Name It and Claim It in the New Year

If  ever there is a time when we collectively rally to put our best foot forward, it’s at the New Year.  We make resolutions, reflect on the past year, tally up our losses and give thanks for our gains –unless, of course, it’s weight which we then resolve to lose.

It may be the only time with the exception of a landmark birthday that we ask ourselves the question poet Mary Oliver poses.  “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”  

The answer to this may be too ambiguous to guide your life unless you break it down into yearly, monthly , weekly , daily, even momentary decisions and actions.   For example, if I know my passion is to write stories that touch lives or help me better understand my own, then it's important that I pay attention, have pen and paper in hand or laptop nearby and actually write every chance I get.  A delay can become an opportunity to rework my blog post.  An unexpected turn of events can provide the comic relief or surprise ending I need for a fact laden feature article.

For years now I’ve used the end of the year to think about my behavior as well as my hopes for the future.  I've challenged myself to come up with a name for the new year that captures my imagination as well as my intentions.  It also has to be tenacious enough to take whatever the next twelve months might have in store.

Like choosing a name for a new addition to your family, sometimes it takes time for the name of the new year to reveal itself.  The year will bring with it its own agenda independent of your hopes and dreams.  This has the potential to surprise and delight you as well as disappoint you and break your heart.

If 2011 was a particularly challenging year, you may believe 2012 is bound to be better.  If 2011 was a breakthrough year for achieving career, relationship, or health goals, the challenge for 2012 may be to sustain or surpass these achievements. 

The expression “name it and claim it” suggests if you can dream it, you can do it. If you can articulate it, you can achieve it. If you can clearly visualize what you want and are willing to take the action to get from here to there, by all means click your heels three times, wiggle your nose, and “Poof!” you are most assuredly on your way.

According to Dave Kohl, professor emeritus at Virginia Tech, people who regularly write down their goals earn nine times as much over their lifetimes as the people who don’t.  Yet a whopping 80% of Americans say they don't have goals.

I love reading Henriette Anne Klauser’s book, Write It Down, Make It Happen.  The act of writing down your dreams and intentions helps define and clarify them.  Paul Scheele of Learning Strategies has a program called Clear Mind Bright Future that breaks down the clarification process into different areas of your life.  Knowing what you want helps tremendously in the daily delegation of your time, energy, and attention.

Since I’ve done this Naming of the New Year thing for several years I will offer four simple suggestions for those of you willing to give it a try.

#1 – Make it meaningful to you.  You are under no obligation to make it meaningful to anyone else.  You are on your own trajectory complete with tricky timing and impatient inklings that refuse to be ignored.  This is your year.  Now is the time.  Inspire by example.   

#2 – Make it fun and achievable.  This is your GPS for the year.  Would you follow a course that feels like drudgery month after month?  I think not.  What excites you as opposed to obligates you?  What nudges you out of your comfort zone enough to make you feel like you've been challenged but not overwhelmed to the point of giving up?  Sometimes it isn't the extra mile but the extra quarter mile that makes you feel sufficiently challenged. 

#3 – Make it memorable.  Like an elevator speech, you should be able to recall your New Year Name at a moment's notice. I like to use words that roll off the tongue.  For example, Happy Shoe Year was great for the year I got a pair of Fatbaby boots, Birkenstocks, and ballroom dancing shoes at the beginning of the year.  It symbolized the adventures I intended to have in said shoes.  Happy Vue Year was going to be about getting a new set of wheels and oh, the places I would go until Saturn went out of business and I decided that might not be the direction my future should follow.  (Adjustments to the name are allowed as circumstances warrant.)  Happy Do Year was the year I planned to stop agonizing over every decision and do more by taking unapologetic action.

#4 - Make room in your life to receive what you desire.  This is major.  How often do you plead, pray, and petition for what you want and when the person, place, thing, or experience shows up, you are too busy (or more likely frightened) to receive it or allow a place for it in your life?  Granted, it may not look exactly how you envisioned it.  The universe does have a keen sense of humor.  But I'm guessing you'll come to see the perfection of it.  Living by design, on purpose, authentically, or however you like to describe it will change your life.  In 2011 I allowed three major events to reshape my life.  Doing this gracefully meant remembering that I asked for it.

With all the hype surrounding 2012, it might be an interesting time to ask yourself, what would absolutely light your fire this year?  How might you go about getting and staying stoked? Then if all the end of days talk turns out to be a hoax, urban legend, or mass hysteria along the lines of a worldwide midnight meltdown at the turn of the new millennium , you’ll be way ahead on next year's resolutions!

I’d love nothing more than for you to share your New Year Name announcement here. 

May 2012 be all you claim it to be!

Time Out for Thanksgiving

My favorite holiday hands down is Thanksgiving.  Not only is there a magnificent feast of food, family, and friends, but also an amazing gift of time.

The older I get the faster time seems to go.  The thing I relish more than anything lately is having a few unclaimed days before me to metabolize my life through writing, walking, or having long conversations with dear friends.

When I took a job four years ago at Clinton Community College the tempo of my life shifted from a spacious and relatively solitary existence to one crowded with information, people, places, and challenges.  I now interact with more people in one week than I previously had in a month.  I will admit I was a bit of a hermit compared to socially acceptable standards.   But as a writer, the silence fed my soul on a deep level.

Of course having a job feeds my body on a very practical level.  Accepting a "real" job was nothing if not a testimony to my ability to have my head in the clouds and my feet on the ground.  Consequently I am extremely grateful that this particular job allows me to have holidays plus a few extra days off. 

A stretch of days that demand nothing more than minimal interaction with the outside world is what my mind, body and spirit consistently crave.  Yet for most worker bees, that stretch of days is usually accompanied by a holiday or two. 

Since holidays are notorious for bringing out bad behavior, the trick to negotiating these potential stress fests is to have stress reducing strategies firmly in place.  Several years ago I came up with my  Top 10 Tension Tackling Tunes to Keep You Humming through the Holidays.  (Click on the link and I'll be delighted to email my list to you.) While even I find it hard to follow my own advice on occasion, I do find that knowing myself helps a great deal. 

If I move and I write every day, I will feel better.  If I speak the truth, even if it isn’t popular or preferred, I will not have to carry around the guilt of betraying myself.  If I say no to requests that aren’t important, I will have more time and energy for those that are.  If I don’t pluck something from every party platter that parades across my path, my physique may no longer resemble that of Mr. Claus.  If I can focus on what I can give instead of what I might get, I can be more present in relationships.  And if I can keep my wits about me, I may see the humor in it all.

Of course knowing and doing are two different things.  As I mentioned in the last post, regular practice is required to defy gravity.  It is also required to get through the day.   If I am too busy, too traumatized, too distracted, or otherwise engaged to plan a healthy meal, squeeze in a little exercise, write a thank you note,  or simply stop instead of snap, it’s unlikely I will default into forgiveness or gratitude.

That’s why time outs are so necessary.  Even in sports that thrive on edge-of-your-seat action, time outs prevent that action from being chaotic or even disastrous.  Like a GPS, time outs remind us of our destination and give us a chance to recalculate so we might spend our time and effort wisely.

Whether you have the opportunity to rejuvenate this weekend or just manage to muster up a moment in the middle of midnight shopping, may your time out bring you clarity, a spot of grace, and remind you of reasons big and small to give thanks.

Defy Gravity

Earlier this month I finally made it to Wicked, the musical about the lives and friendship between Glinda the Good Witch and Elphaba the Wicked Witch of the West.  I had heard a few of the songs long before I had seen the play and was not surprised that Popular was so, well, popular.  It’s funny and cute and something we all can relate to at some time or other. 

 

But my favorite song was Defying Gravity, sung by the well-intentioned but deeply misunderstood green girl.  I had tears in my eyes as Elphaba ascended to new heights belting out her battle cry to be yourself despite all odds.  

Of course not everyone who hears the call can heed it.  The unsuspecting and highly suspicious citizens of Oz assumed the worst.  They could only see the flying phenom as the villain the people in power had made her out to be to hide their own wickedness.  Not once did they consider the rest of the story.

History seldom records the whole story.  If we're lucky, one day it will find its way to light.  That's when a prisoner can become president and change the world.

A few weekends ago I watched the Kennedys miniseries.  Even though I was born in the 60s, I was too young to really grasp the extreme changes that swept the country throughout that decade.  It was fascinating to put events in context and try to comprehend the courage it took to lead a nation through such turbulent times.  It seemed like everyone who tried to do so was assassinated.  It’s enough to make me think twice about leading a revolution.

Yet every era has a need for visionaries, leaders, courageous men and women who are committed to doing the right thing.  Every organization needs someone with a moral compass at the helm or somewhere in the ranks to blow the whistle should things go horribly wrong.  But how many of us, really, want to be the whistle blower?  It’s not a popular position.  At least not until Hollywood makes a movie about you. 

Helen Keller said, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.  Security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.  Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure.”

I say midlife is nothing if not a daring adventure.  Anything that may have seemed secure - relationships, jobs, finances, familial roles, or institutions - can and will come up for questioning.  Avoiding the danger of dealing with these issues at the first sign trouble is not a good strategy.     Just ask the Pope or the officials at Penn State. 

While it may seem easier in the short run to sweep these inconvenient truths under the rug, we all know they will come back to bite us or someone or something we love or hold dear.  We don't have to be Glinda, Elphaba, Nelson Mandela, John or Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Erin Brockovich, or any public figure to live a courageous life.  We are asked to do so every day in a million quiet ways.

In order to do so we must activate our latent midlife superpowers, the most powerful of which may be our ability to defy gravity.  By rising above it all like those hot air balloon characters in the Macy'sThanksgiving Day parade, we can do what's necessary and right and good, even if our voice shakes or we lose popularity points.

What do you think, shall we dust off the broom and take it out for a spin?

All it really takes is regular practice.

Friend or Foe?

We all have them in our lives.  Like fingernails on a chalkboard, there are certain people we would swear were put on this earth solely to irritate, agitate, or otherwise discombobulate.  These people obliterate any chance of a hassle free existence.

For some it’s a boss, a relative, a senator (or pick your politician), a next door neighbor, a daughter’s coach, a son’s teacher, a parent’s pharmacist, or a constantly complaining client.  For others it may be the butcher, the baker, or the candlestick maker, people who are in our lives more out of necessity or by virtue of profession than choice.  

In the case of the Texas Rangers, it would be the St. Louis Cardinals.  I’m writing this during Game 7 of the World Series.  In my case, it's been my landlord.  I bought a house so I would no longer have to deal with his covert attempts to kick me and my dogs to the curb.

My practice of Ho'oponopono was seriously challenged the past couple of months in order to act my age and not my shoe size.   I was able to do this partly because I remembered something a guru or shaman or hung over hippie once told me.  Those who are our greatest enemies in this life may have been our greatest allies in another.  What if these people loved us so much once that they agreed to come back again as our enemies simply to ensure our growth?

Whether you believe in reincarnation or not or whether you can fathom that your current curmudgeon could be motivated by anything other than spite, greed, fear, or self interest, the fact remains that these people often elicit our most resourceful responses.  They compel us to act on our convictions in a way that a pep talk with a friend who has known and loved us all our life may not.

I think of the day my landlord posed the question, “How important is it for you to have two dogs?”  Of course the appropriate answer arose as soon as the opportunity had passed.  Instead of answering his question with another question, “How important is it for you to get a rent check?” I called my real estate agent.  

Of all the buttons to push, this was the one that catapulted me into action.  My response was something like Sandra Bullock’s character in The Blind Side ,  “You threaten my dogs,  you threaten me.”

The truth is I had been tolerating little things ever since I moved in.  It was a little like being nibbled to death by ducks. Things had reached a head by the summer but since I had convinced myself my third move in four years would be out of Iowa and I was not ready to make that move, I simply endured it.  That is until the day of the inciting incident.

An inciting incident is what moves the story to the next stage.  In a nutshell, it's the conflict that makes any story worth reading, any challenge worth accepting, or any World Series game worth watching. 

Okay, scratch that last one.  Personally I would have preferred the Rangers win in four games straight rather than the Cardinals in seven so as to avoid the nail biting, teeth clenching, gut wrenching histrionics that occurred around the fifth, sixth, and ninth innings of almost every game in the series.   As a former Queen of Calm, tonight 's stress management strategy is to write instead of watch the game.  I must admit, however, these shenanigans up the level of play for each team.

[Aside:  I'm really not a sports fan and certainly not a sports writer but if I had to pick a sport, baseball would be my choice - except for the excessive spitting.   I spent my twenties in Texas and a many memorable evening at the ballpark in Arlington.  Hence my affection for the Rangers.  That and I believe in spreading the World Series wealth.  Why does any team need to win eleven times when another team just wants to win one?]

The fact is every hero needs a nemesis to help realize his or her superpowers.  Up until this point, the only noticeable superpower that has surfaced at midlife has been the Invisibility Cloak.  Where I may have been noticed or at least acknowledge by name earlier in my life, now I get the generic “Ma’am” or “Mrs”, neither of which I respond well to,  when asked if I want to use my AARP discount.  That doesn't set well either.

Maybe the real superpower and the one that requires an arch enemy or difficulty du jour is to realize what cartoonist Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com  suggests.  " We are only happy if we are frustrated."

Anything worth doing is fraught with frustration partly because expressing ourselves authentically is incredibly challenging.  It's also intensely important to the way we see ourselves.  Ultimately, it's deeply satisfying precisely because of what it takes to achieve.  (Any guess how many revisions this blog goes through before it sees the light of day?)

I still have a long way to go in embracing the persistent presence of the challenges and challengers in my life.  It takes time and distance to concede they may be doing me a favor by forcing me to move my own story along.

What do you think?  Can a foe be a friend in disguise?  How hard is it to consider?  Who has been especially "friendly" to you lately?

 

Creating In The Middle of Things

Often times I’ll hear friends say, “Did I just say that out loud?”

Maybe we’ve reached the age where holding our tongues has become as challenging as holding our bladders. Or perhaps after years of sugar coating conversations, not saying what we need to say is just as terrifying as actually saying it.

We assume people are going to be offended if we say what we really think, especially if we seldom do. We're convinced they may leave us, fire us, forget us, or otherwise exit our life once they hear what we truly think about what goes on in the boardroom, the bedroom, the ballpark, or the book of the month club.

Then again, they may admire our honesty.

At the very least they might wonder what’s gotten into us.  They may the pass it off as gas or something we ate.

Most likely what's gotten into us is something we've read, watched, experienced, or have always known at a deep level. Maybe we've been quietly contemplating its meaning until the moment came when we had no choice but to speak up. And maybe no one was more shocked than we were to hear ourselves voice our convictions. Hence, the opening question.

Then there's this other thing that’s been happening to me lately.  I actually think I’ve said something, or in this case written something, because I’ve thought about it so much.  Imagine my disbelief, okay denial, when I realized I haven't actually posted anything in over a month.

Despite excellent excuses - buying a house, moving in, and not being able to find any of the assorted wires associated with my desktop computer - not writing has weighed as heavily on my conscience as a rogue piece of toilet paper clings to my favorite clogs. I tell myself no one notices but that is only because it takes a really good friend or arch enemy to point out that I have something stuck to my shoe or I haven't written lately. 

When I was training to be a creativity coach, one of the fundamentals my mentor Eric Maisel taught was that we must be able to create in the middle of things. *

Let's face it.  We are always in the middle of something. Right now you are in the middle of reading this blog. You might also be in the middle of eating a snack, having a meltdown, carpooling, or finishing the seventh frame of Wii bowling.  But does it stop you from doing what you must do?

Although I temporarily stopped blogging, my creative output tripled in the interior design area of my life.  And by "interior design" I mean the curious way I've been arranging both my inner and my outer environments in response to new options.

The frenzy of activity surrounding this move will provide writing material for weeks to come. This is one of the reasons moving is ranked right up there on the Holmes and Rahe Stress Scale. Everything is in upheaval, even if it’s just a move across town.  Everything is also open for negotiation. Will this item stay or go? Is it part of my past, present, or future? Will it work in the new space? Will it fit in the moving truck? 

While the answers may seem obvious, the questions are packed with emotions.

Granted, most people may be more organized when it comes to moving. I had a very short time to find, finance, and finagle a move that I wasn’t even sure I wanted to make.  But now that I’m moved in, I’m thrilled.  I couldn’t have imagined the difference it would make in large and small areas of my life.

If my life up to this point has been all about traveling and taking care of other people’s homes, pets, and predicaments, it’s now all about staying home and at least writing about mine.

So even though I can describe for you in detail the peaceful view from my deck, I can't be trusted to write from there today for fear of abandoning the blog to hang pictures, move furniture, or make 101 decorating decisions. Therefore, I've sequestered myself at my writing desk at a friend’s house so I might finally surface in the blogosphere, without toilet paper on my shoe, thank you very much.

Next time I’ll post pictures of the new casa to illustrate how choosing bold colors after years of white walls can kick start the creative process and start the journey of a thousand steps. (Currently they all lead to Sherwin Williams, Home Depot, Target, and Pier I.  Maybe you've been down this road yourself?)

I'd love to hear your new home/moving stories, even if your "new" home or last move was 20 years ago.

*To read Dr. Maisel's article on creating in the middle of things, click here.

 

Don't Worry, Be Happy.

The thing I’ve noticed about happiness is that it’s more about moments than milestones.  I think we set ourselves up for disappointment when we have these big, hairy, audacious goals that have to be met by a certain age or a specific time in our lives. 

Moments of happiness, on the other hand, are  ripe for the picking.  We just need to remember to pluck one out of each day.

I can safely say the surprise party held in my honor when I turned forty was a lesson in humility as well as humiliation. Wonderful friends and family who’d I'd known my whole life were there to help me celebrate/admit to this shocking occasion.  But because of circumstances a bit beyond my control,  I was living with my parents.  Therefore, this party also served as my induction into the Midlife Hall of Shame.

The year before I had left a man, the land, and a life I loved in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to move back to the Midwest.  As it turned out, within forty-eight hours of returning to the family farm my personal crisis and grief gave way to a global crisis and grief felt around the world as 9/11 changed life as we knew it.  Suddenly I was grateful to be with family and friends in a familiar place that felt safer and more solid than the ground I had just walked away from.

I was shell shocked for the better part of a year and then decided it was time to bloom where I was planted.  I did what I knew how to do best.  My family helped me renovate the upstairs of an old apartment building and I started teaching exercise and creativity classes.  I developed some online courses and offered my coaching services to anyone with an Internet connection.  I took my show on the road when necessary and split my time between the Southwest and Midwest and mastered the  art of living on air and credit cards.

Although air doesn’t exact a price, credit cards certainly do and the only logical way for me to pay the piper was to get a regular job.  Imagining myself to be utterly unemployable for any number of reasons including my age, no one was more surprised than me to find myself on someone’s payroll once again.  I couldn’t help but notice my co-workers’ curiosity about what I’d been up to for the past twenty years.  Since people don’t seem to get fired as easily in education, they tend to stay awhile. 

For me, the goal has always been to grow and learn and do it on my own timetable.  Like Sinatra, I’d like to look back on my life and be able to boast, “I did it my way.” 

I realize not everyone agrees with my way.  After taking the Myers Briggs Type Indicator during the leadership conference last week, I am reminded once again that lots of people look at life through an entirely different lens than I do.  I am sensitive to the fact that I can drive those people nuts with all my hakuna matata talk.  But for the sake of argument, let’s assume those folks didn’t make it past my first post.

So, I shall stick to my bold Bobby McFerrin advice for this week.   Don’t worry, be happy!  I couldn’t make this claim last week because I was convinced the house deal would tank over who should pay for the radon mitigation system.  Fortunately the six Buddhas sitting strategically throughout my current home had the desired effect of allowing compassion rather than pride to rule the day.

Now I certainly don’t mean to make light of things if you are having a demanding day or a decidedly difficult decade.  Midlife is full of unsettling and distressing changes that can send the sanest of us over the edge at least once a week.  My intention is to encourage you to find the moment, the music, the person, or place that brings you back to your best self when he or she seems to have gone missing. 

On this day when we remember the loss of so many loved ones, I vow to live my life with renewed peace, purpose, passion, and last but not least, pleasure!   May you do the same, if you are so inclined.

Get Out of Town

Newton’s Third Law of Motion states, “For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.”

Since I just made one of the biggest decisions in my life, I've been pondering this principle quite a bit.  The most compelling argument against committing my life’s savings to buying a house in a town I imagined living in for five minutes is the formidable list of reasons to leave.

August in the world of academia is exploding with those reasons.  Students are at the height of hysteria and faculty members are flustered as they readjust to new faces and a formidable amount of paperwork.  Requests that would have been reasonable even one month ago are simply out of the question now that classes have started.

I am most perplexed by the lack of preparation or even interest some of the students who come to see me exhibit.  For whatever reason, these students believe I know more about what they want than they do themselves.  It takes patience born of perpetual practice not tell them to return when they’ve got a clue. 

I remind myself I was once an undecided major.  I remind myself I am often clueless about things - my smartphone, for example.  I also remind myself of a request made by a much wiser teacher, “Forgive them for they know not what they do.”

Surely it is the plight of prophets, professors, parents, and puppy owners to be frustrated.  (As I write this, Marley, a rambunctous blue heeler puppy, is biting my ankles and jumping up on the keyboard between bouts of dragging undergarments out of my suitcase unbeknownest to me and leaving them in conspicuous places for all to observe.  Something tells me she, however, knows exactly what she is doing.)

In any case, when I mentioned to a good friend who's been in the business much longer than I have how Newton’s third law was manifesting in my life, he reminded me of two things.  1) The first week of school is not representative of the entire year.  2)  In approximately two weeks, all will return to controlled chaos, at least at school. 

In the midst of all this activity came the call to participate in a leadership program.  Once a month I will travel to other community colleges and learn about leadership with others who have been selected from their campuses to do the same.  The concept is brilliant.  The timing of this month's session, however, was not.  What kind of leader abandons her troops during the first week of classes?

A leader who could use a time-out to think about her behavior is a perfect candidate.  I hadn’t quite convinced myself of that as I threw anything and everything in my car and made the three hour drive to the hotel late Wednesday evening.  I was sure a different week would have been a better choice for all concerned.  As is often the case, I was wrong.  A change of venue was precisely what was needed.

Over the course of a few years my world has gotten smaller and my focus has gotten narrower as my mama bear tendencies have taken root in my efforts to support our satellite center.  This makes the big picture much harder to keep in perspective.  What happens when I am catapulted out of my comfort zone is that suddenly the big picture is evident once again and I am left with the certainty that I need to get out more.

While my relatively quiet and predictable life in a town where I know almost every student is better for me on a daily basis than battling traffic, getting lost at every intersection, and dealing with people who don’t know or care who I am, often it takes experiencing one extreme to appreciate the other. 

Because I’ve always been a bit of a fringe dweller, I tend to forget there are others out there who might feel the same way, struggle with the same issues, appreciate knowing help is available, and embrace the opportunity to connect.  As Barbara Sher, author of Wishcraft and many other life changing books for independent thinkers, says, “Isolation is the dream killer."  I believe she is right.

As uncomfortable as it may be to orchestrate, every now and then I need to get out of town and find my  place in the larger community.  Then I can return bearing the gifts the adventure afforded. 

In the past few days I've gotten to tour a beautiful campus in Des Moines. I got to spend time with  funny, smart, and insightful people with similar jobs across Iowa. I am now a student as well as an administrator and got to celebrate what’s right with the world as well as discuss what could use some fixing.  I got to witness how I behave in new situations with people of all ages and backgrounds and integrate what I know with what I have yet to learn.   At the same time I came up against my limitations, possibilities that had been dormant for years were ignited. 

So here's my advice for this autumn.  Whether it's a learning opportunity or simply a chance to explore an area of interest, get out of town.  If that's not possible, test your ability to see familiar landscapes with fresh eyes.

Bon voyage!