Creativity – Page 2

The Power of Retreat

After a frenzied summer given over to clients and trainings and filming and writing, I’m tired and need some serious off-the-grid time, so I’ve come to my RI beach and my little cottage for my 2nd annual retreat. One of my revered teachers, Dr. Monica, working with me through the darkest days of my life last year, suggested that I create a retreat for myself, spending as many weeks as I could alone at my beach house, asking questions and listening. Uh, listening for what exactly, I’d asked her. You’ll find out, she replied. Go away with no plans, no script? Are you kidding? She told me that once I understood the power of the retreat and the questions I’d ask, I’d create one every year forever more. I was highly doubtful, but agreed to the plan, reluctantly giving it a try.

The rules of this retreat, as laid out by Monica, were simple. I was to do whatever I wanted in the moment for as long as I wanted. Listen. Have no plan, just desires in the moment. Listen. Wash, rinse, repeat. Listen. For as long as I could arrange.

The only question I need ask, Monica suggested, was “what do I want to do now?”

I won’t lie, the first 2 days were excruciating, since I’m a planner who doesn’t know the meaning of ‘spontaneous’.

But as the days went by, I got into the pattern of no-pattern and soon began to seriously dig it. I meditated with Deepak Chopra, weeded my beach roses listening to certain recordings of Coast to Coast AM (don’t scoff…this show does a huge service by discussing things the main stream media won’t touch, like their Lyme Disease show last week…and I love the quantum physics stuff), walked the beach for hours, drove to Rhody Joe’s for their chicken wings, drank martinis, communed in my neighbor’s hot tub, all spur of the moment, none of it planned. I slept late sometimes, got up early other times, watched ‘on demand’ movies and went for days with no TV or music. I wrote and cried…a lot. It was glorious.

Little by little, I started hearing myself again (albeit faintly) after a lifetime of internal deafness. I settled down and took a few baby steps back to myself because I had truly lost my bearings and maybe even a bit of my mind in the previous few years and it was time for that to stop. Fast forward to now…

All this month I found myself looking forward to retreat again

and now that I made it back here, I’m in that early what-was-I-thinking stage that I know will settle into the pattern of no-pattern. I jump up to eat my favorite steak and eggs at Hungry Haven (where the wait staff knows me now and already knows what I want), then drive to Java Madness, my favorite place to write on the planet, where I know the owner now and have my choice of open tables inside since in the nice weather everyone sits out on the large deck overlooking a sleepy marina. Although I love the water, I want to write tucked away in the corner inside, with live music drifting in from the deck. It’s the end of the summer and people are still pretty relaxed. I’m settling in, doing what I want in the moment and listening.

Soon the academic year will start again, and I wonder which of my many ventures will take off this year. At the moment, I have a new idea. I’d like to write a book about fall from grace moments and form a group of others like me, publicly identified as flawed. When I had my 15 minutes of fame, despite all of the loving support extended to me (THANK YOU!!), I felt very alone and so I isolated, as is my nature. I’m thinking that my little group of kindreds would be willing and available to reach out to those who fall in the future, offering a spirit of camaraderie and an action plan based on our experiences. Cool idea, huh? And really needed, too, since mistakes no longer have a half-life thanks to the internet and its forever memory, and the fact that we’re talking about human beings. People screwing up and making mistakes? Yup. Just as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow, humans will be flawed. And that is what makes us all such miraculous creatures.

I screw up, therefore I create.

Love that mantra…

Our Newest Endangered Species: Leaders in Higher Ed

Everyday I read so many articles and blogs about higher ed that my eyes blur. They generally cover just a few categories: innovation through MOOCs (massive open online courses) or the new skill sets needed by higher ed leaders (social media, business strategy, IT) or the bijillion websites that students can use to find the right match school. There are blogs about how to write an essay, how to create the application timeline and even explaining the rules of the new Common App. But nowhere – nowhere – can I find the Voice of Big Vision that we used to know as Leadership.

In short, folks, nobody is driving this bus.

We know that the human knowledge set – everything that humans have learned – doubles in less than a decade now because of the web (or the interwebs, as my hilarious friend calls it ), and technology innovations double every 8 months. All of this change is not only hard to keep up with, it’s hard to place in context.

Because of this rapid change, more than 40 career fields were created in the past decade alone. More than half of the employers surveyed in a recent survey say that college graduates are not prepared for the current work place. New brain science is revealing how kids learn best even as private colleges charge upwards of $60K/year for educating in the old, less-effective way, for universities like all big systems are the last to change in the face of new information. A small and disturbing trend is developing as trustees are offering college presidencies to MBAs instead of to academics, replacing education leaders with financial stewards. These are mismatches if ever I’ve seen one.

When I first entered the field of college admissions, I was trained to believe that every decision we made would change the world and would affect the nation’s future 3 generations out. I was taught that education is the quickest way into the middle class and that a robust middle class makes for a happy, safe and prosperous nation. Since the 1980s I’ve watched us turn away from these beliefs and, not surprisingly, the gap between haves and have nots has grown wider now than its been since the 1930s.

Holy sh*t! We’re going backwards.

So where are the leaders? Where are the men and women who are willing to hold the Big Vision that education matters on so many levels and that it’s the best investment we can make as a country? Where are the men and women who are willing to make the case to their Boards that are stocked with major donors and business people with sharp pencils who want that return on their investments? Where are the ones with clear voices willing to jump into this mess and speak truth to us all? Where are the leaders in education who truly think long term and care about the fate of children one hundred years from now, children they will never know?

We need a Transformational Leadership Council for Education made up of courageous educators willing to be the tip of the spear for the human race going forward, because make no mistake, our future is at stake. The wider the gap between those with and those without, the more unstable America will become over time and maybe we’ll lose the whole thing, all because of fear and lack of vision now.

I’m in the arena. Who else will join me?

Are You In the Rafters or Are You In The Arena?

Having always loved Theodore Roosevelt, I’m thrilled that this quote from his “Citizenship in a Republic” speech from 1910 has gotten so much air time lately, mostly thanks to my favorite mentor, Brene Brown. It goes like this:

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face in marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Don’t you just love that? Doesn’t it make your heart pound with excitement and inspiration? The first time I read this quote, I cried. I’ve long known that I tear up in the presence of truth and the Sacred. To me, this paragraph carries both qualities because it’s a call for all of us to stop sitting on the sidelines saying witty and snarky things about the perceived failings of others when we wouldn’t dare expose our true selves in the world. (Are you listening, my favorite Talk Show Host?)

In my opinion, this land of the free and home of the brave has become a nation of critics, too paralyzed with fear to risk failure. We’re bringing our kids up this way too. The price of failure is too great – college admissions is culpable here – so healthy risk-taking has all but dried up in schools everywhere.

We’re going in exactly the wrong direction.

Since the beginning, America’s #1 strength has been our ability to innovate and create, to build that better mousetrap. We’ve always been a dissenting lot, choosing independence over the suffocation of convention. (Just read the Bill of Rights again, written to “design a more perfect union”.) But in the past 2.5 decades, first seduced by Big Wealth in the go-go ’90s and then paralyzed with fear of terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001, we have become something different… scared to show up and play.

We’re scared to let our kids fail. We’re scared to challenge the crazy lies we’re getting from government, from both sides of the aisle. Now we know that our own government is keeping copies of our every phone call, email and text with no explanation. Google hands over our internet search data to the Feds and also probably sells it to companies so they can track our search patterns and sell us stuff, you know, for our ‘convenience’. And we’re too scared or overwhelmed or asleep to jump into the arena and deal, to question what is going on.

If I were a primary or secondary teacher or principal, I would use this quote as a mantra for myself and my students.

I’d encourage risk taking and especially failure, in order to stoke up resilience, competence and the mother of all skills, confidence. I’d encourage inquiry, not right answers. I’d get my students down into the arena where they could go for it and get plenty dirty in the process. It’s way more fun than mastering the one-trick-pony of the snarky insult of others who risk, or the paralysis of perfectionism.

Reading TR’s ‘Man in the Arena’ quote has inspired me to get real about who I am and what I am here to offer the world. I’ve been criticized plenty – still am – and that had a suppressing effect on me until this paragraph lit me up inside. I know many good people, people I love, who would rather sit up in the rafters and make fun of those in the arena. I no longer join them.

For me, I’ll take my destiny standing up. There’s plenty of room down here for us all and everyone is welcome.

Judgment or Discernment?

I’m hate to admit this, but I have always been harshly judgmental. I was raised that way and had this skill finely honed through a career in college admissions (did you know that judgment is an occupational hazard of admissions?). Mostly I was unconscious about its toxicity. But in all honesty, it did serve me by keeping others who might hurt me at bay. Ah, judgment is such a great defense…

Judgment seemed to be my friend and ally until I fell and was exposed publically to the judgment of others. As you can imagine, it doesn’t feel good to have strangers judge you. It feels so unfair. Ah, karma…

Once I experienced the destructive power of judgment, I made a promise to change and I have.

I’m careful now to hold my tongue when I want to put others down. I recognize that what I want to judge in others is what I hate in myself.

Discernment, however, is important. It’s often mistaken for judgment but they are very different. Judgment is mean and wants to lash out. Discernment is seeing what you see with no story attached. Judgment creates a one-upsmanship (“I would NEVER do such a thing because I’m a better person.”) Discernment is an awareness of what is and offers the opportunity to make another decision.

So now we have the Paula Deen situation. Judgment makes us want to lash out at her for being bad, wants us to write mean things about her and cancel all of her business contracts to punish her for things she said and did in her past. Judgment spins a bigger story here (she’s Southern, she was a closet diabetic even as she was cooking up food to clog our arteries, she’s greedy, she’s evil, blahblahblah) and wants to see her humiliated. Discernment watches with no opinion, knows Paula Deen is mortal like the rest of us and that all humans are imperfect. We’ve all said and done things that society would not approve of. Discernment knows that ‘imperfect’ does not mean ‘bad’. Discernment offers compassion to Paula even as it reviews and maybe resets our inner compass around our own behavior.

College admissions provokes a lot of judgment.

Parents often judge their children for not being smart enough or ambitious enough or conscientious enough etc etc as they begin to compare their children to college admissions standards. One parent I know literally burst into tears when she heard her daughter’s SAT scores, crying “I thought you were smart.” As you can imagine, this didn’t help her daughter at all. The daughter felt shame for “letting my Mom down and making her cry.” I wanted to hunt her mother down and give her a good slap but that wouldn’t help her mother at all.

I appeal to parents now. Drop the judgment and switch to discernment. Discernment carries no story. It sees what is. If your child’s scores don’t fit a certain college’s profile, look for a college where they will fit instead of blaming your child. SATs tell us nothing of value. Truth. If your child’s rank isn’t as high as you’d wished or if they didn’t end the year well, attend to the cause with no story attached. It is what it is. Judgment will choke off any encouragement for them to do their best. Judgment is the death of confidence and confidence is the single most important attribute your child needs to go into the world every day.

Discernment is your real friend and ally. Time to get to know it well.

The Shame Series Continues: What’s The Point of Confronting This? (Or, Can She Please Stop Writing About This Now?)

The reason I’m writing about shame so much recently is that I can see how common it is to the human experience and how it cripples us, creating more drama in our lives than in the typical soap opera on daytime TV. I see how it stops us from being our brave selves. I see it in clients and friends, in people all around me. I see it in all of the haters on social media and in the self-righteous commentators on TV and radio. I can see it is because I’ve come to know it so well myself.

Shame is that awful feeling we have when we feel like we aren’t worthy of being loved, when we feel that profound disconnection from others we need. Shame is ubiquitous (only sociopaths feel none) and it’s easy to understand why. Chalk it up to civilizing children. Lord knows how many times as tiny children we heard “no”, “stop”, “that’s bad” as our parents did their best to keep us safe and under some measure of control. (My father used to say that I got myself into so much trouble, it would be a miracle if I made it to 21.) Then as older kids, we might have heard “what do you think you are doing?” or “shame on you” or “you know better than that” because adults wanted to keep our sexual curiosity in check due to the unintended consequences of that (pregnancy, STDs, big hurts), not to mention the iconic bad decision making of teenagers. All of these phrases were meant to stop us and create a course correction of sorts, but because the sentiment was based in judgment, they also generated this awful feeling called shame.

You feel guilt when you think you’ve done something bad. You feel shame when you think that you are bad.

It hurts to be judged, especially by the people who love us the best. Afterall, if they think we’re bad, we must be bad.

If you or your child is a perfectionist, shame is at the root, hiding, stealthy, even sneaky. Maybe your culture approves of this drive for absolute perfection. Maybe you’ve won awards or have taken your personal value from the perceived admiration of others around you. College admissions certainly stokes this up. But make no mistake – hidden away, shame wreaks havoc in your life. It messes with your health since the fear of doing something wrong keeps you in a chronic state of fight-flight-or-freeze.

Does your child have physical issues like stomach pain or headaches or even repetitive sports injuries? Yup. There’s shame under there.

Shame also interferes with your relationships, because you are only as good as your last success and no one can be allowed to know what a screw-up you really are inside. You’ll always hold a piece of yourself apart, for fear of rejection. Been there. Done that.

So no intimacy or rest for you. Ever.

Saddest and most important of all, there is little creativity being expressed because to do that is to risk rejection and the shame within you will not let that happen. So over time you do what you’ve always done, except really really really well. Over and over. Deluding yourself into thinking you’re growing. One-trick pony. And all the wildly interesting stuff, the juice of life within you that thrives on risk and change, goes unexpressed… and we all lose.

So what’s the point of hanging on to shame? Does it protect us in the long run and make our life worth living? Nah. It’s actually more like a silent and creepy cancer that chokes us off from our authentic self.

If you are not thriving the way you’d like, and you have always been a perfectionist, go immediately and read some Brene Brown, the shame researcher. She’ll tell you all about it in the most hilarious way. She’ll describe how shame thrives in secrecy and silence. In fact, the less you talk about it, the more exponential its growth. When you finally understand it, you’ll want to expose shame to oxygen and sunlight when it surfaces next. Best of all, you’ll want to make a joke about it. (Shame hates to be made fun of.) You’ll laugh about it and share it with those who have earned the right to hear it. You’ll swap shame stories…(Warning: don’t share shame stories with just anyone because shame-based people will only make you feel worse. Share with friends that offer compassion and empathy. Shame hates empathy.)

Soon, swapping shame stories will be the new black.

It won’t take long before you’ll feel more relaxed, more comfortable in your skin. And best of all, that creation power that was waiting in the wings to be noticed and expressed will open up your life in ways you cannot imagine. All good.

I still get paralyzed by shame a few times per day, but at least now I notice it for what it is and I laugh, saying out loud, “Oh, yeah. Should HaveAlready Mastered Everything. Hilarious. Good try.” The Shame Series Continues: Whats The Point of Confronting This? (Or, Can She Please Stop Writing About This Now?)

So here’s your homework assignment for the week: tell someone who has earned the right to hear it your scariest shame secret. Then give yourself lots and lots and lots of approval because you just took a giant step toward freedom.

Fear Nation

We’re bombarded 24/7 with scary news.

If we listen to the media, or even to our friends and community members, there is so much to fear that we must be hyper-vigilant to stay safe. After all, the food we eat is killing us, the water we drink pollutes us, the air we breathe is toxic. We could get the flu and die unless we get the flu shot. We can’t trust anyone because they could snap and go crazy. We could lose our jobs at any moment. We can’t trust our elected officials because they are all corrupt and in some crazy way are united against us, the innocent general public. The world is unstable and some crazy 3^rdworld country leader somewhere is going to bomb and destroy us. Can’t trust humans. The weather is changing and will wreak havoc on us. Can’t trust Nature.

Oh, and our kid will be rejected from colleges because they are not: White or Asian or Black or Hispanic or male or female or rich or poor or middle-class or an athlete or a non-athlete or from the right school or the right state… ad infinitum.

Can’t trust life.

Really? I’m so fed up with this belief system that does nothing but wear us all down.

Recently I’ve become aware of a small conspiracy movement that believes the Newtown CT shooting was a hoax designed to marshal enough public sentiment to limit our access to guns and undermine the Second Amendment. I’ve personally been working with people from Newtown CT as part of the Tapping Solution Newtown Stress and Trauma Relief Project and I assure all of you that the events of Dec. 14, 2012 were no hoax and no actors were involved. This was one huge human tragedy because so many young children were involved. As with so many tragedies, we’ll probably never know what was in the mind of Adam Lanza, the shooter, because he took the coward’s way out. But how we respond to and interpret this challenge and others like it in everyday life is the whole point.

When we choose fear, fear wins. We lose bigtime.

Folks, this is a fear-based planet which is why we’re all here – to conquer fear. It’s no wonder we’re exposed to it again and again so we can confront and live through the fear.

So when you get scared that your child will get rejected from his college choices, your cortisol levels go up (cortisol is the body’s stress hormone) and so does your blood pressure and heart rate. You go into some version of fight or flight and over the long term, this elegant mechanism designed to save your life actually wears your health down and speeds its demise.

So turn off the news and the scary stuff. Step away from any conversation that revs up your anxiety. It’s all b.s. anyway. Look to what is real and true and not there to sell you anything – look at the sky and the trees around you. Watch the birds and wildlife if you are lucky enough to be around some. Tune into your breath and your heart rate. Smile at your children and spouse. Relax. In reality, there is beauty and wonder and innocence all around you at every moment.

Perception is everything.

I heard a recent interview with the iconic Louise Hay who, when prompted by the interviewer to discuss some plan or other, responded, “Why don’t we just trust life and see how things unfold?”

This is the perfect way to inoculate yourself from Fear Nation, even if it is heretical to our willful way of being in a world where we believe it’s all up to us. Maybe it isn’t. Maybe trusting life is the paradoxical key to happiness.

It’s what I choose.

First Aid for College Applicants: Esteeming

Another cycle of college admissions has begun and I’m so struck by the deep fear of students and their parents in the runup to the application deadlines. I offer the usual excellent advice (take it slow, one step at a time, get lots of sleep) but see how often it goes in one ear and straight out the other. Yeah, no kidding. I get it. I’ve been plenty scared in life myself.

So I’ve hit on an important concept I want to encourage you to use as your child is in the throes of applying to college. I call it ‘first aid’ to stop the hemorrhaging of confidence that is inevitable this time of year.

I encourage you to amp up your esteeming of your child.

Esteeming?

You might feel resistance at first. One parent rolled her eyes when I gave her this advice and said, “Oh brother. Aren’t they esteemed enough?” Made me smile. But here’s the thing…actually, no. They aren’t esteemed enough right now.

You can’t possibly understand the scary nature of your child’s world during this moment in time.

They are expected to master the most rigorous curriculum ever offered in the US (thanks to confluence of the knowledge explosion afforded by the internet and the accountability movement of No Child Left Behind). They are expected to provide evidence of leadership sustained over time for college admissions officers who are partial to that kind of person. These same admissions officers expect to see full-blown, highly-perfected humans among their applicant pool of teenagers who, for the most part, are far from it. Students hear snippits of information about admissions that scare them and then, like all people, they connect the dots and make stuff up about how college admissions works. Except that it doesn’t work that way and they are working off of bad information. They are connected to each other 24/7 through technology in ways we aren’t. Social media sucks them into mob mentality. As teenagers, they want to fit in and be accepted for who they are all the while they have yet to grow into social confidence, like puppies who are growing into their paws. They have pimples and body issues as they transform into adults. Their hormones are fluctuating, causing moodiness and angst and a general sense of careening out of control. They are trying to please everyone and to be seen as special when they really don’t feel special at all.

In short, teenagers aren’t finished yet.

So I am urging parents to offer your children ballast. Be extra gentle with them now. Praise them for what they do right and bite your tongue when they screw up. Ease up a bit. Love them, even if you have to take out their baby pictures to remind yourself how perfect they were then because as teenagers they are sometimes a pain in the butt. 😉

This is their initiation into adulthood. It is hard to put years of your life on the line to be judged by strangers using rules you will never understand in such a public way. We adults have never been where they are because our world was so much safer.

Amp up the esteeming and you will see how they relax back into you. It will change everything.

How To Create Peace At Home During the College Application Process

Well, we’re now full-blown in the holiday season again (didn’t we just do this a few months ago?) and if you are the parent of a high schooler applying to college, you probably aren’t singing songs of joy and peace right about now. Chances are, your child is having the usual teenage mood swings and rebellion compounded by all the additional stress of applying to college and the ultimate fear/Nirvana: leaving you for college come fall. If your home is peaceful, please write and tell the rest of us how you’ve managed that. If you are typical, though, you probably need a breather from the increasing tension.

I know a lot about such things because I’ve been through that minefield. And if you think it’s hard to parent a 17 year old, wait until you have to parent a 20-something, which is where I am now. 24 is the new 17. Yikes! So here’s my holiday gift to you…

My surefire recipe for creating peace at home in stressful times

Step 1. Lock yourself in the bathroom and breathe. Breathing is very under-rated. It calms the nervous system and slows the heart. The goal is to get centered in what is happening around you and how you feel about it. In other words, locking yourself in the bathroom gives you some distance, and distance is good when your nerves are frayed and you are about to say or do something stupid that you’ll later regret.

Step 2. Accept the fact that you are not applying to college. Your child is. This is not your firewalk. You don’t have to stay up all night making applications to school. Your academic performance is not about to be judged. You are not about to be accepted or rejected by strangers. It isn’t happening to you, though it sure feels like it. Breathe some more and feel a tiny bit of relief as you meditate on this thought: aren’t you glad you’re not your child?

Step 3. Remember that your role in this college application business is to be your family’s grounding cord. You’ve lived through harrowing times before and have came through them OK. You know that life ebbs and flows, that it brings great times and tough times. That’s what we signed up for when we decided to be human beings. So breathe again and ask yourself how you can ground the rest of your family and create a peaceful home. Breathe in some of that peaceful feeling that you’d like to inject.

Do What Only You Can Do

Step 4. Commit to yourself that you will be unflappable in the coming weeks. You will listen and empathize and go on with your life without trying to fix anything, because you are doing what only you can do – modeling healthy adult behavior during a tough time. You are literally showing your child how it’s done. Matching their own anxiety doesn’t help them. It just makes everything worse.

Step 5. If you want to clear your anxiety and frayed nerves, there is nothing like tapping (EFT). Here is a great script for that. If not, there are many other ways to stay calm in the center of a Category 5 storm: breathing; meditation; reading; going for a walk; talking to a friend or a “paid friend”. Remember what flight attendants tell us upon boarding a plane: place your own oxygen mask on before helping others. Your child needs you to stay strong and relaxed now. Your family needs you to create peace. And you need to enjoy the holidays.