Category: Mental Health

June 29, 2017
People Live Here
I remember once my mother fussing about the house in anticipation of company arriving. Family actually. Dusting high and low, mopping the floor, unwittingly making a striking cocktail of mustard gas, all in the name of clean. In the name of perfection.
My father, in a moment of sanity hollered back at her from a distant room. “You know dear, this is not the cover of a magazine. People do live here. And the people who are coming know that people live here.”
I am passing this word to you.
Your life is not an Instagram post
You don’t have to pretend you are not alive, that you are not be-ing.
You will leave for work from a dirty house.
You will go months or years without exercising to birth your dream.
You will go months or years without exercising even if you’re not birthing a dream.
You will miss the mark on major projects and events. You will forget to return emails and messages.
You will embarrass yourself, make promises you are not able to keep.
There will be flat tires and computer viruses, spilt coffee on foreign business executives.
People will think you are stupid, lazy, or inept. They will tell you so.
You will sabotage good relationships, betray yourself and sell out on your values so you can eat the next day.
There will be days, months, even years of darkness, confusion, mind-boggling and soul-crushing depression.
But, there will be plenty of good times, good moments, blissfully peaceful moments
If you’re still enough, you can feel the bliss even when things are bad.
Because those moments are not some post. They don’t last.
Forgive yourself for all of it. It’s okay to go on being. Someone is living here.
April 14, 2017
Hustle Harder…No.
As someone who is completely done with the recovery time after quarterly burnouts and spirals if despair, I’m through with the Great American Hustle experiment. Seeing this stupid shit plastered on memes and shiny glass windows of co-working spaces, had me working in the exact opposite direction of my greatest strengths. I would venture to bet that a good number of you are doing the same.
Hustle Harder will have you believing that if you work enough hours, all your wildest dreams are garaunteed to come true. But that’s not panning out for most the people on this planet. Were stressed. Fat from overeating all the junk that makes us feel better when were stressed. Overworked. Undersexed and depressed.
We’re all so worried about leveling up, we’re not even dating properly anymore and it’s getting out of hand. The hustle mentality is propaganda that gets us to produce more than what we’re getting.
Physical exertion and brute force is not gettting us nearly as far now as it got our parents and not even close to what it got our grandparents.
That’s not the space and time we’re living in. It’s why you come home exhausted after you’ve been sitting on your ass all day. You’ve spent the whole day fighting battles in the ether. Playing mind games over email. Reading between the lines over calls. Inferring and assuming things. Promoting your work through pixels on a screen. Telepathic, digital mind games.The only way any of us even know what happened with the day is digital record. If something happens to those digital records, one could question whether you did anything with your time at all. It’s all just … Energy.
If we want to get anywhere we’ll have to learn how to manage our energy. Learn how to manage our thoughts, imagination, efforts, and desires. Entrepreneurship is the practice of self discipline. Self Discipline is now the management of your time and energy.
Remove as much resistance in your day to day as possible. Unfriend/follow idiots and sad people. That momentum is too strong and it will suck you in. Or block out times you can’t access your social apps. Cut your commute. Say no to projects that don’t excite you. Don’t tell lies. You’ll have to manage them and the other party will know anyway. Chart your progress by tasks or projects completed, not by hours spent. Sleep when you’re tired. Put off projects that aren’t going anywhere.
I’m not saying that we should all just get lazy and not work at all. What I am saying  is, harder is not the way. Work excited. Work focused. Cut the rest. It’s not helping.
January 9, 2017
Mondays are Magical Too

Mondays are magical. At least they can be, they’re supposed to be. If your Monday isn’t Magical you’ve gone wrong somewhere. Perhaps you spent the whole weekend worrying or working or preparing for today. So, now you’ve just got today. And today, the whole world, being just as anxious as you are, is coming at you like with speed and indifference. Text messages, emails, notifications dinging and pinging all over the place. It’s all just a mad dash to nowhere.

And you can make it stop.

Make the world move at your pace. You are worthy as it is. You don’t have to work yourself into a frenzy. Monday shouldn’t mean anything. It doesn’t really. The whole thing, starting work or having to work on a Monday, is completely made up. There is still living to be done on a Monday. The world we live in is a fantastically magical place to be.

Drink your coffee a little slower. Really taste the flavors. Is that a hint of cherry in your Ethiopia roast? Turn on your favorite music. Look up, look around and notice how tiny you are in relation to the horizon. Smile and Breathe Slow down to speed up. Open your mind to new possibilities. Sight and sound and taste and smell and touch and…. feels. Ah, the feels. Know that you own your now and you are an incredible human being on a fantastic journey. You are a freakin’ genius and you live in a world that is positively pure imagination.

December 13, 2016
Belief & Imagination

imagination-themoonroseagency-com-ava-st-claire-1Some days you can’t tell if bad surprises are part of being in business or if God is singling you out. I’ve met people from all stages of business growth and success. Learning from them and my own experiences have taught me that the task of leadership is challenging for all of us. But the one thing that has given me perspective has having a growth mindset. Knowing that I am fully capable of learning what I need to learn to become the kind of CEO I would like to become.

The foundation of having a growth mindset is self-awareness and self-understanding. In order to grow, you have to know your own strength and what you’re capable of. We don’t know ourselves intimately so we don’t believe in our capacity to overcome the challenges that come with new information.
Instead, we’ve stitched our identities together with a bubble gum concoction of old news and bad habits.

New information tests our fragile identities so we push back. But there is no imagination without information. And we will never reach our greatest capacity without imagining new things.