I just wanted to give you a quick heads-up on an upcoming change with my shoppingcart that most of you will be very happy about. Some of you have been bugging me to sort this out for ages! Here’s the Twitter summary: I’m switching my shopping cart over to USD and increasing the Bottom-line Bookclub [...]
Here’s an example of a guy discarding the traditional boxes and ladders and inventing his “thing” – doing, being and creating what he loves. I often talk about how art-making is a metaphor for living. I found this video of a sand artist and I just love, love, love the metaphors for living within his art-making process. Check it out…
I had a great Twitter chat with the ever-gentle and wise Mark Silver from Heart of Business yesterday. It kicked off when I mentioned that I’d spoken to a book promoter and their advice was to write your book through your blog to grow your tribe before you approach a publisher – publishers just want to know how big your tribe is when they’re considering your book proposal. Mark commented on this and we got into a discussion about connection and creativity and the tension between individual and community that creators – and any leaders, I believe – must manage.
I asked Mark “Do u think highly introverted writers will become obsolete? There’s so much connection required to get your writing read…” and Mark took it deeper with: “I wonder if introversion is a reaction to the deep need for compassion and gentleness that is missing from our culture.” And then he asked me what I thought was going on with the whole introversion and individual/ community tension thing in the creative process. We had a great discussion, and I wanted to share some of my thoughts and take-aways on this with you, because balancing individual and community is something we’re all faced with as creators and leaders and it’s tricky. I know I sure find it tricky.
I got so much joy out of this article – an interview with the Mayor of Johannesburg, Amos Masondo, about Johannesburg’s readiness for the World Cup Soccer in June 2010.
Give it a quick read and notice what thoughts and feelings come to mind for you first…
I’m sure you’ve had one of these sorts of dreams (actually nightmares) before… a really vivid dream that’s really scary, and you wake up and take a few moments to realize that it was just a nightmare. And then you sigh in relief that it wasn’t real. But the vivid-ness of the dream stays with you throughout the day, with flashbacks of feelings and images from the dream popping into your mind throughout the day.
And it’s gonna be you.
That’s the truth of it. And yet we fight ourselves all the time. We force ourselves to be in relationships and work roles that constrain our Essential Selves, we make ourselves do stuff we loathe doing because a part of ourselves is concerned with what everyone else thinks about us, we deny ourselves pleasure and punish ourselves with guilt, and we berate ourselves with our unkind self-talk. All of this makes for internal conflict, a war inside, and the longer the war goes on, the more confused we feel about who we really are and what we really want in life.
Your divided Self
Martha Beck has written about a really useful model of the self as two parts – an Essential Self and a Social Self. Your Essential Self is the part of you that’s spontaneous and creative and playful, the part that knows what’s most important to you. Your Social Self is the part of you that developed since the day you were born, taking in the rules of the tribe and working hard to make sure that you’re safe by making your follow the rules of the tribe and avoid any threats. Your Social Self wants you to be safe, and your Essential Self wants you to be happy. When you feel conflicted, it’s because your Social Self is pulling you away from the direction your Essential Self is wanting you to take, and there’s a little war going on between the part that wants you to be happy and the part that wants you to be safe.
