Posts in "make meaning" Category — Page 13

get your biz off the ground, make meaning

Tiny Rituals and the Fine Art of Motivation

There’s an art to keeping yourself motivated over the long haul. It isn’t as simple as following five steps in a row, or making a Motivation Map or vision board or whatever the shizbuckets is popular these days. Motivation is complicated, and it’s most difficult to manage when you’re already sleep-deprived, broke, stressed, or all three. But tiny rituals help.

Tiny rituals are just that…tiny. Daily. Rituals.

They’re habits that keep you not only motivated, but fully alive and present. They’re not a big deal, they don’t require your participation in any 30-day challenges, and they take no offense if you skip a day or 17.

Tiny rituals aren’t little judgey assholes scrunching up their noses while discussing how much you suck. They’re immensely helpful little beings of light.

Tiny ritual #1: guard your beginnings and endings.

Whether you’re choosing to work for nine minutes or nine hours a day, guarding your time with a formal ending and formal beginning keeps you more focused. Instead of keeping your laptop open in the background while trying to do 22 other activities for six hours in a row, try lighting a candle and setting a timer for thirty minutes. Go hard, go fast, and see if you need another thirty minutes when the timer is up. You’ll get shit-tons of your work done in one-third the time it takes when you’re floating like a lost balloon in Distractedville.

Personally, I light a candle, then say a prayer that goes something like, “Help me to do my best and most sacred work today.” I pull a tarot card for my client(s) and get to it. When my work is done, I blow the candle out.

Easy beginning, easy ending. Energetic division…done. With one breath, my kitchen table is once again ready for hosting meals instead of laptops.

Tiny ritual #2: take breaks.

(Not dance breaks, unless you fucking love dance breaks.)

Truth is, dancing isn’t my favorite. Even by myself, I get sort of awkward and shy and weird about all that movement. But I can stretch like a mofo. I can breathe deeply, I can stretch my legs with a walk. You don’t have to dance in order to prove to your imaginary friends how imaginary cool you are. Do something else that switches your brain off when it’s tired of being on, or on when it’s tired of being off.

Oh, and…it’s okay to rest when you’re tired. Napping is as legit a break as busting out the Michael Jackson Remix.

Tiny ritual #3: bring on staff.

Pretend that you’re really fancy and you can spend $100,000 a year to hire a team of advisors.

Best-selling authors. Brilliant marketers. Poets. Artists. Entrepreneurs. Nobel Prize winners. The best minds of our time.

Imagine they’re all available to do your bidding and give advice whenever you see fit. Now, open your Podcasts app and choose up to five of these brilliant people to listen to each week.

Let your fellow humans teach you stuff, show you stuff, entertain you, and otherwise give you brain food. For free. (Bam! Just saved you a hundred grand.)

Of course, I’d be happy to be on your staff. Subscribe to That’s What She Said right here and you’ll get a new episode every Tuesday.

Tiny ritual #4: sip from other cups.

Whether you’re obsessed with Pinterest or Instagram; whether you’re reading another non-fiction series or you’re dying for the new book by your favorite author to come out, it’s your job to sip from other cups. To take in all the world has to offer and to remix it in your life the way only you can.

Actively seek inspiration, motivation, and input, or your well will inevitably run dry. (Input versus output is totally handled in episode #5.)

Tiny ritual #5: make stuff you don’t sell.

That’s right, stuff you don’t sell. Stuff you’re not trying to strategize or market or turn into your next paying gig. Stuff without hashtags or ‘follow me’ reminders. Just..stuff. Maybe that means you shoot film with your family, or you take a painting class, or you mess around with 30×40 inch canvases and waste inordinate amounts of supplies making new creations. (Yes, those are my feet in the photo up there.)

Maybe you build Play-Doh towers, the likes of which the world has never seen, or write poems like you used to, before you decided your voice wasn’t worth listening to or wasn’t that interesting. There’s power in making for the sake of making, and it fills your well like little else in the world.

Tiny ritual #6: do the crazy-ass thing every now and again.

“I made this ridiculous decision to go to Iceland with my friends for 13 days in August,” she said, “and then I figured out a way to pay for it.” Now THAT’S a coaching client I adore.

Whether it’s Iceland calling, or you want a new chandelier for your bedroom, or a few days off for staycation in your hammock, let the reason you started this business take over every now and again.

Freedom. Security. Getting out into the world. Stability. Adventure. Mayhem.

Whatever your reason for being in business, let it out to breathe every now and again.

[embed_popupally_pro popup_id=”1″]

P.S. I’m proud of you.

listen to the podcast, make meaning

Reclaim your energy, become a quitter.

Once we’ve determined how many lights on your dashboard are blinking, and you’ve established a baseline for self care, we can talk about ways to get your real life back. To get your energy back. To restore the peace you deserve, instead of running around like an iPhone-addicted-blinking-beeping-dinging maniac.

It’s time to actively reclaim all your energies.

Input, input, input. Make sure your active collection of inspiration is equal to all the work you’re putting into the world. Episode 5 of my That’s What She Said podcast covers this in detail.

Facebook groups. Quit ’em, leave ’em, give up the administration of ’em. I recently left all the groups I’d joined — even the ones I’d paid to be a part of — because I simply wasn’t using them. I felt a pang of anxiety each time one showed up in my newsfeed — but not ENOUGH anxiety to click over and see what was going on. Deleted. Left. Moved on.

Become a quitter. Protect your energy fiercely.

Unfollow. There are people you follow just so you’re ‘in the know’ about your industry or about trends, or to keep your finger on the pulse of the next big thing. Trouble is, you don’t actually like these people. Listening to them reeks of obligation. So quit ’em. Unfollow ’em. Stop giving them your precious freaking attention.

Unsubscribe. Those e-mails that end up in your inbox and you blink, stunned, before wondering, ‘How the eff did I get on this list?!?’ Take the two seconds to click unsubscribe. It’s like wiping the sink clean after you put on your make-up. You’ll feel better and it takes no time at all.

Ignore your favorite for a while. Yes, THAT favorite. Your guru, your mentor, the person you simply adore and would trade lives with if you could. It’s possible that you’re dulling your instincts in order to move more in the direction of that person, or choosing poorly for your own career in a dull attempt to mimic that individual. I’m not saying you’re doing this consciously, but it happens to the best of us. Leave, just for a little while, and come back when the voices in your head are once again your own.

Schedule nagging tasks. Those projects you see in your house and think, ‘Awh man, I should do that’ — every single time you pass them? Schedule ’em. Wallpaper the closets, rearrange the pantry, buy the organizing supplies, clean the floors. Whatever it is, schedule it. Treat it as you would a doctor’s appointment or a client meeting. Get it out of the way, whether by yourself or with the help of a professional.

Batch it. There’s no need to do tasks you find unpleasant every day. Schedule your social media. Blog once a month and schedule enough posts to last the whole time. Write for a whole day instead of for twenty minutes at a time. Make so many frozen meals that your freezer is overflowing with the crockpot dinners to come.

Acknowledge your limits. Yes, you have them. We all do. You can’t cook three healthy, organic, vegan meals a day whilst keeping your six-pack abs at the gym while single-handedly caring for your three children whilst running a full-time business whilst making sweet, sweet, daily love to your partner and running the local soup kitchen and volunteering to lead this year’s day camp at the YMCA. You can’t. This doesn’t make you a failure or a fraud. Just a human.

Get rid of the first thing you think of when I ask, ‘What needs to go?’ without guilt. (Really. Ditch it. Someone, somewhere will take money for doing it.)

Express yourself. No, really, I mean it — and we’re not talking about putting more photos on Instagram.

Self-expression is a form of wealth.

The more you stifle, tamp down, or alter your creative spirit in the name of fitting in, getting by, or earning dollars, the more likely you are to end up hating this endeavor you call a business. Where can you let your voice out, into the world, with less censoring? Where can you embrace the awkward moment, share the gorgeous experience, or turn the way things are done upside down? Start there.

Finally, ritualize it. Calling all your energy back to you — and thus resuming the status quo, non-dashboard-blinking-mayhem that is your true nature — means letting things go. Expectations, fears, old ways of being.

I burned this painting. For a year, I had put layer after dark layer on it as I moved through relationship issues, depression, doubt, fear, anger, isolation, and general stuckness. The time came to let that go, and so I blessed the fire and threw the painting on top. It smoked for a second before flames ripped through the middle, and it felt like I had lost twenty pounds as it burned. There’s power in letting go with ritual. Officially, and with ceremony.

There’s no app for letting go, for reclaiming your energies, for shifting focus to be more true to who you are in the world.

But it’s worth doing. Worth pursuing.

Throw off the heavy stuff, and let the fire burn it all up.

(And when you’re done, you can eat s’mores. Which may or may not be the best part.)

P.S. For moving into the depths.

get your biz off the ground, make meaning

The ‘C’ word: community and your place in it

For a while, it was all about the food. Bear and I didn’t want to cook breakfast and we needed some eating establishment close by to remedy the problem. That’s how we ended up at Rich’s.

The first few times we went, we wondered how the place stays in business: paper plates, really? Ads on the tables, really? Color-coded booths and Good Morning America on the TV, really? We judged the crap out of the place, but as we still found ourselves hungry for breakfast each morning, we kept going.

The waitresses learned our daily order. They started bringing our drinks without asking. The hostess learned about what we do. The twin sisters who work there asked if we wanted to hang out sometime. The owner learned our faces and started making inappropriate jokes when he saw us.

At some point, the shift from ‘this is the place where we eat breakfast’ to ‘this is the place where we see people’ took place. As we found out, the restaurant stays in business because people feel as if they belong when they walk through the doors. It isn’t about the home fries or the toast. It’s about gathering together at the start of another day to say, simply by being present, that we are all in this together.

‘Community’ is the latest buzzword in business. Whether it’s called a tribe or a sisterhood; whether it’s a Facebook group or a breakfast club; whether it’s a one-time thing or an ongoing commitment — it’s cool to be a part of community at the moment.

I am ALL FOR community that’s built of mutual trust and love and respect and people coming together in amazing new ways.

I am, however, staunchly opposed to throwing thousands of people into a Facebook group and calling it a community. That’s…a clusterfuck.

Likewise, gathering everyone who has taken a class into a space — whether virtually or in person — doesn’t make a community. It takes a masterful teacher to create a space where everyone feels seen, loved, and safe. Keeping that space open, loving, and safe requires sustained energy. Online, it often takes more energy than in person, even though it’s easy to add ‘online community’ as a line item in your latest product offering.

Community takes time. It takes cultivation. And it takes trust.

I have to trust that you’re going to show up. I have to trust that you’ll contribute. I’ll wonder about you when you’re gone. I’ll think about you when you’re not around. That takes energy, and I have to trust that you’re worth it.

We don’t forge communities by virtue of simply being in the same place, whether in person or online. There’s a customer that the staff at Rich’s calls The Crypt Keeper. She speaks to no one, except to complain about the temperature of her food. She stares straight ahead and she doesn’t engage with another living soul. She couldn’t give two shits about all the other humans present.

That’s fine. Community is also consensual. It’s a contract we enter into: I’ll participate if you will. I’ll show up if you will. I’ll take care of you if you take care of me. We’ll make each other laugh. We’ll tell our stories. We’ll remind each other that we’re here for another day, even if this day happens to suck. We’ll spend our energies on one another.

That’s not at all the same as heaving people into a Facebook group and walking away. It’s not as simple as opening up a forum or a chat and letting people have at it.

Making community is a process, and often a sacred freaking journey.

Community isn’t a line item in a product’s list of features and benefits. It’s a sustained way of being with your fellow humans. Whether you facilitate community or simply participate in it, I urge you to quit those groups in which you can’t be fully present.

Take note of the places where you’re participating and the places where you’re leaning back to be sure you don’t miss anything, finger on the ‘Leave group’ button. If you can’t give yourself completely to the group, get out. You’ll do everyone a favor, and you’ll have more energy for the people you actually want to support as they do their work in the world.

P.S. What do you want to want?

deal with depression, make meaning

I weigh *** pounds (and other truths about working from home)

Let’s visit The Land of Brutal Honesty.

It’s a dark place, but a necessary one. In the land of brutal honesty, we’ve got to talk about the voices in your head that say terrible things.

Let’s hone in on my personal voice, since that’s the one most readily available to me at any given time.

My personal voice says I’m too fat to do __________, where any activity that fills in the blank has nothing to do with the size of my things.

Friend, here is actual dialogue heard coming from my brain in the past week:

“You weigh 182 pounds, you think you can write that!?” (For sure, the number on the scale affects my ability to make sentences. Don’t you know people who weigh less than 100 pounds make the best sentences? You. Break. Sen. tences, Kris-ten?)

“You’re so…fucking…fat. So fat. Soooooo fat.” (This one plays on loop when my brain is out of other ammo. Classy, eh?)

“You’re broke, you know. I mean, I know you think you’ve got money in the bank, but if you got cancer and got into a car accident and then your friends all refused to loan you money or help you out, you’d be screwed.” (Because if I got into a cancer-car-accident, my BANK ACCOUNT would be my first concern.)

“She’s really mad at you. She didn’t say she is, but SHE IS.” (Ah yes, thank you for the paranoia regarding that one friend who didn’t respond to a text message within a few hours. On Sunday. She couldn’t have been ignoring her phone — she must be plotting my imminent demise.)

“You should be farther along by now. Look at her, she’s got hundreds of thousands of adoring fans…what’s the matter with you?” (Shame me for not making progress by delaying my progress with these thoughts. Classic brain manipulation at work.)

Yah. My brain has a fucking lunatic voice inside it. Yours does, too.

Your brain says simple things to start, like:

“You’re not good enough.”
“You’re too _______.”
“That’ll never work.”

And on and on and on, until you’re worried about cancer-car-accident scenarios instead of writing your blog post or meeting with that new client.

Here’s the thing: you are good enough.

If you don’t do the work, no one else will.

No one else has the crazy-ass combination of talents, quirks, brain voices, challenges, and stories that live within you, so nobody else can do the work you do.

Even if you bag groceries at the Acme or sell soap door to door. No one can do it like you. You can sit around freaking out about how much soap the lead guy on your team is moving every day, or you can get out there and beat him at his own game.

You can keep freaking out because your thighs have cellulite, or you can ignore your thighs entirely while you do things like paint and sew and draw and raise babies and plan your next business moves while embracing the messy fullness of your life in this moment.

Your crazy voices will never go away. They’re what make you human.
But you don’t have to listen to them.

You can make progress despite the number on the scale, the number in your bank account, the number of followers you’ve got, or the number of clients on your calendar.

The numbers don’t have the final say. You do.

As for those voices in your head?

Ignore ’em. Change the tapes.
And acknowledge that we’ve all got ’em.
Sadly, you’re no more crazy than the rest of us.

::mwah::

P.S. Your brain is an asshole.

make meaning

It’s difficult because it matters.

We’re chatting and my coaching client is talking about how well things are going. She’s made significant changes to her business. It feels better, it’s growing, it’s no longer a source of disagreement in her marriage. We laugh, we make plans to talk again.

Before we hang up she says, “Wait, Kristen. I just need some encouragement.”

“Yah?”

“I feel like…

There’s way too much to learn…everyone else is doing it so well and I’m never gonna catch up.”

Ah. Yes. THAT. Welcome to the club.

There is SO much to learn — about everything, all the time. We have access to millions of classes at our fingertips. Where once we had to go to great effort to learn new stuff, now it’s practically beating down our doors.

Sorting through the available classes to figure out which ones are worth it is difficult.
Making the time to learn the things once we’ve decided to tackle them is difficult.
Learning the lessons no class can possibly prepare us for? You guessed it. Difficult.

It’s difficult because it matters.

We’re not talking about the pursuit of an extra ten bucks or getting a free milkshake from playing Monopoly at McDonald’s.

We’re talking about doing your work in the world.

It matters.

Your brain will bully you by telling you that everyone else is doing it better and that you should be further along by now.

Thing is, brains across the planet give EVERYONE that same line.

The ultra marathoner who’s tackled six races this year? Hasn’t broken the world record yet. (Clearly a loser.)

The new business owner who’s made 6 figures for the first time? Nowhere near seven. (Why bother?)

The poet who’s just won the National Book Award? It isn’t a Pulitzer. (The only prize that counts.)

Your brain won’t stop telling you everyone else is doing it better. EVER.

It won’t stop telling you that you need to catch up. EVER.

Your job is to keep doing the work.

To ignore the naysaying voices that pipe up when you’re tired, when you’re confused, when you’re unsure of your next step.

Keep. Doing. The. Work.

P.S. There’s amazing power in The Art of the Little Win. (And if that mean voice resonates with you, you’ve probably got some asshole brain going on.)