I found this great Keri Smith survival tool via Elissa Elliott, one of the members of Ronna Detrick’s Conversational Space (a women’s discussion group centered around Faith, Feminism and Truth-please do check it out!).

I’ve loved Keri Smith for a long time. She is 100% authentic, pragmatic, private and creative and the author of many non-traditional inspirational books about creativity and living as an artist. Highly recommended.

One of her survival tools is this “card” which it seemed to me was brilliant as a way (not) to live. Adapted with respect:

HOW TO FEEL MISERABLE AS AN ARTIST A HUMAN BEING:

1. Constantly compare yourself to other artists people.

2. Talk to your family about what you do and expect them to cheer you on.

3. Base the success of your entire career life on one project event, year, relationship.

4. Stick with what you know.

5. Undervalue your expertise inherent worth.

6. Let money dictate what you do.

7. Bow to societal pressures.

8. Only do work that your family would love.

9. Do whatever the client/customer/gallery owner/patron/investor asks. (I’d add: your mother-in-law, significant other, co-workers, boss, friends, other flawed humans)

10. Set unachievable/overwhelming goals. To be completed tomorrow.

Geneen Roth is Oprah’s newest golden child (Oprah blessed her with the #1 spot on book lists). I felt “in the know” because I read Geneen Roth’s Feeding the Hungry Heart (and the now out-of-print but brilliant Thin Within) 20+ years ago. Geneen has written a new book Women, Food and God. I saw Oprah weeping all over Geneen because she finally “gets it” about food….blah blah blah. Next commercial break? TGI Fridays. I kid you not.

• I do agree with Geneen that often we all, including incredibly thin people, eat for reasons that don’t include hunger. In fact, I dare say 75% of the time ALL of us are eating from something other than hunger. Rampant food advertising could be a real part of that problem. (Imagine being a heroine addict and you open Oprah to read about kicking your addiction, turn the page, and voila! a recipe for cooking up the best smack evah! How’s that resolve NOW?). So, there is that.

• Secondly, we have no inherent hard work as part of our world anymore. We have to “make up” hard work (aka gym). We don’t beat rugs, we don’t plow fields, we don’t fix our own cards, hell we hardly even cook. Nearly all of our daily activities involve sitting on our ASSES. At the end of five days of ass-sitting at work, I can barely move. My fanny hurts and it has loads of padding.We don’t burn off our angst physically much anymore. We sit and stare at it…over and over again and we ask ourselves “where is the joy in this”?

That said. We are getting fat as a whole. Bur I don’t think it is all emotional.

Now I grew up with a (sometimes) fat mother. All we talked about was dieting. It was the single most boring part of her personality. I personally saw her as low as a size 4 (frightening) and as high as a 24 (frightening). Despite the relative safety of gastric bypass surgery, she refused because she knew she could lose the weight AGAIN. Fat? Mean as a snake. Lovely for us all. She had no control when “off the wagon”…sundaes were the largest, bowls of popcorn were troughs. No happy medium. For her it was truly feast or famine. She was not happy fat. And I swore I would never be like her.

In many ways, I’m not. I do not subscribe to diet magazines, books, blogs, etc. I do not buy the large size of any food item, not even a Coke (which I am truly and horribly addicted to), even when I am lonely and severely depressed. But, of course, I inherited some genes and strong opinions about what makes a woman beautiful. Ah. That. And now my body is aging and behaving in ways that surprise, scare, confuse and infuriate me all at once. I rarely diet. But I also rarely move. Not good.

I do think we seek out food for comfort and no place do I do it more than when I am “forced” to work a traditional job (vending machines be damned!). Looking for little spots of joy and attempting to defeat boredom during the work day,  the easiest and only one that seems accessible is food. And even on days off, it is easier to stop for fast food than take a class, dig in the yard, meet the new person. When so little of life is about real accomplishment, real satisfaction, let alone genuine joy, something like food is a cheap fast way to get pleasure. Or the hope of pleasure. And if you are stuck at work and unhappy, you can’t take a break to dig in the yard or cut flowers (one of my true sources of joy).

Food and work should not be this emotionally laden and complicated, but they are the real stuff of life. And much of the time, for many (most) people, life has lost much of its inherent meaning. How’re we gonna get that back without a little Taco Bell to buoy us? I am trying to find out…

I find this video embarrassing. Crying over food when there are people who are starving? It does seem we should be ashamed at being filled with such personal drama over a cupcake and should instead dig deeper for real things to work on. Honestly, if we are healthy, how much time are we spending obsessing over our weight and food that we could be spending on fixing the world?

Three years ago I met my love. It was terrible timing (I really can’t stress that enough). I had barely left my current relationship (though it was long dead) and was profoundly depressed. She had just suffered the tragic news that her father had a terminal illness (after her own breakup and career downsizing). We commenced building the most angst-ridden relationship of my life. I say building but in reality, and unfortunately, the relationship built itself because neither of us was fully prepared to consciously decide how and if we wanted to proceed.

What we did know, and continue to know, were several things:

• We are alike where it might be helpful to be different
• We are different where it might be helpful to be more alike
• It is a soulful relationship built on a love of words, beauty and nature
• We share similar passions and values
• As she likes to quote from Brokeback Mountain, we can’t seem to quit each other

Resentment built up through the years. I wanted way more than she was prepared to give at a time when her emotional resources were stretched thin. I felt a deep connection that I’d been missing and wanted to drink deep from that well. We both sacrificed significant bits of our real selves to try to keep this relationship in tact. There were many attempted breakups and one short three month break. She couldn’t decide if she wanted a relationship. I hated her for being undecided.

And so, here we are today. Her father passed 2 1/2 years ago, there is still ongoing estate work, and we have absolutely worn each other out in the rasslin’ of relationship work. I’ve had opportunities for other loves. And I just couldn’t leave and, despite my tugging and pulling, neither could she. My confidantes have asked why.

I think, in the end, it came down to feeling 100% known and accepted. We share a similar language for most things, we both have done intense and deep introspective work, we are quiet (well, mostly, except for those giggle fits) and thoughtful. Those authentic pieces remain and I think we both feel that they are the most important parts of what makes us “us” as individuals. Plus, because of the inherent limits that were placed on this relationship, I was forced to grow and investigate myself, my own dreams and desires (besides relationship) fully. What a gift!

Rarely do we find that perfect match that allows us to express every aspect of ourselves within the confines of a partnership. Being in a relationship requires, duh, compromise and each of us individually must decide how much of our unique, authentic selves to defer, explore elsewhere or ignore. We’re still rooting around in that…and talking, talking, talking. There’s beauty there.

You’re afraid. You don’t have enough followers or traffic or clients or buyers. You focus on fear instead of your vision, the probability of failure instead of your list of successes, what went wrong versus what went right. You are overwhelmed with online marketing “shoulds” and info and opinions. You aren’t making millions, or hundreds of thousands, or maybe even hundreds. You are paralyzed.

Make a commitment right now to do these three things:

1. Look at what has gone RIGHT in your business (Read Switch. I’m through the first 1/2 and it is brilliant). Do more of that.

2. Look around for someone you can support, cheer on, promote. Take the focus off yourself. Do this for the right reason-because you BELIEVE in someone. The world is big enough for all of us cool, lovely people to win. You don’t have to worry about competition. Stop focusing on numbers.

3. Be consistently yourself. I say this and I suck at practicing it, but those writers/bloggers/online business folks who are REASONABLY consistent (not 15 times per day. Boring!) and entertaining get the attention of others. If you are going to use social media, don’t just link to blog posts, don’t just stick to business. Let people know who you are. The medium is useless otherwise.

Be wary of social media and online marketing sales people. They are everywhere. Unless someone has built a trusting relationship with you, do not give them money for a 2-day seminar on how to sell your e-book or set up an online business! If they knew what they were doing, you would already know them, trust them and long to give them your money. Otherwise ignore.

When you are in the thick of the social media life and you are devotedly following Darren Rowse or Chris Brogan, and you are trying to build your own following, you can feel like all the spots are taken. Try to remember that active social media-lites are a microcosm of the Universe, like going to a small private school. It feels like everyone knows every one and there is no room for you.

There is always room for you and anyone else doing good work for the right reasons.  

Don’t be afraid, grasshoppa! Keep on truckin’.

Thank you Robert Madison!

We either make ourselves miserable or we make ourselves happy, the amount of work is the same- Carlos Castaneda (via Twitter @goodvibecoach)

I’m reading Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath. Brilliant book that will probably be my top 2010 business book unless something equally stellar comes along. Like all good non-fiction, it is a quick easy read packed full of lessons. Those lessons are mating with my brain along with lessons from The Art of Possibility and other books leaning on positive psychology.

Human being seem to be drawn to the negative, train-wreck watching version of life. We get tangled up in the looting of Chile and not amazed by all of the good being done at the same time these frightened (dare I say smart?) people are fighting for their upcoming survival. I’m not going to poke around into the why’s of negativity. I personally think we gawk at anything that reminds us of our own mortality and weakness because we are less afraid of that than our strength-which dares us to be and do impossibly great things! You can read this often quoted piece by Marianne Williamson to get a sense of what I mean.

I’m an optimist. I usually have people counter with “I’m a realist” but I question whether they really are. Our daily realities are subjective. If I get on the scale and weigh 195, that is reality. Whether or not I’m fat is subjective. If my husband abuses me or my kids, he’s a bad husband. That’s reality. Outside of that and some other unforgiveable sins, whether he is a good or bad husband is subjective. Good job/bad job. Good friend/bad friend. Clean house/dirty house. Subjective.

So, if your viewpoint is your reality, why not tilt it more towards the positive? If you weigh 195, why not say you are prepared for a Chilean catastrophe more than your slender soul sisters? Why not move towards the positive?

Switch encourages you to find the things that are going right and DO MORE OF THOSE. The Art of Possibility says we create boundaries for ourselves through socialization that simply do not exist. Marcus Buckingham has built a career on telling us to abandon improving our weaknesses and focus instead on playing to our strenghts. We hear things as they are not, see things as they are not. If we are doing this, why not make life more pleasant and productive and lean in to the positive viewpoint?

Discard what isn’t working and focus on what is. Celebrate accomplishments by noting them and what was going on, what you DID when they happened. Get a new client? How? Did you ask for business? Was your house clean when you spoke on the phone? Jeannette and the Law of Attraction both say move towards what feels good and away from what feels bad. These business books all say the same damned thing.

I have, in reality, few reasons to feel optimistic. I choose to be so. Why? IT FEELS BETTER and, I believe (and so do many many others), feeling better creates a more fertile, compost-rich environment for good things to grow than subjective reality. Thoughts? You can respond on my website.

You Might Like to Follow:

Some online loves of mine:
Fabeku Fatunmise (sound healing, cool guy), Kim Woodbridge (Wordpress hero and blogger), Shawn Decker (writer and “positoid”-look it up) and Apartment Therapy for all things design and small space.

Kelly Diels was quipping around about her imaginary boyfriend post from December on Twitter (which included Oprah and Michelle Obama-why not have a boyfriend AND a girlfriend list) so I opted to do my own. I’m able to change and tweak as I please so beware..

Boyfriends

• Adam Lambert
• Ira Glass
• Robert Downey, Jr.
• Mos Def
• Marilyn Manson
• Dan Pink
• David Garrett

Girlfriends

• Adam Lambert
• Kelly Diels
• Maggie Gyllenhaal
• Stephanie Klein
• The Bloggess
• Edie Falco
• Any woman who plays the cello

I wrote a post for the previous incarnation of my blog about believing Twitter would die. The pursuit of numbers was becoming increasingly obscene to me (a behavior I kept having to check in myself) and I was, and still am, convinced that it is about the quality and not quantity of your online relationships that matters. Then Naomi Dunford wrote this and I began to feel a bit embarrassed.

And now I’ve been even more reminded of the capacity of strangers to support you.  I do have a tiny little Twitter/FB family out there and they are amazingly generous people. I think it is because I am most drawn to individuals who are REAL ( I do get tired of hearing myself say “authentic” especially when Oprah says it so much). I worry I come across as an online stalker at times because, when I’m excited about someone, I will promote the hell out of them. I’ve done it with Pam Slim, Jeannette Maw (who is now a major client and no, I never saw that coming), Danielle LaPorte, Kelly Diels and now, my first couple of boys are about to get it.

I simply believe in the goodness and talent of these unbelievable folks.

Yesterday, after having struggled for 5 days with this broken, hacked blog and an insufficient backup and really poor tech support from Netfirms (no link on purpose), the Twitter love came oozing out of the woodwork. It looked a bit like this:

KellyDiels @kellylivesay and oh honey, I’m so sorry. @websiteweekend’s site has lots of tips on security. and eff eff eff eff eff. so sorry hon.

shawnmummert @kellylivesay If your site is well-indexed by Google, you may have cached versions of them online, if you don’t have other copies.

safetycomfort @kellylivesay Hope the recreation process goes really well, and that you’ll be back up and running very soon now. Hugs x

GrowMyAfro @kellylivesay ah, gotta love caching. Whew!

websiteweekend @kellylivesay How uptodate were your backups?

There were emails from Kelly Woodbridge and Eric Hamm too. And, in the end, I was able to salvage ALL of the content except for comments.

In the meantime, three nice men came and dug my car out of the snow (ok, it was for money but still) and today (after being dug out yesterday), my neighbor helped me again.

Lately love has come to me in unexpected ways and social media played a real part in this.

Please follow the above people if you don’t already. Please. They are good. Really good. And talented.

(This site isn’t fully reconstructed yet. I’m using Jing to take screen shots of each step so I won’t wonder what color my background was if it ever gets lost again. I’m learning more about security and Wordpress and database backups than I wanted to…but it is all ok…because of the love. )

It will be a long time before a business book compels me like A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink did, but Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard may be the one. By Made to Stick authors Dan and Chip Heath, I was genuinely excited after I read a brief excerpt in Fast Company’s February issue.

I’m a die hard optimist and, despite massive problems, believe that the best of human beings will always compensate for the worst. I trust people and they generally don’t let me down. Generally. I adore the positive psychology movement and focusing on what is going right versus wrong is the theme of this book (clearly boiled way down).

Chip and Dan talk about finding a “bright spot” in a problem (the thing that IS working) and trying to do more of that. Seems simplistic, right, but human beings generally focus on trying to fix what’s wrong instead of “cloning” what’s right. We do the insanity thing (same thing over and over expecting different results) because we don’t know better. I think this book will really offer to a wide audience a new way.  Reminds me of Marcus Buckingham’s series on focusing on honing your skills instead of trying to fix what you can’t do well.

Times are tough. Change is hard. Yet we will all still find a variety of successes in each day. Looking at why that is and making more of them seems like a fantastic way to structure a day and a life to me.

Share your thoughts..