Your Courageous Life

It can be so easy to assume that we are the only ones struggling, the only ones who are trying to carve out a space for ourselves and then being met with challenges. While the voices that tell us that we are alone/the only one might not be the same as those that directly criticize us for not doing/being/having more, I think it all comes from the same place. At the end of the day, the internalized messages that we are not doing/being/having more are about separation–separating ourselves from others–and the messages about being alone, that other people’s outsides are an accurate reflection of their insides, are also about separation.

Wednesday, I had a rough day. It had been a rough couple of days, compounded in part because I’d thrown out my neck the week before and it kept aching and spasming and I was not really sure what was wrong or why it was not responding to ice, heat, aleve, etc. I had a doctor’s appointment scheduled but couldn’t get in until Thursday. Then I had a phone call that left me feeling drained and depleted and sad, and I noticed that the old story of not enoughness was starting to play in my head.

I decided to get out of the house.

Now, I don’t know what you need when you’re having a rough day, but I do know that there is one place that usually serves to lift my spirits a bit. Is it some kind of life coach cafe? Nope. Peet’s? Not since I gave up the sauce a few weeks ago. Zen center? Not at all.

It’s Anthropologie.

Now here’s the thing. Sometimes, the Anthropologie lust going round the internet gets on my nerves, because a.) their clothes are ridiculously expensive, and b.) they’re not better quality. A few years ago I was on this whole kick of “better to buy quality that lasts” and spent quite a pretty penny there, and have found that the things I get from Anthro aren’t necessarily better quality. Also, I tend to find it harder to pull of the complete Anthro hobo look without looking frumpy–there are only so many layers I can wear before I’ve officially added ten pounds to my (already curvy) frame.

But the thing is, Anthropologie is just total eye-candy. All the way. Without a doubt. The colors, the patterns, the textures…even with the stuff I know I’d never wear, there’s almost always something incredibly beautiful about it. And, of course, there’s always the off chance that on the sale rack there will be that perfect marked down sweater or dress. This dress was $30, snagged when I was aimlessly wandering around an Anthro store:

And I’m glad that it was only $30, because if I had paid more than that for a dress where I’m perpetually hiding my bra straps because the shoulder sleeves don’t stay in place, I’d be kinda annoyed.

But I digress: The point is that, of all places, Anthropologie–with its color and perky music and eye for design–hits my synapses in just the right way when I am feeling a little worn, a little world-weary, a little in need of inspiration and desiring a place to get out of the house before I go stir crazy. I have been known to go on one Anthropologie walking trip with one friend and then turn around and go on another walking trip with another friend.

On Wednesday, I headed over to Anthropologie because I felt acutely conscious that if I didn’t, I’d be not just visiting Funkytown, but taking up a residence. I should say that all of this is practice. It is practice to notice that I’m in a Funkytown funk that won’t go away just by ignoring it, and it’s practice to actually get my toosh out the door (and not do the self-critical thing: “Why can’t you just get over it?” or push myself to try and adopt some perky affirmation before I feel actually ready to do that).

Anthropologie helped, but I noticed I still felt a little down and it was then that I toddled into a nearby Paper Source (another good store for visual inspiration and uplift) and espyed a package of self-adhesive mustaches. Here is how The Brain reacted:

That would be fun.

You can’t get those.

What would be the point.

Waste of money.

But wouldn’t it be hilarious?

What if you bought them?

What if you walked around in them while you were still at the shops?

Do it.

Dude, you so have to do this.

DO IT!

You’ll feel like a total fool.

That’s not true–you actually don’t give a shit. It would just be silly to wear a mustache. Do it!

– And with that, a smile crossed my lips and I knew that I was on to something. I bought them and tried on the first, The Hollywood. I liked it. I hopped into my car and drove down the highway heading back home, and was laughing the whole time, feeling more rested and restored.

All of it practice–practice in noticing what I needed in a given moment. Practice in seeing resistance to that crop up and practice in diving in. I simply could not take myself seriously any longer.

Sometimes when I step into a space like that for myself, the resistance that crops up tells me that I’m being “fake,” that it’s “fake” to embrace happiness in this way. I try to just notice how that is another piece of separation, and that when I’m choosing to step into something, it usually doesn’t feel good right away. At first, it usually feels forced until I find my rhythm with it.

I’m curious to know–when you’ve had a challenging day, is there a particular place that you head to, or a particular store that you go to? I know another thing that I have liked doing in the past was gathering up my books on Italy and going to a tea shop and just drinking tea and reading about Italy, or practicing Italian. Maybe your thing is trashy magazines, the local outdoor jungle gym, or just packing a bag and getting the hell outta dodge. What’s your M.O. for shifting?

P.S. Registration is still ongoing for Across Mediums, which starts in two weeks!

When I was making the video for Across Mediums yesterday, I dug out art supplies that had been neatly tucked away, and as always was laughing at myself for completely and totally forgetting about what supplies were still there. I am the type of person who will walk around an art store for an hour, getting inspired, my check card burning a hole through my snazzy little purse as I lust over new pens and galkyd and tubes of paint and spackle and thinners and ephemera and papers and think, “I wish that I could get all of these supplies!”

And then at home, there are more than I know what to do with, half the time.

When I was working through the Across Mediums project solo a few years ago, I found that I connected with something elemental that I had not been using on a regular basis since childhood. Remember what it was like to just color on the floor? I could do that for hours. It was so entertaining to just be with myself. I noticed that when I first started Across Mediums, the voices telling me that I was not enough were much stronger than when I stopped doing the project a few months later. It had grown easier and easier to just dive in, not make too much out of what I had set out to do, and simply put pencil to page, glue to ephemera, pen to lined notebook, and go for it. I was not trying to make something, I was simply trying “to make.”

Yesterday I was thinking about the element of play, and how necessary it is even in our adult lives, and how hard it can feel, how challenging, to make time for it. Yet just five minutes of sketching can soothe. One of my favorite headache remedies is to go out and shoot pictures. It has cured more than one intense headache. Dancing to a good song can lift me out of a bad mood. Journaling can clarify my thoughts. I’ve been accused more than once of being too “in my head,” yet when I look around the truth is that I step out of my head and onto a page, into a room, into some music more often than not.

And MUSIC–I didn’t realize what a tool it was until I got an iPod a few years ago. I’d been wondering why everyone was so addicted to them (and finding it a wee bit pretentious, I confess) and then I got my first–a freebie when Andy bought a computer–and before I knew it, that thing was full. I loved being able to take any music with me anywhere, change it up to suit my mood, and easily play a song over and over (remember the days of having to rewind a tape to hear your favorite song?).

What I’m bringing to the Across Mediums e-course is that same sense of playtime, of just getting to dive in and get messy and not worry at all about technical ability. There’s really only one rule of sorts: get in there and do. Of course the voices about “not good enough” are going to come up. Of course. And yet, just get in there and draw on a page. Tear it up. Draw over it. Take a picture. Glue the picture face down. Whatever. I’m referring to the course as an experiment in radical creativity, because the point will simply be to create, not to get technical know-how (and to be clear, I’m certainly not bashing technical know-how or saying that skill is pointless! Of course it’s valuable–it’s just not the focus of this particular course).

I’m curious to know–how do you PLAY? I posed this question to the Courageous Year participants recently. How do you get out of your head? What songs do you dance to? Where do you go to sketch when the sight of your own same four walls are too much? Do you read trashy magazines over coffee? Find someone to take a power walk with? How do you PLAY?

Tonight I was chatting with McCabe and she related that in a class she’d taken, a teacher had told the class: “This class is going to bring up all your shit, and it’s going to be the best thing that has ever happened to you.”

Or something like that, loosely paraphrased.

And I wanted to get that printed on t-shirts, because when I’ve got my “shit” coming up, I generally don’t think that it’s the best thing that has ever happened to me. I get really attached to the way I want it to be, and that way is always the easy way. I mean, I can almost hear myself whining as I type this. Why can’t it be eaaaaaassssyyyyy?

But quite frequently life brings up all of our shit, and it’s the best thing that ever happens to any of us.

And then after this I was sitting on the couch eating brown rice and wild rice with steamed green beens (because, if you must know, between reading Fast Food Nation and seeing the movie version and seeing Super Size Me and watching Food, Inc., it just is not sitting right for me to eat processed food anymore, from an environmental, ethical, health and human rights perspective, which is going to be a serious killjoy for me when I want to sit down for my Tuesday night ritual and watch The Biggest Loser while eating a Frosty from Wendy’s, and I don’t have any plan for how I’m going to shift this but green beans and brown rice are a start, and they were quite tasty…) and I was eating dinner and watching How to Cook Your Life, a documentary about Ed Espe Brown, writer of the Tassajara Bread Book and Zen practitioner. I was staying at Green Gulch Zen Center on a retreat a few years ago and had the good fortune of having some of his bread because he happened to be there at the same time.

And oh my god this is good bread.

I still remember this bread.

But I was watching this documentary tonight and there were shots of Green Gulch and I was remembering my time there. And then Ed Brown starts talking about how life brings up all of our shit (only he of course didn’t say “shit”), how cooking can be like a metaphor for life in so many ways. Cooking = timing, patience, our morals and values around affluence, care, tenderness, practice, integrating the body, being present to what is before us. Cooking, as he explains it, brings up all of our desires to enforce our will, to overthink it, to control, to run up against discouragement when things go wrong.

Because things will go “wrong.” And I’m constantly forgetting that and re-remembering. Things will go “wrong.” Life is going to edge up against me all over the place, against all of us, and it’s going to be uncomfortable as hell.

It’s only our stories that tell us that there’s something “wrong” with discomfort that make discomfort so…discomforting.

And I’m the weirdo, I guess, because I like watching documentaries where people chop vegetables and liken that to life.

In this documentary, every story and every sentence was phrased with carefulness, and yet I couldn’t help but think that what Ed Brown says and what McCabe’s teacher once said are basically the same.

So I’ll rephrase it a bit:

“Life is going to bring up all of your shit, and it’s going to be the best thing that has ever happened to you.”

I love it.

So raise your hand if you’re someone who…

*  hoards art supplies, telling herself that she’ll use them (and then somehow that doesn’t happen).

* secretly longs to quit your day job and spend long days sketching or painting or collaging at a studio desk

* gets totally inspired when she buys the canvas at the art store, then feels paralyzed with fear or resistance when it’s time to sit down.

* someone who makes the first brush or pen stroke, sighs and thinks, “That sucks,” maybe gives it another few minutes and then gives up.

* would love to do something creative, but doesn’t have the time or money to go to art school

* would love to do something creative, but doesn’t want to have people critique her work–why can’t it just be fun?

* would love to create lots of artwork, but what would one do with it once it’s finished?

* promises herself that this time, she’ll finish that sketchbook and yet…yet…yet…

A few years ago, I was really inspired by an exhibition I saw at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was a retrospective of the artist Joseph Cornell, who did a lot of collage art and 3-D work. He was a self-taught artist. What struck me moreso than his finished pieces were these glass cabinet islands in the middle of the room that documented his planning process. This man collected clippings, and bits and baubles, and sketched the bits and baubles, and brainstormed, and made notes, and wrote about objects…he did all of this work before he even began the piece itself. Through these glass cases, I had a window into how much pre-work he did before he got to the actual work, and it struck me that this was one way to let go of how “precious” art can be–you know, that feeling of “I can’t fuck it up” and “well, what’s the point? It’s not like I’m going to make money off of this anyway.”

That feeling.

I was also really struck by how he worked across mediums–with painting, sketching, collage, photography, even incorporating math and physics in the sense that some of his pieces were made into clocks or mazes for a silver ball to wind through. What experimentation! What a melding of sculpture and portrait and color and image!

So I went home and started something that year–a project called Across Mediums. I brainstormed some themes and then each week I sat down and did pre-planning for that theme in which I wrote, brainstormed, etc. Then I tried to use that theme across different mediums like photography, painting, sketching, and writing. So if my theme for the week was “birds,” I would brainstorm all of my associations, then I’d write about birds in either a non-fiction or fiction piece, I’d try to photograph birds, I’d sketch birds, I’d paint birds. I found that this process did two really great things:

1.) By the time I had experimented with the subject in so many ways, I was producing better work than if I’d simply tried a bunch of stabs at it, again and again;

and

2.) I was really, really unattached to the final product, because I’d put so much time into process.

It was a really helpful process for me in doing creative, visual art.

On New Year’s Day, I woke up thinking about the Across Mediums work that I had done, and felt this sudden flash of inspiration: turn it into an e-course, a space to dive in, get inspired, shake up the artistic process, be completely unattached to outcome. In the past few weeks, I’ve been fleshing out what I actually did with my own Across Mediums process to make it more detailed and specific and e-course friendly, and I’m excited to announce that next week, I’m going to open registration for Across Mediums, which will start in mid-February!

The course will be two weeks long–fourteen days straight–and ideal for someone who is going to put in 20 minutes each day for those days. Each and every day will have a new opportunity for you to do more across several different modes of creativity (painting, 3-D, photography, sketching) on a particular theme.

By the end of the process, participants will emerge having had some fun with what they were doing, actually using those art supplies (!), and the best part is that the course will guide you to a place of just letting go with art-making and not worrying about outcome. It will present a series of challenging twists and turns–not artistically, but mentally–for you to experiment with and see what happens. It’s also a great way to connect with other people who like to play with art-making from around the world.

The course will be $35 and registration will be very limited, so if you are interested in joining, add yourself to the spam-free announcement list on this page so that you’ll be notified when registration has opened.

The Courageous Year started on Monday, though I opened it up for logging in as early as Saturday. WOW. What unexpected pleasures, what surprising challenges. I know that there’s a lot of talk among all of us who are doing e-courses as to what we use to cobble everything together, so I thought I’d share a bit about my experience with one particular content management system, Expression Engine.

As Andy was coding the backend for The Courageous Year, we were frequently needing to post to the support forums at EE to get advice on how to have them tweaked. Sometimes, the responses were helpful. Other times…not as much. I had an experience of posting to one forum to try and get help where a moderator was a little brusque with me, and that didn’t feel great. Yet I stuck with EE because a.) all of that work had already been put into developing the site, and b.) there just really isn’t a lot of great software out there that supports what many of us are trying to do with e-courses–integrating together a way to post exercises/lessons, give participants a way to connect with one another (via forums, usually), and have a login process of some sort. I’m aware of Ning, and don’t have anything in particular against it, except that they charge $25 a month if you want to skin your own site and not have ads everywhere, and even then one would still need to find/pay a developer for some good coding work.

What has been most frustrating about EE is that the things that “mess up” with this system are just such standard, easy things. For instance, when I post a weblog entry, there’s an option to have a new forum topic appear that is linked to that entry. Fantastic. Problem? If I post-date that entry because I want it to go live next week instead of immediately, the entry will wait to post on the correct date, but the forum thread posts immediately. I can’t figure out how to change it. I posted to the support area about this issue. No response so far, other than one user saying that they weren’t sure it could be done. And why not? It just seems like such bad form within the software itself–why allow me the capability to post-date an entry and then make the forum topic go live immediately, instead of synching with the entry? If I’m post-dating an entry and associating a forum topic with that particular entry, wouldn’t it make intuitive sense that the user wants the forum topic to post when the entry posts? The end result is that I am unable to set something to post and leave it alone, trusting that it will simply execute itself. Instead, if I want a forum topic to coincide with the entry, I need to login each and every morning to get that topic started.

What was most frustrating about EE was that the glitch that showed up prevented a smooth username/password process for some participants. I tested out this process myself (before we went “live” with the site) by doing a fake registration, and things worked just fine, so I typed up the instructions and had them ready to go. It is a pretty standard procedure–registering a username and password, getting a confirmation email, clicking the link in the email and then being able to login. Yet some participants did not receive that confirmation email, so they were waiting for it to come through and never seeing it (not even in their SPAM folders) which meant that I needed to keep logging into the backend to “activate pending members.” How can something so simple be messed up? I had already done things like check to see if only certain people were being affected–i.e., if only Yahoo or Gmail users were being affected. Nope, that wasn’t the issue. Granted, everyone was able to get in because I would activate their usernames and passwords on my end, but if a system is supposed to be self-generating, I think it needs to actually work.

And again, the response from EE was not as quick as I would have liked for paid software. If I were using free open source software, where the support boards are staffed by volunteers who believe in the software, I’d expect to wait several days, maybe even a week to get help. But when I purchased a site license and commerical license, I believe that it’s out of line that I would need to go back into the support forums and nudge my topic to the top of the list so that it will be addressed rather than seemingly forgotten or overlooked. When I noticed that response time was slow before the Christmas holidays, I thought, “Well, it’s the holidays, this happens.” Unfortunately, I just went back into the system today, January 20th, and nudged an unanswered question to the top of the support forums list.

The last thing I’ll speak to in my review of whether or not EE is a good option for e-courses is the layout used in the backend to input entries. Entering a weblog entry on EE is ugly, offers few formatting options and even those are ridiculously basic, and the “preview” mode does not actually work to show me a realistic preview of what my entry will look like, with the CSS formatting. All “preview” mode does is show me a list of the text I entered, completely unformatted and without proper paragraph breaks or even the correct text size as determined by the CSS file that I created. Perhaps unfairly, I’m comparing my experience with EE to an experience such as using WordPress for uploading a new journal entry–WordPress is like poetry. Smooth, clean, easy, intuitive in its layout, with a simple control panel, the option to flip between a Visual/WYSWYG editor or a coding, HTML editor, and the preview function actually shows me what my formatted and complete entry will look like.

Again, this type of thing strikes me as a simple feature that EE could easily build into their site to make it cleaner looking and more functional (I call it “not functional” when, if I hit “preview,” I simply see a jumble of text. Of course if I hit “preview” I want to “preview” what the *actual* entry is going to look like, formatted and ready to go!).

Here is what I will say has been positive about Expression Engine: For one thing, it is really nice not to cobble together the e-course in a piecemeal fashion. Many e-courses are pulling forum capabilities from one place, developing entries from another place, and then use a .htaccess system (easily hackable) to password protect the course for users. Expression Engine is streamlined and an all-in-one package on the USER end. My concerns with it as described in this entry have mostly to do with my backend experience, not with what the people using the e-course are seeing. So if someone is pulling together an e-course or in need of a content management system and they are willing to put up with the limitations I describe above, they could do so knowing that their users would not necessarily be affected.

I also really like that the forums setup is pretty clean and the individual member walls can be customized so that the user can input a lot of information about themselves that personalizes their experience, search for all posts by a particular user, etc. The forum navigation is also cleaner and easier to “see” than my experience when using Ning. I have not had any issues integrating videos into the e-course through embedding code, and theoretically, if all works as it is supposed to, opening another level of The Courageous Year or even taking on a new round of participants will be very simple–instead of re-creating the entire thing, I’ll need only to create a new “module” and then assign new members to that new “module” so that members from one group don’t see what another group is doing, and vice-versa. From an e-course standpoint, this is a helpful thing!

Then again, I haven’t yet gotten to working out those modules yet, so I confess I feel a bit of a hesitance to assume that it’s all going to work as smoothly as I’m thinking it should…there might be some intense backend coding work to do to get a new module ready for new users.

And can I just give a shout out to the wonderful participants who were really patient if they ran into any snafus? Thank you thank you.

Three days in and things are executing as they should, people are interacting, and the fun is beginning.

Poppy

This past week would have already been one of exhilaration–finishing up the entries for The Courageous Year, tweaking the backend, processing last minute registrations, the whole bit. It has been so exciting and great and the days have been passing SO FAST. Like, each day I wake up and think, “Great. I have this whole day ahead of me to get so much done. Let’s get to it!”

Then the day is gone and I’m going, “Wait…where did it go?”

Then I got an email on Thursday that made time seem to pass achingly slow.

When we were house-sitting this past summer and into the fall, I fell head over heels in love with a kitty that was not mine. I cannot recall having this kind of attachment to an animal. I would feel a little thrill of happiness when my key hit the door, each time I came home. I’d head over to her right after putting down my bag. I found pretty much every single thing she did to be utterly adorable, whether it was the little pissy grunts she’d give when she wanted more food and I wouldn’t give it to her (they’re like a little “puff” of a meow, a kitty grunt), to the way she’d sometimes lay on her back, to the way she tried to fit herself into this box:

The owner brought up the possibility of us adopting Poppy because she and her husband want to do more traveling and didn’t want to get house-sitters every time. But right before we were finalizing that possibility, the owner realized that she wasn’t ready to give Poppy up. She’d had Poppy since kittenhood and wanted to see her to the end. This was really, really hard news for me to hear but I understood it–Poppy is this wonderful, wonderful kitty. I adore her. I can only imagine that if I’d owned her for eleven or twelve years, I’d adore her even more!

We tried adopting another cat, and that did not work out.  I knew that I wanted a pet because I had valued that experience of being attached to Poppy so very much, yet after the stress of caring for Buddha, I felt really hesitant. Besides, I just still missed my widdle Poppers. During the whole first week after we had moved out of the house-sit, I started crying when I would talk about her with Andy.

And yes, this felt a little nuts and vaguely pathetic. I mean…it’s a cat.

Right?

So we were taking things slow and talking adoption but wanting to make sure that we got a cat who had been fostered so that we’d be familiar with its behavior beforehand, and we’d put a few adoption applications out there to see if there were any matches.

Then the owner emailed me on Thursday. If we were still interested, we could adopt Poppy!

I think I screamed. Then I cried. Then I called Andy and screamed and cried into his voicemail. And thus commenced with the very sloooooooow passage of time, where it was very very very hard for me to be in the “now” when Sunday at 2:30 PM was looming and I’d be able to adopt Poppy again.

As I type this, she is sleeping on the coaching chair in my office. Despite the stress of the change in housing, her personality is exactly the same. She likes to be petted in all of the same places and she is just as adorable. She hides under the bed to get a bit of privacy and then comes out every few hours to be social, then I guess decides that she needs a bit more space and goes back to hide under the bed.

I cannot tell you how oddly, wonderfully “complete” this house feels with Poppy here.

She was absolutely, completely and totally worth waiting for.

Who are your pets? What are they like? Anyone else “get” this animal connection thing?

Polaroid, Oakland Chinatown. December 2009.

I feel in this moment very much the way I remember feeling in school, right before the teacher said “You may now pick up your pencils and begin the exam,” or in gym class when the teacher was lining us up for a race: “Ready…set…go!”

Also, very much the way I have felt before leaving for international trips; time seems stretchy and weird and I feel wired even without the help of caffeine (which I have been successfully avoiding in the past week, by the way–finally feeling that my latte habit was going into overdrive).

The first level of The Courageous Year begins officially on Monday, but the participants will start using the site this weekend. I am trying to really s-l-o-w down and savor this moment right before something I’ve been working on for months begins. Ever notice how easy it is to work towards something and then when it arrives, it’s just done and over and then your mind is off to “What’s the next thing?” I am a do-er, a mover, a shaker, a project person, and without some due consciousness, I can totally be off to “What’s the next thing?” in a split second.

So I’m trying to really just be in the split seconds, in the moments in-between. I’m trying to really just sink into my life more. Be there when I’m there. No rush anything to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.

What about you? What do you do/where do you go when, in life, you want to slow down and be completely awake to whatever is right before you?

P.S. I can tell when comparing the number of registrants I have recorded versus how many people I see signed up for the Participants only mailing list that some Participants are not signed up for that announcement list–which is what I’ll use to help you log in to the site! If you are doing The Courageous Year and haven’t already signed up for the Participants-only mailing list (a separate list than the announcement list used in general here on Your Courageous Life), please check your Welcome Packet for information on how to get on that Participants mailing list and get the info you need!

San Francisco sidewalk.

Like so many others, I heard the news about the earthquake in Haiti and carried it with a heavy heart. It is such, such unimaginable sadness, and of course living in California, where the threat of earthquakes is always in the background, there’s a lot of resonance with this issue.

But what I have been thinking about this week, is how this situation can be a call to action for myself, and how much I wish it would be a call to action for society as a whole to do more than just react to emergencies.

I was thinking this week about how it is that a person walking down the street with no health insurance who falls down and gets injured would be denied care by a hospital if it wasn’t life-threatening, but that same person with the same injury would be given care if that injury were related to an earthquake. I was thinking about how food and medical supplies are so badly needed by so many countries, and on a daily basis we as a society are allowing people in many countries to go without clean drinking water, but as soon as an earthquake hits, then we’re willing to start talking about problems relating to clean water infrastructure in Haiti.

Why do we, as a society, wait?

I was listening to a public radio broadcast in which someone being interviewed shared that–sadly–most Haitians are so used to having lack of access to good drinking water that they “already know” how to test for water, that they need to use water filtration systems, etc. So basically, lack of access to clean drinking water is already a struggle–a struggle that is so direly, horribly intensified by the earthquake.

So why do we, as a society, wait? We know these things are happening. We know that people are suffering. Where is the call to action–and I don’t mean this as a guilt thing for you, reading this, so much as I ask this question of our entire social system. When will it be worth it to us to invest in certain societal structures like education and clean water and telecommunications and transportation so that when disaster strikes, it’s not hitting people quite so hard?

And here’s why I think it’s so important to invest as a society–because since there’s a great infrastructure in the U.S. for clean water, power lines, natural gas, communications technology, port development, and transportation, I don’t worry about earthquakes in California.

Can we see the full luxury of that? I live in a state that is, without a doubt, going to experience a massive earthquake at some point within the next twenty years, and I’m not worried about it. Why not?

If an earthquake happens in California, I have a reasonable assurance that I will be able to find shelter and food and water. I have access to money that has allowed me to procure enough food and water to last myself and my partner for at least a week (plus emergency blankets and batteries and a flashlight and an inflatable mattress and sleeping bags…), and it’s stockpiled in our storage unit behind the house. I’m recalling that we spent approximately $150 on assorted non-perishables and canned goods–and I can’t even remember how much the other things like the battery-free flashlight and sleeping bags cost–and the average income of a Haitian per year is $270!

What luxury that, because of the solid infrastructure and the support of so many systems coming together, that I am able to spend almost as much as someone from Haiti makes in a year on food that I can just have sitting around “in case of emergency.”

What I’m asking myself in the wake of Haiti is how much more I can do to invest in permanent infrastructure and systems that work within a society. It is one thing to donate money during times of crisis–and that money is so needed, and I am so grateful that you have given anything, whether it is your dollars or your prayers. Yet I can’t stop asking myself where all of us can come together with a collective voice to say that it is not okay that people who are already living in poverty only get the help they need when hit with the direst of circumstances. Even from an economic standpoint, wouldn’t it make more sense to invest in a good system beforehand than try to clean up the mess? According to websites like water.org, a U.S. investment of 11 Billion per year in solid water infrastructures could reap 84 Billion in profit returns (and, might I add, do quite a lot to convince the world community that despite our reputation as a bully, we actually do care about collaboration).

We spend millions or billions of dollars per year on singers and songwriters who sing about love; love for each other, love for the world. We do the same with movies that have a theme of “love triumphs all” in the end. And what love are we, as a society, showing for society on a regular basis? The songs and happy endings are nice–and in the meantime, what’s our call to action? What if, for just one weekend, we didn’t spend all of that money on a movie and that money went, instead, to something else? Would it be okay with us, as a society, if “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel” did not earn $178,451,165.00 at the box office, and that money went somewhere else?

I cannot say enough that this is not a post to chastise anyone else–this is what I’ve been thinking about these past few days. I’ve been asking myself how much more I can do, and how much more aware I can be. I don’t consider myself to be “outside” of this problem–after all, I do all kinds of things that are technically not the “best” for our society, such as buy my toothpaste from corporations like Target or drive a car that uses regular gasoline.

I don’t have answers right now, not for myself or for anyone else. Well, perhaps one–that it really no longer seems okay to me to go on waiting, whether that’s waiting for the “right” solution to appear or waiting for something else. No more waiting. No more hesitating. Time to act, try things out, see what works and what doesn’t, and above all else, to continue to affirm my gratitude for all of the luxury I do have as well as affirming that there are solutions available to us if we will simply work together and insist on a world where solutions, rather than crisis-management, is our priority.

So it is the end of the day  and my first thought when I sat down to write was something like, “Jeez Louise, I did not get anything done today!”

Then I remembered my new thing that I’m doing. I would like to share with you my new thing–are you ready? My new thing is: at the end of the day, I am writing down what I actually did accomplish. I am doing this because otherwise I do things like think, “I did not get anything done today!” and then that feels really defeating. I’m approaching it all backwards (hopefully not “ass backwards”) and find that it gets much easier to do that than to think about what I had intended to do today and did not get done. Also, it is a lovely opportunity to confront my Story that I am valuable if I “do” things rather than embracing a story that I have value simply by “who I be.”

Things that I intended to do today that did not quite happen:

* make videos for e-course

* finish PDFs for e-course

* pick up the house

* make time for process work/my personal coaching tools

I was pretty attached to getting those things done. What actually happened?

* returned something to a store that is located a half-hour away (man, that needed to happen; I was getting sick of looking at it sitting next to the door).

* played “Buzzer” by Dar Williams over and over in the car and mulled over what I want to do with it to turn it into a video (we’ll call this a creative brainstorming meeting among the CEO/CFO/VIP/boss lady of Your Courageous Life–me–and the Creative Director–also me).

* answered a whole lotta emails.

* wrote design ideas for my next tattoo on my arm with a Micron pen to test things out.

* indulged in some diversions by Facebook when my mere mention of cowboy boots prompted some interesting comments.

* navigated my way through a maze of options for recording my interview with the Cafe Gratitude peeps on Thursday and finally found something that should work in terms of price, functionality, and quality. So hopefully now I’m set for that interview, though it did kill an hour at the store (would you believe I went to the store without the camera and then had to run back home and get it to make sure I was buying compatible cards, etc.? Would you believe it? Could you?).

* had sessions with two clients.

I have some time before Andy gets home and we indulge in a date night, some Biggest Loser fun, and then working some of our relationship tools (this is far more fun than it sounds).

If you really knew me, you’d know that I would like to take one important thing off of the list of things I had intended to do today and switch them over to the “done” side of things, and if you really, really knew me, you’d know that the thing I have the most resistance towards doing is making space for the process work. Ugh (says Resistance). Getting clear with myself? Taking time to acknowledge and move through anger, sadness? Blecch (says Resistance)! Think of what I’m grateful for? Get in integrity with me? Acknowledge myself for the things I’m doing well? Fuggedaboutit (my Resistance also tries out thug accents).

Which means that you know what I’m going to get off of the computer and do right now–even though my office needs a pickup and the first thing I want to do is tell myself that I should do that first, or clean the rest of the house while the vacuum is out, or…

Yeah. I’m going to dive straight into the place where I have the most Resistance. Please don’t believe it’s “easy.” I just know I’m going to do it.

Is there anything you’ve been Resisting lately that you’d like to just own up to (perhaps in the comments?) and then get off of the information super highway and just dive right in?

The cover of the e-book. Click this image to download the PDF (3.1 megs; it will take about 2 minutes).

Wow! The past ten days have been interesting, to say the very least. When I first conceived of doing the Job Suckage Challenge the first ten days of January, it was with the thought that I’d likely be banked in Philadelphia with Andy’s family right after the new year, and I wanted to have something going on with the blog without feeling I had to be tied to the computer doing updates. So I set up the Stop the Job Suckage Challenge for those days, and then the Philadelphia plans ended up not happening, so in the most technical of senses, even though the e-course does not start until one week from today, and even though I had closed coaching client calls in order to accommodate this planned trip, last week was my first week of “work” from home.

And, I have to say, it was a good one. I like being my own boss lady.

One thing that is an adjustment for me–and I anticipated that it would be, because of what I’d noticed about myself whenever I did freelance work on breaks from teaching or when I took a semester off of teaching, before–is that there’s a lot of reframing of what “work” means when I am working from home. Basically, it is sometimes a little more difficult for me to get that fresh and clean “productive” feeling when the work feels like such fun.

As an English prof, I “knew” that I had worked because I had lead a class, or I had designed a lesson plan, or I had re-read an article and annotated it in preparation to discuss it with students. There was this whole list of activities that could be defined as “work” that would then be applied to a very specific context. And yes, many of them were fun, however, I was not passionate about a lot of them (I just don’t get excited about thesis statements and topic sentences…and many of my colleagues did, and could argue passionately about teaching methods that would best explain thesis statements and topic sentences, which was my #1 sign that while I was definitely dedicated to helping students and interacting with people, I was not cut out for long-term English teaching).

The “work” I did last week looked really different–most notably sketching/writing this e-book. My intent was not to actually write an e-book, it was to jot down ideas. I wanted to create an overarching page for the website in which I defined/clarified what I mean by “courageous living,” and then the pages sort of took on a mind of their own. I felt it was important to define this because sometimes, when I read self-help-ey types of websites, I cringe. I cringe at false promises of happiness (what I call “30 days to perfection” coaching); I cringe at the push to just believe it, and it will come  (“fairy dust” coaching); I cringe at boot camp drills (“I’m going to yell your ass into changing” coaching).

If you cringe at those things, too, we would probably be good friends. **

I actually really cringe at the word “coaching,” which brings me to a post I know I’ve been meaning to write for awhile, and it’s my whole thing about explaining what it is that I do. Thus, on my most recent business card, I didn’t even PUT the term “life coach” on it, simply because I do not like the term, which could be my own waste of $22 to print incomplete business cards, but hey–I’m on this kick where I’m doing a whole lot of things that don’t make any technical sense but if it feels right, I go with it.

I am thinking that it would probably be easier to “get” where I’m coming from with some of this if you checked out the e-book, first, so I’ll give you a bit of time to download that and review it and then come back here. It will take about 2 minutes to download and is a very, very fast read.

(Pause).

Okay, so back to the challenge of explaining what I do. It can be a challenge for the following reasons:

1.) People don’t know what a “life coach” even is.

2.) When people do know what a “life coach” is, they’ve generally heard jokes that make coaching sound like a total joke, or know someone who went to a school for a few months, go certified, and is now trying to help people go through extreme life crises for the same price per hour as someone who went and got a Ph.D. and did supervised clinical hours. I understand how that might look to people (though I don’t get why someone who went to school to be a therapist, theoretically a profession involving caring and compassion and ideas about respect for one another, would send me the nastiest email last year telling me that I was “dangerous”).

3.) People make fun of life coaches. Who wants to be part of a group that gets made fun of?

4.) In addition to coaching, I do paid portrait photography work and I write fiction (currently unpaid, though not without its moments). I also designed this website (oh yes, that was me, not the boyfriend!) and have had people inquire about getting help with creative direction on their sites, figuring out how to pull something that represents them, etc. and I get pretty excited by that idea, too. Bottom line? I am not totally comfortable with the idea of settling on just one thing when I am, frankly, inspired by and passionate about so much. Also, doing these different things helps balance the others out.

At the end of the day, I stick with the term “coaching” because choosing other words such as “consultant” don’t quite work (I think of a big corporate conglomerate when I hear that word, myself), and Havi has the corner on “habits educator.” Technically,  the State of California does allow me to legally call myself a “counselor,” but I hesitate to use that term because I work with people in other states where legally, the term “counselor” must be attributed to a license, and I don’t want to walk into that murky area of whether I can call myself a “counselor” while working with someone who lives in a state where I am not supposed to call myself that. And in the most technical of senses, I don’t know that what I do falls totally into “counseling,”  (often it feels more like holding space and helping people with “clarifying”) and there are so many different definitions of what that (counseling) even means, anyway.

Whew. Are you exhausted yet?

But for what it’s worth, I do give these things a lot of thought. (Also, for what it’s worth, my coaching/counseling education involved two years of training and lots of supervised counseling practice–not mail order exercise packets–and I use a sliding scale for rates).

So what am I getting at? Oh, yes–we were talking about how I define courageous living and why I felt it necessary to share it. I felt it necessary to share because I want my sincerity to be seen, and because when it hit me that it was totally okay to 1.) Feel the fear, 2.) Do it anyway, and 3.) This resulted in transformation, it was like WOWZA, A-ha, Kazam! Like, here’s this way of being that I can step into when I’m looking around and wondering what the hell to do next, and I’ve been doing it this whole time–now I can just do it consciously. And then, realizing that this was something that anyone could do, and that I could help people do it by holding space as they were going through their own process? That was huge for me.

I hope you enjoy the e-book and I look forward to spreading more goodness over the next few days, including plans to announce a new E-Course for the artists and creatives out there called “Across Mediums.” Registration for the course will be really limited, so if you’re interested in joining, you’ll want to register for the Announcement List (see left-hand side) as that’s where I’ll send out notice first explaining how to get involved.

Also to be announced soon–I will be in Italy again in October of this year and am arranging a retreat there! This retreat will be oriented completely and totally around pleasure–good food, good wine, good sleeps, good people. Space for this retreat will be limited to only ten people, so again, see the Announcement List if Italy is on your list of dream destinations.

** Yeah, sometimes when I step totally outside of myself and think about how it might look to you or someone else that I have been adopting “kate courageous” or the theme of courage, it occurs to me that this might seem like yet another chintzy marketing scheme. I stick with it because every time I do that internal check, what comes back for me is that I’m choosing to orient my life around something (courage) and it resonates with me and feels good to me. Thus, I keep on keeping on.

Wow. 

We’ve arrived at the final day.

You have determined your ideal day, noticed the qualities you’d like to implement in your life, brainstormed solutions, identified resistance, put yourself in integrity, used collaboration.

Tomorrow is Monday.

Maybe you are habitually afflicted with “a case of the Mondays.”

Like anything else, that is a choice…

Exercise #1: Whether you are shifting careers or still looking into your next move, make a timeline.

If you’re shifting careers entirely, make a timeline for how you will transition out and into what career. 

If you’re still experimenting with career options, make a timeline that notes all of the people you’ll talk to and steps you’ll take.

Put timeline dates into your 2010 calendar.

Exercise #2–the “I really do want to shift things litmus test”–share your timeline with someone who you know will gently keep you accountable. Set up a way to check in with them on at least a monthly basis to report your progress. They need not be your ruler…they’re just someone who will listen to what you say you’re going to do.

Exercise #3–the “There is no doubt in my mind that I don’t want to be stuck in a crummy job forever and I will take action rather than procrastinate test”–share your plans with lots of people, via email, via the internet, via the information super highway, and directly ask for their support.

Then, DO IT ANYWAY, regardless of whether or not they give it.

The journey of stopping the Job Suckage may not be over in only ten days. If you want continued support, consider signing up for the first ten weeks of The Courageous Year, where you’ll have the option of receiving additional support in making the changes you want to make. I also work with people one-on-one, starting with a free complimentary coaching session, to help you work through the transitional challenges that come with stepping into your dream career.

Finally, 

CONGRATULATIONS!

You made it to the end. It is a courageous act just to ask yourself some of these questions and consider the responses that come up.

What’s next? You decide. I support you in courageously stepping forward to live 100% fully alive in all areas of your life, including doing what you love as your livelihood.

* This ten-day series is designed to help you kickstart a new way of approaching your job or career. Over ten days, we’ll explore how to look objectively at the job/career situation you’re in, and clarify where to go next. For some, that might mean not leaving a job but drastically improving it in some meaningful way. For others, this series will provide some help with clarifying your next career move or pave the way to a transition. You’re strongly encouraged to complete all ten steps, in order, to see what answers you arrive at.

Today, mix it up and do the opposite of whatever you’ve been doing.

If you’ve been avoiding challenges, hop in there and get caught up. Take action. Go, now–do.

If you’ve been meeting each challenges, let things marinate. Relax. See what else comes up when you create space around this issue.

And, please do report anything you’ve noticed as you’ve come along on this series, in the comments below! I look forward to hearing how it’s been going.

* This ten-day series is designed to help you kickstart a new way of approaching your job or career. Over ten days, we’ll explore how to look objectively at the job/career situation you’re in, and clarify where to go next. For some, that might mean not leaving a job but drastically improving it in some meaningful way. For others, this series will provide some help with clarifying your next career move or pave the way to a transition. You’re strongly encouraged to complete all ten steps, in order, to see what answers you arrive at.

Day Eight: Collaborate

(Nice how all of that rhymes, huh?)

If you are still considering ideas for a career move, it’s time to collaborate. If you know the career you want to go into, it’s time to collaborate.

For those of you still considering–ask to interview people who are involved in lines of work that you might possibly be interested in. Ask what they love about what they do and what is a challenge. People like being interviewed, so you might be surprised by how many people are totally into this (also, people like it when you buy them a cup of coffee or send them a Peet’s card). Try to get a really real picture of their jobs. Don’t back away from asking tough questions. 

For those of you who know your line of work–ask to interview people in that line of work, and ask what things they  would do differently, or what mistakes they made that they’d do differently, and what they learned. Ask about things like unexpected costs. Ask if they have any job openings where you can intern for awhile. Take a risk.

I once thought that it would be a dream of mine to be a working fine artist. I had some solo shows at cafes and other local places. I learned by doing that it was not something that I ultimately wanted to do. I wish that I had asked more questions of someone in the business, beforehand. In case you’re thinking of becoming a fine artist, here’s my brief personal run-down: 

The Good:

Creativity, art, collaboration, the thrill of seeing your work hung, opening nights, attention, getting messy, people who love your work and tell you so.

The not as good:

Hanging a new show (physically demanding), finding storage space for art, the constant marketing, not making much money on a show given how many hours go into it…which leads to stressing about money.

I learned that I personally preferred to make art in my home rather than do shows. That’s just me. Another artist–someone who’s more invested and more passionate about art-making–might decide that all of my “not so goods” are worth it to her, and they have the perseverance to surmount those challenges.

Either way, isn’t it good to be advised of the challenges before jumping in?

So, who will you be contacting today?

* This ten-day series is designed to help you kickstart a new way of approaching your job or career. Over ten days, we’ll explore how to look objectively at the job/career situation you’re in, and clarify where to go next. For some, that might mean not leaving a job but drastically improving it in some meaningful way. For others, this series will provide some help with clarifying your next career move or pave the way to a transition. You’re strongly encouraged to complete all ten steps, in order, to see what answers you arrive at.

“I’m going along with all of this, but I still know that I don’t want to be in this line of work. Now what?”

First, let’s start with those of you who may not know what line of work you want to go into, and then we’ll get to those of you who know what you want to do and want to take the leap.

Please note that these are both super-involved topics, and I’m going to be aiming for brevity and directness.

If you’re not sure what other line of work you’d like to do–talk to your closest friends and ask them what line of work they would imagine you doing, knowing the kind of person that you are. I consider this far more effective than a college career counselor administering an aptitude test. I took those in college and none of them told me what feedback from my friends told me: that I wanted to call the shots, that I wanted to balance between working with people and flying solo, that I had an interest in problem-solving, that I wanted to incorporate creativity, that I get bored with repetitive tasks.

Who knew? Life coaching is a career where I get to “call the shots” by setting my own schedule and working for myself; I work with people one-on-one for their sessions but “fly solo” when I work by studying up on human relationships or working in my home office; it’s all about problem-solving (the kind that can actually be solved or reframed); I get to incorporate creativity all of the time through writing or website design or just having a schedule where I have time for that. And trust me, there is nothing boring or repetitive about it.

My friends never said “life coach” when I asked them what they saw me doing. They used the phrases above. Notice that no one suggested I go into sales.

What jobs are you drawn to? I didn’t know coaching existed as a career until I happened to read an email about it (passed along to me by a college career counselor). Everything in me said “YES!” when I read that description.

What careers have you heard of, where you thought, “THAT sounds so cool!”

I’ve worked with coaching clients before who described five seemingly unrelated creative things they wanted to do, and then followed that up with, “But there is no career that has all of that.”

Meanwhile, I was listening to that thinking, “Oh, she’s talking about becoming a Creative Director.”

The client thought the job didn’t exist. I knew such a position did exist.

And, as Yvonne Dutra-St.John of the Challenge Day organization is fond of saying when she describes how she ended up becoming a leader/co-founder/author: “The job for me didn’t exist yet. I created it.”

Those of you who are uncertain about your next move are in a great place. You get to experiment and try things out. You also get to choose whether you look at that as an unfair burden or as something exciting!

Now, for those of you who already know exactly what you want to do: How can you make that happen for you, part time? Etsy is everyone’s favorite for crafty selling.

Worried that you aren’t yet experienced enough to do what you want to do? Give it away for free. People tend to worry less about experience when it’s free. Worried you don’t have enough experience to work as a home organizational consultant in some capacity? Start consulting for free–organize your neighbor’s closet, note what you learn, and don’t charge a dime. Positive that you can’t book photoshoots because you didn’t go to school for photography? Do it for free.

Or if you know that it’s not possible to implement it part-time, how willing are you to start announcing to family, friends, loved ones that you intend to start __________ by [ this date ] ?

You have no idea what will come out of the woodwork. You might meet someone tomorrow who can hand you the opportunity to make the switch you want to make. That won’t happen if you keep quiet about it.

For every barrier that comes up, choose to take the approach that you will find the time, money, skills, or capability–the solution will present itself. Resistance will tell you that it’s got to be all or nothing, that you have to have it all figured out now (or five minutes ago). Resistance will tell you that if you can’t quit your job and do exactly what you want full time right now, it’s not worth it.

Okay, then–to what are you more committed? Resistance, or something bigger?

* This ten-day series is designed to help you kickstart a new way of approaching your job or career. Over ten days, we’ll explore how to look objectively at the job/career situation you’re in, and clarify where to go next. For some, that might mean not leaving a job but drastically improving it in some meaningful way. For others, this series will provide some help with clarifying your next career move or pave the way to a transition. You’re strongly encouraged to complete all ten steps, in order, to see what answers you arrive at.

Day Six–whew! 

You’ve looked at how to be in integrity (if you skipped the last post, it’s really important–pause, read, then come back here).

Now it’s time for action. Look at your list of possible solutions from days three and four.

Choose between 3-5 items (challenge yourself to go beyond that, even) and implement them.

Now.

Not tomorrow. Not next week.

Now.

It’s Wednesday. You can do this. You don’t have to do it perfectly. You don’t have to see the effects immediately. 

You don’t “have to” do anything–you GET to do this. Chances are good that if you are reading this, you are living in one of the lucky countries where changes such as, say, improving communication skills in the workplace or having a more balanced schedule are “luxury problems.” I don’t say that to guilt you; I say it to encourage you to take advantage of how fortunate you are. Use your power.

Get started.

Tomorrow we’ll address: “I’m going along with all of this, but I still don’t want to be in this line of work. Now what?”

* This ten-day series is designed to help you kickstart a new way of approaching your job or career. Over ten days, we’ll explore how to look objectively at the job/career situation you’re in, and clarify where to go next. For some, that might mean not leaving a job but drastically improving it in some meaningful way. For others, this series will provide some help with clarifying your next career move or pave the way to a transition. You’re strongly encouraged to complete all ten steps, in order, to see what answers you arrive at.

Whenever I used to go to my coach and complain about my previous job, he would ask me how I could effect some kind of change. I was a college teacher and, for instance, one thing I didn’t like was how I would cave in to students because I wanted them to like me. However, I didn’t like me when I used rigid, strict control to keep from being manipulated. I blamed the students a lot for why I didn’t like my job; I wanted to jump ship and quit.

My coach reminded me that I was in charge of whether I liked my job, and that liking myself/my job was tied closely to integrity, and that it’s not a good idea to leave any relationship (personal, friendship, or otherwise) without first “cleaning up your side” and getting fully in integrity.

So today, Day Five, we get into…INTEGRITY.

Integrity is: when your words and actions match, and they are in alignment with your values, beliefs, commitments and life vision.

I was not liking my job because I was out of integrity all over the place. I was complaining rather than doing (words and actions not matching; violation of my life vision–no one has a life vision that involves “complaining a lot”). I was setting up rules and breaking my own rules (more words and actions not matching, breaking commitments). When I was super-strict, I was enforcing rules in ways that were contrary to who I wanted to be in the classroom (contradiction of my values/beliefs). 

I could go on, but I think it’s obvious–I wanted to blame the students, talk about how awful they could be, blame their parents, blame society, blame budget cuts, blame violent neighborhoods, blame blame blame.

But really? I was in charge of bringing my best to the classroom, and it was really hard to do that when I was a.) out of integrity and b.) topping that with a whopping pile of blame to try and avoid owning my part in all of it.

So, it’s time for a tough question: Where in your current job/career are you out of integrity?

Looking at who/what you blame as the cause of unhappiness is an important place to start. There’s probably lots of juice there.

And, by the way–kudos to you for being willing to even consider looking at this, because it’s tough. Noticing where we’re out of integrity is really, really simple (as a step) yet really, really hard (to embrace).

Of all the steps I took, this was the most important. I knew that if I didn’t “clean up my side” and get into integrity before leaving that relationship, I’d just bring the same old patterns to my next job. I’d still abuse myself in the same ways, blame others in the same ways, and try not to own my own part.

A funny thing happened when I did get in integrity with myself around the guidelines I was setting up with students–when I clarified the message I wanted to send and then stuck to it, letting go of the worry that I wouldn’t be liked–students actually thanked me for being strict. They said things about how it kept them motivated. Even better? The occasional belligerent challenges I’d been subjected to when a student didn’t like it if I asked them to turn papers in on time disappeared–in fact, students said things to me when turning in something late, like, “Hey, I know I’m turning this in late, and I’m sorry about that…”

Once the students were no longer the source of blame, my Resistance/Ego/Inner Critic/Fearful Self shifted, and then spent some time blaming the administration, or society, or the curriculum. 

And one by one, looking at my part, getting into integrity with me, I slooowly dropped the resentment I had around my job. 

This didn’t mean that I chose to stay in that job (why, as some of you may have heard…I’m my own Boss Lady/CEO/CFO/VIP). I ultimately knew that teaching English was not quite the right line of work for me–and I discovered that when I even took the very powerful step of getting in integrity by totally creating a curriculum that I was excited about (rather than complain about the dull curriculum that I’d thought I was forced to work with) and then realized that at the end of it all, my heart was still called to something different.

Getting in integrity with your job–doing all that you can to bring the qualities you know you want in your life into your job, right here, right now, no waiting, no putting the onus on someone else to “fix it” or change it–this is BIG. It’s powerful. 

It’s not something you do because you want to stay in the same line of work–it’s something to undertake because it feels more powerful to live that way. It is THE thing that can shift any job, any relationship.

So–again with this question–what are you more committed to? Resistance, or stopping the Job Suckage, aka, getting into integrity, aka, getting fully into your life?

P.S. If you are still interested in signing up for The Courageous Year but you missed the January 1 deadline, I’m extending it to January 15th! If you are contemplating making big changes this year, this course will support you with that–with exercises, interviews, discussion forums, live conference calls, and who knows what more we’ll dream up? Sign up for the e-course today.

* This ten-day series is designed to help you kickstart a new way of approaching your job or career. Over ten days, we’ll explore how to look objectively at the job/career situation you’re in, and clarify where to go next. For some, that might mean not leaving a job but drastically improving it in some meaningful way. For others, this series will provide some help with clarifying your next career move or pave the way to a transition. You’re strongly encouraged to complete all ten steps, in order, to see what answers you arrive at.

Day Four: The “Can’ts.”

Perhaps you read yesterday’s post and decided that you “can’t” find any solutions to incorporating a particular quality into your current career/job.

Perhaps because there’s no time, no money, or because someone else won’t let you.

Yesterday I offered the example of bringing creativity into the workplace, and offered some example hypothetical solutions. One was to see if people from the office would be interested in getting together for a once a month art group.

Resistance–which is codename for that fear-based part of ourselves that doesn’t want to try anything new because it would be, ugh, hard–is going to say something about how that’s a lot of effort, and you don’t even like the people from work anyway, and no one else is creative, and they’re not creative the way you want them to be creative, and you don’t have a house where that could happen, and you’d feel stupid if you put it out there and no one responded, and…

Okay, cool. So Resistance has all of that come up. Now–what are you more committed to? Resistance, or stopping the Job Suckage?

If, right now, you’re more committed to Resistance, that’s okay. No need to cue the grand inquisitor. You’re not bad or wrong. You’re just at where you’re at.

If you read that and thought, “No, you don’t get it, I’m not committed to Resistance–I want to CHANGE,” then we circle right back to that list of brainstorming, and all of the myriad possible ways that life could get shaken up and look different because you were courageous enough to take a new step. 

Whatever Resistance comes up for you, accept it and then work through it. Beating down Resistance with happy affirmations does not work (you heard it here, first). Accepting that you have Resistance, that “Can’ts” come up, is part of the work. Courageously making a different choice is another part of the work.

What are you more committed to?

Maybe you’re overworked at your office and you want peace. Maybe you brainstormed solutions like, “Delegate work to someone else” because you were thinking of any possibility, but really, you can’t imagine that that will ever be a possibility–there are budget cuts, there is no one else who can take the work, etc.

Okay, fine–that might not ever happen. In what other ways can you bring peace to the workplace? Five minute meditation? Closing your eyes and breathing for thirty seconds?

Resistance is going to pop up and go–”But that’s not what I WANT, I want the kind of peace that comes from not having as much work; it won’t work for me to close my eyes and meditate, I NEED the solution to be that someone else takes this work off of my hands!”

Recognize that that is Resistance. Resistance is going to tell you that it’s all or nothing. Resistance is going to tell you that taking any step that is not THE SOLUTION is wrong.

So, to what are you more committed?

Review your list of brainstorming items. Put a star next to the ones that you most wish would happen. Put a checkmark next to the ones that you notice you are most Resistant to–the ones you believe are most impossible to have happen.

Challenge: start daydreaming about the changes you most wish would happen, working out possibilities like you’d move puzzle pieces around to see where things fit. Notice the Resistance that comes up.

* This ten-day series is designed to help you kickstart a new way of approaching your job or career. Over ten days, we’ll explore how to look objectively at the job/career situation you’re in, and clarify where to go next. For some, that might mean not leaving a job but drastically improving it in some meaningful way. For others, this series will provide some help with clarifying your next career move or pave the way to a transition. You’re strongly encouraged to complete all ten steps, in order, to see what answers you arrive at.

Badda-bing, Badda-boom! You have now…

1.) Written out your ideal day, from start to finish

2.) Identified the most important qualities of that ideal day.

(If you haven’t done these first two steps and want to see the previous days, click the “job suckage” category to the left of this entry)

Today, Day Three, it’s time to get pro-active.

Exercise: Brainstorm at least 3 different ways that each quality could some how be incorporated into your current job situation. Brainstorm solutions even if you think that they aren’t likely to happen (note: fire-bombing is not an option).

For instance, perhaps you work for a large corporate entity and you have identified that “creativity” is a quality to bring into your ideal day. Perhaps you are a receptionist, and the idea that you will ever be able to fulfill your longing to become a mixed-media artist while somehow sitting at that desk seems like it’s a total pipe dream. The goal with this exercise is to bring the quality of creativity into your current workspace, because bringing the qualities that are important to you into your current job will make the job seem just a smidge better. It empowers you to create the life you want, with the circumstances you’ve got–and that is Powerful with a big, phat-ass “P.”

Here are some possible brainstorms for such a hypothetical situation:

1.) make art on my lunch break

2.) organize people from work into a monthly art group

3.) carry around art in my wallet/purse/briefcase and look at it often

4.) creatively answer the phone–make it a game to see how many creative ways I can think of to make everyone I talk to feel really great as a result of talking to me

5.) create a piece of artwork, scan it, set it as my desktop screensaver.

Those are just a few random ideas for one quality–creativity. Brainstorm at least three ideas for each quality you’d like to bring into your current job/workplace. The value of how the small things add up is best explained in a quote I heard once. A CEO had turned around a failing company and people asked him how he did it. He replied, “It’s not that we did one thing, 100% better. We did 100 things, just 1% better.”

Lots of “1% betters” can add up to “100% better.”

Now why would you do this, if you know for absolute certain that you are in the WRONG JOB?

I encourage you to do this because this is the 100% fail-safe way to a.) test out whether the jobby-job is the real issue or the scapegoat issue for why life is not working, and b.) because it’s more powerful to make positive shifts even in situations you dislike than it is to wallow, and c.) because if you’re still in the WRONG JOB, theoretically you have not up and quit because you need to wait to do that…you need another job, or to build up your biz on the side, or for Obama to push universal health coverage through so that your kidlets won’t end up with untreated cases of rickets because you jumped ship from that employer HMO. And if you’re in the WRONG JOB for the next three months or year or whatever, why not make it a little more palatable? Why not build some character? Why wallow when there is possibility around every corner?

I’m kind of laughing at myself as I type this, because I absolutely know that when I started to do this work myself, I was all, “Are you kidding me?” It seemed like a colossal waste of time.

And now, on the other side of all of that, having taken these steps, I see how important it was that I acted with all of the integrity I could muster. I felt stronger and more powerful every time I made a choice to put my all into what I was doing. For someone having doubts, I’d ask–what would that feel like for you?

I’ll also add that tomorrow, I’m going to address the “Can’ts” that might have come up for some of you in response to this call for action.

Get started–no need to wait for the right time, the right MOOD, the right pencil, the right…just dive right in and brainstorm at least 3 solutions for each quality that you identified in the previous exercise. Left your qualities list at home? Lost it? The dog ate it? Start brainstorming just based on what you remember, and fill in the blanks later.

* This ten-day series is designed to help you kickstart a new way of approaching your job or career. Over ten days, we’ll explore how to look objectively at the job/career situation you’re in, and clarify where to go next. For some, that might mean not leaving a job but drastically improving it in some meaningful way. For others, this series will provide some help with clarifying your next career move or pave the way to a transition. You’re strongly encouraged to complete all ten steps, in order, to see what answers you arrive at.

Congrats, you’ve arrived at Day Two. If you haven’t already read and completed the exercise from Day One, head over there first and see what’s the what before reading further–yesterday’s practice builds on today’s practice.  Click the link on the left under Categories that says “job suckage.”

Okay–Day Two–so I’m sure many of you may have noticed that there is this thing we do in our modern day society where we get sucked into media advertising and think that if we had SomeThing or SomeThings, we’d be happy. Even though we “get” that it’s all a lie, a funny thing happens on the way to the Circus–we buy yet another book or pair of pretty shoes.

Media research has shown again and again that when we buy Things, we envision that the having of the Thing will confer upon us certain qualities that we associate with the Thing. Clothing is an easy example–branding is so obvious. What’s the branding of a store like The Gap compared to a store like Bebe? If you buy something from The Gap, you’re probably imagining that you’ll take on certain qualities such as looking streamlined and being comfortable. The clothing, of course, does not actually DO this–it’s just an idea we have. And if you get something from Bebe? You’re probably imagining how hot you’ll look. Yet again–it’s just an idea. The clothing does not automatically make you hot.

So we have tendencies to buy Things that are either ideas or image boosters. The book (ideas) and the pair of pretty shoes (image boosters) can be an excellent accompaniment to the ride, but they won’t get you as far as tapping into the qualities and going after the qualities rather than the stuff that we think will get us those qualities.

For example–I’ll just out myself here–I have been known to go through a particularly difficult stretch  in my life and then go out and get a new book, thinking that that’s what will help. That book might promise to organize my life in five easy steps, or teach me positive communication tools, or get me on a new enlightened path to meditation. I buy the book, then read part of the book, then my funk passes so maybe I don’t even finish the book.

It was never about the book.

I bought that book because of the qualities I decided it represented; I hoped that (perhaps by osmosis) I would have those qualities because I bought the book.

But–it was never about the book.

So yesterday you wrote about your ideal day, and part of that exercise was to write about how you felt throughout that day. That’s important, because for this next step I’d like you to review what you wrote and pick out ten qualities/feelings that stick out to you. Prioritize them if you feel so inclined, or organize them neatly in a binder (just don’t go out and buy a book on getting organized to complete this piece of the exercise…)

What does that have to do with stopping the job suckage?

Wait for it…wait for it… I have an idea that if you believe your job sucks, you’ve worked out all of the angles for why it sucks. We don’t need to spend more time there in the Suckage and arrive at those same answers. Looking at your ideal day and the qualities inherent within is part of turning things around at your current job, while you’re still there, or moving towards a new career path.

Tomorrow, I’ll connect these qualities very directly to the Job Suckage issue!

Stop the Job Suckage: Day One of Ten

* This ten-day series is designed to help you kickstart a new way of approaching your job or career. Over ten days, we’ll explore how to look objectively at the job/career situation you’re in, and clarify where to go next. For some, that might mean not leaving a job but drastically improving it in some meaningful way. For others, this series will provide some help with clarifying your next career move or pave the way to a transition. You’re strongly encouraged to complete all ten steps, in order, to see what answers you arrive at.

So, perhaps you have already decided that Your Job Sucks. As a human species, when we think something sucks, we tend to start noticing more and more of the suckage and less and less of what is actually working in our lives. To be fair, the suckage can feel like exactly that–something sucking the life out of you, slowly, via office politics, uninspiring work, threats of downsizing, budget cuts, an impossible workload.

So here’s where we’ll start with day one–what does a complete, whole, 100% fully alive day look like for you? When do you wake up? Where are you living? Who is living with you? What do you have for breakfast? How do you organize your time? How much time do you spend watching television or checking the internet? How much time do you spend with your kids, friends, partner? How do you feel when you wake up in the morning? What practices do you use to keep yourself grounded? At what time do you start and stop work each day? When are you eating meals? What does your house look like? Are you working from an outside office or an office in your home or for a local company or do you have no office at all–are you completely outdoors? How do you spend your leisure time in the evenings?

Exercise: Write down your ideal day, from start to finish. This would encompass a typical day of you living your ideal life with your ideal career and your ideal control over time and money. In particular, be sure to write not just what you DO with your day, but add in how you FEEL as you’re doing it. Are you feeling….alert, awake, peaceful, calm, inspired, overjoyed, passionate, excited, light, free, connected, authentic, joyful, creative…?

Don’t worry–I’m not going to ask you to burn sage and chant with this writing, but you will want to complete it before we get into Day Two!

P.S. Don’t worry about spelling or grammar. Keep your hand moving. Don’t worry about forming a perfect composition. Don’t wait for the right time, the right writing notebook, the right pen, the right computer. Hop in and see what happens.