Since I went through the process of converting my business into a location independent business about a year ago, I’ve been hanging out a fair bit in the lifestyle design community, learning a lot from other people who’ve been working in a location independent way for a long time, and following many of the practicing and aspiring location independent and “unconventional living” discussions on various blogs. And as a newbie to the online world, I’ve learned loads about practical strategies for making a location independent business possible, met plenty of interesting adventurers, made many new friends and had my dream machine stimulated in a big way by seeing, reading and hearing about the choices other people are making. All of this has extended my perspectives on what’s possible. Don’t you love it when that happens!?
Welcome!
This site and my Bottom-line Bookclub are full of resources to help you to learn and change more easily and elegantly... so you can thrive in these fast-paced, high-information, high-change times and become more of the person you want to be..
First time here?
Then I suggest you start by reading more about who I work with, and if that's you, then stick around and let's get to know each other better... browse the articles, sign up for the blog RSS feed, get my FREE e-course, listen to one of my recent teleclasses, or connect with me on Twitter.
- Cath Duncan, Resource Miner & Agile Living Strategist
A big, warm welcome to those of you who are coming over from Lateral Action where my guest post, Switch Off Your Social Self - Switch on Your Creativity” was featured. Creating is central to Agile Living, so I write a lot about stuff related to becoming more creative, bringing your creation and contribution into the world and overcoming the resistance and fear that often accompanies the creative process.
What’s Agile Living all about?
The essence of agile living is about developing the skills and thinking styles to move, learn and change easily and elegantly in response to our high-change world, and to creatively improvise and use whatever resources you have within you and around you right now to create more of what you love in the world.
I’ve been doing loads of unpacking, playing and creative meandering about the idea of Agile Living, dealing with fear, making your contribution in spite of the risks, doing meaningful work, feeling the way you want to feel, and much, much more over the past few months. And I realized that, although I get a bunch of emails from people saying, “Wow, I really resonate with the whole idea of Agile living,” I really haven’t done much in the way of actually explaining on this blog what Agile Living is all about. Some of my creative meandering recently has involved riffing with Jamie Smart and some of our other team members while building in the Eastern Cape (admittedly, the potent varnish played a part in stimulating our creativity at times!), and I wanted to share some of those conversations - in particular some of my thinking on what Agile Living means for me.
We had such a great bunch of people on the building team at Zithulele and one of the things I most enjoyed about the project was the chats we had about life, the universe and everything. And since I’ve followed Jamie’s work for 5 or 6 years now, I really enjoyed picking his brain on some of the stuff about goal-setting and other personal development questions that I’ve had on my mind lately. So we decided to record some of that conversation for you while we were in Zithulele, so you could get in on it too. Here goes…
One of the things I enjoyed most about our recent volunteer building project in the Eastern Cape was the opportunities for me to learn more about myself, to learn more about collaboration and co-creation, and to push my mental, emotional and physical agility a little further.
Africa is a strange and complex and beautiful place and life in Africa is certainly very, very different to the average lifestyle in the Western developed world. And while I can’t say that we had a truly authentic African experience (ours was much, much more comfortable!), as we moved closer to experiencing the African lifestyle, and further from our own comfort zones and what’s familiar to us, each of us in the team had the opportunity to discover how we deal with difference, physical discomfort, inconvenience and situations where life isn’t going as we think it should and people aren’t behaving as we think they should.
Just a quickie: while I’m away, working on our building project in the Eastern Cape, I’m also taking some time to reflect on this previous year and to set my focus areas for 2010. I want to make sure I put my energies into serving you in the ways that are most relevant to where you’re at, so I’d love to hear from you… how can I best serve you in 2010?
Would you take a few minutes to quickly let me know where you’re at and what you’d like to see more of at Mine Your Resources and the Bottom-line Bookclub next year?
Click here to complete the survey (about 6 minutes)
Thanks so much. Here’s wishing you all the best in your ventures and adventures this year.
