There's a scene in the mockumentary film Spinal Tap where one of the band members is describing the special amps they use with volume that goes to eleven, rather than the usual ten.
Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?
Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?
Marty DiBergi: I don't know.
Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?
Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.
Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.
For so many of us, that's how we try to live our lives. Multi-tasking. Using technology to squeeze ever more into the nooks and crannies of our lives. Doing everything we can to turn up the volume to eleven.
And ultimately, that becomes mind-numbing. We don't have the time or ability to notice the subtle pleasures of life, our ability to perform at our best suffers, and the stress mounts ever higher.
In response to that, there is a slow movement afoot. Slow living. Slow food. Even slow towns. But how do you start injecting a dose of slow into your life if you're blazing along at top speed? For The Cloud Spotter's Guide author Gavin Pretor-Pinney, the answer is simple. Look up.
His book was a best seller in the UK last year and there is now a web site called The Cloud Appreciation Society. While the book is filled with fascinating facts and anecdotes about clouds, it's just as much an exercise in contemplation and rejection of the accepted goals of modern life, something that fits well into the slow life canon.
"The speed at which clouds develop and change is so gradual; it's quite the opposite of the pace of life in the city. By spending a little time contemplating clouds, you're really forced to slow down. It's a kind of meteorological meditation," he says.
"Most people walk around looking at the floor, but the whole act of looking upwards is almost like a yogic exercise; you broaden your perspective and open your vision."
If you want to do your best work, you need to give your mind time to "lie fallow." I love the idea of using cloud contemplation as a tool to help that happen. It's easy, it's simple, takes no special training and no special doo-dads to make it happen.
Do you ever have days (or weeks) where you wonder
what the hell just happened? Where life seems to go sideways despite your best
laid plans, leaving you with a bit of a just-hit-by-a-truck feeling?
I’ve been having that lately, and truthfully, it makes it
difficult to want to write shiny happy posts. So in the interest of
authenticity, today I’m jumping in and embracing the fact that I’ve been
feeling crappy. I don’t mean embracing it like, “Whee-ha! Ain’t it great to
feel crappy?!” I mean embracing the fact that getting stuck in the craposphere
is a part of the journey that everybody encounters from time to time.
The big question isn’t, “Why is this happening to me?”
Crapitude in some form happens to everybody along the way. It’s a part of life.
The question then is, “What do I do about it?”
Here are some thoughts of what works for me. I’d love to
hear what works for you as well.
Wallow in it
OK, I know this doesn’t seem like your standard happy
schmappy self-help advice, but sometimes I’m just in too deep to want to start
moving into a positive space. Sometimes the first step in getting out of the
craposphere is just letting myself wallow in the muck for a bit.
When I do that, eventually my wallowing starts to run out of
steam, and I get tired of it. Then I’m ready to move into a more positive and
proactive state.
Express gratitude
When you’re stuck in a crapospheric orbit, everything looks
bleak. It’s easy to paint the entire world with a broad negative brush.
Instead, spend some time focused on gratitude. What is good
in your life – big or small? What are you grateful for? Recently, my friend Nancy Solomon encouraged me to make a gratitude list to help start shifting my
focus. At the time I was still heavily into the wallow stage, and I didn’t
really want to get positive. So I
ignored her very good advice.
But she had planted a seed. As I started to tire of
wallowing, I began thinking, “Well, what am
I grateful for? What is good in my
life?” My brain started picking it up at random intervals, taking inventory of
all the really very positive things in my life. Bit by bit, color started
coming back into my monochrome picture.
Reach out
When you’re stuck in the craposphere, it’s no time to grit
your teeth and say, “I can do it myself.” Now is the time to reach out. You
need to talk to mission control back down on earth. Tell your friends and/or
family what’s going on, and what you’re feeling. Looking for a solution? Let
them know. Not ready to shift into problem-solving mode yet and just want to
blow off steam? Ask them to just listen and not try to solve it.
Take action
The craposphere feeds on inaction and a sense of helplessness.
The more helpless you feel, the stronger its hold on you. To break free of the
craposphere, do something. Take
action. Take steps that lead away from where you are towards where you want to
be.
Learn
Depending on the source of your launch into the craposphere, there may be something to learn from it. Rather than just bemoaning what happened, it can sometimes be helpful to spend some time exploring what you can learn from it, and how that better equips you to do things differently in the future.
Have healthy habits
It may be tempting to spend your time sitting on the couch,
stuffing your face with ice cream and chips and watching mindless television,
but that’s a recipe for locking yourself into the craposphere. Instead, look
for ways to get active and eat healthily.
Try incorporating things you actually like and enjoy. If I
had had to rely on going to the gym and riding a stationary bike, odds are good
I would have gotten no exercise of late. But I love inline skating and dancing.
They’re energizing and fun, even if I’m in a crappy mood.
On the food front, I recently discovered green smoothies.
Yesterday I made one with an apple, a couple cups of grapes, a bunch of kale, some
cucumber, and a few string beans (sounds vile, I know, but it’s actually really
good). Throw it all in the blender and, voila! A healthy, tasty snack.
The way I make it, it ends up with the consistency and taste
of apple sauce (most people make them more drink-like). I put it in the refrigerator
and snack on it throughout the day. Because it’s sweet and tastes good, I haven’t
had to force myself to get the fruits and veggies I need – I’ve just done it.
Focus on nature
The natural world can have a soothing, restorative effect. If you can,
spend some time out in nature. Go for a walk in the country. If that’s not an option,
find a park. You can even get a nature fix just by focusing on the plants and
animals around you in the city.
The other day as I was sitting on my couch, I decided to
focus on the two trees outside my window, enjoying a little sliver of nature. The windows were open, so I could feel
a breeze, and I could hear a variety of birds. As I did directed my attention there, I could feel a growing sense of tranquility.
Look for sources of inspiration
Look for books and movies that inspire you. Fill your mind
with positive stimuli. For me, books and movies about people who have overcome
great odds or who are taking action to make the world a better place (or both) are
always a good bet.
Let yourself feel
Finally, don’t stuff your feelings and pretend they’re not
there. Let yourself feel. Expressing your emotions can be cathartic, and a
vital step to leaving the craposphere behind and stepping back into life.
How about you? How do you break free of the craposphere?
If there's one piece of punctuation that has the potential to change the world, it's the question mark.
I'm a huge fan of the power of questions to solve problems, shine a
light on opportunities, shift your perspective, spark understanding,
and more.
Here's a fabulous list of questions from Scott Ginsberg to help you tap into the possibilities life has to offer. A lot of questions are workplace-related, but you can change
them to personal questions if you replace "you" with "I" (i.e., "how
can I...").
Check this list out. Bookmark it. And most importantly, use it.
Yesterday, riffing of an experience of almost falling while inline skating, I wrote about falling forward, and how it can actually help you stay upright and moving forward when you stumble in life.
Looking back, I realize that I only addressed part of the picture. Following the momentum of the fall is one element, but the other part is letting your feet scramble to stay under your weight.
If you don't keep your feet moving when you trip while skating, you'll ultimately go splat. It's the same in life.
I can't even count how many times I have done something, completely botched it (as I saw it, at least), and then felt too gun shy to try again. My feet stopped moving. I could do all the learning in the world from the experience, but without that continued movement, it was all moot.
On the other hand, I have no shortage of examples where I said, "Huh, well what if I do it this way? What if I try this? What if I take this approach?" And ultimately something good happened.
Next time you find yourself falling, ask yourself, "How do I need to move my feet? What do I need to do to make sure I keep moving forward and don't get bogged down? How can I make sure I don't go splat?"
I just came back from inline skating a few minutes ago. While I was warming up, I managed to catch my skate on a seed pod, which stopped the skate cold. I went pitching forward off center onto the grass, ran a couple feet up a small slope and back down to the pavement, and continued on my way, nice as you please.
I was completely out of control, and definitely falling, but everything turned out OK. Why? Because rather than trying to control my fall and catch my balance, I automatically followed my momentum forward and went where it was taking me. I fell forward and let me feet scramble to stay under the weight (OK, it helps that I used to play inline hockey and feel really comfortable on skates).
How, you may be wondering, is that relevant to M.A.P. Making? Because as you pursue your dreams, there will probably be times when you stumble, or hit the occasional unexpected bump. In short, it's likely that there will be times when you fall.
When you do, you can either resist it, fighting rigidly to stay upright, or you can fall forward.
A great example of the benefits of falling forward is how we react to failure. If you try something and it doesn't work, you have two choices. First, you can rigidly try to stay upright, insisting that you SHOULD succeed, and you SHOULDN'T fail, all the while beating yourself up for the fact that you're falling.
Or second, you can fall forward. "What happened here? What did I just learn? How can that learning feed my success? If I look back ten years from now, how did this just move me towards where I want to go?"
I've done both, and let me tell you, I far prefer the latter. Falling forward helps you maintain momentum towards your dreams. Sometimes falling is just a natural part of the heading down the path, while other times it means you need to adjust your focus. Regardless, if you fall forward, you'll keep moving ahead.
Rigidly insisting on staying upright and in control, on the other hand, will leave you with nothing but bruises.
Turning a big dream into reality isn't just a matter of deciding where you want to go and setting the controls to autopilot. It takes hard work and persistence. More than that, it takes a willingness to adapt on the fly as you encounter unexpected obstacles.
One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is running into an obstacle and letting it stop them, rather than saying, "OK, what are my options now?"
My friend Erden Eruc (pronounced air-DEN air-ROOCH) is a master at asking that question. He is currently on a quest to circumnavigate the globe by human power (by bike, foot, and ocean rowing boat), with a summit attempt on the highest peak of each of six continents in the process. He is also the founder of a non-profit called Around-n-Over, focused on using the journey to educate and inspire kids (I'm on the Around-n-Over board).
Since a first meeting about his dream in 2003, I have watched him pursue it with dogged tenacity. Nothing stops him. He has bicycled from Seattle to Alaska in the winter and climbed Mt. McKinley. He biked across the US. And he rowed across the Atlantic from Portugal to the Caribbean islands. Through it all, he has found ways to make the logistics (financial, bureaucratic, health, equipment, etc.) work in the face of what seems to me crazy odds.
One of the things I find most inspiring is the way he deals with obstacles, either finding ways around them, or - if they really are insurmountable obstacles - asking, "What's the spirit of what I'm trying to do," and adjusting his efforts accordingly.
Right now, Erden is 292 days into a row across the Pacific. His goal was to row from San Francisco to Brisbane, Australia. Unfortunately, unusual winds and currents have prevented him from being able to get south of the equator.
Recognizing that there was nothing he could do about where the winds and currents were allowing him to row, he came back to the spirit of his dream - a successful, safe, human-powered circumnavigation of the globe. As it became clear that Australia was not going to happen, he readjusted his sights, now aiming for the Phillipines en route to landfall on the mainland of Asia and ultimately on to Everest and beyond.
It would have been nice to reach Australia as was the
original plan with this long crossing, which is progressing mostly at
the whim of the Pacific. Yet a door closed creates other opportunities
to be pursued.
If Erden had a rigid attachment to his expectations of exactly how the journey needed to unfold, this leg of it would already be considered a failure. He didn't reach his goal - Australia. But by keeping it in the context of his bigger vision and the spirit of the dream, and adjusting his plans to adapt to reality, he continues to move forward towards ultimately making a dream reality.
Because his dream is so big, how it unfolds may end up looking completely different than the original plan (it has already changed numerous times along the way to adapt to various unforeseen challenges).
But that same bigness creates an enormous canvas for Erden to paint the spirit of the dream. In the end, it's not the logistics that matter, it's what the journey is about.
As I mentioned, Erden's non-profit, Around-n-Over, was founded with a focus on educating and inspiring kids to dream, believe, and achieve. You can see the education portal here.
If Erden's efforts inspire you, find out how you can support his journey and Around-n-Over here.
Are you a perfectionist? If you are, you've probably felt how it can put a damper on pursuing your dreams. Perfection is an elusive beast, the hunt for which inevitably leaves us feeling like we came up short.
One alternative that still lets you play in the neighborhood of perfection is "incremental excellence," or what this article calls "creeping excellence."
...Adopt the habit of creeping excellence in which you
ensure that everything you do is just a bit better than it was the last
time you did it. Leave everything better than when you found it.
Creeping excellence reduces the time and costs racked up by
perfectionism. Perfectionists spend 80% of their time and resources
perfecting the last 20% of everything.
I re-dubbed it incremental excellence (it just sounds better to me), but the idea is the same. Instead of an absolute perfection, focus on using everything you do as an opportunity to discover ways to do it even better.
Make sure you approach it with a positive attitude. "Where are my opportunities to learn and grow" can lead to an upward spiral. "What the hell did I do wrong this time" will take you in the opposite direction.
As I described in a previous post sparked by Lisa Haneberg's podcast interview with him, "Bill grew
up in what he describes as a very bad inner city community. Today, he
is the President and CEO of Manchester Bidwell Corporation, an organization that blends business and social change."
In the book, he describes one of the underlying keys to his transformation from "just another aimless kid, coasting through school, bored, and disengaged" to CEO of an organization that has been the subject of multiple Harvard Business School case studies and recipient of a MacArthur Foundation genius grant:
...one of the greatest obstacles blocking us from realizing that potential is that we believe, or are told, the things we want most passionately are impractical, unrealistic, or somehow beyond our reach. The story I have to share with you is the pursuit of one unrealistic, impractical, outrageous dream after another, and the remarkable consistency with which those dreams have come true. That didn't happen by magic. It happened because I refused to be limited by what conventional wisdom, or other people, or the cautious little voice we all have in our heads told me I couldn't do.
I love the idea of serial unrealistic, impractical, outrageous dreaming. Turning one dream after another into reality. It recognizes that, as we get closer to one dream, there's something else that seems way out there. Something else to make us stretch and inspire us.
And it always starts with where we are right now. Sometimes pursuing a dream means jumping in and starting to build it right away. Other times we first have to start filling in the hole we're standing in so we can stand up and scan the horizon. Sometimes the dream comes rushing up to meet us. Other times we have to diligently chip away at it to make it happen. Whatever the situation, it starts by taking steps.
What's your unrealistic, impractical, outrageous dream? What dreams are you saying no to because you don't see an obvious, readily attained path to get there?
What one step could you take in that direction today? What one step could you take this week? This month?
One of the recurring themes that fascinates me is the degree to which we create our reality by the way we perceive it. Two different people can have the exact same experience, and interpret it two completely different ways. Our perceptions can help us either create our dreams or build a wall between us and those dreams.
Take when things go wrong, for example. It happens to all of us. One person might try something, flop on his face, and come away convinced that there's no point in trying again. Another might try something, do the exact same face plant, and come away thinking, "Bummer...now I know what I can do better next time."
The outcomes for those two people of that same scenario are vastly different.
This comment from Tiger Woods in an ESPN article does a beautiful job of illustrating the "now I know what to do better" mindset...
"The greatest thing about tomorrow is, I will be better than I am
today...That's the beauty of
tomorrow. There is no such thing as a setback. The lessons I learn
today I will apply tomorrow, and I will be better."
I love that outlook. Everything that happens is potential fodder for a better tomorrow. Everything. What if that was the lens we all looked through? What if we really and truly could resist attaching a negative meaning to the bumps along the way and only focused on the positive insights and growth we're taking away from it?
I think that would blow the doors open for who we could become and what we could achieve.
Take a look at your own life. How can you use today to build a better tomorrow?
[Hat tip to WorkHappy for the link to the ESPN article]
Everything I talk about in this blog, and everything I focus on in my work, is ultimately aimed at one thing - catalyzing positive change. For me, that positive change starts at the individual level and ripples out.
An awareness of the issues is important, but too often the quest for awareness turns into little more than "bad news porn." This is wrong, and that is screwed up, and those people over there are doing such stupid things! We can get so caught up in what's wrong that we never focus our attention to what's really important - how to take the steps to create what's right.
In a nutshell, the 30% rule says we should spend no more than 30% of our time talking about what's wrong, and focus the remaining 70% on exploring, strategizing, and taking action.
On his blog recently, he described how it plays out in his own life:
I only spend 30% of my time talking about
problems – any more than that is disempowering (which is not my
intention). The other 70% of my time I focus on visions and solutions.
I refuse to pay attention to sources that spend
100% of their time talking about problems (the negative energy stream).
This includes highly credible, well researched, fact-filled sources
like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. We simply don’t have the time to
bathe in a constant stream of negativity.
I am encouraging others to follow the “30% Rule”.
WE SIMPLY DON’T HAVE TIME TO RUN AROUND TALKING ABOUT PROBLEMS INSTEAD
OF SOLUTIONS. It’s like running into a crowded theater yelling “Fire!”.
Instead of showing people to the exits, instead of coming in with a
fire hose or a fire extinguisher, you just keep yelling “Fire!”. Very
quickly, that becomes counterproductive. Someone said, “You don’t get
points for just predicting rain; you get points for building an ark.”
I love this mindset, whether we are thinking about positive change that needs to be made in the world around us, or changes we need to make in our own lives. Nothing happens by focusing entirely on the problem. Positive change happens when we ask ourselves, OK, so what do I do about it? And then start taking action.
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