Today is another in a long series of grey, sometimes drizzly, sometimes windy days. This morning I feel like a caged animal, longing for the space beyond the clouds, beyond the grey.
I feel easily caged. It’s part of my nature. Put too many boundaries around me (office walls, too much structure, not enough time on my schedule to wander, too many rules or limitations), and I get so restless I could SCREAM. I pace the cage, I rail against the machine, I get really, really cranky.
I know this about myself, and yet I keep expecting something different. I keep thinking I should WANT to fit into the cages that seem to make other people happy, I should LIKE sitting still for awhile, I should be THANKFUL for the office walls and structures that box me in. Oh the “shoulds” I have dumped on my head! I’ve tried so hard to fit into the ordered worlds that seem to make other people happy. And yet I can’t. It just doesn’t work for me.
It’s the same way in the world of business. Even though I am thrilled that self-employment gives me more opportunity to wander, to sit in the middle of a labyrinth to do my work, or to choose the library, a coffee shop, or my tiny basement studio as my creative space for the day, I still find myself trying to force myself into some kind of box.
I should be able to fit my business into a box, shouldn’t I? All the business books tell us to be specific, to have a crisp clean elevator speech, to have a niche market, to KNOW what we offer the world and to be able to communicate it in simple clean language.
But every time I try one of those boxes, I start to get really, really restless and I want to bust out of the box. Every time I try to define myself as one thing – “writer, communications consultant, teacher, creative midwife, facilitator, leadership coach, transformation guide” – I start going a little crazy and my body fills with angst.
And then I do that thing I do when I assume everyone else is figuring it out except for me – I assume there must be something wrong with me. I beat myself up a bit, and I try a little harder to fit into a box.
But the boxes NEVER FIT!
Because I am a wanderer. An explorer. A scanner (in the words of Barbara Sher).
I am a creative thinker. A box-buster. A questioner. An outside-the-lines-colourer.
And you know what? I’m proud of that and I don’t want to beat myself up over it any more. I want to BE WHO I AM and build a business out of that instead of trying to find some model that doesn’t fit.
Because of that, two things will be happening in the coming weeks:
1.) Next week (on my birthday), I will be releasing a new product that I absolutely LOVE because it is so true to my heart. It is about the beauty of being a wanderer and I’m SO happy that other wanderers have agreed to help me with it. OH MY GOSH this is going to be fun! I’m celebrating what makes me a wanderer, sharing it with you, and hopefully helping you to celebrate your own box-busting, colouring-outside-the-lines, happy wanderer nature too.
2.) Within a month or so, I plan to migrate my blog over to my heatherplett.com url. I have loved Sophia Leadership, but it has begun to feel like another one of those boxes. Not nearly everything I want to write about or create or sell is about feminine wisdom or about leadership. It’s time to just brand MYSELF and release the products and services that emerge out of my gifts instead of trying to squeeze all of my energy and creativity into a brand that doesn’t fit. I’ll still write about leadership and feminine wisdom now and then, but that won’t be the whole she-bang. Being a WANDERER is part of my brand, and so I will celebrate my burning need to wander from one idea to the next.
I’d love to hear from you if you have any ideas. For example, let me know what your favourite things are about visiting my site. What would you like to see more of? What things would you buy from me if I created them? What e-courses would you like to see me teach?
I’m done with writing goals. Good-bye. Good riddance.
I used to write them faithfully – at least once a year and sometimes in between. A lot of smart people told me that they were good and necessary and vital to my success, and since I have a habit of listening to smart people, I not only wrote them but I told other people to write them too. (After all, I wanted people to think I was smart too!)
But I’m done with goals. I’m kickin’ them to the curb. Because they’re not the most effective tool in my tool kit.
You want to know what works better than goals?
Questions.
Yup. You heard me right – questions work better than goals.
We have all been taught the value of effective goal-setting, but rarely have we been taught the effectiveness of curiosity. Research has shown, in fact, that curiosity and openness help us get MORE accomplished than determination and goal-setting do.
Three social scientists once conducted a series of experiments to determine which was more effective, “declarative” self-talk (I will fix it!) or “interrogative” self-talk (Can I fix it?). They began by presenting a group of participants with some anagrams to solve (for example, rearranging the letters in “sauce” to spell “cause”.) Before the participants tackled the problem, though, the researchers asked half of them to take a minute to ask themselves whether they would complete the task. The other half of the group was instructed to tell themselves that they would complete the task.
In the end, the self-questioning group solved significantly more anagrams than the self-affirming group.
The researchers – Ibrahim Senay and Dolores Albarracin of the University of Illinois, along with Kenji Noguchi of the University of Southern Mississippi – then enlisted a new group to try a variation with a twist of trickery: “We told participants that we were interested in people’s handwriting practices. With this pretense, participants were given a sheet of paper to write down 20 times one of the following word pairs: Will I, I will, I, or Will. Then they were asked to work on a series of 10 anagrams in the same way participants in Experiment One did.”
This experiment resulted in the same outcome as the first. People primed with “Will I” solved nearly twice as many anagrams as people in the other three groups. In follow-up experiments, the same pattern continued to hold. Those who approach a task with questioning self-talk did better than those who began with affirming self-talk.
My nine-year-old daughter Maddy figured this out before I did. (Or perhaps I had it figured out at nine too, but somewhere along the way I let smart people convince me otherwise.)
Not long ago, she started her first journal. “Mom,” she said, “I’m going to call it ‘A lifetime of questions.'” And then she proceeded to write pages full of all the questions she has about life, leaving blank spaces after each question in case she finds the answer and wants to fill it in. Sometimes she shares her questions with me and sometimes she doesn’t.
The other day, she was waiting in line at six in the morning to audition for The Next Star, a TV talent show that’s like Canadian Idol for kids. After the original giddiness had worn off, she plopped herself down on the ground, pulled out her journal, and started writing her questions. She didn’t show them to me, but there’s a pretty good chance at least one of them was “will I be the Next Star?”
The answer to that question was, unfortunately, “No” (she didn’t make it past the first round of auditions), but if you ask me, she’s a pretty big star just for having the guts to do all the research about how and where to audition, practice her songs relentlessly for weeks on end, get up at 5 a.m. on a Saturday, wait in line for five hours, and then march off alone into an audition room full of strangers (I wasn’t allowed to watch) and compete against kids who were mostly a few years older than her – all at the risk of failure. (One of the first questions she asked me afterwards was “Mom, can I take singing and dance lessons so I’m more prepared next year?”) That little girl is a hero in my books!
So I’m taking the lessons I’ve learned from Maddy and those researchers, and I’m living a lifetime of questions.
Remember that black canvas I painted when I was in the depths of despair over my long surrender? I decided to fill it with a bunch of hopeful questions.
I’ll let you know what the answers are when I find out!
Note: For this and other unconventional wisdom about how to take a more unique and powerful approach to life and leadership, check out How to Lead with your Paint Clothes on. There’s still room in the learning circle (along with the fascinating people who’ve already joined) and we’d love to have you!
One of the things I love about the process of doing interviews for this series is the great variety of stories that are emerging. Today’s story is quite different from the last one, and yet in each one there is great wisdom to be gleaned.
When I first started dreaming about leaving my job for self-employment, I picked up the book Making a Living Without a Job and I was hooked. It was the perfect thing to fuel my dream. I also started following its author, Barbara Winter, on Twitter and soon learned that she is one of the most warm and genuine people you could ever meet. When I finally left that job, I think Barbara was the first person to cheer me on, and she has been a consistent cheerleader and supporter since. Some day, I want to curl up on a couch with her and enjoy a cup of tea together.
In this video, Barbara shares her personal story of making the leap from “safe” employment to the relatively shaky ground of self-employment. (Once again, the longer video – full of all kinds of wisdom and advice – will be available once I release my e-course.)
The language of business and government is largely the language of men. It’s language that’s been shaped by sports and warfare – masculine arenas.
Think about it for a moment – strategic planning, performance reviews, bite the bullet, fast track, jump the gun, keep your eye on the prize, rally the troops, ball park figures – they’ve all been influenced by sports or warfare. Even coaching, though it has developed softer edges, is still a word that comes out of sports, where performance is everything.
Language is not only shaped by the culture in which it is formed, it also helps shape the culture. When you enter a new workplace, you learn to speak in the local lingo. Before you know it, you’re not just talking in those terms, you’re thinking in them too.
Case in point: Not long ago, in my Writing for Public Relations course, we were talking about communications strategies, and I was telling the students how important it is to evaluate after the work is complete. “Even if you don’t have time for a full-fledged evaluation,” I said, “at least do a post mortem with your planning team.”
The students wanted to know what a post mortem was, and I explained that it’s a meeting held after work has been completed to discuss what went well and what needed to be improved next time. I was so used to using the word, I didn’t even think about what I was saying, until a student raised his hand and called me on it.
“Remember how you were saying that language in the world of business is too often based on sports and warfare?” asked the student who’d spent time in the army. “Well, ‘post mortem’ is an excellent example. Interestingly enough, the army no longer uses that term. They now refer to it as ‘after action review’.”
Needless to say, I was sufficiently humbled by my student who’d caught something I didn’t even recognize in my own language. That’s how language is – it becomes so embedded in our psyche, we don’t even recognize how it influences us anymore.
I’m on a personal mission not only to change my own language, but to influence the language of the corporate world. I think it’s time for more feminine language – the language of art and intuition added to the language of sports and warfare.
This morning I delivered a speech to a local business club. I spoke on “How to Lead with your Paint Clothes On.” I talked to them about how to think more like artists, how to incorporate creativity and pauses and white spaces and practice in their business planning. I encouraged them to allow for mistakes, open themselves to possibilities, and trust their intuition. I handed out markers and doodle pages and told them to doodle while I talked. I encouraged them to hold art parties with their staff.
I don’t think the business club (mostly men) knew exactly what to make of my talk. A few of them offered stories of how creativity had shaped what they did, but most of them simply thanked me politely and then left.
It’s a new language for many people – not one that’s particularly comfortable in a business world. Speaking a new language into an old culture can be intimidating and downright scary. But change doesn’t come without a bit of risk. If we want things to shift, sometimes we have to be willing to be the oddball in the room.
Here’s the handout I used this morning. On the back of the page it said “Go ahead and DOODLE!”
Christina Baldwin teaches the power of circle and story
Last year, my word for the year was journey, and what a journey it was! There was significant learning and challenge and change along the journey, culminating with the end of a career and a big step into self-employment.
When I look back on the year, I recognize three major transformative moments when I was immersed in such amazing learning that it changed my life. Those three learning events are available to you in one way or another and I thought I’d tell you about them in case you’re interested.
1. ALIA Summer Institute: Wow. I hardly know what to say about ALIA. It is a transformative experience like few others. If you are interested in impacting social change and you want to immerse yourself in big ideas, surround yourself with big thinkers, and spend time imagining what big things you can do in your life, this is the place for you. It’s hard to define it exactly – it’s a combination of conference, retreat, and intensive workshop. ALIA is one of a kind in its approach. These are people who know something about holistic learning. At the summer institute, you will spend time in meditation, body movement, art & creativity, and deep learning of all kinds. You’ll meet people who are transforming the world through contemplative juggling, aikido, meditative painting, music, and a whole lot of other fun and interesting things. This year, I’m very excited about the fact that I’m doing some work for the ALIA team and so I’m getting to know them better AND I’ll be attending in June.
2. Teach Now Program – Another WOW. I don’t sign up for a lot of online courses, because I tend to prefer in person learning where I can engage in more meaningful conversations, but Teach Now is a BIG exception. I signed up and I listened to every single call and every podcast – sometimes more than once. I still have all of the interviews on my iPod and often listen to them when I’m running because they are just so full of wisdom. This is AMAZING stuff. If you are doing (or dreaming of doing) any kind of teaching, you really should check it out, because few other things have had as much impact on my teaching practice as this course. Here’s a quote from the note I sent to Jen & Michele after Teach Now: “Because of Teach Now, I have been bold enough to be a different kind of teacher than most of my students have had experience with before. I am daring to encourage them to learn FIRST to write from their hearts and THEN to learn to write technically for future PR jobs.” Click the link above to sign up for the free call – you won’t regret it. (p.s. I liked it so much, I’m planning to sign up for a second round!)
3. The Listening Well – A Circle & Story Workshop – WOW again. (How lucky I’ve been to have three wows in one year!) For years and years I’ve been dreaming of taking a workshop with Christina Baldwin. Ten years ago, I first came across her work when I was in a really difficult place in my leadership journey, and it felt like someone had lit a candle in a dark place for me. Her books on Circle and Story resonate so closely with the deep longings of my heart. Attending the workshop just after quitting my job and jumping into a brand new place in which I dream of doing work similar to what Christina is doing was perfect timing and a dream come true. I can’t recommend her work strongly enough. If you can’t make it to one of her workshops, at least check out oneofherbooks.
Today is another in a long series of grey, sometimes drizzly, sometimes windy days. This morning I feel like a caged animal, longing for the space beyond the clouds, beyond the grey.
and I was hooked. It was the perfect thing to fuel my dream. I also started following its author, 
.