Referral Friday is part of an ongoing series inspired by John Jantsch’s Make-a-Referral Week. For more about that—and loads more referrals for everything from cobblers to coaches to gee-tar teachers, start here. Pass it on, baby!

Roughly 15 years ago, when I first moved to L.A., I read a story in the L.A. Times Travel section about a little town tucked in a magical valley about two hours from town. (Okay—90 minutes: traffic was better in 1995.)

I was looking for day trips back then—ways to escape the relentlessly suburban landscape I had yet to appreciate, without breaking the dwindling bank that was sustaining us. The article mentioned places to eat (fine) and hike (uh, no) and even spa, if you were so inclined, but what drew my attention—and ultimately me, to Ojai, again and again—was mention of a little open-air used bookseller named Bart’s Books.

I think I spent two hours and $75 I could ill afford there that day. I’ve spent many times more since, but now I’m savvy to the very drill the author mentioned in the piece: save up your books, bring to Bart’s for credit, come away with more books.

There are indoor rooms with finer books, but without question, what makes Bart’s Bart’s (and makes me want to buy it and live there one day) is the sprawling outdoor area. The books do get dusty, and in places, a bit moldy: there ain’t much precipitation here in SoCal, but we’re generally ill-prepared for what we do get.

No matter. The books are impossible to find and a delight to look for; mustiness just adds to the experience. I’ll confess to a slight dip in my interest level with a changing of owners a while back, but I have all kinds of problems with change, so let’s just say it’s me. Truth be told, there have been some nice, if subtle improvements over the past two years, chief among them how many more of my books seem to get accepted for trade-in. (Or hey, maybe I’m just reading a better class of book!)

If you’re doing a tool up or down the California coast, consider making a small detour inland to walk the magical streets of Ojai: maybe get a bite, maybe do some shopping, maybe even get yourself a little hot spa action.

But if you do turn off to Ojai, you must stop by Bart’s. All books are more enjoyable for being browsed under sunny blue skies…

xxx
c

Image by communicatrix via Flickr. You may reuse under this Creative Commons license.

Tweet This Post

Up early,
aloft,
pre-caffeinated,
I do what I must
to put myself in places
of discomfort.

Why?

Do I long
to thread my way through
throngs of strangers
in recycled air,
heart beating too fast,
nerves flaying at the mere thought
of all that proximity?

Hell, no.

What do you do,
all you happy people,
but remind me of how alone
I really am?
How cut off
in my own skin
and awkward
and remote?

I don’t feel this
at home
at my desk
by the same sunny window
with the same cup of coffee
at the same hour of each new day–

Such lengths
I go to,
trying to make time stop
and the world a little safer.

But the world,
for all my efforts,
remains dangerous
and wonderful,
horrifying
and exquisite,
a place where dreams are dashed on rocks
as easily as they are born out of thin air.

Besides, shit changes
every second,
whether you notice
or not.

So I board a plane
and walk into a new place
and thrust out my hand
and open my heart
over and over
again.

What choice do I have,
a soul alone,
split off from the source
and stuck in a tiny body
with an obnoxious brain?

You are my rocky path
and my salvation, both.

Here I come.

xxx
c

Tweet This Post

A mostly monthly but forever occasional round-up of what I’ve been up to and what I plan to be. For full credits and details, see this entry.

Colleen of the future (places I’ll be)

• South by Southwest Interactive in Austin, TX (March 11 – 16) Sometimes called “Spring Break for Nerds,” other times called “that week where you see how much you can shout over music at loud parties without losing your voice,” SxSWi has become my favorite conference of the year. I’m notoriously squirrely about pinning myself down to events, panels and any other hard commitments, finding I do better when I can roam free and meet up at random. That said, I’ll be joining the stellar lineup of Mike Monteiro’s famed Battledecks! panel (think “death by PowerPoint karaoke.” And pray for me.)
• The Astoundingly Simple Secrets to Making Social Media Work for You (March 23, online at Freelancers Union; $30 for members, and membership is free!) If you missed my talk at last year’s Creative Freelancer Conference, this is your chance to catch the new and improved version (see? good things come to those who wait). And while we’re at it, if you’re interested in attending this year’s CFC in Denver, you can get an additional $25 off the Early Bird price (ends March 12) using the code “4D”.

Colleen of the Past (stuff I did you might not know about)

• Interview at the Get Inspired! Project Thanks to the awesome and ever-generous Dyana Valentine, I was interviewed by Toni Reece for her year-long project aggregating the insights of all kinds of people into what it takes to stay inspired. We had great fun (Toni is a master interviewer!), which you can either read or listen to at the project’s website.
• storytelling at w o r d s p a c e spoken word evening My friend Brenda Varda invited me to share a story at her rebooted salon evening, so I shared the one about how we lost most of my childhood stuff when Mom couldn’t pay the storage fees. You can read about my experience here and here, or just go watch the video on YouTube.
• Dying to Be Born After being both inspired by Seth Godin’s multi-contributor ebook supporting Linchpin and disappointed to find so few feminine voices contained within, yogini, certified Martha Beck coach, and all-around terrific lady, Lianne Raymond, decided to “answer” Seth’s project with one of her own. This one is heavy on the feminine but still all about the issues Seth’s contributors (including yours truly!) discussed. My contribution is a brand new, heretofore unpublished poem. So all you Poetry Thursday freaks who haven’t already, go download that sh*t right now!

Colleen of the Present (ongoing projects)

• communicatrix | focuses My monthly newsletter devoted to the all-important subject of increasing your unique fabulosity. One article per month (with actionable tips! and minimal bullsh*t!) about becoming a better communicator, plus the best few of the many cool things I stumble across in my travels. Plus a tiny drawing by moi. Free! (archives & sign-up)
• Act Smart! is my monthly column about marketing for actors for LA Casting, but I swear, you’ll find stuff in it that’s useful, too. Browse the archives, here.
• Internet flotsam And of course, I snark it up on Twitter, chit-chat on Facebook, post the odd video or quote to Tumblr, and bookmark the good stuff I find on my travels at StumbleUpon and delicious. If you like this sort of stuff, follow me in those places—I only post a fraction of what I find to Twitter and Facebook.

xxx
c

Image by madnzany via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Tweet This Post

Many moons ago, going solely on a hunch, I stumbled upon doing the dishes as a way of setting things right.

It was a magical bit of accidental reframing for me. Dishes were an especially loathed task growing up, for all sorts of reasons having to do with feminism and feeling trapped in a life and a house not of my choosing.

Ironing, on the other hand, was a quieting, calming task I chose. Like most of my favorite soothing things, it required just enough attention to disengage my brain from whatever it was currently sweating out, and not so much that I couldn’t have Brady Bunch reruns on in the background.

Sweeping Changes: Discovering the Joy of Zen in Everyday Tasks, helps reframe all kinds of potentially irritating chores into balm for the soul (not to mention actions that get the house nice and clean.) Author Gary Thorp, a lay-ordained monk in the Shunryu Suzuki Roshi tradition, explicates the dull to-dos of maintaining one’s life and space—the scrubbing of toilets, the preparation of meals, and yes, the sweeping of surfaces—in Buddhist terms: how we care for the things around us determines how we care for ourselves and the world around us.

If we approach a dirty sink—or carpet, or even (or especially) a toilet with loving kindness and our full attention, we improve our ability to approach the more complex challenges of life the same way. And if we go one level deeper, we start getting in our bones that the Buddha lives in everything: not just the clean sink underneath, but the dirty water that fills it. We honor the space walled off arbitrarily by the exterior of our home but not at the expense of the space outside of it, because we see that everything—the floor, the dust, the mites living in the dust—are all part of one, big, interconnected system.

I loved Thorp’s friendly, light, easygoing style so much, I probably read the book too fast. If you pick up your own copy (there are new hardcover and paperback copies available starting at $5.99 and $10.90, respectively, with abundant used copies for far less), I’d keep it by the bed or other (ahem) temporary reading station to dip into here and there, for inspiration. Maybe it’s different for zen cats, but us civilian kitties can get balled up in our Buddhist underwear pretty darn quick.

If you take nothing else from it, I’d suggest taking these two things: pay more attention to your tasks, and less to how perfectly you do them.

Easier on the surfaces and what lies beneath yours…

xxx
c

• Buy hardcover version of Sweeping Changes by Gary Thorp on Amazon
• Buy paperback version of Sweeping Changes by Gary Thorp on Amazon

Image by CarbonNYC via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

UPDATE (8:51 am): In my rush to post, I neglected to mention that John E. Simpson’s comment on a previous post originally pointed me to this wonderful book. I’m horrified, not only b/c I’m such a credit-where-credit-is-due apologist, but b/c I want to maximize the chances I’ll find other great book (and other) suggestions in the comments section. My apologies, John!

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt’s excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Tweet This Post

I had big plans for this weekend, mostly because I had even bigger plans for this week: Taxes! South by Southwest! My first experience performing (hopefully) at The Moth!

I was cat-sitting for L.A. Jan while she went off for a restorative weekend in the Desert, so I figured I’d get plenty done. I had nothing scheduled except an afternoon date with my sister. I’d be far from the distractions of home, so I’d be far more able to apply nose to grindstone and work work work. Get all those posts written and scheduled for my away time. Get my newsletter ready to go. Get my Moth piece written and rehearsed, my Porchlight piece started, maybe next month’s Networker column written.

Oh—and because there’s a washer and dryer on the premises, I didn’t even have to skip Laundry Day.

By Friday evening at 6, I was wiped out. I had half-heartedly wrassled with Jan’s wifi settings and when that failed, booted up her peecee laptop and half-started three blog posts. Nothing. So I did the unthinkable: I shut down the computer, threw in a load of whites, watched cable TV for two hours, and went to bed early.

I woke up the next morning refreshed and ready to have at it—only I didn’t. I did my Nei Kung and my reading. I picked up some coffee and some flowers at TJ’s. I did another couple of loads of laundry (I know—you’d think I had small children or something) and returned a few Very Important Emails. No writing. Nothing. The well was still dry. So I climbed in my car and drove to my neighborhood to do a few errands: check the mail, pick up a framed piece at the store, use up a Groupon that was set to expire.

My sister wasn’t in much of a conquer-the-world mood, either—rain and Oscar traffic will do that to a gal. So we bailed and continued on our respective putter-y weekend ways. I went home for a bit, thinking now that maybe the familiar setting would jumpstart things. I know, I know. But it seemed reasonable enough in the moment. Instead, I tidied up a bit, closed a few more email loops, and headed out to pick up some comforting old-school “Chinese” takeout¹ for the evening. Which I spooned into myself between watching Chinatown and programming Jan’s virgin remote. One hot bath (with graphic novel!) and some Saturday Night Fever later, and I called it a night. Or a weekend, for all practical purposes.

I had two interesting conversations about the weekend once I got back home. One was with L.A. Jan, who had a similarly fraught experience on her relaxing spa getaway, a generous birthday gift from a friend. She was shocked to find out how painful it was to get a massage—how out of touch with her body, not to mention relaxing, she’d gotten. It was a wakeup call, she said; that was the true gift (because hey, it’s hard to look at having horrific bodily reactions plus pain as a gift without some serious reframing.)

The other was with my new friend, Dave Seah, with whom I’m conducting the Google Wave with Dave™ experiment. He had an away weekend, too; he also was rather dreading being away from work for so long. But his weekend turned out to be delightfully restorative, filled with lively and engaging activities, illuminating conversations with friends, good food and plenty of chill time. His tone in the Wave was more alert and excited, more clear and focused, yet also stripped of any of the despair and/or mania that sometimes possesses us when we’re wailing over what we shall do, o, what shall we do? For the first time he seemed to be approaching shipping (in the Seth Godin sense of the word, from Linchpin) from a truly relaxed and realistic perspective: keep it simple, address the fears one by one, do it anyway. Not easy, maybe, but simple and direct, which is a start.

I have “shipping” plans for actual product this year—at least two books, plus a few other possible ideas. But I have also started “shipping” on my talking goals, and here’s how: by saying “yes.”

Yes, I’ll read a story at your event (even though no, I don’t have anything written for it yet.) And thanks, Brenda.

Yes, I’ll read one at yours, too, even if it means I need to sit down and come up with an idea and an outline by the end of the day. Twice. (And thanks, Bill and Josh.)

Yes, I’ll stand up in front of a group of people at SXSW and do Death by PowerPoint Karaoke (aka “Battledecks”), even though I have no idea what I’m doing nor any way to prepare for it, either one of which thoughts is terrifying on its own but together, are positively stultifying. (And thanks, Mike.)

There will never be a right time to stop. There will never be a right time to go. There’s no rule book, here—or if there is, I haven’t seen nor heard of it. The only rules are these: terrify yourself only as much as you have to, comfort yourself only as much as you need to. Or, as Dave said at the very beginning of what turned into the Wave experiment, “Do not hurry; do not wait.”

I must give myself rest, enough to gain the energy to move forward. I must push myself forward, not give into the idea that I need endless rest.

Open and close. Rest and work. Yin and yang. The Chinese, as my white, working-class-Mass.-born instructor likes to say (only with less swearing) had this shit all figured out centuries ago.

Also? Stay on top of your laundry. Just sayin’…

xxx
c

Image by Daveybot via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

¹By the way, is it just Mister, or do all cats go berserk for hot-and-sour soup?)

Tweet This Post

I am mad for deals, especially when they converge with my guilty desire for self-indulgence and my weird attraction for making a game of whatever I can.

Groupon, a daily deal for some various local goody, neatly satisfies all three needs in one digital swoop. After signing up for your city’s deals at the main website, you receive a daily email with a deal which you can buy into for a specified window of time—24 hours, usually. The trick is that the deal gets “unlocked” (i.e., available for purchase) only after the number of people willing to commit to purchase reaches some predetermined critical mass. (Here’s more about the “why” behind it and the inspiration for it, The Point, on Groupon’s “about” page.)

Not every deal will appeal to everyone; then again, how much money and time does any one person have? It seems like I’ve got less of both with each passing day. But I’ve scored some sweet deals for taking a small risk, not only delighted with the savings, but happy to have been introduced to some terrific new resource I might not otherwise have found out about (which is pretty much the incentive for offering door-buster deals as far as the vendors go).

One word of warning: if you’re a hoarder-of-happy like I am, beware—those expiration dates creep up more quickly than you’d guess. In the last week, I’ve gotten a haircut, my car detailed, and $20 worth of expensive takeout. Thank the heavens the relaxation types at the place I still have a massage coming to me get that some of us are foot-draggers (especially when the feet in question have a plantar wart we’d just as soon eliminate before humiliating ourselves in front of a total stranger…)

xxx
c

• Sign up for Groupon via this link and when you buy into your first Groupon, I get points in my account towards more Groupons OR
• Sign up for Groupon via this link and remain blissfully shill-free—I’m good, either way!

Available Groupon cities as of this writing:

• Albuquerque
• Atlanta
• Austin
• Baltimore
• Boston
• Charlotte
• Chicago
• Cincinnati
• Cleveland
• Columbus
• Dallas
• Denver
• Detroit
• East Bay
• Fort Worth
• Fresno
• Houston
• Indianapolis
• Jacksonville
• Kansas City
• Las Vegas
• London
• Los Angeles
• Louisville
• Memphis
• Miami
• Milwaukee
• Minneapolis / St Paul
• Nashville
• New Orleans
• New York
• Oklahoma City
• Omaha
• Philadelphia
• Phoenix
• Pittsburgh
• Portland
• Raleigh / Durham
• Sacramento
• San Antonio
• San Diego
• San Francisco
• San Jose
• Seattle
• Sioux Falls
• St Louis
• Tacoma
• Tampa
• Toronto
• Vancouver
• Virginia Beach / Norfolk
• Washington DC

(All of those city links? Also SHILL-FREE.)

Image by Joe Shlabotnik via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license. Especially good story and comments thread on this one, too.

Tweet This Post

I have never won
one of those coveted
golden bodies
I envisioned myself holding
back in my girlish days.

But I know this lady
who has held several.

And as far
as I know,
she does not sit down
and polish them
afterward,
but gets up
and gets up
and gets up
and does the next thing
after the thing
that came before it.

For most,
the first thing
is to want a thing.

The next,
to allow yourself
to want it,
followed by
taking actual steps
toward living it.

And after that—
way, way after that,
most likely—
you discover that there is no “there”,
just the way
that you are going.

I know

I will hold the want
I have in my heart
as I walk
toward the vision
my heart is holding.

But mostly
I will walk
and I will walk
and I will walk,
stopping
only briefly
to say “hello”
and wish my fellow travelers
safe journey
on the way.

xxx
c

Image by miss karen via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Tweet This Post

This is the second installment of a two-part post about a recent writerly performance (or perform-y writingness). You can read the first installment here.

At some point in your travels, when you’ve traveled long enough, you’re able to recognize what maybe you couldn’t in the moment as turning points.

That night in the Westwood movie house some 25 years ago, eating contraband falafel, watching some movie I’ve long since forgotten—that was one of those events. That morning on a Santa Monica stage was another. Certainly, the afternoon in a West Hollywood hospital bed was another, and one that actually announced itself as such at the time.

It will be time’s call whether my experience last Thursday evening proves a turning point or not. In the moment, though—or here and there during the series of moments that made up last Thursday evening—I noted a number of things that were for me, as I hinted earlier, extraordinary.

Me, talking to people

I don’t know when I crossed over from faking it till I made it to actually making it, but somewhere, somehow over the past four or five years, my introverted self hit critical mass with playing extrovert.

If I was a betting woman, I’d put money on my two-year stint with Toastmasters; then again, something in me wanted to speak more than something else feared walking into a roomful of strangers, so there were probably a number of factors operating to get me over the hump and into a once-weekly meetup with a never-ending stream of new people: years of having to sell overpriced commercial productions to underwhelmed business school graduates with nothing more than charm, pantomime and a few key frames of marker art had to have helped. Moving from a class of 40 girls I’d known since I was six years old to a brand new public high school—with boys, and during the ugliest years of my life—that probably helped build up some callouses, too.

And then there were three years of hard-core business networking as I worked furiously to build up my tiny design and consulting brand. I didn’t turn out to be much of a designer (the jury’s still out on the consulting), but boyoboyoboy, did I log some hours walking up to complete strangers and saying “Hi!”

I am still exhausted after too much time with groups of people, and still require borderline-antisocial amounts of private time, period, but not only can I get out and about by myself, I actually do enjoy it, once the fear has passed.

Me, telling a plain, old story-story

You will laugh (I hope), but I never thought much of myself as a writer. I wanted to be good enough to think of myself as a writer; I hoped that if I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote (and wrote and—well, you get the idea), I’d eventually become good enough at it to win the jobs that would allow me to say, out loud, “I’m a writer” when the inevitable question arose as to my vocation. Now I’m starting to see that in the same way as it goes for actors, the first step is tilling and fertilizing adequate headspace so that one can self-identify as such, after which work—and several dozen-to-hundreds of cycles of submission/rejection—the pro stuff just falls into place eventually.

Again, you will laugh (I hope), but I had ideas of stories in my head that I couldn’t get out. Probably because I thought of them as “pieces” and separate from me. Anytime I wrote something, even as I wrote it, I’d compare it to that ideal (unwritten, of course) in my head, and of course, I found it wanting, and of course, I either stopped dead or somehow sabotaged myself.

The exceptions were humdrum things like letters, journal entries, proposals, evaluations. You know—non-arty writing. And doing vast quantities of non-arty writing is probably what helped me log enough hours to see some results. At a certain point if you do anything enough times with enough focused attention, you get better at it; it’s almost impossible not to. I didn’t get good enough at short stories or poetry or plays because I never worked through the horrible stage, but between all the pedestrian writing I did as a civilian and the insane quantities of time I spent on the blerg, here, I became good enough to tell a story with a beginning, middle and end.

Oh—and once you give up the idea that you will ever be an artiste or that a soapbox is a reasonable place from which to deliver your two cents and just roll with being a Smurf, it gets a lot easier to tell stories that work.

Me, asking for stuff

I’m really at the beginning of this asking-for-stuff trajectory. My modus operandi up until now has been to drop more and increasingly larger hints, working ever harder to be content with even less as I simultaneously hope for a miracle. For me, even acknowledging there’s such a thing as an ask and that it can not only save time and sanity but actual relationships is a huge gain.

And really, I will probably always prefer being asked to having to ask. I accept that it’s my wiring, like “introvert” and/or my years of training as an ACoA rearing one or the other (or both) of their wearisome heads.

But when my new friend Bill and his wife started talking about the Moth, I drew them out, asking questions and advice, accepting such help and guidance as was offered. While I will not be the one battering down the gates anytime soon, I am becoming bold enough to raise my hand to request a day pass.

xxx
c

Image by michale via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Tweet This Post

For someone who never actually read The Four Agreements, I have thought an awful lot about it in the three years since I didn’t actually read it.

Generally, I thought about how great it would be if there really was some very simple and straightforward “Practical Guide to Personal Freedom,” as the subtitle promises—a four-part pact one could make with oneself that provided a clear-cut path of guided self-instruction.

Specifically, I kept turning over Agreement #1—”Be Impeccable with Your Word”—in my head, wondering if its stickiness meant that for me, that particular agreement was the key. In the three years since I’ve been paying attention to my habits, I’ve noticed that my mouth gets me in more trouble than any other part of me after my brain: I’m forever over-promising and under-delivering, when every smart business guide out there advises doing exactly the opposite. So when a copy jumped out at my on the “Most Requested” shelf at my beloved Bart’s Books on a recent trip to my equally-beloved Ojai, I figured I’d pick it up and use it in tandem with my friend Jason Womack’s new book, The Promise Doctrine, and once and for all, I’d whup this over-promising thing.

Imagine my surprise when I found that for three years, I’ve had the wrong takeaway rattling around in my poor, overloaded brain. Memory is faulty, but it’s faulty in reliably illuminating ways: what I’d conveniently forgotten was that being impeccable with one’s word meant not using it in vain, against yourself or anyone else. Negative self-talk? The root of most problems, since the Toltecs (the tradition author don Miguel Ruiz hails from) believe that you need to get right with yourself before you can truly get right with the rest of the world. Being impeccable—literally, not doing harm with one’s word means not using it as a destructive force in any way, but instead using it to tell the truth, to express love (which, in a bit of sneaky-pete dovetailing, turns out to BE the Truth) and build good things, like bridges of communication.

And there’s a special circle of hell reserved for those who use their words to gossip. Bonus-extra? You’re living in it. No, really—you’re making a hell on Earth when you participate in word slime, either by spreading it or letting it land. Very practical, those Toltecs—to hell with the Hell of certain religions who shall go unnamed: let’s get this man-made hell sorted first, anyway.

The other three agreements—not to take things personally, not to make assumptions, and always to do one’s best—fall naturally from the first. While any one of them could certainly stand alone, it seems like they work especially well as buttresses for that primary agreement. Not taking things personally, in this context, is the inverse of being impeccable with one’s word: if you adhere to it, it stands to reason you’d have some protection against other people not being impeccable with their word. Not making assumptions works the same way (as if Felix Unger’s stunning bit of definitive logic wasn’t enough to convince you). And always endeavoring to do one’s best is not just supportive of the first agreement, it’s Do-Bee 101.

One warning for those interested in a four-simple-steps approach: if I haven’t made it obvious, simple doesn’t mean easy, especially here. I’ve screwed up enough times at both really simple and really easy stuff to know. It’s not even easy to get through: at 138 pages, The Four Agreements is a short book but not an especially breezy read.

Or perhaps I should say that for some of us who could really use the information contained within, extraction will be easier if we take it slowly…

xxx
c

• Buy The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom, A Toltec Wisdom Book on Amazon
• Read don Miguel Ruiz entry on Wikipedia (the personal site is down as of this writing)
• Read descriptions of the four agreements on Wikiquote

Image by midiman via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.

Yo! Disclosure! Links to the books in the post above are Amazon affiliate links. This means if you click on them and buy something, I receive an affiliate commission. Which I hope you do: it helps keep me in books to review. More on this disclosure stuff at publisher Michael Hyatt’s excellent blog, from whence I lifted (and smooshed around a little) this boilerplate text.

Tweet This Post

I had an extraordinary experience last Thursday night, and enough time to process it since that I feel like it warrants some dissection here on the digital word slab (which may be my new pet name for communicatrix-dot-com) this morning.

The backstory of the event

A few weeks ago, via Facebook, my friend Brenda Varda invited me to read something at the 2.0, spoken-word gathering  of her project for writers and writing, w o r d s p a c e. (And yes, it’s spelled out with the spaces—get it? Word space.)

The invitation asked for my best “extreme” 5 – 10 minutes of current material; there would be snacks and drinks, the public would be invited, and the list of other invitees was made public, so we could get a handle on the shape “extreme” might take, or at least what the rest of the lineup might be like. She later followed up with a request for a short bio and our putting the word (no pun intended) out to our own networks. Specifically, we were asked to bring one to three people: she wanted a full house, but Son of Semele’s space (okay, this time I’m punning a little bit on purpose), the venue, was on the small side.

We were given the theme of “breaking the wordspace” to either write around or choose our material from; we were told that accompanying music was a possibility (among other things I am envious of her for, like her amazing hair and killer mid-Century modern house in the hills of Silver Lake, Brenda is an accomplished composer and musician).

Where I was coming from

One of my goals this year is “Do three Ignite-type presentations.” That’s my shorthand for:

1. Planned (thought out, plotted carefully, well-rehearsed)
2. Important (to me, personally, and in the scheme of things)
3. Fun (because life is too fucking short)

Last fall’s experience presenting at Ignite: Portland was huge for me. Not just because I presented to the biggest honkin’ crowd I had yet—600 fine and enthusiastic people, bless every last loudly appreciative one of ‘em—but because for the first time since I started thinking about speaking as a means of sharing information, I was talking about something I deeply cared about. Don’t get me wrong: I’m happy to share what I know about branding and marketing, and grateful for the opportunities it gives me to practice skills while relaying information that’s useful to people. To say it’s where my heart lies, though, would itself be a lie.

So I’ve been casting about for ways of moving closer toward my goal of being, essentially, a motivational speaker, if not an outright preacher without a church. There: I’ve said it. I’ve pantsed myself. It’s out, it’s done, I’m exposed, we can move on.

Okay—perhaps a little more on that stink-bomb I just dropped…

The formula for my future

If you’ve hung around at all, you know that I’m a big one for condensed shorthands—not as a means of skipping steps, but as a way of staying focused. I have problems with focus—or perhaps, I have a central challenge of remaining focused when I’ve been blessed with a interests like water contained in a brain like mesh. So I come up with formulas to help me stay on track: The Formula for articulating your brand in terms of your end user; the formula for Right Use of social media (which, as I always point out when deliver it in a talk, also works beautifully for marketing and life in general).

I still can’t articulate what it is that I want to be when I grow up clearly and succinctly in childlike terms, but if I can’t have the laser-like focus that “ballerina,” “fireman,” or even “C-Suite creative executive in a new media company” might give me, I can come closer with a direction and a formula:

• Direction: I want to write and talk.
• Formula: 70 – 90% writing, 30 – 10% talking.

Note that the direction doesn’t specify the type of writing, and that I’ve used “talk” rather than “speak.” That’s intentional: I’m thinking of “talking” as incorporating more than just speaking, which (to me) means a stage, possibly a mic, and definitely a crowd. “Talking” may mean audio and video performance of some kind; it may even mean teaching of some kind, although it would have to be a very special set of circumstances for me to go that route, since (good) teaching requires a level of interaction that would send me and my poor little introverted self running for the hills where our cave of privacy is dug into.

What happened in and around w o r d s p a c e

The above provides both the context for my decision to participate and a jumping-off place for the nutty amount of sturm und drang, synapse-firing, syntheses and lessons that came out of the experience.

But in the grand tradition of jumping-off places, I’m going to hold the rest of it until later. Because the scale of my goals in certain areas this year requires that I learn to exercise some restraint in others. Tune in Wednesday for Part 2, and in the meantime, enjoy the clip, above…

xxx
c

• Sign up for the w o r d s p a c e mailing list
• Join the w o r d s p a c e fan page on Facebook
• Connect with me on Facebook to be alerted to future Colleen talkings

Video shot by my good friend, former client and fellow Cornell alum, Larry Greenfield. Sorry for the overexposure; one of these days, I’ll learn to find my light.

Tweet This Post