‘Tis the season of contradictions. (And the gift of discernment)

You’re feeling the darkness we’re moving into, aren’t you? In spite of the holiday lights, the festive cheer, there is a weighty, contracted, even sombre energy.

Me too.

In the northern hemisphere, the light is growing dimmer and dimmer until we reach the longest night of the winter solstice. And then the sun begins its return.

But that’s just part of the story. A metaphor for the contradictions I'm feeling all around me.

We’re approaching the 10-year anniversary of my mother’s passing at the end of this month. Baking her signature Christmas cookies and singing her favourite hymns yields that paradoxical experience of feeling both her presence and her absence in the same skipped heartbeat.

In the meantime, I’m bearing witness to that painfully liminal space my daughter’s swimming in. Neither a young and innocent little girl, nor a street-wise teen. Yearning for toys under the tree and sensing that she’s “not supposed to” want what she wants.

It’s a time of well-wishing and worry. Of magic and melancholy. Of celebration and sorrow. Of grace and greed. Of hope and hopelessness. Of compassion and commercialization.

(And you know I’m not just talking about the holidays here, Loves. I’m talking about the news from around the world.)

For a light-seeking reveler like myself, it’s easy for me to turn towards the light. In fact, I can reframe dark to light so fast it would make your head spin. I know it has that effect on me.

But this year, it’s different. I’m being called to honour the need I’ve ignored for years. Instead of craning my neck towards the light, I’m going to allow myself to really be in it. To feel it. To not transmute it.

It’s scary and stifling…and somehow a complete relief. Awakening consciousness is like that.

And so, this year:

I’m not going to pour sparkles over the shadows. I’m going allow the dark to be dark and the light to be light. I’m going to allow the sadness to be sadness and the joy to be joy. I’m going to eat the cookies and sing the hymns and cry and stomp when I am called to do so. I’m going to grieve what needs to be grieved and celebrate what wants to be celebrated. I’m going to look back, and I’m going to look forward. And I’m going to look right here, AT the mystery of the present, IN the mystery of the present.

In the quiet respite of the dark, I’ll be able to see. 

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 Check out my free training on the 5 Shifts Our Clients Use to Overcome the Imposter Complex and Grow their Income and their Impact

Where I pull back the curtain on five shifts to start raising voices, rates, and hands all while being the kind, congruent, and authentic leader I know you to be.

From Amy Palko's Revolutionary Lips to Ours: A discussion with Ronna Detrick

I just finished devouring Amy Palko’s soulgift From Revolutionary Lips for the fifth time. And I will do so again and again. In her foreword, Amy says: “early readers reported back again and again this sense of being taken on a journey. And not just any journey. But one that would take them deep into their own lived experience of their body, their desire, their voice, their frustration, their loss, their wounds, their sexuality, their place, their heart, their shame, and their truth.”

I was one such early reader. But I think I was wrong. I think in this revolution, Amy’s creating an exodus, really. It may be MY journey. But it will be OUR exodus.

Dancing with Amy's words, I see it laid out like this:

The collection, the journey, the exodus, the revolution starts with a sigh. An awakening, really. A scan, an inventory of what’s here. Really here. Soft belly, stretch marks. This mysterious land with no map. To learn, by us, for us, from the inside. Oh, it’s THIS leg of the journey that we avoid. And many of us stop here. Stay here. Wishing there was a map. Sipping tea and shrugging shoulders with resignation. But when the tea’s gone cold and the prospect of not moving forward becomes unbearable, we rise from our chairs. And we walk to the edges of oblivion. To the depths beckoning to be explored. The wounds of broken spaces, Scabby places. We will smell the rotting of pain and taste the metallic blood of grief. We force ourselves to stay here, probing the toothache of the soul, because we know it’s here that the questions reveal their gold. And yes, we know they’ve locked people up for less. But we must keep looking ‘round corners to see what’s here. Twists and turns. Collars flipped up to guard our necks from the chill. Until we see the glow. There it is. What we’ve hidden for so very long. What we’ve silenced. What we’ve ignored. Our desires. Ready to be reclaimed. Ready to be chosen. Again and again. Ready to take us home.

Yeah. It’s like that.

It must be like that.

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I wanted to talk to my beloved friend (and this week, I'm thrilled to have her as my house guest!) Ronna Detrick about this business of wanting and owning our desires.

Here's the poem I've chosen to read and to discuss with her. May it lead you home.

Latent

The veil of ambivalence settles close to the skin when desire lies latent - tamped down by stories of excess and extravagance. Oh, she's too much, we say, all the while denying ourselves the permission we seek to want what we want without shame without fear without

Ahhhhh.

Please consider this questions and DO share in the comments (or over on my Facebook page for Amy and Ronna to see):

Who would you be if you could want what you want without shame, without fear, without...?

Thank you, Ronna. And thank you Amy, for the gifts upon gifts of this collection.

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Amy Palko is the creatrix of Red Thread Voices – a publishing house that aims to offer a home to the voice of exiled feminine, She is also a goddess guide, poet, photographer and lecturer whose work has been featured internationally. She lives in Edinburgh, Scotland with her husband and three teenage children, in their home that overlooks the deep harbour, and the wide mouth of the River Forth as it opens up to swallow the cold waters of the North Sea.

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 Check out my free training on the 5 Shifts Our Clients Use to Overcome the Imposter Complex and Grow their Income and their Impact

Where I pull back the curtain on five shifts to start raising voices, rates, and hands all while being the kind, congruent, and authentic leader I know you to be.

Shine some thrival love on your sisters today.

I talk a lot about your people wanting you to succeed. And for the most part, I mean that in an over-arching, “your people want you to succeed in life” way. But I also know it to be true SPECIFICALLY as it relates to business and our work in the world. It’s what I believe with every fibre of my being. Because I live it.

Every win that I’ve enjoyed, every home run I’ve knocked out of the park, can be traced back to someone who’s had my back. This is no spiritual bypass…I also acknowledge my abilities, skills and talents. But allowing other people in? To hold and champion and bolster me? To ask for help when I’ve needed it, and even BEFORE I needed it?

It’s been the key to the success that I’ve enjoyed so far in this lifetime.

And while it may be the most foundational tenet of my belief system, it’s a hard pill for many to swallow, so impressive is the body of evidence that they’ve amassed over the years of being cut down by their others (or having cut themselves down to size to fit in).

So, I want to speak to this. I want to speak to my sisters. (Brothers, thanks for being here and for reading. And by all means, lean in. My sisters are your sisters.)

Sisters: since the beginning of time, we have relied on each other to survive. We know that Paleolithic women worked together to create shelter. Ancient Egyptian women supported each other during the perilous time of pregnancy and childbirth. Iroquois women work the fields in community, harvesting the “three sisters.” Frontier women administered homemade remedies to one anothers’ families during times of plagues. Sumbanese women weave and dye the textiles that are the fulcrum of their economy.

There is no time in history (ahem) that we cannot find evidence of women collectively, communally, and cooperatively working together to assure each others’ survival.

So yeah.

Helping each other to SURVIVE? Sure. We’ve been doing THAT since the dawn of time. Helping each other to THRIVE? Those are brand-new baby muscles we haven’t learned to use yet.

Because we are so very new to this whole THRIVING thing.

It’s what Elizabeth Gilbert points to in her monstrously powerful ICAN speech:

We are living as women in a very interesting moment of history and namely what that is is that we are all, all of us of this generation, and by this generation, I mean any woman born in the Western industrialized world in the last 80 or 90 years, in terms of human history I call that one generation, and something very recent, we are all the subjects of a vast and enormously historically unprecedented social science experiment. And that social science experiment is: what happens if you give women autonomy? What happens if you give them literacy? What happens if you give them education? What happens if you give them legal protections, political rights, access to their own money, chances, power, opportunity all these things that women have never ever had suddenly, we have.

[…] And it's tricky and one of the reasons it's tricky and I would say trickier for us than for men, is that we don't have, unlike men thousands and thousands and thousands of years of role models of autonomous, powerful, independent, literate women who had that sort of control over their own destinies. We don't have those kinds of examples. Not only do not have them mythologically, classically and throughout history, we often don't have them in our own families.

And then fold in our businesses on top of that?

It’s like my soul sister Julie Daley shared with me:

We use whatever our business is as a front for talking about things that really matter. We're only stuck in this work, you see, because our real work was taken away from us several thousand years ago. We looked on the map, but our town was gone. We looked through the catalogue but couldn't find the course we wanted. It's as if someone removed our chair but couldn't take away our longing.

- Marianne Williamson

And we don’t know where to put it. Not only is this business of thriving is new to us. This business of BUSINESS is new to us.

So how can we actually and legitimately feel into the truth that I know in my cells?

(Deep breath.)

By daring to believe. Talking about the things that matter, and daring to believe that it matters to me. (It does.)

I don’t have the proof of history books or Wikipedia citations on my side. But I know what I know and I know this:

I want you to thrive. And I know you want me to thrive. It just makes sense.

You can feel it too, right?

My wins are your wins. My tears are your tears. My success is your success. My survival is your survival. My thrival is your thrival.

And yours is mine.

That rival bullshit is the long shadow of the patriarchy.

You get that, right?

Know why? Because we are each others’ people.

And your people want you to succeed.

See how that works?

We KNOW how to help each other to thrive. We KNOW we can celebrate each other without the projections of hero-worship. We KNOW we can consciously critique each other for mutual advancement without the acrid aftertaste of disdain.

We just need to DO it.

Are you with me?

Dig a little deeper today and shine some thrival love on your sister. Swing out with wild generosity. Be outrageous optimistic on their behalf.

And dare to believe them when they respond in kind.

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 Check out my free training on the 5 Shifts Our Clients Use to Overcome the Imposter Complex and Grow their Income and their Impact

Where I pull back the curtain on five shifts to start raising voices, rates, and hands all while being the kind, congruent, and authentic leader I know you to be.

When doing nothing is the best thing you can do.

Mid-sentence, she gave a gasp. A look of horror flickered across her face as she said: a bird just flew into your window. We ran over to the front window of the house, in the direction that she’d been looking.

There, on the table on the front porch, a little chickadee with wings and legs splayed at odd angles lay very very very still.

My heart just about exploded as I looked over at Jamie and saw the worry, sadness and helplessness in her eyes mirroring my own.

He’s just in shock, I said, the tremble in my voice betraying the confidence my words tried to convey.

We drew the curtains to keep my three indoor cats (stirred by their primal hungers) from frightening the poor thing further and ran through the checklist of options available to nurse it back to health. But approaching it with offers of food, water or bed would just exacerbate whatever panic his wee heart was already subjected to.

In the absence of knowing what to do, we did the best thing we knew how.

Nothing.

(Not entirely true…I know at least two prayers were sent up.)

We pulled ourselves back to the conversations we usually have during our Wednesday co-working sessions: product launches, strategies, SEO, next steps. But it was flat. None of it mattered. Our hearts and minds were out on the front porch…willing the sweet bird to gather its strength, its will, its determination…to get it together as only it could.

We took turns stealing glances out the curtains, giving updates every couple of minutes.

He’s still just sitting there. His legs don’t look right. He seems to be breathing!

The reports became increasingly more positive.

He’s blinking. His left wing is facing the right way now. He’s looking around. He’s sitting up much straighter. Did he always have that seed in his mouth? 

And then a micro-shift towards impatience.

Why isn’t he flying off? He seems fine now.

And finally,

He’s gone!

Hugs and hoots. (And disappointed cats.)

Sweet relief.

You feel it too, right?

You know that place. Of worry, frustration, fear…and then impatience.

As Fixers, it’s painful for us to sit by and wait for things to mend and heal on their own. And then excruciatingly painful to wait for them to take off in full and glorious flight.

AND? Some things just aren’t broken. Just stunned.

Give it time.

Waiting for news from the doctor? Give it time.

Your book sales? Give it time.

A visit from your muse? Give it time.

Your love to be met? Give it time.

Can you trust? Can you accept? Can you imagine that it’s all happening exactly at the speed with which it’s supposed to be happening? That divine timing is not yours to control?

You’ve said your prayers. You’ve examined the options.

When there’s nothing left to do, do nothing.

It will fly when it’s ready.

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 Check out my free training on the 5 Shifts Our Clients Use to Overcome the Imposter Complex and Grow their Income and their Impact

Where I pull back the curtain on five shifts to start raising voices, rates, and hands all while being the kind, congruent, and authentic leader I know you to be.

Beyond Compare: It's ready for you.

It’s Beyond Compare launch day for Lauren and I. I’m writing this in that now-familiar swirl of emotions that even my meditation practice couldn’t still. That blend of excitement (huzzah it’s here!) and worry (how will it be received?) and relief (we pushed it out and here it is!) and exhilaration (and it’s GORGEOUS…and robust…and powerful…and RICH!) and in all honesty, exhaustion.

A year and three months. Hundreds of hours on Google Hangouts and hundreds more writing, researching, and editing. Two cross-country flights. Two video shoots (and a photo session). One false start and a name change. At least one astrological reading and subsequent launch date correction (suck it, Merc Retro!)  Twodesigners, one tech wizard, hundreds of micro decisions (and dozens of macro), six early reviewers, one new MacBook Pro to handle the audio/video edits + uploads, and an incomparable partnership later, Beyond Compare is ready.

Oh how Beyond Compare’s ready.

As much as I’ve been writing here about comparison, I’m realizing that I haven’t been sharing much about what we’ve been researching and creating.

So you can see if YOU’RE ready for Beyond Compare.

Lauren and I have come to understand comparison as a three-dimensional structure. On the one plane, we compare up (looking up to others in a way that “others” us from them) and we compare down (judging and disdaining others in a way that, you guessed it, “others” us from them).

On the other plane, we compare ourselves to others AND we experience others comparing themselves to us. Up or down. Whether we’ve been put on a pedestal or are judged harshly, the impact of “othering” once again endures.

So that’s the framework.

If you allow it to, Beyond Compare will help you to see where comparison:

• may be stopping you from creating what you want;

• may be preventing you from activating your calling;

• may be making you feel (and play) small for fear of projections;

• may be keeping you from expressing yourself fully; and,

• may be allowing you to disown your power (and hand it over to others).

(And clearly? Where comparison is keeping you feeling disconnected with all that “othering” going on. Given how much you value connection, I know this really stings.)

But most importantly, the program offers new ways of being with comparison. Kinder, more aligned ways that serve you, your calling, and others exquisitely well.

In fact, our Beyond Compare motto is:

Kindness – to self, and to others – begets perspective, focus, and a stronger core.

Consider:

What would you consume with joy if you were relieved of comparison and left with appreciation and inspiration?

What would be available if you could transform hero-worship into celebration?

How would it feel to be able to transform disdain into a practice of conscious critique instead?

What would you create if you were free from comparison?

THAT’S why we created Beyond Compare.

Because we can taste that freedom. And we want it for you. You too?

Feedback needn’t be a slippery slope. It’s a gift.

I’ve been telling this story a lot lately…that’s usually a good cue for me to share it here with the intention that it serve you well. When I was first starting out as an Account Exec at a marketing/advertising agency, I had a client who became a pain in the ass. Or rather, the RELATIONSHIP became a pain in the ass.

The road to said asshood was long and wind-y, but we both contributed to the ultimate destination.

Big part of it was that my then boss wasn’t a huge fan of boundaries. And I knew precious little about exerting them. Which, as we know is the death knell of any good relationship.

This was a "sexy" client (read: big fish), so our orders were essentially to hand them the sun, the moon and the sky, nomaddawhat.

It started with the creation of a rebrand (and logo). Normally, you would start here with a couple of black and white options and build from there. Not so with this client. They wanted to start much, much further along. Colours, sizing, variations…all buttoned down right out of the gate. We tried to deliver. No matter how many times we were sent back to the drawing board, we were told by our boss to keep going until the client was 1000% satisfied. No small feat, as they made all decisions by committee.

I recall us creating an iteration that was exactly, precisely TO THE what they had asked for. It didn't look right, or even kind of close, or even decent, but we presented it anyway because we had learned the hard way by that time (round #34?) to show them EXACTLY what they wanted...nomaddawhat.

But by then, they were seriously pissed that we were still so off in our design approach. How could we present something that looked so awful? (Great question.)

No matter how loudly we protested that it was EXACTLY what they had asked for, the response we got back was infuriating:

"Your job is to engineer the solution to the challenge".

Asshat comment. AND completely right. It WAS our job. We got it right on logo #53.

Yep. #53.

When we finally started to do what we should have done in the first place: own our expertise and stand in it. The very reason we were hired in the first place.

Two things I learned then:

1) Relationships require boundaries that honour both parties. Shame on us for not having delineated ours and requested theirs.

2) My job as the service provider IS to make the client happy (within those respectful boundaries). 

3) Good feedback is a gift. One that we weren’t offered…nor did we really deserve it. We all behaved badly.

The subject of feedback, one I’ve been interested in for some time, came up in my Beyond Compare partner Lauren’s conversation with author, web designer and truly fabulous guy Paul Jarvis.

It was in the context of a discussion about evaluation. You see, one piece of our agenda with Beyond Compare is to help transform disdain (that quality of looking derisively down on someone) into the conscious critique of evaluation. (And transforming hero-worship into celebration...more on that another time).  

BeyondCompare-TheComparisonMatrix

Disdain’s easy to understand…it’s the “I can only see your flaws and limitations and deny my own”. Rich and fertile ground for discovery, as you can imagine.

Evaluation’s trickier and the place where we tend to fumble. It’s the “I see your limitations and recognize that I have some too” place. It’s the place of feedback and the choice to engage critically with someone’s work without making them wrong. Assessment, debate and difficult conversations live here. For the benefit of both parties. Like I say, tricky.

So I totally appreciate the clarity and simplicity that Paul uses when he talks about working with his own clients as the creative. He does what my team ought to have lo those many years ago LONG before logo #1 was even imagined…he shares a one-pager with his clients to make sure the exchange of feedback is fruitful, nourishing and USEFUL for both parties. Efficient too.

His top 2 biggies for offering feedback if you’re the client?

#1 - Refer back to goals when asking for changes; and,

#2 - Don't be prescriptive - describe what isn't working and allow me to problem solve how to fix it.

Super clear. The client is the client and the creative is the creative and the work gets co-created in a place of mutual respect. (He shares much more about this in his upcoming course for creatives.)

Let’s face it. Feedback feels like it’s a slippery slope because we all come at giving and receiving it from a strong and defended (and defending) ego.

But it needn’t be.

When we can focus on the goals, see the inherent possibility of the gift of feedback and come at it from a place of compassion and mutual respect, we are really that much closer to bringing our very best EVERYTHING forward.

Which is what it’s about, non?

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 Check out my free training on the 5 Shifts Our Clients Use to Overcome the Imposter Complex and Grow their Income and their Impact

Where I pull back the curtain on five shifts to start raising voices, rates, and hands all while being the kind, congruent, and authentic leader I know you to be.