ESSAYS
Project: 30 Days of Thoughtful
I was looking for something that I could read for 2 minutes in the morning or in a coffee break that would help me continue to keep growing but that was gritty and deep enough to be meaningful. So here’s my offering – a short journey for 30 days into Thoughtful, from September 1 – September 30th, 2017. I’ll send you an email with a reflection from my private journals, this blog and lessons I’ve learned from wise advisors and mentors on the way.
Life By Design: Rhythms of Grace
I am producing a life. I am designing a life of rich experiences, adventure, meaning and relationships. That is the key to productivity – how do I live in a rhythm that sustains these things? If the rhythm of your life feels heavy or burdensome, if you don’t feel light on your feet then you’ve found a great place to start your life by design.
Life by Design: Writing Your Story
What’s the outcome you are living towards? I first knew I wanted to be a writer the moment I defined my life purpose; to help people think differently by communicating and sharing different ideas about how to live. Moving towards the outcomes you desire requires a proactive writing of your story, or what I call life by design. Adapting to the context, circumstances and characters that exist outside of my control.
Life By Design: Moving Through Fear
Fear is most dangerous when it threatens to stop our onward movement, the organic growth that is already going on within us. The navigation we’ve set for ourselves. Here’s a strategy for moving through fear when it threatens to stop you in your tracks. Here’s a list of all the things I wish I could write about and the one thing I have to write about, because I didn’t want fear to stop me today.
Design begins with Story.
From the moment we hear a story, we begin designing. We design possible outcomes and applications of story, we being to envisage the future described by the story. We imagine new ways of being and doing in order to meet the story or change the story. Storytelling is the original design practice.
Nudging, the Art of Small Catalysts.
Much like sailing into the wind to see what happens, we listen to our life and begin the process of transformation to see what might happen. What might our tender, wondrous little changes result in? What wonder might our small lives contain if we allow the change to happen?
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LEADERSHIP
A Liturgy for Sleeplessness.
May the alchemy of body and mind, mystery of eyes responding to light and noise relent — to the tonic of sleep; the easy weighted fall of eyelids, the slowing rhythm of breath.
A Need to be Wanted
“You are requirements,” he said. “Don’t go.”
We have made a mistaken, secret kind of holiness of being needed. I have learned through heartache that to be ‘needed’ is not the same as being wanted. And that is love in boundaries and it sucks.
When You are in the Graft.
Do not give up, do not fight against the pain; fight with it and through it for your life. Hold onto your graft.
Kia kaha, kia maia, kia manawanui (be strong, courageous, be steadfast and willing).
Anticipation Sickness.
This combination of hope and anxiety can be crippling. And that’s anticipation sickness. Knowing the risk you take to hope at all, knowing what losing hope will feel like, how our way of seeing the world will be again challenged. It’s the fear and anxiety that overshadows joy. Hope is not a joyful feeling – hope is the gut-wrenching, white-knuckled sigh of the heartbroken, brave and vulnerable to look up, to say ‘Okay, let’s go again.’
100 Days: Transformation
Because we must learn how to learn and keep learning even when we are in the midst of a repeating machine. There is something in our souls that longs to reach up to the sun and something in our roots that calls for deeper earth.
Welcome to the Lonely.
And I remembered then; this is the Lonely. There was something within me longing to be heard; but the one to hear was not with me.
So I let it sit, let it dwell with me for the day. Loneliness becomes a more tolerable companion as soon as you acknowledge its presence, I’ve found. I let others assume the reason for my quiet reticence that day and then in the evening, alone in the quietness of my room, I said to the Lonely, ‘Thank you for today and good night.’ I will not be any more or less lonely simply because I might one day share my Lonely with another. They will not be able to banish the lonely, but they may share it.