More on Writing

Excellent Fiction Curriculum

I've actually come across the National Novel Writers Month  ("NaNoWriMo") and decided to participate both this summer, if possible ("Camp NaNo") and in November when the "official" NaNoWriMo kicks off.  For adults, the goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.  You are allowed to do pre-writing tasks before the event, in fact it's encouraged (and helps you write a quicker, much more cohesive project).  There are no prizes, although winners might get special offers from sponsors.

They have NaNoWriMo YWP (young writer's program) where you (the instructor or parent) helps a child set a word-count goal that's within reason but still a stretch for them, and they can also set off and write along side you (if you participate).

I live in a Pig Palace

I don't remember how young I was.  Much too young, I'm sure.  I was probably caught between the trap of being a preschooler, an only child, having a "pack rat" father and a tidy mother, and never having been taught how to declutter and purge.

Inevitably I got to an age, probably 5 or 6 at most, where I was expected to have developed cleaning habits and skills in the face of a daunting amount of STUFF in a room much too large for someone my age to be fully in charge of.

The Myth of "Socialization"

How much "socialization" does a child get in school? How much does a homeschooled child "miss out" on this so-called socialization.

First, the term "socialization" makes it sound like something deliberate, like animal husbandry. You pair kids in the corral for purposes of "socializing them." Anyone who has been to a school knows this is simply not the case; the schools group children together based on their classes, which are usually based on their abilities and at the starting level children are grouped simply based on their chronological age. If we were to purposefully socialize our children, wouldn't we pair or group them based on common interests?

William Glasser & Quality Schools

I can't wait for my books that should be arriving on Quality Schools. I already have several of William Glasser's books: Choice Theory, Counseling with Choice Theory and The Language of Choice Theory. The Quality School is going to be arriving on my doorstep shortly. Aside from how you treat your student (in my case homeschooler) in terms of verbal contact, there's a basic difference in how children's learning and work is treated that returns dignity, respect, and a higher level of useful expectations to the children.

Basically, children work at their exercises until their work is an A or B level. Barely-passing work is no longer accepted.

I'd Like to Lose this Baggage at the Airport

When I was deep in the trenches of working on my PTSD* I really felt I was dragging around a ton of extra baggage everywhere I went. I've always had a sense of humor that matched my pragmatism, so I'd occasionally quip about it. Now when I work with people who have PTSD I'll walk them through a visualization exercise of losing their baggage at the airport. It's fun, it's funny. It's vivid. It helps.

Dealing with Loss

It's a shame -- this is such an important show. I can't really justify the ~$480 it would take to upgrade to BlogTalkRadio's (BTR) pro level. So they only allow 3 shows a month on their free account level. I've been holding Let's Heal the World Together calls for almost a year now (August 17th 2009), but since it's not a money-making venture, and there's not a huge following yet, and since this is such a new venue for me, I'm just not ready to fund that type of commitment yet.

Differently-Abled

On the show this week I want to address "Equal Ability" from the point of view of those of us who are differently-abled from others. I am a "disability" advocate. I don't even like the word "disability".

Independence vs. Interdependence

Independence is great! It's tempered with the fact that to have the lives we lead we are also interdependent. Some people are entirely self-sufficient, breeding their own sheep, creating thread and yarn, weaving cloth, making clothes, planting crops, etc. Most of us, especially those of us Internet enabled, do not lead entirely self-sufficient lives. We need others for reasons of money, resources, companionship, and more.

Responsibility

Dr. Viktor Frankl, father of Logotherapy (a specific school of psychology), said the Statue of Liberty should be balanced by the Statue of Responsibility.

Importance of Language

I've changed my website branding, the subtitle of my upcoming book (now Healer in the Hotseat: Rekindling energy for your burning desires), my seminar & workshop titles to talk about "energy management" rather than "burnout". I realized that people aren't able to "get it" when I'm talking about "burnout". Whether out of self-defense, denial, or misunderstanding the language, they don't relate to the term burnout. The people who needed the workshop haven't changed. Their problems haven't changed. In fact, my workshops haven't changed. I'm just changing the package the workshop is wrapped in so that people have a better chance of "getting it". It should have been obvious to me: I had no idea that I was on the road to burnout until I was reading the literature. That's not what I would have called it. I have people coming to my workshop on Friday (now called 9 Keys to Energy Management) because they have been listening to me and realize they're on that road. It's like I'm the pied piper or something. But just like the pied piper, there's a danger of falling off the cliff when calling it "burnout" too. It sounds too absolute, too final, too pessimistic, although I transform not only the symptoms of burnout but the term burnout itself into a positive in my workshops. Before my workshop in that space where people acknowledge that they need my classes, I don't want them to depress themselves or feel fear of what they're going through. Exhaustion and overwhelm are enough, I'm not trying to cause people to prematurely hit rock bottom. Changing the title means I don't have to work against days or weeks of suffering with the notion that one is at the end of their proverbial rope. My SURRENDER™ system isn't just about burnout; it's about managing your energy. Every day we transact energy with the universe. Those of us in most balance may be sourcing some of our energy outside ourselves. Others are trying to get water from sand in a desert and are too depleted to go on much longer. So on this note, for a limited time you can sign up on my mailing list and get "Transforming Burnout into a Burning Desire" -- the recording of a conference call on October 6th that includes some exercises from my book. Last night I had a teleseminar titled "Introduction to Energy Management" which is a 1 hour version without exercises. Once it's ready I'll be swapping the Introduction to Energy Management audio in the place of the burnout audio.

Thinking Bigger: Worldwide Calls

With no small thanks to Michael Port (creator of the Book Yourself Solid 15 week course I'm currently enrolled in, author of The Think Big Manifesto that I'm currently reading -- and the leader of the revolution via the website http://thinkbigrevolution.com ), a nodding acknowledgement to Peter Gabriel (Big Time), I am thinking bigger and bigger. Many of you know that I've been a holistic healer for many years, and that's one reason I've always extended a discount for my services to holistic professionals. You may not have known that I have been an ordained Interfaith minister for over 10 years, although if you've been reading this blog you should be aware of that as well. I've decided that I am going to practice (and preach) what I preach more often: unconditional love, non-discriminatory healing of anyone and anything, raising the bar on planetary awareness. This is part of my personal Think Big Revolution. Now it's on your doorstep. "Whatcha gonna do 'bout it?" Sorry, you can move the girrl outta Brooklyn butcha can't take da Brooklyn outta da girrl. Here's what you can do about it: Get on the calls! Not interested? Get someone else on the calls! You know the type -- they think they can help people, heal people, save people. Maybe they're even doing their part already. Invite them to this call. My ultimate goal is to make sure the healers are taking care of themselves. How better to do that than to have them share with each other about how they work, what they're up to, getting help with the work, sharing the burden. In my self-examination in Michael's Book Yourself Solid course, I realized WHY I want to work with holistic healers. My answer to why: "I can't heal the world alone!" Well, duh, of course not. But maybe all the other healers are thinking the same thing! So get them on the call -- because if we can't heal the world alone, we can heal the world together! Hence the "Let's Heal the World Together!" Collaboration Calls are born! Let's Heal the World Together - free collaborative calls* Motivation - Connections - Group Healings Mondays: August 17, August 24, August 31 Time: 5pm EST, 2pm PST Get together on a conference call with healers from around the world to talk about how we can raise awareness of healing modalities and collaborate together to perform group healings to help people all over the world. Everyone is welcome - this is free, you don't need to be a holistic practitioner or healer to participate on the calls. All modalities of healing welcome. Please invite other healers to the call! if the calls are successful, they will become a regular offering! Register for the call here. *This is not a toll-free call. You must cover the expense of connecting to the call. The call is in the USA area code 530. For now only the first 50 people can be on the call, but we'll have the ability to have break outs into smaller groups to have intimate discussions. If you're too busy to join the calls, I'm going to try to record them and offer recordings to my mailing list for free after-the-fact, so be sure to sign up on the mailing list!

Follow Your Burning Desire - without burning out

I've been working on a proper marketing plan for Liberated Life Coaching and following a path that seemed to resonate with me, and I ended up in the category of burnout in the holistic practitioner market.

It was an interesting cubby, I thought, as a life and business coach, to help practitioners identify and manage burnout. There's a reason these things happen. Call it Law of Attraction, synchronicity, kismet, coincidence, what have you: I'm pondering dozens of articles about burnout, printing them, making mindmaps of a variety of concepts on my whiteboard, digesting all this information.

When I got to the second article, or was it the third, I stopped in my tracks. That veil of ignorance or is it denial suddenly fell down and I was looking at a profile of myself on paper. Signs & symptoms of burning out vary from person to person, but enough of them fit my former incarnation as a web designer that I realized that I was at minimum at very high risk if I had not already succumbed.

I won't go into all the symptoms here and now, the list is tremendous, but I checked in with my life coach, Sheila Pearl about it.

So our meeting this week was an overview exploration of my burning out, whether complete or in-progress, and what I needed to do to start getting un-burnt.

Causation or correlation, no matter, when you burn out you are no longer living your dreams, no longer taking care of yourself, not maintaining a steady energy and beneficial stress (eustress) level, and you are succumbing to exhaustion, lack of motivation, distractions, and sometimes a sense of fight (gripe) or flight (change careers, change cubicles, something).

I have an extreme problem in how I frame my "to do" list. It's my "Do I have to?" list. It's full of should's, have to's, musts, someone will get upset with me unless...but on the other hand the entire list, top to bottom, are things that I decided, wittingly or not, to accept onto my plate. How something I've said "yes" to (even if only by not saying "no" to it) suddenly transforms into this heavy weight of obligation is beyond me, but it does.

I recognize that I did the same at my last employer too. At every weekly meeting, I was given a few more things "to do" aside from requests that came in from staff during the week. I ended up with a "Do I have to?" list of over 100 items, frozen in my tracks unable to define an action plan or prioritize the list, and I was fired.

That's ok, I usually would burn out and leave a position in about 3 years -- long before they wanted to get rid of me. I've only been fired twice out of a dozen jobs, and I take being fired as a great learning experience. It's only taken 3 years to learn this particular part of the lesson, and I've never said they were wrong to fire me.

Well, I have to fire my "Do I have to?" list. It's now becoming a "Want to" list. This is a challenge for me, having been blackmailed out of being comfortable with saying I want something in childhood. 

The fear says that "When I want something, someone is going to use it against me." So if there's something on my "Do I have to?" list that can't be reframed as "I want to..." then I'm going to have to -- oh, there I go again -- then I want to get rid of the sense of obligation. I want to find the person who handed it to me (yay monkeys! Which book has the monkeys again?) and give it back.

I may be doing a lot of apologizing, but at least I'll be able to sleep.

Oh, I see 2 paragraphs above, I did it there too: I WANT TO fire my "Do I have to?" list. **Phew** This is tough work.

Sheila asked me to spend time this week exploring why I'm reluctant to label things as "wants" rather than "shoulds" or "musts".

For example, I caught myself this afternoon saying "I should check if there's a UPS number for my book order" and corrected myself to "I want to check if there's a tracking number" because there isn't even a client involved.  Checking for a number won't change when it gets here. It's not an obligation, and it's absolutely unreasonable to call it a "should." It's an unnecessary burden -- framing my desires as obligations is hurting my ability to finish even my personal projects.

As I work on my own burnout, I'm also taking note of the process I'm going through. I will be helping others with this process in the very near future.

Update: I ended up having a complete epiphany and writing a whole book on burnout recovery:  SURRENDER™ to Passion: Worried to wonderful in 28 days by Rev. Criss Ittermann.  Check it out on Amazon.com & Kindle.