Bust A Rut

One of the biggest things I got out of reading ‘The Secret’ by Rhonda Byrne was the idea of a Secret Shifter:

Secret Shifters, such as pleasant memories, nature, or your favorite music, can change your feelings and shift your frequency in an instant.

By frequency, she’s talking about the energy you give off to attract the things you really want. If you’re not into that ‘frequency’ and ‘law of attraction’ business, that’s cool. It’s actually not as simplistic as visualizing what you want, because you have to pair that with NOT focusing on what you DON’T want, since, per this game, you’ll just attract that into your life, too. It takes a little work, but that’s not what I wanted to get into. I want to talk about the ‘feeling good’ part.

Before I get into work, and after I leave work, and in the morning if I remember to, I cue up my Secret Shifter, my theme song, Thand101. It’s awesome, I love it. It kind of sounds like a galloping horse when fully orchestrated, and I’ll hum it to myself when I’m feeling awesome, like I’m radiating bad-assery, or I’ll hum it to myself, all morose and in more of a minor key than it already is, as a sympathetic back pat as if to say, “Cheer up, ol’ chap, chin up.” Yeah, that bit comes through in a British accent. Self-talk can get weird.

Martha Beck, life coach extraordinaire, has a version of this which is more involved: ask yourself what is your favorite thing to sense with each of your five senses, then ‘sense’ them. Man, that was a clumsy way to say it. Let’s try this:

Right now, what is your favorite thing to see?
What is your favorite taste?
What is your favorite smell?
What is your favorite touch sensation?
What is your favorite sound?
Now, see that thing, taste that taste, smell that favorite smell, feel yourself touching that favorite… touch, hear that sound. Fully immerse yourself in each of these sensations.

They won’t always make sense to… sense all at once, and that’s not the point. You’ll most likely smile, and you’ll take deeper breaths, and your shoulders will slump a little, and you’ll be more present and in your body – that’s the point.

As hustlin’ and bustlin’ humans in the first world, most of us reading this, myself included, we’re often focused on the future or the past, and not in the present. That’s a pretty broad and accusatory statement, so I invite you to analyze that for yourself: are you limiting yourself with regret (past-focused) or worry (future-focused)? One way to bring you back in the present is to then bring you back into your body (vs. your head), and what better way than by sensing. Sure, the fantasy of favorite senses isn’t real, but it uses what your body does to result in a smile.

So there you have it, folks. To bust a rut, immerse yourself in a Sensory Meditation or use a Secret Shifter. This stuff works for me, and yes, the language here can be a little ‘woo-woo’, sure, but we’re not talking about reconnecting with the greater consciousness of the universe (or are we…), we’re just talking about feeling better.

Find Your Path via Mary Oliver

Mary Oliver is a Pulitzer Prize winner of a poet. In 1992, she wrote The Summer Day. Pause after the last two lines.

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

You’re saying my one life is ‘wild and precious’? Hmm, waking up day to day is now colored so strikingly and ephemerally. Ponder that question. I know I am.

Between You And Showing Up

Ah, the motivation to get started on something. Sometimes, that is the hardest part of the activity. The example for me where this applies in spades is the morning run.

I love running. Sure, you get tired and sweaty and just want to walk at times and something or another might start hurting, but all that… I have no problem with; all that is fun. AND… I feel great afterwards: more than the endorphins, it’s feeling fit – maybe they’re the same thing. I prepend that to a workday, and I walk into the office feeling like a bad-ass, having proactively done something to better myself, feeling alive.

If I could just open my eyes and find myself running (sleep-running?), I’d keep running. While it’s effort, it’s ironically not the hardest. So what’s been coming between me and giving myself a radiantly awesome start to every day after turning off the alarm clock?

  • Not rolling back into bed.
  • Getting my feet to touch the floor.
  • Getting my butt off the bed.
  • Not checking Facebook, or email, or the news, on the laptop.
  • Getting running clothes on. Then shoes.

Hmm. It starts with feet and ends with getting them dressed: out of bed and into shoes.

Maybe… just maybe… if I put my running shoes next to my bed at night, I can slip into them in the morning and jump-start the whole process (’cause I’m not gonna roll back into bed with my shoes on).

MAYBE… just maybe… if I put the alarm clock ON the shoes next to my bed at night, I’ll be holding my shoes, facilitating the shoe-to-foot process.

Wow, this post was going to be about how showing up is the hardest part (the problem/challenge/opportunity), and just by going through that little exercise of asking myself, “What is coming between me and…” while writing it out in detail do I have something I can look over and subsequently fall into coming up with a potential solution, from the point of view of more easily showing up. I’m not sure if it’ll work, but at least I have a plan I can try out.

What is something you want to do or be? Ask yourself, “What is coming between me and…” this thing. Write it out. Each blocker. Each annoying or silly or serious blocker between you and this thing you’re after. Now, look over this list.

What can you do to more easily just… show up?

Chicken Scratch

I have a little black book.

If I’m wearing a jacket, you can bet I’m carrying it around with as much love as I might a companion cube, but not for the reason Urban Dictionary might define:

Name for a man’s pocket directory of (hopefully) promiscuous women (i.e. sorostitute).

(Besides, that’s what cell phones are for…)

No, I actually use my little black book about once a month, at my favorite cafe, where I can be seen at the counter sitting for a few hours combing that thing over, shiny pen in hand, and another, littler, non-black book open. At some point, some new member of the waitstaff will see both my notebooks open, can’t help but notice the contents, and exclaim, “Wow, you have TINY handwriting!” This is usually followed by, “My, aren’t you a handsome and irresistible beast. I’ve been working up the courage to, um… wanna go out?” “What are you doing?”

Kids, at this point, I want to lie with something seriously silly, something extravagantly fascinating, something told through an accent.

Kids, at this point, I unfortunately tell the truth. Much less fun. Way more meaningful.

What am I doing? Welcome to my church! No, this little black book is not my bible. Yes, this little black book does have lots of chicken scratch. When I come across an inspirational quote, a valuable phrase, or otherwise something that rings true with who I am or the person I want to be, I write it down. There are some books that are so dense with this kind of goodness that I extract the best lines and re-write ’em in wicked small font so that these pages are similarly dense: more goodness per page. So that’s this notebook.

In this smaller one over here is more chicken scratch. At the top, I write what is top-of-mind for the upcoming month in terms of goals, events, and concerns. With this as context, I then read through the gold nuggets in the black book. What seems most pertinent, I re-phrase and re-write in the smaller book, the latest pages of which I read during my morning commute.

So yeah. Short-term reflection with a long-term perspective. From this, I walk into the month better grounded in a written form of my… essence. I am centered.

In reality, this new member of the waitstaff has already walked off. And back. And off again. And back again. It takes me a little while to get this all out.

How do you center yourself?

Agile Family

This blog documents the adventure of applying Scrum principles to my personal development.

I started a ScrumOfOne because I found it helpful with logistics as I moved into my own space in Boston’s Back Bay. (I carried my cheap bookshelf across town during a late January sleeting ’cause I guessed fewer folks would be out on the roads – I was right.)

Focus then shifted from dwelling development to personal development as I rediscovered pieces of myself. (That February, I was offered extra money to pull extra hours to get a couple of projects done, which I managed by sleeping on a yoga mat at work, not the newly purchased mattress at home. When the last thing you see before you close your eyes is the underside of your desk, you start questioning your choices.)

Having come to terms with what would bring me the most daily joy, what’s left is removing limiting beliefs, getting my butt in gear, and showering you with remixes of Wham’s Careless Whisper, all the while transparently tracking progress towards my vision, frequently adapting. (Adapting the stark abodal palette of browns and greys to oranges and giraffe heads with the addition of my loving partner in fun.)

Now, I can’t help but find the ScrumOfOne in what I read and hear and see, and it’s not so hard when it’s a TED Talk by Bruce Feiler called ‘Agile programming — for your family‘. The talk is much more than an application of Scrum (his last line is powerful), but here’s a primer:

The key idea of agile is that teams essentially manage themselves. … It works in software, and it turns out that it works with kids.

This is essentially family development through Scrum, and it is mentioned in his book, The Secrets of Happy Families: Improve Your Mornings, Rethink Family Dinner, Fight Smarter, Go Out and Play, and Much More.

Do you want a happy life? Try.