Happy to share the next installment in my post-perfectionist video series. Today I address a question posed by Wendy, former student and colleague.

In the video I mention the practice of Remembrance, which I learned from Mark Silver. You can access a recording of Mark guiding you through Remembrance here.

I look forward to your reactions and comments!

Last you read, I had given myself permission to stop for the month of December.  I’m delighted to announce it was a powerful and fruitful experiment — one that I will be reporting back on in my next few posts.

Today, I want to celebrate and declare my intention for 2012 – to finish moving out of the House That Perfectionism Built.  This is a big deal for me, because perfectionism has been a pretty strong constant in my life.  This, too, shall be the topic of future posts and videos which I’m looking forward to sharing with you.

To begin, I am delighted to share with you my Post-Perfectionist Manifesto.  I would love to know what you think, and whether the quest for a post-perfectionist life is one that resonates with you.

Leave me a comment!  Let’s talk about what post-perfectionism would look like or mean for you.

And if you like, give me a buzz — I’m especially interesting in talking with fellow travelers on this wild and woolly path of discovery, self-acceptance and gratitude.

The idea of being unstoppable is quite magnetic.  Especially when it comes to making a difference, the picture of a person overcoming huge obstacles to prevail and beat the bad guys is the stuff of movies and dreams.  We all want to be unstoppable, don’t we?

Well, there are many different elements that play into what it takes to be unstoppable.  Today I’ll address the one that is perhaps the most paradoxical: knowing when to stop.

A Losing Season That Never Ends

Many moons ago, when I was completing my first coach certification program, Dave Buck — my teacher and the CEO of Coachville — said something that stuck in my head: most people are playing unwinnable games in a losing season that never ends.  He pointed out that athletes and high performers are able to clearly distinguish when it’s time to play full out (Game ON) and when it’s time to recuperate (Game OVER).  But in our day-to-day lives, we don’t do that.  We don’t say “game over.”  We don’t take a break.  We just continue with to-do lists that go on forever and gain twice as many additions for every crossed-out item.

This is not a sustainable way of being, my dear peep.  Whether the metaphor is an athlete playing full out, or an artist on stage giving their heart to the performance, it’s important to know when to go dark.

Nature Can Help

And it just so happens that we are coming up on the darkest time of the year, the Winter Solstice.  All around us, squirrels and other small creatures are fattening up and getting ready to crawl into hibernation.  Our pets get fluffy and sleepy.  The harvest has been collected, the trees go quiet – it’s the time of year to renew and get ready for what’s coming next.

That is my invitation to you, my dear peep.  In the midst of the holiday madness, may you find time to slow down, to take stock of what went well this year and what needs to be called good enough.  May you find moments to stop, to breathe, to notice what your heart longs for next.

I guarantee you this: the more you listen to your body and learn when and where you need to stop, the more you will be an unstoppable force in the world, where you are so badly needed.

Walking My Talk

In the spirit of “do as I do, and not only as I say,” I hereby declare this blog to be sleepy and hibernating until the new year.  I will be using this month to go within, go deep, and find what needs to happen next in my life and in my business, to better serve all your fabulous world-changing peeps out there.  I look forward to reporting back on my discoveries.

And in the meantime, have a glorious and glittery holiday season, dearest peep!  See you in the new year!

So let’s talk metaphors.  What if the Death Star is that thing about our world that makes you totally bananas?  (For me, often: domestic violence.)  And what if there is something greater and always available for you to tap into to be a powerful agent of change?

Yes, that’s right, I’m beating the joy drum again.  In fact, I’m all excited and hand-wavy, because in January of 2012 I’ll be co-teaching a new class with Kyeli Smith of Connection Revolution called “Permission to Make a Difference,” and it’s all about tapping into joy and creativity as your energy source to make a difference in the world.

This week Kyeli & Pace are featuring a guest post I wrote about The Force, change-making, and my commitment to helping you source in joy.  Won’t you come over and check it out?  I look forward to your comments.

We were also comparing the experience that I have when I’m coaching a client, or teaching a teleclass, to the experience of writing.  And that’s when we identified the oh-so-important difference: one is a process I trust, the other is a performance I need to deliver.

Like a row of dominoes, a lot of things fell into place at that moment of our conversation.  I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in the past eight years growing my certainty and skills as a coach.  I’ve been practicing the tools and methods I use every day.  I’ve done it so often, now I just show up and trust the process.  It’s easy, it’s fun, it plays to my strengths.

Writing, on the other hand, is pretty new to me.  I started this blog a couple of months ago because I wanted to create a space where I could deliver value to my peeps and future peeps. (Hi there, peep!  ::waving at you::)

The last time I did any serious writing I was in grad school — and baby, it’s ALL about performance there.  You’d better get it right, and you’d better have your facts straight, and you’d better be brilliant every single time, or you’ll get slashed to bits.  Or ignored, which is even worse.  So, hello!  Of course I have performance anxiety when it comes to writing.

Well, I thought that would be a good thing to blog about.  And so I hereby commit to writing as a practice and a process.  One that I will engage with love, curiosity and hope.  One that will occur organically, not every week on schedule.  A practice that is authentic, and self-nurturing, and flexible.  In other words, a practice that is in alignment with the talk I preach to my clients, and continue to walk myself every day.

And you, dear peep?  Is there something you’ve been holding in performance mode, that would benefit from shifting to practice and process?  Do share; I look forward to having a conversation with you about it in the comments below.

True confession: these past couple months since I’ve started blogging and now that I’m launching my new class, I’ve often been an emotional wreck.  There is so much to do!  So much to remember!  And there is no doubt that I would be totally around the bend right now if it were not for a fabulous community of fellow entrepreneurs and rebels: my Lift Off peeps.

Thinking about my peeps and about how supported I feel by them, I was reminded of the power and importance of environment design, a concept I first learned at CoachVille.  And so this week’s post is the first in a series I will be writing about the principles I learned in the environment design classes, now dubbed the World Power Method.

Let me start by sharing the nine different environments first created by Thomas Leonard, founder of CoachVille.  They are:

• Memetic Environment – Ideas
• Financial Environment – Money, Wealth and Budget
• Relationship Environment – Close friends, family and close colleagues
• Network Environment – Professional Connections, Greater Community
• Physical Environment – Places and Things
• Body Environment – Your Energy, Appearance and Clothing
• Self Environment – Strengths, Talents and Character
• Spiritual Environment – Deep Connections and Sacred Spaces
• Nature Environment – The Great Outdoors

As you can see, our environments are much more than just the traditional ecological definition.  And how we attend to and shape our environments has a dramatic effect on our capacity to effect change and live joyous lives.   That is because, in the words of Thomas Leonard himself,

“The Environment Always Wins.”

In the most basic Darwinian sense, we adapt in order to survive.  And we adapt quite quickly!  Our environments have a powerful tug to maintain the status quo.  And because our Social Selves are always on the lookout of how to behave, belong and stay under the radar, we generally seek to behave as the environment expects us to.

Which brings me back to my peeps.  Our relationship environment, the people with whom we communicate on a daily basis, has a very strong influence on whether we have the strength to keep on keeping on.  By virtue of having attended Pam Slim and Charlie Gilkey’s amazing Lift Off retreat, I am now part of a phenomenal group of entrepreneurs that are out to change the world.

This wonderful group of people expects great things of me.  They saw me at my best during the retreat, and some of them have since hired me to coach them.  This expectation gives me strength and pulls me forward, even on the days when a fetal position and a nice novel sound much more appealing.  It also helps that we are constantly inundating each other’s inbox with support, questions and advice.  And celebrations!

Who are your peeps, and where are they pulling you?

My invitation to you is to scan your relationship and network environments.  Notice who gives you juice, and who saps you.  Notice where you could deploy better boundaries, in a caring and compassionate manner.  Notice who inspires you, and how you can be in connection with them on a regular basis.

And here is my coaching challenge for you:  In the comments below, write one thing you will START to do in your relationship environment.  Write one thing you will STOP, and one thing you will CHANGE.  Because when you start, stop and change things in your life, you are on your way to creating the life you actually want and deserve.

PS. Do your dreams need a safe environment?

Yes, I am still agitating about my upcoming class, “From WTF to OMG: Name & Claim Your Heart’s Calling.”  I’m passionate about creating safe, nurturing and fierce environments for peeps to seed and grow their dreams.  (Yes, nurturing and fierceness can co-exist, ask my clients.)  So if you are wanting a community of fellow seekers to name and claim what you’re really about, please join us.

Today I was inspired by a thought in Jen Louden’s The Life Organizer: A Woman’s Guide to a Mindful Year.  She says:

“Desire is the flow of life we yearn to swim in, the urge to be one with Spirit, and the way to stay in touch with this flow is through knowing what we want without insisting that we get it.  It is staying with the feeling of desire, following it with curiosity, that leads us ever closer to what we most want.  All desire, at its heart, is about a longing to be loved and to be one with All That Is.  Even the most mundane desires or, worse, ones that have calcified into unhealthy obsessions have at their root this desire to be known and loved.”

I love this idea, it resonates deeply with what I know to be true and how I wish to live my life.  Do I always live this way?  Ha!  I wish.  Usually, when I deeply want something, I also get profoundly attached to getting it exactly as I imagined it and in precisely the timetable I determined — or sooner.  And then, as soon as I’m attached to the outcome, I become responsible for making it happen.

What if we are only responsible for our desire, and the outcome takes care of itself?

This past summer, I took an amazing class with Mark Silver that helped me heal my relationship with money.  In one of the sessions, he was leading us through the Remembrance, and he said, “Notice where you are holding yourself responsible for the outcome.  Bow your head in humility, and raise this responsibility off your shoulders and into the hands of the Divine.  Our work is to show up, to Remember [our connection to the Divine], and to love.  The rest is beyond our control and not ours to do.”

I will never forget that day.  I not only bowed my head in humility — I flung myself out of my chair and onto my knees, sobbing.  I had not realized, until that moment, that I was holding myself responsible and accountable for so much.  For my family’s welfare and happiness.  For creating a wildly successful business (instead of a modestly successful business, as it has been thus far).  For being a leader in my community.  For making a difference.  For doing it (whatever “it” is in the moment) not just right, but perfectly.  Oy!

Since then, I can say I’ve been making progress.  I sent my inner perfectionist to Las Vegas (since Vegas is not my kind of city, I have no concerns I will go and run into her there).  I’ve been practicing the Remembrance more frequently, and surrendering the outcome.  I’ve been noticing what is already working, and being grateful for that.

And yes, my inner perfectionist has been back a couple of times to visit.  I’m as patient as possible with her, and I ship her out as soon as I can.  I stay focused on what I desire: to serve more and more peeps who are out there making a difference in the world.  To be a great mom and partner.  To be part of the solution to our many social ills.  And yes, at the very heart of it, to feel accepted and seen and loved for who I am.  To have people receive my offerings and to receive theirs in return.  To know myself “one with All That Is.”

And you?  What do you desire with all your heart?  And where could you potentially let go of the insistence that it happen just exactly as you planned it?

PS. I’d love to help you name and claim your desires.

Your heart is always calling you to the next great adventure in your life.  But sometimes we need a little help tuning in to that voice.  Perhaps that voice is very shy or quiet or skeptical.  Perhaps it’s been a while since we listened.  I’m teaching a new class next month on how to reconnect to your heart’s calling.  Please join me for a free intro call this coming Thursday, Sept 29 at 8pm ET to talk about why our desires go into hiding, and how we can coax them back out.  Sign up here for the intro call, or visit the page about the class to learn more about it.

I spent this past weekend volunteering at the Landmark Forum.  It has been fifteen years since the first time I attended this program, and I had a great time reviewing the material and reconnecting to the principles that I’ve found useful in my work as a coach and in my own personal development.  (Yes, Landmark has a controversial reputation.  I personally hate the hard-sell approach, but I love and have benefited greatly from their teachings.  If you’re curious to read more about it, the wikipedia article does a pretty good job.)

So let’s set aside the question of whether I drank the kool-aid or not.  I want to share one of the more powerful ideas I took away from this past weekend and start a conversation with you, my dear peep, to get you off your tush.  Here it is:

We are all waiting for someday, and for somebody else to do it.  Someday I will address the personal relationships I have been avoiding.  Someday I will actually tell my supervisor what I think and how we could improve our work environment.  Someday I will be fully self-expressed.  Someday I will have enough money.  Someday we’ll have a Congress that actually does its work and not just worries about re-election.  Someday someone will do something about domestic violence.

There is no someday.

The only time we actually live in is NOW, and now, and now.  If you are waiting to claim your dream, if you are waiting for that perfect moment when ___, you will probably always be waiting.

And that thing you care about?  No one else is going to do anything about it — because nobody else has the perspective that you do.  We all come to challenges in our world and the possibilities that emerge from them from our own singular frame of reference — our set of experiences, history, talents and strengths.  Only you can step up to make the difference that you see possible; no one else sees that possibility like you do.

Every time you say, “This is important to me, and this is what I’m going to do about it,” the world becomes a better place.  Every time you name and claim your heart’s calling, and start taking small turtle steps to make that dream a reality, you inspire someone else to do that too.

We all spend way too much time thinking about our past, our patterns, the things that are making us crazy about ourselves and the people around us.  What would it be like, instead, to focus on a future possibility that you want to make a reality?  What if you trusted that everything you already have and know and are is enough for the task at hand?  Imagine greeting each day like it’s a new opportunity to take a step in the direction of the thing you’ve decided you want.  Imagine choosing to focus on the next thing to be done, rather than the thing that’s been making you crazy for the past two weeks. (Because guess what: it will probably make you crazy today again, too.  Say, “Thank you for sharing,” and move on to the next turtle step on the path you are choosing for yourself.)

Gandhi said, “Whatever you do may seem insignificant to you, but it is most important that you do it.”  In other words, Tag: You’re It.  So what do you stand for, and what are you doing today?

PS. Need some help finding “it”?

I’m very excited about a new class I’ll be teaching this fall.  It starts at the end of October, and there’s a free introductory call on September 29.  If you are tired of yearning but not knowing what your dream is, please join me and other peeps on the journey to name and claim your heart’s calling.  Sign up here for the intro call, or visit the page about the class to learn more about it.

With all this academic excitement in the air, I thought I’d use this space to think and talk about the learning and teaching cycle, a process I think we could all harness to be happier and more powerful agents of change.

First, let me set the stage with some observations:

• Life gets crazy after we leave school and enter the “grown up” world of work.
• Very few work environments encourage us to stay fresh, to continue to seek and learn.
• The lack of training and development in work environments is part of what makes us lose hope and enthusiasm – it’s the same old, same old.  This in turn leads us to hopscotch through new jobs when we can’t stand the boredom anymore.

It does not have to be this way.

My vision is this: that we are all both learning something to keep us humble and teaching something to help us feel masterful – at the same time.

It can be hard to think of yourself as a teacher.  What do you, one small peep, have to offer others?  Well, anything and everything that you have learned on the way to becoming who you are today.  Also, remember that your strongest gifts and talents come so naturally to you, you don’t even think of them as important.  But they are, and other peeps would greatly benefit from your teaching of them.  And the more you recognize what you have to offer, the more you will step out to meet the opportunities and challenges out there waiting for you.

It can also be hard to think of yourself as a learner.  Our society rewards mastery, bravado and big egos.  The more confident and together you seem, the more approval you get.  It takes guts, in my opinion, to stay humble and open to new learning.  We are not usually rewarded for showing the soft underbelly of our insecurities and self-doubts.  But it’s where it’s at, my dear peep, because when you come from a place of learning and curiosity then you’re not trying to control the outcome.  As my favorite Louise Hay affirmation has it: the point of power is always in the present moment.  And when you are learning, you are in the present.

The trick here is to do both at once –kinda like patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time.  But take it from me, my dear peep: I’ve been doing it for a while now, and it really works.  You feel useful and hopeful.  Powerful and infinitesimally small.

What do you think?  What are you currently learning and/or teaching?

Among other amusing traits, Sofia has a very powerful voice box which she frequently deploys at full volume.  Sofia is always singing, especially in the car.  And there is one particular song which she sings with such gusto and enthusiasm, even though she doesn’t understand and cannot pronounce half the words, that lead me to writing this post today.

The song in question is “Stand” by Karen Drucker.  This lovely song is a repeating chant that says:

Let there be peace, I am a stand for peace. 

Let there be love, I am a stand for love. 

Let there be joy, I am a stand for joy.

We are making a new world now.

 It’s not hard to figure out why I love this song; it’s always been like an anthem for me.  It has now bumped up to the top of my hit parade, because every time Sofia sings it, she sings as loud as her little lungs will let her:

LET THERE BE JOICE, I AM STAND FOR JOICE!

At first my reaction was, “Oh, adorable.  Another word she will one day stop mispronouncing.” (Like smaghetti. I love smaghetti.)

 But then it hit me: joice = joy + choice.

Brilliant!  And absolutely true. It is when we have choice and freedom to choose that we have access to surrender and joy. The more we see different viable options, the more we feel relief and are able to open up to the possibility that yes, one day I will be doing what I love and making a difference and paying all my bills.  This is actually going to happen.

In my work with my clients, I am often exploring their thoughts and limiting beliefs and old core intentions that are holding them back.  Pretty consistently, when our inner critic is screaming in our head, the pain we’re feeling is the perceived lack of choice.  We feel like we can’t do anything different, we can’t do anything right, we’re pretty much dead in the water.  But as soon as we consider the possibility that (a) it’s just a thought and (b) there are other thoughts that make me feel and act differently, lo!  We have choice and relief.  We can choose which thoughts we entertain.  We can choose which actions would be most aligned with our essential self.  We can choose, as I often do, to take a nap and revisit the whole catastrophe with fresh eyes and rested mind and open heart.

Recently, the freedom to choose self-care has been the door that leads me to joy and relief.  No surprise there, as I’m busy raising a three and seven year-old, and also raising this coaching business into a mature, adult, self-supporting outfit.  I have so many expectations of myself, it’s not even funny. I’m noticing that expectations and joy are inversely proportional.  The more I drop expectations, the more joy I have.

So here’s to the idea of ‘joice’ – the feeling of freedom and flexibility and many many options.

Where do you feel that you lack choices? What would happen if you freed yourself from expectations so you could experience more joy?

I’d love to hear in the comments, or join me for a free monthly Provocative Conversation and we’ll delve a bit deeper into what joice means for you.