, and speed up when slow time isn’t a match for your goal.

Experiment

The writer Annie Dillard says that how we spend our days is how we spend our lives.

So beautiful.

Spend a day noticing when you’re in clock time and when you’re in slow time. 

Are you making the right choices for your relationship with time given your goals? 

Consider the experiences, feelings, and support that help you move you through clock time in an energizing and inspiring way. Write a list or draw a picture (or sing a song or make a sculpture). Consider the experiences, feelings, and support that help you slow down and be present in slow time. Make another sculpture (you get the point).

Choosing how you relate with time, and being able to toggle in and out of different rhythms, will help you be fully present no matter what rhythm you’re in.

Listen to Your Emotions

Listen to Your Emotions

If you can identify your feeling and listen to their message, your emotions can empower you. 

Anger tells you a boundary is crossed.

Sadness signals loss.

Fear signals danger. 

Joy uplifts your energy.

Having feelings is richly human.  Your truth matters. 

But we’ve all experienced emotional hijacking. Something triggers you, and it’s usually an old wound. On impulse, you move to old behaviors that somehow helped you to take care of that old wound. Icing someone out. Telling someone off. Collapsing into a puddle of unworthiness. Numbing out with alcohol, drugs, food, shopping, or work.

Different results will happen when you give yourself space to respond to situations with calm instead of reactivity. 

When you have mastery over your feelings, you learn to avoid your knee-jerk impulses that could hurt you and your relationships. That gives you more choices in how to productively respond to triggering situations or your own triggering thinking.

Tending to your emotions can help you increase your resilience and your ability to sustain awesome performance and high character regardless of the stressful situation that might be happening, or to take a pause long enough to process your emotion and return to work when you are able. 

Not only does tending to your emotion help your performance, it also helps your emotional, mental, and physical health. There’s opportunity to heal yourself, and byproduct of that might be to offer healing to others who will learn from you how to be present and responsible with your feelings.

Mark Twain said this:

“Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.”

Working through our emotions and stresses, we have the potential to create something beautiful.

So how do you grow your emotional mastery, and positively perfume your world?

Knowing your triggers will help you increase your inner and outer resources to work through a stressful situation, and to find some ease and calm.  In working through stressful emotions, you can learn to cultivate the “relaxation response”, a term coined by Dr. Herbert Benson at Harvard Medical School in the 1970s.  You can cultivate your ability to create calm at will.  In creating this ease in your body and mind, you can improve your health, relationships, and decision-making skills.

An emotion lasts about 90 seconds, at most.  If it lasts beyond 90 seconds, it’s because the emotion is continuously being triggered – either because you have not left the triggering situation, or you are perpetuating the emotion with your thinking.

You can learn to create space between the trigger and your response so your emotions are neither dismissed nor overblown. You can increase your ability to identify your emotion, listen to your need, and respond to your need.  

No matter what your emotion is, there are strategies to identify your emotions, listen to your needs, and respond with your best outcome in mind. There are so many fun emotions to look at - here we’re going to look at anger.

Anger

Anger comes out of the the need to protect and restore a value, an idea, or a position.  Someone has crossed your boundary.  Your client is late to a call. You missed your own deadline. A technology glitch messed up a group call. You have a disagreement with your partner about the nature of love.

So, what do you do with your anger?

If you slow down your response, you can feel into it and choose how to respond for the best possible outcome.

1. Thank it. Celebrate it. Your anger has a place in your body for a reason. Tell your anger that it is absolutely welcome here. Have a personal experience with your anger in your body.

2. Notice and feel it. Is it hot and sharp? Where is the anger in your body?  You might feel tight in your neck. You might feel a sharp sensation in your chest. You might have a headache. Your stomach might feel tight.  Feel it. 

3. When it has passed, think about it. How do you typically work with your anger?  Do you back down, explode, get frazzled, numb out, or repress your anger?  Do you get sarcastic, self-righteous, or overcome with rage?  Does your anger empower you or give you clarity?

4. Consider how your anger impacts your well-being. You might experience anger as powerful and energizing.  You might experience it as nauseating and debilitating.  When you know your patterns with anger, you have perspective to think about whether your habitual responses to anger serve you, or if there are more productive ways of working with your anger.

5. Remember your values and choose yourself.  What message is your anger telling you? What is important to protect, maintain, and value in this situation?

6. Choose your response. What will you say or do? Your response could be an internal action or an external action. You might decide to sit in the heat of your anger and let it pass while you remind yourself that you cannot control others.

   Or, you might have something to say or do that involves other people. If you do have something to say or do, ask yourself, does it have to be now? Your aim is to communicate your boundaries so you are most effective - direct, empathetic, and clear.

Whether you’re working through anger, sadness, or fear - your emotions can be powerful messengers. It takes time and practice to refine your emotional skills, and no situation is the same so it’s a constant practice.

When you’re emotionally triggered, it’s often because you attach negative thoughts to a situation.  A friend is succeeding and that means you can’t. You didn’t get a project that you wanted, and that means that you won’t get any future projects. Someone interrupts you and that means that they don’t value your ideas. 

When you are going down the rabbit hole of negative thoughts related to the feeling, pause, and think about alternatives.  A friend is succeeding and that means you can learn from them. You don’t get a project that you wanted, and that means that you have space for something even better. Someone interrupts you and that’s because they’re excited about your collective ideas.

The negative thoughts you have about a situation are sometimes right, and sometimes wrong. Imagining positive alternatives is not about denying a shitty situation, but about expanding possibilities and channeling your feelings towards something better.

So, choose yourself when you have strong emotions.

Cultivate a positive intention to use your feelings for good.  Anger can lead you to making a clear request or stating a clear need. 

Consider how you’d like to feel and be supported. Maybe you need to self-soothe by pausing, taking a walk, wrapping yourself in blankets, placing your right hand on your heart and left hand on your stomach, or breathing in for 3 counts and out for 4 counts. 

Consider how you want your customers, clients, and community to feel as you respond to situations that anger you.

Nobody but you can take care of your feelings and needs.  Listening to your emotions and responding to them empowers you to lead with your values and your value.

New Voices In Your Head - A Genius Dinner Party

New Voices In Your Head - A Genius Dinner Party

How would your life and your life’s work be impacted if you mastered understanding of your greatest sources of inspirations, and sought counsel from them?

Who are your muses, living and dead? Who are the artist, leaders, master in your field, explorers, social changers, business icons, performers, innovators, musicians, and philosophers who are dynamic, compelling, and inspiring to you?

Your muse can also be a piece of art, a poem, a country, a constellation, a myth or story, a historical time period, and beyond.  When you think of your muse, you feel alive. Your soul is sparked. Your intellect is bursting. You feel empowered. You feel positively transformed. Your thinking, being, and feelings expand. You shift your perspective. You feel a deeper connection to yourself and what matters to you. 

Here’s the fun part.

Write a list of 7 muses, and the qualities of each that inspire you. This might take a while, and that’s ok. You get to comb your life and consider what really matters to you.

Here’s my list for today, and a super brief explanation of why they inspire me:

1. Antonia’s character in the Dutch film, Antonia’s Line - she’s fierce

2. Starhawk, author of The Fifth Sacred Thing - she fights for a better world

3. Khalil Gibran, author of The Prophet - he is wise and beautiful

4. Krista Tippet, Creator of the podcast On Being - she goes deep and listens well

5. The Book of Poetry by Sam Taylor (it’s a poem) - unfurling hilarity of difference

6. James Cordon (I love carpool karaoke) - so fun and down to earth and touchable

7. Rhinoceros, a play by Ionesco - absurdity and a message to be yourself (or turn into a rhinoceros)

Now you try it. Write a list of your muses, and the qualities about them that you greatly admire.

Ask yourself:

How does each muse show me areas within myself, my life, and my work that I would like to further deepen and cultivate?

Next, invite these muses to hang out with you. You can do this a myriad of ways. One way, which I’ve done several times with great fun, is to invite 7 friends to my apartment for dinner. I assign each of them a muse to study before the dinner, and then they show up to dinner as a hybrid of themselves and their assigned muse.

From there, I run ideas, projects, and personal conundrums by my team, and they advise me in the voices of my muses. It’s enlightening for all, we get to know each other through our creative and philosophical interests, and it’s joyous,

Another option is to have imaginary conversations with your muses in your head or as you journal. Take them in. Listen to their voices. Sense their energy of wisdom, protection, strength, and other qualities specific to them. See what comes up.

This method of talking to your muses can apply to so many creations and decision.

Want to launch a project? What would Gloria Steinem, Warren Buffet, Joan Baez, Nicola Tesla, ambergris, and Aphrodite say to you about your project?

Showing up to a tough conversation or meeting? How would Ghandi, Michelle Obama, Amelia Earhart, Mick Jagger, Shakespeare, Robyn Davidson, and Tim Ferriss advise you?

The possibilities are limitless.

We can all listen to the voices in our head. Sometimes the voice is our vibrant wonderful self, and that voice is really what matters. To get creative and shift your perspective, welcome new voices to the conversation.

But sometimes the voices in your head represent your inner critic. You know, that voice that says you’re not enough and you don’t deserve the chocolate, the time off, the accolades, the dream, the money, the person, the peaceful resolution. That voice can feel so real. Your 7 muses offer you an alternative to your inner critic - inspiration, elevated thought, refuge and safety.

See what happens when you curate the voices in your head with your purpose, values, and inspiration. Of course, the voice that I want you to ultimately listen to is your own.

Higher Purpose in Business

Higher Purpose in Business

Break a million dollars. Outperform your competitor’s product. Write a best-selling book. Land a star client. Add zeros to your income.

For business success, we’re taught to set goals that make us money.

I do love money. But it is not happiness (sort of). There have been lots of studies that examine the threshold of how much money we need to be happy. A Princeton University study reports that when we make $75,000 per year, we’re happy - but making any amount more than that doesn’t necessarily increase happiness.

But there’s a twist. While making above $75,000 per year will not impact your general day-to-day mood (your daily feelings of stress, anxiety, joy, sadness, and so on) it can raise deeper existential life satisfaction and give you the feeling that your life is working out.

On the surface, outperforming your competitor’s product or breaking a million dollars is not that deep of a goal by itself. You’re better than someone. You’re worse than someone. That’s an endless and dissatisfying loop. Big goals and big numbers might juice up your motivation, but in a grander sense, it’s not that moving. If you want to feel a deeper sense of life satisfaction and personal meaning, your business goals have got to tap into something deeper and emotionally driven.

Aspirations are different than goals. They point to a higher purpose, a social and emotional reason for existing. Aspirations are your vision for transformation that you want to lead in the world, and that is also aligned to your business objectives.

Aspirations not only move you, they move everyone around you to support your vision. Your team members, clients, potential clients, family, and media rally around your idea and vision to transform the world.

Your aspirations make others willing to change their behaviors and actions to align to your vision. This is huge.

For a solopreneur, that could mean the difference between hoping you get a new client to buy your product - to having a message, brand, and solution that inspires others to engage with your work. Your exponential and viral satisfaction leads to growth.

For a larger company, that’s the difference between trying to improve performance through measures and agreements and awkward trainings - to having a greater purpose that taps into your employees’ emotions. That shift will transform your organization into a collection of people who fully own their part in driving your company’s purpose. Again, your exponential and viral satisfaction leads to growth.

Having and sharing your company’s higher purpose not only creates massive accountability and higher personal standards for everyone (including you), it also turns everyone (including you) into an evangelist for your company. You, your clients, team members, leaders, colleagues, and others in your community will be excited by what you are creating, and share that within their respective worlds.

So if you or your team members are looking at spreadsheets all day trying to figure out how to make improvements, great - data is hot. Robots, AI, yes - it’s the future. It’s now. But the way to connect to your higher purpose is to connect to people.

Your higher purpose and your company’s story already exist. All you have to do is listen to understand. Ask questions, get curious, listen, notice what you hear, learn about who you are. Your curiosity, self-awareness, and understanding of others will guide you to surface the purpose that is already there.

When you see your higher purpose, then the magic can begin. Infuse your higher purpose in all that you do. Tell your purpose over and over again. Love it. Share it. Integrate it into your systems, communications, branding, processes, business direction, goals, customer experience, and beyond.

I have worked with many successful entrepreneurs and business leaders who love and repeat their higher purpose over and over again. It is deceptively brilliant. Your ideas and messages might not be that seismic. In fact, they’re usually not.

But when you fully own it, live it, and embody it, your message will become your own transformation and the transformation that your followers want to join. Your purpose tells you who you are and who you are not, and your actions, conversations, and offerings align to that. You can drop what’s not aligned.

Know your higher purpose in your business, and once you do that, feel free to look at a few spreadsheets from time to time.

Creative Discontent

Creative Discontent

I love to be positive, but let’s get a little negative for the fun of it.

Creative thinkers and innovators might be bursting with ideas, but sometimes you need some inspiration. Negative inspiration.

Let the problems in your world or the greater world spark your creative solutions.  Creative thinkers can focus on what most people want to avoid. Personal problems such as fear of intimacy, a need for respect, perpetual conflict, identify-based discrimination, miscommunication, loss, addiction, depression, illness, or financial insecurity can move you to develop understanding and creative solutions. Global problems such as hunger, war, xenophobia, addiction, disease, overconsumption, disproportionate wealth, unclean water, crime, and poor sanitation can press you towards new solutions.

Big problems call for big solutions. Creative thinkers can sit with problems, pain, and complexity, and see a new world where these problems no longer exist, or at least not to the magnitude that they exist today.

Dissatisfaction drove Jonas Salk to discover a cure for polio, Maria Montesorri to design a better way of educating children, Gandhi to create a more effective means of nonviolent social change. 

Your dissatisfaction can be big, or it could be simpler everyday problems, like rude drivers, telemarketers, unpredictable trains, and perpetually late doctors.

Take a moment to be dissatisfied. Sit with the awfulness of it.

• What causes you creative discontent? 

• What do you complain about the most?

• What is something awful that moves you to take action?

Flip your creative discontent to expansive solutions using your imagination. You know what you don’t want - so what do you want? What is your insight? What world will exist with this problems solved?

Get turned on by your ideas. Create through curiosity, joy, and love. Solve problems in ways that are intriguing and fascinating to you. What experiences do you want to have as you solve this problem? Who will have perspective and energy that will add value to your impact?

As you expand, consciously expand your framing. People tend to solve problems knowing what they already know. You have a frame, a lens through which you look at, process, and think about life.  Your frame is your cognitive belief system that makes sense of complex information, behaviors, patterns, and decisions. 

Your frames are based on all of the complex experiences and emotions of what makes you who we are. It’s what you’ve studied, and why. It’s how you were raised, It’s your gender, sex, and sexual orientation. It’s your race, culture, and nationality. Religion and spiritual experiences shape your frames. Your relationship status shapes your frame.  Your relationship with your frame shapes your frame.

Understanding your frames and other people’s frames tells you how you think, and also primes you to mix it up and reframe so you can expand your frame and come up with something totally unexpected.

A single problem can be framed a myriad of ways by different people.  It is possible to see different patterns from the same information. 

Think about why you love to travel or learn about new cultures. People from different countries have realities different than your own. This illuminates your unconscious and tacit ways of being in the world. Behaviors and beliefs that are natural to you are juxtaposed to totally different way of being, and you get to question yourself with more awareness.

Thinking strategically and creating insight means tapping into new ideas by testing and examining your tacit thinking. Moving beyond your assumptions and your own worldview.

We frame problems according to our experience, so if you want to think creatively and strategically, include people with diverse perspectives as you create solutions. Know your own frames, their assets, and their limitations. Bring new frames into your world.

Travel and conversation is great for creative and strategic thinking. Go somewhere new. Live a new way.

What 9 Days of Floating Taught Me

What 9 Days of Floating Taught Me

I am already a regular floater. Twice a month I enter a dark room filled with salt water, close the door, and block out all light and sound. Floating in salt water at the exact temperature of my skin, I don’t know where I begin and end.

When I float, I let go of everything. I am peaceful. I surrender. I let go of everyone else’s voice or expectation. I let go of my own expectations, to do list, relationship dynamics, my age, and what’s for dinner. I am with myself. I am in my body. I can hear my heart beat. I feel the rhythm of my blood moving beneath my skin. My breath is loud in my ears. I go inside.

I thought I’d try 9 days of floating in a row, between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur - to reflect on my year, let go of what was no longer serving me, and have more clarity about the year to come. I wanted to contemplate how to write myself in the book of life, not leaving it to the almighty out there, but give it to the almighty within.

For me, part of feeling fully alive means facing and preparing for death. Accepting endings. Remaining myself during uncertainty and disappointment.

Floating has become one of the ways to release my ego and self-interest. I strip down and question the things that I think will protect me, but actually siphon my energy and deprive me of real freedom.

Would I feel vastly and deeply held by 9 days of floating?

Sometimes floating was like the equivalent of rushing to a yoga class. I have such full days (so yes, I am vibrantly alive) that it was challenging to devote about 3 hours per day to resting in a pool of water, plus the travel and hair blowdrying, and tea drinking involved. Sometimes I started out frenzied and then the experience became luscious.

By day 5, though, I was wondering - why am I doing this? Is this completely necessary?

No, not necessary. But good. I did this because that is me. I experiment. I contemplate. I do new things to see what will affect me. I also like the affect of floating. My mind becomes more clear and settled. I love working or relaxing after I float. I am clear headed and words and ideas tend to flow out of me without feeling rushed.

9 days of floating also helped me appreciate how to hold opposites at once. I slow down and I speed up. I think deeply and I eat turkey burgers. I can let myself be held by water, and I also work hard.

We sometimes believe that we need solid ground and permanence to feel steady. We need a certain dollar amount, a certain number of likes, approval from someone we think we need it from. But impermanence and liminal space is actually a very friendly place. It’s a lot more kind than building our lives on a false foundation of belief that everything is secure and will stay the same. It will not.

Floating reminds me of impermanence, of weaving in and out fast and slow, sacred and profane, your voices and my voices, of floating and standing. I feel safe in quiet and unsteadiness.

So, how can I write myself in the book of life when I know that the people I experience will change, the light coming into my kitchen window will change, the weather will change from Fall to Winter to Spring to Summer, my emotions will change, my body will change, the character on my face will deepen, and all the other invariable fluctuations?

The answer, as the hippies have said, is be here now. I want to face death, the book of life, the experience of aliveness. So I float to let go, to listen to myself, to remind myself of my animal ways, to practice receding from the world.

While there are twinges of sadness with time passing, I feel comforted that endings always lead to new beginnings.

Creating anew often means dropping something old - old behaviors, old frames, old relationships, old habits. It’s scary. We cannot know the future. But the more we can sit with impermanence, the more we can create on this day.