Category Archives: Life Transformation

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Demolition Woman [30 Day Writing Challenge, Day 4]

My therapist once told me that it’s never too late to have a great childhood. I took her up on this, and promptly set about releasing the old traumas and outdated life operating systems I’d acquired over the course of my literal, chronological childhood. And I made it the sport of the day to dive into my not-too-late new childhood, rewiring my emotional habits and my life with a new sense of joy, play and lightness.

I redecorated my house to suit my 9-year-old self (see photo), started having a bunch of adventures around the world, and re-taught myself the curiosity, enthusiasm, wonder and trust of a well-parented kidlet.

Recently, my cousin posted a photo on Facebook that brought my not-so-great chronological childhood to mind. She currently lives on the same street I grew up on, maybe 15 houses down from my childhood home. That home was the site of great, great pain and devastating emotional wounding to me, as a young girl. It was the place where I experienced the most traumatic events of my life, the ones I had only really been able to acknowledge, integrate and release twenty years later, after years of therapy and a general commitment to healing every area of my life. 

The photo my cousin posted was a stark one. It was a photo of her current home which, until recently, stood in the midst of an upper-middle-class subdivision of similar two-story, 80’s construction homes. My childhood home was one of them. But in this photo, her home stood alone, amidst a vast expanse of well-manicured dirt. After decades of threatening to do so, the State of California had surprised nearly everyone in town, and moved forward with plans to raze the neighborhood and run a freeway through it. My cousin was one of the last people in the area to move, and so ended up living in a home that remained standing while those around it were completely erased off the face of the earth, one-by-one.

On a whim, I shot her a message on Facebook. After asking her whether my old house was still standing, and hearing that it was indeed, I asked her to go take a quick photo of it and send it to me, which she did, a couple of hours later.

I sat and considered the little square on my screen for a moment. It took me a moment to recognize it as my house. The paint job was different, the lawn was brown, the roofline was saggy in the middle. It was clearly suffering from the absence of constant grooming by my meticulous, Marine father. To be fair, I’m certain its owners had permanently deferred maintaining the place once they realized it had a date with the wrecking ball.

Maybe it was this shabbiness, or maybe just my adulthood and tons of trauma release therapy, but the place also just didn’t seem scary to me anymore. It didn’t seem loaded, at all. It seemed a little sad, actually. Like, I was sad for the house, for all that it had witness over the years, versus being sad for myself. Of course, I knew what the house, as a non-sentient ‘being’, could never know, which is that it had no more than a few weeks to exist. Demolition was unavoidable, and imminent.

The few moments after my cousin zapped the photo of my old house to me across the Webs were each coded with an emotion. Moment 1: wow, the house looks bad. Moment 2: hm, I don’t feel as bad as I thought I would. Moment 3: poor, sad house. It has no idea what’s about to happen. It’s dying and doesn’t know it.

Then in that fourth moment, it really dawned on me: the house was being demolished. The site of my deepest trauma, of the worst moments of my life, was about to be completely obliterated off the face of the planet. Gone. Fini.

Except, actually, not fini. Instead of fini, my beloved State of California was actually going to run a freeway through it. As a lifelong Californian, I have always had a strange love of freeways, those strangely gorgeous wonders of geography and engineering that allow us to traverse vast expanses of our obscenely un-walkable state in unnatural ways and at unnatural speeds. My personal Ground Zero was going to be erased, then replaced with the ultimate symbol of forward motion, freedom and activity.

YES.

So, I went on about my morning, saying a little prayer of gratitude for the lessons I’d learned from my pain, and for the person it helped create me to be. I affirmed that there was nothing more for me to glean from that stuff, and bid the pain of that part of my life, the pain that had been symbolized by that house, a final farewell. I went on about my day, getting a cup of tea and getting dressed to walk the mongrels.

As I got ready, I noticed some construction noise in front of my house. It was like heavy, heavy drilling, odd for so early in the morning. I walked out onto the front porch, and saw that the entire freeway frontage road near my house had been blocked and studded with cones overnight. A massive sign messaged that the freeway entrance was closed temporarily to repave the road and install a protected bike lane, and that traffic was being redirected to another entrance.

But that’s not where the noise was coming from. Immediately in front of my house, some guys were drilling into the sidewalk, installing a bright orange ‘Detour’ sign. They saw me and waved hello. I smiled, waved back and walked back inside, shaking my head and laughing to myself as I went.

detour

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

P.S.: I issued a 30 Day Writing Challenge for Conscious Leaders a few weeks back, and over 150 brilliant souls signed up! I decided to take the Challenge right along with them, and it’s been a profound journey for many of us. Most people are journaling or free-writing every day, privately. But I wrote this post on Day 4 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

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Simple food—and people—rules [30 Day Writing Challenge, Day 3]

I love simple food rules. One of my favorites comes from culinary anthropologist and author, Michael Pollan: “Eat real food. Mostly plants. Not too much.” But I have my own, too. A number of them, which now that I think of it, might actually defeat the purpose of simplicity. Anyhow, here’s one decision rule I have about food. I require the food items I eat to fit one of the following items:

  1. It must be filling
  2. It must be nutritious, or
  3. It must be truly, intensely delectable.


But no one food item needs to be all of these things. This is how I come to have a daily diet that consists 90% of hemp protein powder, avocado, eggs, kale smoothies, french fries and a collagen drink my friend Alice tasted, then immediately deemed “wet dog soup.”

My food rules work for me.

And they came to mind this morning when I met with an old friend I’ll keep nameless unless and until he tells me it’s okay to do otherwise. He and I worked together at the best company ever. He’s a super smart dude and one of those generally wonderful human beings you’re glad to know type folks.

My food rules came to mind when my friend told me how he thinks about companies. He said, when we worked together we had the complete trifecta: a product we loved, a mission we were on fire about, and a CEO and team we were devoted to. But after looking at and talking to literally dozens of companies, I’ve realized what my Most Important Criterion is: for me, if the CEO and team are smart and coachable and engaged, that’s good enough for me. I can help with or be okay with the rest.

This, I found fascinating. It was like simple food rules, but for work and leadership and, really, for people. Part of the reason I found it fascinating was that I’ve been doing a lot of work recently with my coach to rehabilitate some of my dysfunctional and, frankly, inaccurate, long-held beliefs about men and relationships. After spotting and calling me out on some of these deep-down, beliefs, we actually put together an affirmation: that there are abundant caring, capable, dependable men who are attracted to and available to me.

Three simple rules.

Sounds great, right? The problem is that I quickly corrupted this affirmation, tacking on a bunch of other criteria. I thought, hmmm, I have met and know a bunch of guys who are caring, capable and dependable, who are attracted to and available to me, but I’m not really into them. So I need to narrow this down a bit more. Be more specific. So I bolted a bunch of criteria onto this affirmation, and it became:

There are abundant sexy (to me), caring, capable, dependable, trustworthy, active men who are attracted to and available to me.

It has come to my attention that this is just too many things. It’s a little like in leadership, when you see companies try to focus on six things a year, and they end up focusing on nothing. A couple of my friends even mentioned it: hey, that’s too many things to be looking for. You’ve gotta decide which 3 things are really critical to you. That’s all you can really ask someone to be.

This required some emotional and intellectual rigor. And in the process of meeting people, trying relationships on and feeling into what I’m really attracted to, in both friends and romantic partners, I realized something: that I had been creating this laundry list of things by thinking about what I didn’t have or what didn’t work in previous relationships, then listing the opposite of those traits as what I really wanted.

Once I had that insight, it hit me like a bolt of lightning that I was doing it all wrong. not the way to create what you want, to get clear on what you don’t want and move to the opposite of that. Sometime the contrast between what you don’t want clarifies what you want, but more often, it keeps you stuck in the energy of struggle and scarcity. It keeps you stuck in a focus on what doesn’t work.

After years of practice, I’ve now (mostly) released the stressful approach of focusing on what I don’t want. I was only really able to do this after I cultivated the skills of setting good boundaries, speaking my own truth in every situation and identifying red flags that signal a person or relationship is not right for me.

But it still took some emotional discipline to listen to that still, small voice in my spirit closely enough to identify just three characteristics I consistently find attractive. These are the three things I feel so strongly about that I am willing to put a stake in the ground around them, when it comes to deciding who to partner up with, date, hang out with and share a life with. Here are the three I selected.

I want to be in relationship with people who are intentional.

I want to be in relationships with people who are caring.

And I want to be in relationships with people who are resilient.

Intentional carries a connotation of integrity to me. Intentional people are principled and purpose-driven. They are thoughtful and deep. They are active, and take actions with deliberation. They don’t let life happen to them. They move through the world with clarity, wisdom and consciousness, even if they shift the direction of that motion in different seasons of their lives.

Caring people just give a shit. They are engaged and listen, but also are willing to pour themselves into the specific people and causes and projects and work and play that trigger their personal or spiritual mental frames for “Things I care about.” They don’t act bored or like they’re too cool for school about everything. When something is important to them, they act or feel or engage with bold enthusiasm, love and even joy. With care. They think about how their actions or inactions impact others, and they factor that into their calculus of how to act and be in the world.

Resilient people carry a testimony about how they got from the deep, dark nights of the soul to the beautiful vibrance of today. Part of that testimony is the faith that they can handle what may come. I love resilient people because of the triumph of spirit they represent, and because things happen in life, so it’s really game-changing to know that the people in your life have your back and won’t flip out when shit gets real, because they’ve already been there and lived to tell the tale. Resilient people also have a glow of brilliant perspective about them. They don’t major in the minors, because ain’t nobody got time for that when you’ve been on death’s door or lived in misery and came back or got out. And they do major in the majors, like loving the people in their lives and having adventures, and making bold life decisions in the direction of their highest purpose and joy, because they count every day as the precious blessing it is.

Maybe one day I’ll get it down to one. One simple people rule I send out into the vortex and connect with people around. For now, I’ll stick with these three. And I’ll work on developing tolerance and communications skills and appreciation for the varying ways humanity shows up in the form of individual people.

P.S.: I issued a 30 Day Writing Challenge for Conscious Leaders a few weeks back, and over 150 brilliant souls signed up! I decided to take the Challenge right along with them, and it’s been a profound journey for many of us. Most people are journaling or free-writing every day, privately. But I wrote this post on Day 3 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

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The Tao of Pugs: Life Lessons from Canine Royalty [30 Day Writing Challenge, Day 2]

Psychologists say that neurons that fire together wire together. They call this neuroplasticity, a recent scientific observation that we create new neural connections based on learning and behavior and habit throughout our whole lives.

The positive psychologists have built something on top of this finding they call self-directed neuroplasticity. This means that not only do neurons that fire together wire together, but that we can actually choose which new neural circuits we create by mindfully selecting what we focus on, what behaviors we engage in and what habits we form.

There is a lot of wisdom out there in the world about how to do this. But sometimes, when your wiring is really off, or when most people around you have the same faulty or outdated wiring as you do, the most helpful thing in the world is to actually see someone in your real, everyday life model a new (to you), graceful, powerful circuit.

And sometimes, like, let’s say, if you’re me, one inspirational model of setting the bar high for life and the people you let in your life, is the model presented by your dogs.

I mean, listen. I have a high bar for myself. Always have. I’ve had an inborn spirit of excellence, which was reinforced and encoded into permanence by my dear old Dad.

In fact, my standards for myself have sometimes been too high. But I haven’t always had super high standards for the people I let into my life. And I haven’t always been good at setting boundaries for my loved ones. This took a lot of rewiring, and my dogs were my model.

“The girls,” as they’re known all over Oakland and the blogosphere, refers collectively to my dogs Aiko and Sumiko. They are ½ Pug and ½ Japanese Chin, and were intentionally bred as a so-called “designer dog” mix by a Bay Area breeder. The breeder sold all the other pups in their litter, but because Aiko and Miko each had an umbilical hernia, the breeder surrendered them at 6 weeks old to the San Francisco SPCA. Which is where I found them, and immediately changed their pound puppy names (Mugsy and Bugsy, Lord have mercy SMH so hard) to something more fitting of their station.

The rest is history.

Speaking of history, for you to understand how my dogs because my gurus, you must first understand the history of their breed. Pugs were specifically bred to be the lapdogs of the Chinese Imperial family. Tragically, they were bred not to be able to walk too far from the laps they were supposed to warm, as the palaces in which they lived were vast and easy to get lost in. So Pugs were bred to have short legs and to resemble the Lion Dogs, aka Fu Dogs, of ancient Chinese myth, which is how they come to have such very short nasal passages. (Side note: This is why most Pugs can barely breathe. Fortunately, the girls have longer legs and are leaner than the average pug, given their mixed-breeding. Side note 2: This is why mutts are great.)

Because Pugs couldn’t go far, each Pug in the palace was historically assigned their own, dedicated eunuch. When the dog wanted something, their wishes quickly became the eunuch’s command.

So, in just the same way as shepherd-breed dogs still need something to herd even if they live in Manhattan, Aiko and Miko still require an extraordinarily high level of customer service, just like their Pug ancestors would have had in the Imperial Palace. Even though Aiko and Miko live in Oakland.

And for the most part, they get it. They get it at home, where I’m trained to feed them at precisely 6 am and 6 pm. Even my son knows what to do. When he walks in for a visit, they run up, he kisses them each on both cheeks, then they walk off. When I get out of the shower, they show up, lick my knees and peace out. On College Avenue, where we walk every morning, they know which people have treats waiting for them. I’ve decided the human brain has a neuron triggered by pugs, because so many people flat-out love them, for no reason at all.

But also, these two get extraordinary customer service because they require it. When Miko wants to be picked up, she walks up to you and lies down. You know what to do. Even people who’ve never met her, somehow know exactly what she wants them to do. And when Miko gets too much attention, Aiko walks up and just nudges her out of the way, somehow ensuring that the hand you were just using to pet Miko lands neatly on her little head.

When they hear a treat bag-sounding noise, they sit on their little butts, as taught, with the expectation that you see them seated and will deliver. As you’ve been trained to do.

They are clear on what they want, in their own minds. And they clearly communicate what they want and need. But here’s the thing: they don’t freak out when they don’t get it. Nor do they get existential or destructive or irate when they don’t get it.

They will let you know. They will speak up themselves and ask for what they want and need. They will howl a little bit or paw at you if they want to be picked up. They will howl a lot if it’s time to eat. But if they don’t get what they want, and it’s not a dire need, they will either walk away and either get over it, fast, or walk away and find it elsewhere. They will find someone else willing to perform to the customer service standards to which they are accustomed.

It’s in their royal lineage. They were bred for this, to know what they deserve and are entitled to, purely by virtue of being who they are. Not because they deserve more than anyone else or are better than anyone else. Just because they are.

So, this is one of the lessons I’ve learned from these precious little mongrels of mine, one of the things they’ve modeled for me. The truth is that we all have a royal lineage. We are all children of God, the Creator of the Universe. That means everything is our inheritance: peace, joy, health, love, prosperity, enthusiasm. Everything. Not because we’re better than anyone else, and not because we deserve it more than anyone else. Because it’s our inheritance. All of ours.

But we forget this sometimes. And we take so much less from the world, from the people around us. And we think this is normal, for a few reasons.

Some of us think it’s normal, because we grew up with very human, mostly good enough parents. And they model for us that we shouldn’t make so much noise or ask for so much, or we should learn to put up with things that really, we shouldn’t. You get what you get and you don’t get upset, they tell us, sometimes about things that actually warrant upset. Our loving parents do this because they, too, were taught this. They, too, believed the lie that there’s only so much to go around, and that something bad will happen if you make too much noise.

Or our well-intentioned, perfectly flawed parents themselves modeled dysfunctional relationships. Dysfunctional relating. They didn’t show us how to set boundaries, so we didn’t see it and we didn’t learn it. This, too, they do because they had their own emotional wounds, or never saw healthy relationships modeled themselves.

But you know, they really were good enough as parents. Good enough that we now can take the opportunity to heal, to be more deliberate, and to rewire these circuits intentionally.

Or sometimes, we think it’s normal to require less of the world, and the people around us, because our culture has normalized the broken and dysfunctional. Have you ever tried to find a love song to listen to that’s not about heartbreak and betrayal or addiction and codependency? Nope. Because healthy interdependence, true partnership, mutual love and respect, careful stewardship of another’s precious soul, the hard work of building a life together? These things are boring, compared with the fireworks of lyrics like “I hate you so much right now.”

A friend once brought her little dog-traumatized boy, about 4 years old, to my house to meet the girls. She hoped the exposure to my very mellow mongrels would help him get comfortable around dogs again. It worked. Thirty minutes into the visit, he was sitting in their bed with them, hugging and squeezing them, and trying to sit on them. He crossed boundaries, for real.

And their response was brilliant and instructive. They didn’t snap at him, bite or even bark. They didn’t go through all kinds of gyrations and dramatics to try to get him to change or act right. But they didn’t take it either. They both just got up and walked away. And they kept walking away every time he tried it. He had to learn that they would only tolerate certain behavior if he wanted to hang out with them. And he did.

There’s one more big life lesson I’ve learned from these precious sugar plums of mine, and it isn’t about the standards to which they hold people, or the standard for behavior they tolerate. It’s about the standards, the conditions if you will, they put on their own happiness.

Exhibit A: The girls in their happy place

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Exhibit B: The girls when they’re calm and just got treats

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Exhibit C: The girls when they want something

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Do you notice anything? These dogs have achieved pro-level equanamity. They feel emotion. They respond to situations, as needed. But they don’t allow the situation to determine their overall state. And they don’t allow situations to cause them to act outside of their normal, regal selves. They are nonplussed, in virtually every situation. Exceptions being squirrels and peanut butter.

They trust and know they will be provided for, and they are. They expect great things, and they get them. They require high thread-count linens and grain-free, Omega-3 fatty acid balanced dog food with raw freeze dried bits, and that’s exactly what comes to them. And if by chance circumstances aren’t precisely to their liking, they stay steady and know that things are always working out for them. And that’s exactly what happens.

P.S.: I issued a 30 Day Writing Challenge for Conscious Leaders a few weeks back, and over 150 brilliant souls signed up! I decided to take the Challenge right along with them, and it’s been a profound journey for many of us. Most people are journaling or free-writing every day, privately. But I wrote this post on Day 2 of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

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Beautiful, Living Ruins [30 Day Writing Challenge, Day 1]

I spend a lot of time in gyms and fitness studios: dance, yoga and especially spin. Some of my best friends are people I met spinning and burpee-ing. It’s not at all uncommon for me to walk into a studio and run into 7 people I know and love coming out of a class.

As we go to kiss and hug each other in greeting, unspoken protocol is for the sweaty person to issue a disclaimer: “Ugh. I smell bad!” or “I’m so sweaty!”

This is so common that I’ve practiced something like a standup comedy bit, which I say in reply. “I like my people sweaty,” I always say.

It always gets a chuckle. But real talk is: I actually do like my people sweaty. I respect the sweat. I respect the people who wear the sweat. I love them for being the type of person who come in, day and and day out, after a long day at work, and doing what it takes to make the sweat happen. So when I say, “I like my people sweaty,” what I mean is “Hey, girl. I see how hard you’re working every day. I love and respect you for it. You are my kind of person. Don’t let my diva tendencies fool you. Kissing you is more important to me than not getting sweaty.”

I’ve noticed recently that there’s another kind of person I tend to like: people who are vital and alive and happy, and who have also been through traumas and nightmares that would make your blood curdle. People who are, the psychologists would say, seriously resilient.

This is a pattern in my relationships that I’ve noticed very recently. I had met a few people over the past year with whom I really connected. And they all shared a theme. I’d sit down and talk with them on first meeting, and just get a hit that said: “Hmm. I really like this chick. She is cool. We are vibing. She’s got an energy that feels great to me.”

Then, an hour into the meeting, each of these people entrusted me with a story of something they’d gone through. Two of them had been on their deathbeds, recently. Like, the kale that is currently in my vegetable beds was in already in those vegetable beds while these people across the table from me were fighting for their lives. And as I harvest the leaves today, they sit on the spin bike, or take meetings with me, or travel the world with me.

Two more had been through intense betrayals in their marriages, followed by rejection and just plain meanness and mayhem.

Another shared with me the day-in and day-out horrors of caring for an aging husband as he leaves us, slipping into incoherence and incontinence, all while she also raises their children and working a full time job. Still another shared a mental health diagnosis from decades ago, notwithstanding which he’s built an incredibly rich, healthy, love-filled, fulfilled life.

And these people are out here, in the world, after the event they thought would do them entirely in. They are living and thriving. Loving people and loving life.

I used to think it was coincidence that I met so many people like this. Now I know the truth, which is that there are medical miracles and spiritual triumphs happening all around us all the time. Miracles that we have no idea are taking place unless and until we take a moment to connect with people, deeply.

I also know the truth that like attracts like. And that one of my special talents is helping people feel safe and uplifted as they share kind of scary stuff they’ve been through. As a result, in the same way that a biased researcher will make sure they find what they’re looking for, I tend to find these dark nights of the soul the people I meet have been through. And survived. And thrived in spite of. And been developed by.

Calling this a talent is not the right word, though. It’s more like what it says in the Bible, that deep calls unto deep.

Because I’ve been through some stuff, too. It may be all cashmere cardis, pugs, metallic sandals and acquired startups at my house now. But the foundation of that life is my soul. And this soul, my soul, was honed in the fire of my brother’s 25-year prison sentence, a gut-wrenching custody drama, two divorces, near-bankruptcy, teenaged motherhood and a series of childhood traumas and abuses.

Marianne Williamson, writing of romantic relationships, once said something that stuck with me ever since. She said that we attract people in at the level of our own bullshit. This is the truest story ever told.

So it’s been fascinating and frankly, delightful, to observe the leveling up of the people I attract into my life, over time. I see it as evidence of my own growth. It’s not that the people I used to attract in were terrible and the people in my life now are perfect. It’s more that the people I used to attract in and get and stay in very close relationship with were married to and desperately holding onto their wounds, their dysfunctions and their struggles.

My second husband flat-out broke it down for me once. He said, “Tara, the thing about you is that you’re a fixer. The problem is, that quality about you attracts people who need fixing. Including me. You have to watch out for that.”

Listen, all of God’s children have issues. And, to give myself a little credit where it’s due, I definitely meet my old type of person still, on occasion. But Wise Adult Tara makes Wise Adult Decisions about not getting involved with them. And she certainly watches for red flags that her fixing tendencies are being triggered. Wise Adult Tara has a rule and mantra about this: “I do not intervene between people and the natural consequences of their behavior.” This is a helpful, helpful rule. You are welcome to borrow it. 😀

But the people who come into my life regularly these days? I think of them as gorgeous, vital, thriving ruins. Walking phoenixes. People who should have been out for the count, for real for real, as the kids would say. And who rejected that. Who were victorious. Who have chosen to be victors, not victims.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time in Croatia the last couple of years. I’m sure I’ll write much more about that in future posts. It’s the most gorgeous place on earth, really. But when people ask me for the #1 reason I love it there, I tell them: it’s the living ruins.

In the coastal Croatian town of Split, 1700 years ago the Roman Emperor Diocletian built his retirement palace out of limestone, a few football fields long. And it’s still there, in roughly the same dimensions as it always was. But here’s the rub: in Split and elsewhere in Croatia, these “ruins” are vibrant and alive. Unlike anywhere else, where the ruins reek of decay and the sadness of long dead civilizations, the Croatians somehow got it into their minds that it was okay to build their downtowns right inside these ruins.

So Diocletian’s Palace is a limestone ruin that you can get a tour guide to walk you through, just like at the Coliseum in Rome. But in the Palace, you can also eat at a restaurant inside it, run your hand over the back of the 3rd century Sphinxes Diocletian left lying about, or lounge about on the steps in the evenings and sing along to old Prince songs with the locals. People live in apartments inside the Palace, work in banks in the Palace, go to the movies in the palace and worship in churches in the Palace.

These people have turned this structure, which should by all accounts and customs be a dead, destroyed ruin, into a thriving, vital center of life. A vital ruin. Just like the people I love and am proud to be attracting into my world. Just like me.

P.S.: I issued a 30 Day Writing Challenge for Conscious Leaders a few weeks back, and over 150 brilliant souls signed up! I decided to take the Challenge right along with them, and it’s been a profound journey for many of us. Most people are journaling or free-writing every day, privately. But I wrote this post on Day 1 (!) of the Challenge. I’ll be doing another writing Challenge in January; click here to get on the list for the January Challenge.

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10 Day Writing Challenge FAQs: What I am—and am not—challenging you to do

UPDATED FOR MARCH 2019 10 DWC

Q: What exactly are you challenging me to do, TNN?
A:  I am challenging you to write something every day for 10 days starting March 19, 2019.

Ideally, you should aim to write the equivalent of 3 pages longhand every day.

Three pages longhand roughly equates to 750 words typed. Writing speed varies a lot person to person, but many people will find this to take about 30 minutes to complete, daily, on average.

I recommend you do your writing in a dedicated Google Drive folder, with each day’s writing on a new, dated Google Doc. This creates a permanent, searchable, secure repository of your writing. (Notebooks work well, too!.)

Once you’re done writing for the day, I recommend you copy and paste the day’s writing out into 750words.com, which will create a running dashboard that visualizes how much you’ve written across the month, will help keep track of your daily streaks and progress and is generally awesome. It’s also free. No one else can see your account or your writing, FYI, unless and until you decide to share it on the SoulTour Community Group.

I am not affiliated with 750words.com – it is a tool I personally have used and think work well for this.

Q: What are you not challenging me to do?
A: I am not challenging you or asking you to publish your writing, though occasionally we’ll throw out a “Share a Snippet” call on the SoulTour Community Group, for anyone who wants to. In the past, some people shared everything they wrote, some shared a paragraph here and there, others kept it all private.

I am publishing what I write to you, as an exercise in vulnerability, but this is your challenge. You do what you need to do. And you know what you need to do. If you don’t know now, you will soon. Just get started.

I am not challenging you to bare your soul or to write about any specific topic. I will provide writing prompts daily, but you can take them or leave them. And I will bare my soul, because that’s the kind of chick I am (becoming). A couple of you have shared that you are planning to use this Challenge to refresh your children’s excitement about writing, looping them in and having them do the Challenge with you (which I adore). Others are using it to set goals. Still others need to process the past or find a breakthrough. This Challenge will work for all of these things.

Q:  What should I write about?

A:  Every day at midnight Pacific I’ll send you an email with the writing prompt of the day. The prompts are designed intentionally to trigger shifts to new levels of personal growth and unlock previously untapped inner greatness. 

On any given day, you can use the writing prompt, you can free-write, or you can work on your own book or blog project.

Q:  What is free-writing? 

A:  Free-writing is a brain dump exercise: put words on the page. Any words. Whatever’s on your mind. It is meant to be private, so no one will ever see it. Uncensored.

If you want more information on free-writing, Google “Morning Pages.” From Lifehacker:

Every morning, take a pen and three blank pages and write down whatever you want to fill those pages.

Q: Do I have to publish what I write?

A: Nope. The moderators and I will publish some of our writing to the SoulTour Community, just for fun. And you’re welcome to do so. And you’re welcome to do so on the Group, which is Private.

That said, if you’re doing free-writing or Morning Pages or journaling, I actually encourage you to start off with a plan to not show your writing to anyone else. The goal of these exercises is just to get your mind and soul and spirit trained to pour out freely, without censorship. And the best way to do that is to know that you’re writing for yourself. That it’s between you and you.

And that said, don’t be surprised if, by the middle of the month, you’re just excited about what you’re writing or discovering and you want to post/publish it.

Q: What if people don’t like what I write? What if someone finds or reads my writing and gets upset?

A: One of the Patron Saints of our Writing Challenge is Anne Lamott. She earned that distinction with this quote, from her book on writing, Bird by Bird:

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

#preach #Amen #tellyourstories

This applies to people who read anything you write publicly.

With respect to your private journaling or free-writing, writing in Google Docs will help, because: password.

Also, anyone who reads your private writing anywhere else and gets upset or confronts you about it is just giving you a great opportunity to speak your truth and practice boundaries. By boundaries I mean righteous indignation and expressing the unacceptability of reading your private thoughts. Yeah, that happened to me. It was uncomfortable and fantastic.

Q: What if I’m terrified?

A: If you’re terrified, you’re doing it right. See also this blog post:

Q: What’s the SoulTour Community Group for?
A: First, here’s the link to join the SoulTour Community.

Second, it’s to connect with others doing the Challenge. To share your experience. To ask your questions. To get inspired. To stay on track. To get back on track, should you need to.

Third, I am maintaining an archive of the PODs (writing Prompts of the Day) in this Spreadsheet. And I’m also adding videos, thought starters, inspiration and other juicy goods to the Community Group on a daily basis.

Fourth, I love you.

Head up + heart out,

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Are you both excited AND terrified by the 10 Day Writing Challenge?

Marvelous. It’s already working!

Are you both excited AND terrified by the 30 Day Writing Challenge?

I’ve had notes from a number of you expressing this general sentiment. So many notes that I thought we should talk about it.

Let’s take these emotions in turn: first the excitement, then the terror.

The excitement is impulse. But not impulse the way we normally mean it, like dysfunctionally impulsive behavior. That excitement you feel when you come across a Challenge like our 10 Day Writing Challenge for Conscious Leaders is the kind of impulse that happens when you get a glimpse of something that will lead you to what you desire, deep down in your spirit.

I believe that a lot of what we desire, we desire because it resonates with something way down deep. The excitement, the impulse, you get when you’re given this sort of Challenge like a spiritual breadcrumb on the path to what you really desire and who you really are.

To be clear, I’m not talking about desires like, say, a Tesla or a ring. I’m talking about deeper desires than that. I believe the things we are spiritually encoded to desire the most are to give love, to receive love, and to live a life of meaning.

My whole life changed when I started consistently paying attention to these kinds of impulses and started letting myself follow the paths to these deep desires. I don’t follow every single inkling or urge, but I do try to honor and give some attention to those that trigger a deep twinge of something that feels like resonance with who I really am or what I really want.

To do that, I had to (gradually) train myself out of the thought habit of immediately countering these desires. I had to stop focusing my energy on the internal struggle and start investing it in doing the work of following these impulses.

In the olden days, I’d have an impulse that felt like it might be the first step of something possibly major. Then my immediate next thought would be to counter that impulse with fear, with all the reasons why I can’t/shouldn’t follow that path. Does that ever happen to you?

I still did some big, glorious things in my life. But this internal dialogue made them harder, fewer and farther between than they needed to be. It led to years of playing a smaller game than I’m here for.

The idea that I don’t have time to tend these little spiritual bonfires was a go-to line of mine for years. And I’ve heard it a lot from those of you who hesitate to commit to this Challenge.

But I practiced my way out of it. And I invite you to take the challenge as as an opportunity to practice your way out of it, too. Trust me. I’m a busy chick. But It’s very rare that that “I don’t have time” even occurs to me anymore when I’m facing an impulse or project that I feel like might be an important part of my journey. And when it does, I’m very sweet and compassionate with myself as a I note the “no time” thought, then choose instead to focus on speeding that makes me feel expansive and aligned and just GOOD.

I’m committed to making time to follow the sparks that have proven over time to keep my soul stoked, my spirit open, my creativity and emotional groundedness flowing. Even if I have to stop doing some other, less critical thing.

I see Challenges as powerful little micro-seasons for growth and breakthroughs. I do them in lots of areas of my life, most often self-directed/DIY. They allow me to try on a practice or a habit or a new way of being, for a finite, manageable period of time. Sometimes, I like the practice and keep it, or some element of it. Other times, not. But even if I don’t integrate it into my daily routine for the long term, I’ll usually have made some sort of progress on a project or an issue in my life in the process of trying it on. Or I connect some new dots, or have some clear idea or insight, in the course of the Challenge that I wouldn’t otherwise have experienced.

The other thing about Challenges is that they’re just FUN. I think of them as growth games for grownups. In a Challenge, you can try on a new practice or way of being on without a death grip or terror because hey, guess what – YOU chose to do it and you are the boss of your own Challenge. It’s between you and you.

That POV allows me to take on Challenges with a spirit of both play and excellence. And that makes me feel proud and energized and engaged and alive during and after the Challenge.

Okay, so what about the horror part. It’s what Steven Pressfield calls Resistance. We’ll talk about that a lot more in the actual Challenge.

For now, it’s important to know that this Resistance is simply a habit. It’s a thought habit. You can rewire it. Doing Challenges, when the stakes are low, can be an early step toward rewiring yourself into freedom from Resistance, or at least into the consistent new habit of overriding Resistance when it arises.

I’ve heard a number of variations of fear in the “I want to do it but am afraid to do it” notes a few brave souls have sent me. And I’ve given various corresponding forms of advice, in these one-on-one conversations:

  • Failure isn’t a thing here. What happens if you only write for 2 or 5 days of the Challenge? You’ve written for 2 or 5 days more next month than you did last month. Seems like a net positive to me!
  • This is your Challenge. You can do it while you’re traveling, or you can take it as a 5 or 7 day challenge or whatever you need to do. If you want a breakthrough, try to do something every day. But you get to define success here.
  • The more consistent you are, the more progress you’ll make. But you know what? If you have a day where all you can write is a single sentence? I hereby give you official permission to count that as a win.
  • If you’re doing this to get clear or set goals, you might not need as much writing as 750 words x 10 days. You might have clarity on day 4. If you’re trying to experience a real shift or trigger clarity or flow, you might have your breakthrough on day 7. Or you might need to keep writing until day 49 or day 99. That remains to be seen, so it’s a good thing you’re getting started!
  • If you want to write a book, you can use this Challenge to “turn pro.” 750 words a day is probably what you need to do, and consistency matters. I’ll hold your hand. Trust me when I say that you can do this.

Obviously, which advice is right for you depends on your situation.

But what I’m about to say now applies to everyone.

This is a growth experience. There’s a reason they call them growing pains. If I were challenging you to do something you already were doing or already had the capacity to do or was super super easy to do, there wouldn’t be any growth potential in it.

Game design guru Jane McGonigal speaks and writes a lot about why games (including Challenges, IMO) are so engaging than reality, including something she calls Hard Fun:

“If there’s anything I’ve learned as a game designer, it’s that the hard part is the fun part. We need a good challenge to have fun, to feel alive, to unleash our strengths, to turn strangers into teammates and allies. This is why we play games – sports, videogames, all games. We play them because nothing makes us happier or stronger than tackling a tough challenge that we choose for ourselves.”

If you’re both excited and terrified at the prospect of this Writing Challenge, again, you’re doing it right. It’s already working. I want to invite you to see that as a sign that you’re in the right place, and that signing up is the right thing to do.

But I also want to invite you to have a little shift of state and spirit around it. Yes, this is a Challenge. Yes, it’ll be challenging. Yes, you might see some scary things inside and be challenged to make some changes that are even more scary. Or not. But in any event, remember that you are choosing this Challenge for yourself.

It doesn’t have to be hard. It doesn’t have to be terrifying. You can decide not to be a martyr to the Challenge. Try easy. Go easy on yourself. Be light and playful with this project. Allow for the possibility that your challenge will be a fun, exciting adventure into new territory, inner and behaviorally.

I see your bravery, and respect you for it. Let’s do this. Our Challenge begins MONDAY, JUNE 9TH, 2018. It’ll cost you nothing but a little time and more spirit and soul. Here’s the sign-up link.

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Clarissa Pinkola Estes: Letter to a Young Activist in Troubled Times [Full]

A note from Tara for context: Legendary psychologist and storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estes shares how she occasionally writes open letters to souls around the world, this one, aimed at young activists in troubled times. I think that group includes conscious business leaders, right now. All of the below are her words. I believe they’ll bless you the way they’ve blessed me.
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Clarissa Pinkola Estes: Letter to a Young Activist in Troubled Times

The letters are sent out to sustain those who see the greater world and the personal world but without wearing the usual anesthetizing blinders. They go to those who see all suffering, and thus can use small reminders that they and their souls are still fully capable and not alone, those who are carrying precious goods in thought and action.

The letters are sent out just to remind people that the outcome in the moment may not be the most of what to aim for, but rather something else, something far more mysterious that comes on wings or wind.

Here is one of the “letters from the ark” for you now …

Do not lose heart, we were made for these times

Mis estimados:

Do not lose heart. We were made for these times.

I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered. They are concerned about the state of affairs in our world right now. It is true, one has to have strong cojones and ovarios to withstand much of what passes for “good” in our culture today. Abject disregard of what the soul finds most precious and irreplaceable and the corruption of principled ideals have become, in some large societal arenas, “the new normal,” the grotesquerie of the week.

It is hard to say which one of the current egregious matters has rocked people’s worlds and beliefs more. Ours is a time of almost daily jaw-dropping astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most to civilized, visionary people.

You are right in your assessments. The luster and hubris some have aspired to while endorsing acts so heinous against children, elders, everyday people, the poor, the unguarded, the helpless, is breathtaking. Yet, I urge you, ask you, gentle you, to please not spend your spirit dry by bewailing these difficult times. Especially do not lose hope. Most particularly because, the fact is — we were made for these times.

Yes. For years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement. I cannot tell you often enough that we are definitely the leaders we have been waiting for, and that we have been raised, since childhood, for this time precisely.

I grew up on the Great Lakes and recognize a seaworthy vessel when I see one. Regarding awakened souls, there have never been more able crafts in the waters than there are right now across the world. And they are fully provisioned and able to signal one another as never before in the history of humankind.

I would like to take your hands for a moment and assure you that you are built well for these times. Despite your stints of doubt, your frustrations in righting all that needs change right now, or even feeling you have lost the map entirely, you are not without resource, you are not alone. Look out over the prow; there are millions of boats of righteous souls on the waters with you. In your deepest bones, you have always known this is so.

Even though your veneers may shiver from every wave in this stormy roil, I assure you that the long timbers composing your prow and rudder come from a greater forest. That long-grained lumber is known to withstand storms, to hold together, to hold its own, and to advance, regardless.

We have been in training for a dark time such as this, since the day we assented to come to Earth. For many decades, worldwide, souls just like us have been felled and left for dead in so many ways over and over — brought down by naiveté, by lack of love, by suddenly realizing one deadly thing or another, by not realizing something else soon enough, by being ambushed and assaulted by various cultural and personal shocks in the extreme.

We all have a heritage and history of being gutted, and yet remember this especially: we have also, of necessity, perfected the knack of resurrection.

Over and over again we have been the living proof that that which has been exiled, lost, or foundered — can be restored to life again. This is as true and sturdy a prognosis for the destroyed worlds around us as it was for our own once mortally wounded selves.

Though we are not invulnerable, our risibility supports us to laugh in the face of cynics who say “fat chance,” and “management before mercy,” and other evidences of complete absence of soul sense. This, and our having been “to hell and back” on at least one momentous occasion, makes us seasoned vessels for certain. Even if you do not feel that you are, you are.

Even if your puny little ego wants to contest the enormity of your soul, that smaller self can never for long subordinate the larger Self. In matters of death and rebirth, you have surpassed the benchmarks many times. Believe the evidence of any one of your past testings and trials. Here it is: Are you still standing? The answer is, Yes! (And no adverbs like “barely” are allowed here). If you are still standing, ragged flags or no, you are able. Thus, you have passed the bar. And even raised it. You are seaworthy.

In any dark time, there is a tendency to veer toward fainting over how much is wrong or unmended in the world. Do not focus on that. Do not make yourself ill with overwhelm. There is a tendency too to fall into being weakened by perseverating on what is outside your reach, by what cannot yet be. Do not focus there. That is spending the wind without raising the sails.

We are needed, that is all we can know. And though we meet resistance, we more so will meet great souls who will hail us, love us and guide us, and we will know them when they appear. Didn’t you say you were a believer? Didn’t you say you pledged to listen to a voice greater? Didn’t you ask for grace? Don’t you remember that to be in grace means to submit to the Voice greater? You have all the resources you need to ride any wave, to surface from any trough.

In the language of aviators and sailors, ours is to sail forward now, all balls out. Understand the paradox: If you study the physics of a waterspout, you will see that the outer vortex whirls far more quickly than the inner one. To calm the storm means to quiet the outer layer, to cause it, by whatever countervailing means, to swirl much less, to more evenly match the velocity of the inner, far less volatile core — till whatever has been lifted into such a vicious funnel falls back to Earth, lays down, is peaceable again.

One of the most important steps you can take to help calm the storm is to not allow yourself to be taken in a flurry of overwrought emotion or despair — thereby accidentally contributing to the swale and the swirl. Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.

Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good. What is needed for dramatic change is an accumulation of acts — adding, adding to, adding more, continuing. We know that it does not take “everyone on Earth” to bring justice and peace, but only a small, determined group who will not give up during the first, second, or hundredth gale.

One of the most calming and powerful actions you can do to intervene in a stormy world is to stand up and show your soul. A soul on deck shines like gold in dark times.

The light of the soul throws sparks, can send up flares, builds signal fires, causes proper matters to catch fire. To display the lantern of the soul in shadowy times like these — to be fierce and to show mercy toward others, both — are acts of immense bravery and greatest necessity. Struggling souls catch light from other souls who are fully lit and willing to show it. If you would help to calm the tumult, this is one of the strongest things you can do.

There will always be times in the midst of “success right around the corner, but as yet still unseen” when you feel discouraged. I too have felt despair many times in my life, but I do not keep a chair for it; I will not entertain it. It is not allowed to eat from my plate.

The reason is this: In my bones I know, as do you, that there can be no despair when you remember why you came to Earth, who you serve, and who sent you here. The good words we say and the good deeds we do are not ours: They are the words and deeds of the One who brought us here.

In that spirit, I hope you will write this on your wall: When a great ship is in harbor and moored, it is safe, there can be no doubt. But … that is not what great ships are built for.

This comes with much love and prayer that you remember who you came from, and why you came to this beautiful, needful Earth.

Excerpt “Do Not Lose Heart, We Were Made for These Times,” (a/k/a “Letter to a Young Activist in Troubled Times”) Copyright ©2001, 2003, 2004, Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, All rights reserved. This particular work is released under a Creative Commons License by which author grants permission to copy, distribute and transmit this particular work under the conditions that the use be non-commercial, that the work be used in its entirety and not altered, added to, or subtracted from, and that it carry author’s name and this full copyright notice. For other permissions, please contact: projectscreener@aol.com

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Vote For You: A Commencement Address for Graduating to the Next Level of Your Work and Life

Last week, I had the great honor of delivering the Commencement Address at one of my alma maters: California State University Bakersfield, where I did my undergrad and master’s degrees, before getting my law degree from UC Berkeley. I’ve shared the speech script privately, and those who have seen it have urged me to share it publicly. Enjoy.

You might have heard that this is an election year. Ok – I’m seeing fear on your faces. Don’t be afraid! I’m not going to name any names or tell you who I think you should vote for.  But there is one vote that you will make this year, this month and possibly even this week that will have a much greater impact on your life than who you vote for for President. And I am going to campaign for you to make that vote in a very particular direction, for a very particular candidate.

If you leave here today remembering nothing else, remember that I told you to vote for you. Vote for you.

Let’s talk about:

  • why I want you to vote for you
  • how you can do that
  • what it will take to consistently vote for yourself going forward, and
  • what will happen in your life when you start consistently voting for yourself.

Why Vote for You

The word vote comes from the Latin votum and vovere, which mean vow, to promise or wish. What I love about vow and promises and wishes is that they all imply future. They imply a commitment to or a hope for the future. And they all imply transformation. They all suggest the belief that there will come a time when things will be different and better than they are right now.

That is inherently optimistic and energizing. That is WHY you should vote for you.

How to Vote for You

But you’re probably wondering HOW you can vote for you, or what I mean by “vote for you”.

There are two different things you’ll need to do, over and over again, to vote for yourself in life:

  1.  You will need to pick yourself at times when no one else would or no one else will or no one else has yet
  2.  Voting for you also includes choosing situations that are beneficial for yourself and your long term ability to live into your dream for the future. Even when it’s really hard, make the choices, small and large, that create conditions conducive to your long term growth and your ability to do what you were put here on this planet to do.

You just heard about the most recent high points of my journey, but it wasn’t always like that. I met a professor here at CSUB named Dr. Beth Rienzi, who became my mentor. The day I met her, when I was 16 and very pregnant, she said: “It’s clear to me that you’ll be going to grad school.” And she started doing things then to prepare me for that, and did in fact involve me in doctoral level research and publishing, expose me to academic conferences and generally groom me for a bigger universe of possibility than I could have even imagined at the time.

She voted for me. And from then on, I made it my own job to vote for myself, to pick myself, to insert myself and say yes to opportunities and situations where no one else would. At some point, the rest of the world caught on, and started voting for me, too.

When you leave here and enter the workplace, you might see an opportunity or role or future that you would love to have, but don’t think you’re ready for. Maybe no one in your family has ever done anything like that before. Or maybe you just don’t know how to do the thing you’d love to do.

Let me let you in on a secret. NO ONE really knows how to do big things before they do them! Really, no one. I’ve worked with some of the best and brightest CEOs in the world, and I’ll tell you: they’re all guessing. They study and build skills and recruit really smart teams and get wise counsel and then they guess.

This is the definition of an executive decision: to be willing to guess, wisely, but make the decision when others would freeze up in fear or dither in uncertainty.

The takeaway is that If you have a dream in your heart, a spirit of excellence, a commitment to always learning and the opportunity arises, the only question you need to ask is “why not me?”

That doesn’t mean you say yes to everything. But it does mean you do things you’re not yet ready for, things you’re not yet qualified for, and things you haven’t done before. And it does mean that when you’re starting something big and new for you, and you feel really uncomfortable, or like you’re afraid of exposing yourself or being rejected,  or like you’re an imposter, you resist the urge to turn back. You resist the urge to crawl back into your comfort zone. And instead, you tell yourself that this imposter feeling—this freak-out moment—is a sign.

It’s a sign that life is about to get really interesting.

It’s a sign that you’re onto something good: something that will grow and develop you.

So, vote for you.

Vote for you when you face new opportunities, or the opportunity to create a new opportunity

Vote for you when you pick mates

Vote for you when you interview bosses (that’s how I think about taking jobs)

Vote for you by taking care of yourself, and not overextending yourself

Vote for you by building good habits around your health and your finances

Vote for you by building the habit of ruthless prioritization. Understand that that means you will say no to lots of things that are amazing, in order so you can say yes to things that really matter.

What it takes to VFY

Now. There are a couple of things you’ll need to be able to consistently vote for yourself:

1. First, know what you believe in. That’s how we pick the people we vote for, right? They give us these manifestos, and that helps us have clarity that they want and will work for the same future we want. Well, you need to cultivate that level of clarity about what you believe in, what you stand for, what future you want to create and WHY in order to consistently vote for yourself.

You don’t have to sit in a room and wrack your brain to think up a clear vision or get clarity on your purpose. Cultivate clarity about what you stand for and believe in through activity. Be out there, doing and trying lots of things.

Remember the miracles of biology, chemistry, cell replication and divine creative power that got you here, and take seriously the idea that you are here for a reason. Over time, you will learn what kinds of things you don’t want to work on, people you won’t work for, things you won’t do, not because you don’t like them, but because it pulls you out of your purpose

2. The second thing you need to vote for yourself is this: the power to vote.

In politics, the power to vote is called “enfranchisement”. Franchise is from the french word for “freedom”.

You might not always feel like it, but you have SO much freedom. You get to pick anything you want to do with your life, with your time, and you get to pick it every single day – even if you have been told you couldn’t, or your family has never done that before, or whatever – those limits only have the level of power you give them.

If you want to live a life of engagement, be on fire about your life, and be a person of growth and impact, I’ll give you one rule of thumb for how to choose what you do with that freedom: look for the problems, the frictions, and the sticking points in the world. And devote your time to eliminating them.

Look for the problems in your own life, your limiting factors, and focus your energy on eliminating them.

Look for problems in the world that make you angry or things you wish were different, and focus on making them different.

At work, look for the frictions in your company or in your customers lives—then get good at spotting and removing those frictions.

Then, team up with other people who are focused on looking for the problems in the world and who are on fire about getting rid of them.

I believe this is the single most powerful way to become a person of service, influence and impact.

3. The third thing you need to vote for yourself is to stop being your own opposition.

We’ve all heard negativity and critique and internalized that over the years. In order to consistently vote for you, you’ll need to rewire the way you talk to yourself. Learn how to bless yourself and your vision with your words, and slowly you’ll find yourself extinguishing your limiting beliefs

  • You vote for yourself every time you reject mediocrity, even your own.
  • You vote for you every time you refuse to settle for less, from the world or from yourself.
  • You vote for yourself when you master your habits. Stop letting bad habits create emergencies in your health and your finances that pull you out of your power and your purpose.
  • Vote for yourself by surrounding yourself with people who are for you, who will champion you, and will say so, about you and to you.

What happens when You Consistently Vote For You

Think about what happens when we vote a politician in. That night, they have a victory party. They express gratitude to everyone who helped them get there. That’s like today for you.

But what happens next? They stop campaigning and start using the powers of their new office, their new capabilities, to take on the future that they envisioned when they first asked for the vote.

Just like a newly elected politician, you are just getting started on your most powerful days, your most prosperous season. You can leave here and take your new capabilities out into the world and start consistently voting for yourself, every day, to take on your new future.

So do me a favor, when you have to choose between one thing or another, don’t play small or give into the urge to stay in what’s comfortable. When you have to cast a ballot for where to work, what to do, who to work with, whether to start a business or write a book or put yourself out there in a way that is vulnerable or scary, remember that you are here to bring something to this world that nobody else could bring, and vote for yourself. I’ll be voting for you, too.

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Monk Mode: How and Why I Gave Up the State of Distractedness for Lent

I sweat a lot. After 20+ years of working out 5 or more days a week, my body detects nearly any degree of temperature increase as a signal of an impending workout. This makes for lots of interestingly sweaty moments.

As a result, on top of my yoga mat, I use an absorbent rug to give my hands some traction. The rug I’m using these days has a bunch of non-stick material in the spots where your hands and feet most commonly go, in the form of mantras and phrases from the lululemon manifesto.

Most of them are nice little notes with reminders to sweat (on it!), breathe and eat lots of veg.

But one, in particular, has been on my mind a lot recently, and it goes a little something like this:
“that which matters the most should never give way to that which matters the least.”

A number of you have reached out to ask what I’m working on. What’s shareable at this point is that I’m writing a book and ramping up to launch a business. Yes, at the same time.

But when Lent rolled around a few weeks back, I was in the midst of interviewing candidates for the community farm I helm the Board of, attending family weddings, facilitating a Retreat, and hosting an Alice in Wonderland themed birthday party at my home for a dear friend. I was meeting with sometimes 2 or 3 other entrepreneurs, colleagues and investors every day of the workweek.

I calculated that I was fielding an average of 6 invitations for meetings, every single day, and this doesn’t even include the never-ending flow of brunch invites. So much brunch is happening, guys. So much brunch.

All marvelous things. But, despite having recently quit the best job ever, I was busy. Too busy, even, to decide what to give up for Lent. I Googled what Lent is really for. It’s supposed to turn our focus back toward God (the most important thing), purify us, and prepare us for celebrating Easter. I decided that giving up food or Facebook or something wouldn’t really fit the bill, for me – I don’t really struggle with them. I’d actually sort of decided that I was too busy to figure this out, and was just going to honor Easter which a big brunch and keep it moving.

After a 6-day run at breakneck intensity, in which I got no writing done, I was on the yoga mat, de-chaosing my nervous system to onramp back into writing.I looked down, saw those words, and it became crystal clear that there was something I needed to give up for Lent this year: distractedness.

I know that phrasing is awkward, but it is also precisely accurate. At 40 years old, I know by now that you can’t actually give up distraction. There’s lots you can do to manage incoming distractions, but life happens, people you love will need you, and trying to stop the world from turning and events from happening is a little like trying to stop the ocean from creating new waves.

It’s a losing battle.

What you do have control of—utter control of, actually—is the way you allow your mental state, your calendar and your priorities to respond to the incoming flow of distractions.

I realized that I had allowed my mental state to shift from flow and focused creation mode to meeting mode or executive mode, which is what I’m wired for. Normally, taking meetings and nurturing relationships are the cornerstones of my career. But taking all those meetings during this critical, micro-season for my book and my business was keeping me from the creation projects that must happen right now for the longer-term vision to come to life.

Ultimately, I decided to give up the state of distractedness from my mission-critical creation projects for Lent. Here are the exact steps I took:

1. I created a decision rubric. I worked through a detailed outline and strategic action plan for the book and my company launch, and created a decision rule: for 60 days (a long Lent, certainly), my decision rule for whether I’ll take a meeting is based on whether it furthers the book (including its marketing and promotions) or the launch of the business.

Meeting with prospective clients, it might surprise you, does not fall into the “meetings I’ll take” side of the rubric. That’s a lot of what I’d been doing, and I’ve found that most prospective clients are urgent enough that it’s difficult to extract from the conversation, and that most of the great prospective clients for my business are so engaged that one conversation snowballs into 5 meetings and then poof! a week of writing is gone. I spent the first few days still taking meetings that had long been calendared, but am now well into the delirium of uninterrupted, deep work and thought time.

2. I communicated it directly, unabashedly and consistently. Where I live and work, things get done, built, created, started via relationship, conversation and action. My bias is toward yes, toward connecting and toward action. I’ve long cultivated that. And people know it, which is why the calls and emails come in.

I love that about myself, and my circle.

I got some help from my team in clearing everything I could from my calendar. And I also simply started fielding incoming meeting requests – even some from friends! – with some version of this:

Hey – I would love to connect soon. Here’s the deal. I’m in Monk Mode1 right now, working on my book and business. You know I love to connect with people, and I was finding that it was really distracting me from the things I need to get done right now. Do you mind if I reach back out in April or May to set something up? Thanks so much for understanding!

I’ve gotten maybe one response that gave away some irritation. I’ve gotten about 2 dozen that have expressed some form of admiration, appreciation or even flat-out jealousy. So far, verbatim, I’ve gotten: “I love that!”, “I admire that”, “I admire your directness”, “I want to do Monk Mode!!”, and so on.

It is a luxury to be able to focus most of your time and bandwidth on the projects you’ve always wanted to work on. Giving up distractedness is a mindset management move, not only a time management move. If you feel like you’d love to do Monk Mode, but could never get that much control over your own time, I’d challenge you to look at your calendar, look at what you do with your unbooked moments and get real about how you could devote more of your mental bandwidth to the projects or people you say you care about.

3. I observed my internal resistance without judgment. My nervous system is wired for a fast pace and for a lot of interpersonal interaction. So I definitely have experienced some internal resistance to Monk Mode, as luxurious as it really is. This mostly comes up in the following forms:

  • saying yes to invitations and projects, especially exciting ones
  • falling prey to calendar creep, that thing where you agree to do one 30-minute call and end up booking 6 hours of meetings that day, and
  • fantasizing about elaborate mental or logistical “prerequisites” to going into Monk Mode, like thinking about going away to my favorite retreat Ranch.

I’ve been treating these things the same way you’d treat your wayward mind during meditation: noticing the drift, and softly releasing it. This is a course of constant course-correction. I’m not even really tempted to be harsh with myself on this point, because (a) harshness with self never got anyone anywhere, and (b) it’s precisely my normal nervous system wiring that makes me an effective leader and entrepreneur and marketer and speaker and thinker.

This is just a season in which I can’t give way to that tendency to run on a constantly booked calendar. I’m allowing myself to down-regulate on my nervous system’s own natural timetable, just constantly reminding myself to say no, to keep the calendar clear, and to enjoy this experience.

Here’s what has happened in my world since going into Monk Mode: compounding energy, clarity and creativity. When I went into Monk Mode it was a lot like that financial strategy of paying yourself first, but with my time and my energy. And in the same way paying yourself first creates compounding interest on top of interest over time, I found myself finding new stores of energy, getting clear on things that had been foggy, then even clearer on more things, fast, and finding creative solutions to challenges that had been long stuck in my mental parking lot of issues to work out.

Flow has become my friend. Productivity, too. I’ve made about as much progress on my two important projects in the last 14 days as I had in the first 6 weeks of the year.

The projects I’m working on will bring to the fullest expression and impact the work I was put on this planet to do. I know that. They are the most important thing. So giving up distractedness from those projects for Lent seems more appropriate, in many ways, than giving up, Facebook or, well, all of those brunches.

TL; DR: Going into Monk Mode will churn up all sorts of creativity, energy, productivity and flow for your most important projects. Don’t let your most important things give way to anything else.

1. Hat tip to Jim Collins – I borrowed the phrase “Monk Mode” from a passing comment he made in the intro to Good to Great.

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How to Have a Post-Traumatic Breakthrough

There are only two kinds of people in this world: those who have been through a life-changing traumatic experience, and those who will go through one in the future. If you are a living, human being, you will experience sickness, deaths of loved ones, accidents, and all manner of ups and downs someday.

Mark Epstein calls this The Trauma of Everyday Life.

Ask the happiest, most well-adjusted, most successful or most alive person you know—that friend or mentor who seems to have it all together, who seems to sail through life.

Ask them if they’ve ever had a traumatic experience.

You might be surprised. You’ll hear stories of being orphaned, diseases, divorces, bankruptcies, car accidents and natural disasters. You might even hear stories far beyond the “everyday” traumas we all experience: stories of child abuse, violence, war and genocide.

Of course, if you ask the most dysfunctional, disgruntled, misanthropic person you know about their experience of trauma earlier in life, they’ll have similar stories.

So what makes the difference? How can you experience post-traumatic breakthroughs instead of hardening your heart, spirit and life around your traumas?

Some say the key is to experiencing post-traumatic growth is to tell a new story about your trauma. I agree that this is the first step of the process, but I believe it’s only the first step.

I’ve learned that post-traumatic breakthroughs happen when we allow the experience to make us into something new, something different than we were before. Something much less perfect, much more real, more nuanced, stronger and more sensitive. Something which has new capabilities and beauty, less fear and frivolity.

There is tons of precedent for this trauma-sparked transformation in art and in science:

  • There’s the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which broken pieces of pottery are rejoined with gold, creating in pieces more cherished than the originals ever were.
  • There are self-healed quartz crystals. After being damaged in the ground, these gems grow hundreds of new crystals over the damaged area, creating wild new inner landscapes, complexity and brilliance.
  • Then there’s David Bowie, whose magically wonky eyes were not actually different in color. His pal George Underwood punched him in the eye when they were teens. From that day forward, Bowie’s right pupil was paralyzed in the open condition, making it look like one eye was blue, and the other black. Early on, Bowie later recounted, he felt embarrassed at the imperfection. But later in life, he thanked his childhood friend and lifelong collaborator for the injury and the career-enhancing “mystique” his imperfect, asymmetrical look created.

I’ve found three common threads in basically every post-traumatic breakthrough story I’ve heard (or lived). For good measure, I’ll phrase them in terms of what you must do if you want to engineer your own post-traumatic breakthrough.

1. Reframe the situation, and tell a new story. I recently read a blog post where the writer took great issue with the sentiment that things happen for a reason. He railed at this concept, on grounds that it makes the victims of life’s terrible, traumatic events feel guilty or somehow at fault when they can’t find that meaning.

And he’s right: really bad things happen to good people all the time. It’s not their fault if they can’t find any meaning to make out of it. But there’s nothing wrong with seeking meaning or perspective out of bad things that happen in your life. Why limit your life to just having bad things happen and feeling terrible about it, if you are open to finding inner development or new perspectives instead?

Martha Beck has an exercise where she asks readers to think of their most cherished experiences or favorite things in life, and then reflect back on how they came to have them – including at least one “bad” thing that happened along the journey.

This “reframing” is a skill we can cultivate and use anytime we want, after any trauma, small scale or large.

Two of my dear friends lost their parents – one her mother, the other her father – in very traumatic early-life experiences. They are two of the best wives and mothers I know, and I know their families agree with that.

Coincidental? Maybe. But I know that my friends cherish their children and relish the moments of their lives with a lighthearted, reverent gusto I’ve rarely seen, even among other great parents I know. They live their lives along a narrative of joy, delight and engagement with their children. This, in the wake of circumstances that could easily and justifiably have cemented around mourning and devastation.

I’m not suggesting that every trauma is just as easy to recover from as every other trauma, or that if someone doesn’t have a breakthrough that’s their fault or they’re doing it wrong. Everyone has a path and a process, and sometimes it’s not pretty – sometimes it never gets pretty. But if you are open to – or committed to – finding or creating a post-traumatic breakthrough, you must search for new meaning in the old trauma story.

2. Be transformed. I watched a film recently in which someone who had witnessed a friend’s murder expressed what many of us feel after even much “lesser” traumas, wondering aloud if she would ever be the same person she was before.

The answer is no. Experiencing the end of the world as you know it equals experiencing the end of the you you once were.

When it comes to finding or creating post-traumatic breakthroughs, the single most important element of the new story you seek to live out is the character you cast for yourself in in that story. Specifically: will your role be defined as the person to whom this terrible thing happened? e.g.,: Orphan. Sick. Loser of jobs. Loser – period. Bankrupt. Divorced.

Or, in this new story, will the traumatic experience be a factual circumstance, a contextual element, that is helpful in understanding the character you have become, will become, are becoming, are now?

e.g.,: Mom of the Year, influenced by having lost her mother early on. Visionary leader of your own company or life, after recovering from years of victimization, losing jobs or co-dependency. Lover of life and of people, powered by compassion, after deep healing from a childhood of disconnection and abuse. Responsible money manager, lessons learned from the recession and subsequent fallout.

To get to your post-traumatic breakthrough, you must pick a path: who do you want to be?

3. Practice your new identity. This is not magical thinking. Okay, maybe a little bit – there is some willful magic in deciding you will not be defined by something that could very well have been the end of you, literally or otherwise. After the magic, though, comes the work. Whether the trauma you’re healing from is a life disaster you had a hand in creating, or some heinous act of humanity, going from trauma to breakthrough requires work.

The power of surrendering to the transformational power of trauma, and naming your new character in the new, breakthrough story of your life, is that implicit in this story is clear guidance and direction as to what you need to do. Character and story necessarily imply context, landscape, ability. What skills and capabilities will you need to become this character? What resources and relationships will you need?

That work could be internal: therapy, meditation, belief rehabilitation, and the like. It could be developing interpersonal skills to manage your grief, overcome your struggles with confidence or survive broken family dynamics. It could be external: a change of place, learning how to do something new professionally, creating powerful, healthy relationships with mentors or supportive friends.

The real power of claiming a new character in your new, post-traumatic story is that it points you to the who/what/where/why of your breakthrough, so that you can begin to create the capabilities and context for it to come to life.

Closing Caveats.

My final caveat is that you might find this identity shift to be very hard, or very scary. This is normal – it takes courage to release elements of the way you’ve always seen or described yourself, even though they may be dysfunctional or limiting. When you pick an identity different from what you’re currently living into, you will be forced to take some behaviors and even conversations that you have engaged with for decades off the table.

No matter how justified your grievance may be, if you keep telling that old story, you’ll block your breakthrough.

In no way does it diminish or minimize the traumas of your life to seek meaning. Neither does it disrespect what you’ve been through to recast your traumas as circumstances—context that adds layers of beauty, nuance, sadness and strength to your fully glorious, fully powerful being.

This is true whether your personal trauma is a lifetime of criticism from the people you love, or a wartime experience of death and destruction.

One of our most powerful capabilities as humans is that we can search the darkest nooks and crannies somehow extract something good, something useful, something meaningful or beautiful. Practice conducting this search in the wake of your own traumas, and what you’ll find one day is a new version of your beautifully broken self.