Dealing With Your Own Dry Spells

July 10, 2011 By Dolly Garlo Leave a Comment

Red Rock CanyonLegacy Journal readers, like our clients, tend to be accomplished and successful, mid-career business owners and professionals looking beyond their current work to building “what’s next.” Not for retirement, that is mostly a foreign word and applies perhaps to finances but not to life and work in the world. While financial independence – minding your business – is definitely a part of what’s next, continuing to be productive – minding your profession – is as well. Some need to get businesses or professional practices set up in a way that frees them to focus on what’s next, and some have already done that or are in the process. Others feel stuck or lost, or just can’t see what’s next after being so immersed for so long in what has made them successful to begin with.

They can see milestones – like, my kids will all be in college or out on their own in the next few years, or my investments have reached a point where I can draw some of my income from interest, dividends, lease payments and the like, and not rely on earned income alone.  But they can’t see “what’s next.”  And considering stepping away from a business or professional identity they’ve long held can be a bit immobilizing – “who will I be then?”  

Does that resonate with you?  

I’ve been there; asked similar questions. And ultimately what I learned is that “who you will be then” is all you’ve ever been (you bring it all along with you) … plus. You get to use the best parts of it all in new endeavors about which you’re really passionate.  But getting there is a process, and sometimes that process starts with simply feeling lost.

So, here are some ways to address feeling lost, confused or like you’re dealing with a real creative or productive personal “dry spell” that you don’t seem to be able to see your way out of:

1.    Accept Your Current Situation. First, maybe foremost, is to accept that’s the way things are … for now.  Having the awareness of your situation, and then fully accepting it, are the only “ways through” to do something about it.  Denial or pretending things are fine don’t even get your started – the nagging feeling that you know the truth, that you’re ready for things to change – can start to eat away at you.

Doubt is part of the process. So, go ahead and just say so: “Whether things are just fine, or not, I’m ready for a change even if I don’t know what it is yet and I’m not sure if I’m capable.” There. How does that feel? Lightning didn’t strike. Like everything else, this too shall pass.

2.    Let go.  Start by dropping or at least temporarily letting go of the things you can’t control. Tune out the mainstream media, for sure, at least for awhile.  Let go of your current expectations – for yourself, others, or the direction the world is going (or not going).

There is an old saying that ‘expectations are pre-meditated resentments.’ Meditating on them, that is, holding them in your thoughts, takes energy. When that energy is of the negative form (a resentment) you are really turning your capacity away from what you could be doing something about – what you can control, like you and your life, and the consequences of your actions. 

Clean UpMaybe there are some things you need to clean up and get complete with. Maybe there are some things you want to do for you – like take the time to work out, read, write or learn something new. These are things you can do now, and finding the time is just about letting go of things that are not yours to do.  

This is not about abandoning responsibilities, though you may have to get yourself out of a few you’ve already agreed to and are ready to let go of.  It’s also not about being self-ish; it’s about being self-directed rather than other-directed.  Only from there, can you begin to engage in things that truly excite you. Remember, whatever they are they will benefit someone else in some way, too – so you can still be responsible to others.  But benefitting others without also benefitting yourself is choosing to play win/lose, and agreeing in advance to be the loser.

3.     Re-charge yourself. Recognize the ebb and flow of nature.  Like waves and tides, our creative and productive energies sometimes wax and wane. We can’t be at our peak all the time. To be our most effective, we may need to challenge ourselves with big meaningful goals. But that doesn’t mean we have to pursue them 24/7/365.  In fact, we can’t.  There needs to be a balance of self-care time for rest, relaxation, rejuvenation, fun, laughter, and enjoyment.  So when you don’t know what else to do, choose something that fits in one of those self-care categories and re-charge yourself.

4.    Focus on your spiritual nature.  When you’re ready to take some action, but are still not sure what’s next, focus on the spirit that moves you, whatever form that takes. Connect with what is meaningful for you. Visit environments you find soothing and inspiring, where you can breathe deeply and fully.  Engage in prayer and meditation. Spend some time simply engaged in the wonder of it all. (Here’s a poem by Mary Oliver to help you remember this). Ask for help from the powers greater than yourself you most resonate and connect with, by whatever name you call them. See what comes up for you when you do, and what shows up serendipitously in your world as a result of your requests. Keep track of this information in an idea journal.   

5.    Create rituals that comfort you.  Often when you are in that “space in between” – where you know you don’t want to stay where you are but have yet to devise a plan for where you are going next - it is most helpful to just relax, take one day at a time, and do things that you know are good for you and that you’ll feel good about. 

MusicDevelop and engage in pleasing routines you may not otherwise because it seems too indulgent. (Be a little indulgent!) Listen to soothing music and just relax and breathe and “just be” for a bit, without doing anything.  Fill the open space that appears in your mind with gratitude for all the good in your life. Create a new exercise routine, and stay with it. Walk in a beautiful park on a regular basis at a similar time each day and learn what nature has to teach. Visit a labyrinth and engage in a moving meditation – or participate with a group in a gentle yoga class. Now’s the time to be gentle with the current you, while the “new you” is forming and getting ready to emerge.

6.    Muster some courage. It may only take a tiny bit to begin considering what’s next. The English word courage derives from Old French, based on the Latin root “Cor” meaning heart.  So focus on your heart, and what you deeply need to feed you. Then consider what having courage really means.  It has three parts – one of which we’ve already addressed: doubt + commitment + action. That is, courage is to make a commitment to act even in the face of your doubt. The actions you choose can be small steps, and they will likely be at least a little uncomfortable – though they should be bearable. Getting out of your comfort zone is what making a change entails. Turn doubt into wonder or curiosity or exploration and just take one step.

7.    Interact with your communities. Get together with people you know care about you, who are nurturing, will listen and will help re-charge your batteries (not the ones who drain you!) These are supportive people who will lovingly tell you the truth, rather than just what they think you want to hear.  Engage with bigger groups who are doing something important in the world that you support.  Notice who you’re drawn to and what their qualities are.  What might you emulate? Where do you feel yourself wanting to be engaged?

When all else fails, just do something completely different. This doesn’t have to be a big change. Just engage in some things you’ve never done before – for an hour, an afternoon, a day, weekend or even longer. Go somewhere new. Stretch yourself. Immerse yourself in something you’ve wondered about. Take a friend so you can compare notes (and so you’ll actually do it).  
       
Or you could hire a coach (especially recommended!) who can help you explore your deepest desires and interests, shed what is no longer yours to focus on, design what’s next based on your gifts, talents and resources – and then begin actually doing something about them.  Finding that sense of authenticity and personal integrity, and then demonstrating it in the world feels great and can lead to amazing things you feel truly proud of. That will allow you to feel more like the “you” you are ready to become.  

The first part of the “7 Steps to Creating Your Legacy” program is built around these notions of defining, discovering and designing, and we utilize them in working with private clients one on one as well.  From there, we help you get into action on building what’s next when the gentle rains begin to fall and nurture the growth of both you and something that deeply interests you.  

I’d love to join you in that journey!
Cheers, Dolly

Filed Under: Blog, Designing Your Legacy, Life Design, Positive Thoughts & Inspired Ideas, Spirituality, Wellness Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Are We Entering An Era of Caring?

March 11, 2011 By Dolly Garlo Leave a Comment

I sure hope so.

This morning on the other side of the world, once again, the Ring of Fire snapped many people out of their alpha state thinking mode of going through their everyday motions, with big news.  The earth errupted 80 miles off the coast of Sendai in northeast Japan with an 8.9 earthquake was followed by aftershocks measuring 7.1, 6.5, and 6.4 in magnitude.  The tremor was felt in Tokyo, and generated tsunami waves up to 3 miles inland on the island of Japan.  Three miles.  Imagine that distance from where you sit right now (and then imagine the wave itself …)  The quake prompted tsunami warnings for much of the Pacific Rim, which in our part of the world includes Hawaii and the west coast of the U.S. and Canada, where evacuations resulted.

A Bloomberg television reporter covering the story said the wave that washed up on shore “was mixed with mud, with ships and cars smashing toward wooden houses, dragging those into rice fields, and basically bashing them into pieces.”  The quake was not as destructive as the 9.3-magnitude earthquake that shook Indonesia – the second-largest in recorded history in December of 2004, the tsunami from which killed more than 300,000 people in over a dozen countries – but you get the picture.

In the world of cause and effect, I don’t believe the Earth is trying to send a message of unification – we’re all in this together, as Marshall McLuhan has said “There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We’re all crew.”

But I sure hope that is the result.

Modern technology has created an amazing transparency that gives us the opportunity to really experience the truth of that perspective  - toppling dictatorships in the Middle East and disasters thousands of miles away that can and do reach our shores, not just the one’s that happen on (New Orleans and Katrina) or near (Haiti) them - do affect us all in one way or another.

That technology allows us to see and learn about things that were once only in the hands of a privileged few, who we trusted to govern things until we learned that their control was more selfish and greedy than caring. It allows us to see – and experience – that we are not so far removed from the struggles of other humans who happen to speak different languages, wear different clothes and have different customs. And it allows us to take different actions to address these things.  As a nurse, I’d like to think that caring could be a really good underlying operating principle for humanity in taking those actions.

We all want the same basic things: to love and be loved, to be safe, to care for our families and friends, to be productive and feel accomplished, to be nourished and rest, and have our daily needs for healthy living addressed. Beyond that we want some time to share ourselves with others and pursue happiness through enjoyable activities and learning (which least often results from conspicuous consumption - just one of many forms of ineffective attempts to address whatever dis-ease might be troubling us).  There are plenty of those basics to go around, if only we care for one another and share ourselves.

Maybe disasters are a way of showing us that there are things to be afraid of, but that doesn’t include other human beings.  I don’t wish for more such challenges to pull us together.  I just wish that the lesson of ‘caring for others as we care for ourselves’ will take firm hold in the minds and hearts of everyone, and become a basic value and tenet of daily living.  I pray that with each such natural disaster (as there seem to be more and more of them) we really “get” this important lesson that results from our living planet’s communications.

Blessings to you all.
Dolly

Filed Under: Blog, Living Your Best Life, Meaning, Positive Thoughts & Inspired Ideas, Spirituality, Video Tagged With: , , , , ,

Having The Idea Is The Easy Part

June 24, 2010 By Dolly Garlo 2 Comments

In the Legacy Journal, we recently featured a Legacy Story about Dan West, an Ohio farmer with a good idea. How many times have you had a good idea?  Maybe you have them all the time. Maybe you stop yourself from having them, or doing anything with them because you think “Who am I to think I could do that?”

Who are you to think you can’t!? I like Marianne Williamson’s reasoning: “You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do.”

Kids get this.  They haven’t had the disabling fear, the sense of scarcity, or the experience of “not enough” that precedes thinking they can’t do something.  They figure they can do anything, then they become teenagers who are invincible and college students who are idealists! Until the adults in their lives advise them to be “sensible,” to grow up and get a good job. Maybe that’s you?  Someone who gave up passion for sensibility?  And maybe you even picked a job or a career course that you actually found interesting and challenging … until it wasn’t anymore.  When did you lose your own sense of possibility in life?

Want to read more? Click Here

Filed Under: Blog, Legacy Stories, Spirituality Tagged With: , , , , ,

Protecting Our Future

May 29, 2010 By Dolly Garlo Leave a Comment

The children are our future, the popular song tells us.  But as the fabulous Riane Eisler so accurately points out, why then do we pay our child care workers less than $10 per hour?  Where are our values really? Because that is where our money goes.  And isn’t it so often that our money goes out to pay for convenience? 

The pride of do it yourself, of crafting something by hand, and of eschewing waste with re-use, refurbishing or re-purposing has gone out the window with do more faster and even better, have someone else do it for you.  With just about everything.  When was the last time you grew your own food or churned your own butter – like so many did not too many generations ago?  When was the last time you bought your food from someone who still does these things, as opposed to from a more convenient factory farm to big box store arrangement …?  Heck, when was the last time you cooked your own meal — from scratch without opening any pre-mixed packages?

Two words come to my mind whenever I think about the future: clean and renewable.  Of course, I speak of energy production because it is the one thing behind our culture of convenience that seems the most at odds with my version of the future as an environmental activist – a truly healthy planet.  What if we all valued that a bit more and were a bit more concerned about how healthy the planet is that we WILL be leaving our children? 

How would what you do have to change?  Because it WILL take all of us.  This isn’t just about the utility companies or the government making decisions and changes to better our lives.  After all folks, we are the government and we are the utility companies as well as all the other businesses we patronize.  As Walt Kelly put it so well: “We have met the enemy … and he is us.”

How’s that you say?  Well, at least here in the U.S., we have the right and opportunity to vote the bozos in or vote the bozos out – or participate as one of them by being involved in government at any level.  That includes everything from writing to or calling your local, state and federal representatives all the way to, if you were born here, being the president (otherwise, the governor of some great state).  Isn’t that what we teach our children – that you, too, dear Johnny or Jayne, can grow up to be president of these United States? 

And you know that “market” they are always talking about?  Right again – that’s us, too.  We can vote with our dollars.  Instead of getting the lowest prices for the most amount of stuff, how about we cut back a little and maybe pay a little more for one or two items of higher quality: organic produce or fair trade clothing made from natural fibers not produced in some sweat shop overseas?  Can you say more with less?  And then how about using and reusing those items and making them go as far as we possibly can before they become disposable? Or even running our businesses in a more socially responsible way …?

(I’m thinking here of my dear husband, whose brimmed cotton canvas bucket hats become compass covers – he works on boats – when they no longer protect his lovely cranium … and then the shreds of what’s left of that natural cotton can be recycled.)

In my mind, we’ll have to gear up considerably to begin mastering alternative energy production methods that are, well … clean and renewable.  But I for one, think we are up to the task.  We, the voters and the market.  We will have to return to playing the role of citizens and conservationists, rather than consumers.  We have plenty of history and plenty of role models to teach us how … and we have technology to help.  At least until the oil runs out (if we don’t do something soon about that because we are really fouling this beautiful planet with what remains of the remains of dead dinosaurs).

If greenhouse gases – like auto exhaust and that from factory smoke stacks full of carbon dioxide and all the other chemicals we spew into the atmosphere – were a color rather than invisible, I think more people would notice and be appalled.  Hey, what if it looked like what’s spewing into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig and killing the marine life that will end up in our food chain?  (Oh, and not to leave out the children … their food chain too, since these toxics persist and are multiplied as big fish and big bird eat little fish …)

Well, if you’ve got the picture now … here’s the good news.

We can return quickly to being citizens and conservationists - proud contributors and preservationists – with just a little added consciousness (and conscientiousness).  Along with clean and renewable, I’d simply ask that you add these words to your daily vocabulary as you exercise greater awareness about every thought and every action you take, every moment of every day.  I full well know that while simple, this level of consciousness is not easy to master in practice.  So that’s why it becomes a practice. And that practice can become a movement.

While they may sound like small things, even seemingly insignificant (“who am I, I’m just one little guy”), these things all add up.  Shifting to this way of being and doing is actually a BIG job if you’ve ever tried it.  None of us will be perfect at it, but if you do it best as you can each step of the way with your life and work, and all the other people in government and industry do it best as they can each step of the way in their lives and work, or at least enough of us get it going so others can catch on and join in, then things can change significantly for the better.  And quickly … exponentially.

Then, if we use the intelligence and technology we have to focus on the production of clean and renewable energy sources, then we can be living in harmony with the planet thereby truly protecting our future.  (And no, nuclear is not among them until we can get beyond nuclear fission to nuclear fusion … and I think we can, eventually, if we’re consciously focused on that … but that’s much longer term, down the line.)

We’re at a point in a new era where this shift can happen.  It must happen.  As aptly noted recently by Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed, at the EEPC India, Export Award Presentation Function, we did not leave the stone age because we ran out of stones …

Another great quote further illustrates:

“Memo to oil apologists: When VHS supplanted Betamax, nobody shed a tear.  When word processing software replaced typewriters, nobody shrieked about a socialist revolution in the steno pool.  And when the jet engine replaced the propeller, there were no protests on the Mall in Washington about a vast supersonic conspiracy. Face it: Technology changes.  And the petroleum-based economy is dead. It’s built on antiquated technology that’s killing us and our planet.  Oil has served its purpose.  It was great while it lasted, at it got us to a point where we have the industrial and technological wherewhithal to chart a new course.  But we’re no longer primitives who need animal fat to light our evening meditations, or chase away evil spirits.”  ~ Martin Luz in HuffingtonPost.com

Indeed, the universe has been beautifully set up for us humans by putting the biggest nuclear reactor we’ll ever need perfectly positioned at the center of our solar system, which in my humble opinion at about 93,000 million miles away, is about as close to nuclear technology as we humans need to be at this stage in our evolution.  But beautifully, that sun-reactor shines on this planet all day every day.  All we have to do is rotate around and collect it, store it and share it. And the rotating is already being done for us! (Think about how big that part of the job would be if we had to do it …)

With the brilliant minds of our leaders in technology and elsewhere, this is totally doable.  Just ask the children who draw pictures of this concept every day in grade schools around the world, and who are learning how to play nicely in the sandbox with others and to share their toys (then pass them down to the younger kids …).  That sunshine is in everything we know as life that is on the planet today.  It is begging us to be more consciously engaged with it.

And so is the earth.  Since we cannot see the dinofuels we’ve gassified and put into the atmosphere, it is now giving us a glimpse of what we’re doing by pumping millions of gallons of pure black crude into our oceans (and we have underwater cameras so we can watch it happen with full awareness).  I say oceans rather that Gulf of Mexico here because in their fluid state, the tar balls that have been put into circulation can now go everywhere on the planet to be cleaned up by everyone – after we focus on the massive efforts needed currently on the U.S. Gulf Coast.

What’s one thing you can do each day to make a positive difference and help return us to a world that’s clean and renewable?  Whatever you do will be your contribution to protecting our future.  And whatever it is, it is a valuable contribution.

Blessings for your efforts, Dolly

Filed Under: Blog, Enlightened Leadership, Living Your Best Life, Spirituality Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,