by Heather Plett | Jun 11, 2012 | circle, journey, Uncategorized
Thank you for visiting my new site! I’m excited to have you here.
It’s been an interesting journey that has brought me to this place – a spiraling journey that started out with my first blog, Fumbling for Words, which later morphed into my second blog, Sophia Leadership, when I started on my self-employment path. Finally I am here, at the site that bears my own name. It feels right, at this time, to be just me, beautiful, flawed, growing, emerging, good enough ME!
I believe that all of life is a spiraling journey – like a journey up a mountain that can not be a direct path, lest we move too quickly and sprain an ankle or get altitude sickness. Instead, we spiral round and round, often feeling like we’re back at the same place, but nonetheless getting closer and closer to our destination.
Hence the spiral that appears all over my new site design. We have much to learn from spirals.
We also have much to learn from circles, mandalas, and labyrinths. As I wrote on my “about” page:
Circles teach us how to gather – looking into each others’ eyes, sharing our gifts, leaning in, and supporting each other through change and growth.
Spirals teach us how to learn and how to live – going inward, seeking the source of our truth and our strength, and then going outward, serving the world with our gifts.
walking the labyrinth
Mandalas teach us how to engage our minds and our hearts – slowing down to the speed of contemplation, exploring our creativity, and trusting the intuitive truth that arises.
Labyrinths teach us how to journey through life – trusting the path, accepting the turns that take us in the wrong direction, and putting one foot in front of the other until we reach the centre.
If you’d like to learn more about circles, spirals, mandalas, and labyrinths, I welcome you to join my free 75 minute call on Tuesday, June 26th at 7:00 pm Central Daylight Time. Register below.
It will be an interactive call (in the spirit of the circle), so I hope that you will join us, but if you can’t, sign up anyway and I’ll send you the link to the recording once it’s done.
This is not a sales call. It’s a learning journey, and I welcome you to come with me as we explore the path.
Here are a few things you’ll get out of the call:
- a basic understanding of circle and how it can inform the way we meet and engage in meaningful conversations
- an exploration of how labyrinths and mandalas can deepen your journey and become valuable spiritual & creative practices
- ideas that will help you engage your intuitive, right brain processes for increased clarity and creativity
- lots of tips that will help you understand your own personal spiraling journey, including an exploration of the value of chaos
- time to explore these ideas in a safe, non-judgemental environment
Thanks again for visiting! Take a look around, and let me know what you think of my new digs! One of the things you’ll notice, if you visit the “work with me” page is that I’ve decided to put my coaching work more front and centre. I’ve had some pretty powerful coaching opportunities lately, in which I’ve seen some beautiful transformations in my clients, on the path through chaos to creativity. It made me realize that this is a gift I need to be more intentional about sharing. If you’re looking for coaching, contact me and we’ll have an exploratory conversation.
by Heather Plett | May 3, 2012 | journey
This morning was hard. I was letting the monsters win.
I was struggling with the usual not-good-enough-itis. You know the drill.
I decided it was time to go for a walk. When the monsters start winning, it’s usually a sure sign that I need to get my body moving and I need to be in nature for awhile.
Unfortunately, the moment I left the house, I got a phone call that made matters worse. It was one of those “bad news – you owe more money than you thought” kind of phone calls, and it plunged me even deeper into the monsters’ lair. The tears started flowing as I walked. And then it started raining, which seemed fitting. I kept walking. Oddly enough, walking in the rain often helps my mood.
As I walked down my favourite woodland path, I started beating myself up with old stories. “Why aren’t you better with money? Why couldn’t you have been satisfied with those well paid, upwardly mobile jobs you’ve had in the past? Why aren’t you more successful at this self-employment thing?”
As my friend Desiree said the other day (and I think she was quoting Pam Slim), I was doing some serious “story-fondling”.
Things got worse. I started ranting at God. “Why did you have to choose this particular path for me? Why did you make me so restless that I keep looking for the next journey I need to take? Why did I get stuck with a journey that takes me through so many hard places? Why didn’t you make me an accountant so I wouldn’t have to worry about money? Why didn’t you make me more like those friends who are still content in the perfectly good jobs I left years ago? Why do I have to experience so much brokenness?”
Oh yeah, the monsters were having a party.
And then I spotted something on the woodland path. A small fish. Perfectly placed in the middle of the path, looking like he had climbed out of the river, slithered along the ground for about 200 feet and stopped to catch a breath on the path, only to find that he could no longer breathe. There was a look of surprise in his eyes.
You see the metaphor here, don’t you?
A fish out of water.
Exactly what I would be if I had chosen the path of accountant, or stayed on the path of government management.
Dead on a path that wasn’t mine. Unable to breathe because I was meant for other things.
Fish need water. Birds need the sky. Worms need the soil. Rabbits need the earth.
Artists need to paint. Dancers need to dance. Accountants need spreadsheets. Scientists need test tubes.
Take a path that’s not meant for you, and you can never be fully alive.
And with that, the monsters began to retreat. All I needed was a dead fish on the path to remind me not to listen to them.
A little further on the path, I found a small pink pillow hanging from a tree. On it were the words “The Princess is In”. Hmmmm… do you think I should find a metaphor in that too? Smile.
An interesting side note: I’m in the process of creating a new website that offers a little more clarity and focus for my work, and, even before this morning’s wandering, I’d settled on language that relates to serving as “your guide along the path through chaos to creativity”. If you’re having trouble finding your path and would like a guide, check out my services, and contact me.
by Heather Plett | Apr 27, 2012 | Uncategorized
My hotel room smelled like cheap disinfectant. It wasn’t the ugliest room I’ve ever slept in (at least it had a functional toilet and properly-wired light switches), but it was close.
I knew I couldn’t spend the whole evening there. I needed green space. I needed fresh air. I needed some mindful wandering to help me process all of the wonderful things that had happened on my trip before returning home early the next morning.
So I did what I often do – I opened Google maps and looked for the nearest green patch on the map. About a quarter mile away, past the industrial wasteland, across a freeway, and at the edge of the suburbs, there was a strip of green along what looked like a tiny creek. Hmmm… it looked promising.
What a delightful surprise I found when I crossed that freeway and climbed the embankment! There was a protected greenbelt running along the creek, with a beautiful walking/biking path that stretched out for seemingly miles.
I’m happy for groomed trails when I’m on my bike, but when I’m walking, I always look for the “path less traveled”. Sure enough, closer to the creek was a rugged path made for adventurers like me. Everyone else took the easy path – I climbed through the underbrush to find the one closer to nature.
For the next two hours, I wandered wherever my curiosity would take me. I climbed under bridges, I knelt on the damp ground to get closer to the violets, I scampered after bunnies, and tried (unsuccessfully) to take pictures of an elusive red bird. I scratched myself on low-hanging branches, and I nearly got stuck in the mud.
I was my 10 year old self again, finding secret hideaways in the woods on our farm.
It was heavenly. It was like a deep exhale after an exciting but full and intense week.
Wandering is my meditation, my therapy, my brainstorming session, my stress-reliever, my playtime, and my teacher. It fills me up in a way that few other activities do.
What about you? Do you love to wander? Or perhaps you haven’t discovered the beauty of wandering yet. Check out my e-book on the topic. It’s full of goodness, including interviews with a dozen other people who know the power of wandering.
by Heather Plett | Apr 14, 2012 | Uncategorized
I was at a social justice conference once when a well known storyteller got up to speak. I settled comfortably into my chair, preparing to be inspired.
He told a great (and very short) story, and then sat down. I thought he was just taking a break – maybe a musical interlude or dramatic pause – and then he’d get up to tell us what the story meant or how we should apply it to our lives.
Nope. Nothing. That was it. End of story.
I felt cheated. It was, after all, a social justice conference. We’d come to be inspired, to take home a toolkit full of take-aways and lessons-learned. If I remember correctly, his story didn’t even seem to have a social justice lens. It was just a story.
But was it?
The truth is, it stuck with me throughout the day, and into the week – long after I’d forgotten the take-aways from other talks or workshops.
One of the things I learned from his story is this: we don’t always need to hear the moral of the story. Sometimes, in fact, there is no moral. There’s just story. And the story becomes what each of us needs it to be. (Kind of like Jesus’ parables, right?)
I am a meaning-maker, a metaphor-finder, and a teacher. I like to follow story threads to their natural conclusions and then wrap the threads into neat little bows that allow you to take the stories home in pretty little packages to unwrap later. I’m used to shaping my ideas into teaching tools so that you have useful takeaways. It’s what I do and it’s often what I expect others to do.
But sometimes I try too hard and sometimes I do the story a mis-service by giving it only one shape when perhaps what you needed was a different shape entirely. Perhaps the story is still what you need, but through your lens it looks different and I’ve just ruined that for you by prescribing my own shape to it.
I’m finding lately that I’m growing somewhat weary of blog posts and social media updates, mostly because there seems to be too much expectation that we make sure every story has a moral, and every thread is tied.
We want to make sure we’re offering “good content”, and so we tie those threads. The blogging professionals remind us of how many extra hits we get when we can give “helpful tips for an easier life” or “do-it-yourself advice for ending the story as successfully as I did”, and so we give every story a nice juicy moral that readers can apply to their lives.
In doing so, sadly, we lose some of the messiness (and beauty) of life. We take out the really raw bits, because they don’t fit into neatly tied packages. We don’t tell the stories that end unhappily or not at all. We ignore the journeys that don’t conclude in simple and profound destinations.
This is one of the blocks I’ve had lately. This blog is now part of my business, and so I should be giving you good content that will keep you coming back for more. I should be offering you neatly tied packages. And I should do that on a regular basis so that you’ll come back often. And I certainly shouldn’t post this blog near midnight on a Friday. It’s blog suicide.
Unfortunately, many of my stories are messy and rarely do they come to me at appropriate blogging times of day. And often they don’t fit into clean frames or end with simple-to-communicate morals. Many of them are just little pieces of my journey and so the end is simply the beginning of something new. Sometimes (like when a man climbed through my window and raped me more than twenty years ago), it takes me years and years to process the lessons I’m meant to take away from a story. And even when I think I’ve learned all there is to learn, something new shows up a few years later and I realize the story hasn’t finished unfolding itself in my life.
And yet… I know those stories, as messy and unfinished as they are, are worth sharing. So I’ll keep offering them to you, but sometimes I won’t bother tying the threads together. I’ll let you find your own threads and see how those threads weave into your stories.
I am reminded, once again, of one of my favourite quotes.
“I’m not a teacher, only a fellow-traveler of whom you asked the way. I pointed ahead – ahead of myself as well as you.”
– George Bernard Shaw
Traveling is what I do. It’s what we all are doing. I haven’t reached the destination, so I can’t give you the “moral of this life-long story”. But maybe I can help you navigate some of the rocks that tripped me up.
Where am I going with all of this? I don’t know for sure. I haven’t figured out a way to end this post with a neat little moral either.
So I’m just going to leave you with what it is… some of the thoughts finding space in my head.
by Heather Plett | Feb 29, 2012 | Uncategorized
My current time-waster/stress-reliever is a game called Mahjong, where tiles are stacked in various formations and the goal is to remove all of the tiles by finding matching pairs.
I’ve gotten to the point where I can win about half the games I play, but that meant a fair bit of trial and error had to take place before I could begin to understand the strategy. At first, I’d simply remove any matching pairs that appeared, hoping to get to the bottom. With that approach though, I never succeeded.
One day I had an a-ha moment while playing Mahjong.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
In other words, by removing the easy tiles at the beginning instead of saving them for later when one of them might match another tile that’s more important to remove, I ruin my chances of success in the long run.
The most valuable thing to do is to remove those tiles that reveal something deeper underneath.
The more I play Mahjong, the more I realize those lessons go much beyond a simple game.
Since I started my business last year, I have been doing a lot of things. Too many things. There are lots of things I CAN do, and I’m good at many of them, so when people ask me to do them, I think “I need to make money and I need to get my name out there, so I’d better do this thing.”
I have been writing a book, editing other people’s books, tutoring people, coaching people, mentoring leaders, serving on the board of a women’s empowerment organization, teaching effective written communication, teaching writing for public relations, teaching effective facilitation, teaching emotional intelligence, facilitating community-building workshops, facilitating leadership workshops, teaching creative writing, teaching creative discovery, teaching social media skills, writing and selling ebooks on writing, wandering, leadership, and social media, serving on the organizing committee for an international women’s gathering, building a couple of websites for clients, doing mandala sessions and creating a mandala discovery course, doing a Skype interview series for a leadership gathering, hosting retreats… and… there’s more.
Some days, at the end of the week, I feel like my brain has been riding a merry-go-round for days on end. These past weeks have been especially challenging, since I’m currently teaching courses in three very different subject areas (writing for PR, effective facilitation, and creative discovery), and building a website for the event I’m helping to host this summer, and planning 2 upcoming retreats, and doing some mandala sessions. TOO MUCH!
I need to make money, I need to build my platform, and I enjoy variety, so I have a hard time saying no to the work that shows up.
Just like in the early days of playing Mahjong, I’m removing all of the tiles that appear, without consideration for whether or not they’re helping get to the deeper purpose.
Just because I can, doesn’t mean I should.
It’s time to apply that mantra to my life as well as my Mahjong board. I need more strategy. I need to trust that hanging onto some of the easy tiles will mean I’ll have them in reserve for when they help me get to the deeper stuff.
Yesterday, I took a baby step. Because of my skill-set and experience, I’d been asked to sit on the board of a really interesting organization doing international development work, mostly in Africa. It was SO tempting to say yes, since it so closely matches my values and interests and I knew I would be an asset to them and and it would give me a new circle of interesting connections. BUT I knew it would take time away from some of the other valuable work I’m committed to that’s even more closely aligned with my values and interests and long term business goal. So I made the difficult decision to say no. OOoooo… that was tough.
And I’m going to start saying no to more things, like some of the teaching that requires too much of my time and energy in areas I’m neither effective nor interested (grading papers, for example).
None of it has been a waste of time though. Just like all those practice rounds of Mahjong, before I started winning games, this past year has been incredibly valuable for me. I’ve learned so much more about what I’m good at, what I want to spend my time and energy on, and what offerings of mine people benefit the most from.
I couldn’t get here without the practice.
I couldn’t start saying no until I’d said yes a lot of times. I couldn’t find the work that was most meant for me, without a little trial and error that helped me eliminate the work that wasn’t meant for me.
Here’s what I’ve learned about myself this past year:
I love public speaking. I am often in my most happy place when I am speaking, leading, facilitating, or teaching. But I don’t really enjoy speaking on topics that don’t energize me.
I love engaging people in meaningful conversation, and I love helping them get to deeper levels of meaning. I even get energy from facilitating challenging dialogues.
I love encouraging people, but I don’t really enjoy being in a position where I have to judge their work. I’d much rather offer words of encouragement to my students and help them find their unique gifts than correct their papers and give them grades.
I love creative writing, and I enjoy teaching other people to write more creatively, but I don’t really enjoy teaching business writing.
I am a meaning-finder, a metaphor-maker, a big picture thinker and a non-dualistic processor. I thrive on creativity. I am much more comfortable outside the box than inside. I feel easily trapped when I have to teach or work in environments that feel too restrictive or systems-driven.
I can’t think of anything I love more than doing creative work (like mandalas) and encouraging others to grow in their creativity and self-discovery.
I keep going back to the personal mission statement I wrote about 10 years ago when I first started imagining this work.
“It is my mission to inspire excellence in people, to facilitate personal growth and the discovery of gifts, and to serve as a catalyst for positive change.”
It’s time to start saying no to more things so that I can say a bigger YES to my mission.
This week I woke with a new abbreviated version of my mission statement on my mind.
I am a catalyst for creativity, community, and change.
And I say a bit YES to that.
