Justine Musk's Blog, page 25

how to be an original (part one)

1

I met President Clinton last week, at a cocktail party in the presidential suite in an ex-pat hotel in Haiti. Later, I was part of a group that had dinner with him, and the next day a small number of us got to tour the Academy of Peace + Justice with him. (The Academy is a free school sponsored by Artists for Peace + Justice for kids from especially poor and troubled parts of Haiti. They get three meals a day along with an education. You can't nourish the mind if the body is suffering. The body is the mind and vice versa. But I digress.)

"Nice bracelet you're wearing," Clinton said to me at one point, referring to a Haitian-made bracelet I'd bought for ten dollars at the hotel gift shop.

"Thank you. It's made out of safety pins."

"I know!"

What strikes me about Prez Clinton is his singular and distinctive voice. We were at a table with extremely accomplished and high-powered men (they were mostly men), but as soon as that throaty, smoky voice rose through the conversation, people were instantly and eagerly attentive. You could be blindfolded and not even know that Clinton was in the room, and you'd recognize that voice, and you'd immediately wrap your sense of Clinton's personality around it, as well as all the history and associations the name 'Bill Clinton' has for you and whether those associations resonate with you or piss you off. Chances are, you would not have a neutral or indifferent reaction to it. That voice would immediately get under your skin. Love him or hate him, you wouldn't – or couldn't – ignore him.

The power of voice.

2

Around the same time, entrepreneur and brand editor Abby Kerr posted this piece on her blog analyzing the "bigger-name online voices" of Danielle Laporte, Marie Forleo, Chris Guillebeau, Havi Brooks, Charlie Gilkey, Laura Roeder – and me. (And how delighted am I to be included in such company? Thank you, Abby, you rock. Plus you have wondrous taste.)

Glancing down that list of names, of people whose online work I am familiar with and in a few cases know extremely well, I was struck by – how singular and distinctive their voices are. Unlike the above example with Clinton, they convey those voices through writing rather than talking – but as Abby notes, there's often

a direct and very cozy link-up between how people write and how they speak. Google 'video' plus the name of any person I profile below and you'll see what I mean.

So I started thinking (again) about voice. So many creatives are turned off by the concept of 'brand' – and its old-school corporate bullshit associations – that I don't think they understand that, at least online, your voice is your brand.

(You may not believe in your brand – but darlin', your brand believes in you.)

The reason why Danielle LaPorte could charge $150 for her self-produced digital program called The Firestarter Sessions – basically an ebook, a few downloads and short videos – and experience the kind of success she could then channel into a quarter million dollar deal with a major publisher, has everything to do with her voice. Her voice is what sets her apart from some anonymous online marketer who packages similar information. (I bought Danielle's program, so I can speak directly to this.)

People who were already fans of Danielle through her popular blog eagerly purchased this thing because they wanted the information, yes – but they also wanted to hang out with the sense of personality and identity they have constructed around Danielle's unique writing style. They have an emotional connection with Danielle's brand. (I use the word 'brand' very deliberately here, to stress the difference between connecting with the idea of Danielle vs actually connecting with Danielle herself. I am talking about fans, not stalkers.)

When people fall in love with your voice, they will follow you anywhere.

The above is paraphrasing something Dean Koontz said in an interview in Writer's Digest that I read a loooooong time ago. After twenty years of writing fiction in several different genres, he noticed how his fans would follow him from genre to genre once they learned to recognize him through the multiple pseudonyms his publisher(s) advised him to use. Which is what led him to say – and I am definitely paraphrasing here – that that advice about using pseudonyms was actually pretty stupid.

But for people to follow your voice – or even want to follow – it has to be the kind of voice that they can recognize – instantly – through the great din of online conversation, including constant online static as well as the ongoing signals that other powerful voices are sending out to their people.

It has to be singular, distinctive. An original.

3

I would say – I mean, I am saying – that a compelling, original voice has four things.

(I would list the four of them here…except I want to keep you in suspense.)

4

A compelling online voice has relevance.

You talk about things that your audience cares about: that helps improve their lives in some way or connects to their interests, goals and passions. You serve your audience through your content.

This is why I don't think it's (usually) very effective to post excerpts of your fiction on your blog (except in certain cases, which I won't go into here). It's not just because a blog is a very different form than a novel, with its own learning curve and advantages for an audience.

It's because it's actually rather difficult to get strangers to read your work. You may not be asking them for money, but you are asking for their time and attention with no real guarantee that there's anything in it for them (how do they know that they'll find the experience worthwhile, other than your unproven untested word for it?). Your creative work doesn't yet have any relevance for them, at least as they perceive it.

But when you know your audience – and you learn them better and more deeply as you go – you learn what they care about, and where that overlaps with what you care about. That overlapping place is your place of service.

I gave a workshop in which I had the attendees do the "I am…" exercise in which they pretend to be that person's Ideal Reader. They write a first-person stream-of-consciousness description of Ideal Reader that includes her hopes and fears and tastes and what keeps her awake at night and anything else that comes up.

One guy said, "Is it normal for your Ideal Reader to sound a lot like…yourself?"

I think it is. I think that choice between 'writing for an audience' and 'writing for yourself' is a false one. There's power in writing the kind book – or blog – that you yourself want to read but can't find because it doesn't exist yet.

It's your job — your destiny, if you will — to bring the damn thing into being.

As individuals, we have a heightened sense of our own differences (which we are consciously aware of) rather than our underlying commonality (which acts as an unconscious frame of reference for those differences).

We're more alike than we are different.

The bad news is: you're probably not as unique in your tastes and longings as you think.

The good news: you're probably not as unique in your tastes and longings as you think.

You can find a way to serve yourself as well as your audience (and vice versa); you find the point where you and your audience are one and the same.

Which is why you can't form a deep understanding of your audience without also forming a deep understanding of yourself.

– to be continued tomorrow –

how to change yourself and/or your life

There's nothing you can't do if you get the habits right. — Charles Duhigg

1

Things fall apart.

On the day my ex-husband left a voice mail for my therapist telling her to tell me that he was filing for divorce, I started smoking again.

Of the vices available to me, smoking seemed the lesser evil. Besides, I'd kicked it once, I told myself and others, so I knew I could do it again.

I declared to anyone who saw me in the shameful act of lighting up that I would quit on the day my divorce finalized, which I expected to take less than a year.

It took two and a half.

I had read that it takes the average smoker about 8 or 9 failed attempts before they stop. I knew that my brain would have to throw down new habits over the bad habits – it would have to learn to automatically drive past the Beverly Hills gas station with the gleaming interior and rows on rows of imported chocolate bars where it had become my routine to buy my Capri Ultra Lights – and I knew that could only happen with repetition.

So instead of quitting cold turkey – and setting myself up for failure – I decided that nonsmoking was a skill I would practice, for longer and longer periods of time.

At first it was only for half a day, and then a day. But the act of riding out the nicotine craving, over and over again, laid down the new neural pathway. As that groove in my brain got a little bit deeper, abstaining got a little bit easier. I would count the days without a cigarette —

– then have a fight with my boyfriend, or spiral into a pit of despair and worry about my kids and/or expenses and/or the future which would send me back to that slender cigarette between my fingers, the flame, the first inhalation.

After two or three or five days — however long it took the pack to run out — I would return to my nonsmoking practice.

Soon I was nonsmoking more days in a month than I was smoking, and then I was only smoking occasionally, and then I wasn't smoking at all.

2

I've since learned that the old grooves in your brain – the grooves of that bad habit – never disappear. They exist beneath the new, better habits you've simply layered on top. It takes three weeks of practicing the desired activity everyday in order to turn it into an actual habit, something you can do (or not do) without thinking about it.

But the problem is stress.

Because stress is a bitch.

People will stop drinking or smoking or snorting cocaine. They'll even start to consider themselves recovered. But sooner or later life dumps the kind of stress that collapses those new habits until the old bad brain grooves reign again.

The trick is to prepare a plan for coping with that stress so you won't be undone by it.

I use what Heidi Grant Halvorson refers to as "if-then planning."

It works like this: you decide ahead of time the specific action you will take if some specific thing happens.

If it is 7:00 pm, then I will go to a spinning class.

If I don't make all my calls before lunch, then I will complete them at 1:30.

If I wake up at 6 am, then I will write for an hour before breakfast.

Heidi writes:

One study looked at people who had the goal of becoming regular exercisers. Half the participants were asked to plan where and when they would exercise each week (e.g., "If it is Monday, Wednesday, or Friday, then I will hit the gym for an hour before work."). The results were dramatic: weeks later, 91 percent of if-then planners were still exercising regularly, compared to only 39 percent of nonplanners! Similar results have been shown for other health-promoting behaviors, like remembering to do monthly breast self-exams (100 percent of planners, 53 percent of nonplanners), and getting cervical cancer screenings (92 percent of planners, 60 percent of nonplanners).

These plans are effective, Heidi tells us

Because they are written in the language of your brain, the language of contingencies. Human beings are particularly good at encoding and remembering information in "if X, then Y" terms, and using these contingencies to guide their behavior, often below their awareness.

Once you've formulated your if-then plan, your unconscious brain will start scanning the environment, searching for the situation in the "if" part of your plan. This enables you to seize the critical moment ("Oh, it's 4 p.m.! I'd better return those calls."), even when you are busy doing other things.

Since you've already decided exactly what you need to do, you can execute the plan without having to consciously think about it or waste time deliberating about what you should do next. (Sometimes this is conscious, and you actually realize you are following through on your plan. The point is it doesn't have to be conscious, which means your plans can get carried out when you are preoccupied with other things, and that is incredibly useful.)

In my case, I tell myself

If I am tempted to buy cigarettes, then I will tell myself I am a strict nonsmoker, take pride in my resolve and drive right past the store.

Or

If I am tempted to smoke, I will run through all the reasons I need to quit, take pride in flexing my willpower and drink water or meditate instead.

I have battle-tested these tactics – and, for me, they work.

Thank God.

3

Tim Ferriss once remarked to me that men who learn how to be successful with women "tend to be successful in other areas of life."

Which just means that life doesn't much like your attempts to compartmentalize it. When we make improvements in one area, the effects – the boosted confidence, the skills you've acquired, the greater sense of well-being, the willingness to take a risk — spill over into other areas. Everything connects. You can't lift one piece without finally lifting up the whole thing.

(It works the other way as well. Take one piece down, and other parts of your life go down with it. When I started smoking, for example, I stopped doing other things: working out, sleeping enough, eating enough, paying parking tickets. I am not proud.)

At the same time, your willpower is a limited resource. If you spend it all on making nice with your psycho boss whom you secretly despise, and on carefully not sleeping with that ex-lover you're still wildly attracted to even though you know he's all kinds of No Good…then you're much more likely to eat that red velvet cupcake – cupcakes — from the fabulous bakery on San Vicente.

(This is one of the reasons you're much more likely to be successful if you focus on one goal at a time. It makes sense to focus your willpower on one thing instead of diluting it across many things.)

It's why we're more vulnerable to temptation when we're tired, or sick, or stressed, or at the end of a long and difficult day. The willpower muscle has gone to jelly.

In THE WILLPOWER INSTINCT, Kelly McGonigal explains:

Smokers who go without a cigarette for 24 hours are more likely to binge on ice cream. Drinkers who resist their favorite cocktail become physically weaker on a test of endurance. Perhaps most disturbingly, people who are on a diet are more likely to cheat on their spouse. It's as if there's only so much willpower to go around. Once exhausted, you are left defenseless against temptation – or at least disadvantaged.

The good news is, you can build up the willpower muscle like any other muscle – slowly, over time, through the exercise of it.

This information helped motivate my quest to stop smoking. I quit for my health and for my kids, but also because I wanted the boosted willpower to apply to other areas of my life. That, I thought, would be cool.

4

When I started working out again, I noticed something interesting.

I have developed the habit of going to Purebarre, an intense 55 minute class that combines movements from yoga, pilates and ballet. I have a love/hate relationship with it. I can force myself to go – possibly because of my newly strengthened willpower – also because it is sculpting a stomach I will shamelessly reveal to my boyfriend at every opportunity ("Yes, Justine, I can see your audacious abs. Put your shirt down.") — but on the drive there I will bitch and complain inside my head. Don't want to do this don't want to do this really don't want to do this oh God maybe go to Starbucks instead and have a cakepop.

But when I pull into the garage underneath the plaza that houses the studio, my body suddenly feels…perked up, like a dog lifting her head when someone throws steak on the barbecue. Even as that dialogue continues in my mind – maybe there will be an earthquake and I won't have to do this – my body feels anticipatory and eager.

The spirit may be weak, but the flesh seems quite willing.

When I read the book THE POWER OF HABIT, by Charles Duhigg, I started to understand.

Habits are created when you put together the "habit loop" of cue, routine and reward, and cultivate the craving that drives the loop. The actual habit emerges when you start craving the reward as soon as you see the cue. Your brain shifts from spiking with pleasure when it gets the reward, to spiking with pleasure in anticipation of the reward. (Pavlov. Dogs. That.) When the anticipation goes unfulfilled, you experience the kind of craving and longing that just might drive you nuts.

What I had started to crave was the feeling I get at the end of a Purebarre class. It's a sense of accomplishment mingled with a serious hit of endorphins. In short, I feel like a stud.

My brain had linked that sense of well-being to the act of driving into the underground parking lot. Pulling into the lot (and looking, sometimes desperately, for a parking space) is the cue. It triggers the anticipation of the feeling I know I will get after 55 minutes of hell.

(I am exaggerating, Purebarre, you know I love you. I don't really think that you're a hell. Maybe just a tiny little corner of it.)

So when you are trying to develop a new habit, it's essential that you choose a simple cue (like lacing up your running shoes) and a clear reward (like a midday treat after your jog). The habit becomes the thing, the routine, that happens in between.

Says Duhigg:

But countless studies have shown that a cue and a reward, on their own, aren't enough for a new habit to last. Only when your brain starts expecting the reward – craving the endorphins or sense of accomplishment – will it become automatic to lace up your jogging shoes each morning. The cue, in addition to triggering a routine, must also trigger a craving for the reward to come….

…Cravings are what drive habits. And figuring out how to spark a craving makes creating a new habit easier.

5

To transform a bad habit into a good habit, you keep the old cue and deliver the old reward – but change what happens in between. Instead of the old routine (smoking), you insert a new one (sipping water or herbal tea, or meditating, or connecting with a friend). But this requires you to become aware of exactly what it is that you crave (a sense of relaxation, momentary escape, social bonding) as well as the cue that triggers it (stress, writing-fatigue, alcohol, clubbing, the smell of cigarette smoke).

Says Duhigg:

Almost any behavior can be transformed if the cue and reward stay the same.

6

Sometimes change requires one more ingredient if it's to take permanent hold.

Belief.

A group of researchers at the Alcohol Research Group in California interviewed AA members to see why habit replacement on its own didn't seem to be enough. Alcoholics who practiced those techniques could stay sober – until stress raised its ugly head and shot their new routine to hell.

But alcoholics who believe in some kind of higher power were much more likely to hold onto their sobriety.

Researchers realized that it was belief itself that mattered. AA trains people to believe that life will get better. Whether it takes the shape of God, or a rather vague higher power, there is something to believe in when they can't believe in themselves.

And once they learn to believe, that skill spills over into other parts of their life.

Until they believe that it is possible for them to change.

As Duhigg puts it, "Belief was the ingredient that made a reworked habit loop into a permanent behavior."

7

Belief seems to be easier when it's supported by a community, even if that community is made up of only one other person.

When you see other people change, it's easier to believe that hey, if that guy did it, you can do it too. Communities make change seem believable in a way it might not if you're struggling alone.

A 1994 Harvard study looked at people who had remade their lives. Some of them had reworked their habits after experiencing a personal tragedy, or watching a friend endure something traumatic. But many people didn't require a drastic event to shake up their lives; like AA members, they could change because they "were embedded in social groups that made change easier."

"Change occurs among other people," says psychologist Todd Heatherton. "It seems real when we can see it in other people's eyes."

I wonder if that's because other people tend to treat us more kindly than we treat ourselves. Pay attention to the self-talk that loops through your head on a daily, even hourly basis, and tell me this: is it positive or negative? Would you talk that way to a friend, or a stranger, or, really, to anyone?

Writer and motivational speaker Sean Stephenson points out that

We often think that we have to "find" ourselves in life. Yet we don't have to search the world to find ourselves. We create ourselves every moment, and we do so through our language, through what we say to ourselves on a regular basis.

When I think of some of the things I've been known to say to myself – I'm stupid, I have fat thighs, and fun little tidbits like that – the idea that I'm "creating" myself with this language is, how do you say, fucking depressing. If there's a voice in my head yammering about how I'm a loser, incompetent, powerless, is it any wonder that my self-confidence will flicker in and out like a candle in the wind?

Because that saying – You have to see it to believe it – turns out to be wrong. It's the other way round. The beliefs that we've internalized from others or acquired on our own become a filtering system for the world. The brain is primed to pick up and interpret things in a way that will support pre-existing beliefs, and reject, deny or minimize the things that don't.

We believe our own personal reality into being.

7

I can't speak for men, but as a woman I can say that this culture seems quite happy to support and reaffirm any sense of inadequacy I might have. But that's okay, the culture tells me, because I can still learn ten ways to look seven years younger and ten pounds slimmer in the eight must-have fashion items of the new season that is six minutes away from turning into the next new season that will have its own can't-miss twenty pieces to reinvent my now dangerously outdated wardrobe. I can Botox and style and highlight and diet and liposuction and shop and tummy tuck my way to perfect self-confidence, because that's what self-esteem is all about, right? (The secret to life, boys and girls, is this: a fabulous makeover!)

(Not to mention that plastic surgery is just another choice that today's post-feminist woman is free to choose as she sees fit, just like when she chose to give up her high-powered law career to stay home with the kids because if she didn't, who would, although it was indeed her own choice freely chosen because it's not like the impossible hours and lack of decent maternity leave and underlying boys' club mentality and snide attitudes about the "mommy track" ever had anything to do with it. Of course not. But I digress.)

The culture tells me that I can make the choice to change. To improve myself. And the way to change, it seems, is to buy shit, including a zillion self-help titles that littered the aisles of Borders before the company went belly-up.

But once you've learned to loathe yourself – or at the very least, to view your naked self in the mirror with a kind of mild dismay – it's hard to change, or believe you can change, in the face of your own self-directed verbal abuse. When I was a kid, my father would yell at my sister and me to set the table. This tactic proved less than effective. It doesn't make much sense that the mental equivalent of yelling at myself to lose five pounds or clean out my email or go to that killer punishing yoga class that's too advanced for me anyway…will prove any more effective.

I didn't manage to quit smoking because I called myself a fucking moron every time I broke down and had a cigarette, or even for picking up smoking in the first place (I was in college, old enough to know better yet crushing on a tall lanky grad student who would smoke across from me in the pub and make it look elegantly, languidly cool). I learned to ride out the craving because of how I learned (am still learning) to be in the moment, to feel my feelings without seeking distraction or escape. The moment passes – and takes the craving with it. And I could hang with myself, be fully present and aware, with an attitude of loving-kindness.

I surrender to the moment without trying to control or abuse it. Or myself, for that matter.

And that, perhaps, is the irony of change: real change seems possible only when you accept yourself as you already are, your life as it already is. When you pursue the change not out of loathing, but love and self-care.

Because when you love someone, you want the best for her. You wish her the vibrant health and fulfilling relationships and wondrous life you know she deserves. And when she regresses, or makes mistakes, or seems uncertain, or doesn't believe, that's okay, because you can believe for her.

Be good to her.

the art of being fearless

1

If you've ever been legally deposed, you know it's a brutal experience. The night before I was deposed for the third time out of five in a case that stretched on – and on – for over two years, I was terrified. I was going head-to-head with one of the best lawyers in Los Angeles who seemed determined to trip me up, break me down, and make me cry (and then, afterwards, would be apologetic about it, in a "just doing my job" kind of way).

That night, everything about what I was going through seemed to gather up inside me and pitch me to the edge. I couldn't sleep. I fretted and smoked. I might have cried. I am not proud.

And at some point, I gave in to the anxiety. I lay on my bed and let it shudder through me. It couldn't last forever, I reasoned. Surely it would burn itself out?

The next morning, something interesting happened.

I was calm and hollowed-out. It was as if I had gone to this place beyond anxiety where I no longer gave a damn. (Later, I would learn to think of it as "the place beyond the 'fuck it'"). I felt myself surrender to the moment with no sense of trying to control the outcome.

It was what it was.

The lawyer started in on me. I knew I was supposed to say as little as possible. You give the answer to the question and nothing more. This can be surprisingly difficult, especially when you're nervous. We were ten minutes in and he was already accusing me of perjury. Then, when he was interrogating me on something I'd said in the transcript, I suddenly got it. It was as if a wind swept over me, shifting my perception.

This – this deposition – was a game of language. Every word was a chess piece. You move it to your advantage. It was about, as Bill Clinton did so famously, questioning what the definition of 'is' is. It was distasteful and even kind of stupid (depending on your definition of 'stupid') but once I saw the game, I saw how the lawyer was trying to play me, and I could defend myself. I gave clipped, minimal answers. Words turned into rocks that I tossed down one after another, as if using them to jump across a stream. When I got to the other side, and it was over, my own lawyer looked at me with something akin to amazement.

2

Fear can be your friend. It carries a message that you need to hear. It is a warning of something that hasn't happened yet. I remember a passage from the book GIFT OF FEAR about a woman attacked in her apartment. She was on the bed, and her rapist was saying he was done with her, he was going to let her go. He shut the bedroom window and left the room. Fear seized her, and rose up inside her, lifting her body off the bed. Wearing only a sheet, she soundlessly followed her attacker through the apartment. He had no idea she was behind him. When he went into the kitchen, she went out the front door.

Later, she realized that the simple act of shutting a window had signaled to her unconscious his intention to kill her. He shut the window because he didn't want anyone to hear her scream. He left the bedroom because he was looking for something to use as a weapon. Her fear connected the dots before her conscious mind was willing or able to; fear hijacked her body and quite literally saved her life.

3

Fear can also serve as a gatekeeper, like those statues of Chinese lion-dogs that flank temple doors. I am reminded of a dream I had in my early twenties. I was living inside a stone castle, dark and cold, but through an arched doorway I could see the world. It was sunlit and colorful and I wanted it. Shadowy figures patrolled the doorway, and I knew that I couldn't get out into the world without figuring a way to slip past them.

But I also understood that those figures weren't my enemies. They were – or thought they were – keeping me safe. Passing through that threshold would be a profound act; it would change me; it would cast me beyond the edge of my known territory. Those gatekeepers were a test of my will: did I want it bad enough? If not – or if I tried to make my way past them and failed – then I should go after something else, something that truly motivated me.

Or else I wasn't ready yet, hadn't acquired the skillset or maturity that I needed, and should try again another time.

4

Ultimately, what we fear is death. It could be literal but it could also be symbolic: professional or psychological death through exposure and humiliation, for example. We fear being shown up as inadequate. Or maybe we fear the opposite – that we are more powerful than we know, which carries its own burden of risk and responsibility.

So we find hundreds of ways to distract ourselves. As Pema Chodron puts it:

"…we always have to change the channel, change the temperature, change the music, because something is getting uneasy, something is getting restless, something is beginning to hurt, and we keep looking for alternatives."

We make excuses. We procrastinate. We look for ways to escape the moment.

But what if – instead of leaping to change the channel, or smoke a cigarette, or shop at Saks, or zone out in front of the television – what if instead of that kneejerk search for distraction, we held ourselves still? What if we allow ourselves to feel whatever feeling we are trying to suppress? What if, instead of running, we stop and turn to look on that fear directly? To identify and name it?

The act of naming a thing is an act of power over it; through naming, we assert control and ownership.

5

The ironic thing is that confronting death …can actually make us happier. As Jane McGonigal points out in her book Reality is Broken, positive psychology manuals will advise us to

Think about death for five minutes every day. Researchers suggest that we can induce a mellow, grateful physiological state known as "posttraumatic bliss" that helps us appreciate the present moment and savor our lives more.

The prospect of death, our own death, has a way of stripping away the excess, the small things, the bullshit, so that we can suddenly see what's important to us. When I find myself in need of clarity, asking myself – What would I do if I knew I was going to die six months from now? – can serve up that clarity pretty quick.

Facing our fears has a way of changing them into something that serves us. In his book BUILT TO LAST, Jim Collins observes that the leaders of remarkable breakthrough companies aren't fearless risk-takers – but fearful and paranoid even in the best of times. (In the words of Andrew Grove: "Only the paranoid survive."). They assume that disaster is around the corner – and then prepare accordingly. They don't conquer their fears so much as acquire the skills and resources needed to live peacefully alongside them. The thought of approaching disaster doesn't scare you quite so much when you're ready to meet it with a force of your own.

In those instances when the fear doesn't serve us, we can acknowledge it for what it is. We can listen to it, and respect it, and get unnerved by it. We might even be convinced by it.

But we don't have to do what it says.

We can learn how to act in the face of it. We can practice this through allowing ourselves to be uncomfortable: experimenting with small actions that fall outside our comfort zone, retreating to the comfort zone to rest and regroup, stepping outside of it again. If writing the novel frightens us, we sit down and type a paragraph. Or a sentence. Or even a word. But we do that day after day after day until the act of feeling that discomfort, moving through that discomfort, becomes a habit that carries over into other areas of our lives.

6

Pema Chodron says: No one ever tells us to stop running away from fear. We are very rarely told to move closer, to just be there, to become familiar with fear.

…Usually we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear…

The trick is to keep exploring and not bail out, even when we find out that something is not what we thought. That's what we're going to discover again and again and again. Nothing is what we thought.

I like that phrase: "intimate with fear".

That night before the deposition, I became intimate with mine. There was no escape, no chance of distraction. I was pinned to the truth of the moment. And I learned that my fear was me and not-me, it had its own life as something apart from me. It was a squall of bad weather moving through me. I let myself feel it, and then let it go.

I came out the other side of the experience with a new sense of my capability and resilience. I was more of a badass than I'd realized. Now, I'm glad to have had that experience (and the gifts it gave me), just like every other event that has broken me open in some way, made me deeper and wiser — even if I'd rather stick needles in my eyes than go through it again.

There are a lot of things I want to do with what remains of my "one wild and precious life," as Mary Oliver puts it. Thinking of some of them scares me to death. I don't expect that anxiety to ever truly subside. Your fear points you to the things you care about so intensely, you think you'll be shattered if you lose them or can't have them. Your fear leads you to whatever lesson you still need to learn, to become the kind of person living the life that you want to live.

More than one successful blogger has said that he or she uses fear as a litmus test for posts: if she feels an edge of anxiety, vulnerability, when pressing 'publish', she takes that as a sign that she has brought all of herself to her work. She has pushed herself (and her audience) someplace new.

It's an illusion that we can conquer our fears and then be done with them, as if passing some final exam. Things fall apart and come together and fall apart and come together. Then they fall apart again. We reach our limit and break new ground…and find ourselves once more at our ragged edge, with change and ambiguity and uncertainty ahead. We're passing through a threshold that will change us; something in our old identity must die so something new can take its place.

Pema says:

Reaching our limit is not some kind of punishment. It's actually a sign of health that, when we meet the place where we are about to die, we feel fear and trembling. A further sign of health is that we don't become undone by fear and trembling, but we take it as a message that it's time to stop struggling and look directly at what's threatening us.

I took a rock climbing lesson once. It turns out I have a fear of heights. I never went back – the idea of climbing mountains for no reason isn't something that motivates me – but I remember my takeaway from that day: how even though my legs were shaking, I could still pull myself up the rock.

how to turn your creative online platform into an art*

Art isn't only a painting. Art is anything that's creative, passionate, and personal. And great art resonates with the viewer, not only with the creator.

What makes someone an artist? I don't think it has anything to do with a paintbrush. There are painters who follow the numbers, or paint billboards, or work in a small village in China, painting reproductions. These folks, while swell people, aren't artists. On the other hand, Charlie Chaplin was an artist, beyond a doubt. So is Jonathan Ive, who designed the iPod. You can be an artist who works with oil paint or marble, sure. But there are artists who worked with numbers, business models, and customer conversations. Art is about intent and communication, not substances. — LINCHPIN, Seth Godin

1

Strange concept, developing an audience before you have something to sell.

Maybe it makes perfect sense, if you tilt your head and shift your angle. If you don't have something to sell, you don't have such an obvious agenda. Buy my book. No, really. Buy my book!



That annoys people.

When you're randomly shoving your book in people's faces, what are the odds that that particular reader is going to be your right reader? If you walk into a crowded bar and throw yourself at the first prospect you see, what are the odds that she or he will prove a match for a genuine relationship (or even an awesome one-night stand)?

There's an element of subjectivity to art. We like what we like, and even if we're not sure how to put that into words, we know it when we find it. The nature of the art has to link with the nature of the individual. Two inner lives have to open up to each other and find recognition. Resonance.

Maybe you can't truly sell or market your work online. Nobody wants to be marketed to unless they're already sold on your work and on you. This seems a paradox but what I'm trying to say is:

You create, online, a sense of who you are and what you stand for as an artist.

You put yourself out there to be found.

You cast your signal into the strange endless void of the Internet, and you wait for your people to hear it, and recognize it, and follow it back to you.

You see yourself reflected back in them. Something in you and something in them fuses, becomes one and the same.

This is known as a bond.

This is known as a sense of authenticity.

2

What if you came to the Web with open hands and open mind? Instead of locking in to one goal and blinking out other possibilities – sell my book sellmybook SELLITBABYSELLIT – you cultivate a sense of journey and exploration.

You decide that instead of 'marketing' yourself, you will practice, online, being the artist you secretly know yourself to be.

It is in the content you share and the story you tell and the voice you send out to your audience.

It is the intensity with which you listen to what's happening around you.

It is the way you gather information and translate it to wisdom about yourself, your work, your audience, your marketplace, and the deep instinctive sweetspots where they start to intersect.

You will practice being an artist online until you get so good that the people you attract through and to your content turn into fans, or even true fans. They mention your name. They share you with others. They do it with a speed and reach you could never achieve on your own. Slowly, and then faster and faster, you become light and heat and energy, radiating ever outward into spaces that surprise you.

2

An artist interprets the world around her and makes meaning out of it, a meaning that serves others as well as herself. An artist creates the kind of value that can't be replicated, automated or outsourced, because an artist works from her inimitable soul.

And when I say "from the soul" I mean from deep within, in a way that draws on your unique layering of personality and intelligence and personal history. You bring all of yourself (your selves) to your work: your shadow as well as your shiny public face. You need your darkness as well as your light, for they define themselves against each other and both have gifts to give.

You fashion your own point of view.

This is what makes you original.

The first breakthrough comes when you make the mental shift from What can I get to What can I give: when your 'platform' or 'promotion' becomes another way to create meaning, to give value to people, to be another face for your art.

I had a great conversation with the ace book publicist Lauren Cerand the other night, on the rooftop of a Venice hotel (Venice, California) as night gathered deep along the beaches.

"People get so hung up on the 'social' part of social media," she told me, "that they forget the 'media' part."

She said, "Social media is something that you make. It is your own thing. It can be whatever you want it to be. No publisher or agent or editor can take it from you or claim it as their property." She moved her hands a little, as if creating a thing out of air. "It's yours."

It is also your gift to others.

Meaning, real meaning, tends to transcend and escape whatever tries to contain it. Meaning depends upon the audience as well as the artist; in that way a book or painting or company is co-created. Because the same thing can be different things to different people — multiple aspects of the same meaning shifting in and out of view – art exists on an intensely personal level as well as a collective one. Your job as an artist isn't to control your meaning, but to bring it into being and ship it out into the world.

It evolves and thrives, or withers and dies, in the conversations of those who gather round it and carry it to others.

Or not.

3

An artist understands that art is in the process and not just the final product.

An engaged audience doesn't happen overnight. It is organic and shifting and tailored to you; new people move in as other people, wrong people, filter out. They go off to seek meaning elsewhere. This releases you as well.

It's a process. You are making your own thing. You are creating and co-creating it a bit at a time. It's rather like a book happening online, chapter by chapter, page by page, bird by bird.

You need to think long-term, or else you'll get discouraged. Just because hardly anyone is reading the blog post you wrote today….doesn't mean they won't discover it three weeks or three months or three years from now. You are creating a source, a resource, that deepens every time you roll up your sleeves and get to work on it (and even, sometimes, when you don't).

As your audience evolves and grows, so do you. You work with meaning, and through meaning, as each expression of it opens up into another expression to lead you somewhere new. The better you get at this – like anything else, it takes practice and time – the more interesting people start to find you. They join you on the journey. Some fall out early on; others become increasingly emotionally invested in you.

It's standard marketing advice to create what's called a customer avatar: an in-depth individual profile of someone who represents your audience. You get into her head and examine what she needs, what problems she faces, what makes her happy, what keeps her up at night, where she hangs out and what she does with her time. Then you can tailor your content to those needs, desires and anxieties: you know where to find her, how to attract and seduce her.

I have experienced the inverse.

Perhaps it works better that way.

The more experienced I became online, the more confident and relaxed. My 'writerly' voice came apart and my authentic voice broke through it, like a moth struggling out from its cocoon. You are more exposed this way, it's true. But your vulnerability is also your strength. It shows who you are. Your right audience can't recognize you until you step out from hiding. If you operate behind a mask, people will be attracted to the mask and not to you. When it gets knocked off — and sooner or later it will — people will be confused, or dismayed, or angry, and they will desert you.

4

When you practice being an artist, you are also becoming yourself; you are making your soul manifest; you are turning into an original.

When you make meaning from your soul and deliver it to the world through an ever deepening skillset, when you offer your work as a gift, something that transcends expectation and obligation, your audience begins to reveal itself. The more they see of you, the more they can see themselves in you.

You are on a journey and so are they.

You may not know exactly where you're headed, but that's okay.

You will help them.

They will help you.

You will reach your destination together.

* With thanks to Jeremy Lee James

how to turn your online platform into an art

1

Strange concept, developing an audience before you have something to sell.

Maybe it makes perfect sense, if you tilt your head and shift your angle. If you don't have something to sell, you don't have such an obvious agenda. Buy my book. No, really. Buy my book!



That annoys people.

When you're randomly shoving your book in people's faces, what are the odds that that particular reader is going to be your right reader? If you walk into a crowded bar and throw yourself at the first prospect you see, what are the odds that she or he will prove a match for a genuine relationship (or even an awesome one-night stand)?

There's an element of subjectivity to art. We like what we like, and even if we're not sure how to put that into words, we know it when we find it. The nature of the art has to link with the nature of the individual. Two inner lives have to open up to each other and find recognition. Resonance.

Maybe you can't truly sell or market your work online. Nobody wants to be marketed to unless they're already sold on your work and on you. This seems a paradox but what I'm trying to say is:

You create, online, a sense of who you are and what you stand for as an artist.

You put yourself out there to be found.

You cast your signal into the strange endless void of the Internet, and you wait for your people to hear it, and recognize it, and follow it back to you.

You see yourself reflected back in them. Something in you and something in them fuses, becomes one and the same. This is known as a bond. This is known as a sense of authenticity.

2

What if you came to the Web with open hands and open mind? Instead of locking in to one goal and blinking out other possibilities – sell my book sellmybook SELLITBABYSELLIT – you cultivate a sense of journey and exploration.

You decide that instead of 'marketing' yourself, you will practice, online, being the artist you secretly know yourself to be.

It is in the content you share and the story you tell and the voice you send out to your audience.

It is the intensity with which you listen to what's happening around you.

It is the way you gather information and translate it to wisdom about yourself, your work, your audience, your marketplace, and the deep instinctive sweetspots where they start to intersect.

You will practice being an artist online until you get so good that the people you attract through and to your content turn into fans, or even true fans. They mention your name. They share you with others. They do it with a speed and reach you could never achieve on your own. Slowly, and then faster and faster, you become light and heat and energy, radiating ever outward into spaces that surprise you.

2

An artist interprets the world around her and makes meaning out of it, a meaning that serves others as well as herself. An artist creates the kind of value that can't be replicated, automated or outsourced, because an artist works from her inimitable soul.

And when I say "from the soul" I mean from deep within, in a way that draws on your unique layering of personality and intelligence and personal history. You bring all of yourself (your selves) to your work: your shadow as well as your shiny public face. You need both your darkness and your light, for they define themselves against each other and both have gifts to give.

You fashion your own point of view.

This is what makes you original.

The first breakthrough comes when you make the mental shift from What can I get to What can I give: when your 'platform' or 'promotion' becomes another way to create meaning, to give value to people, to be another face for your art.

I had a great conversation with the ace book publicist Lauren Cerand the other night, on the rooftop of a Venice hotel (Venice, California) as night gathered deep along the beaches.

"People get so hung up on the 'social' part of social media," she told me, "that they forget the 'media' part."

She said, "Social media is something that you make. It is your own thing. It can be whatever you want it to be. No publisher or agent or editor can take it from you or claim it as their property." She moved her hands a little, as if creating a thing out of air. "It's yours."

It is also your gift to others.

Meaning, real meaning, tends to transcend and escape whatever tries to contain it. Meaning depends upon the audience as well as the artist; in that way a book or painting or company is co-created. Because the same thing can be different things to different people — multiple aspects of the same meaning shifting in and out of view – art exists on an intensely personal level as well as a collective one. Your job as an artist isn't to control your meaning, but to bring it into being and ship it out into the world.

It evolves and thrives, or withers and dies, in the conversations of those who gather round it and carry it to others.

Or not.

3

An artist understands that art is in the process and not just the final product.

An engaged audience doesn't happen overnight. It is organic and shifting and tailored to you; new people move in as other people, wrong people, filter out. They go off to seek meaning elsewhere. This releases you as well.

It's a process. You are making your own thing. You are creating and co-creating it a bit at a time. It's rather like a book happening online, chapter by chapter, page by page, bird by bird.

You need to think long-term, or else you'll get discouraged. Just because hardly anyone is reading the blog post you wrote today….doesn't mean they won't discover it three weeks or three months or three years from now. You are creating a source, a resource, that deepens every time you roll up your sleeves and get to work on it (and even, sometimes, when you don't).

As your audience evolves and grows, so do you. You work with meaning, and through meaning, as each expression of it opens up into another expression to lead you somewhere new. The better you get at this – like anything else, it takes practice and time – the more interesting people start to find you. They join you on the journey. Some will fall out early on; others will become increasingly emotionally invested in you.

It's standard marketing advice to create what's called a customer avatar: an in-depth individual profile of someone who represents your audience. You get into her head and examine what she needs, what problems she faces, what makes her happy, what keeps her up at night, where she hangs out and what she does with her time. Then you can tailor your content to those needs, desires and anxieties: you know where to find her, how to attract and seduce her.

I have experienced the inverse.

Perhaps it works better that way.

The more experienced I became online, the more confident and relaxed. My 'writerly' voice came apart and my authentic voice broke through it, like a moth struggling out from its cocoon. You are more exposed this way, it's true. But your vulnerability is also your strength. It shows who you are. Your right audience can't recognize you until you step out from hiding. If you operate behind a mask, people will be attracted to the mask and not to you. When it gets knocked off — and sooner or later it will — people will be confused, or dismayed, or angry, and they will desert you.

4

When you practice being an artist, you are also becoming yourself; you are making your soul manifest; you are turning into an original.

When you make meaning from your soul and deliver it to the world through an ever deepening skillset, when you offer your work as a gift, something that transcends expectation and obligation, your audience begins to reveal itself. The more they see of you, the more they can see themselves in you.

You are on a journey and so are they.

You may not know exactly where you're headed, but that's okay.

You will help them.

They will help you.

You will reach your destination together.

things that smart women know

This morning I asked on Facebook and Twitter: What do smart women know? I distilled the answers into this post. Thank you to everyone who participated*. You are awesome sauce.

Smart women know that perfection is annoying and overrated.

Smart women know to be gloriously imperfect.

Smart women know that they are responsible for creating the beauty in their lives.

Smart women know that there is more to life than being in a relationship.

Smart women know that success stems from love, connection and leading from the soul.

Smart women know that great men exist and they are not the enemy.

Smart women know that people are going to talk whatever you do, so stand tall in power and intention and continue to forge ahead.

Smart women know that it's good to be bold.

Smart women know that they can feel fear and still act fearless.

Smart women know who they are and what they're worth.

Smart women know they have to make up their own rules to get ahead.

Smart women know not to get caught up in ego bullshit, but to get out into the world and do the work they're called to do.

Smart women know that love is an action, and not (just) a warm fuzzy feeling.

Smart women know to let go and forgive.

Smart women know that their self-worth does not depend upon a man.

Smart women know how much they don't know. They know humility.

Smart women know that being and expressing fully who they are brings joy and peace and fulfillment.

Smart women know to listen to their intuition and their hearts and live from the inside-out.

Smart women know how to say no nicely, how to say it like a hardass, and when to use either approach.

Smart women know other smart women, when to ask advice and when to listen.

Smart women know that misogyny is in our cultural DNA and when to push back.

Smart women know that men come and go but a dog will love you forever.

What else do smart women — and men — know? Add in the comments below.

*Emelie Rota, Sorinne Ardeleanu, Kaynek Young, Betsy Peters, A Luis Moro, Joanne Meade, D'Lanie Blaze, Jean Morgan Compton, Cyd Madsen, Julie M Daley, Laurie Sutherland, Naima Singletary, Susan Kelly, Erin Griggs, Tae Phoenix, Juana, Annie, Laura Anne Gilman

Demi Moore, the limits of beauty + why Cleopatra was badass

1

I was skimming an article that claimed how the newly single Demi Moore has been partying with her daughter's friends and chasing men half her age when I came across a quote from one of her alleged friends. It was something like:

She's going to turn 50 soon and has no idea what her life is supposed to look like.

In these rapidly changing times, you could wonder if anyone knows what life is supposed to look like. On some level we're all forced to wing it, creating and recreating ourselves and our 'brands' and innovating our way forward (or sideways or backwards before looping round again) into the rest of our lives.

Those who can adapt shall inherit the world.

People like to say that women have too many choices now, and get paralyzed and stressed and miserable in the face of them, and so blame the evils of feminism. I don't think that's true. I think women can choose to be traditional (marriage, kids) or trailblazing (anything else, including the attempt to combine marriage and motherhood with a career).

Once you step out of the "traditional" life script, there are no clear models to follow, which is why it's so easy to think that we're fucking it up (or fucking up our kids).

You have to see it to be it, but trailblazers can only "see it" in their heads.

You can look to other women as heroes, but every woman is piecing together her own idiosyncratic path that usually has to weave around and through the paths of others (spouses, children, aging parents).

Being a trailblazer is difficult. You're always rebelling against some aspect of the status quo. You invite all kinds of criticism. You wrestle self-doubt on a regular basis. You have to juggle twenty different balls at the same time and damn, do you get tired. Etcetera. It's easy to retreat into fantasies of a golden era (such as before feminism) when these problems didn't exist and everything was rainbows and unicorns and fairy tales ending happily ever after. (Cause that's what life was like back then. Right?)

Maybe that's partly why the Hotness Olympics has such a fierce hold on girls and women. When so much about the kind of life that you're "supposed" to have is unclear, the one thing that is crystal-clear is how much society rewards and valorizes good-looking people.

(So much so that career counselor and noted blogger Penelope Trunk in her Blueprint for a Woman's Life advises women to get plastic surgery.)

If you make yourself as hot and sexy as possible, if you manage to finally lose those five pounds and go to yoga everyday, if you hold onto your youth long after your actual youth has passed, then you win, right? You get the prince and he loves you forever and everything comes up roses and unicorns and disco balls and cute happy children who always say please and thank you.

Right.

2

I live in Los Angeles, in a social milieu where Botox and plastic surgery are the norm. But when everybody competes according to the same beauty standards, everybody starts to seem, with varying degrees, the same. It's become very clear to me that the Hotness Olympics is rigged. It has no winners, because even the winners don't win. In the words of Michelle Pfeiffer, who would know: "Beautiful women get used a lot." They're commodities. They're interchangeable. They have an expiration date.

Which is why the kind of trailblazing I would like to see more of is the rejection of the Hotness Olympics for erotic capital.

EROTIC CAPITAL: The Power of Attraction in the Bedroom and the Boardroom is the title of a book by Catherine Hakim. However you feel about her central message, the book recognizes – in a way that the Hotness Olympics does not – that attraction is multifaceted. Hakim breaks erotic capital down into six components, and physical beauty is only one of them. Even this definition of 'beauty' makes allowance for something other than genetics and plastic surgery:

The French…speak of the belle laide…the ugly woman who becomes attractive through her presentational skills and style. Getting fit, improving posture, wearing flattering colors and shapes, choosing appropriate hairstyles and clothes – such changes can add up to a completely new look.



The second component is sexual attractiveness, which is separate from beauty:

….sex appeal can also be about personality and style, femininity or masculinity, a way of being in the world, a characteristic of social interaction. Beauty tends to be static and is easily captured in a photo. Sexual attractiveness is about the way someone moves, talks and behaves…



The third component is

"definitely social: grace, charm, social skills in interaction, the ability to make people like you…want to know you and, where relevant, desire you…"



The fourth component is

"liveliness, a mixture of physical fitness, social energy and good humor. People who have a lot of life in them can be hugely attractive to others – as illustrated by those who are "the life of the party"…"

The fifth component is

"social presentation: style of dress, face-painting, perfume, jewelry, hairstyles, and the various accessories that people carry or wear to announce their social status and style to the world."

(This component – otherwise known as personal style – is my favorite. I am fascinated with it.)

And the sixth and last component is

"sexuality itself: sexual competence, energy, erotic imagination, playfulness, and everything else that makes for a sexually satisfying partner."

All six elements combine into someone's "erotic capital": a mix of aesthetic, visual, physical, social and sexual attractiveness to other members of your society in all social contexts. It includes skills that can be learned and aspects of your personality that can be cultivated, like intelligence and joie de vivre. If you lack in certain areas, you can actively develop other areas to compensate.

As Diana Vreeland once put it, "You don't have to be beautiful to be wildly attractive."

3

I am fascinated by the great courtesans and seductresses of history. Ellen T White refers to them as "sirens" who are "irresistible." Not to everybody, necessarily. Certainly not each person every time. "But a Siren's batting average is very high." And in books like Katie Hickman's COURTESANS or Eleanor Herman's SEX WITH KINGS or White's own SIMPLY IRRESISTIBLE, a theme that emerges over and over is that true Sirens set themselves apart and make the world take notice through the force of their personalities. They are defined not by physical beauty – in some cases they were actually rather plain – but by "unshakeable confidence."

Be she a kook, character, sexpot, intellectual, muse, mother, or moll, the Siren lives large. Each embraces life in her own way and is determined to live it as thoroughly as possible.

White also says:

In fact, let me go out on a limb here: being physically exceptional can sometimes be a deterrent to becoming a world-class Siren…Being beautiful is too easy. Everyone naturally gravitates toward beautiful people; consequently, beautiful people are rarely forced to spend any time or thought on becoming magnetic people or in calculating how to get what they want.

(This reminds me of an incident at a black-tie fundraiser when an acquaintance of Adrien Grenier told me, rightly or wrongly, that "Adrien has no game." I retorted, "Adrien Grenier doesn't need any game." "So if he ever does," my friend said, "he's in trouble.")

Cleopatra, for example, knew the power of spectacle. She also knew exactly whom she wanted to impress. She smuggled herself into a heavily guarded palace and dazzled the great military strategist Julius Caesar; she sailed up the river Cydnus in a pimped-out barge, dressed as Aphrodite, reclining under a canopy of gold cloth while boys dressed as Cupids cooled her with fans, and dazzled the hedonistic and sensualist Mark Antony.

Cleopatra is not reported to have been particularly beautiful.

She was just badass.

White breaks the "siren" down into five archetypes: the Goddess, the Sex Kitten, the Companion, the Competitor, and the Mother.

(The funny thing was, even skimming the descriptions, I could recognize several of my female friends.)

Instead of traipsing off to the plastic surgeon for a new nose, women should, according to White, recognize which of the archetypes predominantly represents their own personality and play up the strengths and advantages: in other words, to become more of what they already are.

5

There is so much more to life than being desirable. Then again, we are biologically wired to want the kind of attention that just might deepen into love: so we can band together against the world with all its pitfalls and predators; so we can survive, thrive, and procreate (or not).

"What scares me," Demi Moore told Harper's Bazaar magazine, "is that I'm going to ultimately find out at the end of my life that I'm really not loveable, that I'm not worthy of being loved. That there's something fundamentally wrong with me."

When she collapsed in a Beverly Hills bungalow, according to People's assistant managing editor Kate Coyne, she "was so frail and gaunt that some of the paramedics who arrived actually thought that she was a cancer patient who was in the final stages of treatment."

I saw Demi and Ashton Kutchner at Chateau Marmont once, years ago, and what surprised me was how small she was: this frail, quiet woman with long dark hair who seemed to disappear into Ashton's larger broader presence.

This is a woman who was the highest paid actress in Hollywood. Married to movie stars. Known for her beauty and fabulous body and seemingly unending youth. If life for women is a beauty race – and so many people will tell you that it is – Demi Moore won, and won big.

How did we get to a place where being intensely desirable went from living large and having game and embracing life with unshakeable confidence, to being mistaken for a cancer patient?

How can we get someplace else?

how to find the Big Meaning of your novel (+ blog) that will make your readers fall wildly in love with you

1

So I realized I was coming at my novel from the outside in.

I'd created a complex storyworld with a cast of characters and tangled backstory shaping the frontstory. It was like I had the map, but couldn't find the interstate freeway leading to my destination. I felt like I was going down some darkened country roads, and it was only a matter of time before I'd end up in a town of cannibals or something.

(Cue the sound of a chainsaw.

…On second thought, DON'T.)

As Roz Morris suggests in her book NAIL YOUR NOVEL, one way to help yourself get unstuck is to remind yourself why you wanted to write the damn thing in the first place.

For me, for this book, it was the idea of repetition compulsion: how we recreate relationships and situations from the past in an ongoing effort to resolve them. I'm using reincarnation as a metaphor for that.

But what is the point of the book? If art is the creative demonstration of a truth, what is the truth I am trying to prove? I needed to get at the novel from the inside out.

Back to basics: a story is about a character who wants something and must overcome obstacles to get it.

But in order to do that, she's forced to change in some way.

It's in the overcoming of those obstacles that she finds what she lacks, and acquires what she needs, to achieve her goal (or not). The meaning of the story – the thematic significance – is in that character growth. That shift in consciousness that makes a new life possible.

In her book THE PLOT WHISPERER, Martha Alderson advises you to look to your own life, for your own truths, that you can then bring to bear on your novel. What are the big truths of your life?

I'm talking what Jim Signorelli refers to as big-t Truths, those metaphysical truths that we can't measure or quantify but recognize, somehow, as right. We vibe with them.

In contrast, little-t truths are the facts and figures we find in the history books, for example. So-called objective information. (It's not like history is, you know, written by the victors or anything.)

Little-t truths can be manipulated.

Big-t Truths cannot: they are what they are, and they remain the same from Homer to Shakespeare to Spielberg to Joyce Carol Oates. They are the abstract truths that live behind, and in between, and beneath the other kind. Little-t truths inform us; big-T truths live inside us, and a writer doesn't teach or preach so much as stir them to life. We feel that shiver of recognition, that sense of deepening alignment with the values of the novel, as we live vicariously through the characters and arrive at a sense of what it all means.

2

Big-t truths live in your platform as well, your blog – that is, if you want to create something powerful enough to attract and engage new readers and deepen your connections with your fans.

It comes back to the question: What do you stand for? What is your purpose? What is your defining value or ideal?

The nature of blogging (and online writing in general) is to provide information that solves problems, that illuminates or improves your reader's life in some way. Think of that information as the bait on the hook that draws your readers to you (you just want to make sure that it's the right bait for the right kind of audience).

But to turn those readers into fans, you need to deepen that engagement, because information on its own isn't enough.

The gurus will say that you need to connect with readers emotionally, and that's true. But more than that, you need them to resonate with you. And that happens when they can sense the big-t Truth living behind that information, shaping the delivery of that information, and they recognize it as their Truth as well.

Community develops around shared values.

To find yours, Signorelli suggests what he calls the "laddering interview", or what is elsewhere known as "the five whys". You explore the motivation behind your motivation behind your motivation until you get to its root cause. That's where you find your Truth.

For example:

Why blog about creativity?

Because I think it's important to a well-lived life, a healthy society.

Why?

Because it deepens your connection to yourself and the world.

Why?

Because it helps you explore and develop your identity, your voice, your vision, and project that into the world.

Why?

So you can interact with the world as your full-bodied, amplified, authentic self, which allows you to stand in your power and connect with like-minded souls.

Why?

So you can work together to create a movement, raise awareness, find innovative solutions, that change the world. And sell your work and make some money as a side benefit.

You try it.

3

Getting back to my novel, this is the thematic statement I came up with:

The hunger for love leads to distortions of love, but only real love can heal and transcend the cycle of exploitative relationships.



So my character has to grow toward genuine love and intimacy in a way that helps her save herself (and others). I have to create the events, characters and situations – the objective information, the little-t truths, the 'plot' — forcing her to do that.

Wish me luck.

What are the Truths that you're working with?

The ABCs of Self-Love: G is for Growth: how to find your life's meaning. really.

This Blog Crawl of Self-Love is hosted by Molly Mahar of Stratejoy. She believes in the transformational power of radical self-care and so do I. Find out more about The ABC's of Self Love Blog Crawl + Treasure Hunt here.

1

So there's this thing called a 'growth mindset' and this other thing called a 'fixed mindset'.

If you have the former, you believe that things like talent and intelligence are not fixed at birth; that with work and effort, you can improve. You can invent and reinvent yourself.

You can grow.

If you have the latter, you believe that growth is not possible. You are who you are, and that's the end of it. Instead of expanding to become more of what you want to be, you contract around those frozen beliefs about yourself.

You protect your self-image at all costs.

You avoid challenge. You look for the easy A. You don't work hard when you don't see the point. You sidestep anything that might show you up as quote-unquote inferior – because then you'll be stuck with that inferiority, with no way out of it.

Life is more interesting with a growth mindset.

2

Most of us tend to have a mix of the two; in some areas we believe we can grow, and in others we believe we are stuck in permanent positions.

Those beliefs shape our actions which shape our life.

They serve as a prism through which we filter the world.

Our subconscious draws our attention to the things that our beliefs have primed us to notice, so that we are constantly interpreting the world in a way that supports those beliefs. Between you and 'objective reality' is your own personal paradigm, to sift that reality and serve it up to you.

It aligns your reality with what you want to see – and blocks out what you don't.

Change your beliefs, change your paradigm, change your world.

The question is how?

In the book CREATIVE THINKERING, Michael Michalko observes

Habits, thinking patterns, and routines with which we approach life gradually accumulate until they significantly reduce our awareness of other possibilities. It's as if a cataract develops over our imagination over time, and its effects only slowly become obvious…

You cannot will yourself to change your thinking patterns any more than you can stop your foot from changing direction…You need some means of producing variation in your ideas. …

One powerful "means of producing variation" is: an antagonist.

A struggle.

3

I write fiction (when I'm not writing blog posts). Fiction concerns imaginary people who undergo a series of events and revelations that changes their paradigms and alters those characters forever.

This kind of change doesn't come easily; an old sense of identity has to die, so a new one can rise from the ashes.

It's that shift in identity – and how it enables the protagonist to overcome obstacles and face down antagonistic forces and achieve her heart's desire (or not) – that shapes the ultimate meaning of the story.

4

Sometimes you seek growth; sometimes growth comes at you and for you like a heat-seeking missile.

Growth can announce itself with mess, discomfort, increasing pain. As children we learn our strategies of survival: our paradigm. Then one day we enter a place where those strategies no longer work for us. They hold us back or threaten us, they turn from angels to inner demons; we have to separate ourselves from them so that we can adopt new ones.

If we don't, we stagnate.

We get caught in the repeating loop of our own history.

We sabotage ourselves and get preyed on by others.

Growth can announce itself with unease, with desire. There's something (or someone) you want to have – or something you want to escape. There's someone you want to become – and someone you need to stop being.

That desire is strong enough to push you out of your comfort zone and into a new act.

You struggle and you fight and you fail. Difficulty mounts. Your antagonist breaks you down, pushes you to the edge, strips you of everything you thought you knew – but it's in that death, that moment of surrender, when you release the old beliefs and turn toward the new.

Your actions change accordingly.

You can do what you couldn't do before — and the world finally offers up the prize.

5

One way to plan a novel is to reverse-engineer it. You look at the climax, the final showdown between your protagonist and your antagonist: exactly how does the protagonist prevail? What kind of person must she become, in order to prevail? What quality, what way of seeing the world, does she need to possess at the end of the novel and lacks in the beginning? How does she achieve that quality?

Then you can backtrack your way to the beginning, finding the moments to demonstrate that growth, that change, in your character.

One way to plan your life is to reverse-engineer it. You dream up a vision for your future. You imagine yourself having already achieved your goals.

The nature of goals is to force us to stretch: we need to acquire new skills and develop new aspects of our character.

In the beginning you may doubt yourself, think that the person you know yourself to be couldn't reach such a lofty destination. And you're right.

But what you need to remember is that the journey changes you.

The journey finds ways to turn you into what you need to be.

Which is why it's important to ask yourself not only, What do I want out of life?

But also, Who do I want to become?

In that transformation – from who you are into who you need to be – you just might find the meaning of your life.

6

You can always fake it 'til you make it. We have a funny way of growing into what we only think we're pretending to be. Thought and feeling may generate behavior, but it turns out that behavior can generate thought and feeling.

As Michael Michalko observes:

Every time we pretend to have an attitude and go through the motions, we trigger the emotions we pretend to have and strengthen the attitude we wish to cultivate.

You can change the way you see yourself, and the way others see you, by your intention and by going through the motions.

Your pretense can change your psychology.

7

Growth can announce itself with little, seemingly superficial changes that audition a much larger change.

You can bring this about yourself: change your hair, change your dress. Fashion can serve as the thin end of a wedge that separates you from your past.

The makeover is a popular staple of television: when the woman (usually it's a woman) changes her look, it's understood that her life also changes. A new identity is cut and trimmed and styled into being. Growth happens from the outside in. And it's not very threatening: if you don't like it, you can always go back to your previous hair color.

But now that you look different, how are you received? Now that people receive you that way, who can you meet and what can you take part in? Now that you can engage with new people and events, how do you feel about the person you are becoming?

In his book TRANSFORMATIONS, Grant McCraken muses on how a generation forced the growth of an entire counterculture (bold italics are mine) :

They were growing their hair a little longer in the back, going to the occasional rally, listening to new music. And even as each of them was trying on novelty, the response of the world, and the meaning of the novelty, were changing. Working en masse, millions of Oscars created a more receptive, less risky environment for one another…[They] reset the tolerances and moved a culture toward change. The great change of the counter-culture came from millions of little gestures, tiny departures, modest risks brought together into a magnificent aggregate.

8

McCraken also writes about people he calls "playwrights" (we would call them "change agents") who get "under" culture to rewrite its beliefs, its very rules of perception. He uses Ani DeFranco and the way she subverts traditionally feminine notions of delicacy and beauty as an example of someone who "is not only working on her persona, but on the culture that defines the persona."

[Change agents] may be driven by inklings of cultural developments in the works, but they are traveling alone, driven by their own initiative and inclinations, haunted possibly by their own demons, writing from their own needs to their own specifications. Playwrights like DiFranco are inventing themselves, but in the culture of commotion their creations sometimes recruit avant-garde followers and even mainstream enthusiasts. From their efforts to invent themselves can come substantial changes in the global culture.

McCraken calls these followers and enthusiasts "off-Broadway players" who use the playwright's work to "take their leave from the traditional order of things" and create lives according to the playwright's innovations.

They "inhabit worlds that the playwright has opened up."

The playwright becomes a light to steer by.

Her followers change their music, speech, clothing, residence and "invite and suffer the disapproval and sometimes the hostility, even violence, of the mainstream world." But they are better protected than the playwright, because they travel in a group. They are not, as DiFranco is, reconstructing cultural categories and cultural rules. They grow and transform in ways that make them members of this group. (In contrast, the playwright stretches, grows and transforms to rebel against a group.)

McCracken observes:

Their collective effort, their community, can begin to move a culture's center of gravity.

But this [change in the culture] is not the achievement of an individual. The off-Broadway player is engaged in a personal transformation. Only the playwright accomplishes cultural transformation.

9

DiFranco would be what Michael Michalko calls a "self-created individual", who seems "more alive and creative than others."

In the world of humanity, a person who is talking, walking and working can be alive and self-creating or lifeless and drab. This is something we all know, yet never talk about.

What makes some people seem especially alive and others seem lifeless and drab?

He compares these individuals to the emperor moth, with its wide and magnificent wingspan.

But first, the moth must be a pupa in a cocoon.

One day a small opening appears in the bottom and the moth struggles to force its body through it. The struggle takes hours. The moth often seems stuck.

But this struggle is how the pupa forces fluid from its body and into its wings; it prepares those wings for flight.

You could help the pupa by enlarging the hole with a knife or scissors so that the pupa simply slips out:

But it will have a swollen body and small, shriveled wings. In fact, the little moth will spend the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings. It will never fly.

In a novel, the antagonist serves a similar function. The antagonist is whoever or whatever traps, restricts, and opposes the protagonist; what the protagonist must struggle against to escape.

As Martha Alderson points out in her book THE PLOT WHISPERER:

External antagonists challenge [the protagonist] throughout the story and especially in the middle. They know how to push her, to ignite her flaws, to create gaps of imbalance, and become what she must overcome for ultimate success.

10

It's the struggle that makes us strong, and readies us for flight.

It's how you grow through and out of it – the meaning you make of it – that can not only shape yourself and your creative work (and your life) — but inspire others.

They see themselves in you and your struggle. Your meaning becomes their meaning.

They might seize on that meaning and create communities around it. They might even create a movement.

They might shift the center of the culture.

how to be creative

Accept that you've got the creative urge and it's never going to go away. Make friends with it. Drink some tequila if you need to.

Commit to the process. Rome wasn't built in a day. Unless of course it was built by aliens. This is doubtful.

Engage! Things start out murky, but that's ok. Creativity builds on itself, and clarity comes through engagement. Usually very slowly. So in the immortal words of the great George Michael, you gotta have faith, or at least act like you do.

There is a gap between where you are and where you want to be. The only way to get where you want to be is to close the gap, through practice and learning and practice and feedback and more practice. There are no shortcuts, unless of course they were built by aliens. This is doubtful.

You eat the elephant one mouthful at a time. I am speaking metaphorically here. You are not really eating an elephant. But the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single baby step, and all that. It's not like you can hop in a Porsche. (I mean, you can, but it won't help you become a better artist.)

Creativity happens in the relationship between you and your medium, whether it's the violin or writing or painting or puppetry or interpretive dance or start-ups or some combination thereof (interpretive dance puppetry, which I hear is wildly underrated). So you need to find your medium. Keep yourself open to new experiences and be willing to try new things, because your medium might surprise you when you're least expecting it. It might fall on your head like a piano, for example (a cartoon piano, since a real piano would probably kill you dead, and this would be counterproductive).

Find your tribe. Find the people you want to be like and put yourself in the path of their direct influence. You have to see it to be it.

Avoid toxic people. They kill your creativity and your spirit. They also don't know what the fuck they're talking about and are generally just saying it to hurt you. But part of your brain might not realize this and accept what they say as gospel truth. Bad idea. So let them gently know where they can go (and I don't mean to Canada).

Seek constructive feedback. Seek mentors and coaches. You don't have to go it alone. You also don't have to reinvent the wheel (of cheese) — unless you want to.

Master your tools. They amplify your voice and open new dimensions of possibility. They help you close the gap.

Master the difficult. Most people won't bother.

Celebrate your progress, step by step by step. We need that sense of forward motion to stay motivated, and nobody else is likely to do it for you.

Embrace your limitations and constraints. Magic often happens when you're bootstrapping it (or the creative equivalent) because then you're forced to work over and around and beside things. You're forced to solve problems in new and interesting ways. Formula inhibits creativity – but form releases it.

If you don't have any limitations, make some up. Create a structure, a form, in which you must work.

Develop creative rituals. They help you transition from everyday thinking, which is not creative, to creative thinking, which, um, is. The more regular and practiced your rituals, the more ingrained in your brain, the faster and easier the transition.

Control your space. Block out interruptions. Take your work seriously enough to carve out an inspiring little environment for it.

Be imperfect. Allow for mistakes. Often the art grows from the mistakes.

Reframe failure. It's just another form of data. Before you can get to what works, you have to go through the stuff that doesn't work, and why. The faster you fail, the faster you can figure this out.

Go for bold heroic failures. Why the hell not?

Be solitary. You need that space and time for dreaming, and mulling things over, and connecting the dots, as well as the creative act itself. These things require deep concentration, which you will not get if someone keeps interrupting you to offer you almonds or ask to have sex with you or talk about Spongebob. (Why Spongebob? I don't know. It just came to me.)

Be social. We need that thrum of energy, that cross-section of perspectives. Creative work happens in solitude, but creative idea-gathering tends to happen in the world.

Feed your head. Don't leave inspiration to chance. Schedule it in. Establish a creative routine, then step outside of it. Mix it up on a regular basis. Seek out sources of influence. Force your brain to think in new ways. The brain is a lazy brain. It will go on automatic if you let it, so it can sit on the couch and drink a beer and watch some godawful reality TV show featuring annoying housewives.

Steal ideas from everywhere you can find them, and then recombine them in new and interesting ways. Take ideas from a field or discipline as far away from yours as possible, and then find ways to apply those ideas. People will think you're a genius. Or nuts. Or nuts, and then a genius.

Create conversation. Look behind the conversation and examine the beliefs and assumptions that are framing the conversation. Challenge those assumptions.

Go where the conversation isn't. What are people not talking about, that you think we need to be talking about? Bring that into your work.

Freewrite on any given problem that's been bothering you. Give yourself twenty minutes and go. Magic stuff happens when you do this. It's like you channel a completely different part of your brain. When you write stream of consciousness, thoughts lead to more thoughts lead to more of what you're really thinking. You know more than you realize. So go ahead. Impress yourself.

Shift perspectives. Create a cast of characters and examine your work through their eyes. What would Steve Jobs tell you to do? David Bowie? Michael Cunningham? Your younger self? Your older, fabulously successful, world-famous self? Your objective self? Your emotional self? Your friendly animal totem self?

Develop your signature voice. Follow your obsessions and bring them into your work. Build on your strengths. Do more of what you love. Do more of what you know. Do more of what you do too much of.

Be a freak. Your kind of freak.

Be generous. Give work away. When you empty the box, your brain will refill it. There's always something in the box.

Ask yourself lots and lots and lots of questions. Your mind will come up with answers.

Write stuff down. Keep an ideas journal, or a creativity journal, or just a list of stuff that comes to you. Otherwise your mind will think it has to keep hold of everything itself. Then it stresses out. So do a brain dump on a regular basis. Clear the space for the fresh and the new.

Love the world. 'Cause love rules.

Be a maverick. Have some swagger. Own it and work it. Why the hell not?