Posts Tagged ‘change’

On Hiatus

It’s that time. Since December I’ve been preparing myself and have been being prepared for the experience of birthing a child and transforming into a parent. It’s been intense. And eye-opening. And thrilling. And the child isn’t even here yet!

Over recent months, I’ve gradually pared back my professional activities, choosing to  follow my intuitive awareness that I needed extra space to integrate and consciously sink into this new reality. I ceased new business development in May and wrapped up existing client work earlier this month. And since then? Since then I’ve largely been dragging my heels. I have this excellent to-do list written on the back of an envelope of final tasks I need to complete prior to taking a maternity leave. But for days and weeks I’ve found complete inertia when it comes to checking these items off the list. I just haven’t been ready to temporarily close shop. Or to have a baby, for that matter.

 

37 Weeks Pregnant

I look ready!

 

But now it’s time. 85% of babies are born in the two weeks before or after the official “due date” and I am now less than two weeks away from my own due date. While most first time mothers go a bit late, my own mother always went early and there’s really no telling whether labor will begin for me today or in three weeks. Importantly, rumor has it the baby won’t wait simply because I’ve resisted setting up my email auto-responder or changing my outgoing voicemail greeting. But I also (thankfully!) now feel ready. There’s been both a physical and emotional shift in the last week and I’ve had the desire and focus to tackle my list.

So as of the end of this week, consider me on hiatus. I intend to be entirely out of commission for August and September and very possibly October, depending on how my body, mind and spirit respond to this experience of bringing a child into the world.

May these upcoming weeks for you be filled with light and goodness. I look forward with anticipation to establishing the next chapter of Get There From Here with you all upon my return!

The Mundane

Unless you’re a Spanish Civil War history buff or a voracious consumer of literary journalism, Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell may not have made it onto your book shelf. My husband is of the latter persuasion so when I was perusing the shelves recently, he suggested Orwell’s account of his experience of joining the militia during the Spanish Civil War.

 

 

Truth be told, the book is not the easiest to read. I’m missing a lot of historical context and terminology which makes the political maneuvering difficult to comprehend without creating flow charts and keeping a cultural dictionary nearby. Thankfully, however, Orwell keeps much of the narrative focused on the action of war. Toward the end of the book, he reflects upon a skirmish in Barcelona this way:

“When you are taking part in events like these you are, I suppose, in a small way, making history, and you ought by rights to feel like an historical character. But you never do, because at such times the physical details always outweigh everything else…What I was chiefly thinking about was not the rights and wrongs of this miserable internecine scrap, but simply the discomfort and boredom of sitting day and night on that intolerable roof, and the hunger which was growing worse and worse…”

The narrative of our lives is centered in the mundane. It is hard to be conscious of the greater stories unfolding while we are in the midst of them because we must eat and sleep and talk and work and laugh and clean. This does not mean that we are not undergoing transformation or making a significant difference in the world. It simply means we’re human.

Documenting Metamorphosis

Change can be elusive when it comes to keeping track. Sure, there are those moments when something suddenly shifts in a big way – like the way priorities sink into place at times of illness or death or someone speaks a truth that we’ve never been able to hear before and it blows our mind. More often than not, it seems we awake suddenly realizing there’s been some massive alteration and are able to see, in retrospect, that we’ve been traveling toward such changes for quite some time. It’s just that we’d had no idea they were occurring or how significant the change was.

I recently received a surprising lesson in this process. At nearly five months pregnant, my body has been undergoing rapid changes from the get-go. It’s been the unseen physical changes that I’ve been tuned into the most: the fatigue, nausea, increased flexibility, shortness of breath, random cramping and the recent wiggling of the growing baby. Sure, the pile of clothes I can no longer fit into has grown larger with every passing week, and I’m fascinated by my changing shape, but when my husband snapped a recent photo of me (part of series to keep track of the physical progress), I was shocked at how “little” I looked pregnant compared to how pregnant I felt, and I said as much.

 

Week 19 – you’ll notice the “belly band” keeping these unbuttoned pants up, even though they are two sizes larger than my pre-pregnancy jeans.

 

Scott laughed at this and immediately scrolled back to the photo he took at five weeks pregnant, just days after I had gotten a positive pregnancy test, at a time when I was aware that my most comfortable jeans were already getting a tad tight.

 

Week 5 – just the beginning!

 

I almost fell over from shock. Even though none my pants have fit since the end of December and nearly all of my shirts are too short, I quite simply had no awareness of the degree to which my body had actually changed shape. I harbored no recollection of ever being so…skinny. Tiny. Straight. It seemed preposterous.

This got me thinking. If keeping track of the incredibly rapid changes to my very visible, physical body had proved elusive, what does that mean about the other, less visible ways we evolve? If we can’t remember where we started, how do we know how far we’ve traveled? Tangentially, is it even useful to have such knowledge?

I have little trouble answering that last question. I do believe it’s useful to be aware of our significant alterations and to pay moderate attention to our growth and development. It boosts us for the continuation of the journey. It helps us have compassion for those at different places along the path. It gives us a road map to hand off to others who might want or need one. It keeps us simultaneously grounded and keyed into the bigger story unfolding.

In regards to the “how” of documenting metamorphosis, I imagine that varies from person to person and the individual narrative that is undergoing transformation. Sometimes photographs work. Or examining one’s own creative output. Often, words do. A quick perusal through my own journals from 10 years ago reminds me of where I was and how much I’ve changed. For that reason in part, I often have my clients write their “current” story – be it a personal or business story. It provides a concrete record of where we started. Similarly, it always gives me great joy to look at a client’s evolution through the lens of my notes taken throughout a coaching engagement.

You have changed, too. It’s a requirement of life. So how do you know that you or your organization has undergone some transformation? Or how much has changed? How have you documented your own metamorphoses?

Pregnancy (Or How Wanting and Getting Something Are Two Very Different Things)

My immediate reaction to the knowledge that I was, indeed, pregnant was one of shock. The next one involved that heavy, sinking feeling you get in your stomach when you realize you have made a wrong turn and there’s no easy way to fix it. I sat at my computer comparing my dollar store pregnancy test to googled images of other positive tests and burst into tears.

Women everywhere, since the beginning of time, have been shocked and dismayed at their wanted and unwanted pregnancies, I am certain. My pregnancy falls into the “wanted” category and after nine months of “trying” and one miscarriage, you’d think I’d have caught on to the fact that continued unprotected sex would almost assuredly result in pregnancy. I wasn’t born yesterday, after all.

But becoming a parent wasn’t a given for me. It’s been a careful process of evolution into an awareness that I would like to embark on this mysterious journey of life-altering significance. I looked deep into my soul. I considered the person I want to be and the life I want to live. I casually interviewed other parents and made studious observations. And at the end of the day, I realized that yes – yes! – I would very much like to throw my hat into this particular ring. But somehow wanting something and getting something are two very different things.

Hence the torrent of tears.

By now I’ve had several months to let the news sink in and the worst of the misnomered “morning” sickness pass. The shock and dismay are largely gone and I’ve allowed that, while this will undoubtedly change my life in ways too numerous to count, it will likely not ruin it. Quite the opposite, as a matter of fact.

Or so I am led to believe by numerous things I’ve gotten but never even considered wanting: the wide-eyed wonder I saw in my husband’s eyes when we heard the baby’s heartbeat for the first time; the irrepressible shout of joy from my best friend upon first hearing the news; the encouragement from other men and women who have already traveled this road; the extra long hugs my father gives; my mother’s repeated requests for pictures of my growing belly; and mostly, my own inner sense of calm matched with a deep, abiding joy that overtakes me at the most surprising moments.

Choose Your Friends Wisely

This is Part Six in a Six-Part Series about getting to the stuff that matters this year. If you missed the other parts, start here.



We all know the people closest to us have a significant effect on our lives. You’ve likely been hearing about this since you were a child when your parents weighed in on your peer relationships. More recently, research has even shown that your choice in friends can make you fat.

Our relationships also effect what we believe is possible for us, what’s important to us and whether or not we’re likely to act on those possibilities and values.







Take the Olympic athlete I heard about recently who was coming out of retirement for one last contest. When her father didn’t believe she’d make it, she cut him out of her inner circle. In order to achieve this difficult goal, she knew she needed to weed out negative influences and, pain her as it might, her father was being a negative influence.

When you think about getting to the important stuff in your life, do you find that you are surrounded by the right people? Do they believe in you, support you, encourage you, challenge you, speak the truth to you? Do their own journeys inspire you?

Integral to the design of the upcoming 6-month coaching group, Jumpstart What Matters Most 2011, is community. Participants will benefit tremendously as they build an intimate creative support group that stays connected, in touch and as they serve as cheerleaders and fellow travelers on the journey. If you are looking for that kind of support, consider joining us for our start in one week! The group will stay small, but can accommodate one or two more people.

Isn’t it time you started getting to the stuff that really matters?

What Really Matters

You already know what’s important to you. Because you have been told what’s important to you. By the media. By your friends. By your partner. By your parents. By pundits. Maybe even by me.

There are so many voices competing for your mind share, particularly around the New Year, telling you what you should care about, change and go after that it can be hard to hear your own voice.

Last year around this time I blogged about New Year’s Resolutions and when it’s good not to make them.  This year I want to encourage you to orient your life around what really matters.

Sounds kinda simple, right? Often, no.

The initial problem rests with all those other voices, with the competition we face in identifying what’s really important to us. How can you focus your energy on making time and space for your creative work or  solidifying and growing your creative business or integrating your creative self into your life if the cultural narrative you are being peddled is one of short-term fixes and surface-level adjustments?



(Perhaps getting to more than the most important stuff can work if you are a Hindu god with multiple arms. Alas, you are not. Recommendation: stick the stuff that really matters.)



If you are truly ready to get to what’s important in 2011, step one is to actually identify the stuff that matters to you.

Next week I’ll be rolling out an offering for a group coaching program to equip you with a new story and strategic roadmap for getting to the deeply important creative, vocational and entrepreneurial goals you have for yourself, your business and your life in 2011.  As a group, we’re going to start, here, too, with identifying what actually matters.

For now, I encourage you to take some quiet space to do a quick inventory of this last year as it relates to what’s important to you. Here are some guiding questions:

  • If every moment of your year had been calendered, would a review of that calendar reveal that your time had reflected those deep, creative and difference-making priorities you set out for yourself?


  • When did you feel most alive or creatively engaged over the last 12 months? What were you doing? What was the environment like? Were you alone or working on a team?


  • What dragged you down the most? Was there a project or work that was soul-sucking? Be specific and detail the context and environment.


  • What did you not do that you wish you had?


  • How did you change and grow in ways that prepare you for getting to the stuff that matters in 2011?



I invite you to use your answers as building blocks for crafting your own story that you submit at Tell A Story. It will be an inspiration to others, I am certain!

Finally, as we sit at the threshold of a new year, I want to thank you — all of you — who have followed and participated in the growth of Get There From here throughout 2010. I’m deeply privileged to be doing this work that you make possible. Happy New Year!

Leap and the Net Will Appear

This post was submitted on Tell a Story. Isn’t it time you told your story?

Leap and the net will appear. That quote comes from Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, a book that led me to find a coach and played a part in a series of leaps I would take in my life.

It all began with my simple desire to write. I enjoyed writing when I actually did it, which was rarely. Part of the problem was laziness, and part of it was lack of inspiration. What would I write about? And then there was the matter of my inner critic rearing its ugly head, saying why bother? Who will read it? I would occasionally try to write, but often felt blocked. Yet I still found myself buying books about writing, reading articles about writing, and listening to interviews with writers, living vicariously through their tales of creative fulfillment. Clearly, I had some desire to write.

A friend suggested The Artist’s Way, which is basically a 12-week program involving journaling and reflective exercises geared toward silencing your inner critic and discovering or reconnecting with your creative side. I immediately bought a copy, completed (and enjoyed) the first exercise, and then let the book sit around for another few weeks as I made half-hearted attempts to continue with it. I’d always been a good student, but part of the motivation in school was having to complete assignments and turn them in for a grade. I’m no longer in school, have no teachers, no assignments, no deadlines, no pressure, and therefore, no motivation. But I still wanted to complete the exercises in the book, get in touch with my creative side, and establish a regular writing practice. My husband, who had been working with a life coach through his job, suggested hiring one for my creative needs. That way I would have someone to check in with periodically, someone to motivate me and help me set goals, and someone to hold me accountable for meeting those goals.


Leap #1 – Hiring a Life Coach

This may not seem like much of a leap to some people, but please understand; I was a very private person who did not disclose a great deal of information about myself to others. The thought of discussing myself, my fears and insecurities, and my creative goals with someone I didn’t know (or even with someone I did know) was outside of my comfort zone. I also had some resistance to telling people I wanted to write because I feared they would expect me to churn out a best-selling novel or two, and I would feel like a failure if I didn’t.

I found a delightful coach whose warmth and sense of humor immediately put to rest my concerns, fears, and resistance. And as luck would have it, she also loves to write and was familiar with The Artist’s Way. We worked together for several months, during which time I completed all the exercises in the book and established a regular writing routine. I was very happy with my coaching experience and proud of my accomplishment, but I had a burning question: what now?


Leap #2 – Giving Speeches
Huh? How did I go from quietly writing for my own sense of creative fulfillment to getting up in front of a room full of people and giving a speech? Well, I felt like I needed to take things a step further. My concern was that this new writing routine would just be a fleeting thing, and that in a few weeks I would get lazy again. One thing I know about myself is that once I take action, I love to reward myself with inaction.

There was one piece of writing, a personal and somewhat humorous essay about my childhood, which I kept reading out loud. The more I thought about it, the more I realized I had written a speech, and I felt like I wanted to share it. This was very out of character for me, yet I yearned to find my voice and tell my story. My husband belonged to a Toastmasters group, and the thought ‘why don’t you join?’ kept bobbing to the surface of my mind. I desperately tried to drown this thought, but it kept coming up for air and getting stronger each time. I even pictured myself getting up, giving the speech, and feeling the emotion of every word and phrase. Then I would stop myself and say, are you insane? Why would you want to put yourself through that?

I discussed the idea of public speaking with my coach. It went like this:

Me: (exasperated & dismissive) “I can’t believe I’m even thinking about this! I’m an introvert! We don’t do this stuff voluntarily!”

JGB: (calmly & rationally) “We are more than just our Myers-Briggs personality types.”

What a wise woman! She proceeded to coach around the issues I was having, and we finally negotiated an action step for me to take. I would visit the Toastmasters group, only as a guest, just to observe. A baby step. That worked out quite well, as I not only joined the group, I also delivered my first speech at the next meeting. It was very empowering, to say the least. Toastmasters also gave me the structure and deadlines I needed to motivate myself to write.

I like to think of giving speeches as my version of bungee jumping — something new and different and challenging for me, and a great way to step outside of myself and lean into my discomfort. My initial desire to write led me to public speaking, which led me to co-presenting an all-day workshop that evolved from one of my speeches. This would have been unthinkable to the pre-coaching me.


Leap #3 – Quitting my job to pursue my passion
So did I quit my job to pursue my passion for writing? No, I did not. Did I quit my job to pursue my passion for public speaking? No, I did not. I quit my job to pursue my passion for yoga.

You see, something interesting happened as a result of my journey from coaching to writing to public speaking. I not only discovered that my true passion was yoga, I also realized that it could be my dream career. Just to be clear, I love writing and public speaking, but I’ve been having a torrid love affair with yoga for many years, and only after giving speeches did I realize I had the courage (and the skills) to lead a yoga class. This realization led to getting my yoga teacher certification, which led to one teaching gig, which led to many more opportunities, and those opportunities led me to the ultimate leap of quitting my full-time job as a librarian to pursue my passion for teaching yoga.

It’s amazing to think about how my life unfolded and expanded since that very first coaching session!

Now, I’m not suggesting that you run right out to get a copy of The Artist’s Way, quit your job and the universe will immediately shower you with rainbows, puppies, and free candy. But what I am encouraging you to do is get clear on what you want and take action. Take action on whatever it is that you’ve been holding back from. Maybe it’s something as simple as getting back into a writing routine, or maybe it’s something as grand as writing a best-selling novel. Maybe it’s as simple as delivering your first speech, or as grand as becoming a motivational speaker. Whatever it is, take action, even if it’s a baby step in the right direction. Those baby steps are powerful! They lead to big, grown-up steps, and grown-up steps lead to leaps, and trust me, when you leap, the net will appear.

A New Chapter

Ta-da!

For months, I have been teasing the fact that Get There From Here was going re-focus around story in an bigger way. Today, after nearly a year’s work, it officially has, and I’m so pleased to welcome you to the updated site that reflects this re-orientation. It’s all about helping you get to the stuff that matters through the creative power of story!

There are some obvious changes. The website copy has changed. The font is easier to read. There are beautiful new images on each page. This is all good stuff and I hope these changes will make getting the support you need an easier proposition. You might be particularly interested in a few specific spots:



Check ‘em out!

I also think the following interview of me, filmed by the Empowerment Group to help kick-off their Power of Story event, will provide some nice context for this shift. It’s the story of my business and of me as an entrepreneur. At the very least, you can appreciate the creepy image of me that YouTube chose as the still.





As Get There From here has grown over the last 3+ years, I have so valued the deep learning clients and readers of this blog have enabled me to to experience. In other words, thanks for being here. It makes all the difference.




I’d also like to offer a shout-out to Alx Block, Lula Jones and Scott Gleeson Blue who worked tirelessly to get the new site up and running.

The Thigh Bone’s Connected to the Knee Bone: Part 3

Check out part 1 and part 2 of this story to read how I began the process of taking responsibility for my story about my health.

I cried, I journaled, I prayed about how crappy I felt about my relationship to my health. Which is where we left off yesterday and where I was feeling some measure of clarity about a next step. Ready for it? Cool. Here is the thought that immediately popped into my mind:

Get online and intuitively google.

Huh? Wait. Screwing around online has become my default avoidance technique. I think I may have actually rolled my eyes. Surely, this was me just trying to get out of taking further responsibility, right?

Now, I don’t really understand how intuition works. I just know that it does. And that I rarely regret following a gut instinct. So I took a deep breath and hopped online, deciding simply to stay awake (in the spiritual sense) and see what I discovered.

There are a few important background notes worth mentioning here:

1. I’m a skeptic. It’s a family trait. And it’s extremely valuable. It’s what keeps me from being cultish about religion, new age fads and myriad ideological camps. It’s also what makes me a late adopter to everything from useful technologies to useful ideas.

2. I’ve increasingly become attuned to the fact that we see as though “through a glass, darkly.” In other words, the longer I live and the longer I study and the longer I walk alongside my clients in their own processes of discovery, the more convinced I’ve become that very little (if any) of life is black and white and that we have no choice but to move forward in partial blindness.

3. I’ve tried a lot of different things. In the realm of health, I’ve seen chiropractors, neurologists, voice pathologists, surgeons, physical therapists and an acupuncturist. That’s probably a short list.

Back to the internet.

So I’m googling away, feeling my way from site to site, following my intuition. And I come across a page that mentions something called Tension Myositis Syndrome, coined by a Dr. John Sarno of NYU’s Rusk Institute. TMS is a psychosomatic disorder, and the theory behind it states that the brain seeks to distract the individual from painful, unconscious emotions so it uses the nervous system to restrict blood flow to specific body parts and this mild oxygen deprivation causes pain. The focus and attention to the pain keeps you from experiencing said painful emotions. Apparently, these painful emotions can be pretty run of the mill stuff but for whatever reason the individual finds them unacceptable and therefore represses them. The brain wants to make sure it stays this way.

While TMS is most often diagnosed in back pain – of which I have none – it has also been connected to almost every chronic, idiopathic problem I have ever had.  I ordered the book, The Divided Mind, by Dr. Sarno and while dragging my skepticism through the muck of it, became even more convinced that this syndrome is worth exploring. Part of what has convinced me is actually physical: my arm pain has decreased by about 30% since first reading about TMS and I notice the pain spikes whenever I’m angry or irritated. And then all I think about is the physical discomfort.

But reading the book also leaves me feeling depressed. I am aware that I’d much rather deal with physical problems than psychological ones. That awareness depresses me even more. I like to think of myself as emotionally attuned and open to dealing with whatever issues I have.To help me sort through all of this, I made an appointment to go see a doctor who specializes in TMS to see which of my chronic conditions might stem from psychological factors and which of them might, say, result from a need for new orthotics.

Quite frankly, the long and short of this has very little to do with whatever is causing my physical problems. It has to do with my relationship to them. It has to do with my story about my health and my willingness to take responsibility for it. It reminds me of when I first began an effort to change my financial picture. While a desired outcome may have been more money coming in through my business, it really boiled down to whether or not I could develop a healthy relationship with my finances, whatever they looked like. For richer or poorer, right?

The same is true with our bodies, with our health and wellness. And whether I have TMS or Parkinson’s or have just hit an odd rough patch, I am responsible for how I respond, for what I bring to the table, for how I act in relationship. Will I obsess over what’s not working? Will I go through long periods of not doing anything to address my problems? Will I remember that the thigh bone’s connected to the knee bone, that there is a interrelatedness in all things? And if the cause of my symptoms is psychological, will I be brave enough to follow through?

I don’t know if I’m anywhere near resolution to my chronic health concerns. I don’t know if the path will be easy or hard. What I do know is that I am no longer out of integrity. I can get up in front of a room of people, share with them about how to craft their own powerful stories about health and wellness and know that I’m along for the ride, too. That I have begun changing my own story.

A Heavy-Handed Analogy for Choosing a Direction

It’s been over a year since we moved in to our house and my husband and I are finally ready to paint the downstairs. We painted the 2nd floor rooms in distinct, bold colors before moving in and have now grown tired of looking at creamy white walls on the 1st level. Living in an open-style row home with rooms that flow together, we want three complimentary colors for the sun room, living room and dining room.

So two nights ago, off we went to Lowe’s, which has a nice selection of affordable, no-VOC paints. We opted for samples, preferring to err on the side of caution (note: I’ve painted entire rooms only to later discover I don’t like the color).

Lowe’s visit #1:
Sand and Sage, Creamy Chocolate, Foreshadow

Totally didn’t work. All the colors were darker and more purple than we’d ever have imagined. They reminded me of eyeshadow I wore in the 10th grade.

Lowe’s visit #2:
Azure Snow, Shoreline Haze, Tea Stain

Or so we thought. Turns out the dude behind the paint counter, who appeared hopped up on speed, actually skipped Shoreline Haze and gave us Tea Stain twice. But these colors we liked. There was nothing dark enough for the living room, however, and I wasn’t convinced that Shoreline Haze, the original color we expected to sample, would cut it either.

Lowe’s visit #3:
Shoreline Haze, Fairmont Penthouse Stone

Looking good! Seven samples later and we’ve actually found a palette we can commit to. We’ll be buying gallons this evening.

(The Wall of Samples)

I promised a heavy-handed analogy so here it is: choosing your paint colors is much like choosing your direction in life. Here are some parallel lessons:

Lesson 1: It’s a good idea to do a little sampling.
I was really tempted to take our first choices, spend many hours, roughly $120 on several gallons of paint and just hope for the best. I would have been very disappointed and frustrated. I also would have found some way to blame my husband for this error, since disappointment and frustration always bring out my best.

Lesson 2: Sampling too much may not be helpful.
Truth be told, there’s a part of me that would prefer to sample about 10 more colors. At least. But experience tells me that 10 more colors won’t make me any happier with the final result because choosing something always means not choosing something else. No matter what excellent choice I make, I’m missing out on another good possibility.

Lesson 3: You can always change your paint colors.
Let’s say it turns out Fairmont Penthouse Stone makes us feel like we’re hanging out in a cardboard box drinking out of a mug with more than one Tea Stain while we’re being smothered by a Shoreline Haze. Well, then it’s back to Lowe’s we go. A hassle? Yes. Doable? Absolutely.


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“When I am asked for a referral to a life coach, Jennifer is on the top of my list. If you seek results, personal transformation and want to enjoy the process, Jennifer Gleeson Blue does not disappoint. I consistently hear rave reviews from all whom I have referred to her for life coaching.”Seth Kaufman, Philadelphia, PA