A Virtual Micro-class
The Power of a Positive No
This time for women in particular!
Tuesdays, October 3 & 10 at 11 am pacific
I. personal ambiguity
At the start of the pandemic, a client, Steph, asked "How do I learn to spend time by myself?"
Although the planet is full of people cherishing time alone, the reverse is also true.
1. From craving solo time...to...not so much, where are you?
An upside of our new normal, if we acknowledge the tension, is revealing the story beneath the story. It's happening with social justice, me too, climate change and everyday lives. The gap between what's going on, versus what we say is going 0n, has surfaced in clearer outline.
Steph said her goal was to take one deep breathe a week. Whatever keeps you from quality self-connection is more obvious now, if you take note.
So her question was timely. The stress of acceleration pulls us from simply noticing, yet alone connecting, with intentionality to ourselves.
Sometimes the painting is in charge. Sometimes I am.
- Susan Rothenberg, Artist
In micro-managed times, we fetishize ambiguity, while it's home base for creatives. In any inventive path, you recognize going in, you are bound to get lost. Yet, you sign up anyway for the creative confusions, inherent challenges and ultimately, freedom of it all.
My background as a painter implies solo hours in the studio. And guess who shows up when spending time there? Rest assured, given half a chance, the cadence of your specific personal ambiguity will.
There's good news: doubt arrives partnered with possibility, if we are willing to apprentice to our own confusions. The conundrums of achievers have appeal to me. Working with clients, I guide people to align with their specific strengths, befriend their bafflements and direct creative drive.
In coaching I admire the willingness to hold confusion as an opportunity for self-design. While quality time alone can happen in the studio, in nature or your room, it also happens in proximity to others. In coaching teams, we see how private confusions have resonance for others too, in enriching or un-fun ways.
Working with people in business who may or may not identify as creatives, I know how creativity takes many forms - from project management to UX design to stakeholder leadership to musicianship.
The painter Willem DeKooning said, first entering the studio, it's crowded with voices other than your own. After awhile these voices quiet down, until only one or two remain. Then, with time, if you are fortunate, even you leave.
2. What 3 words describe the quality of time by yourself?
II. LEARNING UNASKED
The distinction between learning asked and learning unasked is helpful here. Baking your first cake or learning to drive are examples of the former. You chose to learn and can foresee the outcome. You won't necessarily be changed by the experience.
When my sister passed away too early, I recognized the difference between choosing to learn something and having learning thrust upon you. I called this dynamic "learning unasked”.
Learning unasked is visceral: you are thrown back on yourself like nobody’s business. In the gray zones of uncertainty you wake into the middle of a muddle without GPS.
The pandemic has thrown us into collective/individual states of learning unasked. We didn't choose to be the learners we now find ourselves to be.
Yet, well before the pandemic, learning unasked has been part of human experience.
It throws us a choice: to design into what is opaque or not. To activate creativity in the fullest sense, or not. Two alternate strategies with two alternate outcomes.
3. What has opened up for you during our new normal?
