Today’s writing stats: 943 words

Today the morning pages led me to an unexpected place.  Yesterday I wrote about the morning page ritual and how I’m using it to work through ideas that need expressing or whatever’s getting in the way of expressing them.  Today I wrote about whatever was getting in the way so I could get it out of the way, and surprisingly it led me to describing exactly the frustration that led me to creating this project, this course.  An excerpt:

This morning I’ve been thinking about what I would write, and yet there’s this big, huge writing block, thinking block, living block that keeps getting in the way. I hate it It’s awful. And I wish that I could come up with some way around it, that I could improve the situation, but it’s really hard to do – probably because it’s another person and that person’s attitude. It’s consistently negative. It seems to be always focused on deficiency and what’s missing and what’s not working. And the worst part is that all this negative thinking doesn’t lead to productive solutions or even conversations. It leads to more negative thinking and an “I’ll show you” strategy. It’s about complaining and criticizing and yet not doing anything to improve the problem. It’s about taking a problem and actually making it grow. It’s about noticing all the things that are wrong in the world and instead of figuring out what can be done to improve those things or at least improve the attitude about those things, it’s about blaming and absolving responsibility for the problem. It’s a coping mechanism. I see that. The blaming and pointing fingers is a way to defuse the situation and make it not something that person is responsible for. It means no one has to do anything difficult or uncomfortable (well, not no one Just the person who’s doing the blaming and pointing fingers). It’s about noticing the deficiencies everywhere else but never taking personal responsibility for a problem. Never thinking, “What can I do that would confront this problem, that could acknowledge the issue and try to do something positive about it.”

@saramccann – I appreciate your feedback and the fact that you willingly waded through all that mess.  This is my new problem, now that I’m not writing first for purpose, that I have to figure out to do with all the material: how to sort through it, how to sculpt it, what I want the finished product(s) to look like.  As for the 10 minutes bit, I’m now literally at the point where missing my writing feels like not brushing my teeth.  There’s a gap that needs to be filled and I feel incomplete without it.  Actually, now that I’ve assigned those morning pages for “expressing ideas or whatever’s getting in the way” – I crave my daily writing stint.  It is my daily therapy.  That being said, I also spend lots of moments in my day feeling forced into menial tasks because I’m engaged in childcare.  So 10 minutes of kids captivated by a screen?  I’ve now determined that’s gold in my book.  And since I don’t have time for messing around, that means I have to get to the point right away.  I’m in touch with my thoughts and my emotions so when the moment arrives, I’m ready to write whatever’s there.  It’s like bringing my conscious and unconscious minds together for a little soiree.  They like to mingle at least once a day and have the event captured by the fingers.

In other news, I’m now characterizing all those little thoughts that constantly nag at my brain (buy snow boots for E, remember parent-teacher conferences, figure out how many teacher gifts for the holidays, buy a gift for C’s party this weekend, what’s for dinner tonight) as gnats that circle around my head.  At the moment, it seems hard to grab the right one at the right time – and those gnats are always hovering just outside my head, ready to interrupt a train of thought or moment of insight or just throw off the whole deliberate plan.  Darned gnats.  Grab a fly swatter and smash them all to the ground!

Today’s Writing Stats: 2013 words

Yesterday I had a lightbulb moment about my course and the needs of my audience.  Awesome.  For anyone passionate about my course, here are the details.  Kind of rushed with multiple interruptions.  I hope I’m able to convey the idea clearly enough.

Happy Thanksgiving! The morning was a lot of boys screaming and behaving hostile towards each other. Not the most gracious behavior that’s for sure. And now, at least for a few moments, the older boys are engaged in Minecraft on the Playstation and the twins are playing with the bin of mismatched legos. Ah, a moment of peace. I’m so thankful for that!

Yesterday I said that I was going to talk about the idea of HOLDING SPACE – a theme that flows through so many of our course ideas. I do still hope to talk about that idea, maybe a bit today, but I had a HUGE LIGHTBULB MOMENT yesterday and I’ve been waiting for a moment to capture it in writing.

This week I received an email from an online publication called New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst. The reason I’m on their email list is because I stumbled across their website months ago and decided to submit an inquiry to publish an article. The article idea was later rejected (oh well, at least I tried – I thought “Why I Stopped Seeing Noncompliant Patients” was well-suited to their readership but apparently not. Now I can reserve it for my own website – I think it will be a sensation) but then, as I said, I received an email this week telling me about a new publication called “Physician Burnout: The Root of the Problem and the Path to Solutions” and that publication may boomerang my course idea into new areas and realms.

So first of all, I am not a physician. I am a dietitian. Nonetheless, this topic is important to me because a) I’m creating a website that’s dedicated to “Changing the Conversations of Healthcare Professionals” and that includes physicians, and b) I did not realize that physician burnout was so pervasive – more than half of physicians experience burnout, and it’s thought that this number is increasing due to factors including Emergency Medical Records, demands for increased productivity, as well as the increasing complexity of medical patients. If this is true for physicians, it must also be true of other healthcare professionals who support them and work in the same environments as them.

So the first thought in my head, as I download this 48-page publication, is that WOW this means that the work I’m doing is important, urgent, and timely. There’s lists of all the bad things that happen because physicians (and presumably other healthcare professionals) are disengaged. “Broadly speaking, disengagement undermines morale.” So true. When we can engage healthcare professionals and enable them to feel competent and capable, we improve their morale, the morale of patients, and ultimately the outcomes that matter so much.

Then I start reading through the multiple articles, and one major theme that comes through is this: As a culture, we tend to blame physician burnout on the physicians themselves, we think it is an individual problem. We can address the problem with initiatives that target the individual – resilience training, time outs. That if we just train physicians better, then the problem will improve. The reailyt, though, is this. Physician burnout is not an individual problem. It’s actually a systemic problem, and research demonstrates that this problem starts during medical school and clinical rotations. These individuals who enter this field, people with exceptional dedication to caring for others and learning copious amounts of material, start with higher than normal levels of resilience and self-affirmation (I can’t think of the exact word there, but that will do for now) and by the end of medical school and medical training, they are already falling, our system is already failing them. Anyway, the theme I want to address here is that WE BLAME THE PHYSICIANS THEMSELVES but really it is a systemic problem.

One of the problems is that due to the increasing size of our medical systems, we are now focusing more on metrics and less on relationships. Quality indices, which are supposed to improve care, may not reflect what patients and their practitioners perceive as quality of care – but simply what managers are able to extract from the health record system. According to one physician, “Getting in and out quickly, ticking off all the boxes, and getting your records completed promptly – these are the things the system values. But my patients want me to listen to them and make sure their concerns are addressed. Being assessed every day by measures that don’t really improve patient care – over time, it takes a real toll on you. The people in charge don’t realize that you simply can’t pull real quality out of large data sets.”

According to this physician, her goal is not simply to meet productivity targets, but “to take the time to get to know my patients and intervene in ways that actually improve their lives.” The people who care for patients feel that “face-to-face interactions with patients, not board meetings or creative huddles, are where health care needs to focus.” Unforutnatley, “hospitals and health systems are becoming increasingly detached from the reality of meicine. As organizations grow in size, they rey less on relationships and more on aggregate data and policies. As health care shifts from relationships to data-driven, process-oriented approaches, it inevitably discounts the needs of particular patients and the people who care for them. As many physicians see it, collecting evidence to demonstrate that healthc are organizations and their executives are performing well is ultimatley less important than taking good care of patients.” The article ends by stating, “We need a renewed commitment to the most central of all medicine’s ends: caring well for patients.”

And what that means for me – is that I can’t just create a course that’s a band-aid, something that promises that it will fix patients and the frustrations themselves, and also that I can’t presume that physicians and other healthcare professionals aren’t doing their very best already, and that they need one more set of instructions to follow. To presume that I have the one solution is ludicrous and big-headed. And to suggest that it’s a problem of individuals not carrying their own weight is short-sighted and lacking compassion for people who are already working through so many systemic obstacles to care for their patients.

So, in essence, I don’t want to create a band-aid, a “new strategy” approach that adds more to all the other things these healthcare professionals face in their daily work. The goal is to create a course that SUPPORTS healthcare professionals and their work, so in this case it may not be just about better caring for patients, it may actually be about better caring for patients AND the healthcare professionals themselves. I can’t come in with a dictive that says “You are doing things wrong and here are the right ways to do things.” Instead, I have to say, “You’ve been doing your best to care for patients in a system that doesn’t always help you to do that the best way. Here are some strategies that you can teach your patients, and these same strategies can also enable you to take care of yourselves.” THAT is empowering.

That leads me to the ideas presented in another article within this publication, that suggests that there’s a problem with the current prescription for physician burnout. These problems are the idea that busy clinicians will take their free time to sit by themselves and watch modules and revamp their workflow, that we expect educational resources alone to motivate behavior change, and that we spend so much time describing and diagnosing the problem rather than “experimenting to innovate solutions”, and that the solution is for individual clinicians to “practice self-defense against increasingly untenable clinical demands.” The author argues that the medical profession is attempting to address burnout with symptomatic management and treatment of the individual.

This author suggests an idea that may propel my course in a more proactive direction. He says, “Rather than resiliency training, how about performance training? In addition to training to be competent clinicians, we must train in order to maintain that high performance – both for ourselves and for our patients. Meeting our high professional standards day in and ay out requires systematic and intentional training. Whereas stress management is defensive and reactive, performance is offensive and preemptive. Depression screenings and mental health resources help with coping, whereas performance training optimizesfor thriving. A campagin against burnout combats disease, whereasa campaign for performance promotes vitality. Self-care sounds soft, whereas performance is hardcore. Performance is immediate and tangible, whereas wellness is delayed gratification – a notriously hard sell. Minset is important; building a new skill set in personal performance to enhance both self- and patientcare generates an internal locus of control, which drives motivation and action.” The author also highlights the fundamentals of human performance – “sleep, physicial activity, nutrition, mindful awareness, energy management, and self-compassion” and likens these to the tenets of lifestyle or preventive medicine. Essentially, we are encouraging clinicians to “train for peak performance” and concludes that “when empowered and supported to take care of ourseves as whole people, we are more willing to treat our patients in kind.”

So to summarize what I’ve stated above: it’s important to change the conversations of healthcare professionals to incorporate not just more effective strategies to use with patients, but also to discuss the daily challenges we experience at the patient and system levels that make it dififcult to practice the type of medicine that practitioners know in their hearts is the way to practice medicine. And ultimatey, any solution needs to be targeted not just to effectively engaging and educating patients, but also successfully engages and educates the practitioners who care for them.

So the Operation Healthcaring course? It’s going to be about OPTIMIZING THE PERFORMANCE OF HEALTHCARE PROFESSIONALS – AT WORK AND AT HOME. I’m going to use all the same strategies – Mindset, Listening, Bright Spots, etc. And it’s not just going to be focused on using these strategies with patients. It’s going to be focused on using these strategies in real life, and also applying them in our work with patients. That’s why the Pill Problem story is so powerful (according to the feedback I’ve received so far) – it’s because I’ve taken a personal problem, a challenge that I’ve been facing in my own life, and I’m figuring out how to face this problem as a human being and then I’m relating it to the challenges that my patients face and suggesting that we can apply the same strateiges with them. And the best part is that these strategies are so effective and so universal, that they apply in so many different situations, and by using them we can improve the quality of our own lives, hopefully decrease the demands and stress that we place on ourselves at work and at home, and by improving our own lives we have the energy and incentive to share these strategies with our patients and improve their lives.

That also means that the journal entries and ideas will not just be about healthcare situations. They can also be about home situations, about work/life balance (ha! that’s a joke of a term), about priorities, about efficiency vs. productivity (they’re not the same thing). That means I can talk about my own experiences as a patient and then apply those to my experiences as a practitioner. that means I can talk about my own experiences as a human being, and then apply those to my experiences as a leader.

Must go. Children screaming. Again and again. It’s never ending. What a miracle that I was able to carve this time out for creating something that has the potential to change so many lives – when many times I’m barely capable to impact the lives in my own house in the way that I’d like to be able to do. Ah, parenthood – the ultimate measure of humility for any person on this planet.

Today’s writing stats: 2260 words.

Summary: I finally got around to writing about HOLDING SPACE.  Also about setting priorities and determining what things only I am uniquely qualified to do.

This morning I woke up knowing that I have to turn down the kidney chef writing gig.

It has to do with the whole idea of holding space, that idea that runs through so many of the projects and courses that we’re planning. Here’s the idea. In order to honor something, we have to hold space for it. In a relationship, we have to hold space for the other person to express themselves without judgement or interruption. It’s like holding back all the other things that are threatening to intervene. I picture it as the listener who is holding open a bubble for the speaker, and at the same time holding back all the other people and thoughts and stories and disasters and all those other things that at our back so that we have this space that we are able to hold open for that other person. It sounds easy to hold space, but it’s not. It takes a lot of effort to keep that space open despite all the other demands and interruptions and catastrophes that threaten to get in the way. I can see the listener sweating, grimacing, the muscles tensing to hold all those other things out. It’s often not an easy thing.

In a schedule, we have to hold space for the things that are most important. If we don’t hold space for the things that matter – our spouses, our families, our friends, activities we love, time to rest and relax – then other people aren’t going to make the space for it to happen. So if you’re thinking about your goals and priorities for the coming year, it’s important to actually determine those priorities and schedule those priorities and carve out the time for those priorities. And then – when something new comes along – then you have to decide whether you can hold the space for that new something. Many of us don’t stop to think about the implications of saying yes because we’re so worried about the implications of saying no – disappointing the other person, looking bad, not seeming like a team player, missing out on something that might emerge as a result of this opportunity. But every time we say yes, we hold space for something else. And there’s only so much space in our lives. It’s not just schedule space, the amount of time that’s available. It’s also mental space and personal space and relationship space. Every time you say yes to one thing, you’re saying no to something else. And for many of us, the no that emerges from the yes will lead to us holding less space for one of our priorities. Maybe not always – maybe sometimes that yes will actually fit in with our priorities and that makes it a no-brainer – but I’ll venture to say that most of the times when we say yes, we’re saying no to other things that we value at least as much if not more.

Which leads me to the kidney chef gig. At surface value, this seems like something that fits with my goals and priorities really well. I enjoy writing and I want to do more of it. The audience is a group of people I care about – people with kidney disease. The project is something valuable – showing people with kidney disease that they can make food choices that support their health without sacrificing good food and good taste. And my work would be published online and people who care about the same things as I do could read it and that could bring about new contacts and opportunities and bring new traffic to my website. And though it wouldn’t be my primary reason for taking the gig, there would be some payment for my work so that makes it valuable too.

When I stop to think about my top priorities, however, it’s just a little off the mark. My priorities include my family (a big commitment including 4 boys under the age of 12 and a marriage that could benefit from holding more space), my work (a full-time job that enables me to support that first priority, and also enables me to do meaningful work that adds value to my own life). And now I have this other priority – starting my own online business dedicated to supporting healthcare professionals in starting new conversations and training them to optimize their performance on the job, off the job, and everywhere in between. Right now I don’t hold space for this third priority – rather the project is like a beverage that finds space when it spills around the other priorities. I’ve managed to carve out time every morning to think about it while my fingers capture it on the screen. I listen to audiobooks during my work commute that add creativity and complexity and new realizations to the material I’m creating. And I steal moments during the day to collaborate with my online community about my project ideas and share in the feedback and support from others in similar boats. I would like to become better about holding space for this other priority, I would like to earn some money from this third priority so I can hold less space for the second priority and therefore create some dedicated space for priority #3. At the moment, though, it’s a lot of creative balancing and that can be stressful – especially when priority #3 conflicts with the demands of priorities #1 and #2. Which is actually pretty often, that I’m engaged in one and feel the need or the desire to switch to the other priority.

So when I think about this kidney chef writing gig, I think about how it fits with my top priorities. I don’t think a person can have more than 3 top priorities, and in fact 2 would be preferable (and when I can get priority #3 off the ground I hope it will actually take the place of priority #2 – work – and therefore my life will be at least a little more simple. Maybe?). So where does this writing gig fit?

Well, it certainly doesn’t fit with the family priority. Taking on this writing gig will hold space that could have been dedicated to playing with my kids or spending time with my husband after they’ve gone to bed. So that’s a fail on that one.

It does fit with the work priority, in terms of the audience and the meaning in the work. The only problem with that it’s something “extra” I’d be doing beyond all my other obligations on the job. It’s not something my company would value. And any time I’m able to hold space for writing and editing an article for kidney chef during my time at work – it would be space I’m holding at the expense of something else I could have accomplished during that time that might have benefitted one of the other priorities. So it’s an almost fit on that one, but not quite.

And last, the online business priority, it seems to fit. If the goal for priority #3 is to build an online business dedicated to changing the conversations of healthcare professionals and training them to optimize their performance on the job and off the job, this fits with that. I’m providing tools for patients, and presumably tools that healthcare professionals can read themselves, for teaching people how to change their behaviors in effective ways and stressing the things that really count when it comes to managing disease with our lifestyle behaviors. That’s a win there.

The only problem is that, at least in this case, the online business I’m supporting is not my own, and the articles I write for this website will not work on my own site because a) I’d be writing for a slightly different audience (patients instead of healthcare professionals themselves) and b) I can re-use some of the content but I can’t publish the same article. Add to this, I’m an obliger and therefore agreeing to publish these articles for someone else’s site will end up trumping my own commitment to creating articles for my own site. I’ll spend more time worrying about the quality of the articles I create for this other website than what I actually end up publishing on my own site. So even if it’s manageable time-wise (which I’ve already realized that time dedicated to this new writing gig will be space I’m holding at the expense of creating content for my own site), it will actually be a mental drain from one of my top priorities, and maybe from ALL of them.

Add to that the uniqueness factor. Thinking about me and the priorities I want to hold space for in my life, which are the priorities that REALLY REALLY matter. In other words, what are the priorities that I can uniquely fill and no one else can take my place? In terms of my family, there is no one else who can fill that priority in the same way that I can, with the same dedication and knowledge and commitment. I suppose I could get a babysitter or put more responsibility on my husband (which he already does a lot for the kids, and that wouldn’t necessarily strengthen our marriage – might add more bitterness and resentment unless there’s a better payoff for him like he can cut back on his hours at work). So the FAMILY priority – I am uniquely qualified in a way that no one else in the world is.

At work, I have unique qualifications that make me a good fit for my job, but in my job as a dialysis dietitian at a dialysis facility? There are other people who are capable of filling my role. Heck, in the last 6 months I’ve helped to cover 2 maternity leaves. If I’m able to cover maternity leave for 2 dietitians in 2 different facilities, then no matter how valuable those employees are to their facility, it means they’re not irreplaceable. It’s always possible for someone to NOT return from their maternity leave, and that means someone else will need to be found and trained for the position. So I am uniquely qualified for this role and yet I am replaceable. Which is why I can choose to cut back my hours or leave my position when I start generating enough income from my online business. The next person won’t be the same – she’ll have her own unique qualifications – but someone else can still step into the same role.

As for the online business, I am uniquely qualified for this role based on my education, my experiences, and my passion for the project. This is something I feel compelled to pursue not just because it’s meaningful to me, but because I’m not seeing anything else like it on the landscape, at least not yet. And even when it comes to online education for dietitians, the course I’m envisioning is going to be unique even in that arena because I’m envisioning a community and opportunities to practice these skills out in the real world and share those experiences with others.

And that leads me back, once again, to the kidney chef gig. I am uniquely qualified for this role – but there are many other people out there who are also qualified for this role. When I think about my phone interview with the guy in charge, he wasn’t “SOLD” on me from the very start. He was just intrigued by my profile. But he didn’t remember that we didn’t speak after his first contact, he hadn’t noticed that I was an English teacher before I became a dietitian – essentially, there were details in my profile that made me a good fit that he hadn’t even appreciated when he reached out to contact me. So I’m thinking that he wants qualified candidates to write for his site, but there’s nothing so unique about me in his head that I couldn’t be replaced by someone else with similar qualifications. He’s holding a space for a renal dietitian, but that renal dietitian doesn’t have to be Laura Koller – it can be another renal dietitian who is interested in writing for an audience they feel passionate about and have their name published in the online business world.

So saying yes to the kidney chef gig means saying no to holding space for my top priorities, including one that so far doesn’t have dedicated space held for it. I can say yes to this writing gig and it might lead to some interesting experiences and opportunities BUT it also means taking time away from something else that might lead to some interesting experiences and opportunities engaged in my own online business. And when I think about the opportunities for which I am most uniquely qualified and irreplaceable, I know that the top two items are a) mother and wife to four boys and a husband, and b) starting an online business dedicated to changing the conversations of healthcare professionals and training them to optimize their performance on the job and off the job. Moving into the new year, I need to be sure I am holding space for those top priorities, even at the expense of minimizing space or turning away other opportunities, because those are the things that truly matter to me and that I am truly meant to do.

@bobbiejo – I’m so inspired that you’re inspired!!!  Amazing how daily writing can connect a person with her priorities.  And whether or not those priorities are connected specifically to your online course, don’t they all matter in the long run?  Look up the Four-Burner Theory for a similar perspective on the concept of limiting priorities.  I hope you’re setting yourself up for a successful and priority-laden 2018 🙂

@fiona – Thanks for stopping in and sharing your support.

Oh, another thing.  I thought I would call the course Operation Healthcaring – but I’m not.  That will still be the website, dedicated to Changing the Conversations of Healthcare Professionals (haha – spellcheck corrected that first word to “Chaining”).  The course itself will be called SUPERTRAINING: Superior Performance Training for Healthcare Professionals – train for your own peak performance on the job, off the job, and everywhere in between.  The Motivation Superhero in me just can’t get away!!!

Today’s Writing Stats: 935 Words.

It’s about 15 minutes before 10am when my husband will be walking in the door from work. All 7 boys in the house (all under the age of 12) are right now in the basement playing pinball and video games and on their devices. I’m actually not sure. I just sent them down there after the Koller classic breakfast of eggs, bacon, and bacon-grease English muffins. And thinking I have 15 minutes (not sure if they’ll be without interruption – that’s a gamble) then I can sit down and put in my morning pages, my words for the day.

The only thing is I haven’t really thought about what I was going to write today. I don’t have a topic at the tip of my brain, something I’ve been mulling over in my head or just waiting for the right moment to express. I’m sure I’ll have one or more thoughts like that at some point today, likely at times I’m not able to capture them, but at this time my mind is scrambling to figure out what I’m going to fill this space with, the space that I’m holding to empty everything that’s in my brain and hopefully come up with something that might apply to my course – the content, the theme, the script, whatever things I need to finish, whatever things I want to finish. The Stuff That Needs To Get Done.

So perhaps I can start there, with the items that need to get done.

First – I need to get the blog up and running. All the elements are there. I just need to publish a few posts and make sure the tech part is working. I have it on good advice that it will. I think I can dig back through the material I’ve written this month and come up with material for at least a few posts. The stuff about what healthcare isn’t and COULD be. That’s the one that’s popping into my head right now. But then there’s other stuff I probably don’t even remember that’s been forever immortalized at 750 words and I will wonder who actually wrote it back when because I don’t remember actually thinking or writing it. When my fingers are flying across the keys it’s often like capturing my unconscious thoughts when I’ve barely had time to think or consider or evaluate them. Which is good. It just means it doesn’t always register in my brain when it’s expressed on the page.

Which is getting off the topic of stuff that needs to get done. You wonder why I haven’t gotten stuff done. I’m so busy exploring the tangents that I’m not pursuing the core of my work. Hmm mph.

Next – after the blog is up and running and I have some content (not sure how often I’ll plan to post it, although a structured schedule would probably be good for disciplining myself to get it done) then what’s next? I’d like to work on my lead magnet. Which I’m thinking is going to be that four-week four-email course about FOUR WINS in FOUR WEEKS and creative teaching strategies. Mindset. Bright Spots. Shrink the Change. Build Habits. Somehow I can capture each of those ideas in a (somewhat) brief week’s worth of assignments – I want to save the really deep stuff for the course itself – and put it out there so others can use it.

I do have a lead magnet I could use now – the article “Why I Stopped Seeing Noncompliant Patients” – which I think could interest people just enough to subscribe to email list because they’re thinking, “Gee, I’d like to stop seeing noncompliant patients. That would make my job so much easier!” Maybe they’ll be disappointed with what I say, or maybe they’ll be enlightened. Maybe they’ll unsubscribe because it’s not what they want. But that could actually be a good thing because if the “Why I Stopped Seeing Noncompliant Patients” article doesn’t resonate with you, then you’re not going to be interested in the rest of the stuff I’m going to share. Probably not anyway. And maybe those people who were ticked off my the fact that I actually didn’t stop seeing any of my patients, that I just stopped seeing them as noncompliant, maybe it will come back to them and make them think and then maybe – later on even after they’ve unsubscribed – they’ll decide to come back and see what more they can learn.

And then the course. Of course. And since I’ve hit 750 words and there are 7 boys meandering about the house and my husband will be walking in the door in another 5 minutes – I think this will be it for today. At least for this morning.

One more thing – I need to look at my schedule for this week and I need to hold space for the most important tasks. If I don’t hold space then the tasks will likely not get done. They’ll just keep waiting for the right opening in my schedule that will never exist specifically for the task. And if I want to make progress on this passion project – then I need to be deliberate about holding space regularly, maybe even routinely at some point. For now, though, at least I’m holding space for the thinking and the writing and the thoughts that will, at some point, propel me forward into a new space that I’ll be holding for the realization of this vision, this dream.

@tripphanson – I really appreciate your connection and your insight!  You and I are definitely on the same page about this one.  The last time I got up to speak to a group of people, I made myself repeat the word experience in my head several times.  I wanted to provide an experience – not a performance – for the audience, I wanted to fully experience the talk, and I wanted this to change the experiences of my audience.  I find that EXPERIENCE is such a key word in so many aspects of life, my current theme word, to remind me to slow down and actually be present in every moment as much as I can and think about how others are experiencing the same moments given their own past experience.  So the word experience is quite key here, but unless you’ve arrived at that conclusion already I don’t think it’s going to be the thing that hooks my audience.  There’s still something compelling about performance, especially from an athletic and training perspective that will fit in nicely with my course outline and lessons.  But I’ll have to sit with it longer.  And probably land on something else that I’m entirely sure about.  And then decide that something else is more appropriate.  That’s the way things usually roll.

Anyway, thanks for reading and joining in the conversation.  I value your input and experience 🙂