What's in the gallery?
We dissolve stuck and rewrite patterns. We apply radical playfulness to life (when we feel like it!), embarking on internal adventures (credo of Safety First). We have a fake band called Solved By Cake. We build invisible sanctuaries, invent words and worlds, breathe awe and wonder.
We are not impressed by monsters. Except when we are. We explore the connections between internal territories and surrounding environment to learn what marvelously supportive delicious space feels like, and how to take exquisite care of ourselves. We transform things.* We glow wild.**
* For example: Desire, fear, worry, pain-and-trauma, boundaries, that problematic word which rhymes with flaweductivity.
** Fair warning: Self-fluency has been known to lead to extremely subversive behavior, including treasuring yourself unconditionally, unapologetically taking up space, experiencing outrageously improbable levels of self-acceptance, and general rejoicing in aliveness.
What's in the gallery?
We dissolve stuck and rewrite patterns. We apply radical playfulness to life (when we feel like it!), embarking on internal adventures (credo of Safety First). We have a fake band called Solved By Cake. We build invisible sanctuaries, invent words and worlds, breathe awe and wonder.
We are not impressed by monsters. Except when we are. We explore the connections between internal territories and surrounding environment to learn what marvelously supportive delicious space feels like, and how to take exquisite care of ourselves. We transform things.* We glow wild.**
* For example: Desire, fear, worry, pain-and-trauma, boundaries, that problematic word which rhymes with flaweductivity.
** Fair warning: Self-fluency has been known to lead to extremely subversive behavior, including treasuring yourself unconditionally, unapologetically taking up space, experiencing outrageously improbable levels of self-acceptance, and general rejoicing in aliveness.
This post may not have a point.
It’s Sunday. I don’t have to have a point.
Tracing memories.
This past Tuesday I sent you all on a mission to reread and mock mercilessly brainstorm ways to revise an old post of mine as part of our whole ongoing Blogging Therapy series thing.
The post in question, among other things, recounts an episode from a few years ago, when my gentleman friend and I were in Berlin for two months and semi-accidentally landed this insanely great house-sitting gig.
Like, a house.
Well, two floors of a gorgeous old apartment building.
I know!
I’ve lived in pretty much every part of Berlin, in a huge variety of places … and while not all of them were semi-legal drag-king-inhabited squats in abandoned buildings, this place was pretty outrageous.
Actually, we were kind of afraid to touch anything because it was all way more fancypants than a. our place in San Francisco or b. pretty much anything we were used to.
And we were still kind of in awe that despite our incredibly stupid plan to go to Berlin for two months and just count on our ridiculously great “apartment luck”, it was totally working.
Get this.
One of the many oddly fabulous things about this place we were staying is that they had one room that was a trampoline room.
And when I say “trampoline room” I mean that the entire room, which was actually quite large, was taken up by this enormous trampoline.
This is Berlin we’re talking about so the ceilings are ten miles high. One wall was floor to ceiling windows through which you could see the tops of trees poking up. One wall was mirrored.
And the rest was trampoline.
I wish I had pictures because there is absolutely no way to adequately explain how insane this room was.
You know, we’d tell friends about it and they’d say “Whoah, that’s crazy. A trampoline room.” But then they’d come over for dinner and freak the hell out over the enormous room that was all trampoline.
Mixed feelings. Mixed everything.
Those two months for me were all about mixed feelings.
I was loving the Shiva Nata workshops I was teaching. But I was conflicted about where my Fluent Self business was going and whether there would still be room for yoga stuff and general wackiness within the coaching/consulting practice I was building.
I was loving being back in Berlin. And being there with my gentleman friend (we’d both been there many times separately but never together). But I was pretty much a wreck over meeting my ex.
Loving seeing old friends. Sad about saying goodbyes again.
Also, I was speaking more Hebrew than German because my ex and my best friend and a whole bunch of other people from Tel Aviv were in town at the same time.
And I was teaching in German and writing in English. And it was all … I don’t know.
Anyway, it was jumbled, tumultuous times. And for all sorts of reasons, the jumbled, tumultuous jumping on the trampoline helped me clear my head and climb back into my body.
But of course I was conflicted about that too.
The simple living advocate and the yoga teacher in me were not into the decadence. Not at all.
An entire room for a trampoline? Oyvavoy. That’s no way to live.
The ex-hedonist in me thought it was pretty fabulous. And the six year old in me just wanted to bounce around all day. Bounce!
Anyway, I was mostly disapproving, theoretically. But in practice …. I loved the sensation of freedom and intensity that came with pure, ecstatic jumping around.
I got to jump every day for six weeks and then we landed an even more outrageously fabulous house-sit. In a three-story penthouse apartment in the Sophienstrasse in Mitte.
If you’ve ever been to Berlin for more than five minutes, you’re already gasping. If not, just assume that it was spectacular. But no trampoline. Alas.
And that was that.
A couple of months ago I was on the phone with one of my clients in Switzerland and she mentioned that she bounces.
On a rebounder. And does the Shiva Nata portion of her change-yer-habits practice on it too.
I was intrigued. I started researching and then gave up entirely the second I found the one I wanted.
It was the decadence thing again. Yes, my stuff. My patterns.
Like, how can someone who boycotts box stores and makes her own conditioner out of stuff in the kitchen and generally believes in not having very much stuff …. how does she justify something like getting a trampoline?
Even if it’s a really, really tiny one …
Anyway, that was where I got stuck. So I gave myself a few months to work on that and with that.
In the meantime I was getting these huge amounts of email, some of which was highly critical and hurtful and a lot of which was requiring me to be very clear about setting boundaries.
It eventually occurred to me that my ten-minutes-in-meditation that I was doing over every tough thing in my inbox was taking a lot of time and energy.
And that maybe things would be a lot easier if I could just kind of bounce it out.
Yeah, I was crushing hard on this trampolina.
It showed up a few days ago.
And I pretty much can’t stop bouncing. It’s that great.
Also, it’s in my office (of course). So now I feel like I work at Google or something. You know, one of those companies where they cater to you tremendously because they want you to be creative and feel appreciated and loved.
And it hit me:
I do work for a company that would do anything to help me be creative and feel appreciated and loved. Mine.
And if I want my desk to be a chaise lounge and my conference table to be a rebounder, then by golly …
Exactly.
Tramp tramp tramp tramp tramp tramp tramp*.
That?
That’s the sound of me. Jumping and bouncing. On my trampoline.
*Bonus Freddy the Pig reference: which book is that from?
They recommend doing ten minutes. Twice a day.
The first day it hurt so much that I gave up after about three minutes and spent the other seven cursing being old and tired.
Later on I barely made it through ten minutes and had to spend the rest of the day recovering.
But then I got hooked.
And yesterday I did twenty minutes while dancing around to Been Gone Too Long by The Snake Charmers** (which is awesome, by the way). And now I’m hooked.
**You follow Marie — @snakecharmers — on Twitter, right?
I told you there wasn’t a point.
Things move and change.
Seeds are planted. Stuff grows. Things emerge and lead to other things. There are twists and turns and surprises. Sometimes whatever it is will take some time to get there.
I’m not ready to decide what the point is today. Or if there is one. I’m just hanging out and watching patterns.
Absorbing information. Connecting dots. Closing circles. Bouncing.
A lot of bouncing.
Friday Check-in #24: bony edition
Because it’s Friday AGAIN. And because traditions are important. In which I cover the good stuff and the hard stuff in my week, trying for the non-preachy, non-annoying side of self-reflection.
And you get to join in if you feel like it.
So I know that usually when I talk about the hard stuff in my week it’s mostly the big kind of “hard”.
The big kind?
You know, existential angst. Things going horribly wrong.
Missing my friend who is dead and wanting him back. Stuff like that.
Of course there’s some regular old “This happened and I found it challenging” or some CrankyPants McGrumbleBug kvetching but it doesn’t take over my week.
It did this week though. So have patience with me and wait for the good because there’s a lot of it. And I’ll try to go back to Challenging Life Issues next week. Sigh.
The hard stuff
My site getting hijacked by Russian hackers, may they all be impotent forever.
Yep. They hacked my site and planted links to Russian porn sites on every single page. As well as some extra folders full of spamtastic crap, just for fun.
Ugh.
It’s creepy. And weird.
Like someone breaking into your house but then not stealing anything. But leaving half-eaten bowls of cornflakes in your cupboards and empty cigarette packs in your dog’s water bowl.
And we don’t even have cornflakes. Or a dog.
I HATE THEM.
Things change. But why? It is so very hard to deal with.
This is small, petty stuff, but I really don’t care.
After we kicked out the evil sexpot-bots, we upgraded to the very latest edition of WordPress.
And gaaaaaaaaaah, I can’t find anything I need.
The “manage posts” tab which is the single thing I click the most in my life no longer exists.
Now I need to click “edit” which — to me, at least — does not sound as though it will help me do the thing I want to do which is to manage the damn posts.
It’s like walking into your house and finding out that someone moved all the furniture around and said “Isn’t this so much better?”
And you’re thinking, I think I liked this house way better when it had a bathroom.
And then more things change.
Yes, still petty. I am not done with the petty. Sorry.
One of my favorite things to read when I’m feeling picky and irritable is Amelie Gillette’s wonderful column ‘The Hater’.
It used to be that when something (oh, say Russian porn hackers … or WordPress) got on my nerves that I would head over and read some of her vitriolic hating.
Of course I never understand most of it, since I don’t have a television and am frightfully unaware of most pop culture references.
But she’s a terrific writer and somehow reading her flow of hate always eases whatever annoyances I’m dealing with, and I laugh and feel better.
Here’s how it used to work. I’d open up the Hater page and read three or four columns in a row. You know, just scrolling down the page.
But they redid the AVclub site and now you only get excerpts of each post. You have to click through individually for each one.
And I never really have patience to click through. Even though they’re good. Even though I’ll probably enjoy reading the rest.
My favorite “cheer me up” site is now all choppy and broken up and unappealing. WHY?
By now everyone should know that having to click a link to continue reading the thing you started is the online equivalent of walking three blocks without a jacket to buy someone a sandwich. Don’t make me click!!!
Guilt, I guess. And some sadness
Even though taking a sabbatical from email is totally one of the smartest business moves I’ve ever made, part of me still feels kind of bad about it.
I wasn’t really aware that I was feeling bad because I was so busy feeling good, but yeah, it was totally there.
My gentleman friend reported that several times this week I sat upright in the middle of the night, wild-eyed and apparently wide awake, and proclaimed loudly:
“People need me to answer them!”
I have zero recollection of this but I believe it.
Sad face.
The good stuff
No email!.
Oh. My. God.
On Monday I announced that I was taking a year’s sabbatical from email, which was a really scary thing to say and everyone was awesome about it.
And then I was expecting that Marissa would have to spend her entire week writing answers to all the “But you’ll still answer this one, right?” emails.
But it didn’t happen. It was blissfully quiet. And peaceful. People wrote support questions directly to Marissa if they had them.
And that was it. I should have done this two years ago. I seriously didn’t realize that all I had to do was ask.
Time! Like, on my hands. It’s the best thing ever.
This is like quitting smoking and then randomly having fifteen shekels when you need them.
I have had so much time this week. Not reading email. Not answering email. Not crafting answers in my head. Not drafting apologies.
Instead I’ve been hanging out at the Kitchen Table. I’ve been writing. I’ve been thinking.
I went for a long walk yesterday in the middle of the day and didn’t even feel guilty.
The joy. It is outrageous and all-consuming.
La Calaca Comelona.
Or as we call it, the Bony Mexican. Which sounds horribly inappropriate but it really has to do with the fact that I can never remember what the restaurant is called.
The part of my brain that actually remembers taking two years of Spanish at Tel Aviv University knows it means the “Hungry Skeleton”.
But the rest of me knows that it has something to do with bones and that they have amazing Mexican food.
So I said to my gentleman friend, “Let’s go to that bony Mexican place” and it all went downhill from there.
Anyway, we went there with Ez. And our friend Denise. Both of whom will have websites very, very soon and I’ll finally be able to link to them.*
* It actually hurts my fingers that I can’t do that right this second.
Haven’t been there since Melle was in town forever ago. Yum.
Ez lives here now!
I know I said this last week but having my brother living with us is just the best thing ever.
Everything is funnier, for one thing.
And I could not be happier about it.
Selma and I were in the Oregonian.
This didn’t even happen this week but I forgot to mention last week because I was so upset about all the stuff I was getting in my inbox.
Anyway, my duck and I were on the front page of the Healthy/Wellness section of the Oregonian. Same article as in the New York Times but a terrific picture of Selma.
In close-up, sitting on my hand. Very nice.
The article also generated a few sales, some odd queries and some people who want to meet me. Also the weirdest thing ever to be left in the “comments” part of the online shopping cart:
“Read about you in the Oregonian. This better work.”
Awesome. That’s exactly why I tell my clients to grow their community of clients, customers and fans slowly and organically instead of trying to get a bunch of random outside attention.
The people who hang out here on the blog generally already feel like they’ve gotten their money’s worth before they even buy something, if/when that time should come. Whereas total strangers don’t even know if they’re your Right People yet.
Anyway, it’s still cool that we were in the paper.
Visit to the tax lady.
This was also hard because we really, really, really miss Diane who was our tax lady when we lived in California.
To the point that we almost didn’t want to move because not driving to Oakland to have Diane do our taxes seemed like the most depressing and awful thing ever.
Also hard because it’s kind of like going to the doctor. Like, let me get this straight … I’m paying you to see me naked and find out how much I weigh?
But it still counts as the good part because last year my gentleman friend had to do ten minutes of acupuncture on me before I could even walk through the door. And this year I didn’t need any. Ha.
Not to say that I wasn’t slightly a wreck, because I was. But I wasn’t a huge, impossible wreck. Progress, baby.
I’m giving a talk this evening at Jennifer Louden’s Comfort Retreat.
There’s really nothing more exciting than having someone I completely admire invite me to talk in front of a gazillion people about the stuff I care about most.
Working through fear (but not trying to stomp on it), and shifting stucknesses without hating yourself for having them.
Or something. I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to be talking about but I am absolutely convinced that we’re going to have an amazing time. I love Jen madly and her work is ridiculously inspiring.
Catch you tonight? Because that would be really, really great.
That’s it for me …
And yes yes yes, of course you can join in my Friday ritual right here in the comments bit if you feel like it.
Yeah? Anything hard and/or good happen in your week?
And, as always, have a glorrrrrrrrrrrrious weekend. And a happy week to come.
Something to believe in.
I’ve been thinking a lot the past few weeks about what mysterious forces and processes come together to allow for “success” in something — insert your own definition here.*
*Let’s just all try and assume for now that it’s something positive and mostly-desired.
One of the themes I keep coming back to is the “someone believing in me when it seemed like no one else did and I didn’t know how to believe in myself” thing.
I don’t like it. I don’t like it because it’s cheesy and annoying.
It reminds me of made-for-television movies and excessively romantic sunsets and crescendo-ing violins.
Also because it’s outside of the space where most self-work happens. You know, it’s no longer directly about the relationship with (or to) yourself. Which is where I want to hang out.
That’s where I want to focus my energy. That’s where I’m inclined to spend my time. Not with outside forces and outside legitimacy.
Except that it keeps coming up. So clearly there’s something going on there … probably something important.
So hang out with me for a bit while I process out loud.
Madison
I spent a little over a year in Madison, Wisconsin … allegedly attending university but mostly internally raging and biding my time until I could either move back to Israel or figure out a way to get to Europe.
All sorts of people were giving me the “you’re not living up to your potential” spiel, which (shockingly!) missed its intended motivational target and only resulted in me getting more depressed.
Other people’s expectations were heavy, irritating and seemed to bear no relation to my own conception of who I was.
And then by a rather miraculous (or at least incongruous) series of events, I was spontaneously adopted by David Mitchell and his bizarre and wonderful group of friends.
Dave’s friends were all in their late forties and early fifties. They were intelligent and funny and quirky and free-spirited, but not in an especially bohemian way or anything. They just really enjoyed being alive.
A concept that was completely eye-opening to me.
Anyway, Dave and Joan and Paul and Victor (Maddog) and Cathy and the rest of them all — astoundingly — thought that I was absolutely fine the way I was.
They also all believed that I was bright and talented and going to do great and exciting things in the world and that it was completely okay if I took as long as I needed in getting there.
This was all news to me.
Everything I knew from my parents and friends was “Doom, doom, doom” and “Things generally get worse, not better” and “You’re wasting your life!” and variations on all of that.
But here were a bunch of people who saw potential in me but liked me as I was right then — and anyway weren’t at all worried about me squandering it. That was what I took with me from Madison when I moved back to Israel.
Tel Aviv
My friend — the one who killed himself — was the one who was not just a fan of my writing (at a time when no one got to read anything I wrote ever), but of the fact that I did it at all.
He would introduce me to people as “my friend, the writer”, and when he did it, the word “writes” didn’t even make me want to throw up.
Once he bought me an old beat-up typewriter for my birthday.
He also thought I was the best bartender in town.
And then when I quit the bars and became a yoga teacher he also thought I was the best yoga teacher in town, even though of course he never took a class from anyone other than me.
Mostly he just thought that having me around was good for the world.
And at a time when I was deep into self-destruction, paralyzed by self-doubt and loathing and a whole host of impossible fears, this was pretty hard for me to believe.
But I also knew that he believed it. I knew he was smart and discerning enough that I would have trusted him if he’d said those things about somebody else.
So some tiny part of part of me believed him.
Berlin
It was February. It was cold. I was sick. But really sick. The kind of sick that forever changes the definition of the word.
I had a horrible middle-ear infection which, among other things, was causing blood and insane amounts of scary-looking goo to erupt from my head in a never-ending fountain of yuck.
I would wake up in the middle of the night screaming from the pain. Sometimes it was the sound of the screaming that woke me up.
The doctor who treated me absolutely refused to let me pay no matter how many times I tried. She’d sneak me in before work and during her lunch break and tell me stories about her childhood in East Berlin.
She cared for me. She cared about me. For whatever reason, she took an intense personal interest in both the process and the experience of me becoming well.
It took several months before I could really hear again, but healing from that particular illness launched a crazy chain of intense healing experiences that have brought me directly to the work that I do now.
San Francisco
After Berlin I took Selma and went to San Francisco, solely on the basis of several nights of recurring “Listen, you need to go to San Francisco” dreams that were then encouraged by a couple of wonderfully bizarre coincidences.
And one of the very first things that happened when I arrived was that I met my gentleman friend.
Obviously being in love is pretty much the best thing in the world. But you know what else?
Meeting my gentleman friend is not just the best thing that ever happened to me. It’s also the best thing that ever happened to my business.
Mostly because he believed in it so entirely that he could see what it could become and had no doubt ever that I’d be able to pull it off.
He consistently dreams big for me, without putting pressure on me to act on those dreams and without ever being impressed by my stucknesses. He just assumes I’ll be fabulously successful at whatever I do just because hey, I’m that great.
And at the same time, he’d love me just the same if all I did was read books all day and go for walks and do yoga.
I’d honestly never been in a relationship with someone who didn’t need to knock down my every single idea with a bunch of objections about why it probably wouldn’t work.
Not out of meanness or anything. I think they mostly just wanted to keep me from getting my hopes dashed — to keep me from getting hurt. Or maybe there was some jealousy involved or some more general insecurity, too. I don’t know.
But the end effect was that they’d dish out the kind of “helpful critique” that would convince me to dash those tiny hopes myself before they ever got a chance to breathe.
Here.
My relationship with myself is, of course, always interacting with and reflecting themes of my relationship with others. So there’s tension there, but there’s also play.
Here is what’s going through my head right now — and I hope you’re not expecting coherency here:
- It’s easier sometimes to trust others (well, certain others …) when I can’t trust myself.
- I can also remember how to trust myself, just from remembering what it is like to have had someone believe in you.
- Sometimes this isn’t easy (sometimes nothing is easy).
- But then at other times there’s flow — the sense that it’s possible to allow things to get easier.
Reminders.
I’m thinking that all these people who were able to believe in me like that are really more than sources of strength.
They’re reminders of what I already know.
The fact that they’re there … in my memory or in my kitchen or whatever, is a reminder of a whole range of strengths they see in me — strengths that I forget about.
This is a steady, calming reminder to shift my focus inward so that I can reconnect to the internal resources and strengths — the stuff that I tend to avoid, even though it contains all the qualities that I need to guide me.
I used to think a lot more about all the people who knocked me down. Or that I perceived as having knocked me down.
Lately I’ve been thinking about all the other people. The ones who have carried me when I was tired.
But I’m also thinking that they were only carrying me because they knew how strong I was.
One last thing.
I’m also thinking (but I have no way to say this without it devolving into cheesiness so please forgive me), that I hope you know that part of why I am here is to be that person for you.
Because Selma and I are completely prepared to believe in the great things that you’re going to do, without at all needing you to have done them yet — or ever — in order to like you.
We just believe. Because it’s true.
Item! I am feeling most enthused!
A somewhat goofy mini-collection of stuff I’ve been reading, stuff I’ve been thinking about and oh, some completely random crap.
Basically the stuff that never gets mentioned here because I’m not the kind of person who can just make some teeny little point. Not into the whole brevity thing, as the Dude would say.
Actually, I’m under the strict compulsion to write ten pages about anything on my mind. So this is me. Practicing brevity.
I did a lot of reading this week.
Probably because I wasn’t answering email. Good stuff.
Item! Post No. 8 in a series that has no specific point other than letting off steam and sharing stuff I get excited about.
Item! This is absolutely inspiring!
This post from Amy Mommaerts about art as mental therapy was really touching. One of the lovely things I read this week.
She’s @AmyMommaerts if you’re a fellow Twitterite. If not, argh. Come and play!
Item! What’s wrong with this article?
First time I’ve ever linked to an article about a brothel.
I love how they get divorced because she was working at one and not because he was going to one.
Also, note that it’s Poland. This is the country where I got stuck in an elevator. Still haven’t forgiven them.
Item! This is the best description of blogging that you will ever read ever!
Emma’s post about the joy of blogging knocked me over with how great it was.
I mean, of course I knew this was yet another blog that got started thanks to my Tuesday Blogging Therapy series, and that I was getting midwife credit.
But I had absolutely no idea how tingly and powerful it would be to read about blogging from someone who really, truly gets the thrill of possibility in the medium.
Everyone who hangs out online — even if only occasionally — needs to read this post at least once.
And not just because a. she uses the phrase “may heavy breasted women sing her name down the ages” and b. is referring to me.
Item! Sometimes you will be less than excited about blogging!
And then if you’re feeling slightly less enthused than our Emma about blogging … you’ll want to read Amy Derby’s terrific piece which asks the question, Ever felt like divorcing your blog?
Answer: oh goodness me, yes. Thankfully we’re over that now.
But seriously. Great post. Watch her video there too. Amy tells it like it is.
Item! If you are an artist or otherwise creative you NEED to read this!
This is actually something I’ve been wanting to write about.
How people ask us questions that completely trigger our stuff, to the point that we can’t even understand why anyone would be such an insensitive insulting meanypants.
And then it so often turns out that their question came from a misunderstanding, a lack of knowledge, a lack of confidence, a desire to be kind or whatever.
Their stuff. Not our stuff.
So I highly recommend that you read this terrific explanation of how this process works with one specific question that drives artists and designers crazy.
Item! I am flattered by your title!
How could I not click on a post entitled Havi got me unstuckified?
Pretty great. Also: hilarious.
This guy Rob hadn’t updated his blog in over six months … found our Blogging Therapy series and gave himself permission to stop feeling guilty about it.
And whaddya know … he’s back at it. And he’s really funny. I’m his newest fan. Maybe I’ll see you guys there.
Item! I cannot wait to take this class!
I have a huge secret crush on Cairene MacDonald from Third Hand Works.
And I’ve been really wanting to do something with her that would involve soaking up some of her coolness and also getting a bunch of stuff done.
Also, it drives me batty that she’s not insanely famous. Because she should be. You guys should be beating down her doors. In fact, I’m really going to have to (gently, yes?) biggify the heck out of her this year.
Anyway, she’s doing a class. Called Bite the candy. Because she’s cool like that, like I said.
It’s three and a half hours of concentrated knocking stuff off your to-do list.
With support and smartnesses. It’s only $25 which is so low that I’m going to have to insist on paying more.
I am completely serious. Sign up for her class before she reads this and gets a restraining order or something.
Item! Jennifer Louden is so ridiculously amazing that I can’t stand it!
Did I mention that I’m teaching at her comfort retreat thing this weekend? As in, the night after tomorrow? It’s me and a gazillion super famous people … and I’m giddy with excitement about getting to learn stuff from all of them.
I’ll talking about techniques for working with fear. And Jen will spreading her uniquely non-annoying sweetness and light.
Should be a really powerful weekend.
That is all.
Alas, no more goofy. No more pouncing on objects. No more exclamation points. I’m all out.
Until next Wednesday.
Tomorrow we’re back to our usual programming (patterns, habits, stucknesses, biggification and stuff that I say to myself). See you then!
Blogging therapy: Learn from my mistakes
Doing something kinda different this week for post number fifteen in our “taking the scary out of blogging” series. And yeah, if you want to play catch-up (no obligation, of course), links to the first fourteen are hidden way down at the bottom this time.
Anyway, instead of working on emotional stucknesses and what-iffery (no worries, we’ll be back to that next week), I wanted to touch on some practical bits.
But first I have to wax philosophical (and type a shockingly naughty word).
If you don’t blog, you have my permission to think about this stuff we’re going to be talking about in terms of general writing and useful communication skills. But it’s also even more than that.
Naomi said the other day that — excuse me, I’m quoting directly here:
“Marketing is the shit you do that makes people buy your shit.”
And that is why we are madly in love with Naomi. My I’m-a-yoga-teacher-with-a-duck version of that is:
‘Marketing’ is the art of helping your Right People find you and feel safe enough to receive from you, so you can live your crazy helper-mouse mission.
We can talk more some other time about “marketing” and why it (the word, the concept, the application) doesn’t always have to make us want to run and take a shower.
For now I just want to throw it out there that the way you write blog posts (or anything, for that matter) can make it easier for your Right People to say yes to you. And that is useful not just for you but for them.
Learning from my mistakes.
I’m going to give you a challenge and draw attention to something embarrassing I wrote just so you feel better about yourself because that’s how nice I am.
Let’s dive into the archives here, shall we?
In Blogging Therapy #13 when we talked about finding your voice, I made the following suggestion:
Go to the archives of a blogger you admire, go back to the very, very beginning and read the very, very first posts … What you’re doing is discovering (or reminding yourself) that even the best blogging voices are not born that way.
So then I had the brilliant idea that this would make a terrific homework-ey exercise dinksbumps* for everyone taking my Blogging Therapy course.
*thingamasomething
The assignment was this.
But imagine that you’re listening to this assignment being transmitted over a crackling radio connection and that it’s coming from someone who addresses you and your partners as “Angels” and also that there’s cool ’70s theme music:
Someone left me a comment this week on a very, very old post. It’s actually from before I started blogging. Because when I started the blog I put up a bunch of old noozletter articles so I wouldn’t feel lonely. And — every once in a while — someone discovers one of them.
Reading it again now made me realize that 1. wow, there’s some good stuff in here (yes, that surprised me!) and 2. there are a lot of ways I’d change it if I were writing it now.
Then it occurred to me that some of these “here’s what I’d do differently” bits would be useful for you guys.
So here’s your challenge:
Read the post:
https://fluentself.com//blog/newsletter/ways-to-work-on-your-patterns/And then … try and guess what changes I would make if I were writing it now …
Obviously my writing voice has changed quite a bit since July 2007 … and there are aesthetic considerations as well. Give it your best shot!
Right. So I’m about to share the answers which means …
If you want to try and guess the answers yourself, you might want to not read below this little dotted line thingy until you’ve taken a swing at the homework.
Yes, that is what the dotted line thingy looks like. Wait, I’m putting another one in so you can’t say that you missed it. 🙂
Okay, heading into “answers” territory … spoiler alert activated.
Ready? A whole bunch of things to consider.
One of the women in the Blogging Therapy course wrote:
“It’s like looking for the find-a-words when you don’t have the list of words to work from. If this were a crossword puzzle book, I’d turn to the back page right now to find out the answers. Instead, I have to wait. Oh, darn!”
So yeah, it probably wasn’t a fair assignment. Also, I got carried away with the fun and fascinating the stuff we came up with in class, and totally forgot to share the answers. Oof.
Let’s take a look.
Thing 1: Shorter paragraphs.
By a lot. Space breaks are your friend.
The most important thing you can do in your blog is have insane amounts of space breaks. Because people skim and their eyes get tired and it can be hard reading blogs.
If you help them by creating more space they’re more likely to actually read it.
When in doubt, throw in more. If I were re-formatting that semi-embarrassing post, there would be at least twice as many breaks. Probably more.
Thing 2: Headers.
Best way to break up text and draw attention to things.
I’m also a fan of the blockquote tag as a way to say “Hey, I’m making a point”, so I’d probably also use some of that.
Like this.
Thing 3: Help people hear your voice.
You’ve probably noticed that I italicize quite a bit.
Partly it’s to break up the text again and give it a little life, but it’s also to help you hear what this is sounding like in my head.
Being a real, live human being like Betty Boop told you to is useful and important. So I’m always looking for things that will help me get the “me” across.
Thing 4: Not boring people to death with the headline.
I’m no headline expert.
And, to be honest, those biggified blogger articles about “Ten ways to get people to read your headline” are usually so stilted and self-congratulatory that I can’t even get through them.
So don’t take advice from me on this.
I’ll just say that if I were rewriting that post, the first thing I’d change is the headline. It’s painfully dull. Plus sooooo not google-able.
Instead of “More ways to work on your patterns” (seriously, what was I thinking?), I’d probably do something to make it sound as though it weren’t written by a self-help robot.
Maybe “Change your patterns. But first, you have to catch the train.”
Or “How I got a clue (literally!) and stopped being late to work.”
I don’t know. Those aren’t good either. But I’d sure as hell come up with something better than “More ways to work on your patterns.”
Thing 5: Maybe a graphic.
I’m not (as you may have noticed) a follower of the popular “have a lot of bright pretty pictures” school of blogging.
It’s partly because of a severe handicap that results in me only being interested in words. And partly because I spend so much time writing these things that I really can’t be bothered to do anything else with them.
But I do order awesome custom graphics from my designer. You’ve seen them on the Item! posts and the Ask Havi posts and of course in the Friday Chicken.
It couldn’t hurt.
Thing 6: Not being a pain in the ass.
As Diana so perceptively pointed out in her response to my “homework”:
“Fewer imperative sentences.
I don’t know if you’ve changed your writing style because you are blogging or if you are mellowing with age, but I don’t think you would say “Get going!” now and certainly not with an exclamation point.”
Yes, I’m mellowing with age.
A phrase which — applied to me — hits me straight in the funny bone.
So probably not that. I think it’s more that I gradually realized that expertise alone just isn’t sexy.
When I read blogs where the writer wraps herself in this big cloak of “Hi, I’m an expert and I am so totally over having your problems”, I lose interest.
The blogs I love to read are written by people. Like Naomi. I’m much more inclined to take her advice because she doesn’t present herself as someone who knows everything.
Yeah. I definitely wouldn’t say “Get going!” now.
In fact, I take it back. You most certainly do not have to get going on anything.* That would be ridiculous.
*Unless of course you happen to feel like it for reasons of your own.
Thing 7: Where is Selma???
I know. Not everyone has a duck.
But the fact that I wrote an entire post and didn’t even mention my business partner who deserves sole credit for my fame and fortune and general well-being?
Weird, right?
Especially since she was absolutely with me on that walk to the train station. Gah. I don’t know.
I guess it took me a long time to realize that even though some people would (and do) think it’s really screwed up that I have a duck, the people that get it are so totally my Right People that it doesn’t even matter if everyone else thinks I’m not all there in the glove compartment.
That’s it. Enough with the expert-izing.
Hope there was Something Useful for you in here today. Next week back to more Blogging Therapy of the emotional stucknesses kind.
Tomorrow: pure, unadulterated goofiness.
Oh, and as promised, the links to the other Blogging Therapy posts in the series:
Part 1. What if people are mean to me?
Part 2. What if I throw a party and no one shows up?
Part 3. Why even bother when there are already other people doing it better?
Part 4. What do I saaaaaaaaaaaaaaay?
Part 5. Help! Perfectionism! Gaaaaak!
Part 6. But I’m not an EXPERT!
Part 7. Don’t make me be vulnerable!
Part 8. I just don’t have the time!
Part 9. What if someone READS what I wrote?
Part 10. But I’ll never be popular!
Part 11. De-shouldifying.
Part 12. A bunch of questions.
Part 13. Finding your voice.
Part 14. Worry. Worry. Worry.
Yes, that is a lot of Blogging Therapy. And no, you don’t have to read any of it if you don’t feel like it. See you tomorrow …