Old rusty windmills and “Mom is always working!”
Every one of us Makers who’s growing a dream, building a business, or trying to see our project turn into something rewarding knows the feeling of hitting a “stop point.” I call it flatlining.
We do everything to push things along, then as our returns start sagging, we slow down and eventually slide to a full, disappointed stop.
This is your dream, your baby, your idea or talent starting and stopping like an old rusty windmill.
You use all your resources. You Flowdream. You look up strategies on websites. You get a little lost and take a stab at a few things until again you slide to a halt.
• You have an email list that’s half built.
• You have ideas for a website, but no site (or the one you made yourself 4 years ago).
• You have flyers for your sessions but they sit on your desk undistributed.
• You have names of prospects for your business but you have phone-phobia and no one ever gets a call from you.
• You attended two conferences and three online summits to learn how to monetize your make, but now you don’t have time to implement anything you learned. You never open your notebook that you wrote so excitedly in all those days.
Paper Flowers, Authentic Expression, and “Making”
Let’s Talk Making Each Day Count
Everything we do, all the time, is Making. Even when we’re binge-watching a Netflix show, we’re making ourselves relax.
The DMV, Long Waits, and Way Stations
The line wrapping around the DMV at 8:40 on a Tuesday morning encompasses three sides of the building.
They won’t let us inside anymore because the building just won’t hold us all. We begin to creep forward. It’s hot in the sun. No one dares leave his or her spot for a bathroom break. We’re all pretty quiet and uncomfortable.
Most people are staring down into phones. We have a 4-hour wait ahead to get my daughter’s drivers permit. No, we didn’t make an appointment – the wait for that was 13 weeks.
Life is about waiting sometimes. Waiting for the right job, waiting for the drivers learning permit, waiting for the right man or woman to come into your life, waiting for the right house or apartment. Waiting.
Think about all this interim time that goes by in the “in between” zones. As if life decided that for every one part of action, it requires 2 parts non-action, like a cosmic recipe.
Doers vs. Wishers
My friend and I are talking, and you know that feeling when someone mirrors back to you something that seems obvious, but for a second you’re able to see it through that other person’s eyes? It’s kind of a marvelous “ah ha” moment. My friend said, “I really admire how you were able to get…
IDGAF
I know I’m pretty much useless when, instead of getting work done, I’m folding clothes.
It’s 11 a.m. and my workday should be in full swing. But I work from home, and so instead I’m folding laundry and checking my emails every five minutes looking for something exciting. Nothing exciting comes in.
I spot the stack of old financial papers that need shredding. I’ve let them languish by the shredder for months. Yes, months. I know something is really awry because now pulverizing that stack through the shredder is looking really good and I spend the next hour doing it.
Hello, Rebellion. How are you today?
“I don’t want to! You can’t make me. I don’t care if I should. No.”
My name is No . . . my sign is No.
A Types, overachievers, controllers, and those of us who generally Get Shit Done know this feeling and it scares the heck out of us. It’s called IDGAF. (You can work that acronym out.)
IDGAF is your inner rebel, telling you she needs a break. Give her one. What’s so hard about that?
Oh, I know what’s hard: you’re going to lose control of your life for five or ten minutes, or maybe even half a day. Or if you really slack, maybe even . . . a week. And if you’re really, really screwed – a month. And of course the ultimate freak: forever. You’ll be in IDGAF forever.
Because what if you never find your way out of IDGAF? What if you stop earning your income? What if your marriage that you’ve been propping up suddenly bores you? What if you stop to relax for one bald second and discover that you’re running on fumes and those fumes felt so real that you lived off them for ages?
My meltdown friends
The first email I read today is a friend’s “so-called” business newsletter. She usually hardly ever talks about business in it.
Instead, she’s typically describing her latest break up drama, or how her company is reinventing itself in perfect syncopation with her own internal reinvention, which happens dramatically around every six months. Her newsletter stays juicy.
I love it.
I’ve realized that the three newsletters I read most often are all from women who tell me about their kids, husbands, and lives more than anything else.
There’s the corporate woman with the farmer husband. And the Australian woman who keeps moving houses every year, always searching for the better place to be, dragging her husband and kiddos with her. And the entrepreneurial lawyer who’s a Burning Man devotee.
I realize that even though I’m reading their emails just to find the juicy scoop on what’s going on in their world, they somehow slip in their business messages too.
In fact it deepens their validity that I can watch them build and run hugely successful businesses exactly while all their head and heart drama unfolds.
It’s not a slow train wreck”¦it’s a slow train assembly, and they’re simply handling all the routine fallout from life as they continuously assemble their dreams.
8 investments that changed me as a woman
I’m jumping on a trend here before it gets too big. It’s just so good that I can’t pass it up! It’s the “8 Investments That Changed Me as a Woman” post.
The idea is to put down the 8 things you’ve done, bought, or allowed yourself to have that have massively upleveled your life. (And yes, it’s “for women,” but you fellows may resonate to this list too!)
The list is materialistic because it’s about things we acquire. But it’s also a huge lesson in receiving.
As someone who practices Flowdreaming, I’m always thinking about what I want to manifest/make/create/have/be/do next. So this concept fits right in.
Here are my Top Eight.
1. Retreats for My Own Personal Joy, Creativity, and Wellness
It took me forever to allow myself to go on spiritual or creative holidays. I had so much resistance to it. For one, my husband would be upset that I didn’t invite him. For another thing, how can I justify spending the cash on myself like that, when I have no idea if there will be any “return on investment” for it?
I used to be so ridiculous about this. Sure, I’d take a regular vacation and not worry about “ justifying” it. But if I wanted to go off and do art for a week, or meditate for a weekend? Uh uh, that had to become a work expense or I’d find some other way to make it “ok.”
No more. Now I take one to two pure “me” trips each year. I choose things that I want to do or learn. I don’t invite anyone to go with me if I want to just be inside myself for the week. I’m not beholden to making anyone else happy when I gift myself these treasure weeks.
And you know what? These weeks infallibly end up cracking me open like a coconut. The point of these trips is to see what gets opened, exposed, or grown in me. I want to experience something that I don’t already know about myself.
These weeks accelerate my inner journey, which in the end, makes me far richer and more productive in my life. My well rarely goes dry as a result.
I used to think life was fair
I used to think life was fair: If I played by the rules, bad stuff wouldn’t happen. Now I know that those rules are bunk.
I received an email this morning from someone that puts into words exactly how I used to feel:
She wrote: “We couldn’t afford much as we went through our layoff with our newborn and toddler in tow, but we managed to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps in the end. For quite awhile there, our life was a chaotic storm. We couldn’t see anything but the nightmare around us…we didn’t understand…we were educated professionals who played by the rules…why is this happening to us?!”
I know that feeling so well. It’s pure disillusionment.
But when you get past this, you become free. Absolutely free.
Here’s why:
We all have a set of rules that we play by. And we get really upset when other people break these rules, and seem to suffer no consequences.
(Have you ever wished someone you despise would get a broken leg, but they NEVER do, and worse, better and better things keep happening to them? If you have, you’ve got to keep reading.)
We also get bummed when we ourselves do everything right, and then one day we get completely dumped on.
I felt this way when I left my corporate job. It wasn’t fair that I was making the company multi-millions each year through our new division, and no one saw or cared about what I had given them, even when the numbers were staring them right in the face.
I felt this way, too, when I got cancer at 43. I eat organic foods, was vegetarian for 24 years, and I’ve probably swallowed more herbs and vitamins than most people will consume in a lifetime. So, cancer? Seriously?
It’s not fair.
However…thank God I’ve gotten over fairness!!!!
Hear me: Fairness can hamstring you and hold you back in ways you can’t imagine. Let’s turn this concept on its head.
Ready to go break a ceiling in your thinking?
I’ve got a much better strategy to play by!!!
Do you want to find out what it is???
Sucky jobs & pre-existing patterns
One of my students, Maddy, is telling me that she’s waking up at night, panicky, worrying that she’s going to lose her house when they lay her off at work. She doesn’t know when the layoffs will come.
She’s living in a constant state of low-level fear, feeling horribly frustrated and powerless. She’s even applied for another job in the same field that she doesn’t even want, and afraid they’ll reject her.
Last night, another student, Claire, told me that she’s already lost her job and now she’s dreading finding another even as the bills are piling up, since the jobs are always the same low-level, horrible, mind-numbing kind. She’s been on a merry-go-round of them for twenty-five years. Her credit card is stacked up with debt.
Both Claire and Maddy have the same emotional energetic pattern. Let’s pull it out into the sunshine and take a look.
I ask Maddy why she thinks she can’t be happy in a career.
She answers, “My parents always said ‘just get a job. No one likes their job. Everyone just does one. That’s the way it is. Just get through it.’”
“And that’s what you’ve been doing?”
She tearfully nods and chokes out, “Yeah.”
“Do you think I hate my job?” I ask.
“No.”
“Does my husband hate his job as a designer? Do you think my mom hates her job? Did my aunt hate her job teaching English as s second language? Does my cousin hate his job as a chef?”
No, no, no, and no.
“And do you think we have jobs we love because we’re special or smarter or something? In other words, different or better than you?”
“Yes,” she practically whispers.