what are you paying attention to?

I've been watching the Olympics lately, and I have to say, I feel both inspired and lazy.  Inspired, obviously, because these are the world's top athletes demonstrating their skills in the most intense competition in the world.  And lazy, obviously, because I'm sitting on my couch eating popcorn and cheese and not swimming/running/jumping/making my horse dance/etc.

But it makes me think -- so many people spend so much time watching television, and how often are they truly inspired?  I'm not.  I mean, I watch the Biggest Loser, so I'll admit that my tastes run towards the self-improvement, but does Gordon Ramsay yelling at a bunch of aspiring chefs make me feel tingly and excited?  Does watching the BAU chase after serial killers make me proud of myself? No -- in fact it stresses me out.  But, like a train wreck, I'm drawn back to it week after week.

(Don't judge.  You have some equally horrendous guilty pleasures.  And if you don't, well, I have some popcorn and cheese you can eat and a horse you can make dance.)

The same thing goes for music.  I noticed that my running music, last time I ran, went like this:

Angry song
Angry song
Angry song
Fun, Upbeat song

Angry song
Angry song
Angry song
Fun, Upbeat song

And I have to say, that run was harder.  Maybe it was the humidity, maybe it was the popcorn and cheese, I don't know.  But it does make me wonder -- should I be surrounding myself with more inspiring and loving sensory input?  Or is the impact the same if I'm listening to Evanescence as when I'm listening to Miley Cyrus?

(I told you, don't judge.  They're both equally awful.)

There's something to this, I think -- lots of folks believe that your physical surroundings (i.e., that pile of dishes in your sink, Kate) is a reflection of your inner mental state.  The more clutter in the hall, the more stuff that's unresolved in your head.  So let's turn this around:  if you're putting visual clutter and noise into your "hall," isn't that going to have an impact on your head?

Maybe, maybe not.  Try it.  See if watching only uplifting shows (no more Law & Order SVU for you, Sandberg) makes you feel better.  Watch what impact your music choices have.  And decide for yourself.

As for me?  I'm going to eat more popcorn and watch Usain Bolt again.

what I learned from Stephen Covey

Stephen Covey, one of the founding members of Franklin Covey (the time management people), a motivational speaker, and the author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (among others) died yesterday.  He innovated the field of leadership studies and contributed a huge handful of powerful principles that have inspired leaders for generations.  There are thousands of lessons I could quote from him, but what has stuck with me most continuously is this:

"The key is not to prioritize what's on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities."

To demonstrate this, imagine that you have two bowls of exactly the same size that represent your life.  One is full of rocks, and the other is mostly full of sand.  The rocks are your major priorities -- family, friends, exercise, client work, etc.  The grains of sand are all the little things you do that add up over the course of the day -- emails, errands, laundry, dishes, diapers, TV, etc.  Your task is to combine the rocks and the sand into one container, to make sure you're getting everything you want out of life.  However, if you put the sand in first, the rocks won't fit.  You have to put the rocks in first, and then pour the sand around them.

Most of us have this backwards.  We have the major commitments and desires, but we let day-to-day life overwhelm and overtake us.  We regularly and continually put the sand in first.

The video below is old and, arguably, corny.  But it demonstrates this principle so clearly that I had to include it.

  

The first step is to identify your rocks -- your priorities.  Then to add them to your schedule in such a way that they really ARE priorities.  Then let your life fill in around them.  As the video shows, it will anyway.

what I learned from the feds

You wouldn't know it just by looking at me, but I am currently on jury duty.

Ok, well, not active jury duty.  Standby jury duty.

I have been assigned an attractive eight-digit number and am required to call an 800 number every night for two weeks to see if they need me to report the next day.  Many people I tell say that this is so frustrating and awful, and, really, I see it as a win -- they could call me and require me to sit there every day for two weeks.

So I called the Friday before I was due to serve and the friendly voice on the phone said that if the first three letters of my last name were "S-A-N" then I was to report to the federal courthouse in Brooklyn.

Doing my civic duty.

I rolled up to the courthouse at about 8:25, as we were required under penalty of death and/or dismemberment to be there by 8:30.  I checked in my mobile devices (both work and play) and headed upstairs with two, thick Philippa Gregory novels.  At around 9:15 a woman came out and gave us a very sneaky speech about how she knows everyone hates jury duty and it's not her fault so please don't yell at her and don't worry if you're in the bathroom when your name is called because they'll keep calling it.

And then we waited.  And read.  And waited.  And tested the theory about your name being called in the bathroom.

I could go on for days about how thrilling it was, sitting in the overly air-conditioned room, waiting for something to happen, or how annoying it was to see Ms. Lateypants roll in around 10:30 and not get yelled at, but that's not my point.  I had vacation coming up later that week (for July 4th) and I did NOT want to be at jury duty instead of on vacation.  Miss work?  Sure, no problem.  Miss squishing my little nephews?  Think again.

At a certain point, people around me started freaking out about the fact that we were on a two-week standby.  "I have a doctor's appointment."  "I have to pick up my mother at the airport."  "I have to travel for work."  I wanted to stand up and scream, "I HAVE TO GO ON VACATION!" but thought maybe that was inappropriate.

I came up with a plan:  if I was called for Thursday, I would tell them I had a doctor's appointment and couldn't be there.  I was ready with the details of my extravagant lie -- I was seeing Dr. Tyler Andrews* in Connecticut who was an endocrinologist (apparently they're very hard to get appointments with -- who knew?).  I was starting to get antsy and panicky, when I realized there was nothing I could do about whether or not they called me.  I would just have to burn that bridge when I got there.

So I just waited.  I called Monday night to see if they needed me Tuesday -- nope.  I called Tuesday night to see if I would have to schedule that appointment, but no, they didn't need me.  Thursday night I called, and they didn't need me Friday, either.

(See where I'm going with this now?)

The feds taught me that sometimes it's not worth stressing about something you can't control.  Have a plan, be open and ready for what you don't want, and then Let. It. Go.  Sitting there (like Mr. Chattypants in the back of the room) worrying and fuming about whether or not I'd have to give up my vacation was just going to a) be annoying and b) cause me stress it turns out I wouldn't need to feel.

"Isn't that the whole point?" a friend of mine recently asked me.  "You realize there are things you can't control and then you just don't bother trying to control them."

Jury duty is just one of those things.

*both of my nephews' names

making peace with peanut butter

I  confess: I love peanut butter with a fierce, burning love that should probably be reserved for a soul mate, or, you know, a person (or a pet – you know, something that can love me back). The sweet saltiness, the salty sweetness. Not even its being one of the few foods that can’t be dislodged by the Heimlich maneuver will dissuade me from my faith in its perfection.
I. Love. Peanut Butter.
Now, I’m sure you’re thinking “Kate, that’s not burning love, that’s food obsession.” But you’re wrong! I mean, it’s not like I stay up every night, dreaming of peanut better. And I don’t bathe in it (much) or talk about it (daily) or carry pictures of it in my wallet (though that’s not a bad idea). I’m not nuts! (heh heh)

It’s just that, up until about six weeks ago, if there was peanut butter in my house, I would consume it. Rapidly. By the spoonful. While standing next to the pantry door. Drooling. (It was not pretty.)

So I never bought peanut butter. Safer to just not have it in the house than to risk the 47,000 calories I was likely to consume in a sitting, like I did whenever visiting my mother, who, surprisingly, doesn’t have the same obsession. (My sister, though, suffers the same compulsion so perhaps it comes from my father’s side...)

I started reading a book called “Intuitive Eating” by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch that talked about the dieting mentality and how food restriction doesn’t work. “When you rigidly limit the amount of food you are allowed to eat,” they wrote, “it usually sets you up to crave larger quantities of that very food.” So by not having peanut butter in the house, I was setting myself up for hours of drooling next to the pantry door.

Their advice? Slowly re-introduce any foods you have restricted and teach yourself that you are allowed to have them. Reset your inner calibration so that you can appreciate the food for what it is, and not for all the emotional baggage that saying no to it has meant. For me, the first choice was, of course, peanut butter.

I warily bought a jar of natural (because it’s the most deliciousest kind) and kept it in the cabinet. The first week? It was bad. I ate a lot of peanut butter. And the second week, too. The third week started to taper off a bit, because, let’s be honest, at least half the jar was gone, and the fourth week it dropped off even more. By the fifth and sixth weeks, there were maybe two or three spooonfuls just sitting in the jar, smiling at me.

I call that a success! A jar of peanut butter has never lasted six weeks in my house before!

So what did I learn? That yes, I go to peanut butter for comfort. And I go there because I’m not usually allowed to go there, so it makes me feel special. But once I could have it any time I wanted, some of the comfort left. I started to see it as a fuel. A delicious fuel, don’t get me wrong, but one that was in service of me, not the master of me.

Can I take this experiment to the next level and do it with ice cream? I’m not sure. In truth, it takes a lot of faith, and a willingness to put on a little weight in the service of making peace. And given that it’s hot AND bathing suit season, I may hold off on this experiment until December. But I’ve taken the message to heart – there’s nothing I can’t eat. And when I watch people around me dieting and worrying about what they eat, I wonder if they, too, will sometime soon, find themselves next to the pantry door, overeating in an effort to feel special.

on trust and independence

I've been thinking about trust a lot lately and was surfing the internet to see if anyone else had crystallized the link between independence and trust that is starting to form in my brain.  My search results were mostly banks and insurance companies and (unfortunately) not usable quotes or nuggets of genius, so I was disappointed.  But the more I thought about it, the more that actually made perfect sense.

As I see it, there is an inverse relationship between trust and independence.  The more independent I am, the less I have to trust others.  And the less I have to trust others, the more independent I am.  This may be exactly what the banks and insurance companies have already realized -- people want trust AND independence.  They want to be able to trust when they need to, but to stay independent when they don't.  Because trusting other people is risky, and independence, while lonely, means never getting your heart broken.

I think of trust like climbing up a tree -- I only climb as high as the branches where I know that when I jump, I'll land on my feet.  Which is to say, I only trust people as far as I can take care of myself.  So it's not really trusting them much at all.  Asking someone to be there for you when you can, in all reality, take care of yourself is like a safety net over an air cushion -- nice, but extra.  I've gotten so good at taking care of myself that I can climb pretty high up in the tree, so I may seem really trusting, but when it comes to the moment of faith, I nestle one branch below or leave the tree entirely.

The problem is, I don't think this is working.

In my effort to be self-reliant, I have atrophied my trust muscles.  Out of a fear of being too needy, I have choked off my ability to effectively need others at all.  And this is sending mixed signals -- "I trust you, but I don't need you."  

I don't have a quick solution to this situation.  But I am slowly finding ways of trusting other people, and scaling back my own need and willingness to take care of everything myself.  Which, in and of itself, is a step towards trust.

"the best years of our lives are not behind us"

A few weeks ago, an article from the Yale Daily News made the rounds on Facebook.  A young, talented writer had some encouraging words about her experience at Yale that I think apply to us all, no matter how young or old we are, no matter whether we went to Yale or didn't.  She says:

But let us get one thing straight: the best years of our lives are not behind us. They’re part of us and they are set for repetition as we grow up and move to New York and away from New York and wish we did or didn’t live in New York. I plan on having parties when I’m 30. I plan on having fun when I’m old. Any notion of THE BEST years comes from clichéd “should haves...” “if I’d...” “wish I’d...”

Of course, there are things we wished we did: our readings, that boy across the hall. We’re our own hardest critics and it’s easy to let ourselves down. Sleeping too late. Procrastinating. Cutting corners. More than once I’ve looked back on my High School self and thought: how did I do that? How did I work so hard? Our private insecurities follow us and will always follow us.

But the thing is, we’re all like that. Nobody wakes up when they want to. Nobody did all of their reading (except maybe the crazy people who win the prizes…) We have these impossibly high standards and we’ll probably never live up to our perfect fantasies of our future selves. But I feel like that’s okay.

Marina Keegan, 22, was set to graduate from college with more wisdom than some of us attain by 122.  Unfortunately, she never made it there, as she died in a car crash just days before commencement.   Her writing (which you can read the rest of here) is so full of hope, of encouragement, and stands as a reminder to the rest of us that it's never to late to do something about your dream.  To find those people who make up your web and be grateful for them every day.  And to spend more time with the boy across the hall and less time procrastinating.

give yourself permission for your passion

So many of my clients are incredibly creative.  They have great ideas, spend time thinking about them, planning for them, and dreaming about executing them, but when it comes time to actually make it happen, something always gets in the way. 

I work with dancers, writers, musicians, actors, directors, mothers, teachers, strategists, lawyers, business people, you name it.  I believe creativity is not a what, it's a how.  It's not the content of your job, it's how you execute it.  It's not the title that you have, it's the passion you bring to everything you do (and not just work).

So, given that I work with such fabulously imaginative people, why aren't they all -- and why aren't we all, every one of us -- totally fulfilled, living out our dreams?  Because when it comes time to do something about our dreams, there is very often a voice that says "it's not good enough" or "I don't deserve it."

To that voice I say (fairly unceremoniously), "I appreciate that you're trying to protect me, but now if you wouldn't mind, please shutthefuckupthankyouverymuch."

There is no permission slip for passion.  There is no rule that says you have to be accepted for what you do.  Think about the books you remember -- not all of them are the greatest books you've ever read.  In fact, some are the absolute crappiest books you've read, which is why you remember them. 

One of my favorite creative geniuses, Ira Glass, has been famously quoted as saying, "All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”


Give yourself permission to write your stories, sing your songs, dance your dances, and dream your dreams.  If you don't, who will?