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Cross pollinating my recognized expertise
Then & Now When I started as Executive Director of The Arts Partnership in 2010, I was pretty much an absolute nobody. I didn’t come from a family name that mattered in my community, I hadn’t done anything that identified me as a powerhouse and I wasn’t married to someone whose name, title or reputation held any particular significance. In short, I had to build my credibility from the ground up. So I did. I made one phone call after the other, read one leadership book on top of another, drank one seemingly never-ending cup of coffee (eventually moving entirely to tea), introduced myself to one person and the next…
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Short & Sweet, aka Keep Going, Dayna!
My next retreat is February 19-21, and there are spaces available. I hope you'll sign up. But if you don't, I'm still going to do the work because I care, it's generous, helpful and absolutely worth the journey--mine and yours. But I can't control your journey, only mine. So I'm here.
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A potential shooter, curtains and my early morning habits disrupted
But as I reread the emergency alert, I wish for one half of one second that we had curtains. And I hesitate to even write that because Dr Marry will use that sentence against me for the rest of our lives together. But it's true.
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Lead from the Outside, ruffled feathers and the attempted sound of silence
This assignment asks us to be vulnerable, honest, brave and willing to both praise and censure ourselves as well as accept praise and censure from others. What could happen in your life if you got honest with yourself and if others were willing to go to a place of loving honesty to really give you the opportunity to reflect and grow as a person? Could you take it? Would you hear it and ponder it, or would you ruffle your feathers and defend your actions?
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Disrupt your personal systems to name and articulate your highest calling
You have dreams you want desperately to pursue. You’re also being pulled in a million different directions, and your plate is likely already full to overflowing. How in the world will you ever figure out how to make those dreams a reality much less take the first step? Through a Personal Systems Disruption retreat! Thank you for providing the platform and the tools for me to disrupt my personal systems, tools to help me define my ‘next,’ for introductions to some amazingly talented, creative, fun, loving people and for affirmations of who I’ve been, who I am, and who I can become. It was a wonderful journey that was…
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25 trips around the sun with my boy
Even in that moment, holding this tiniest, most perfect of little persons, my mom didn't say yes or no. It wasn't that all these people didn't have opinions, but every single one of them knew I was going to have to do this largely by myself; that answer had to come only from me. I looked down on little Quinn John, and I decided to be his mom.
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Really Facebook? THIS is what you’re choosing to focus on today?
*Watch Gratitude Tuesday: grateful free write ep 132 here. For the first time in 132 episodes, Daily Dose apparently isn’t available on Facebook because I started playing “Linus and Lucy” from Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas, and the powers that be determined that it was a violation of copyright. I’m not saying it’s not a violation of copyright, although we aren’t making money off of it, and we recognized the composer and the album. As a side note, it seems to me that Facebook has larger fish to fry than our little Daily Dose and playing a song that is practically a piece of the public realm. So I’m…
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A crisis of conscience
But this post was on my personal page. And this moment was something I never expected to live through. Going forward, Dolley Madison saving the portrait of George Washington won't be the last time there was a literal attack on our most sacred institutions. The history books now will say that the Capital was breached in the early days of 2021. And I can't pretend that that wasn't instigated and fueled by the man who resides at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
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Getting over my own self…again
An important note of digression: the Universe's favorite thing to do to and with me is to wait for me to say the word N-E-V-E-R. "I'll never get married." "I'll never have a full-time job." "I'll never teach." "I'll never..."
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Looking ahead to 2021
So my word for this year is clarity. Specifically, clarity of time and purpose. And of sentence structure. I write like I think, which is in long, connected ideas that link idea to idea to idea. It gives my writing a very specific voice that clearly identifies me as the author. But it also demands a lot of the reader, perhaps too much.
