Category: Uncategorized

 

This image is beautiful and represents this reflective time of year as well as all the pieces and systems and holons, and potential and mystery, and the sense of being on a journey. I often use images and music to create different qualities of states or spaces.

While my attention has been on lots of writing, learning, collaborating, and living, which I am truly grateful for, I have neglected this website as well as another blogging opportunity that I could be playing with. I met a public relations professional yesterday evening, and as we spoke for a few minutes I was painfully aware that even as I spend a good amount of time recommending to clients that they take responsibility for their own online presence, I am seeing some potential incoherence in myself.

For a while – years possibly – I have felt a tension to create engagement and publish regularly online. Several months ago I made my first posts on this website, and in a sense I have been stuck. What might be causing this?

After working with many clients over the past few months, collaborating with them to improve their various writing projects, from website content to newsletters to white papers to essays, and primarily resumes and cover letters, I am learning a lot.

One of the key factors in how easy it is to create coherent, powerful, and inspiring or at least interesting content is: Focus. I need focus. This is not news. It is just finally being embodied as I serve others with my writing, and I can glimpse a little bit more about how useful it would be to apply this concept.

Over the next couple of months I am intending to start putting out posts that transparently continue the exploration of what the focus of my professional brand is. I have done some research, I have real-life laboratories on a day-to-day basis to test out my thoughts and ideas and practices, and I want to start sharing it and modeling my own process of Becoming.

I write a lot of content for different forms of communications, and I believe the words and the design and all of it can convey some more invisible aspects of us, or our essence, as well as contribute to our individual process of becoming.

I am going to explore a focus while realizing that this focus will likely grow and expand and emerge over time. Remembering the developing or emerging nature of our development and growth helps free me up to play within some focus here.

What do I stand for? What do I aspire for? What is my intention? These are a few of the questions that come up when I wrestle with what to put on these pages.

I have a few pieces of the puzzle.

Writing. Learning. Collaboration. Creativity. Offering value in the moment, even if it is simply listening, presence, and a reflection of what is heard or an idea that seems to just come in from nowhere.

I’m not sure if these are intentions, values, or principles. When I look at each word they see to expand.

I write a lot of resumes and yet that is not all I do. What about the collaborative contributions I am making to other writing projects, and how does creative writing or poetry fit into this branding process? How will I continue to hone my skills as an effective resume writer and editor while remaining open to the other kinds of writing, creativity, and forms of professional expression and business/community leadership I will eventually want to enact?

If anyone has read this far, I really appreciate your reading/listening and am quite open to thoughts or questions.

I am committed to taking this website to the next incremental level of clarity and aliveness over the next several weeks and am curious to see what will unfold!

After moving into a studio, starting a new professional routine last month, and practicing multiple new behavioral and emotional habits, I don’t seem to be naturally inclined to blogging.

Why can’t I just focus? Well, that’s what this is. I don’t have a blog strategy or focus,  but this post, and potentially subsequent sporadic – I would like to commit to one per week but am too sure that would not happen and am examining if that is perhaps because I don’t want it to happen since two is not that many – posts will be about focusing!

I think part of the resistance is also because I’m spending a large part of  the day time on writing professional marketing documents. Between that and journalling, what is left to blog?!Yes, lots for sure.

Without further ado procrastination, I just read this timely article in Google Reader, a new tool I am *hoping* will help me focus (!), called Cutting the Cord to Materialism. It was a guest post on Zen Habits, which I find refreshing and useful.

With the average American spending 5.4% on Entertainment, no wonder the ties are so strong to conform. Not to shirk my individuality here, and I think I’ve been doing a bit less than that with no TV for about five years (though I spend about 1/3 of my life online possibly) and my main ‘entertainment’ budget being weekly ecstatic dance and future travel, but I find I have resistance to creating the life I love, and I wonder how much of it is cultural constructs and conditioning.

In this guest post from David Damron of the Minimalist Path, he invites us to reflect on what we long for:

Let’s start with an exercise …

1. Grab a small sheet of paper and a pen or pencil.

2. After you read the following question, please take 5 deep breaths before answering.

3. Write your response to the up-coming question on your piece of paper in one sentence.

Here is your question to answer:

If you had the opportunity to do one activity for one week without any worry about finances, cost, or other outside commitments, what would you love to do for this week?

Here is what I wrote: I’d like to travel to a place warm and sunny, with a beach, and trees, and Mexican food – where I could just be, sleeping, exercising, and possibly experience this respite with a loved one, and we would leave behind internet and electronic devices and be together, write together, rest together, and have the option to pick up and fly anywhere we want to visit anyone we feel like being with, or just experience the welcome disorientation of being home, away from home, together.

What about you, dear reader?

I think that answer is authentic and may point to my desires for more connection, rest, warmth, light, well-being, and play/activity. Honestly, I think I am on the path to becoming more aligned with my being and aliveness all the time – as if I could not be, but that is another story.

And, I think I will continue to follow the Minimalist Path, as I am still finding out how to settle in to this small living space, and as I look at a box of papers I have not opened for a good two years, I know it is going to feel really energizing to simplify and create more order in my daily life.

Thanks for joining me as I find my blogging-way.

We have a peak experience which is a state, an insight, or a reignited aliveness to engage in what we are doing, living, and being.  We have a sense of renewed purpose, or possibly more accurately, vision. So much energy is liberated. Then what?

This happens both in our personal lives and in organizations. We go through a branding initiative, we make commitments to be engaged more fully, and what happens? How do we sustain the transformation?

The gap is small, and yet not. It just takes right now making one step into our aspirational visions. Over and over again. Day in and day out. And that is where the gap gets big.

We must become a learning organization. This is popular in business in the domain of capacity building and organizational (people/culture) development. Even thinking about this blog, though: how can I sustain the growth, and what am I growing toward? How can I hold the ambiguity of knowing that I don’t actually know specifically what I am growing into, but am holding a range or spectrum of possibility for what is becoming and emerging? How do I become more comfortable with this, and yet have the steadfastness to show up every day and practice, making little adjustments all along the way.

This is a partial answer: Mindful Contructs. Mental models are a significant part. The story we are telling about what is and what is possible is key.

Here is another partial answer: inquiry!

What comes up for you when I ask these questions?

This blog intends to foster collaboration and sharing of resources to mind these gaps and sustain them in our inner and outer communities. This is a place to start, a stick in the sand — but hopefully not the mud — and one little step on the path where the process and the outcome are both learning.

Welcome.