For those of you who don’t track every damned thing I do, I’ve been a little busy lately addressing some…issues.

Or perhaps I should say, readdressing some issues, because two of these are whoppers that have been ongoing science projects: changing my relationship with money and getting down with my Actual Desires.

And readdressing these issues has brought back an old visitor ’round these parts—a little fella I like to call the Resistor, a shape-shifting, merciless motherf*cker whose sole purpose is to push back. Lovely, right?

I named him after a force Steven Pressfield describes in his battle guide for artists, The War of Art. Steven and his book have been much on my mind lately as I push back against the pushing back, or rather, he and it popped back into my brain when I sat down to write about the damned difficulty I’ve been having with writing lately. Because hey, the one thing I generally have little to no problem with is writing, so when that goes down, I know something’s up.

I reasonably sure that the last thing Mr. Pressfield would want is for me to turn him into a patron saint of anything, much less Procrastination (or would it be anti-procrastination?), but hey, he wrote the book on it, and then showed me the fateful kindness of stepping out of the mists to say hello, so tough. Tough. We’re at DEFCON 3, here, and as far as I’m concerned, that means I have license to do whatever it takes to beat the wave back. (Don’t worry, Steven—I’m not actually going to bother you; I’ll just, you know, light a candle and pray a little and stuff. From a respectful distance.)

So. Two things.

#1: Money is ass. I mean, it’s great, what it can do, but it’s ass, the way it gets abused. And my family graveyard is littered with the bodies of the Lousy with Money, in both senses of the phrase: they were either unbelievably good at acquiring it or terrible at disbursing it or both. A surprising number were both, which is doubly-super-awesome because then there is so much residual collateral damage after their deaths. Huzzah!

You grow up watching people who are either afraid of money or afraid of not having it and the chances that you’ll magically have a healthy relationship to the stuff are sucker’s odds. I’ve been outrageously fortunate in that, even without a lot of working at it, I’ve managed to have enough of the stuff to live comfortably my entire life. As my first shrink-slash-astrologer told me as part of a chart reading that I won on a bet*, while I have issues aplenty to keep me busy this planetary go-’round, money is not one of them.

Why, then, am I bothering to waste precious time, energy and (haha, irony pop-up!) money on correcting how I look at money? I don’t even have a next generation to fret about passing this along to; the buck** stops with me.

Plain and simply, I think it’s my job. I know it’s not anywhere in the “hire me” section, but the more I do all this personal excavating-type stuff, the more it feels like that’s what I’m here to do: excavate and illuminate. There will be no 1.34 children to benefit from my presto-change-o, but out of the few thousand people I reach via my various nefarious online activities, there may be one or two who will be spared some of the agony my family (most of whom I am estranged from because of money) and I have been through.

#2: 99% of the other shit I have left to deal with ties into #1. Those Actual Desires I mentioned above are so closely tied in with money, I feel very comfortable smooshing them together in one post and giving my Actual Desires short shrift here at the end. (Pause once more for the Irony Train to pass through.) After all, you can look over the whole almost-five years of this blog and find out-loud examples aplenty of me showing you my ghosties about being out there in a bigger arena. For Mistah Resistah, I’ll be explicit: it is my full intention to remove every goddamned obstacle between me and getting what is is I’m supposed to be doing, which I have identified in this here article as the twin tasks of EXACAVATING and ILLUMINATING, out to the widest right audience.

You’re already here; you know what it is that I do, and presumably, you’re getting something out of it or you’d just, you know, hightail it out of here to one of the million-billion other places available to go and do one of the million-billion other things you could do with your own precious, precious time.

And so, to you, fellow traveler, I ask the following: take in what you feel it is useful to take in, and spread what you feel needs spreading. As you most likely are, but all the same, this is the place where it serves to be explicit. Forward this piece, or the website address (that’s http://communicatrix.com), or re-post a chunk of it, or whatever. I’ve got 50 breathing down my neck and this Resistor cocksucker throwing up roadblocks and while I will do my best to grapple elegantly with both of them, I’m not too proud to ask for help.

You hear that, Resistor?

xxx
c

*Someday I will have to tell this full story, if I haven’t already. It may have violated every ethical shrink code in the book, but boy, was it effective.
**Again with the irony! Although admittedly, this is more of a pun. Shudder.

Image by oswaldo via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

I have a confession to make that some of you who are constantly chastising me about working too hard (*cough* ANGIE *cough*) may find difficult to believe: I am, at heart, a lazy sumbitch.

As I can hear the chorus of disbelieving protests rising up from behind (or is that in front of?) computer screens everywhere, let me add that I have confirmation on this from the most vaunted of sources and a new favorite obsession (what? you didn’t think lazy people could be obsessed?), the Enneagram. (Yeah, it feels woo-woo and squishy, but hey, I’ve got “virgo” in my tagline, and only there semi-ironically, after all.)

According to the Enneagram, or to various books and websites which explain it, I am a three, or a “three”, or a “3″, a.k.a. “the Achiever” or “the Succeeder,” depending on which source you’re referring to; for convenience’s sake, from here on in let’s go with “Achiever” and dispense with the quotation marks, as all the finger-motoring to the “shift” key gets tedious and Achievers have no time for tedium, as we are very busy with our achieving and/or succeeding. (Here is a fairly typical and good description of threes, if you can call the peculiar clutch of personality traits that define attention whores “good.” Sorry. Quotation marks.)

The deal with Achievers, as you know if you’ve clicked through and might surmise even if you haven’t, is that we work really, really hard…except when we don’t, and we curl up into small, apathetic balls of non-activity and go on week-long benders of The Tudors. Everyone on the Enneagram wheel defaults to some evil or lame behavior when confronted with some kind of adverse circumstances; for threes, the behavior is laziness and the trigger is stress. Which, as you might guess, kind of comes along with the territory of pushing for achievement, especially when the thought of not getting it means the removal of love. Good times!

Because it wouldn’t be a complete system without an equally strong shift in the opposite direction, if we push through the hard stuff and confront our fears, we blossom into the kind of thoughtful, fun, spotlight-sharing, “Goooooo, team!” types who—of COURSE—naturally attract the love and attention that motivates all of our baser behavior. And there are specific prescriptives for getting to this glorious place, all of which have to do with letting go, serving the greater good and not operating all by our lonesome. Which, again you might guess, is hard for us dig-me, loner, spotlight-hogging types.

I’ve committed myself to this personal growth stuff, though, and once you do, you’re basically all-in. What’s more, the Universe starts cooperating in weird ways you kind of wish it wouldn’t, like when it makes you blurt out loud on the Twitter that you’ll help mount a big unconference and then again when it makes you blurt out loud on a conference call that you will head up sponsorship opportunities, which means not only getting in touch with strangers, but asking them for money. Which you don’t get, but which will disappear into sandwiches, swag and sodas, which in turn will disappear with the attendees.

Many hard things have been done this year by me, but none so hard for me as helping in the way I did with PresentationCamp LA. I confess, I got into it (I thought) for purely selfish reasons: raising my visibility as a speaker, getting another chance to speak, and meeting Cliff Atkinson. Out of the three, I accomplished exactly one—meeting Cliff—because frankly, between the running around and the stressing myself out about whether I’d do a decent job at my new and horrible job WHICH I SIGNED UP FOR, I was too fried to actually present anything. Worse, even after I thought I’d made my peace with this at 5pm on the Friday before Saturday’s 8:15am call (Cliff and I met early to pick up more snacks), I flipped myself out even further and decided to put together a presentation on how to be funny. Because boy, nothing says “hilarious” like an exhausted speaker presenting material she put together in six hours and rehearsed exactly once.

At some point in the day, I let go of that lunatic notion completely and just tried to enjoy myself. And mostly, except for being tired, I did. Because everywhere I looked, I saw people having fun—real, unbridled, full-on, nerdly joy—because of what I, as one small part of a much bigger team, had put together. And baby, it felt great. Not b.s., fleeting-moment great, but deeply connected, awesome great. It was great just seeing it and soaking in it, but oh, no, that wasn’t enough for the big, bad Universe—it had to send wave after wave of incredibly nice people up to me afterward to thank me for my part in giving them a great day.

Okay, okay. I get it. It’s enough, for now.

One more small thing before I go, though. Because the Universe is such a meticulous motherfucker, it also has taken pains to point out to me various versions of “what if?”: what if I don’t do the hard stuff? What if I just do more and better of what I’ve been doing? What if I become outstanding at what I do? Won’t that be enough?

And no. No, a thousand times no. Not by half. I’ve had wave after wave of mirrors put in front of me, showing me slightly different flavors of Me of One Possible Future, and no. No, thanks. I literally recoil from them. Yes, that’s judging; I am also using the Remembrance to help me deal with that. I’ve seen possible ways, and now I know my way. I’m not sure where it leads to, ultimately, but I know that the other is the road to nowhere.

Onward. And excelsior!

And boy, wish me luck. Because like the song says, the going, she is never especially easy…

xxx
c

Image by eyeliam via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

I came across a couple of items recently about Jay Leno, which I particularly noted because (a) he’s a person who doesn’t typically blip across my news radar field, so twice in one week was a sit-up-and-take-notice red flag for this pattern-seeking monkey; and (b), one resonated with me rather deeply.

The first item was embedded in a conversation on the excellent Adam Carolla podcast, and confirmed what many before have said: like him or not, comedically-speaking, Jay Leno is a nice guy with his (gigantic) head screwed on right.

The second (whose source I cannot recall, but may also have been the Adam Carolla podcast, as I’m seriously obsessed with it these days) was something I’d not heard before but was not particularly surprising, either: that Jay Leno views his body primarily as a vehicle for carting around his brain. Which is to say he does not take exquisite care of of his body beyond the bare minimum of caloric intake and sleep, ergo (and this is my extrapolation/dialectic):

1. Having been hit with the psychic whammy of being kinda-sorta shoved to the sidelines of the only game he’s ever wanted to play…
2. at a stage in his chronological life when the physical plant under the best of circumstances is already breaking down…
3. he experienced some health issues which landed him in the hospital

It should be noted here that Leno himself has shrugged off the health issues as mere exhaustion, but the timing is interesting and frankly, there’s nothing mere about exhaustion, especially when it causes you to cancel stuff and head to the hospital in a highly uncharacteristic fashion.

Here’s the thing: I get it.

I mean, I’m nowhere near the level of a Jay Leno in terms of weight of the world on my back, or of work schedule, or of anything else (although my chin comes damned close). But I get the exhaustion thing and I get the body-being-a-brain-hod thing and I get the bifurcation of thinking and feeling. I am the person who cried for two years when she started doing the Relaxation Exercise in Method class, because—hello—you cannot start really moving a body you’ve been bottling stuff up in for 40 years without having some of the stuff leak out. Leaking happens under extraordinary circumstances, and for body-is-a-brain-hod types, moving the physical plant in certain specific ways is extraordinary. I also cried regularly and copiously during my initial six months of shiatsu bodywork therapy, and that wasn’t even me doing the actual moving.

I am the person who got by because she learned to tune things out, which probably had a lot to do with being raised by two people who also got by because they learned to tune things out. The longer I live, the more I think most of us get by most of the time by tuning things out, which is not always a bad thing—I don’t want pilots and firefighters and cops doing a lot of feeling at critical moments, and I think (haha) that they probably feel (haha) the same way. And that’s fine.

What’s not is me letting thinking become my default mode for dealing with everything. Just like FAST is not the only speed to do things at, THINK IT OUT, BITCH is not the only way to slog through a problem.

At a recent workshop I attended, I met many wonderful people and heard many inspiring stories and was treated to a few big surprises, but the greatest tool/takeaway/net-net I got was that maybe, just maybe, there was another way to get at that meaty nugget of Who I Am and What I’m Here For than making and executing another goddamn list. Maybe I could feel my way through it. Maybe I could look around at my environment and me moving through other environments and start taking note of what I was feeling when I felt the best. Danielle, the woman who led the workshop, shared the four feelings she’d identified for herself as ones that felt like True North—affluent (in all its various meanings), sexy, communion, playful—and suggested that we just start taking note of how we felt when we felt good: in various rooms of our homes, at various times of the day, with various people.

I’m sure there are a slew of exercises like this in all kinds of books that sit on my shelves right now, some of which I’ve likely read. Somehow, though, that was the evening when the message got through my thick skull: because I was ready, because the language she used was one I understood, because I’d paid to hear it.

But also, o, Irony Syrup on Obvious Pancakes, because I was exhausted. Sometimes, those of us prone to overthink need to be tuckered out enough to let things in.

I’ve started my list. I started it that night, in fact. There are feelings on it like “joy” and “safe” and “free”. It’s just a beginning, but I’m okay with that, too.

I will feel my way through this, I think…

xxx
c

Image by anvilon via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

As I’ve mentioned before—in 2006, if any of you were alive back then—there’s a frame in my bathroom that holds a magazine cover from the New Yorker with a picture of a glass half-full of what looks to be orange juice.

It’s from 1995—probably none of you were alive back then—so it’s faded now. The juice doesn’t look very appetizing, and the water spots and toothpaste splatters aren’t helping much, but for a few reasons, it’s not going anywhere soon.

The first is that the issue date is January 30, 1995. That’s the day my mother would have turned 59 had she not died the previous September, also on the 30th. The irony of that cover coming out on that day hit me like a wave of…well, orange juice. So there’s that.

The other more far-reaching (and less sentimental) reason is an ass-kicking one. Every time I look at that picture and actually see it, which may or may not be every time I need to actually see it, I think about time remaining and the choices I can make about what to do with it.

I can think about how I’m still stuck or about how I’ve managed to move forward.

I can think about the ways in which I suck or, on a good day, if I’m feeling a mite brave, the ways in which I might possibly be considered to be awesome.

I can think about what I don’t know yet or about all of the things I have the opportunity to learn.

You get the picture. (Ha ha.)

A fellow traveler and I had an impromptu conversation last week about being stuck and moving forward and how there’s that time in the soup when, on top of a lot of patience, you need a lot of faith and a lot of help to see that you might at some time in the future not be in the soup. We were in our own, individual soups at the same time for a while, and it appears that he has made his way out, had a nice rinse off and change of clothes, and is on his merry way. And I’m happy for his merriness, in no small part because it reminds me that at some point, after enough patience and faith and help, I, too, will be out of this particular soup. (And into another, no doubt, but hey, that’s a post for the Future Me to write.)

What’s interesting about this time in the soup is that it seems to have lasted longer than previous soup-times, and, possibly as a result of this, I find myself more willing to try some outrageous (for me) things to see my way up and out of it. Like, for example, announcing on the same site where I send potential clients that I am, in point of fact, in the soup. Which doesn’t exactly impair my ability to do for them, but does look a bit…inelegant.

And then there’s the stuff I talked about previously—the opening up both to myself and to others in a way I may have thought of as silly or weak or too woowoo even for me. (And which, to be honest, I still do sometimes—I’m just doing it anyway. Nyah nyah nyah.)

All this by way of saying the following: if you think change is easy, there’s a very good chance you’re not actually doing it. Remember adolescence? When your body did it for you? How that felt? Yeah. It’s like that, only this time you’re picking it.

Of course, being in pain doesn’t automatically mean you’re changing, either. You can feel horrible and not be doing a damned thing about it: how great is that?!

Fortunately, even the pain of changing doesn’t feel like pain all the time—at least, as I’ve experienced it. There are moments of peace and moments of ecstasy and moments of regular, garden-variety joy. Kind of like…life.

So from here, in the middle of Big Change (which includes the Change, which again, is a whole nuther story), being stuck is a lot like…life.

More notes as I have them…

xxx
c

Image by ahisgett via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

I’ve long joked that I have two settings: “full-bore” and “off.” Modulation and moderation, while lovely concepts, have always existed just outside of my grasp.

Okay—that’s crap. They’ve existed as concepts, period.

My own journals only reach as far back as freshman year of college—the ones extant, anyway—but still, you can map the signs of today’s all-or-nothing Colleen. The endless, earnest lists filled with things to purchase, in order to fulfill some very specific and lofty role I’d conceived for myself. The Big Plans and Serious Resolve which make their semi-annual appearance at the end of an old calendar year and the beginning of a new academic one. And then, of course, reboot after reboot mid-term, when something inevitably went awry.

I’ve learned my lesson about such foolishness as saying “never again!”—at least, I think I have. (See how I dodged that one? Progress!) I’ve definitely learned it in the area of relationships, where I was once foolish enough not only to literally utter the phrase “Well, I’m done!”, but to do it out loud, in front of a witness. Who, as I recall, actually took a step back from me.

I’ve also learned a fair number of tips and tricks about making work work. Accountability is a huge help, but the source must be frequently refreshed, because my modus operandi, honed by years of service as the child of parents with high expectations, is to choose stern taskmasters, then win them over with circus tricks and the old soft shoe. Doing the hardest (or most important) work in the hours I’m freshest is another big one, as is providing myself with the right space (quiet, usually, and fairly neat, and often private). And giving myself some time and room to putter, since puttering seems to release some sort of magical creative chemical in my brain.

What I’ve finally accepted that I suck at is figuring, as in “figuring out what I’ll want to do outside of the moment of commitment” and “figuring how much time it will take to do whatever I’ve committed to.” I’m coming around to the idea that contractor-type calculations— figure it out, add 30% of the cost and double (at least) the time—may not be conservative enough. Time after time, I’ve found myself back in the rather uncomfortable position I’m in currently: owing a lot of people I really like a lot of stuff that seemed like something I’d not only love doing, but have all the time in the world to devote to.

To steal and pervert a line of Will Rogers’, hoard time: you ain’t gettin’ any more of the stuff.

At my most calmly productive, I was mapping out a daily schedule for myself down to the fifteen-minute segment, a trick I picked up from my friend, Mark, one of the more successful and productive and still not insufferable people I know. I didn’t have to think about what I had to do next: I just looked down at my calendar and it told me. It kind of sucked, but it kind of rocked, too. The rocking part was obvious: holy CATS, did I get stuff done! And did I feel good at the end of the day for doing it! The sucking part seems obvious—lots of me rebelling in you are not the boss of me fashion—but I’m not sure I really got at the root of it. Maybe it wasn’t me wanting to fly free; maybe it was me being afraid of what would happen if I actually succeeded. You know, that whole Marianne-Williamson-by-way-of-Nelson-Mandela thing (or was it the other way around?).

In the spirit of scientific experimentation, I’m giving it another whirl, 2.o-style (i.e. with free online tools, not ugly, expensive Covey paper products). I spent the better part of 90 minutes of Sunday afternoon mapping out this week—slotting in the hard appointments and then the Quadrant 2 stuff and then all the rest—until I was looking at a screen which more closely resembled a really, really badly fragmented hard drive than a modest solopreneur’s Google calendar. I also had the closest thing I’ve felt to an anxiety attack just afterward, but that might just as well be a function of too little sleep filled with too-weird dreams fueled by a late-night screening of one of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen.

All I can say is that we shall see. And by “we,” I mean me and anyone reading along here. Or here, or here. I’m covering my bases on this, since all y’all join me at different nodes.

I make fairly few requests here (at least, I hope I do, as a staunch proponent of the 95/5 rule—my, such a lot of rules in a personal blog post!), but I will make one now: what do you do, or have you done, to keep yourself honest? I realize the answer will be different for every human on the planet, and that you may look at this whole post uncomprehendingly (and boy, do I envy you right now if you do). I think, though, that if you’re reading this, chances are good that not only have you been down this particular stretch of road, but that you have stories to share, and stories of a personal nature are my favorite way of taking in new information.

Either way, I trust you will wish me luck, as I do you with your endeavors.

Oh, what a week we’ll have…

xxx
c

Image by psd via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.