Author: Christine

Christine http://www.mombie.com I'm a writer/storyteller/director/creativity & lifestory coach with a black belt in ITF Taekwon-do. I read voraciously and I write like my fingers are on fire. I'm the founder and Co-Chair of the Association for the Arts in Mount Pearl and I'm the current president of the St. John's Storytelling Festival. I bake a mean chocolate chip cookie.

Action Item: Get this book!

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#Reverb10 Prompt: Action. When it comes to aspirations, its not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen. What’s your next step? By Scott Belsky, author of Making Ideas Happen

Can I start by saying how excited I was to find out that Scott Belsky’s book exists? I really need some help in this area.  I mean I probably put more ideas into action than many people do, but I have trouble getting started sometimes and I’d love to have a way to prioritize and pick which ideas to do when.

Okay, so imagine I have an idea.  My first step is to write it down, and usually to ramble and or brainstorm about it for a while.  Then I usually bounce it off the person I know who will see its spaciousness (different ideas need different people), and we hash it out a while.  Then, depending on the size of the idea/project, I either start making lists and a timeline or, if it is soonish and smallish, I round people up get things moving.

I want to put more of my ideas into action though, and I want to build upon those ideas and grow more, fresh ideas and just go mad with idea growing.

Again with the structure and consistency though. I need it.

Un-needful things

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I am totally intrigued by all the prompts for this week, and I want to do them all.  I’m just going to start with the most recent one and work backwards.

Prompt: 11 Things. What are 11 things your life doesn’t need in 2011? How will you go about eliminating them? How will getting rid of these 11 things change your life?  Prompt by Sam Davidson author of 50 Things Your Life Doesn’t Need

Eleven things I don’t need, huh?  In no particularly order:

1. hassle

2. household clutter

3. guilt

4. emotional clutter

5. tiredness

6. junk food

7. bickering children

8. leftovers (stuff hanging around unfinished, not just food)

9. inconsistency

10. those old computers in the basement

11. toys the boys have outgrown

Okay, so those first nine are a little different than the last two but they are all valid, so I’m running with it.

I  love this prompt.  I got up this morning and thought about my to do list for today and then thought ‘To hell with it!  I don’t want to spend my whole day getting the house ready for Christmas and not have any pre-Christmas fun.’  This prompt ties right into that liberating thought.  I am ditching the guilt and embracing the fun of Christmas prep, instead of saving the fun for after the work.  I’m starting elimination of things on this list NOW, damn it! Whoot!

Ahem.

So how am I going to go about eliminating these things?

As for today, I am going to do some tidying – while blasting music and hanging with my kids – but I am also going to make some gingerbread with the boys and help them finish the Christmas cards.  And we are going to go for a walk in the snow.  Take that ‘work first, play later’ attitude!

As for my 2011 plan, I’m going to treat the list in groups.

Group 1: hassle, guilt, emotional clutter, tiredness, bickering children, leftovers, inconsistency,

These things all grow from the same seed, the same thing I identified in my first Reverb10 post.  I don’t set good boundaries in my life, I don’t have structure.  Without structure everything seems important all the time and my life is all about reacting to external things.

I’ve been re-reading Chip and Dan Heath’s book Switch: How to change things when change is hard and making notes about how to make it easier for me to adopt the structure(s) I have in mind.

Basically I know I have to make it easy and habitual to follow the structure by eliminating all the decisions about what should be done when, and I have to make sure not to tire out my will-power.  And I have to identify the things that really matter to me so I can use that identity as a means to automatically make other decisions (i.e.  ‘A self-caring person like me knows it is better to go to sleep when I’m tired than to stay awake reading.’)

When I get this structure in place, and hence eliminate all* of these things I don’t need,  I will  be better able to say no to things I don’t have time or energy for, and I will be building my energy all the time with good self-care habits.  I will have a consisent plan for getting my work done so it doesn’t seep over into other parts of my life, and I will be able to ditch ‘leftovers’ from other sets of past priorities.

Group 2:  junk food

Damn, I hate the way I eat and I hate the way I feed my family.  The structure I discuss above will help me with planning better things to eat, but that’s not the only source of this problem.

I have a lot of trouble with the notion that some foods are ‘bad’ and others good.  Even the ‘worst’ junk food has some nutritional value and I hate how foods come with moral values attached to them.

Yet I know that some food serves my body’s purposes better than others.  Some foods give me energy longer, some foods leave me feeling bad after I eat them.   And I want to feel good, and I want my family to feel good (and to be well fueled) but getting into complicated food rules.

So I am labelling food that doesn’t make us feel good as junk food, and I am going to find the easiest path to keep us eating food that does make us feel good.  And how will my life feel after that?  I can only assume it will feel GOOD.

Group 3: household clutter, those old computers in the basement, toys the boys have outgrown

Some ‘leftovers’ fall into this group as well, but this one is more specific, so I’ll handle this clutter group separately.

I feel bad about the things in this list.  I feel bad because a lot of it represents a type of person I thought I was, or things I thought I’d do with my kids, or stuff I meant to be better at.  And I feel bad about the idea of throwing these things out, so I’d like to find the perfect place to donate them.

I recognize the futility in this line of thinking, yet I haven’t changed it.

If I were to let go of the things that didn’t pan out, I could make so many other things pan out from what I know now, so I need a plan to ditch those old things.

I’m going to use Julie Morgenstern’s SHED principles and pick a time each week to go through some of the old stuff and pick the things I really want to keep and ditch the rest.

I think this is going to feel very freeing as I let go of things I meant to be, so I can decide where to go next.

*I know there is a limit to how much bickering I can eliminate, but I’m thinking of the kind that stems from boredom and lack of movement, not the basic sibling type bickering.

Bonus Reflection

This week was harsh.

One or both of my boys has been sick since November 26, and this week we all finally hit the wall.  I was skittery from not being able to work at all(with deadlines looming) and from not getting a full night’s sleep.  They were skittery from spending too much time sitting around, too much time in the house, and too much time with each other.

That much skittery in one house is not good for anyone.

I did my best to counter it, trying to find things for them to do, taking us for a walk once they felt better, and doing relaxation exercises.  As a result they were doing better but I was still edgy.

Then there’s fact that I haven’t done the Reverb10 reflections since Monday. I was really enjoying the exercises, I found the prompts interesting, and I yearned to write about the ones piling up in my inbox.  Yet I didn’t take the few minutes necessary to sit down and write about them.

Thinking about that made me think about how if things are hectic I will forget to get a drink of water, even though I am thirsty.  Or if I am in the middle of something I won’t take time to eat.

Basically, the times when I need fuel (of one sort or another) the most, I won’t stop to refuel.

So, this week, when I clearly needed some headspace, I just bemoaned the lack of it rather than taking time to find that space.

Shit, that sucks.

I’m going to need to do some paper journal rambling to figure out what to do about that.

Not making much of anything.

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December 6 – Make. What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it? (Author: Gretchen Rubin)

This is a weird one for me.

In a way I make a lot of things,  I bake and I cook, but those things aren’t lasting.  I don’t even make fancy cookies or cakes that someone would want to take a picture of.  They taste good, and they look good to eat, but they aren’t something you’d want to record for posterity.

Last week I made Christmas cards with my kids, but that’s kind of misleading because I didn’t actually do any myself, I let them make a glorious mess while I organized the materials.

I write. All sorts of different things.  But while that is creative it is not something I would consider myself to have made.

I made a movie with my kids’ friends in October (I still have to edit it), but that was like making a play or writing a story. Still not a THING I made.

The truth is, I don’t make very much.  The details required for crafts and craft hobby confound and frustrate me and I lose any pleasure of creation to the notion that this thing has to go there.  For Christmas, my friends have decided that we will exchange 10 dollar gifts in an elaborate sort of game.  So we don’t know who will end up with the gift we bring.  Everyone else is making things,  I may end up baking.  I can’t really think of what I can make that would end up as something I would want to give as a gift.

I still have a while to figure that out though.

And since I haven’t really made anything lately, I’ll have to go with what I would like to do.

I’d love to be able to draw.  I’d love to be able to create with charcoal and pastels and put feelings into sketches instead of words.*

And on the one hand, I don’t need very much in order to be able to ‘make’ that.  I just need some paper and a pencil I guess.  But what I want?  Delicious cream coloured thick art paper, and the kind of pencils REAL artists use – the kind that you have to use a knife instead of a sharpener to make a point on.

I don’t know if I’ll do it though.

*My usual joke is that I don’t draw and I don’t take good photos, so I have to be really good with my thousand words. 🙂

Letting Go: No one cared about the cupcakes.

#Reverb10  Prompt for December 5 – Let Go. What (or whom) did you let go of this year? Why? (Author: Alice Bradley)*

I’m not good at letting go.  Not in most senses of the word.  It’s hard for me to know when to stop, hard to know when I’ve invested enough time, hard to know when it’s just enough.

It feels to me like too many people are willing to just let go when things get challenging, to just let people and things drift away from them when with a little effort so many dear things and people could be kept close.  I err too far in the other direction, I think as a sort of counterbalance to how many people I know let things ebb away.

I’ve been working on it though, learning what to keep.  And I’ve been putting it into practice in small ways.

I have fairly high standards for myself in some things (and in others I have appalling low ones, but let’s stay on topic here).  I try to always bake things from scratch (a cake mix feels like cheating to me – stupid as that is), I try to minimize how much help I ask for, I try to make the things I care about as close to my vision of them as possible.  It’s fairly exhausting at times.

So this year I tried to figure out where the important things were and hold on to them.  I tried to judge how much I could get done in the time frame I had and yet arrive at my destination (event/activity/cake) unflustered and unrushed.  It has taken a lot of practice, since, on some level, I feel that if something is Christinely-possible then I should knock myself out to accomplish it.

I’ve had to give myself a stern talking-to on this and I’ve learned to say no to myself about half the time when I start to go into overdrive and want to cram more into the time before an event.  Just because I *can* make a fourth dessert doesn’t mean I should, and probably no one will notice anyway.

This has meant letting go of one notion of myself as a superhero, as she who can do the impossible (at great, invisible personal cost) and start my evenings/events/parties dressed up, with make-up on and ready to go instead of taking 30m after everyone gets here to get into party mode because I had to rush through my personal preparations in order to have everything ‘ready.’

What does a practical example of this look like?

Well, take my six year old’s party two weeks ago.  Last year, I would have knocked myself out to have all three floors of the house tidy, I would have bought a ton of food for the parents who might show up, and I would have baked the cupcakes from scratch (and made the icing from scratch ,too).

This year, I tidied the main floor (and forbid the kids to go up or down),  I told the parents that my house was small and there would be a crowd of kids so they should probably go home (in a friendly tone, not a snarky one) and I bought icing and made the cupcakes from a mix.

Here’s the thing, the cupcakes were a party ‘prop’ –  a reward for finding 10 chocolate coins at the videogame themed party – and only the kids were eating them.  They weren’t the main cake, he wanted chocolate dipped donuts** as his cake (they were great, held they candles perfectly).  Last year I would have really felt like I had failed if I served those cupcakes.  This year I focussed on the fact that by using a mix I had time to let the birthday help me make the cupcakes, and I started the party relaxed instead of overwhelmed. No one else noticed the cupcakes but me.

I think I made a good move there.

*I’m a day behind. Yesterday was wacky around here.

**Go ahead, muse about the crap I feed my children if you like.  Birthdays are for all manner of treats in my books.