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Detox from Corporate Life
In my twenties, I was what some of my friends and family called a “martial arts maniac,” training, teaching, and performing the Afro-Brazilian style of capoeira for up to thirty hours a week (all while working a full-time job). One of the best parts of this experience was doing performances at local schools, because the enthusiasm and excitement of the kids was infectious.
One morning, we did a show at Sanchez Elementary School, located in the Mission District of San Francisco. We performed for a full school assembly of about five hundred kids. The standard school performance format was to do our show, then invite a few volunteers from the audience to learn some basic moves and practice them onstage with a professional performer. The kids got a big kick out of it, and it was a great way to include a bit of instruction.
A few kids did the practice performance, and then we asked if there were any more volunteers. A very small boy shyly raised his hand and approached us with trepidation. I assumed by his demeanor and body language that he was going to be very ginger and timid in his movements.
I was wrong.
From the moment he stepped onstage, he exploded. He jumped, leaped, spun, kicked, and flipped around like a beautiful tiger. The audience was squealing in delight, and all of us performers were clapping wildly to see such a magnificent display of courage and talent.
After the show, the principal of the school came over to me and said in hushed tones: “I think that was the most amazing thing I have ever seen.” She explained that the little boy who had shown such fire and passion onstage had emigrated from Vietnam a year earlier, and was painfully shy and withdrawn in school. The teachers were worried that he had learning or behavioral problems and had no idea how to get through to him. “I was totally shocked to see such power and creativity come out of that little boy!” she said.
This little boy, for many reasons that could have included trauma at leaving his home country and difficulty with a new language, had his inner tiger on a short, choking chain. If he had not had the opportunity to show what was inside of him, no one would have known that he contained such inner power.
Do you walk around the same way?
Find Your Inner Tiger
I believe that each of us is born with a strong, creative spirit that wants to jump, dance, learn, and grow. I call it the “inner tiger,” and it is the life force that propels us toward an active, open, engaging, healthy, and fulfilling life. It can also be called your higher calling or life purpose. So why do we often chain it up and not let it roam freely?
• We are told at an early age that our fire and passion is not “appropriate.” We hear things like “nice girls from the suburbs don’t start punk rock bands,” or “well-educated Indian men do not start scrappy entrepreneurial businesses,” or “corn-fed farm boys from the Midwest do not join the New York City Ballet,” or “spending your life traveling is a lazy and meaningless way to use your life.”
• We see others around us conforming to “safe” lives and we don’t want to stand out. So we go to the “right” schools, take a job at the “right” company, and buy a house in the “right” neighborhood, even if we have to walk around with a suppressed scream in our throat.
• We tell ourselves lies to feel better. Lies include: “I never wanted to choose this career path, but my parents made me,” or “I hate my job, but I have to stay in it until my kids are in college since there is no other way to make money,” or “I really want to start a business, but I am too young (or old) and no one would ever take me seriously.”
Keeping an active tiger chained up inside you takes a lot of energy. It saps your life force to continually pretend to be motivated, to feign enthusiasm for your life or job, to grind through another day at the office when you can feel that it is strangling your spirit. Releasing it allows you to create a life that thrives from your creative energy and utilizes the best of your strengths. So how do you cut the chain?
• Acknowledge that it is there. Verbalizing the fact that you feel stifled, uncreative, and unfulfilled in your life is the first step in doing something about it. Stop pretending that everything is okay if it isn’t.
• Pay attention to your body. Tense muscles, stomach problems, anxiety, and trouble sleeping are all signs that you are trying too hard to control your creative impulses. Get back in touch with your body by exercising, meditating, and practicing deep breathing. This will reconnect you with your true voice that will tell you what you need to do to take care of yourself.
• Stop with the mind-numbing substances. Another sign that your creativity is stifled is when you have to down two glasses of wine when you get home from work just to calm your nerves. A funny thing happens when you remove all mood-altering substances from your diet (including excessive caffeine or chocolate, whatever your vice is): you bring a new sense of clarity to your life.
• Agree to take action. If you have been living an unfulfilling life, you may feel stuck, unmotivated, and overwhelmed. But staying stagnant is not going to keep things the same—it will get much worse. So begin to do something, anything, to get your creative juices flowing. Take an art class. Take an afternoon off and paint a picture. Strike up an interesting conversation with a total stranger. Run through a field of flowers or jump in a pile of leaves. When you begin to feel a bit more like your two-year-old self and have your energy back, take concrete steps to improve your life.
• Own up to your lies. Whenever you find yourself saying “I have to do this,” or “so-and-so made me do this,” or “I am like this because . . .” stop, look in the mirror, and say very clearly: “Up to this point, I have chosen to create a life that isn’t fulfilling. It isn’t working. Now I am choosing something different.”
Some of you know that your inner tiger is chained up, but are so tired, or stuck, or scared, that you need some extra help releasing him. Do you find yourself agreeing with any of the thoughts below, expressed by my faithful blog readers?
I describe my office job and cubicle as toxic to my spirit. Before I
graduated, I was ambitious, excited and had big dreams. My work
sucks all the creativity and fun . . . and is starting to sap my spirit too.
It has dampened my will and motivation and has just made me stop
caring. I’m . . . no longer excited about projects or making a differ ence. I’m just going through the motions . . . it’s hard to keep the
lethargic work energy from spilling over to other aspects of my life.
—Laura (now touring Europe)
I feel as if I don’t have a soul anymore . . . mostly machine and all traces of humanity have been pounded out of me. As my wife says “You used to be fun, but now you suck!”
—Richard
Finally, my favorite:
I felt as if the blood was being siphoned out of my body. Not enough to put me out of my misery, just enough to take away my will to live!
—Barbara
In order to have the creativity, energy, motivation, and endurance to start a business, you absolutely need to thaw out your soul. Here is how to do it:
Step 1: Clear Your Plate
If you are serious about starting a business, you will need to completely reorganize your schedule so that you have time to work on your ideas.
Here are some areas to “trim fat” out of your schedule and free up time to plan your new venture:
• Meetings, committees, and task forces. We all know that meetings take up at least 50 percent of your time in a corporate job. Look at each of your appointments and ask yourself “Is this meeting, committee, or task force critical to get my job done effectively?” If not, find a politically astute way to back out of it. “I would love to keep attending this meeting, but I am just swamped with _____ (fill in the blank) project right now that is critical to my (boss) (customer) (VP).”
• Outside volunteer projects. I am 100 percent supportive of community volunteering. I spent ten years of my life volunteering at least thirty hours a week, and I learned a ton from it. But right now, you need to use all of your extra time to plan your business. So gracefully back out of as much volunteer work as you can. Don’t worry, your fast-track application for sainthood will not be revoked, and you can make up your goodwill toward men (and women) once your business is successful.
• TV zone-out time. When I am really stressed out, I can get sucked into a bad pattern of zoning out in front of the TV to unwind and relax. One hour can turn into three or four if I am not careful (especially if I am watching one of those home improvement shows—for some strange reason, they are highly addictive).
• Kids’ activities. I don’t know if it is the same outside of the United States, but we schedule our kids like little executives. Parents frantically shuttle them between soccer, karate, and trombone lessons, play dates and extracurricular test preparation. The poor little tykes must carry electronic organizers and cell phones just to keep track of all the details of their overscheduled lives. I am not suggesting cutting out all of your kids’ activities, just scale back a bit so that they are less harried and you have some time to rest or plan your business. I remember spending hours as a kid making a paper boat and sailing it in a puddle in our driveway. It was exciting and stimulating and is one of my fondest childhood memories.
You may find that a freer schedule will also clear your mind and allow you to think creatively about your new venture. Who knows—after your new business is up and running you may just choose to keep your less-harried schedule.
Step 2: Reset Your Mind to “Beginner”
We all get cocky and think we know a lot about a lot of things. This is probably true; your life experience and education have given you a rich body of experience that you should be proud to share with others.
However, if you go into entrepreneurship for the first time with an attitude that you know everything, you will miss all kinds of great information and opportunities. Great entrepreneurs see the world differently from your average person, and this is because they understand “ beginner mind.”
What Is “Beginner Mind”?
Beginner mind is a state of being where you approach situations with no judgment, censoring, editing, or preconceived expectations.
When you are in a state of “ beginner mind,” you think things like:
• Wow, this is cool! I wonder how it works.
• That is interesting! Why do you think that?
• I want to learn as much as I can about this topic!
• I really don’t understand this person, but I wonder what makes him tick.
• I can’t wait to get in front of customers to hear what is important to them!
• What else? Tell me more.
It is in direct opposition to its cousin “expert mind,” where you think things like:
• When is this person going to stop talking so I can share what I know?
• This person is so wrong in her explanation and I can’t wait to prove it to her.
• I tried that already and it didn’t work.
• I can’t wait to share my 152 PowerPoint slides at my first sales meeting. They will be so impressed with what I say that they will probably buy my product before I leave the building.
• This is a total waste of my time. I am learning nothing.
“Expert mind” can be very dangerous to a new entrepreneur, since you are in a phase of discovery where you need to soak up as much as possible about your new venture. Some expert-mind traps particular to corporate employees can be things like:
EXPERT MIND TRAP
“I don’t need to bother learning small business marketing, because I graduated with honors in my MBA program and was the senior VP of marketing for a major company.”
REALITY
The marketing you know may be very, very far removed from what you need to know to be an effective entrepreneur. Although it may sound similar in concept, in practice it is very different.
EXPERT MIND TRAP
“I know there is a need in the market, since I have studied it extensively online for the last two years and have the spreadsheets to prove it. I do not want to bother talking with someone in the market, since I know they will just confirm my research.”
REALITY
Nothing substitutes for talking to real people in your target market. Many entrepreneurs see the potential of a five-billion-dollar market in their area of interest. But how many can personally name those that are ready to buy the first ten products?
EXPERT MIND TRAP
“I don’t really want to talk to people who have been in this field for a long time, since they are too ‘old school’ and don’t have half of my fresh ideas or social media savvy.”
REALITY
You can learn many, many valuable things from seasoned entrepreneurs in your field. You may not agree with everything they say, but you can avoid many mistakes by listening to what they have learned through hard-won experience.
Cultivating a beginner mind as an entrepreneur will greatly increase both the depth and pace of your learning, and make the process fun and exciting. You will find that more people are willing to talk with and support you when you are open and nonjudgmental.
Step 3: Thaw Out Your Soul
I have spent lots of time in cubicles. Even as a consultant, I would often get assigned a cube to work in for a long-term project. And as much as I knew that I was not an employee and had a vibrant life outside of work, I would sometimes slip into a bit of a coma.
This is such a common feeling that I sometimes wonder if cube furniture comes with a strange chemical pheromone that actually draws your life force out of you. Maybe it is activated by fluorescent lights?
Whatever it is, I know from firsthand experience as a consultant in hundreds of corporate environments that some longtime employees, who by their nature were never meant to fit into corporate life, develop a serious rift between their emotional and intellectual selves. This manifests in:
• Not being able to identify what makes them happy
• A feeling of numbness and emptiness
• A feeling of burning rage
• A feeling of powerlessness and loss of self
• A sense of loneliness and loss of direction
Why does this happen?
As humans, we are made with both emotional urges and rational thoughts. Our emotional self, which resides in the realm of our physical body:
• Wants to be creative and playful
• Seeks out pleasure and comfort
• Is stimulated by beauty
• Recoils from unhealthy relationships
Our intellectual self, which resides in between our ears:
• Is influenced by ideas
• Wants to appear rational and reasonable, not emotional
• Can “suck it up” and bear tremendous emotional and physical pain
• Is very influenced by what is “right” and “responsible”
To make it through modern-day corporate life, you have to quash your emotional desires in order to survive. The intellectual self reigns supreme. The reality is, we are not meant to sit in meetings for hours and hours, hashing out technical details that everyone knows will be changed next week anyway. We want to run from unhealthy relationships, but when our boss (whom we often did not choose to work for) is a manipulative and political person, we choke down our feelings and stay in the unhealthy relationship for fear of backlash to our annual review or bonus. And when our job responsibilities call for us to perform a task that we find meaningless and trivial, we choke down our urge say “That is absurd, and I won’t spend my valuable time that way!” and do it anyway, in order to be responsible and a “team player.”
There is nothing wrong with being responsible. It is just that if you continually repress your natural desires, you will find yourself in a permanent “living dead” state, so used to choking down your emotions that you can no longer access them.
What can you do to shake up your numb soul?
• Do not beat yourself up for feeling this way. Remember the lessons from chapter 2: Many people feel lots of guilt for complaining about a steady job, good paycheck, and honest living. You should be thankful to have a paycheck that sustains you and your family, but don’t confuse this with accepting that this job is the right fit for your creative soul.
• Begin to reconnect your emotional and intellectual selves by exposing yourself to creative environments or activities. Remember that your emotional self craves truth and beauty, so look for ways to express both. Nature is great for waking up the emotional self, as is music, art, and really sensuous food. See specific tips for waking up creativity in the following sections in this chapter.
• Keep close tabs on your “inner meanie” voice. As you brainstorm areas of interest and business ideas, the voice inside that has been shaped by your corporate life, parents, religion, and the media will say things like “You will never make money at that!” or “Only granola-eating liberals want to write poetry!” These voices are extremely unhelpful at the initial stages of brainstorming. If you find yourself blocked by such thoughts, turn to them in your gentlest of voices and say “Thanks for sharing, sweetie—I appreciate the thought!” and keep moving forward.
• Rest. Sometimes, what your emotional self wants most is to snuggle under the covers and take a long nap. It is tiring to repress yourself for so long, so you may need to do a bit of temporary hibernating in order to figure out what moves you.
• Surround yourself with supportive people. Your bitter, repressed cube mate may not be the best person to confide in if she is stuck in the complaining stage and not ready to take action. In fact, many people who finally do work up the courage to leave the cube are surprised by the negative reaction of former colleagues. You may think they would be happy for you, but many feel resentful that you actually made the step while they are still unhappily slogging away at a job they loathe. You may find more support from an enthusiastic software developer in Prague that you meet through an online forum than from your next-door neighbor whom you have known for years.
• Make time for the creative journey. If you really want to figure out what moves you, you need to devote time and energy to the pursuit. If you allow yourself thirteen hours a day to check e-mail and create PowerPoint slides and seven and a half minutes to think about your creative soul while you are using the restroom, guess which side will win? Take some time off from work, cut back on nonessential obligations, and make figuring out the next stage of your life a priority. You will not regret it!
Step 4: Prepare to Walk Through No Man’s Land
No matter how great the ultimate benefit of a change, going from “what was” to “what will be” can be very unsettling.
One of the top authorities on change and transition, William Bridges, in his book
Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes, refers to the period between “endings” (your old life) and “beginnings” (your new life) as the Neutral Zone. This term was first coined over seventy-five years ago by Dutch anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, who noticed that in most traditional societies, all ceremonies marking change involved separation, transition (which he called the neutral zone), and incorporation.
1To this day, many traditional societies mark significant changes with rituals that help with the transition process. In my husband’s Navajo culture, for example, male and female puberty ceremonies are marked by four days of isolated reflection, sharing of wisdom between the young and elderly, time in nature, and disconnection from “modern conveniences” including electronics and all forms of media.
In today’s society, if we get slowed down by a significant life transition and can’t keep up a frantic level of activity and output, we question ourselves. The reality is, being in this awkward state of transition is an extremely creative and ripe period. Before doing some specific exercises to wake up your creativity, here are some hints to help you have the best experience in the Neutral Zone:
• Embrace it. Instead of asking yourself “When am I going to get back to normal?” be thankful that you are given an opportunity to reflect on your life and come out with a new, improved, emotionally healthier you. You may not want to do this in public, but repeat the mantra “Uncertainty is powerful and liberating!” as often as you can, and you may just begin to believe it.
• Ask yourself “What am I afraid of?” Your fears hold lots of information that can shape your new life. As an example, in a typical transition like getting married, you may fear losing your independence, or your prized hot car collection, or your sense of spontaneous passion. Don’t choke down these fears; look at them closely and use them as the basis for good, healthy discussion with your spouse-to-be about how you can design a life to incorporate the things that are important to both of you. The same will be true for your business.
• Tune up your health. When I went through a slow period in my consulting business a couple of years ago, I used the free time as a way to get back into working out. I took up yoga, Pilates, and kickboxing, dropped twenty pounds and found that my overall emotional well-being sky-rocketed.
• Clear out clutter. A period of transition is a great time to clear out junk, boxes, papers, pictures, old clothes, moldy food from the back of your refrigerator, and expired cans from the pantry. A clean environment really does contribute to a clean mind. I am also a big fan of rearranging furniture since it will get you comfortable with seeing familiar things in a new and different way.
I have done my best to suggest ways to prepare a healthy environment to support your creativity. If you are ready, let the games begin!
Step 5: Open the Creative Floodgates
I always laugh when asked for advice on reawakening creativity from extremely locked-up cubicle warriors: “I really have no idea what I want to do in life. Do you have an hour coaching session where we can figure it out?”
People in corporate environments are desperate for advice and relief, and this I can understand. But reawakening creativity is not a five-step process with a neat timeline. It is an organic, nonlinear, messy experience that needs time, space, and attention.
One of the best ways to start is by setting up a regular time to tap into your creativity.
Morning Pages
It is uncanny how many clients I talk to who have read Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. They are not all Birkenstock-wearing hippies as you may think. Software engineers, salespeople, accountants, musicians, and writers have all found her suggestions for unlocking creativity helpful. One of her cornerstone activities is doing “Morning Pages,” which is a great way to get your thoughts flowing and, in her words, “quiet your inner Censor.”
WHAT ARE MORNING PAGES?
In Julia’s words:
Put simply, the morning pages are three pages of longhand writing, strictly stream-of-consciousness: “Oh god, another morning. I have NOTHING to write about. I need to wash the curtains. Did I get my laundry yesterday? Blah, blah, blah . . .” They might also, more ingloriously, be called brain drain, since that is one of their main functions.
There is no wrong way to do morning pages. These daily morning meanderings are not meant to be art. Or even writing. I stress that point to reassure the non-writers working with this book. Writing is simply one of the tools. Pages are meant to be, simply, the act of moving the hand across the page and writing whatever comes to mind. Nothing is too petty, too silly too stupid or too weird to be included.
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Meandering and Mindfulness
• Spend an afternoon wandering through a new part of town. You probably have well-worn paths from your house to the grocery store, dry cleaner, and child’s school. Choose a totally new and different neighborhood that you have never explored and just wander the streets. Notice which stores or buildings are interesting. Pay attention to the people in the neighborhood.
• Go to a local art museum and play hot-warm-cold. Walk into the museum and pretend your body is a heat-guided missile. Try not to think, just let your body go toward the art that makes you feel hot (I mean body temperature hot based on excitement, but of course it could be that kind of hot, depending on what kind of museum you go to!). As you look at the art, let your body relax and soften your gaze.
• Use your camera to document whatever you find interesting. When you look at life through the lens of a camera, you change your perspective. Take pictures of whatever interests you, from the way a leaf sits on a sidewalk to the words of a graffiti tag on the wall to the graceful neck of a subway rider. Don’t worry about the quality of each photo, just take lots and lots of shots of things that interest you.
•
Surf the Internet with a tool like StumbleUpon. www.StumbleUpon.com is a free service you set up with your Internet browser that allows you to preselect topics of interest from a broad number of categories like “food,” “photography,” “health,” or “ business” and then click a button to see Web pages that contain information about those topics. The more popular a page is, the more likely you will see it. This is a great way to open your mind to the many different ways people approach the same topic.
• Sit quietly in a comfortable place and pay attention to your breath. You may notice that your mind races with all kinds of ideas. Take the role of observer and notice the thoughts without reacting to them emotionally. Close your eyes and breathe in and out slowly, noticing the rise and fall of your chest.
• Eat a meal in small, slow bites and savor the taste in each mouthful. Notice the taste of each item on your plate. Sense the subtle flavor in even a glass of water.
Physical Activity
While the eyes are the window to the soul, the body is the door to creative impulses. You don’t need to engage in high-impact or rigorous activities, but something that makes your heart race or body sweat is a great way to shake up your mind. If your regular exercise routine feels a bit rote, try the following things:
• Take a dance class. By making your body move in a new way, you break old, stuck patterns and get your blood and energy moving. I spent a lot of time around Brazilian dance, and it is a very fun thing to do with lively drums and joyful, full-body expression. If that doesn’t float your boat, try any style, such as ballroom dancing, free-form modern dance, or country-western two-step.
• Take an improvisation class. The basis of improvisation is reacting creatively to a situation with as little thinking as possible. It is an excellent way to bring fun and spontaneity into your life and learn to act from impulse, not obligation.
• Get jiggy with it at unexpected times. Yes, I am suggesting that you should awaken your creativity by having sex with your partner. Don’t get arrested, mind you, but your sexual self has a lot of creativity, especially when you let it break out of the “only the third Wednesday of the month at nine p.m.” routine. And, yes, you can tell your partner that you must do it since I told you so.
Step 6: Observe and Track Ideas
All of these creative exercises are going to start to generate all kinds of thoughts, sounds, images, and ideas. To benefit from all this creative output, you want to set up some simple systems to capture ideas. Use technology to help you track ideas, but don’t get so enamored by the system that you lose the point: to capture your thoughts.
Notebooks Everywhere
I used to get very frustrated that my best ideas come late at night in the bathtub. I would sit at my computer for hours, staring at a blank screen and painfully typing out a few really bad passages. Then, as soon as I left my computer and headed for the bath, my mind would explode with ideas. A few times I actually got out dripping wet and typed ideas at the computer before going back in the water, but now I keep a notebook handy next to the bathtub. Other common places you do not often have access to a pad of paper are in the car, or a part of your house not associated with work, like the kitchen. Secret hint: the room where you do lots of sitting and thinking is a great place for a notebook (and I do not mean your parlor!).
Index Cards
Index cards are a slight variation on notebooks, except that they can be handy for tracking one idea per card, which can then be organized into sections or patterns. You can work with plain white cards, or choose a pack of different colors, which would be used to designate different topics.
Record Your Voice
Some of you may feel more comfortable recording yourself talking rather than writing down notes. This can be handy if you tend to brainstorm while driving. The relatively new service
www.jott.com is also a good tool that works by leaving yourself a voicemail, which is automatically transcribed in an e-mail and sent back to you. This works well for short messages. For longer recordings, try a service like
www.audioacrobat.com where you can record up to two hours of audio using your phone. You can access the voice recording later or send it to be transcribed, using one of the many cheap transcription services found at virtual assistant sites.
Computer Folder
Much like the paper folder, set up a dedicated folder on your computer that is in an obvious place, like your desktop. Each time you write or find a document that is related to your business idea, put it in the folder.
Browser
Any major browser like Internet Explorer or Firefox allows you to “book-mark ” Web sites in specific categories. Try to create broad categories, since too many specific categories will make it harder for you to quickly grab and categorize something.
This service is similar to bookmarks, but your results are public and you can also see which sites other people find interesting and noteworthy. Track and tag Web pages and blog posts that interest you over a period of time. Then, using the “cloud” feature, see which of your tags are the most prevalent.
Vision Boards
A vision board is a graphic representation of words and images related to your topic of interest. If you are a highly visual person, it can be a great way to start your brainstorming process, and to see a picture of your interests in one place. The basics are easy; just grab some magazines, scissors, and glue and get busy posting thoughts on a big board.
EXERCISE
How to Create a Vision Board, by Christine Kane
WHAT IS A VISION BOARD?
A vision board is typically a poster board on which you paste or collage images that you’ve torn out of various magazines. It’s simple.
The idea behind this is that when you surround yourself with images of who you want to become, what you want to have, where you want to live, or where you want to vacation, your life changes to match those images and those desires.
For instance, before I ever started performing music and had no idea how I’d ever get a gig, write enough songs, or assemble a press kit, I drew a picture of myself in a bar with people watching me perform (I’m a terrible visual artist, so I actually had to label the people “people”!). And though it wasn’t the only factor in making it happen, I had a calendar full of bar and coffeehouse gigs by the next year.
My drawing was a kind of vision board. Vision boards do the same thing as my drawing did. They add clarity to your desires, and feeling to your visions. For instance, at the time I did my drawing, I knew I wanted to play in bars and coffeehouses. (I have since left that circuit, and I’m performing in theaters and at conferences. But in my early twenties, I wanted to play in bars and coffeehouses. I was pretty clear about that!) Taking the time to draw it out, even poorly, made it indelible in my mind.
There are several methods you can use for creating your vision board. I’ve written about each one below. You can choose which one works best for you, depending on where you find yourself on this path of creating your life.
SUPPLIES YOU’LL NEED FOR CREATING A VISION BOARD
• Poster board. (Target sells a really nice matte finish board. I highly recommend it.)
• A big stack of different magazines. (You can get them at libraries, hair salons, dentist offices, the YMCA.) Make sure you find lots of different types. If you limit your options, you’ll lose interest after a while. When I facilitate my women’s retreats, I always make sure we have plenty of Oprah, Real Simple, Natural Home, Yoga Journal, Dwell, Ode, Parenting, Money, Utne, and an assortment of nature magazines.
• Glue. Not Elmer’s. (It makes the pages ripple.)
Before you begin your vision board: No matter which method you’re choosing, have a little ritual before you begin your vision board. Sit quietly and set the intent. With lots of kindness and openness, ask yourself what it is you want. Maybe one word will be the answer. Maybe images will come into your head. Just take a moment to be with that. This process makes it a deeper experience. It gives a chance for your ego to step aside just a little, so that you can more clearly create your vision.
THE FIVE STEPS OF CREATING A VISION BOARD
Step 1: Go through your magazines and tear the images from them. No gluing yet! Just let yourself have lots of fun looking through magazines and pulling out pictures or words or headlines that strike your fancy. Have fun with it. Make a big pile of images and phrases and words.
Step 2 : Go through the images and begin to lay your favorites on the board. Eliminate any images that no longer feel right. This step is where your intuition comes in. As you lay the pictures on the board, you’ll get a sense of how the board should be laid out. For instance, you might assign a theme to each corner of the board. Health, Job, Spirituality, Relationships, for instance. Or it may just be that the images want to go all over the place. Or you might want to fold the board into a book that tells a story. At my retreats, I’ve seen women come up with wildly creative ways to present a vision board.
Step 3: Glue everything onto the board. Add writing if you want. You can paint on it or write words with markers.
Step 4 : (optional, but powerful) Leave space in the very center of the vision board for a fantastic photo of yourself where you look radiant and happy. Paste yourself in the center of your board.
Step 5 : Hang your vision board in a place where you will see it often.
3 source: Christine Kane, www.christinekane.com Chapter 6 will help you take the output of all your creativity dredging and see which ideas are fit enough to survive the gauntlet of a real business model. Through that process, you may find that your intense passion for hand-painted Czechoslovakian buttons is really a passing fancy, much like your lust for Ray Gonzalez in seventh grade. Or you may discover a vast marketplace of button-loving enthusiasts who will gladly pay top dollar for your rare collection. I was shocked to find that thousands of people are drawn to knitting humor. Who knew?
So if you are antsy to keep on fleshing out your business idea, go ahead and jump to chapter 6.
But if before jumping you want to know what to expect on the journey from employee to entrepreneur, read on.
