I was in another one of those weird funks I get in when I don’t have a book I find engaging. We went to the library, and I was scanning the new nonfiction books, looking for the covers that would grab me. This is the way I find nearly all the books I read, unless someone else recommends something specific. I am a great believer in judging literal books by their covers. I wasn’t having much luck, so I asked the Universe to guide me to whatever book I needed most to read this week, and I kept wandering, searching for something to draw me in. Then one word, “Illogical”…
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I messed up, so I’m making changes
But I don't care, and I'm not embarrassed. I don't feel like a failure. I feel like someone who's laying down the tracks as I'm traveling on them. I'll make missteps, try things that flop and go in directions that don't work. But as long as I trust my instincts, I know I'll be ok. I'll pick myself up, try something different and keep on choo chooing down the track.
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Rainbows and ladders
The set up I had breakfast with a friend recently; she asked me how my new life was going, a question I’m getting a lot these days and one that’s forcing (allowing?) me to have hard conversations with myself because the answer isn’t what I want it to be…yet I paused to determine how honest I would be. I went for real and said, “Oh, it’s a complete bust.” She looked a bit askance, so I went on, “I naively thought that when I finally announced I was leaving my stable job to venture out, the Universe would send a rainbow through my office window and a unicorn would gracefully…
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Resistance, messy journeys and mountaintops
After that conversation, I listened to a podcast with Oprah Winfrey and Steven Pressfield about his book, The War of Art. I've read the book multiple times and always find it valuable, but this conversation hit me differently. My internal force, aka Resistance, is rearing its ugly head because I've had the audacity to dare greatly. I've told the world I've left my comfort zone and have entered into the great unknown Resistance is working its hardest to stop me from taking the next step, from looking at the proverbial pie and saying, "I want a bigger piece of that." In the book, Pressfield says, "The more important a call…
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What if you don’t have a Spark?
Looking at it from this different lens, it's easy to see how anyone could read that and assume I'm only interested in working with people who have grand, audacious dreams: professional athlete, rock star, astronaut, tech scion… In the course of thinking about and working through this with a number of trusted people in my life this week, I came to realize I've only been thinking about this work from a shallow, surface-level place because it never dawned on me that anyone would believe they didn't have a spark.
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Something to puzzle over
Dr Marry and I did what so many of us do: we make a big declaration about something...anything in our lives. And we make a great big splash about it.
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So much already planned for 2023
Happy new year! I hope your 2023 is off and running. I’m using this post as an opportunity to share three offers I have created for the new year. Some of this can get confusing if you don’t live in my brain (be so happy about that, btw!), so I’ll try to explain as carefully as I can what each offer entails. I hope you’ll be as excited by one or more of them as I am. A FREE, virtual, 3-day (re)Discover Your Spark experience Tuesday, January 17—Thursday, January 19 over zoom from 11:45-12:45 CDT. In September, I held my first-ever, free opportunity for people to get a taste of…
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Facebook memories inspired my word for 2023!
It's amazing to realize that on this day, five years ago, I would have hesitated to say why the year had been difficult and heartbreaking. I would have stumbled over the truth behind what made it joyful, surprising and blessed because I wasn't yet, we weren't yet, ready to openly share our story. Perhaps we didn't yet trust that this new phase would last, given how relatively effortlessly the shift from utter despair to absolute joy had arrived at our doorstep. I also know that shame was still part of our lives. It might have downgraded to a baby elephant, but given that they weigh 200+ pounds at birth, that's…
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Out with one decade and in with the new
December 28, 2022 early am I’m up in the early, pitch dark silence of York, England, sitting in the living room of the beautiful AirBnB I rented nearly a year ago for just this occasion, the final day of my 5th decade. A number of people I love are asleep in this house with me: the incomparable Dr Marry, my spectacular mother, her partner Bob, my beloved Quinn and his girl Leona. All, and my brother Wes for part of it, have made the trek across the pond to celebrate this milestone birthday with me—something I have been planning since Dr Marry and I celebrated my 46th birthday in Yorkshire…
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Christmas memories from the “days of yore”
I immediately pulled out the cassette tapes of these albums my dad made for me in the 1980s. Incredibly, we still have a working tape player, and perhaps even more incredibly, the tapes are playing just fine. I've had them on pretty constant play ever since. Although I had forgotten that you have to physically turn cassette tapes over, which is kind of irritating compared to our modern streaming services, where all we have to do is tolerate a few ads or pay a monthly fee.
