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How do you work through hesitating, second guessing, stopping or… and embrace uncertainty?

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Do you ever put off something challenging or even stop yourself… when moving forward is best, if daunting?

Tuesday was primary day in New York. My daughter was running for one of the county commissioner seats in Brooklyn. Early in the day, she sent me photos of herself and a flyer with her name on it. I loved the photos and immediately posted them on Facebook because I thought it was so great! When I told her I posted them, she asked me to take them down. I double-checked and she was firm. I felt disappointed. I so appreciated her energy and moxie, and wanted to celebrate it. She said, “I don’t want to share because if I lose I’ll have to explain that I lost.” My response was, “There is glory in the running! And, I understand and  will take them down.” I waited (impatiently) for the results and then posted the photos—because she won a seat!

When is the last time you wavered before taking a challenge or revealing that you were doing something where you might fail, lose, or feel embarrassed? What did you do?

There is no one answer for what’s right here. We are all different, circumstances vary, and we each have a continuum of comfort around risk, embarrassment, losing, and more.

Were you able to work your way through the feelings of hesitancy? 

When I pause (significantly) to ponder whether to share a new challenge with uncertain results, I work to recall my past successes. They form the foundation for moving into the endeavor.

Did you remember that there is no predicting the future? We just can’t know what will happen. Did you fortify your inner risk-taker, rally your support network or maybe reach out to an ally who continuously champions you?

I totally believe what I said to my daughter and understand her hesitancy. 

I’m about to apply for some consulting work that I would really like and I’ll be disappointed if I don’t get it. But this is the life I have chosen—to continuously put myself out there in the world and work with the results. 

More immediately, I’m about to teach a Zentangle pattern that I find particularly challenging (Rick’s Paradox). I don’t see it as easily as other patterns. So I’m taking extra time and practicing before doing the work in my beautiful book. I’ve heard the same kind of hesitation about drawing from participants in my sessions. We all wonder about the drawing we will do and whether it will meet our hopes, desires, or expectations. I always hope for the best, discover what happens in the moment, breathe deeply, and use my skills when I feel challenged.

This is what I said to one of the participants just recently, 

“Ah, it is a challenge! I believe that I will do my best to create the beautiful designs and knowing that I am human, I will probably make mistakes along the way. I work to breathe, let it go, and make it beautiful. I hear you.”

I believe it—and live it—and it isn’t always easy.

One of my most recent resources for working with my emotions and feelings is the book  Positive Intelligence by Shirzad Chamine. I am a part of his coach training program and have started to integrate some of his work into my coaching practice with clients. This work feels just like home to me, do you know what I mean? In 2004, I completed Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness Coaching Program. (His book, Authentic Happiness is great!) I also value and use Jackie Kelm’s work, The Joy of Appreciative Living: Your 28 Plan to Generate Greater Happiness. Do you know these works? If so, what do you think? I’d love to chat!

In response to the very difficult times I/we are facing, I reach out to friends and colleagues, and gather resources and methods, that will support my self-care so I can step into working to address the challenges of our lives.

What about you?

If you would like to talk about great resources or are ready to step more fully into the work and the play of your life, please reach out to me!

 

*Written on Wednesday… it’s been a full week!

When the path is clear to me, the project gets done

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I’ve been musing about several projects… Why is one at completion, another a bit of stop and go, and a third feeling both exciting and daunting?

What’s your style of working?

Do you live the adage, “How you do one thing is how you do everything?”

Is your style of work the same across the variables of

  • size of project
  • timeline
  • complexity
  • need for research
  • collaboration
  • perhaps, final approval? 

While I can make generalizations about how I work, I chafe at the literal meaning of the saying.

As I complete a project today that I started in September, I am making time to reflect… as it’s my intention to teach folks how to do what I have done. I want to be able to support them through the peaks and valleys of the process and so I am taking a magnifying glass to my journey. I think it’s also helpful to me to stand back and look at how I do what I do—there are lessons in it for me. 

When I realized how many photos I had taken of the process (who doesn’t love a photo essay?) I decided to quickly make an annotated visual timeline —such fun taking this walk down memory lane!

How do you review and reflect on your projects—appreciating and celebrating what worked well and learning for the future about what might be done differently?

Honestly, I don’t always take enough time for such reflection… Note to self, build in the time!

For my other projects, I’ve discovered…

My fifty stories/sketches about experiences with patients… I have 50+ more about my reflections

The one-page visual I am creating around how chaplains work in a hospital grew out of a need I saw in (you guessed it) my chaplaincy work… In my effort to address the need, I decided to create a useful resource for patients in hospitals (and their family members). As it turns out, this is just a bit complicated to achieve in a visual storytelling style, on one page—there’s a lot I want to say! So this project is a bit of “stop and go” as I navigate my thoughts about how to share information in a fun, accessible, visually appealing style. As time marches on, (and I do love a deadline), it will be done in just over a week so that I can put it aside, review it again in 10 days or so, make any minor revisions needed, and enjoy sharing it at the Graphic Medicine conference.

Here for Good, my graphic memoir project feels a bit like reaching through the fog at times. since I started the actual work of writing and drawing. I have never told a story this big or this long nor am I very familiar with the genre. I have lots to learn and do and sometimes I am uncertain as to my path:

  • What do I do first?
  • Which tasks can be done simultaneously? 
  • Which books will support my process? 
  • How might a mentoring group work for me? *SAW—Sequential Artists Workshop
  • Shall I seek an accountability buddy?

As you muse about my stories, what have you realized about your way of working and playing with projects?

I’d love to hear how your style or styles of work both enhance your experiences and also get in the way—there’s always something to be learned! 

Clarity of purpose—it’s an essential ingredient for success!

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Time is precious. How I spend my 168 hours* each week is of great importance to me.  I’m the gal who squeezes out every possible juiciness from my day.  I choose my play and work with care. 

Lately, I find myself reflecting on a variety of my engagements. How I am spending my valuable time?

The questions I ask myself include: 

  • Am I a fit for this organization, program, or experience?  
  • What was, and is, my purpose in being a part of this endeavor?
  • Am I achieving my goals and/or re-designing them to meet my developing needs?
  • Am I surrounding myself with people of the same mindset that I seek to live into—curiosity, hope, discernment, full engagement, and a willingness to tackle the challenges that arise with an eye toward the goals to be achieved?

What describes—or how do you envision—

successful, productive, life-affirming working, learning, and playful relationships?

These questions are not academic for me.

Several recent conversations have prompted me to realize that by returning to my touchstone of purpose, I am best able to answer my questions.

In one instance, re-grounding myself enabled me to speak with clarity about where I am in the moment and what I hope for the future of the organization. 

In a different conversation, I realized my colleagues and I have come together because of a shared interest in the learning experience yet we are all so different. While we felt an instant camaraderie, when we being to listen deeply to each other, our ways of being in the world were clashing causing disharmony. Perhaps we will find ways to come together though I am not sure… I also am weighing how much time I will devote to discovering the answer. 

What’s your thinking about engaging in learning, working, and playing relationships?

How do you find the right partners for those adventures and endeavors?

I am reminded that being clear about my purpose(s) becomes both my compass and my lens as I step into new adventures and make time to assess current projects and relationships.

How are you spending your precious time? 

* If you’re seeking support in wrangling what you want from your time (because time management is self-management, right?), I highly recommend 168 Hours by Laura Vanderkam. I’ve also just learned of Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. I can’t wait to listen to it! And, one of my favorite resources, The Joy of Appreciative Living by Jackie Kelm, offers a different lens for viewing how we engage in our lives. My Appreciative Living coaching is one of my favorite offerings … maybe it’s a gift you give yourself this summer. If you’re interested, let’s talk!

Stepping into the Unexpected… Almost Reluctantly

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Please take a walk down memory lane with me. Reflect, for a moment, on your professional and personal growth experiences over the years. Have you ever felt that you weren’t quite sure you wanted to do an activity or exercise suggested by a trainer, facilitator, or coach? It doesn’t happen to me too often. (What happens more often is having done the activity, I wonder about its purpose, importance, and usefulness.)

I’m currently taking an online course in learning how to draw in new and different new ways. I am really enjoying it and I think the teacher is very good. Those of you that know me, know that that is high praise indeed, as course design, development, delivery, and evaluation are my bailiwicks, and it tends to make me a hypersensitive (hypercritical?) participant.

In the second lesson of the course, we were asked to do an exercise and I hesitated. No doubt this is due, in part to my curious nature/the realization that I am a “Questioner” in Gretchen Rubin’s work on Four Tendencies. And, while I could conceptually see the POSSIBLE use of the task, it was stepping into a process I don’t often do—pure fantasy product creation.

So I hemmed and I hawed, and yet I didn’t want to step into the next lesson because if a course has a good design, I shouldn’t be skipping anything along the way, is my thinking. So I abandoned myself to the experience and I am glad I did! The exercise asked me to engage in thinking totally differently—and that was the beauty of it! The assignment was to make my ideal pan. I do love pens though I have never imagined what the perfect pen would be. I made the time to delight in a bit of whimsy and brainstorming… after the initial doubts about whether I could actually do it. This darling is the result! It is fun, practical, and incorporates my love of the undersea world.

So what about you?

How do you engage with your learning? Do you (generally) trust in what has been designed and developed or do you question throughout the experience? I do both! And I will tell you with no shame, that I will never say, and do not appreciate hearing, “Trust in the process.” If a teacher, trainer, facilitator, or coach can’t tell me why I’m doing what I’m doing, where it came from (tied to what earlier content and/or processes or the overall gestalt of the learning), and how I can integrate what I’m learning into the present or future learning of the course, work or life, I outta there!

What’s your thinking about your learning experiences?

With the shift to so much learning online there’s been a proliferation, if not a glut, of opportunities… some are worth their weight in gold (so to speak) and others are mere imposters of what learning is meant to be… I have learned to be in touch with the creators and ask the questions  I need answered/do my due diligence because I know how I learn best. What about you?

My time, energy, and resources are too precious—I guard them well.

Have an affair with your creativity!

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How do you find the time, really, make the time to be creative?

I think we all define or describe creativity differently—from diving into new opportunities at work, to drawing, painting, building, cooking, sewing, knitting, singing, to playing instruments, and more.

As I think about creativity in my work or in my play, it means total immersion, commitment to process,  and oftentimes to product, too.

  • What about you?
  • What does creativity mean to you?
  • In what ways are you creative?

If you’re not in a formal program that gives you some structure and freedom to nurture your creativity, how do you do it? This is the question I have wrestled with over time and perhaps even more recently because of I am noticing that time feels WONKY in this pandemic— both so compressed AND so endless.

As I make time for getting out to walk daily, I’m currently listening to Elizabeth Gilbert’s book, Big Magic. She raises the same question, about making time for creativity, in a fun and provocative way, she says,

“Have an affair with your creativity!”

I love that! Gilbert went on at quite some length about the ways that we find time to have an affair/make time for what matters to us. So that might be a big slice of time but more likely, it’s tiny pockets of time—15 minutes here, 30 minutes there, because life is busy. I find 10-15 minutes too short and unsatisfying to me… What about you?

So that’s my question to you today and I want to hear your answers. How do you make time in your life to nurture your creativity?

Here are half a dozen ways in which I do it, I hope you’ll share yours too.

1. I carve out an hour every evening after dinner before watching a bit of Netflix.

2. When I’m working on a project, a passion project to be exact, I start my workday an hour earlier and I devote the first hour of my day to that project. I put on some music for 60 minutes, I love the app, focus@will, and I do nothing but that work for that time. It is exhilarating!

3. I buddy up with someone who has an interest in pursuing a particular aspect of creativity—we might take a course together or am just be checking in with each other. My favorite example of doing this right now is partnering with my friend Julia Curtis in Tasmania. We spend every Thursday, in the late afternoon for me, and early Friday morning for her, working our way through Lynda Barry’s book Making Comics.

4. I’m also curious to see what other people are doing. A friend told me about a class she was taking online. I thought it sounded like fun. I then remembered that I had bought that class a few weeks earlier and had put it on the back burner for a while. Her mentioning it made me dive back in and now that’s what I’m doing every evening.

5. Making space for learning about art is so important to me and so once a week I do a deep dive into someone’s art/craft. These days that might mean a virtual art tour, pulling a book from my shelf and drawing or creating from it… I’ve also started combing magazines for images and creating files for inspiration so that’s like stealing/finding the time when I’m doing other things (organizing).

6. I like to engage in challenges, like the 100 Day Project or Inktober because I love seeing what other people have done. It is so inspiring for me… so I have to admit that I generally keep these projects short (meaning how long I devote to them each day). It’s not that it’s not worth it, it’s just that there are so many interesting things to do in this world, I often wonder who how to schedule them!

I hope you share your ideas in the comments so that I may learn further ways to nourish my creativity.

And, if you want to buddy-up to get more creative, or you’d like encouragement in the process, reach out to me, I’d love to chat!

Postscript: I hope you will take me up on my offer!

I created a product over a dozen years ago, Plan Your Fun! In essence, it’s a self-coaching program with an evergreen, week’s calendar. In the booklet, I share ideas for making space in your life to engage in play. The wall calendar is the place to post your plans for play, in this case, creativity, during the week—so that you can anticipate the events and then savor them… While the product is still on sale at www.coachingtoys.com, I am happy to offer it for free to anyone who contacts me (free shipping in the US, let’s chat about shipping outside the US).