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.
Learn from my amusing mistakes
Speaking of “coping with anxiety” …
Remember when I mentioned the other day feeling just the tiniest bit anxious around the whole “Hmm, I wonder what I’m going to teach at the yoga festival this weekend” thing?
Well, that got resolved pretty quickly. In what’s probably the most ridiculous way ever.
I was sitting on the couch, wondering which technique of mine would sort it out the fastest …
…when I got distracted by the unexpected news that RBB (German television station) wanted to interview me for their evening news program that oh, everybody in Berlin watches.
Whoah.
Nothing like perspective to knock you over the head.
So, yeah. All of a sudden the idea that I would feel even the slightest bit of anything about teaching on a stage in front of a gazillion people seemed pretty silly.
After all, — or so went my stream-of-consciousness autopilot rambling — I’ve been teaching for years. I’ve lectured in German plenty of times. How could that be the slightest bit intimidating? What was I thinking?
In fact, why even bother getting nervous about some silly festival when you can get nervous about your first television appearance ever being an interview in a foreign language?
And isn’t is so typical that my first television interview would be in German? I mean, that’s so the story of my life.
What’s that? A learning curve? Is it steep? Oh, well then, take me straight to the top of it and drop me … hahahaha … it’ll be fun!
Then the silliness kicked in …
It suddenly occurred to me that if my nervousness about Unknown Thing #1 could disappear so completely in the face of Unknown Thing #2, it couldn’t really be all that deep a pattern.
Which made me laugh out loud because the whole situation was just so absurd. Scaring yourself out of the scary? What, it’s like hiccups?
Apparently it does work like that sometimes. Because: hey, no more Schmetterling im Bauch (butterflies in the stomach). No feelings at all, other than: Alright, let’s do this thing!
Report from my first ever television interview:
Because of course you want to know how it went, right?
It was fine. They loved Selma (I’m telling you, my duck is a superstar). They were thrilled (thrilled!) that I speak German. They asked me seriously difficult questions. And they filmed part of one of my workshops.
But the weird thing is, I’d always imagined that during a television interview it would be impossible not to think about everything that you’re probably doing wrong.
You know. Stuff like … “I wonder what this looks like. Is my hair a mess? Am I smiling like a maniac?”
Except, because it was all in German, I was mostly thinking about nailing all my prepositions. Which was actually kind of a welcome distraction.
Report from the Berlin Yoga Festival:
First of all I have to warn you that yoga festivals are full of yoga people.
Normally I’m pretty much the wackiest person on the block. But the nice thing about being at a yoga festival is that even I get to feel pretty darned straight.
Your obscure brain training techniques seem way, way less bizarre when the person teaching right after you is a European-lookin’ dude in orange robes, with a beard down to his pupik, as my mother would say. Who’s the weirdo now, huh?
Like I said, perspective is everything.
Also, in case you’re wondering: no, I didn’t make it to the class on not being judgmental.
Anyway, it was raining cats and dogs but luckily, since both my programs took place inside tents, they were still full. *blows kiss to programs coordinator*
So yeah. I managed to deliver a 60 minute lecture in German without looking at any notes, answered lots of interesting questions, didn’t knock over the microphone and enjoyed the hell out of the 90 minute practice session that Selma and I taught.
Lessons learned:
1. Be German
No matter how many times you give people your bio, they can still (and will) make up an entirely new and nonexistent way to spell the thing that you’re teaching.
-
→ Get someone to go over all the brochures and posters that other people produce.
2. Make fun of Germans
Yoga-ness trumps German-ness. Just because you’re supposed to start teaching at two in the afternoon doesn’t mean you will.
→Bring a book or something.
3. Be accessible
It’s always good if you don’t have to shrug your shoulders in bewilderment when people ask you excitedly when your next workshop is.
→Glue or staple a little info sheet to your gorgeous postcards.
4. Get a raincoat that a grownup would wear
I don’t care if you do carry a duck. You need a new raincoat.
→ I think that says it all.
5. Avoid potential embarrassment
Let’s suppose you’re (hypothetically, let’s say) going to be demonstrating an incredibly complicated movement technique in front of an audience and television cameras.
It’s probably easier if the thing you’re standing on isn’t made of rickety, widely-spaced slats covered with felt.
Which might just be the least stable thing ever to be danced upon in the history of dancing upon things.
No, I didn’t fall down. That’s the benefit of being the #2 world-expert in a coordination technique.
→ Have someone check out anything that has a suspicious name like the “other” stage.
6. And finally: Take notes
No matter how many times you’ve learned all these lessons before, you haven’t.
-
→ Write them down somewhere where you can find them. Like, oh I don’t know, online?
Coping with anxiety
Because anxiety sucks. That’s why we need coping tactics.
Some woman contacted me this week kinda randomly because she was hoping I could give her some techniques to help her deal with anxiety.
Which always makes me wish you could hug people over the internet. Because I’d totally do it.
And because: ohhhhhhhh. Anxiety = not fun.
Normal, yes. Anxiety is generally pretty normal for anyone who has lead even a slightly interesting life, but no, not fun at all.
Let’s talk about that.
Point one: Anxiety is normal
Now this is where I’m probably supposed to give you the whole “don’t listen to me, I’m not a shrink” spiel and direct you to my fancypants disclaimer, but pretend I’ve done that so we can get to the point.
The only people who haven’t ever experienced anxiety to some extent (and I know you’re thinking that “some extent” is hardly as crippling as yours but trust me on this) are not people you want to be.
People who have not been writhing on the floor in terror at some point in the past few years have either been leading extremely boring lives …. or are so repressed and overly-self-disciplined that it’s going to come back and bite them in the ass. And you don’t want to be there when that happens.
The rest of us deal with anxiety. Life is full of hard and scary because it’s always in flux. And believe me, it’s normal and it’s human to freak out when the scary shows up.
In fact, I’m feeling slightly anxious right now, wondering what I’m going to say in my brain-training lecture at the Berlin Yoga Festival tomorrow. Normal.
I work with a lot of people who deal with everything from minor “whoah, having a moment here” freakouts to full-on panic attacks, and believe me, it’s common as a headcold.
That is, if you can imagine for a second a world in which people didn’t admit to getting headcolds.
Point two: Thinking that it’s not normal makes it worse
Know what? I used to have panic attacks too when I was in university, and the more I convinced myself I was going mad, the more often they’d show up.
Of course, my family’s habit of dropping hints that I probably was going mad: less than helpful.
You probably can’t imagine the relief I felt when I met with a smart, funny, beautiful, capable psychologist, but try. Because she assured me that I was remarkably well-adjusted and that anyone who said otherwise was clearly off their rocker.
In the most perfect reframe I’ve ever witnessed, she said — and I’ll remember this forever —
“Hmmm … so you left home at 17, went halfway across the world all by yourself with no plans and no money, had a hundred things go horribly wrong at the same time including getting dumped, having a close friend die, and getting kicked out of your flat, and now you’re dealing with some fear.
“Well, yeah. That’s pretty much the healthiest reaction you could possibly be having.”
OH.
It took about five seconds for that penny to drop. After which I stopped worrying that I was losing it and decided to start taking better care of myself so that I could start noticing what was setting me off and what was grounding me. And that was the end of the anxiety.
And, you might say, the beginning of my interest in the mysterious and fascinating ways of patterns and habits.
Point three: There are *so* many things you can do about it
It used to be that your only option for dealing with anxiety was years and years of therapy.
Or — if you were a quick study autodidact like me — a nibble of therapy, a library card and a lifetime of intentional self-practice.
Today, though, is probably the best time in the history of the planet to be flipping the heck out.
Because there are a million great techniques out there from acupressure tapping to vipassana meditation to yin yoga to NVC (compassionate communication) to hypnotherapy …. and on and on.
Plus there are much easier ways to get started. Things like my Emergency Calming Techniques package if you’re into serious shifting and instant relief. Or things like, I don’t know, books that Oprah reads, if you’d rather just dip your toe in.
There’s choice out there, is what I’m saying.
So start reading, start journaling, start actively and passively tracking down those patterns so you can learn about how they work.
Start picking up those useful clues that are going to give you important information about how you interact with yourself and the world around you.
And when the hard and the scary show up, take a deep breath and allow yourself to be terrified. Just for a minute. Just for now. Remind yourself that you’re letting yourself be terrified, which is way more powerful than your fear.
Who knows, maybe you’ll even find out what your anxiety is trying to tell you.
*internet hug to you*
Ask Havi #1: The “How come?” edition
Because I said so
Actually, the credit for the brand new Ask Havi category all goes to Kelly Parkinson (aka Copylicious).
Kelly, who is also my amazing writer-friend slash colleague slash cheerleader, likes to regularly point out how unfair it is that I don’t let people peek into the contents of my inbox.
This happens whenever she asks me for genius-advice on something. She asks, I give it, and then she wants me to put it out there for everyone else.
And because she’s always right and because she’s careful not to use any icky marketing words like “leverage” (ewwww) when she brings it up, I said I’d think about it.
Then Naomi started in. Yes, that’s Naomi-my-internet-crush aka Itty Biz, who is also my another amazing writer-friend slash colleague slash cheerleader and is also always right.
Actually, Naomi recently wrote a great piece about why to be nice to the people who contact you, which now makes me feel even worse about the way I’m completely going to recklessly disregard her smart advice again.
When it’s good to be a helper-mouse …
The weird thing is, I actually love the idea that one quickie email answer of mine could help more than just one person. Also love the idea of being part of a living library of useful, practical, here’s-what-you-do information.
And, generally speaking, I like being what my gentleman friend would call a helper-mouse (don’t ask).
Who doesn’t want to be a helper-mouse? Hey, that’s pretty much the whole point of my business.
But just to fully establish my helper-mouse street cred before I blatantly refuse to be helpful a couple paragraphs from now: over the past few years I have gone way, way, way out of my way to help a ton of people who aren’t clients and probably won’t be.
Nice people. People in need of a helper-mouse. Mostly fellow Israeli expats who are now in America and Europe.
I help out partly because they ask (hello, to be Israeli is to live the Art of the Ask).
Also partly because I’ve moved countries three times in my own life. Having had to grapple with the harsh learning curve, I completely identify with how incredibly head-banging-against-the-wall frustrating that particular change can be.
Learning new ways of communicating and/or doing business: so not fun. I absolutely remember how great it is to have a helper-mouse, and how miserable it is when no one wants to be one.
When you really don’t feel like being a helper-mouse!
So yeah, helping people is what it’s all about.
But, sometimes you just don’t want to do it. Welcome to the downside to the “hi, I’m an approachable helper-mouse” thing.
People know I’m “that way” and that I have a duck and that I’m a big believer in acting like a real live human being.
Thus, the deluge. I get all sorts of requests from all sorts of people.
Some of them I’m happy to answer. Sometimes requests even lead to friendships. In fact, this weekend I’ll be having tea with Sandra Gross, a yoga teacher from Zurich, who came all the way to Berlin to see me teach mind-body brain training at the Berlin Yoga Festival. And also with Gabriela Rosa da Silva, a photographer from Paris.
But a whole bunch of them I don’t actually feel like dealing with. Ever. In fact, I have so many of these in my inbox right now that I don’t feel the slightest bit like being a helper mouse.
At all. Ever again.
Screw helper-mouse-ism. Screw who-knows-what-future-benefits. Screw good-person-ness. Screw karma karma karma. I just don’t feel like it.
Today, anyway, I’m feeling more like a grumble-mouse.
Hmmm, what kinds of requests, you ask.
Oh, for example, the “Would you mind rewriting the copy for this event I’m doing so that people will actually come to it?” requests.
Uh, yeah, actually I would mind. I don’t even know you and it takes time, energy and dusting off my genius hat. Grumble grumble.
Or the steadily growing requests (three this weekend!) which start something like this:
“I know we haven’t talked in fifteen years, but …”
“I found your profile on LinkedIn and you went to Tel Aviv university and I went to Ben Gurion university, which are totally in the same country, so ….”
“I’m also a teacher/healer/coach/etc so we have a lot in common, so …. “
And end with:
“… would you please review my website and tell me what you think and what I’m doing wrong?”
Urm…
So here’s what we’re going to do
The truth is, I think it’s super important that people feel comfortable asking for things and get better at letting themselves ask for things. Yay asking for things!
And I also think it’s super important that people who aren’t in the mood to give those things feel comfortable about saying no when that’s the true answer. Yay boundaries!
More than that: it’s also important to me personally to be able to step into helper-mouse mode when I feel like it … and without it ever morphing into a “should”. Yay minimal amount of self-awareness!
So, taking a cue from my father, who is big into the “there’s always some sort of solution that you’re just not seeing” kind of thinking, I came up with a compromise. Yay compromise!
Alright. People ask me for stuff. Good for them. And if you’re one of those people, you can keep asking.
Here’s my solution. Ask away, but know that I might fold my advice to you into a blog post. If I’m giving you my time and energy, then everyone gets to share.
And I want a small favor from you. Well, not a favor, exactly. I just want you to do something for me before you ask, and that is to read the rest of this post and follow the advice therein.
Yes, I said therein. Oh, I told you it was grumble-mouse day. It’s so grumble-mouse day.
Before you ask me (or anyone) for website advice: step #1
Run, do not walk, to your nearest independent bookstore or online independent bookstore and grab a copy of Steve Krug’s book “Don’t Make Me Think”.
Yes, that guy I’m always quoting in my noozletters and such.
Internalize his approach to usability testing, download his freebie test script so you know exactly what to ask people, and then test your site for usability. Observe how people navigate, what they don’t click on, what confuses them, and take notes.*
∗ Ummmm …. please see my Hi-I’m-a-cobbler-and-my-kids-are-barefoot disclaimer: It’s been eons since I tested for usability on my own site.
Before you ask me for website advice: step #2
Talk to Men With Pens. They’re smart, they’re funny, they’re polite and sensitive in a way which only Canadians (or people pretending to be Canadians) can get away with. What’s not to like?
Also, they do this awesome $30 site review, which they call a “Drive-by Consult“. They’ll tell you what’s not working and why, and then you fix it. Excellent.
No, I’ve never done it, but I hear from reliable sources that it rocks, so maybe I will. And really, for expert advice, $30 is absurdly cheap.
Once you’ve tested for usability and gotten your site shot up by Men with Pens, then I’ll tell you what I think. And I’ll even thank you for saving me 9/10ths of the work.
Before you ask me for freebie advice on everything else:
Hmm, I guess the best thing to do would be to read everything on this website.
But in general, if it were up to me (I know, it’s not, I’m still in grumble-mouse mode) and I got to choose how I’d want you to ask for freebie advice on any subject imaginable, it would be exactly like this:
Hey Havi, hey Selma! I loved the piece you wrote about [for example: solving the but-I-just-don’t-have-time problem].
I’ve been trying to apply this stuff but I’m getting stuck with X, Y and Z. Do you think you could write a piece that addresses this angle more specifically? Especially how to [whatever]? Because that would be so great!
But regardless of how people ask — and again, good for you for asking — I’m going to be doing a lot more of my answering here on the blog in the newly christened Ask Havi section.
(Don’t worry, I won’t name any names unless you specifically say you’re cool with that!)
That way, I’ll have more fun with it, and (she types hopefully) my helper-mouse moments can function as a useful resource that’s available to all sorts of people (especially the ones that would never dream of asking for help).
And best of all, that way I’ll be back in helper-mouse mode and out of the grumble zone. Because the grumble-zone isn’t good for either of us.
That’s it! Ask away.
(photo credit: Richard Miller :: Calyx Design)
My 100% guilt-free email policy
The end of email guilt
The other day someone apologized yet again for not getting back to me sooner, and it occurred to me that maybe it’s really time I reference my guilt-free policy in every email.
Which would be awesome. Because then I could just say (chirpily), “Please see my 100% guilt-free communication policy“.
Of course you can’t actually see it, since it’s in my head, but it’s still a policy.
Yeah, that’s right. I have a strongly-held 100% guilt-free correspondence policy.
Because, for some reason, despite the fact that it seems to me as though I do nothing but talk about my guilt-free email policy, no one seems to actually know about it.
My policy? Why, yes, I have one. Haven’t I already told you about it? It’s 100% guilt-free, guaranteed. For real.
So here’s how it works.
If I write to you and you don’t write back, and I find myself really wanting an answer on something, I can always send another email that says “Hey, could I get a response on this thing?”
Otherwise you’re good.
Only write something when you feel like it. Don’t write when you don’t feel like it. No need to feel bad if you do feel like it but you don’t get around to it. We’re cool.
You know when you write to me and say “Sorry for not getting back to you, but …”?
Don’t do that. You don’t have to say that.
That’s what a guilt-free email policy means.
It means I assume that — like me — you’re busy with a hundred different things, you’ve got stuff going on, and that you still love and adore me, like I do you. Mwah.
It means that guilt is unnecessary and it’s harmful and there’s no reason to take it on when you don’t have to.
It also means that, as far as I’m concerned, you don’t need those irritating Tim-Ferriss-ey autoresponders that say you won’t be getting back to me for X amount of time … because I don’t care. Get back to me whenever. Seriously.
I said you couldn’t see my policy, but now I’m going to write it down so you can.
Which is silly, because just reading the words “guilt-free correspondence policy” should have done the trick and calmed you the heck down. But whatever, here’s the policy.
The Official 100% Guilt-Free Correspondence Policy
There is no need to feel guilty when you don’t answer an email right away. Or ever.
Sincerely, Havi Brooks and Selma the Duck
If you’d like you can send a short “Can’t get to this at the moment, will catch up when I can”. But you don’t have to. We’re cool.
Got it? Good.
(Unless you work for me, in which case some policies, ahem, may not apply).
Hold the schnick schnack!
Did you know? I’m sitting right now in my favorite cafe in Berlin. Which also happens to be my favorite cafe in the world. Favorite!
To the point that were there to suddenly be some completely ridiculous law that from now on cafe-sitting is like marriage, and you have to choose only one that you’ll sit in for the rest of your life — this would be the One.
It’s the one where I always like the music and it’s always at the right volume. Where I always feel completely at home. Where the mirror in the bathroom makes me look fantastic. And where they have the best home-made cookies in town.
Yes, I know, I don’t eat cookies.
But even when you don’t eat cookies, you at least get to successfully convince other people to go out of their way to meet you, because you’ve promised them the best cookies ever . And then they come and of course you were right and everybody’s happy.
But you don’t want to read about my holiday abroad.
And actually I’m sitting here and thinking about “service” and what it means — in business and in general — because that’s the sort of thing I think about.
That elusive something or other
The impossible-to-pin-down je ne sais quoi. Or … das ungewisse Etwas, as we say here in Deutschland.
It can be kind of hard to determine what constitutes “good” service, since what you want and need at any given time tends to vary. And it varies so completely from person to person as well.
In general, of course, you can say that people have “stuff” and they want their “stuff” to be acknowledged and respected, rather than stepped on.
(This is what the Californians call “being sensitive to your needs”, and unfortunately my time in California wasn’t sufficient for me to be able to say this without a little sarcastic edge to the air quotes, but you get the idea.)
Personally the kind of service I tend to like is the “leave me the heck alone, but be there if I need you” variety.
Like in my favoritest-cafe-in-the-world* , where they smile happily at you when you come in and then happily ignore you once you’re settled in.
∗ I know it’s not a word, thank you.
They’ll also wax rhapsodic over which cookies are the best today (hazelnut!) but only if you ask. Suits me perfectly, because I’m more a cat than a dog, if you know what I mean.
But — beyond your personal cat vs. dog preferences — when it comes to being served, there are also some things that are pretty much always good and some things that pretty much always suck.
No schnick schnack, please: things that are good
Today I was at the T-Mobile store because my German cell SIM card stopped working. The guy replaced my card for free, which was awesome.
Then it turned out that in addition to the card issue, there was a phone issue (but more about that in a minute). I was going to have to buy a new phone, preferably a cheapie since I’m only in Germany for a month or so of the year.
The T-Mobile guy was pleasantly insistent that I needed the simplest possible model — without any “schnick-schnack” (what we would call “bells and whistles”) — and he actually ended up sending me to another store a few blocks away where I could get a better deal.
In the end I got a cheap-ass, completely schnick-schnack-free phone, and got to keep my old number as well. Hooray.
But back to things that suck
Turns out that the reason I’m in this absurd phoneless situation to begin with is this:
The people at Motorola, when specifically asked the question, “So which phone will work in Germany with my T-Mobile SIM card?” specifically recommended a phone which doesn’t.
It comes with plenty of schnick-schnack, though. Plenty of ridiculous features that I’ll never use. I didn’t even want this phone, except for the “will work in Germany” part of it.
And the Motorola people got over two hundred dollars because it was important to me that I have a phone that would work in Germany as well as the States, and not have to do what I did today which was buy another phone. As far as I’m concerned, that’s part of the schnick-schnack!
The thing is, it only takes one negative experience to establish the pattern in the brain, which is to associate frustration/annoyance/hurt with what appears to be the cause of it.
Just this week I screwed up with a customer, through a combination of oversight, chaos, poor staff choices and just plain old stuff-falling-through-the-cracks-ness.
Any way you slice it, I was absolutely in the wrong. And even though I can work on doing all sorts of things right, this guy has every right to feel frustrated, upset and disappointed with me.
It’s what Steve Krug calls “mensch points”, and you can lose them pretty darn fast when you’re in the business of serving people, whether in the sense of serving coffee, serving ideas or just caring for people in a deep and personal way.
Ow, right in the insecurity bone!
Actually Mark Silver of Heart of Business does this very cool, very out-there role-playing-style exercise where you physically bow down to your customer in a full prostration. As a way of, among other things, getting in touch (literally!) with the vulnerability of service.
Then the person in customer-mode bows to you, and you get to feel the vulnerability that’s always there when you share your gifts with someone who has given you their trust.
I don’t know if it’s even possible to give you a hint of the deep, visceral, spine-tingly full-body power of this exercise, but that’s what it was. It completely imprinted in my body a sense of protective mama-hen love for my clients and students.
And it gave me a deeper appreciation for anyone who can be with me in my own state of need, and meet me there.
I so wish Motorola would say to me exactly this:
“Wow, that seriously sucks. We misinformed you, it cost you a ton of money, and now you have a useless phone that you never even wanted to begin with *and* you had to buy a new one. Aaargh. We feel terrible about this.”
Haven’t called them yet, but at best they’re likely to say something like “we apologize for any inconvenience”. We shall see.
Because “serving” people is scary
Yeah, it’s scary and it makes you feel vulnerable. Not to mention that usually we’re so deep in our own issues and stucknesses that we can’t even see our customer’s issues and stucknesses.
What I’d really like for my own business is to keep learning more about the scary and the vulnerable, so I can get better at noticing when it’s showing up — whether it’s mine or whether it belongs to someone I care about serving.
Honestly? I want to be able to give out amazing hazelnut cookies to all my clients. And to ask for a hug from Motorola when I want one. And that we all insert the word schnick schnack into conversation as often as humanly possible.
But alas the world doesn’t work that way (yet).
I’m guessing though that the only thing I can really work on is practicing being in service to myself.
You know, noticing what my interactions with others look, sound and feel like on both sides of the equation, so they can be just that much more human — and ideally — as schnick-schnack-free as possible.
Well, at any rate, it’s a start.