After numerous setbacks—some regular-usuals that I now know to plan for (hello, holidays!), some spontaneous combustibles that required urgent but unscheduled attention—I wrapped up my goal planning for 2010.

Yes, five weeks or roughly 10% of the way into the year I’m supposed to be living, I’m done planning for it.*

It is an easy, easy slide into self-loathing, just taking in that last sentence. It feels like a sentence, when I start to take it in fully: this is your life, loser, and no one to blame but yourself for it. Little Miss Overachiever. Little Miss Fancypants, with your ridiculous notions of time and how many things you can fill it with—or, if you want to dip into that bucket o’ truth you claim such fondness for, how much shit you can cram into it.

So, you see how I talk to myself when you’re not around?** Not nice. Not even helpful. But this is the voice that runs through my head most of the time, or one of them, and it is this voice—or rather, what this voice is doing to me—that I’m choosing to address this year.

Because two very interesting and highly unusual things happened this year during the penultimate phase of goal-planning. They’re embarrassing enough that I’d ordinarily leave them out, but illuminating enough—at least, I hope they are—that they’re staying in.

For those of you unfamiliar with the values-centered goal-planning system outlined in Jinny Ditzler’s Your Best Year Yet, it starts with an inventory and ends with a map, with a whole lot of excavation, grading and other survey-ish/cartographic folderol in between. The inventory is a look back at the previous year’s happenings, divided into accomplishments and disappointments, the better to get a handle on what’s working (so you can feel good about yourself!) and what’s not—so you can beat yourself with a cudgel crafted from your own sodden, misshapen failures. Kidding! Only—well, there’s a reason Ditzler has you list your accomplishments first. It can be mighty dispiriting to look at that list of disappointments. She is fairly adamant that accomplishments be viewed with pride and the disappointments taken as learning, but right there, that’s suspect to self-loathers: wherefore such inequities of discernment? That’s just bad science, lady!

Interestingly enough, in the five years I’ve been doing Best Year Yet, I’ve never once had a problem coming up with staggeringly long lists of accomplishments that even the meanest stranger would affirm as such, while my list of disappointments has been proportionately far smaller. Of course, they’re big honkers, those disappointments—stuff like “only completed 4 out of 10 goals from last year”; worse, they tend to recur. This may not be a big deal when you’re 20 or even 30, but when you’re staring 50 in the droopy, gray-haired sac, you start to worry. Time is, as they say, at a premium. How much more of it can you count on? How much more can you waste on an outright-destructive or even “benign” insalubrious habit? Is there even such a thing after 45? (I’m really asking: is there?)

My own goal-planning process ground to a depressing halt in December not only because the year had worn me down and the holidays weren’t going to let up, but because when I finished up my list of disappointments, I noted that 11 of them—that’s 11 out of 18—were recurring. And big ones, too, like “didn’t write book…again,” where “again” meant “for the third year in a row.” After completing those two lists, I went on to answer the next couple of questions, but really, I knew I was fucked. The only way around this problem was through it, and that was going to require a lot more time than the week I had set aside. And resources, too, in the form of outside help.

Which brings us to the penultimate session I mentioned about 40 minutes ago in this piece.

Up until this year, I’ve mostly done my BYY plan alone. I ran last year’s by my business coach, but only the final plan, and only the business-related aspects of it***. While it makes me cringe with shame now, I realize that I was doing a lot of obfuscating and tap dancing, more plainly called “hiding” when one is not given to obfuscating and tap dancing. If I was going to change my pattern, someone else was going to have to be given root access to the plan, to help keep me honest about what was going on. One of my friends from Success Team (my weekly mastermind-like group) agreed that it might be helpful from an unsticking perspective to collaborate, so we scheduled a work session for this past weekend.

I was prepared for almost anything. A lot of stuff bubbles up during the BYY excavation and mapping process, and for me, that inevitably brings a lot of crying and pain, especially around the Dreaded Chapter Four, where you look at your limiting paradigms. (Trust me, unless you’re Jesus, you’ve got at least one.)

What I was not prepared for was bursting into tears when I looked at my list of accomplishments, which is just what I did when it was my time to go over them. I’d thought, “Oh, I’ll just read the topline from this embarrassingly long list to save us time.” Instead, something told me to read it in its entirety—all 47 items—and when I the last one, I collapsed in a heap of sobs: all of this stuff I’d accomplished, and still I felt like shit? What would it take? What would ever be enough? If accomplishing all of these 47 remarkable things—and my friend assured me that individually, many were remarkable, but taken together, they were REMARKABLE—if doing all that did not fill the black hole inside me and make me feel loved or safe or worthwhile, what would?

The answer—that nothing would, that no external thing would ever be enough—stared back at me, plain as you like. Hence, sobbing. A lot of it. Fortunately, I have loving and patient friends. Who somehow, when I am feeling like it’s anything but possible, can assure me in a way that I actually can hear and almost believe, that I am enough: that I might be lovable just because of who I am, and not because of any list of things I do.

It seems so simple, but trust me—it can take a long time to “get”, even if you know it. Even if you’ve paid your shrink thousands of dollars and wept your way through boxes of her Kleenex to learn the same thing. Learning is not necessarily “getting”; if you’re lucky, I think, you “get” it with enough time before you die to know some kind of peace. I felt one huge shift like this in the past 10 years—when I had my hospital bed epiphany. I had a second one this past weekend, looking at that long list and bursting into tears. I have a little more peace, but I’d also like to get a little more of this music out of me before I die, you know?

The other Very Interesting and Unusual Thing that happened revolved around money and happiness. It also involved a goodly amount of sobbing, and is involved (and possibly significant) enough to cover in depth another day.

For now, know this: next year when I sit down to do my Best Year Yet plan, I expect the list of accomplishments will be far shorter, while the list of disappointments will likely be about the same length as it’s been in previous years, only with a much, much higher percentage of new things I’m disappointed about.

And that, my friends, is an accomplishment in and of itself…

xxx
c

*Hopefully. Because I finished the wrapping-up yesterday, late in the day, and am feeling rickety about it. Plus, you know, shit happens—Q.E.D.

**Obviously, you’re very much around, as you’re reading this. What I mean, which you probably already gathered, is this is the dim chatter that forms one layer of my soundtrack. This is the stuff that goes on that I generally don’t write, or if I do, that I erase before publishing.

***Your Best Year Yet is a whole-life planning system, based on the idea that achieving balance is largely responsible for achieving happiness, and possibly for achieving goals themselves, at least in the “life well-lived” sense. Also, it’s worth noting here that even my coach said my plan was probably overly ambitious. I made changes to it based on her feedback and those changes did work: the four out of ten goals were largely accomplished because of those tweaks.

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt’s excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Image by jurvetson via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license. For maximum enjoyment, view in original, huge size.

TOPICS: change, december in january, goals, love.

Now that it’s safely behind me, I can confess that I was not looking forward to my trip to Washington, D.C., last week.

I made my plans a few months ago, when I was still excited about the prospect of working at speaking, working at consulting, working at this thing I’ve been working at for the past couple of years—helping people wrap their heads around social media, for want of a better descriptor. I jumped at any chance to speak, and even more quickly if the trip included travel. And to D.C.? A place I hadn’t seen since my eighth grade class trip…from Chicago…on a bus?

Yes, I would very much like to do this job.

Only there were some problems. I was aware of them from the get-go, just like I’m aware of all kinds of other warning signs I choose to fuzz out or otherwise overlook: the diminishing sense of return I got from consulting; the dimming enthusiasm I felt for various self-promotional endeavors; the increasing intake of alcohol on school nights.

Worse, there were the spikes of enthusiasm for things which pointed in the opposite direction, like increasingly non-marketing-oriented blog posts and newsletters. Or the odd, one-off personal-coach-y coaching session I was talked into (and secretly loved, and told no one about). Or my bright and shining moment of pure truth and beauty on the stage of the Bagdad in Portland. talking about poop and love.

So week after week, I found myself not re-working the presentation, but working some damned fine excuses. Exhaustion was a good one, as was my being ridiculously overcommitted, as was every procrastinator’s favorite trump card, the holiday season. And then finally, in the new year, which I’d cleared out in anticipation of needing to close some loops, my personal life went into a tailspin and, well, you gotta deal with that.

I boarded that excellent airliner to D.C. with no small amount of dread, sweating out that first half-day in town. And then I made a decision: I might go down, but I’d give it my all before I did. Because if nothing else, there were people who had stuck their necks out to bring me in for this talk, even though it wasn’t strictly inside my proven area of expertise. I went to bed Wednesday night thinking, “You will come up with the framework that ties this together, and you will tie it together the best that you can.”

An interesting thing happens to me when I really and truly give myself over to an idea: it starts taking shape. To be fair, I’d had the talk in the back of my head for weeks; I knew where things didn’t line up. And I’d had a couple of in-depth conversations with the organizers, so I knew what kind of help the attendees were going to be there looking for. Still, I went to bed with nothing and woke up—at 2am—with an idea. And because I had no pen and paper by the bed, I made myself feel my way to my friend Jared’s office where my laptop lay sleeping, pulled up a text file and spewed out everything that had bubbled up. And then all day Thursday and most of the day Friday and very early in the morning Saturday, I did not sightsee or lounge about or cocktail it up with my peeps: I worked.

And lo, it worked. Ten or 12 or 15 hours of me and PowerPoint, me and Photoshop, me and Firefox later, it came together and helped connect the dots for people the way I’d hoped it would (and, from the sound of it, the way the organizers had, which was only slightly less important to me).

I learned a great deal this past week about work: both how I like to handle it and how I end up handling it when I don’t handle it as I’d like. I’m both thrilled that I’m at a place where I know my stuff well enough to pull things together swiftly, and aggravated at my entrenched habits of procrastination. It’s something I really want to look at this coming year (starting tomorrow! on Groundhog Day!).

I also learned that sometimes, as I did when I signed on to help Cliff Atkinson with the first L.A. Presentation Camp, sometimes you have to let that crazy, impulsive side of you jump out and say “YES!” even when the prudent side of you might not. That is stretching of the good type: you, taking what you do to the next level. After which you’re free to enjoy the clean air and fine views on this new plateau, or take your snapshot for posterity and head back down the hill (or to another hill entirely).

The world will never want for cocksucking boulders to push or motherfucking hills to push them up. That is what the world is made of: cocksucking boulders and motherfucking hills.

May you put your shoulder to the right ones this year; may you enjoy the view at the top, and everything in between…

xxx
c

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

TOPICS: change, fear.

Just before the end of the past year, I decided to forgo my usual habit of cramming my annual planning into the most riotously busy time of the year. Hence, “December in January,” where I spend the first month of the chronological new year planning my own, to begin in February.

My Nei Kung instructor and I have been talking a lot about the process of change, one of my favorite topics.

And to be clear, when I say “favorite,” I mean something I spend a great deal of time thinking about, not necessarily something that I enjoy engaging in. I hear the change junkies talk about how all-fire fantastic it is, and remain skeptical—unless by “fantastic,” they mean “other worldly and outsize,” in which case I’m in 100% agreement.

Anyway.

I was late to the idea that the most efficient way of eliminating a bad habit is by replacing it with a good one, or at the very least tying it to a positive, values-based motivator. Why? I’m an idiot! Okay, I’m not an idiot, or at least, not completely. But my tendency toward impatience made me move sometimes rather more quickly than I might have prudently, and to act like an idiot. That test in the eighth grade that’s 479 questions long, and whose first command—read all the way through to the end of the test before starting to answer the individual questions—is critical to the successful completion of the test? I failed that test. Leap first, look later. I’m the world’s best im-patient.

Reading and working through Your Best Year Yet several years ago helped start the shift. It’s so dense and chewy, you can’t skip steps, so I didn’t. It took me a full week-ish to slog through it, but by the end, I had a much better handle on myself, and my first taste of what life felt like when you took time to actually look at it.*

Working through the Great Hypnotherapy Project with my friend, Greg, gave me my next taste of swapping out bad for good as methodology rather than just brutalizing the bad out of yourself. The type of hypno that Greg practices involves coming up with lots of positive replacements for the habit you want to let go; before we did the session to help get me back on my Crohn’s diet, we spent a long time going over the requirements of the diet—what was allowed and of that, what I liked best—and where I was getting stuck. While I was listening to the tape regularly, I felt almost no cravings for the stuff that was disallowed.

Jim, my Nei Kung instructor, who is also a licensed therapeutic hypnotherapist, confirmed that the replacement of “bad” with “good” is a straighter route than just dumping the bad. Trying to stop something is much, much harder than replacing it with something else. I think it has something to do with, to paraphrase Marshall Rosenberg in his a-ma-zing book, Nonviolent Communication**, us bucking at having choices removed, even when it’s in our best interest and it’s us doing the removing.

So I’m looking at framing all of my goals as additive (per Greg and Jim), as well as awesome (per Naomi, who oughta know because boy, is she ever!) Full and final list (fingers and toes crossed) next week, in time for Groundhog’s Day, but here’s what we’ve got so far:

• Read 52 books. No-brainer additive thing. If you were watching a lot of TV and wanted to stop (as I did, a few years ago), you might want to look at this as an additive replacement. I hope to read many more than 52 books, but this is a start.
• Practice Nei Kung 30 minutes daily. Additive thing to replace “stop being someone who is a brain without a body.” Kidding, but not far off. Nei Kung is gentle but fairly easy for me to do, as I apparently am both built and wired for it. FINALLY. Because that running thing totally didn’t work out, plus who knows when I’ll have good enough health insurance again to replace my knees.
• Feng shui my place. Additive thing to replace “declutter,” which I love and has helped me, but which is starting to feel a little brutal, especially as we get down to the bone. Okay, closer to it. OKAY—through the first layer of the epidermis. It’s a teensy cheat, since part of feng shui-ing means removing clutter, but it’s way more fun to make it a game with all the doodads of feng shui. Plus, you know, built-in feature for the blog!
• Eat SCD-compliant six days per week. Additive thing to replace “Get off Crohn’s meds,” plus my way of easing myself into something good for me by leaving myself some wiggle room. I don’t get to go off the meds until I’ve been back on SCD sans flares for a minimum of one year, possibly two. But I’m not going to worry about that now.

I have a few other ideas I’m still working on, some of which will probably remain private, but others that I may be able to share once I survey the full schmear. “Music” is still floating around, and I’d like to do something that has me caring for my friendships a little more consistently than I have in the past. Never know when you’ll need those darned things.

I’m still looking for additive ways to switch up some of my more destructive habits, especially procrastination and web surfery. I have a feeling that the way-in is connecting more deeply to the things I do want to do, which is going to mean yet more of this messy and painful opening-up-and-letting-go stuff.

I am, however, very open to suggestions right now…

xxx
c

*Other than the five months I spent recovering from my Crohn’s onset, but that was less a choice than something thrust upon me.

**In a year of outstanding books, this is the current front-runner. I cannot thank Havi Brooks enough for tipping me over into finally reading it. (THANK YOU, HAVI.) Look for a review soon, but feel free to buy it immediately. If you have to talk to anyone, yourself included, it will make the experience better and might just save your bacon. Oh, and I’ve already read/loved the How to Talk So Kids Will Listen book (thank you, my shrink), so I’m guessing that third one on the page is killer, too.

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

TOPICS: change, december in january, goals.

That Seth Godin has a new book coming out is generally a cause for celebration. Seth has a knack for teasing out one big, necessary idea and illuminating it in a way that makes it seem obvious, post-reveal, without ever coming across as obnoxious. That, my friends, is a gift.

So, too, is the way he chooses to share his gifts with the world. Seth regularly throws his weight behind people and ideas worthy of support, and has a special fondness for the Acumen Fund, an innovative, can-do nonprofit with a similarly iconoclastic chief executive, Jacqueline Novogratz. Moreover, he combines his various loves and interests in innovative ways, modeling the very behavior he describes so well in his books about marketing: for his latest book, Linchpin, he offered 3,000 early review copies to his readers willing to donate a minimum of $30 to the Acumen Fund; so eager/loyal are his readers, he hit his mark just 48 hours in, raising over $100K for Acumen.

In a further example of walking the walk, Seth reached out to a group of his regular devotees (or, in my case, an irregular one) to assist with promotion: would we read even earlier, advance portions of his book, and interview him about the material on our blogs, and post them all on one day in a big, glorious, central round-up of semi-anarchic, semi-choreographed promotion?

Uh, yeah. Yeah, we would do that.

So here is my interview with Seth on the themes of his latest book, Linchpin: Are You Indispensable? The interview questions are based on the advance pages I read; I’ve since read the entire book, and could have a whole other interview based on the chapters about Resistance and “There Is No Map.” Who knows? Maybe I will!

But don’t wait: buy your copy now. Like The Dip and Tribes before it, Linchpin is one of those “must-reads” that, thankfully, doesn’t read like one.

xxx
c

THE INTERVIEW

Colleen Wainwright: It seems like a central theme of your book is that we’ve fallen asleep: as creative beings, as free thinkers, as true individuals. Do you have any practical tips on waking the hell up? Or accurately gauging whether or not you’re asleep?

Seth Godin: We haven’t fallen asleep, we’ve been put to sleep. Actively brainwashed and hypnotized by industrialists in search of compliant factory workers and eager consumers. Of course, our genes were complicit, but please don’t blame yourself.

And we’re all asleep. Some are more awake than others (Spike Lee or Shepard Fairey or the guys who started the Four Seasons). Still, we stick with the status quo way more than there is any reason to. We do this because the system has persuaded us it’s the only way.

As you guessed, the theme of my book is not to tell people what to do, but to identify the hypnosis and give us words and concepts we can use to wake each other up. Either that or we can keep shopping at the mall, driving an SUV and figuring out how to pay for our McMansion while we stress out doing by-the-book work at our by-the-book company that’s getting its ass kicked by some startup with no overhead.

CW: You say flat-out that one doesn’t have to quit one’s job to start effecting meaningful change. My own experience with trying to do that, back in advertising, was akin to banging my head against the proverbial wall. Does it only work for certain industries? For people higher up on the organizational food chain? Isn’t there a point where we have to say, “Nope, not gonna happen here,” cut our losses, and move on?

SG: I think there may very well be times you need to quit, but most people never even get close to that. Most people say “my boss won’t let me” and give up because they’ve bought into two myths: the first is that (as we saw above) the safe thing to do is play it safe, and the second is that your boss is crazy enough to take responsibility for your art. Why would she? You can’t go to her and say, “I feel like doing something remarkable, if it doesn’t work, will you take the blame?” Not the way it works. It turns out that if you start smallish and do remarkable stuff every day… make connections, be human, do the work, focus on things that matter, go the extra mile… then every day you’ll get more chances to make things change.

Sure, it’s possible that your boss will fire you. But if she does, is that the place you wanted to be anyway? Fired for delighting a customer? Fired for making a difference?

Odds are, not only won’t you get fired, you’ll get asked to let others in on your secret.

CW: I love the concept of “emotional labor”: that it’s both mission-critical and wildly difficult. Also–and possibly even more significant–is that emotional labor is the Rodney Dangerfield of efforts, rarely garnering respect. How do we change that? Or does everyone signing onto the program have to get down with being the nutty Van Gogh of their endeavor or organization, only (if ever) appreciated after the fact?

SG: There’s not nuttiness on the table here. I’m proposing that you embrace the fact that the only thing you get paid for (unless you’re a brilliant programmer, chemist or race car driver) is doing emotional labor. Bringing guts and ideas and love to work when you and others don’t feel like it. That’s your job. And the people who do that the best keep getting rewarded for it. Dishwashers don’t get to whine about their chapped fingers, and white collar workers like us shouldn’t whine about how hard it is to be generous and creative and flexible.

CW: Speaking of “emotional labor,” your statement that “Work is nothing but a platform for art and the emotional labor that goes with it” may be my favorite phrase you’ve ever coined (and you’ve coined a lot of good ones). It’s basically saying that *anyone* can create art with what they do, right? But is that true? Can you be a corporate cog–a very small piece of the machinery, with a very unsexy job–and make art? What does that look like?

SG: If you work for a company that truly prizes cog-hood… say you’re an insurance actuary, or someone assembling pacemakers… I’d argue you should get out, now. Why? Because every day you spend there is a day where you give up value and a bit of your life. On the other hand, at just about every other job there’s a chance to lead and make change and connect and create tiny breakthroughs. Which lead to more than tiny ones. I know people at giant famous companies that get to do this all day, every day. How’d they get that job? Because they started, and they continued and they pushed until it was their written role.

So, for example,

• Laurie Coots at Chiat Day spends most of her time causing trouble, disruptions and the creation of opportunity.
• When Robyn Waters was at Target, her job was to transform the organization from a K-Mart wannabe to Wal-mart challenger by bringing style and art and color to the inventory and mindset of the company.
• Donna Sturgess gets to do similar work at GlaxoSmithKline. She finds high bars and encourages people across the organization to jump over them. She makes art and change for a living.
• And at Starbucks, Aimee Johnson runs the group that developed both the high-end coffee maker they acquired and the new line of Via coffee.

I’ve met similar people at banks (!) and even General Electric.

CW: Okay. Let’s talk about fear, one of my least favorite (and most consuming) topics. If lizard brain—the thing that makes us react in the scared, small, self-preserving way, that just wants “to eat and be safe”—is the source of resistance, it’s pretty important to resist succumbing to it. How does one do that? It’s not like you can sit down and have a heart-to-heart.

SG: My other goal here is to scare you to your toes. To scare you NOT of standing out, but to scare you about fitting in. To scare you about your diminished role if you refuse to do emotional labor. To create a new fear, a fear that’s greater than the fear of being your artistic genius self. Boo.

CW: Giving, “free” and the honored Native American tradition of potlatch are all good, but where does it stop? We may no longer equate dying with the most toys as winning, but a gal’s gotta make a living…right?

SG: The more you give away, the more you get. This is actually a secret plan to have what you want and need and hope for, because the market (bosses, hiring companies, the market) love free stuff, and they’ll stand in line for more… they’ll bid for more… they’ll pay for more… if you’re the one who can deliver it. Be generous, make art, make connections, do work that matters and you don’t have to worry about making a living. The secret of potlatch was that the big chief could give away EVERYTHING and he’d be even richer the next week.

• Read the rest of the Linchpin interviews with Seth Godin at this Squidoo page
• Buy Linchpin on Amazon.com
  

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

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt’s excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

TOPICS: change, fear, reviews/books.

Just before the end of the past year, I decided to forgo my usual habit of cramming my annual planning into the most riotously busy time of the year. Hence, “December in January,” where I spend the first month of the chronological new year planning my own, to begin in February.

I realize that logically, there must be as many people who excel at true blue-sky thinking as there are people who can only function within very narrow constraints, although I imagine it’s terrifying to run across either.*

Like most people who enjoy thinking of themselves as Very Special Snowflakes, I really fall in the vast, lumpen middle: yes, I’m creative (so are you, whether you like it or not) and no, I don’t do too well when that creativity is not applied to certain tasks.

On the other hand, I flourish within constraints! There are few things I enjoy more than figuring out how to maximize in a box**, whether it’s moving furniture and doodads around a living space to get my feng shui’d (thank you, Karen Rauch Carter) or bending Robert’s Rules of Order right up to the breaking point (a.k.a., how a nutjob-wacko-freak learned to love Toastmasters.) Rules and processes can be very soothing to the scrambled, easily stimulated brain; for the afflicted, the quickest route to making one’s world a little bigger is often to make it a little smaller.

The catch, of course, is getting the mix of free-swim to drills just right, or in the ballpark. I tend towards all or nothing thinking, which is most likely rooted in some early training (and which doubtless saved my ass on more than one occasion), but which, as an adult with true autonomy, is now more of an artifact than a useful modus operandi. To paraphrase a former acting teacher , if the choices are “all” and “nothing,” the answer will most often be “nothing.”***

I’ve written a lot about the structures I’ve adopted to wrangle my chaos into some kind of order so I won’t go over them again here, other than to say they range from simple things like calendaring writing time to multiple sources of accountability (because I yam a slippery devil!) to simply throwing out tons of crap. As I move forward, I’m looking to employ more strategies like these to free up mental and physical energy for what’s feeling more and more like an intense period of creative work around the corner. Here’s what I’m looking at doing:

1. Creating more structure for the blog.

When I first started blogging, I wrote about whatever struck my fancy, and mimicked whomever I was enamored of. Go back and enjoy the schizo qualities of communicatrix, circa late 2004: it will make you feel oh-so-much better about your own chances for success! I can’t tell you the relief I feel these days knowing that Poetry Thursday is right around the corner, or that I have a Referral Friday feature to fall back on. I may never lock myself into a rigid floorplan, but like Gretchen, Havi, Chris and any number of friends who do this regularly, I finally see the value in some kind of publishing “schedule.” They’re just smarter, since they saw it way before I did (even though they all started blogging after I did, which doesn’t make me feel any better about my stubborn face, but there it is.)

2. Pirahnimals.

This is the term Dave Seah, my partner in the Google Wave with Dave™ project, came up with when I said I was considering an adult version of Garanimals to help streamline my wardrobe. For years, I’ve resisted uniforms of any kind, probably because of the eight years (1967 – 1975!) that I chafed in one. My favorite dressing style has been “costumes,” by which I mean dressing for the day’s physical and/or emotional needs, not “gardener” or “slutty nurse.” It was fun for a long, long time because it fed my needs for change and expression, and also my love of rag-picking (i.e., thrift/sale shopping). These days I have plenty of room to express myself via writing and speaking and performing and no end of material, I want to allocate more resources toward the creation of art than the fabrication of frame. Frames are important—L.A. Eyeworks built an iconic ad campaign around this simple, brilliant idea a couple of decades ago—and I’m expending a goodly portion of thought about suitable ones for my needs. More on that as I have it.

3. Streamlining “external” communication.

There are only so many hours in a day, and I’m finally accepting that I need to spend a certain number of them on stuff like eating, sleeping and relaxing if I want to have the life I say I want to have. I’ve already dramatically pulled back on social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, I rarely talk on the phone and I try to restrict commenting on other blogs to conversations where I can really add value or situations where it’s appropriate to show appreciation. (There should always be time to be nice, but I’m going to have to learn to be pithier about it.) I’m hoping that creating some structure around the types of things I write about here on the blog will allow me to continue writing here as often as I do (and maintain the newsletter and actors’ column), but I’m (reluctantly) open to the idea that I may need to cut back if I want to write books, too. And yes, I want to write books, and yes, one of them is a collection of poetry. God help us all.

Other things I’m thinking about are:

• Creating a budget (something I’ve never done in my lifetime!). This is about dragging monsters into the light, to get a good look at them. Hard to start, usually not as awful as I think it’s going to be once I see it.
• Moving to an even smaller/cheaper place to conserve money (and energy—it takes a long time to clean a 1BR apartment in a filthy town like L.A.).
• Taking a “real” job. This is the weirdest of all: I haven’t had a job-job since I quit my Stupid Day Job (which was really a great job, and thank you, Uncle Dennis!) back in 1999. I have a lot of pride mixed up in this decision, so it’s hard to see it clearly right now. The more time I spend away from consulting, the happier I am: it’s exhausting work, as I performed it, and not sustainable, and definitely not compatible with my desire to write even more (writing is exhausting, too, but in a very different way). I have no idea if I’m even employable any more, or what for; I’m in the musing stages about this right now.

I’m still in a very open place about all of these things right now, weighing ideas, possibilities and (nice, informed, positively-phrased) suggestions. My multiple nodes of collaboration have also shown me how much stuff there is to me that I can’t see: you are in a position to hold a (kind, helpful, positively-angled) mirror up to me, or pluck a stray hair from my jacket, that I cannot.

I’m specifically curious (yes, again) as to why you read the blog, assuming you read it with any regularity. I threw this question out a couple of years ago and received so many generous, helpful answers it was deeply moving. In the interest of giving something back as I did then, I’ll donate a dollar to the relief efforts going on in Haiti for each reply (up to $500.), via comments or email, that offers some thought, feedback, illumination or idea to move me forward on any of the six areas above.

These could be anything from exercises for “writing shorter” (without adding more work) to great hacks for streamlining process to the best post you read in 2009 about x. It might be better if you shared stuff that’s really helped you rather than guessing at what might help me; experiences related honestly and kindly (and with humor, if one can muster it) are my preferred method of learning. I love biography; I consider “self-help” a necessary evil when there’s not a readily available biography illuminating the topic. But hey, as long as you comment with good intentions, I say “yay!” and Haiti gets another of my rapidly dwindling pool of dollars.

Thank you for providing this tremendous outlet for growth and change, for helping me feel less greedy about it by allowing me to kick in some (more) dough for a worthy cause, and for helping me take it to the next level.

Whatever the hell that is…

xxx
c

*For me, spending time with fully unbridled creative thinkers is exhilarating and exhausting; doing the same with people who have nothing but rules is—well, okay, usually just exhausting, but kind of fascinating, too, like observing an alien species.

**The Chief Atheist has a great phrase for this exercise as applied to excursions which he calls “going to the Museum”: anytime you have to go somewhere you might otherwise find tedious, off-putting or overwhelming, go as an anthropologist collecting data. Guaranteed to turn even the most moribund gathering into a series of excellent adventures, and helps keep you from jumping out of your skin during the occasional stumble down rabbit holes into alien worlds.

***Eight years later, I note there’s no small irony in my having left his tutelage after being presented with exactly those two choices.

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

TOPICS: change, december in january, goals.