We are our entourage

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Choosing your mental diet

My blog has moved to http://frameshiftcoaching.wordpress.com

Please update your feeds and links!

Grumbling, part 4: Appreciation, the anti-grumble

My blog has moved to http://frameshiftcoaching.wordpress.com

Grumbling, part 3: Cleaning up grumbles with others

You can see this post at my new FrameShift Coaching Wordpress site. Please update your links!

Taking on BIG this month

Hello! This month, I have decided that it's time for me to go BIGGER. Reach higher, and shoot for goals that are exciting and a little scary. Wanna join me? What is a goal that, if you reached it in September, would absolutely knock your socks off?

One of my goals is to grow my blog even bigger. So here's what I'm taking on:

1. Build a new-and-improved blog site. I've already done this one, and here it is:

http://frameshiftcoaching.wordpress.com

Yes, I never thought I'd willingly leave a Google-owned product, but here I am. Wordpress rocks. So please update your links to my blog accordingly!

2. Double my blog readership! For this one, I'm going to need YOUR help. Is there anyone you know who would enjoy reading my blog? Anyone who could benefit from it? Send them the link! Do you have a website on which you could put a link to my blog? Please link it! I must confess that it is a little scary for me to ask for your help like this, but as the saying goes:

The great happiness lie on the other side of the great fears

Thank you, in advance, for your help with my quest to go BIG!

What is your big September goal? I'd like to invite you to share your goal in a comment to this blogpost. It's one thing to entertain a goal in your head, and quite another to share it, risk being vulnerable, and let other people support you in your quest. Please share your big goal with us, and use the new blog site to do it!

Grumbling, part 2: Until you walk a mile...

Two blogs ago, I talked about how grumbling and complaining can be poisonous. Today, I'm going to talk about how easy it is to complain, and how hard it is to do what you're complaining about.

The other day, my friend Jennifer was talking about her mother, and complained that "my mother is in her late 60s, and still trying to find herself. She's making these little sculptures in a desperate attempt to connect. It's pretty sad." It was easy for Jennifer to sit back and take pot shots at her mother's art, or her mother's attempts at self-expression. But when charged with the task of expressing herself through art, Jennifer freaked out. What if it looks stupid? What if people judge what I paint? What if it's not good enough? If the painting is supposed to be a self-expression, and it sucks, what does that say about me? Argh! She made that painting, and emerged with a newly-found appreciation for her mother's courage to express herself through art.

It's really easy to complain someone else who is putting themselves out there, but instead of criticizing, shouldn't we be admiring their courage? It's not as easy as it looks.

If you walk around with this mentality, it's a lot easier to fill you days with love and appreciation. That performer on the subway? Wow, what courage to play in front of a crowd of strangers. A less-than-eloquent Sarah Palin interview? Yes, maybe she should have reviewed her facts a bit more beforehand, but what guts it must take to go on national TV. How cool. How many of us have dared to be in her position?

Image courtesy of http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/

On work and quality

My bike Roland was stolen last year. I loved this bike: it was my mother's before me, older than I was, and four sizes too big, but I didn't care. He was a great bike.

In the past month, I decided that I wanted to get a new bike. And I started noticing that, seemingly everywhere I went, there were bikes parked on the street with "For Sale" signs on them. Some of them looked pretty good: nice bikes, reasonably priced. But I was reluctant to take the next step and contact the owners about the bikes. It was like pulling teeth, and made me feel all angsty. I tried wildly to find excuses for not pursuing the bikes: see that patch of rust on the wheel? The frame is probably a tad too small. The tires look flat. On and on.

So yesterday, after passing by yet another bike for sale, it hit me what was going on. I have a theory about the way the world works, that goes like this:

If you work hard, then you will reap nice rewards

That sounds like a pretty good theory to live by. The industrious ant storing up food for the winter, and such. But I have also developed a corollary to this theory:

If something comes to me with little work, it must be flawed.

Interesting. So I am essentially equating value with how much work I put in. This was why I didn't want to pursue the bikes for sale on the street, because what could be easier than just picking up a bike off the street on the way to the coffee shop? In order to find a quality bike, I felt I needed to search Craigslist, compare at least 10 bikes, visit them, negotiate, think about it... make the whole thing a huge ordeal. THEN I would find a quality bike. But picking one up off the street couldn't possibly result in my obtaining a quality bike.

Of course, this is a silly theory. There is no reason those bikes on the street couldn't be quality bikes. Who says I need to go through a huge ordeal in order to find something great?

So the lesson I learned here is that I need to dump the theory that:

I need to go through a huge ordeal in order to find quality

And replace it with a theory that works better for me. How about this one:

Quality isn't necessarily correlated with ordeal size.

So I tested out that last bike on the street, and guess what? Now I have a bike. No ordeal required :)

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