UTurn: Guidance and Inspiration for following your calling on the Open Road

I took a walk today and was delighted to discover this teeny-tiny egg shell at my feet on the way home. Like a little piece of the sky. I made a nest from grass clippings to honor the creature that gave birth to it, and the creature that was birthed from it.

Before I took my walk, I was feeling discouraged and frustrated. Wondering whether my work made a difference. How I would keep going despite all the challenges. Crispy around the edges, if not quite burned-out.

A tiny soft voice that I could just barely make out whispered “get outside.” I’d been ignoring her for hours, but she’d made some sort of deal with my dog to guilt me out of the house. (One of the many things I like about dogs – they seem to be aligned with wise mind more often than not.)

What does your tiny soft voice say? If you’re feeling burned out, you’ve been ignoring her, or him, for a while now. Start listening. That voice will lead you to signs of new life, reasons to have faith and hope, and clear evidence that you’re making a difference.

Tell me what you hear and what you learned in the comments.

Raise your hand if you tune out a little when you hear the word “leadership.”

Raise your hand higher if you tune out completely.

OK, I see a lot of fully extended armpits out there. Thank you for your candor. And for wearing deodorant today.

For the sake of this post, and because it’s 4:12 and I want some, let’s use the word “chocolate” wherever we’d use the word “leadership”.

I am passionate about chocolate. I feel endlessly curious about all the chocolate theories, studies on chocolate, and watching people come into their own…as chocolatiers.

There must be a lot of other chocolate fans out there, because chocolate is one of the most popular subjects of popular nonfiction. We can never write, or read too much about chocolate, at least according to publishers.

I just finished teaching a quarter on Leadership Strategies for the University of Washington’s Nonprofit Certificate program. My wonderful co-instructor, Laura Pierce, and I had to choose a small number of quality books on leadership for the students to read and workshop for the class.

The eager and talented students did an amazing job with their final presentations. And as I watched, I wondered: how many other really useful and excellent books on chocolate are there that I don’t know about?

So I thought I would ask you fabulous folks: What are your favorite/most influential chocolate books?

I’ll start a list – please continue it in the comments!

• The Practice of Adaptive Leadership by Ron Heifetz et. al.
• Good to Great, by Jim Collins
• Switch: how to change when change is hard, Chip and Dan Heath

Just a quick note to say that my wonderful graphic designer, Shanda Foisy of Pixel Soup Creative, has finished “evolving” the Open Road brand.

The colors are called Tangerine, Chocolate and Pear. Yum.

I wanted a brand that reflects the joy and light my clients experience when they take steps toward claiming and following their calling.

Please comment to let me know if you think this new logo reflects that spirit!

Over the next few weeks, I will be completely overhauling my website with this new look and new clarity about my mission: helping women at a career crossroads claim and fulfill their calling to give back in a way that gives them energy and momentum.

Hope you feel as invited as you truly are to connect with me when you can’t stand to put off finding and fulfilling your calling one more minute!

I had dinner with a newish friend tonight, with the intention to also give her a tarot reading as she navigates some really big changes (end of major relationship, beginning of master’s program and a new job). I showed up in my comfortable, well-worn role as the “helper,” but my friend in her wisdom wasn’t going to let me off the hook that easily. She has attorney training and she’s a very skilled coach, a delightfully lethal combination, it turns out.

She said a couple of things to me during dinner that left me feeling like I’d been sprinkled with stupid dust. You know the feeling? Like Wile E. Coyote just over the lip of the canyon holding completely still before the fall.

Not a common feeling for an extroverted know-it-all, but one I’ve come to recognize as pay dirt for major leaps in my personal and professional life:

1. If you want something you’ve never had, you have to be willing to do things you’ve never done

After the stupid dust settled, it struck me as obvious. Well of course! You actually have to learn how to do it by trying to do it. If I wanted to be a professional bowler, would I read all the bowling books, join bowling groups, read bowling blogs, talk about bowling all the time, but not ever actually roll the ball down the aisle? Risk that I might actually suck at bowling? Why would I want to do that?!? I LOVE bowling!

Loving the idea of something is not the same as actually doing it. I realized this about 20 years ago when I heard a successful novelist say that being a writer meant spending 8-12 hours a day in a room by yourself focused on one thing. Yeah, I’m never going to do that. I like the idea of it, but it stops there.

What do I have to be willing to do to have what I really want? What about you?

2. “How much longer do you have?”

I’ve been having essentially the same conversation with my friends, colleagues and coach for the last 3 years. With more or less swearing, some iteration of “I want to completely focus my business on coaching people to discover and fulfill their calling but I’m scared to put myself out there.”

My friend asked me how much longer I was willing to play small. 3 years? A year? Six months? How did I feel when I thought about doing exactly what I’m doing now for another 3 years?

What’s that? You say it makes you feel sick?

Well, yes. Sick. The way many of my clients feel when they finally decide to call for help. Heavy, overwhelmed, exhausted.

So at my friend’s urging I gave myself the rest of this year to really focus on my own calling, to be curious about it, embrace it, embody it in the spirit it was given to me. Be willing to do things for it that I’ve never done before. Being married is good practice for this.

Stay tuned. Maybe Wile e Coyote might fly this time. And let me know what cliffs you’re hovering off the edge of.

The other night I was sitting on my couch typing away on my laptop when I heard a very loud BANG!…thump, thump, thump (overhead), crash (into the weed jungle on the west side of my house).

Now, I love my neighborhood, but there are guns aimed and fired occasionally and I have had to call 911 several times in the last few years. So it makes sense that my first thought was “go get Dakota.” My partner is kind of a tough ass when she needs to be (she’s the one on the right in the photo).

She hadn’t heard the bang thump thump crash, but she gamely went out into the weed jungle to investigate, yelling back over her shoulder that I should keep away from the windows.

She thrashed around out there for about 3 minutes before I couldn’t stand it any more and opened the window to ask her what she’d found. Incredibly, she turned to face me and held up…yes, a baked potato. Intact except for a small round chunk missing from its side. We looked at each other for a looong tiiiime.

This is one of those stories that I will get mileage out of for years. But that’s not why I’m sharing it here on my blog for social change agents who want to fulfill their calling with ease and grace.

What I found myself thinking for days after “the incident” is the fact that I live in a world where a baked potato can fall out of the sky onto my house.

I did not know that. In fact if you had asked me before-hand whether I live in such a world, I probably would have said no. But I would have been wrong.

So what are all the other things that are possible in THIS world, my little sphere specifically, that I don’t currently believe in?

And I’m noticing – there are a lot of metaphorical baked potatoes falling from the sky all the time. A crow raises a kitten. A burned-out nonprofit worker finds the courage to take care of herself and find a new leadership role. The thing that really needs to be said gets said.

What might be possible for you that you don’t believe in yet? What if it can happen anyway?

I have been getting migraines since I was about eight years old. Intense throbbing pain blooms on the inside of my right eyebrow, light and loud noise are suddenly unbearable, as are strong smells.  Sometimes the pills work but make me sleepy and woozy, sometimes they don’t.

I’ve had to cancel a lot of plans on friends, family and work colleagues, disappoint and frustrate a lot of people over the years. My partners have often felt helpless, exasperated, and convinced  there was a cure – something we could do, or that I could do, to make them go away.

I have been sure too, seeking help from pretty much every medical tradition and modality, including pills, needles, rubbing, cracking, tinctures, pressure, stinky herbs, patches, devices, talk therapy, meditation, traction and combinations of the above.

I continue to hope that I will find a solution, but I’m tired of fighting. Tired of thinking of my body as a problem to be solved, as a mysterious machine that I have not yet figured out. Tired of feeling angry, helpless, believing that I’m being invaded by some external alien force every time I feel the telltale throb in my eyebrow.

When they’re feeling truly stuck, I tell my clients that the most radical, useful thing to do might be to accept the truth of the situation. And when my brave, amazing clients are able to do this, I’ve seen them find the strength and courage to go after what they’re really meant to do and be. Incredible power is released when we tell the truth, when we can bring gentle awareness to what is actually happening, when we stop fighting.

Of course, it’s a lot easier to coach someone else to do this than to do it yourself. I tell my clients this too.

I will not be taking to my bed for the rest of my life, but I will be resting when I need to, and accepting that that I am a whole package, and that the very qualities that make me a good coach and an excellent dog-mom and partner may also give me migraines.

I’d love to hear what you’re working on accepting, and what power you suspect might be released as you gently embrace the truth.

You know those moments when something that has been rolling around in your head for months, maybe years, crystallizes and comes popping out of your mouth? Almost before you know what you’re saying? I think the technical term might be “aha moment.” (And you know, coaches love technical terms.

I had one such moment the other day, talking with my partner. What came out of my mouth was “if I could ask God one question today, it would be – how do we know when to push and when to receive? When to be disciplined and All-American go-for-it, and when do we just  let life unfold ?”

Partly I was surprised because I don’t believe in God as an entity you can interview like Barbara WaWa, glass of iced tea on the side table and mic carefully hidden under lapel. But my lovely partner reminded me that God does often answer questions if you’re looking in the right place for answers.

I know that entire ancient philosophies have been dedicated to this question. In fact, now that I think of it, the Yin Yang symbol is probably supposed to represent the balance between these two ways of being. In my own humble life, I find myself constantly wrestling with this question: should I push myself to rewrite my website now, today, or should I instead walk my dog, fold the laundry, call that friend back? What’s the right thing? And how much will my inner critic punish me later if I don’t choose “correctly?”

Later that evening I was reading Laura Fortgang’s new book Prosperity Plan, and a quote jumped out at me that, I think, was God answering in her own indirect way.

“Always leave enough time in your life to do something that makes you happy, satisfied, even joyous. That has more of an effect on economic well-being than any other single factor.” - Paul Hawken

When I’m taking Paul’s brilliant advice, there is almost always a clear answer to that big hairy question ready and waiting like a scroll from one of those old-fashioned fortune-telling machines. It comes from somewhere between my diaphragm and my collarbone, and always seems to have the just-right idea for right now. And when I listen to this voice, somehow everything gets done and everything is just fine and there was no need to worry.

I think God wants me to listen to this voice more often, and to hear it, I need to enjoy myself more often.

So, today I spent 2 hours in the garden clearing out dead stuff and noticing little green shoots and weeding. And I’m writing to you, and I had biscuits for breakfast after jumping rope at booty camp. And life is good. And my to-do list is shrinking.

Does this ring true for you? How would you answer this big question? Love to hear from you!

I wanted to send you a special audio message during this dark time of year, whether you are filled with joy and surrounded by healthy loved ones or grieving a major change or loss…or both.

2010 has been a big year for many of you. Our world is changing rapidly, and sometimes change is painful, even as it brings new vision and possibilities to light.

My wish for you as we close out this year and prepare ourselves for a new one is faith. Not the kind of faith many religious institutions demand, where you are asked to believe in what you can’t see or know first-hand.

But faith in life itself – that you as a blessed recipient of life can rest in the knowledge that you are loved and needed. NOW. Not later after you become more successful, a better partner, thinner, healthier, kinder. NOW.

Life has been unfolding for millenia without you worrying about a thing. Life doesn’t need you to worry, it needs you to have faith.

It needs you to notice that bright blue stellar jay foraging around in the un-raked leaves in your yard, the extra-yuminess of that third cookie, the sheer bliss of a kid anticipating.

I was out in my yard yesterday in an unexpected spot of sunshine. I noticed that there are already buds on some flowering trees. They have faith in spring. Trust them.

In 2011 may you find many occasions to remember, embrace and embody your true calling. Because life needs you NOW, as you are, in your full glory, uniqueness and fragility.

And thank you for the amazing and life-giving opportunity to ride shotgun with you on the Open Road!

That may sound like a personal question, intrusive even, and perhaps slightly dirty.

One cool morning last week as I walked out my front door to pick Japanese anemones for my altar, a very loud squirrel (unintentionally) offered a life lesson. Alarming and alarmed-sounding squeaks from the transformer across the street kinda’ killed my flower-buzz, but I didn’t think much of it; there’s a chestnut tree on the corner that they assault with military determination every fall.

However, as I walked back up my front steps, I saw the reason for the little guy’s freakout: he had “hidden” some of these treasured chestnuts right on top of my mailbox, which is right at the top of my front steps, which is right next to my front door. 

I laughed for a minute and felt bad for him and impressed at the same time – his brain is smaller than even one of these nuts, but his determination is much bigger. He had carried two golf-ball sized, attached prizes all the way down the tree and across the street, braving traffic and dogs, scrambled up my glider, and carefully deposited his harvest…in a very un-strategic location.

Note to self, I thought: you shouldn’t tell just anyone about your chestnuts – especially the really big ones. If you you dream of a totally different career, plan to take up sky-diving or spend a year in Tanzania, play it close to the vest for a while. Humans have an unfortunate tendency to project all of our fears and worries onto the brave souls who stick their necks out.

The fastest way to kill your new idea is to have your Aunt Hazel remind you of what a dreamer you’ve always been.

What are your biggest chestnuts right now? And have you squirreled them away somewhere safe until you’re ready to eat ‘em?

Every year in August and early September, mournful kazoo-like sounds distract me from work in my home office. Without even looking up, my heart does a little empathy flip. The sound is a baby crow trying to understand why it’s mama and papa are no longer feeding it.

Now whether you like crows or not (and they seem to be more fashionable lately, thanks in part to Crow Planet, which I adored), this scenario has got to pull at your heart strings a little.  I find myself thinking “Just give him a goddamn french fry already! Its not like you didn’t steal them from my neighbor’s dumpster anyway! Poor thing.”

But the parent crow remains coolly oblivious to the pleading, eating the entire french fry/soiled cardboard/carrion right in front of it’s progeny. You’d think crows are terrible parents, but they’re one of the most doting, family-oriented birds in the animal kingdom.

In order for the baby to have any chance of survival (and most crows die before they reach their first birthday) the parent has to let go. The baby crow doesn’t understand this, of course, and I project s/he feels abandoned and terrified. And hungry.

Puts me in mind of the many times I’ve felt the same way – lost, scared, fresh out of faith in the world. Hungry for love and comfort. When I can get quiet and pay close attention during those times, I remember that these feelings lead to a greater sense of spaciousness and peace than I’ve felt before, a clearing out and letting go that was absolutely necessary for a big leap that I didn’t know I was capable of making.

Maybe the parent crow is silently beaming through the barrage of pleading “I have faith in you – I know you can do it – go find your own food so you can come back to us!”

Is the universe sending you a message of faith that you’ve been mis-translating? Tell me all about it.