30 Things I Did This Year

As the year closes, one resounding thud of a thought keeps circling: I don’t want to lose this year too. I want to capture this year, keep it like a songbird in my heart.

And it’s way too easy to let it slip into blankness the way 2020 did. In other words, I feel like I lost one year, and I sure as heck am not going to lose two.

So I’m doing something to capture my year. I’m doing something that cements it into my life, and reminds me that a hundred good things happened to me, my family, and people I love.

I’m purposely and thoughtfully folding up the sweater of my memories and placing it carefully and sweetly in the drawer. This is giving me closure. It’s making my 2021 shine brighter.

Do you want to do this with me?

Here’s what we do. First, this is an energy exercise as much as anything. It’s asking you to call up and touch on one bright sparkle of a moment or event, one after another, until you’re overflowing.

22 bullshit life purposes

Maybe you’ve always had too many interests, too many possible directions to go in. Narrowing them to “The One” has always been tough.

You can feel the old thoughts swirling: Will you ever be able to choose the “right thing” to focus on? And what about the other things—what if you’d like them more than the thing you choose and just don’t know it? 

How can there possibly be time for them all? Speaking of timing, when will one thing you want really ripen up into something spectacular….or should you drop it now and move on to the next thing that’s been patiently waiting for your time and attention?

Which way do we go, which way do we go?

I made the mistake of spending too much time on my phone last night—swipe swipe swipe

I made the mistake of spending too much time on my phone last night—swipe swipe swipe

I sniffled into my pillow around 11 pm, miserable and thinking that we are all gonna die, starve, or be homeless. (Oh my god, I know, I know better.)

So I totally get your feeling of sliding between two crazy poles of fear and calm right now. It’s like an army has invaded our country, except it’s made of the people we love and the viruses they harbor. Now what? You can’t fight that with a missile.

How I’m turning a crazy time into a peaceful, productive, focused time

How I’m turning a crazy time into a peaceful, productive, focused time.

I’m thinking a lot about this right now.

I’m seeing peers still lobbing emails about new programs they’re launching as if nothing in the world is going on. I’m seeing my local theaters assuring me that all the seats are wiped down. And I’m hearing that the stock market is just a wreck.

I am wondering what all this means, and how long it will last, and what each of us is going to do to weather it.

Because there is A LOT we can do. I am constantly reminding myself that it’s never about what’s happening around you. It’s about how YOU are happening to it. Here are a few things I’m doing right now:

What 2020 will give us in this new interesting era…

I don’t forecast often, but I can’t help but think about how this virus will change us, as a culture.

What I see is that things that were “optional” are now becoming essential. Here’s are a few things I expect to see go big in 2020:

1. More work-from-home opportunities. Yeah, if you work in retail or manufacturing, you’ll still be driving to work. But I’ve managed a virtual team in my company for seven years. It is wonderful. Now a bunch of mainstream companies are going to offer more of it, too.

2. Netflix, Hulu, TV, podcasts and entertainment services in general are going to have to keep up with demand. Talkshows will record to empty audiences. But they will still reach your living room. Binge-watching is about to hit new levels.

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

I just spent the day in Old Town San Diego. It’s the historic spot of our town where the original settlers put up their houses along the El Camino Real trail. You get to eat truly excellent Mexican food and dress up in old-timey clothes for photos as you wander the old streets.

I haven’t been there in years since I was a kid. I remember pining for bouquets of those giant bright Mexican crepe paper flowers there … and my mom getting me weird-tasting sarsaparilla candy instead.

I looked around and thought about all these people making things and manifesting their authentic expression: Making art, making food, making music, making sales, making laughter, making memories.

Everything we do, all the time, is Making. Even when we’re binge-watching a Netflix show, we’re making ourselves relax.

The emperor wears no clothes

It’s cold – as in air-conditioning cold – in the hotel conference room. I’m gathered with a bunch of other women at a self-development conference, and we’ve been picking apart our lives (in between shivering or baking) all weekend.

Many of the women are coaches. In fact, I’d say 80% are, which is why this weekend has been so difficult for us.

You know the old saying: “The emperor has no clothes”? It refers to a fairy tale in which an emperor is hoodwinked into believing that two tailors have made him the most handsome outfit in the world. However, if you’re stupid or ignorant, he’s told, you can’t see the clothes. Of course, this is all bullshit and the tailors made nothing. The emperor walks naked down the street in a procession, yet all his townsfolk except one honest child are afraid to say what they really see.

Today we use this phrase to mean that we sometimes portray things about ourselves to others that are deeply untrue, because we’ve hoodwinked our own selves into believing them. It means we can be hypocrites, that we’re false under our own words.

I find that coaches often carry this energy in their own Flow. It’s embarrassing. Here we are, leading people into knowledge and guiding them toward their desires, while our own desires are unfulfilled and we fail to follow our own advice.

Think: the plumber whose own pipes are always broken. The accountant whose own accounts are a mess. You get the idea.

The question is: Does this mean we’re truly illegitimate? Hypocritical? Are we sipping our own Kool Aid? Are we wearing no clothes?

Ms. Goalypants

Hey there, Ms. Goaly-pants. Ease up.

If January (and all its goal-setting hoohaw) is sitting hard on your heart, then here is a reframe.

Relax. Breathe.

Most of us tend to overcomplicate everything because we’re driven by lack-thinking. And so we spend our days trying to be super on top of everything so nothing bad will happen. It’s frickin’ exhausting.

Now add those new January goals to the list. Arggh! Do you see why you don’t keep them?

The idea of living in a state of ease has become an ideal for most of us. Instead, it’s all: Goals! Work! Goals! Work!

Letting go and trusting Flow is apparently only what you get to do when you retire. (As in: hard work, frustration, and sacrifice now . . . ease later.)

Overcommitted exhaustion and continuously feeling behind or “not as good as”become the default energies that show up in every area of our life. And, instead of ending up successful, we end up burned out, cranky, unhealthy, and often with lower self-esteem than when we started.

Here’s the email that provoked this thought in me:

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.