Calling All Voices: Four Questions To Change Your Life and Change The World

1. What delights you and brings you alive?
2. What breaks your heart?
3. What does healing look like?
4. What one life-affirming action will you do beautifully and consistently, with love?

These four questions, conceived by my Real Speaking teacher Gail Larsen, powerfully and succinctly capture the process of life coaching and personal transformation. They go to the heart of our own truth, and call us to look with clear eyes at what is etched in our souls.

For most of us, there is at least one of these questions we’ve been avoiding for most of our lives. It could be any one of them. Perhaps we have not allowed ourselves to want what we want, to feel the joy of being fully alive. Or maybe we have masked ourselves with a facade of “perkiness” and images of “happiness” which belie the deep caverns of unexpressed pain in our hearts. Even if we have done the work of facing our deepest truths, we can get lost there if we never look beyond these current realities into a vision of what our lives could be. And finally, all the dreaming and scheming in the world is no substitute for taking actions which are aligned with the truths we have uncovered and pointed in the direction of our brightest visions.

Is it really OK to have fun?

From solitude to oneness

Acknowledgment

I’m sitting here in a moment of deep acknowledgment. I just listened to the recording of my interview with Susanna Liller, creator of The Heroine’s Journey. It’s been such a hectic week of travel, ceremonies, meeting new people, taking some risks, and steeping myself in creative inspiration, that I haven’t had sufficient space and time to acknowledge myself along the way.

I finally opened the email and listened to the file containing the 50 minutes of conversation with Susanna and her community of heroines. I was both surprised and filled with pride to hear the clarity and power in my own voice.

Sometimes we forget to step back and listen to ourselves. We forget to enjoy who we are.

Listen to the interview here.

Going upstream

There’s a certain exhaustion with going against the grain. I am feeling that sensation at my core right now, and trying to find the way to float along with the current. I keep asking, “What am I fighting?” It’s not like I”m trying to fight anything. But the idea that there is “something wrong” with me, my life, my past, my future…it keeps me in a perpetual state of hovering. I shouldn’t say “perpetual” since I’ve felt this way for only a few moments. I like to overdramatize.

This is not an unfamiliar feeling. It feels like I’ve always felt. Going against the grain. Others I’ve known who have worn their against-the-grain-ness on their sleeves in the form of different-colored hair, pierced body parts, tattoos, or “alterna-clothing” — and I’m talking about the high school sense of the word “different” — manage to have at least the appearance of fitting in. They wear the signature look of someone who is going against the grain. Funny that it’s a very identifiable style that says, “I’m not one of the “in” crowd.” In other words, it signifies belonging to another crowd – the non-conformers.

A lesson on living in the moment

Remember that Ignite talk that I was so jazzed about doing earlier this month? Well, it went GREAT. I felt SO good while I was preparing for it, while I was giving the talk, and right afterwards.

But part of me was living in the future, waiting expectantly for the video to be embedded on the Ignite website, so that I could broadcast it to all my friends who are scattered around the world, and use it as marketing on my website.

Well, today the email I was waiting for FINALLY arrived. The videos were released! There was a disclaimer that the “quality of the videos for speakers not standing behind the podium was not as we expected”. I wondered how far below expectations we were talking about.

FUN first drafts

I just sent off the final version of my slides for my upcoming Ignite Bay Area talk. I have to say that it was such a fun process…really! About a month ago, when I found out I was selected, I was methodical in creating a huge white board with sticky notes containing all the “turtle steps” that would get me to the Wildly Improbable Goal of delivering my talk in front of an audience of strangers on March 2nd.

First there was the question of how to get everything to fit in 20 slides and 5 minutes. No, actually, first there was the question of scheduling an Open House where I would try to gather a few of my friends (or anyone who would agree to come) to watch me give a “practice” run of the talk, in exchange for some free food and great ambience in my new studio.

OK, so the date was scheduled. Now how was I going to let everyone know? A newsletter, of course! Except it had been four or more years since I’d last sent out a newsletter, so my contacts were out of date, and I hadn’t announced formally that I had changed the focus of my business and stopped teaching violin. What a great opportunity!

And while I was at it, why not put out a schedule of events in March too? Kill three birds with one stone, you know? Be efficient! All of these plans came out of the single idea that I was going to give a 5-minute talk in San Francisco.

The many ways to say, “You CAN do it!”

Does all the woo-woo, positive psychology, self-help talk make you feel a little queasy or, at best, skeptical? Does an email with the subject line, “You can do it!”, make you want to “Report spam” faster than you can hit “Delete”?

When I worked with parents and their children in a coaching/teaching environment, I learned that there are many ways we adults try to encourage our kids. We all have a default style of communication that is a product of the various influences in our lives – our own parents, our many teachers, our older siblings, our bosses, our mentors, or even a conglomeration of all the ways we DON’T want to be like any of those people. What I’ve learned about effective coaching I first saw by watching children who were actually allowed to learn. It’s simple: all a kid wants is to know what it feels like to try, and to know that they’ll be OK if they fail. If you give them those two things, they’ll try over and over again with great enthusiasm, and pretty soon (or maybe a lot later) they will succeed.

The second half of this – letting them know they are OK even if they fail while trying – is tricky. I saw so many adults sit beside their child and just watch, hands folded across their chest, while their child tried, making no attempt to help, and remaining motionless in response to anything the child did. Sure, they were “there”, but I would sometimes wonder if they were actually in the same room as we were. I’ve also seen the other end of the spectrum, where a parent would literally lunge forward and want to take over, rather than allow their child to try something that they might not “get” on the first attempt. They preferred not to witness a failure than to allow the child to try.

I never figured out a way to coach parents to see their own tendencies in these situations. First of all, I was too busy trying to do my job coaching, witnessing, and encouraging the child. Second of all, I was frozen in astonishment at some of the parents’ behavior, not knowing how to address these things in the time allotted, or in front of the child.

These are, of course, excuses. The truth is I did not know how to hold the space for adults to really open up to what was going on. In some ways, it takes more skill and more patience to get an adult to open up than it does for a child.

A crayon speaks

While in Santa Fe for a training workshop this January, one of the exercises we did involved drawing a crayon from a box of 64, whose color spoke to us. Then we were asked to write, using the voice of the color to speak about itself. I drew the color “carnation pink”.

Here is what the crayon had to say:

“I am carnation pink. 

Drug of choice

When I was in medical school, “drug of choice” was a term used to refer to the most widely accepted medicine (pill, injection, whatever) for a particular condition. There were usually alternatives if patients were allergic or the drug of choice was not available. As a medical student, you were golden if you could immediately name the drug of choice for a given situation when quizzed by one of the doctors.

I now realize that for most of my life I’ve been high on my drug of choice – the drug of approval. It’s been an easy drug to become dependent on without even knowing it. There are plenty of systems in our society that are set up to get us hooked on the smiles and impressed looks on Other People’s faces when we do something that they approve of. It starts as soon as we are born. Our parents and other caretakers are our first encounter with what it takes to get approval. Then, when we’re handed off to the next big system of socialization – school – we quickly learn exactly what we need to do to earn approval. It comes in various forms – attention from the teacher, gold stars, stickers on our hands, nice comments written at the top of our homework, maybe a “Student of the Year” prize at the end-of-the-year assembly, or a row of “A”s on our report card. We adapt our behavior to this system. Some, like me, find that getting all the approval from the system is much easier than expressing what’s real. Starting in first grade, the reality was that I felt like an outsider in almost every way. Not just the fact that I was the only ethnic minority in my entire elementary school class for many years. Or the fact that I felt embarrassed that I couldn’t say in English the names of the things I had eaten for dinner most nights, when I was asked the next day at school. Or the fact that sometimes my mom would pick me up from school and say things to me in Chinese in front of my friends, which further highlighted the gaps between what I experienced at home and what was being presented to me in the great system of American socialization – public school. I just felt both an incredible longing to fit in, as well as a deep knowledge that I never would.