So far I’ve looked at some highrise apartments and suburbia style houses, and haven’t found anything I’m attracted to yet. Last night I explored downtown and I enjoyed the walkable neighborhood and the cafes, so that’s where I’m going to go look next. :-)
I’m moving to Vegas!
I think of Vegas as being like a space station: of course Vegas doesn’t have to manufacture its own oxygen, but everything else is built and created by hand. Vegas is as we decided to make it be (for better or worse!) If we imagine building a space station using an asteroid for raw materials, we’ll have something quite similar to the situation Vegas was built in: lots of rock, a blazing amount of sunlight, and not much else. And we’ll face the same choices: what we create will be what we decide to create. So what do we want?
The part that I was hesitant about when I thought of moving to Vegas is that I enjoy plants and natural environments such as forests. But if I choose to live in a natural forested area, I necessarily have some impact: I contribute to the need for roads, power lines, and cleared living spaces, bulldozing parts of the natural world that I want to keep.
When we build space colonies, we’re going to need to create these kinds of plant-filled environments if we want them. So Vegas is good practice! ^_^
John Kaufman writes in The Personal MBA:
When you’re feeling lost, take heart — it’s just your brain gathering the information it needs to make good decisions. Embracing the impulse to try something new will help you exit Reorganization more quickly.
I’m intensely introverted — not in the everyday, colloquial sense of being shy or not wanting to talk with people, but in the Myers Briggs sense of wanting both deeper, more intense conversation with people when I talk with them and wanted lots of private time to recharge and process.
In the Myers Briggs sense of introversion, it’s not that introverts want to connect with people less, instead it’s that the distribution of connection energy is different: extroverts like to connect all the time, but not necessarily to go so deep. Many actors are introverts, which surprises people, but makes sense when you think about extroversion and introversion as a distribution of connection energy: actors give intense and focused performances.
In the everyday usage of introversion as a synonym for shy or unsocial, introversion is something you can get over: you can learn how to be social with people without feeling shy or awkward. However I find that as I connect with people more, my introversion actually becomes more pronounced: I have a greater need for private space and private time.
I was talking with my Life on Purpose coach this morning, Ann Swift, about how I was feeling lost, and she recommended listing out all the things I wanted to help me gain clarity and to make it easier to find the right place for me. OK! Here I go! ^_^
I’m looking for a place to move to, a studio, apartment, or cottage:
San Francisco and the peninsula has a lot going for it: a wonderful, temperate climate, a terrific, optimistic entrepreneurial culture, and a delightfully bicycle-friendly community. What I haven’t found so far is a place that meets my needs that’s also in my price range. The high-tech industry has been attracting a lot of people to San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and rents are being pushed up high.
I’m also considering Las Vegas. The climate is a bit harsh for bicycle riding, but the city (outside of the tourist strip) is quite bicycle-friendly. There’s a growing entrepreneurial culture (lasvegasstartups.com). The rents are much cheaper, and flights to San Francisco are inexpensive as well.
I’ve been using a variant of Mark Forster’s Autofocus System, a system which balances the rational and intuitive parts of the brain for getting things done. I’ve found it very effective for me.
I’ve tried various to-do lists and other time management approaches before, but none have lasted very long. I found them too rigid (at least in how I was using them), where the to-list list because a list of things I was now “supposed” to do (as if it was an assignment). This is intended to reduce procrastination, but I want to be a state of flow where I’m creatively tackling whatever would be most useful to do now, not slavishly doing what I thought yesterday probably would be most useful.
For example, sometimes an opportunity will come up unexpectedly and that will turn out to be the most useful or most important thing to do right now. But if I think of my to-do list as a list of things that I’m “supposed” to do, now I’ve just “fallen behind”. Which is silly, the whole point of a system is to help me focus on getting the important things done, not feel like I’m never caught up.
And even if I think some to-do action is important, often when I notice I haven’t done something that I’ve been meaning to do for a while it turns out that there was a good intuitive reason for why I was holding off. There’ll be some aspect of the situation that I hadn’t considered, and that specific action I had in mind wasn’t actually the best idea for what to do. Once I realize that, then I usually think of some better action to take.
In the AutoFocus system, you keep a list of things you’ve thought of to do. Then, when you’re ready to do something, you scan through the list looking for something that calls out, that feels ready to be done. Eventually, things that haven’t ever risen in importance to get done are dismissed from the list.
In my variant I keep my list on my computer, which I call my “action idea list”. This is a simple plain text file where I add ideas as they occur to me. To go on the action idea list, an idea has to be a specific, do-able action, not a desire or a goal or a larger project. If I first think of a larger project, then I think of what the first step would be, and write that down instead. Likewise, if I think of something that would need me to do something else first before I could actually do it, I write down the action that I’d need to do before the other one.
For example, this post was on my list as “post action” (my shorthand for “post on my blog an article about my action idea list”), and other everyday tasks like “groceries - buy soap” and “fax address change to insurance company” go on the list as well.
Things that would need to be done at a specific place I give a prefix like “groceries -“. Then when I’m at that place I can quickly scan the list and pick out those items.
While I know that people often prefer using paper for things like this, I’ve never managed to actually carry a notebook around with me at all times. Then I’m writing ideas down on little scraps of paper and losing them. Or I’ll go somewhere and say, “oops, I left my notebook behind. What was I going to do again?”
I keep my action idea list text file in my Dropbox folder where I can also view and edit it on my cell phone. That lets me record ideas as soon as I think of them, and they’re always with me to look at.
Rather than making a commitment to do specific items (or a commitment to do all the items), instead I make a commitment to set aside time. In my case, I’ve found that I’m often my most creative in the morning, so I get up early and set aside a couple hours to work towards my goals. Now that I have that habit in place I know I’m going to be doing something, and the system helps me figure out what I want to do each time.
Erin Pavlina has a wonderful blog post up called 10 Ways to Show Yourself Some Love. One the suggestions is to think about what kinds of things make you feel loved when someone does that for you, and then do it for yourself. (For example, if you feel loved when someone gives you a gift, give yourself a gift).
Last night I had a painful knot in my back, and I thought, “I could get a massage for this”. I was resistant at first, but then I remembered Erin’s post. I feel love through physical touch such as hugs and cuddling, so I said, “OK, I’d like to do something for myself tonight. And not just a gentle, pleasant feel-good massage, but a serious sports massage that’s going to really get in there and do some major work”. Half an hour later I was lying on the massage table of an expert.
We found way more tension, knots, and tightness than I had any idea I was carrying around. I’ve been losing some flexibility in my legs, and he pointed out this was because the muscles in my buttocks were so tight. I had no idea this was even possible, that lack of flexibility in my legs could come from anywhere else than the legs themselves. But the buttocks are where those muscles attach, so when they’re tight I feel the pull in my legs.
He said he could release that tension but it would hurt, was that OK with me? I said, “sure, go for it”. “Gaaaaaaaa ouch!” Nope! Too much for me. So then I thought I should come back every day until I got all this tightness cleared up. I said, “OK, should I come back tomorrow?” He said, “no no no, you will be sore tomorrow. Wait until you aren’t sore any more and then come back”.
And I am sore today. I’m too sore to carry my backpack on my back, I’ve been carrying it around. But it’s a feeling good kind of sore ^_^
At the Conscious Growth workshop I discovered that across all the different parts of my life and all the various things I do, I have a consistent message, a consistent attribute that I’m expressing, and that message is joy.
Now, I hasten to add that this doesn’t mean that I may be feeling especially joyous :), any more than an artist who paints beautiful women is necessarily a beautiful woman themself. Yet whether at work leading collaborative software architecture design, or giving advice to entrepreneurs, or performing my lyrical interpretive dance, or in personal activities such as practicing elegant and sensual bondage, what I most naturally tend to aim for when doing these things is creating or unblocking joy.
(And when I do things without that intention, that’s when I feel disconnected, and that I’m just going through the motions, that’s when my heart isn’t in the work).
When people perceive that energy of joy, they often think of entertainment. They see me speak and say, “hey, you could do stand up comedy” or they see me dance and say, “wow, you could produce dance videos”.
However, I often want to go deeper, like a dentist who performs a root canal to fix a serious tooth problem: there’s some short term pain and suffering, resulting in long term healing and freedom from pain. I like to find underlying causes, to uncover what’s the source of a problem, and help fix that.
For example, when I give advice to entrepreneurs I tend to be quite direct in my feedback. I’m not, “hey let’s clap our hands and feel happy about the plan ra ra ra!” xD. I say, “OK, here’s your goal or your mission as you’ve described it to me, and here’s where I’m noticing that your actions or plan or message looks like it may be inconsistent or incongruent with your goal, or your own talents or capabilities”.
And often this can be very helpful. Notice the entrepreneur is doing all the hard work here ^_^: they’ve come up with a first draft (or second draft, or eleventh draft) of their business approach or marketing message etc., I take a few minutes to give feedback, and then if they find my feedback useful they get to work on the next iteration. Yet sometimes my advice can unblock the work or make it less difficult: I may say “ah, you don’t need to climb the cliff here in this situation because there’s a path over here you can take to get to the top”, or “hmm, do you really need to hire someone, it looks like you already have the resources available in-house to do this” or “here’s how to make your marketing message clearer so that customers will be able to understand it more easily”.
I don’t yet know in what direction this insight will eventually lead me, what I might end up doing the most. Yet I already feel greater clarity and more connection in my life. I had been doing these disparate things without understanding why I was doing them, and now I know.
This past weekend I attended a Conscious Growth workshop given by Steve Pavlina (http://www.stevepavlina.com/). At the workshop I realized how powerful my desire to grow is. My inner voice is saying “I WANT TO GROW!” :-) I’ve had an intellectual interest in personal growth for a long time, reading books and blogs and deciding to attend the workshop, for example, and what’s awoken is a serious desire.
There are aspects of my life where I was ahead of other people in the workshop, where they look at that part of my life and say “wow, that sounds pretty good, I’d like to get there myself”. But just because I’ve gotten to point B doesn’t mean that I want to stagnate, to stay stuck on point B forever! I want to keep going. What’s really fun about the workshop is that we all share this common interest in growth.
A fun part of the workshop for me is that for people who are currently at a point A, it’s often pretty easy for me to help show the way to point B in those areas of my life where I’ve gotten there myself. When someone has a question about whether to focus on money or not focus on money right now, or how to express a boundary clearly, or how to be more expressive in public, it often just takes me 20 seconds to make some useful suggestion.
I found the feedback exercises invaluable. For me my relationship area is the weakest (all kinds of relationships, from the personal to the professional), and it was amazing to get the feedback on how I was perceived, insight into how starving I actually was, how opaque I can be.
I’ve thinking a lot about how much people said I had a positive glow, even saying I reminded them of Eckhart Tolle! I’m not, like, super-happy or anything xD. What I realized is due to my practice of my hobby of lyrical interpretive dance, it’s easy for me to express what happiness I have. I might be feeling only a little bit happy in a particular moment, but that’s still happiness, and I can still open the gates and express it. Naturally, when I’m with other positive people, that can start a positive feedback loop which in turn helps me become happier.
I might think that the desire to be happy is universal, that everyone might like to be helped to smile or feel a little bit better. But I realize that’s not true. There are plenty of people for whom some nudge from me would be unwelcome, intrusive, annoying. There’s a consensuality aspect to cheering people up: I can learn to invite people to be cheered up if they want to be, without being overbearing.
I feel gratitude towards everyone involved in the workshop, from participants annoying and helpful , Steve and the helpers.
I think I’ve made more progress than I’ve realized. Over the summer I did a lot of work with the Lefkoe method that released a lot of blocks in my life. I’ve been so used to feeling needy and unhappy it’s taken me a while to fully realize that I don’t actually feel that way any more. There was an underlying shift in the reality of my emotions, and it’s taken a while for my self-perception to catch up.
Thank you everyone!
^_^
I’m often told that I give amazing hugs. I give someone a hug, and they say, “wow…! that was the most amazing hug ever…” Giving a great hug is easy to do! Here’s how.
A relaxed body is soft, like a teddy bear. When we tense up, our body becomes harder, less comfortable to hug.
When we hug someone, it’s normal to tense up. We’re letting someone into our personal space. Some people, when they hug us, are awkward or bump into us. I’m not sure how they even managed to do this :-o, but I’ve had people bonk into me with their elbow or chin when they tried to give me a hug. (Dude! You need more practice!) Getting bumped into hurts less when we tense up. That’s why we tense our muscles in the first place: tensing our muscles protects us.
It’s hard to avoid tensing up when we first enter a hug, unless we know someone very well. If you’re hugging a novice hugger, relaxing before entering the hug may not even be a good idea! xD However, once we have our arms around each other, we’re past the danger point. We’re not going to get bonked now.
So here are the steps to a great hug. When someone wants a hug:
- I open my arms.
- I let them put their arms around me.
- I then relax.
- I finish the hug by opening my arms and stepping back.
Advanced technique:
- Most hugs are of course quick hugs, so after just half a second I’ll finish the hug. However if the other people happens to also relax into the hug, we can choose to let the hug last for a few seconds longer if we wish.
hugs!
^_^
