Kristen Kalp's Blog, page 12

Sometimes ‘not this’ is clear enough.

Today, we dive into the last of the four qualities that bring the best of your voice to light: wildness, kindness, bravery, and, today, clarity. (Listen to the other podcasts in the series: your work is not your worth and what does your work have to do with your voice?)

Clarity is tricky in real life, since we’re never given a 27-point plan to follow about anything, let alone the most important parts of our lives. It’s hard to know we’re doing the right thing at any point with regards to something as simple as eating carbs. (Science differs!) Or screens. (Is Netflix self care or self sabotage? Depends on the day.) Throw some big-picture scenarios into the mix and it often feels impossible to know if we’re on the right path with regards to anything at all.

Instead of promising I can give you simple clarity or deliver your life’s mission in 28.6 seconds or via a much-watched TED talk, let me give you a guideline. Guidelines are rarely sexy and often helpful.

Sometimes ‘not this’ is all we get.

As Liz Gilbert describes it, ‘not this’ is what your soul whispers when it’s appalled — i.e. when it can’t believe you keep doing X and it so clearly keeps asking you for ‘NOT X.’

When you’re in a relationship for far too long.

When you know your job is crushing your spirit.

When you’re being abused or minimized or treated like shit in any capacity.

You won’t get the 43-point plan or the ejector seat that makes leaving as easy as pressing a button.

You’ll get ‘not this.’

‘Not this’ is vague enough to be frustrating and simple enough for you to know exactly what needs to happen next. It’s a miracle of a phrase, should you find yourself, say, weeping in an outdoor shower while your life wakes up all around you and you find yourself in the midst of a marriage that feels like strangling, one breath at a time.

It’s early 2014, winter on the East Coast but lovely in California. I’ve just discovered the heaven that is Laguna Beach, and I’ve convinced my husband to move there for a month so I can bring a massive event to life without Seasonal Affective Disorder punching me in the face.

I’m standing outside and showering in the sun. And my body is screaming, ‘This! This place! This sun on my face! This beach! This, this, this!’

I’ve taken to doing yoga in the morning sun, then tossing my clothes off and letting every last bit of hot water pour over me while listening to every talk Rob Bell has ever uploaded to YouTube. It’s like washing the dust off of every portion of me, slathering myself up in the backyard whilst contemplating God and the mysteries of the universe and hoping the hot water heater doesn’t run out just yet.

The minute the water turns off, I wander back inside and wrestle with my marriage.

All the enthusiastic ‘THIS!!!!’ coursing through my body brings the wall of ‘not this’ into even sharper perspective. I cry every single time I manage to face my life by walking back into the kitchen.

The singular pain that comes of knowing a thing has ended and yet staying.

For inexplicable reasons and for far too long. Somehow it’s always far too long.

When you come to a point in your business that’s lovely — in other words, when you find a ‘THIS!’ — you’ll often find a ‘not this.’ Your job is to honor it.

I’ve ‘not this’ed prescriptive formulas and online programs, ebooks and partnerships, long-treasured ideas and very, very expensive advice. (All of which were a ‘this!’ at some point.)

Your job is to keep finding and then being honest about the ‘not this’ bits when you find them.

Maybe you’ll lose forty-three grand and lie on the couch for six months when the event you went to California to finish is a financial dud. (For example. Total hypothetical.)

Maybe you’ll meet the love of your life and learn more about partnership and intimacy, depth and bliss than you could have imagined. (Again: totally made up it’s not like I have a Bear.)

Maybe you’ll discover a spiritual practice that makes your other work seem shallow by comparison and then spend your days pursuing depth in all of your work. (One more time: certainly not my experience.)

Clarity, in its earliest stages, might just say ‘Not this.’

And you might not hear any words other than those two for the weeks or months or years it takes for you to listen.

If you want your voice to be clearer, it can be helpful to articulate the ‘not this’ness of your clientele as well. My clients are deeply feeling, sensitive souls who tend to be creative for a living. That’s great, but it’s a bit nebulous.

The ‘not this’ of my clientele is as follows: my peeps don’t support Trump. They often fall for purchasing prescriptive programs and 6-point plans because it’s easier than facing the solitary path that is following your own body of work wherever it leads. They are not timid, though they might seem quiet from the outside. They are not used to expressing their voice at its full capacity, and they are hesitant to turn people away because money is money — or so they’ve been taught.

‘Not this’ draws a clear boundary. If you love Trump, we won’t be able to work as closely as I’d like, so I’d rather not take your money.

‘Not this’ gives you clues about what’s going on in your soul. Your life and your work have their own opinions most of the time.

‘Not this’ might be all you get.

Let’s suss out your ‘not this’ in everyday life:

When you first heard ‘not this’ described, did any particular situation immediately come to mind?

Is there anywhere — job, business, partnership, family, friendship, everyday life — that you feel compelled to do something different, even though you don’t yet know what it is?

Are there any projects or ideas that keep floating around and begging to be made, even though you ‘don’t have time’ to make them or they don’t make sense with your current business model?

Is there something people keep asking for, but your time is being taken up by some other service, project, product, or program that was previously the crux of your career?

Do any aspects of your professional life whisper ‘not this?’

Do any clients reek of ‘not this’ or ‘not them?’

Do any of your habits speak of ‘not this,’ but you keep doing them?

Does any part of your everyday routine feel like, ‘not this?’

Does any part of your work sparkle more than it used to, and you know it’s time to give it more energy?

Do you keep daydreaming about some inexplicable, ‘impossible’ project or idea, even though you don’t know how to bring it to fruition? (That’s a ‘THIS,’ and your job is to honor it.)

You don’t have to know what will come of it.

Just stating it is probably enough.

Not this, not this, not this.

Make a NOT THIS list of 10 things, as fast as you can and without second-guessing yourself!

If you’d like to send me what you’ve discovered, awesome! I’m at k@kristenkalp.com and I’d love to hear, or you can tag me on Instagram at @kkalp.

If you’re like, WAIT I LOVE THIS PODCAST SERIES ABOUT VOICE AND IT’S OVER — come to the Voice workshop! These sneak previews are part of a larger curriculum that’s going down on May 20th and 21st in Philadelphia! The expression of your voice will be wilder, kinder, braver, and clearer by the time you leave, and you’ll have fun along the way.

Read all about Voice.

Buy your ticket now.

P.S. Three $0 ways to make more money this year.

The post Sometimes ‘not this’ is clear enough. appeared first on ⚡️Kristen Kalp.

Brave is just another word for ‘Vulnerable.’

This is part 5 in the Voice podcast series. Past episodes include: your work is not your worth. This is what your voice has to do with your work and worth. How to take time off.  Nice and kind are not the same. You don’t have to go in order!

When I talk with my coaching peeps 1-on-1 about being a little more vulnerable in business, they usually freak out. They imagine a world in which every secret they’ve ever had is laid bare and then featured on a reality show that’s beamed into every home on the planet — AND it’s shot in HD so that every pore on their face has its own character name and story line. That’s not the case, and I want to address this as an introduction to the sort of brave that affects your voice (or lack thereof) the most: vulnerability.

Let’s dive into what keeps you from being vulnerable, where you’re most likely to waste your vulnerability juice, and what it looks like to turn one of the scariest acts most females can imagine — asking for help — into a fun game. (Yes, REALLY. A fucking fun game.)

First, a word to calm the parts of you that are freaking out when I even mention the word ‘vulnerability,’ let alone begin to talk about it.

Vulnerability doesn’t have to happen all at once.

You don’t have to go from being a master of mystique to spilling your sexiest secrets in one fell swoop. Often, the first steps into vulnerability as a business owner will be fairly mundane. They’ll look like having your face on your website. Your face in a headshot without your partner, your kids, your dog, your tools of the trade, and/or your cat(s). Just you.

Add your full name, your location on the planet, and your phone number and e-mail address so potential clients can actually contact you, et voila! You’re 30% more visible than you were mere moments ago.

When you’re even a shade more visible, you’ll be tempted to retreat and stop making the cutting edge work that’s calling to your spirit at this moment.

Please don’t give in to that temptation to stop making, doing, or calling rad stuff into being. PLEASE don’t download a freebie from the interwebs and build the ‘instant’ product that’s already done for you if you just fill in ‘content.’

Likewise, don’t fall for the trap that you’re already visible enough, and if you were any good everyone would know about you by now. Your asshole brain will try to convince you of the ol’ ‘If you build it, they will come’ mentality and try to tell you that if you were REALLY gifted, you’d have moved one billion dollars’ worth of product in the past four minutes by activating your new Squarespace website. Don’t listen. That’s not true. Overnight successes take, on average, 7 to 10 years to happen.

You’ll naturally want to come up with a 6-step program or a light and airy product that’s ‘easy’ to sell, when what your spirit wants is to combine words and meetings and breathwork and books in ways no one has ever seen before, or hold a workshop that won’t sell nearly as well as one about sales. (At least, that’s how it is for me at the moment.)

Let’s explore a few ways you can be vulnerable without throwing yourself over a metaphorical cliff and getting deeply hurt, thus undoing all your progress and giving another victory to the ‘just sit down and shut up, you’ve got nothing to say’ voices in your brain.

Make the work, even if you don’t show it to anyone.

I write poems that no one sees all the time. (Here are the ones you can see.)

The willingness to be vulnerable with your SELF — with your own feelings, desires, insecurities, fears, and demons — is the only way to be comfortable sharing any of your vulnerable bits with anyone, ever.

Also, let’s talk about Hilma. Hilma af Klint was a Swedish painter and mystic born in 1862, who died in 1944. She was classically trained in art, displaying her landscapes and botanicals widely throughout her lifetime. But her secret work. In secret, she created painting after painting that wasn’t to be viewed until a full TWENTY years after her death. It wasn’t that she was scared, it was that she knew the world wasn’t ready — she was ahead of her time, and her peers wouldn’t have gotten it. She was completely right, and her work is now on display across five floors of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.  In a display called ‘Paintings for the Future.’  The ongoing discovery and study of her work has caused art history books to be rewritten, as the dudes credited for first using x or y technique or modality are no longer accurate. It was Hilma first.

GO BE A HILMA.

In other words: don’t self censor.

Even if you only make stuff that lives in a closet or drawer or under a bed or is kept wrapped in brown paper until twenty years after your death, you’re much further along than those who let their best and most vital work languish in their minds, never to see the light of day. (Or worse, the ones who make mediocre ‘safe’ work while trying to appeal to everyone, ever. Introverts at Work will help you beat your vanilla, appeal-to-everyone impulses.)

This step is impossible to view from the outside and no one can possibly hold you accountable for doing it, so I can only say it here and hope you hear me: don’t self censor.

Don’t self censor, don’t self censor, don’t self censor.

The parts of yourself that you’re most afraid to show to others will often be the parts that are embraced with the most love.  (Or a retrospective at the Guggenheim.)

I started writing about my struggles with depression in 2013. I was certain that somehow the world would shatter, people would stop hiring me, and I’d be fending off flaming bags of dog turds for writing that article. All roads led to homeless and penniless in my mind.

Instead, people wrote kind notes. Six years later, that original article is the #1 most popular thing I’ve ever written. (Sad. True. Both/and.) Peeps have sent me e-mails and letters and they’ve hugged me upon meeting to let me know that I helped. Years later, I still get thank you notes for that first article.

Oh and, that first article didn’t ‘do’ anything. It didn’t end with 84 Steps to End Your Depression Forever! It didn’t recommend miracle supplements you could buy to solve your life or even conclude with a happy ending, meaning I’d suddenly been cured or fixed and could help you out of the dire, horrible places in your own brain. It simply acknowledged my ongoing struggles with mental illness and let my peeps know that I was still alive. And working. And that continues to give people hope.

Please remember this when you’re tempted to believe you’re not being ‘useful’ enough. Acknowledging what you’re going through without rushing to make it a happy ending is useful.

Further: you can unfold by degrees.

From that first article with depression, it took years for me to go deeper: keeping the wolf at bay, hard-won depression tactics you can actually use, and the depression chronicles. More recently, I’ve talked about suicidal ideations and how I’ve handled them — in the ‘tell on yourself‘ episode of the podcast. Unfolding by degrees means…

You don’t have to share your experiences in the present.

It took a full year for me to talk about my divorce anywhere, in any capacity. It took two years for me to admit the full cost of having hosted Brand Camp publicly.

I had depression for more than a decade before I talked about it with anyone other than my doctor and my best friend.

I still haven’t talked about medical marijuana anywhere. My inner Nancy Reagan is rather strong.

Vulnerability means, in the words of either Brene Brown or Glennon Doyle or both in some class they taught that’s no longer online — writing from our scars, not our wounds.

You don’t have to share your gaping wounds, but you can write/sew/dance/make/leap/film/photograph your way through them. You can take notes to use as fodder. You can keep an open list of ‘This Will Be Funny Someday’ vignettes on your computer. You can move through a tragedy of any kind — from a ruined favorite shirt to the death of a loved one — knowing that someday, somehow, this, too will be a scar.

You don’t have to accept feedback.

When you’re putting work in the world, you’re not required to ask for or to accept feedback of any kind.

This flies in the face of all those who want you to run beta programs and then get feedback before you launch a thing, or put your soul’s work up in simplistic polls on social media — thus letting strangers talk you out of what every fiber of your being wants to make next. This is harmful, uninteresting, and dangerous.

If I followed the advice of even my dearest clients, I would only talk about marketing and sales — NOT about honing your voice, not about vulnerability or depression or the hardest bits of being in business, and certainly not tiny, annoying progress.

You are in no way, not once not ever, required to hear the feedback of critics or total strangers. This especially applies to completely subjective works of all kinds.

The minute you let someone else’s opinions matter more than your own internal barometer, your work gets diluted.

Are you pushing your own limits?

Do you stand beside what you’ve made?

Would your past self be proud of what you’ve created?

The answers to those questions are far more important than whether someone, somewhere, on the internet approves. Personally, I’ve got three people I trust to look stuff over and tell me where/if it’s falling down. I run harsh critique through those same three people to see if it’s valid or if it’s just trolling. I ask my clients for feedback once they’ve worked with me and address their concerns one-on-one. This isn’t to say that I don’t accept feedback, only that you, dear human, are not required to ask for it at any point. Sometimes work is better when it’s yours and only yours.

Too often, we give others’ opinions far more sway than our own at some delicate point when the aliveness of the whole project hangs in the balance.

You can also minimize vulnerability wherever possible.

We all know the nerve-wracking sensation of launching a thing into the world, whether it’s a workshop or a workbook, and whether it took two weeks or two years to bring to fruition. You can absolutely minimize that vulnerability so that it can be used in other places!

When it comes to bringing your work to the public, start with a sure thing.

I sell every single book, program, product, class, whozeewhatzit or thingamabob I make to a sure thing before I release it to the general public. Meaning, I make a thing and then ask one of my favorite peeps to buy it, knowing that the person will say ‘yes.’

In the case of the Voice workshop, I invited my KK on Tap and Steer Your Ship peeps to attend first, knowing the cost is included in their coaching and they were, therefore, more likely to hop on board. That’s how I got the first seven attendees, and how I got past the ‘what if no one signs up ever’ hurdle.

The Sure Thing Method takes away the vulnerability of ‘OH GOD WHAT IF I DON’T SELL *ANY* OF THAT THING’ and frees me up to release my work into the world with less stress about how it will perform financially.

If you want to sell a new thing, start by hitting up the people who told you to make that thing in the first place. If they’ve bothered you to teach yoga for years and now you’ve got classes on the calendar, ask ’em to come. They’ve been hounding you to paint, and you’ve just finished a bunch of pieces? Ask ’em to buy. (Speaking of which: come to Voice. You’ll love it.)

Ask, ask, ask. And, um.

Asking is always vulnerable. And therefore brave.

This is me telling you that you’re not broken or weird if you find asking for help and/or a sale to be practically impossible. The good news is that it gets easier with time and practice. Where once I felt like I was going to puke every single time a person e-mailed to ask about hiring me, I can now report that I feel only a brief wibbliness in my belly before answering the message and signing ’em up for the right offering. (Related: you could probably use this breathwork class.)

Here’s the game part!

Start a ‘no’ collection when you begin to ask for help.

The next time you make a thing, aim to ask for something so outrageous or out of your league that you collect 10 no’s. You’ll get far more yes’s along the way, and you’re mentally prepared to spin every ‘no’ as a good thing. It’s fucking revolutionary.

Can I be on your podcast?

Will you talk about this new thing with your people?

Will you come to my workshop?

Will you hire me?

Can I use your space to meet with people?

Want to talk on the phone?

Want to feature me in an article?

Can you help me plan for X?

Can we get coffee and talk about Y?

Would you be willing to look over _____ and review it before I share it?

Do you have any insights about __________?

The bigger the ask — and bravery involved — the more exciting it is when you get a yes. This also keeps you from giving up on potential clients who have ghosted you, because if you follow up enough to get a ‘no,’ you can add it to your collection.

Finally: there are laws, there are rules, and there are opinions. Distinguish between the three carefully.

People will take it upon themselves to give you advice and to ‘look out for you’ in many ways.

Someone once told me that calling myself an orphan hugger was the most offensive thing she’d ever seen and made me look “hopelessly naive.” I’d just spent months in countries literally hugging orphans and was merely being accurate.

People have told me how inappropriate it was for me to mention the shaving of legs (SUPPORTING THE PATRIARCHY!), how completely wrong it was for me to take products off the market (HOW DARE YOU NOT TAKE MY MONEY), and the ways my use of strong language is offensive (yawn). Related: what to do when strangers are mean to you on the internet.

They’ve sent me long, long lists of reasons they’re unsubscribing.

…and I’m still here.

Still alive, still vulnerable, still doing my best to avoid self censoring.

Still taking a stand for the introverts, those called to the depths, and those who are sensitive AF and learning to live with it.

Still helping creatives do their big important magnificent brutal difficult lovely work in the world.

Still advocating for the use of your voice to brighten the world, starting right now.

If you’re like, ‘YAH KRISTEN BUT HOW DO I ACTUALLY START,’ here we go!

To be more brave, show us your:

Face

Full name

Physical location on planet earth

Phone number

Email address

Baby steps into a less vanilla business

Scars, not your wounds

Untouched, raw work

Work you don’t censor

Work you’re called to make

Biggest asks (and build that no collection).

You can feel those getting harder as you go down the list, so begin with the first five and go from there. You’re more than capable of being more brave in business, starting right row.

If you’d like to actively step into the bravest parts of yourself with my support, check out the Voice workshop! The 2-day workshop goes down in Philly on May 20th & 21st!

Your voice will become more wild, kind, brave, and clear during our time together. You’ll unlearn a bunch of asshole brain bits, explore your own edges and the places you’ve suppressed your voice over the years, and meet a bunch of like-minded folks who kick infinite amounts of ass. KK peeps are unfailingly witty, kind, and awesome.

Get a ticket.

P.S.  Let out your meows.

The post Brave is just another word for ‘Vulnerable.’ appeared first on ⚡️Kristen Kalp.

Nice and kind are not the same.

Let’s review what we’ve done so far in the Voice series, shall we?

First, we determined that your work is not your worth.

Then, we talked about what your work and worth have to do with your voice.

Last week, we covered the four elements of a resonant voice in the modern world, and I introduced you to the ‘wild’ element by teaching you how to take time off. (Which is something 100% of my clients ask for help with, so please don’t think I’m being patronizing. It took me years to learn how to run a business and then, at times, leave the business alone so that I could be a human with a life outside of my work.)

Today, let’s dive into Kind.

Nice and kind are not the same.

They sound the same, and I’ll bet some people even use the two words interchangeably, but they’re about as far apart as two similar-ish words can get.

Let’s start with a deep dive into Nice.

Nice lets racist, sexist, and any other -ist comments slide because she ‘doesn’t want to rock the boat.’

Nice doesn’t start important conversations about politics, religion, money, or health issues because ‘we don’t talk about such things.’

Nice is always ready to become a martyr and let self care slide.

Nice says ‘Yes’ and means ‘No.’

Nice says ‘I don’t know’ and means ‘Oh hell no.’

Nice breeds the sinking feeling that no one knows the ‘real’ you, since you haven’t let the ‘real’ you out to play for months/years/decades.

In other words: nice breeds resentment.

When you let others’ needs run roughshod over your own, you naturally come away feeling like you got the short end of the stick.

If people have taken the last of your good and vital energy on any given day — and it’s not yet 11 a.m. — you have no choice but to hate everyone just a little. That’s the nature of being depleted. And holy shit, do you resent the people who deplete you.

Kindness, on the other hand.

Kind takes care of itself.

Kind knows its own value.

Kindness treats the gifts you steward as important.

Kind also makes boundaries.

Good, firm, steady boundaries that prevent it from slipping into martyrdom.

When I say ‘boundaries,’ I’m not talking about that time your cousin was addicted to some drug and you refused to give her money to buy more, or that time a guy said he wanted to take you home from the bar and you said “No thanks.” Those are examples of boundaries in action, but they’re pretty extreme and obvious. Of COURSE you can stand up for yourself in dramatic situations like those.

Boundaries are the everyday practices you implement that teach people how to treat you.

Boundaries can be as simple as not answering your phone after 8pm, choosing to return voicemails within 48 hours instead of 1 or 2 minutes, or refusing to eat at fast food chains because of the unfair treatment of workers.

Everyday practices that teach people how to treat you look a lot like how you respond to e-mails and phone calls, when you let screens into your life, how much time you work, how much time you take off, how much influence you let others’ opinions have on you, and whether or not you’re willing to bend over backwards in any given situation.

You’re teaching people how to treat you.

Right now. All the time.

Boundaries make it easier to get people to treat you well.

They are a kindness to yourself and to those entering your sphere, whether as a client, a colleague, or a friend. When you get a grip on boundaries, you’re growing more satisfied with your life as it now stands. Because asking for ten minutes alone before you come downstairs to make breakfast is a small but relevant change, right?

Likewise, taking Sunday mornings off to lie in bed and eat pancakes won’t cost much, but you’ll appreciate that time more than the entirety of the rest of the week, combined, if you’ve been aching for a break.

Drawing boundaries around your time can be tricky, but it’s a necessary part of making space for good shit to appear in your life. You’ll need to prioritize some things while de-prioritizing others in order to get what you want.

To get started with the kindness of boundary-making in a simple and quick way for your business, just complete these four sentences:

__________ takes a disproportionate amount of my energy without giving me much in return.

In order to create _______________, I have to give up ________________.

To bring ____________________ to life in the next few months, I can’t give a shit about

_______________________________________ anymore.

Committing to _______________________ means I have to stop _____________

__________________________.

Kindness means you’ve been a decent enough steward of your energies to actually be with people when you’re in public instead of wishing to go home and sleep. It means you’ve said ‘yes’ and ‘no’ and meant both of them without lying to anyone — including yourself — about your desires. It also means you’ve gotten in touch with what you want to do and with the work you want to create.

Kindness leads to giving from a much fuller tank, which splashes out and affects the quality of your every interaction.

Here are a few questions to help you spot the difference between nice and kind in your everyday life:

How many times in the past week have I said ‘yes’ when I really meant ‘no?’

How many times in the past week have I ignored commitments to myself in order to take care of others?

When do I have time that is designated as NOT ‘On’ — whether that’s working, caregiving, or both?

Which people in my life do I resent for my past niceness? Which clients? Which activities or appointments?

Is there any way that I’m martyring myself for my business, hoping that at some point I’ll ‘make it’ or ‘be successful’ and magically recover from years of overworking?

How often do I agree to special arrangements or other profit-eating timesucks instead of charging appropriately for the hassle?

If I were partnered with me in an intimate relationship, would I be happy about how much time I spend working, thinking about work, taking care of work, musing on work, planning for work, and fussing about work-related things?

What do I need to give up, ignore, or stop in order to practice kindness with myself?

What do I need to commit to in order to practice kindness with myself?

If any part of you is like, ‘HOLY SHIT KRISTEN I’M SO NICE AND I DIDN’T EVEN REALIZE IT, WHAT NOW!???’  A diagnosis of ‘Nice’ means you’re operating exactly as society has prescribed.

We’re trained to be nice to others since birth. We’re told to share, to smile, to talk to strangers, to hug relatives and the old people who smell like mothballs at church, to laugh at unfunny jokes, and to generally make others comfortable in every way before worrying about ourselves. Keep those practices in play for a couple of decades, and it’s no surprise that we wake up in adulthood to this fuckery.

We can see how incredibly UNkind we’ve been to ourselves for the sake of keeping others from being disappointed in us. Or worse, not liking us AT ALL.

You don’t have to be nice anymore. Kindness is the far more powerful and subversive option.

Start by telling the truth about what you want and refusing to take up the chains of martyrdom. Say ‘no.’ Ask for help. And take some time off, too.

If any part of you balked at that list, you’ve hit upon another truth: to be kind, you’ll also have to be brave.

Brave is where we’ll pick up next week, with part five of the Voice series.

Wild, kind, brave, and clear voices resonate with our souls the most deeply, and the Voice workshop will help you cultivate all four.

It goes down in Philadelphia on May 20th & 21st, and includes a host of classes, worksheets, follow-up, to help you take the steps to use your true-actual-raw-real voice in the world. Learn more or pick up your ticket now.

P.S. Boundaries are the best thing ever.

The post Nice and kind are not the same. appeared first on ⚡️Kristen Kalp.

How to take time off. An introduction to WILD.

Welcome to part three of the Voice series! Listen to episode 1 and episode 2 if you wish, or dive in below:

At the recent meeting of my KK on Tap peeps — (click here to get in on coaching for the entirety of 2019!) — we had plowed through the set of initial questions and were getting to the ones that people usually deem too ‘stupid’ to ask.

I LOVE ‘STUPID’ QUESTIONS.

They’re usually exactly the thing everyone in the room is thinking or feeling, and thus they reveal whole worlds when they’re out in the open.

“How do you take time off?”

We had to walk through what taking time off isn’t, so I’ll recap for you:

Tackling new work projects you didn’t have time for during the year is not time off.

Working 2 or 3 hours less than usual is not time off.

Comprehensively crossing every single item off a dry erase board full of this year’s ignored work activities is not time off.

Checking your email on your phone instead of on a bigger screen is not time off.

Returning calls or emails ‘real quick’ while standing up (because not sitting means you’re not working!) or on the toilet is not time off.

Taking time off means operating under the assumption that the world will go on without your efforts to keep it in motion.

The world does not need your emails to be returned within 2 hours. We will not shrivel and die if you enjoy your weekend completely and don’t even share it on Instagram. You are not required to sip inspiration and rest through a coffee-stirrer-sized straw while you pour yourself out in larger and larger pitchers-full of effort without any rest at all. To put it another way:

Burnout is not the price of being alive.

So, how do you actually take time off without constantly worrying about, checking in on, or dreaming about your business? What if you actually learn to separate your work from your worth (which is literally the subject of this podcast, so start there if you need it)?

You ask yourself this question, over and over and over.

What sort of immersive experiences would I like to have?

Immersive, as in ‘completely consumes your attention for a period of time.’

Immersive can be any activity you find lovely and enjoyable: reading, sex, bathing, writing, drawing, painting, crafting, meeting up with friends, and generally making come to mind.

Going to the movies is immersive. It’s impossible to be checking your email and answering texts with a movie on the big screen, if only because the other patrons will throw their popcorn at you when you try to sneak a glance at your screen.

Netflix is not immersive. You’re at home, which for many of us means we’re making lists upon LISTS of things to do, try, and take care of when we look around. You can easily be distracted by any number of ’emergencies’ or try to watch some low-brain-usage shows while you also do work. (Been there, did that to the tune of an entire season of The Real Housewives of New Jersey.)

What sort of immersive experiences would I like to have?

What would I like to try, learn, experience, make, or enjoy during my time off?

What do I never ‘let’ myself do?

These questions usher in your own answers to how to take time off.

Instead of trying to find ways to putz around the house and avoid doing the seventy-four piles of laundry left wrinkling in the corner — which generally leads to scrolling for hours at a time — you’ve accessed a bundle of experiences that get you excited about putting your business down for a while.

Lest you think ‘immersive’ is code for ‘expensive.’ My answer to the immersive experience question was free.

I scheduled a day to (not check email and) visit the Philadelphia Free Library. I wandered around and picked a book to read, then parked myself at a table and…read. I took notes. I patted myself on the back for making such a magnificent choice. I dipped into a few other books that caught my eye, and strolled out two hours and forty-five minutes later.

For a brief bit of time, I didn’t worry about texts or email or Instagram or trying to encapsulate my experience for sharing. I just channeled the 6-year-old self that could read uninterrupted for days of summer vacation on end, and I let her out to romp. She basically freaked out and couldn’t believe how great it was to be in a library with windows 20 feet tall and this whole building has BEEN HERE this WHOLE TIME and it was FUCKING DELIGHTFUL.

Your immersive experiences might be going to the gym or taking a workshop or signing up for a once-a-week class for the foreseeable future. They might be taking your family to see fireworks or new movies or, hell, the library for a while.

You might cook a meal that uses every last one of your gourmet tools or practice your French with a foreign language partner or just make yourself leave the house and see what happens.

Whatever gets you away from places your clients can demand things of you and into the bigger world counts as an immersive experience.

The more immersive experiences you let yourself enjoy, the easier it is to believe that your business will not wither and die from 24 hours of ‘neglect.’

Counterintuitively, the more immersive experiences and time off you enjoy, the more likely you are to produce better and more engaging work.

Vaguely distracted, always-on you isn’t nearly as compelling, talented, or alive as the you that can only be accessed by taking the time and energy necessary to refill your well.

Finally! When you disengage from work in a healthy way and on a regular basis, you’re actively refusing to put all your eggs in the ‘money’ basket of life. You do not make money from walking around the neighborhood and petting every dog you see, but you do help your soul believe the world is okay, at some level. You are not actively earning dollars for putting in your time on the treadmill, but you are remembering that you have and can even enjoy a body. You will not earn millions from loving the shit out of your partner at a secret hotel rendezvous, but you will strengthen your relationship through shared experience.

The world gets more wild and delightful when you choose to actively engage with it as a human being instead of couching the entirety of your value in your work on this earth.

To be crystal clear: learning to take time off is revisiting some part of your own wildness.
Wild is just unlearning the conditioning and thought patterns that typically govern your behavior.

Instead of buying into the reasoning that says you need to be more productive and work harder while in a semi-distracted, ultra-connected state, you unplug. You let the emails go unchecked for a while. You throw yourself into an experience that isn’t all about generating income. You make blank spaces in your calendar and refuse to fill them. You don’t try jamming one more thing into an already-full day. You sink into your bathtub and feel the glorious feeling of having a body. You let the subway ride be the subway ride without it being an opportunity to play a game, check the news, scroll on Instagram, or return emails.

You can re-wild yourself at any time, from the inside out.

What would I like to try, learn, experience, make, or enjoy during my time off?

What do I never ‘let’ myself do?

Those are questions designed to bring the edges of your wild to light. You aren’t required to spend eight days naked outdoors in order to find it.

Start where you are, with what you’re not ‘allowed’ to do. And go do it.

As we’ll explore in the Voice workshop, the most resonant voices are wild, kind, brave, and clear.  Next week, we’ll hit up ‘kindness’ and dive deeper into why being nice…sucks. Hard.

P.S.  The Voice workshop will help you reconnect with your most intuitive and authentic self, and goes down in Philly this May.  I’d love to meet you there!

The post How to take time off. An introduction to WILD. appeared first on ⚡️Kristen Kalp.

What do work and worth have to do with your VOICE?

This is episode #2 of the Voice podcast series, and I didn’t even mention your voice at all in part one. Well spotted.

Here’s the thing: if your work and your worth are inextricably bound together, you’re highly unlikely to use your real voice in any but the safest of environments. (Read: never.)

When a customer deciding not to use your services really means there’s something wrong with you and you’re not good enough — OF COURSE you’ll take it personally and then try even harder to please absolutely everyone by becoming more bland and broadly appealing.

When a criticism of something as simple as your color choices is, in your view, also a commentary on the ways you’re a waste of humanity, OF COURSE you’re not going to share your work with many people, or spend years pondering font choices in the hopes that you will be immune to critique.

If your latest project doesn’t do as well as you’d like, commercially, and that means you’re somehow less entitled to exist, OF COURSE you’re more terrified of failure than anything else on earth.

But! When you can separate your work (and others’ thoughts about it) from your worth as a human, you’re far more likely to take chances, share your opinions, and generally experiment with your output for both business and pleasure.

When you truly believe that a troll commenting about the size of your ass or waist or wallet or work has NOTHING TO DO with your intrinsic value as a human, you get freer. Fast.

Free, like: you don’t hide behind planning and planning and planning in ever-more-advanced attempts to stave off criticism by releasing a ‘perfect’ product, service, piece, website, or event. You just put your work into the world.

Free, like: you aren’t obsessed with making people like you (because their disliking you decreases your value as a human, asshole brain whispers), so you’re better suited to take a stand, to become less vanilla, and to express yourself as you truly are to those around you.

Free, like: you stop holding yourself to an unreachable ‘I’ll be myself when…’ standard that’s always six months or $10,000 away, so you can connect with the clients who are already on the calendar in a deeper way.

Tying your work and worth into a big hairball is the opposite of free.

When you close the door on your soul and tuck it into a tiny, tiny closet reminiscent of Trunchbull’s Chokey in Roald Dahl’s Matilda, you lock your voice up along with it.

You dim your opinions and feelings because you need the most people possible to approve of you.

You loosen your boundaries toward people who suck because you need them to like you, even if they text you absurd demands for sushi delivery at 3 a.m..

Then you spend more and more time scrolling or shopping to dull the pain of shutting yourself down.

When you untangle your work (its own entity! Books! Papers! Emails! Art! Coaching! Whatever it is!) from your worth (soul! Spirit! Ineffable magic in all kinds of forms, not the least of which may be dressing like a 4-year-old at inopportune moments!), you’re fucking FREE.

No one has to like you for you to feel okay with being alive.

No comment is forever.

No potential client’s decision to hire someone else will stir up all sorts of shame and not-enoughness within.

The kind of freedom you seek only comes when you’ve committed to connecting with and sharing your real/true/authentic/raw and probably uncomfortable voice with the world.

Right, but how the fuck do we do that, Kristen?

Glad you asked.

There are four qualities you can actively cultivate within yourself that pretty much guarantee your voice grows more resonant within your own soul and with like-minded people. Ready?

The voices who resonate most deeply within the soul are wild, kind, brave, and clear.

Wild, as in untamed. Willing to challenge the status quo and step outside societal norms when necessary.

Kind, not merely ‘nice.’ Willing to establish boundaries, tell the truth, and bear the consequences without being cruel in any given situation.

Brave, as in vulnerable. Willing to express the fullness of an experience in any given moment, even if it may not turn out well. Willing to move toward the expression of emotion and intensity, rather than away from it.

Clear, as in articulate. Not muddy and vague. Lacking doublespeak or cloudy ideals. Not harkening back to an imagined past that never existed. Concise. Clarity has done the hard work of sorting through murk and yuck to state the simple-but-not-easy truth in any circumstance.

When you connect with the parts of yourself that are wild, kind, brave, and clear, you naturally end up with a wilder, kinder, braver, and clearer (i.e. far more powerful) voice.

Those elements of your voice draw people to you online and off, for business and for pleasure, in ways you can’t even imagine when your soul is in The Chokey.

Let’s unlock it, okay?

I want to hear you speak with every bit of the authority and lack of shame that our politicians employ on a daily basis. (The morally bankrupt get a say, so you sure as hell get one, too.)

I want to hear you share your work — as well as the good and the right, the miraculous and the possible — without the fear of perfectionism or someone not liking you that currently keeps you bound up with silence.

I want you to reject the endless societal constraints placed upon you — be thinner, be quieter, be nicer, oh honey just ignore him he’s drunk — in order to become a freer, wilder, more intuitive human.

I want you to remember the deepest, truest self you’ve been tamping down, ignoring, hiding, or refusing to feed any carbs for years now.

I want to help you find a more expansive, brighter life within this one you’re already living — and then share that brightness with everyone you meet.

Ultimately, I want you to use your voice.

Today, and tomorrow, and for all the days to come.

The Voice workshop is for finding, unleashing, and using the voice of your truest self, starting in a human-to-human, real life space without online comments or haters of any kind.

We have far more power, wisdom, and creativity than we give ourselves credit for.

It’s time to let it out.

The next four podcast episodes are tiiiiiny travels into the places where you typically tamp your voice down and pretend everything is ‘fine.’ We’ll enter into each one together, undo the ‘fine’ parts, and go searching for ‘free’ instead.

In the meantime, let’s find the places where you tangle your work and your worth on the regular:

What have I made someone’s not hiring me say about my value as a human?

Where have I taken critique of my work as critique of my soul?

Where have I given in to asshole brain’s assessment of my total value being related to my brand/web presence/availability/font choices?

Am I predisposed to give the naysayers too much real estate in my brain? Which ‘comments’ or critiques do I still carry around?

Have I let any comments or critiques transform into new rules for being — to the detriment of my voice in the world?

Do I trust that I can be seen and loved as I truly am, even in business?

Where do I hide behind my ‘professional’ voice in order to avoid being seen, heard, or judged?

Journaling on the answer to any one of those questions will show you the places where you’re currently trapped in the work-is-worth paradigm — and will also show you where you can get FREE. Starting right now.

P.S. Part One in the Voice series is here.

The post What do work and worth have to do with your VOICE? appeared first on ⚡️Kristen Kalp.

Three $0 ways to make more money in 2019.

As you continue to be hit with the ‘New Year, New You’ vibes that encourage everything from starting a Keto Diet to taking endless free trainings that end in pitches for multi-thousand dollar programs, I wanted to give you a few ways to make more money that cost nothing more than your time.

$0 way to make more money #1: Separate your work from your worth in the world.

The value of your work is dependent upon many factors; some economic, some artistic, and some woven into the fabric of society itself. That’s why tying your work — specifically, the number of dollars it brings in — to the sum total of your worth is bound to disappoint you.

If you’ve ever said, “I’m gonna charge what I’m worth” or “they’re not willing to pay what I’m worth,” stop EVERYTHING and listen in. That’s dangerous talk, and we can untie your work from your worth in this brand new podcast episode.

$0 way to make more money #2: Clear energy and plan for the year ahead.

Clearing the energy of the past year while making simple, straightforward tweaks to your calendar can help 2019 be a touch less frustrating than 2018. If some part of you wants to usher in a clean slate for the year, particularly in business, this podcast episode will help.

Also! You’re not behind or wrong or dumb or hopeless if you don’t have a 2019 plan. It’s January freaking EIGHTH, you’re a living breathing amazing human who doesn’t have to waste one more second on perfectionism of any kind.

$0 way to make more money #3: Pay me, dammit!

If you’re afraid of making more money because you think you’ll somehow change — like making six or seven figures means you become a racist, sexist, no good, very bad asshole of DOOM (been there, thought that) —

Or you don’t think you deserve to get paid fairly for your work.

Or you don’t trust yourself to make more money.

STOP EVERYTHING AND LISTEN TO THIS PODCAST EPISODE.

Pay Me, Dammit! is a free class about money, but it’s really about all the ways money is a stand-in for the ways you’re holding yourself back. We tackle ‘em, together, and then I throw down scripts and techniques that just plain make you dollars.

Lemme know what happens when you listen to any/all of these, please! I’d love to hear about it, and I’m always here to answer your questions.

Hugs,

K

P.S. If you wanna make more money with my 1-on-1 help in 2019, check out KK on Tap for a full year of biz coaching.

The post Three $0 ways to make more money in 2019. appeared first on ⚡️Kristen Kalp.

Your work does not equal your worth.

This is episode #180 of the That’s What She Said podcast!  Listen in or read along below.

If you hang around the interwebs long enough, you’ll find shit-tons of pricing advice for business owners, creative humans, and artists of all kinds. Mostly, this advice amounts to ‘charging what you’re worth.’

It seems empowering and amazing, since it usually means ‘charge more and actually make a profit at this business venture.’  But it’s actually disempowering.

There’s an innate danger to saying, “I’m gonna charge what I’m worth.”

That statement unequivocally equates your work with the sum total of your worth as a human.

Let’s say you’re a skilled clock maker living in 1823. You’re the sole clock maker in your town. Those in your village rely on you to keep the village activities synchronized to some degree. Your craftsmanship is unparalleled and gorgeous. You make a decent living from your skills, which allow you to provide an education for your children and a small bit of savings for your family. (You’re in Switzerland, so your practical-yet-artistic skills directly translate to an increased chocolate supply.)

Cut to 2018. A skilled clock maker is no longer necessary to keep the town operating on time. You, modern clock maker, may be even more skilled than that 1823 person. You may have trained longer and be devoted to more challenging projects.

More gears. More moving parts. More time dedicated to the tiniest of details.

Your work can be more beautiful than ever; you can even be the most talented clock maker in the world! And yet. You may or may not make a living from your work in the modern age.

Of course, you say. This is obvious, Kristen. The value of some work changes over time.

That was so easy to see, right?

Cut to the modern day. You picked up a camera and haven’t reeeeeeally put it down since. You decided to start charging for your photographic work a few years ago, and you’re steadily raising your already-profitable prices as you get busier and take care of more clients. You’re making a decent living from your work. It’s not an empire, but your career is going somewhere you find both fulfilling and challenging.

And then.

Your partner’s work moves you to a new nation. You don’t speak the language and you’re unaware of how the photographic market works in Morocco. Your business shrivels up because you’re unable to communicate with your clients, and those you do manage to find are exceptionally demanding due to cultural differences and unspoken expectations.

Is your work suddenly worth less, here?

Are your talents any less sharp in this new nation?

Should you give up on your artistic aspirations and take up a different job because you’re making less money?

Or. Do circumstances and locales dictate the value of your work.

Of course, you say. This is obvious, Kristen.

The value of your work is dependent upon many factors; some economic, some artistic, and some woven into the fabric of society itself.

YES EXACTLY. That’s why tying your work — specifically, the number of dollars it brings in — to the sum total of your worth is bound to disappoint you.

Whether you’re living in 1823 or Morocco or just 2018: your work is not your worth.

The value of your work can swing wildly from valuable to moderately valuable to a mere commodity over the course of a generation, or with the invention of a new device. Tying your value as a human to the value of your work is setting yourself up for disaster. (See: cannabis farmers whose product has dropped in value by more than 65% since 2015.)

To put it another way: your work does not equal your worth.

For starters, your work pays dividends that are not monetary in nature. Does it bring you a sense of meaning, fulfillment, joy, anticipation, delight, or value in living? Those things aren’t measurable in dollars. You will never happen upon a bevy of Joy Tickets and Delight Nuggets that directly translate to muggle currency. (Related: M-School is a 7-part podcast series to help you bring your magical self to business.)

Further! Working doesn’t make you more worthy.

You’re worthy of being on this planet, whether you make a shit-ton of things or not. Whether you own a business or not. Whether you sell 100% of your next product out in 3 minutes or not.

We see that equating worth with work is absurd when we’re talking about puppies — no, I will NOT force a bevy of baby labradoodles to scout out dog #lifehacks and share them on Snapchat — and we can even spot the equation for 19th-century clock makers. It’s harder to spot the absurdity when it concerns our own lives; equating work with worth is the water in which we swim.

Capitalism pushes us to think we’re more worthy of taking up space as we (get thinner and) produce more stuff: more babies, more art, more work, more food, more cleanliness, more money by any means necessary. Unless you’re driving the economy through the exchange of currency, you’re worthless to capitalism.

Further, and OF COURSE: the hardest work you do is unlikely to be paid work. Whether that’s raising children, caring for a sick sibling or spouse, recovering from mental or physical illnesses, raising the average level of Woke-ness in those around you, or becoming a fuller, deeper, and more enlightened human being — the dollars don’t come rushing in on the heels of those endeavors.

Let’s interrupt the work and worth equivalency.

Let’s talk about charging a fair price for our labor.

Let’s talk about getting as much compensation for your work as possible, whether that involves currency or not.

And let’s separate our WORK from our WORTH once and for all.

A few questions to help you spot this slippery cultural thread in action:

Where do I treat ‘me’ and ‘my business’ as one and the same? (Your business is not you. It is a separate entity.)

What would it mean to charge a fair, living wage for the work I choose to monetize?

Am I trying to monetize my joy in any way — and is that necessary? (Read: it’s okay to make things that aren’t for sale.)

Do I measure the success or failure of any given project by how much money it made?

Do I measure the success or failure of any given year by how much money I’ve earned?

Do I deem my work a ‘failure’ when it doesn’t make money, and is this fair to the work I do? (Hint: it’s probably not.)

What other forms of compensation does my work provide? (Feeling good in your soul absolutely counts as compensation.)

Is there any work I’m no longer interested in making money from doing?

Is there any work that has run its course and can be pruned from my business?

These questions reveal spots where you might be giving money faaaaaar more say over your life and your value to the world than it strictly deserves.

Much of the power you have to change this way of being is in noticing where you’ve given money and/or productivity your power, and then taking it back.

What if you enjoy the work you make, regardless of how much it earns?

What if you stop trying to monetize every aspect of your joy?

What if you give more time and energy to projects that feed your soul, and give a touch less attention to those that are only profitable?

What if you count the days in which you don’t make a single thing — just enjoy being alive — as your most productive?

Because shaping and exploring the contours of the interior continent is some of the most beneficial and rewarding work any human can do.

P.S.  Want to answer all those Work and Worth questions in a nifty workbook?  Click here and I’ll send it to you pronto.

The post Your work does not equal your worth. appeared first on ⚡️Kristen Kalp.

Have you ever noticed…

… that the truly talented people you know hesitate to share their work, while the trolls who spew hate speech on the interwebs don’t experience any hesitation whatsoever about tweeting and commenting and leaving a trail of 1-star Yelp reviews in their wake?

Let’s change that.

I want to hear you speak with every bit of the authority and lack of shame that our politicians employ on a daily basis. (The morally bankrupt get a say, so you sure as hell get one, too!)

I want to hear you share your work — as well as the good and the right, the miraculous and the possible — without the fear of perfectionism or someone not liking you that currently keeps you bound up with silence.

I want you to reject the endless societal constraints placed upon you — be thinner, be quieter, be nicer, oh honey just ignore him he’s drunk — in order to become a freer, wilder, more intuitive human.

I want you to remember the deepest, truest self you’ve been tamping down, ignoring, hiding, or refusing to feed any carbs for years now.

I want to help you find a more expansive, brighter life within this one you’re already living — and then share that brightness with everyone you meet.

Ultimately, I want you to use your voice.

Today, and tomorrow, and for all the days to come.

The Voice workshop is for finding, unleashing, and using the voice of your truest self, starting in a human-to-human, real life space without online comments or haters of any kind.

We have far more power, wisdom, and creativity than we give ourselves credit for.

It’s time to let it out.

Details for this live 2-day workshop soon, shoot me an email — k@kristenkalp.com or fill out this form — and I’ll send you allll the things FIRST.

The post Have you ever noticed… appeared first on ⚡️Kristen Kalp.

How to clear energy and plan for the year ahead.

Psst! This is episode 179 of That’s What She Said. You can listen in or keep reading to enjoy it!

I was at Trader Joe’s last week and my cashier looked STRESSED OUT. I said, “It’s busy, huh? Are people crazy today?” She glanced from side to side and then looked me up and down, as if making sure I wasn’t a Secret Shopper, before saying: “One lady yelled at me because she wanted a 15-pound turkey and hers was 14.9. I only have so much control over turkeys, lady.”

Over the past few weeks, I’ve also found myself asking questions to my KK on Tap peeps like, ‘When is your cut-off deadline?’ ‘When are you done working?’ ‘Are you slowing down in December?’

…and then realized that I couldn’t keep asking these questions without coming up with better answers myself. In an effort to slow down and avoid becoming the screaming turkey lady at Trader Joe’s, the podcast is on hiatus from now through January.

Here’s how I’m clearing the energy of the past year and planning for the one ahead.

I know, I know, the shiny AF super-planners that promise you’ll be organized, fit, meditating, and rich in 30 days or less have been for sale since October, and you’re still in the thick of things and don’t have time to reflect on anything except what to buy before you see your friend’s sister-in-law’s daughter, Stephanie, who you bought a gift for that one time and now you have to do it every year.  (I suggest a Bob Ross Chia Pet.  Every year.  Done and done.)

We don’t do shame around here. There’s no rush on listening to or implementing any of this material. It applies any time of year, and it’s here for when you need it. Okay? Okay.

1. First: acknowledge everything.

This is stolen from Katherine North at Declare Dominion, and it’s just two brilliant questions that help you process a bunch of months all at once!

What are you proud of having accomplished this year? List 5 things.

Further, what did you come through? List your top 5.

We so often list our achievements as if they exist independently of what we’ve encountered, engaged with, conquered, finished, fixed, said goodbye to, or tried in any given year. But they don’t.

Asshole brain will always say you haven’t done enough and will make you think you haven’t survived much either, but those assumptions don’t hold up to even a tiny bit of inquiry.

When we acknowledge our Tiny, Annoying Progress as well as what we’ve straight-up survived, we honor the places where we’ve spent our energies wisely, and those places and circumstances that took our energies, too.

This year, I’ve survived losing beloved doggo Hermione D. Granger, adopting tiny pupper Aaron Neville Longbottom, having said 10-week-old puppy in the ICU for multiple days, sleeping 16 hours at a time for months on end because my thyroid took a hiatus from functioning, and improvising my way through paying SO MANY thousands of dollars in unexpected veterinary and medical bills.

…not to mention all the dollars I give to HBO, Amazon, and the people who make the most important things: pizza socks, unicorn bodysuits, and remote-activated bubble machines. Well, Bear bought me the last one for our kitchen, but you get the idea.

When we acknowledge the quite specific and often brutal working conditions we’ve survived, everything we’ve done this year seems AMAZING.

Plus, we’re all surviving the global rise of populism! 30% of the world’s population lives in a backsliding democracy! The 24-hour news cycle brings gloom, doom, and disasters on a daily basis!

We all get an extra 20 Achievement Points just for surviving 2018.

2. Get out your calendar.

Paper or digital, it’s fine. I can’t do a paper calendar because the feeling of being unable to cross an item off my to-do list is devastating, while dragging an incomplete task from one day to another on my Google calendar feels just fine. Thus, I use a digital calendar. You may be the opposite, or use both kinds, and I have no judgement about what’s better or worse except that having a calendar and a plan generally beats not having any sort of calendar or plan. (Related: here’s everything I know about time management.)

3. Add space and pleasure to your calendar first.

As you look at the next six months, play with letting space and pleasure take up blocks of time before anything else gets layered into your schedule. This is the total and complete opposite of what most people on earth do, which is why this single action is both powerful and rebellious. Instead of filling your calendar with to-do’s, work tasks, projects, and ideas, then squeezing fun into those 2 cold-ass days in February that remain, you can choose to prioritize time for pleasure in the coming year.

Pencil in vacations, birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, and/or days off before you add anything else to your calendar.

Reserve time in the form of crossed-off work days even if you don’t know where you’re going on that vacation next September. Making room is enough. Also: you don’t have to go on vacation to have time off! You can choose to stay home for a few days in March, or two weeks in April, or for a long weekend in May. Since you own the business, YOU make the calendar, and YOU can take as much time as you need to remain a fully functional human.

You don’t have to ‘earn’ time off. You deserve a weekend and a slower season whether you’ve crushed, nailed, cruised through, or just barely survived this year.

The world will not cease to rotate on its axis if you’re having a good time and you don’t work on Tuesdays. Promise.

I go one step further on the pleasure route and make a Depression Calendar, which is my personal antidote to those cold winter days when I’d rather do anything but leave the house. Scouring your town for events, films, festivals, gatherings, parades, and parties costs you only a few minutes and some nominal ticket fees.  Maybe plan to do something truly unique after visiting Atlas Obscura and (searching your hometown)?

In return for this small investment of time, you’ll actually leave the house when it gets dark at 4:21 p.m. instead of sinking into the abyss of Netflix and delivery pizza for the duration of your Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Good planning can be the difference between looking out over a bleak emotional landscape and seeing a ton of things to look forward to on your winter calendar.

For me, it’s the difference between having a so-so winter and an absolutely devastating one. (If I manage to get a spectacular winter under my belt, you’ll be the first to know, and I’ll share every damn thing I’ve done in order to make that happen.)

4. Embrace the ways you actually use time.

Are you an achiever’s achiever? If yes:

You naturally fill every single moment with work if they don’t schedule offline time, down time, free time, and unstructured time.  If you’re naturally attuned to being productive at all times of the day and night, schedule your days off before you plan your work days. Place some days, like Tuesday evenings or Saturdays, entirely off limits from work-related tasks. Finally, create clear start and end times for your work on any given day.

The boundaries around your time are to keep work from spilling into every aspect of your life and taking over your every relationship, including the one you have with yourself. Don’t let ‘busy’ crowd out your interior life.

Do you hate structure and discipline more than nearly anything else on earth? If yes:

You naturally fight structure. You feel imprisoned by the discipline of knowing what we’re going to do on any given day, so we keep vague to-do lists which never come to fruition. It’s taken years for me to realize that I actually have to schedule writing time, email time, work time, marketing time, administration time, banking time, and coaching time, or they won’t happen. (Also, setting internal goals is helpful!)

Schedule your work days with clear start and end times — holding a morning call or meeting can help assure you’ll show up on any given day! — so that you actually work through your to-do list instead of getting distracted by what’s urgent or shiny or both.

As you take a look at your to-do list, break every huge task on your calendar — i.e. ‘make a new website’ or ‘get 12 new clients’ — into much much muuuuch smaller tasks. The bigger the project, the more likely you are to have tons of tasks within it.

That initial breakdown of a huge project into small tasks can be a bit stressful, but choosing to get every item onto the calendar means you’re much more likely to finish the project, publish the website, launch the project, and/or sell the event. I’ll guarantee your asshole brain calls you a ‘flake’ when all you really need is a clear calendar and specific to-do lists for any given month.

The boundaries around your time are to make sure each work item or task is a.) on the calendar and b.) actually gets done. This keeps your truest work from getting pushed to an elusive ‘someday’ that never comes. It also keeps you from wallowing in the swamp of ‘OH GOD I DUNNO WHAT TO DO NEXT’ that can cost you weeks or months or years.

When you translate Enormous-with-a-capital-E tasks into smaller ones and add ’em to your calendar, you have a realistic grasp on how long any given project will take. This causes less stress about timelines, due dates, and deadlines. Translated: you can’t write a book in two weeks while selling your screenplay and raising your babies and cooking all the meals and working out for three hours a day and fighting a chronic illness, okay? Breaking your tasks down and scheduling them allows for realistic time expectations all around.

5. De-prioritize shit that doesn’t matter, isn’t working, or sucks your energy.

Identifying energy sucks can be just as vital to your calendar as getting all the planning, organizing, and ‘to-do’ing exactly right.

If you spent eight months working on a project and it didn’t appear on your achievements list from earlier, can you find a way to ditch it, stop promoting it, or vote it off your business island for a while? Is any one product or client consuming a disproportionate amount of your attention or energy, with little reward?

Cutting the chaff often makes way for more amazingness, more wonder, and more progress on your most important tasks. (Related: that time I lost 6,644 subscribers in a single day.)

I cover this in waaaay more detail in Konmari (that doesn’t suck) for business.

6. Plan to communicate with your peeps. Regularly.

You have peeps. Don’t fight me on this, you do! Even if we’re talking about your mom and that one friend who tells you to write more often, or 3 former clients, or 41 people who signed up for your email list years ago.

You. Have. Peeps.

Talking with your peeps inevitably leads to a healthier, more stable business. You don’t have to have a content calendar or editorial calendar or Pinterest-optimized images or all three in order to talk with your peeps in a casual way about what you’re working on and what’s for sale.

You do have to communicate with them regularly via a channel you control if you want to avoid finance-related stress, though!

Whether you choose to use email, snail mail, or live meetups to talk with your peeps, How to F&*&ing Communicate will help you introduce you to quick, clear, and doable methods for connecting with your fans, followers, and clients. No stringent, stressful guidelines across 83 platforms. Just simple, not-freakishly-difficult ways to talk to people regularly.

Learn more about How to F*%&ing Communicate here, or download the gift guide to see the other classes for sale!

7. Ask what wants to be born.

Often, as you make space for reflection and planning, you’ll uncover an inkling that you’d like to make a new thing — or you’ll feel like you finally have time to take action on the inklings that have been circling your brain like patient-but-annoying hummingbirds since August.

I’ve got a workshop that wants to be born, and there’s also a bigger, deeper project that wants to take shape this winter. (It’s par for the course for this to be terrifying! Of course it is. And we do it anyway.)

Establishing a series of deadlines and check-ins for yourself can help ensure that whatever your truest work is, you’re going to get it done.

Even if it’s slow going.

Even if you don’t know how it will make money.

Even if you’re sure it will fail and you’re hesitant to start.

Acknowledge and then make what’s dying to be born, okay? Do the work only you can do.

If you’re a business owner, you’ll absolutely love M-School! This podcast series helps bring your magic to the world, and you can listen to every single episode starting here. It’s free, it’s smart, and it helps you acknowledge your true nature while also selling the shit out of your work.

Finally! If you need my help bringing a project to life, revamping your business, or holding you accountable for making changes big or small, check out KK on Tap! I’d love to work with you for a whole year!

You can put down a $100 deposit and we’ll start out work together in January.

Until 2019 —

 

 

 

P.S. If you’d like to explore any part of planning your marketing year further, check out episode 88 of That’s What She Said: how to plan your next six months.

If you’ve got an idea for the coming months’ podcasts or blog posts, talk to me!  Just shoot me a message below.

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The post How to clear energy and plan for the year ahead. appeared first on ⚡️Kristen Kalp.

Beth Pickens knows Your Art Will Save Your Life.

Books that change us are rare, and those of us who adore books read and read and read and read and READ to find those lucky, magic tomes.

Beth Pickens wrote a lucky, magic tome, and it’s called Your Art Will Save Your Life.

Beth describes her background working in the arts, nonprofits, administration, and counseling — and how that combination resulted in the very specific art consulting work she now does.  Check out her workshops, her book, and her pamphlets (Making Art During Fascism!  On Artists and Hopelessness!), then listen in to our conversation below.

“You will make work that has an enormous impact on someone. You may never meet or hear from them, but someone will encounter a work you make and it will do something transformative for them. They will be grateful you exist, thankful you made the work and let it be out in the world. In order to get there, to let your work reach the people who need and want to experience it, you have to be of service to it. You have to make it, yes, and you also have to support its life after it’s no longer your private experience. This takes enormous generosity.” — Beth Pickens, Your Art Will Save Your Life

Beth Pickens and I talk about:

+ why giving up the things that give you meaning in life miiiiight not be the answer to the current political climate

+ why Beth *doesn’t* consider herself an artist, even though she’s written a book

+ the results of living in a ‘digital climate’

+ the inescapable nature of the news and how that impacts your life

+ how to stay woke but also function and have fun (Is that even allowed?)

+ how to engage politically *and* maintain your creative practice

+ how to be less scared of grant-writing and getting funding for your art

+ asshole brain thoughts every artist shares

+ the importance of starting and building a local, IRL community for every artist ever.

…and a bunch of podcasts, books, and other works that are inspiring her right now.

Named in our interview: Women’s Center for Creative Work, The Explosion Chronicles by Yan Lianke, the Girls Always Happy film by Yang Mingming, Dynasty Handbag’s Weirdo Night, and the You Must Remember This podcast.

Follow Beth on Instagram, then check out her work and pick up a book or pamphlet on her website.  (Author photo credit: Amos Mac.)

P.S.  Want to meet another amazing author?  Alexandra Franzen is the best.

The post Beth Pickens knows Your Art Will Save Your Life. appeared first on ⚡️Kristen Kalp.