Archive for Musings
June 16, 2008 at 12:54 pm ·
The World Health Organisation has predicted that by the year 2020, Depression will be the second biggest health problem world wide (the number one being heart disease).
Depression isn’t discerning… it has visited famous writers, artists, composers, performers, sports people, politicians, inventors.
I have registered for the Sydney Blackmore’s Half-Marathon 2008, which is on Sunday 21st September, 2008.
This is a personal goal I set at the beginning of the year before I’d even started running, let alone become addicted as I have in the past few months.I would like my run to “stand for” something and have nominated The Black Dog Institute as my preferred charity.
I’d love your support… and invite you to visit this page to “cheer me on” – every little bit helps! In the last week, when I have been tempted to snuggle back into the doona on these cold and rainy early mornings, just knowing that friends and clients have already sponsored me has made me get up and get running.
Posting my intention on the blog will keep me honest, and encourage me to stick with my training program to achieve this goal! Thanks for your support, and I’m excited about helping to “tame the black dog”.
Filed under Musings/p
January 3, 2008 at 9:42 pm ·
Yesterday morning I woke up feeling a little glum – possibly the post- Christmas sugar withdrawals, or the realisation that another year has gone, and I’d better make this new one “count”. How will I measure that anyway?
Will I let my Ego set my direction for another year, or will this be the year I finally find the courage to follow my heart?
As if hearing my inner call for help, my friend Sandra magically appeared on my doorstep – bearing presents and presence… both at which she is truly gifted. Our conversation led me dancing into the office to unearth a copy of my favourite childhood book, which I was awarded as a prize for spelling in 1972. At the tender age of eight, attending Weilmoringle Public School, I was a master speller – and these were the days where children received books at the annual prizegiving. If you were really smart, you’d go home with an armful!
Reading the book together, I recognised that my life work and purpose was mapped in this beautiful children’s story –it is clear that if there was ever a “recipe” I had been seeking, I’d had it all along… in this beautiful prize.
Seven Roads To Happiness by Desmond Marwood and illustrated by Richard Hook, is about Prince Piccolo, a little boy born into a Kingdom cursed with a 100 years of sadness by a wicked witch! He promised his father that he would discover the secret of Happiness and break the spell. He sets out with his puppy named Petal on a journey of discovery only to find resistance every step of the way. Just as he was about to give up, he met a caterpillar called Claudius. He wasn’t from the Kingdom, so had escaped the spell of sadness. He offered to help Piccolo restore Happiness to the Kingdom if Piccolo would assist him along his own journey to Happiness (a lesson already – the best way to happiness is to help others).
Claudius’ first step was to wake Piccolo very early in the morning, the little Prince’s first experience of the sweet morning air. Their jubilation was noisy, waking the villagers – whose consternation at being woken so early turned quickly to joy as they also enjoyed the morning breeze tickling their noses – hence the First Road – inhale the fresh morning air.
They continued along the road, coming to a sad and despondent gypsy camp. Claudius fashioned a musical instrument from a reed, and started to play. It was contagious, and soon the gypsies were dancing, singing and making music – rekindling the “Happiness Overture” which was to drive away evil spirits. The Second Road – play beautiful music – dance and sing every day.
Satisfied that the gypsies would keep the music playing, the trio continued up into the mountains. They set about making paints from plants mixed with oils from the villagers lamps, and brushes from the goats hair, and painted a huge picture of happiness. The mountainfolk all come out to see what was happening – and were filled with happiness at the sight of the vibrant colours, and started painting their own houses and cleaning up their streets. The Third Road – have a vision & surround yourself with pictures of what makes you happy.
On the other side of the mountain, they arrived in the village of Minestrone, once famous for its fine food prior to the sadness spell. They dusted off the dishes, went to great lengths to find the recipe and ingredients for a big pot of Happiness Soup. You guessed it, after the villagers had all tasted the special soup, Happiness was restored and everyone started cooking and partying again. The Fourth Road – beautiful food shared with family & friends.
Meanwhile, back at the palace, Piccolos’ father, King Merry, was still under the sadness spell, despite hearing all the tales of Happiness spreading through the Kingdom , and tasting the Happiness Soup. Prince Piccolo, Petal and Claudius made haste back to the castle. As soon as he saw his little son again, and gave him a huge embrace, Happiness was restored to the King – Road Number Five – hug the ones you love.
Now the trio were back at the palace, strange things started happening to Claudius. He was given the Royal treatment for his contribution to restoring happiness to the kingdom, but his health declined and soon he was confined to bed, with a Do Not Disturb order from the King’s Physician. By the time Piccolo worked out a way to climb into the window to visit Claudius, the little caterpillar had disappeared. He thoughtfully left a note, advising he had turned into a chrysalis. He asked Piccolo to guard his chrysalis, saying “A wonderful thing will happen very soon and then you will know that I have at last found my own Happiness”. The days seemed long, but one day when everyone was trying to work out how first the caterpillar and then the chrysalis disappeared, a beautiful butterfly appeared – yes, it was the transformed Claudius! The Sixth Road – Be willing to go through the struggle to become your real Self.
Claudius was then appointed the Special Royal Envoy of Happiness for the Kingdom. Before flying off to the four corners of the Kingdom to keep his eye on the Happiness levels, Prince Piccolo asked him why he had said there were seven roads, yet he’d counted them and there were only six? Ahh, The Seventh Road – Each of us must find our OWN Happiness!
May you travel the seven roads in 2008 –
- get up early and breathe in the fresh morning air
- enjoy beautiful music
- clarify your vision and keep the picture of it close
- eat a big helping of Happiness Soup every day in good company
- hug the ones you love
- be your Self
- follow your own bliss!
Remember that happiness is always within you, no matter which road you travel.
Filed under Communication, Values, Musings/p
December 18, 2007 at 9:35 pm ·
As we draw to a close of another calendar year, there are prolific messages for us to reflect and ponder the year that’s passed, and anticipate what we will create in the year to come.
We can beat ourselves up for the card unsent, the presents unbought, the myriad of “stuff” incomplete, or we can simply welcome the chance to pause, take a breath, and know that where we are right now is exactly perfect! So, if you haven’t received my card yet, don’t hold your breath - I didn’t send any. If you haven’t received my “me-mail” about all the exciting things I’ve accomplished this year, don’t blame your internet provider - I didn’t write one!
What you can be certain of is that I am holding each of you in my thoughts as I reflect on all the people who made 2007 memorable and special. There are so many things to celebrate, to acknowledge and to be thankful for.
I trust that 2007 has been all you planned and you are filled with excitement, enthusiasm, inspiration and joy as we prepare to welcome a brand new year.
My wish for you is prosperity - such a rich and delicious word.
What does prosperity mean for you?
May it manifest for you in 2008.
Filed under Communication, Musings/p
July 25, 2007 at 11:40 pm ·
Here we are almost at the end of another month, and my best intentions to blog have gone out the window. Last night I attended an event convened by AmCham Women In Management, hearing three inspirational women speak about Entrepreneurship. A key tip (amongst many) was delegate, delegate, delegate!
So, demonstrating my rapid learning and ability to instantly implement lessons, I have asked a talented friend to “guest write” something for you. He has often told me about his “reverse pumpkin theory”, so it’s a pleasure to share it with you:
Reverse Pumpkin Theory - David Smith, (Author, Musician, IT guru and creative genius)
We all have friends who live in the country. People who have eschewed the lure of the bright lights and the traffic jams and the freshly ground Brazilian coffee lovingly steamed by Manuel, the only barista who really understands us. Or was that Columbian? Whoever… Anyway, we all have friends who live in the country. It’s a rule.
And, sure enough, the same as we denizens of the metropolii occasionally decide that what we really, really need right now is some country air, and head west over the mountains to the great beyond, so our country friends decide that what they really, really need right now is a dose of carbon monoxide poisoning, a high stress ride through the streets of an unfamiliar city with one hand on the street directory and the other, white-knuckled on the wheel, and a personal introduction to Manuel, the only barista who really understands them.
So they arrive, dusty, tired, stressed. It’s usually a Saturday, mid-afternoon. You usher them in, show them the shower, pop a nice bottle of something in the freezer, and half an hour or so later, they emerge, human… almost normal. Small talk is exchanged, the good old days dissected and then one of them gets a gleam in their eye and says “We’ve brought you something from home. Gerald (Norman, Barry etc) will get it from the car.”
And so it begins… A battered cardboard box arrives. Inside is a scattering of potatoes with clumps of red dirt still attached, perhaps also an obscure vegetable that you’re not quite sure of, like a turnip or a parsnip, and always, always, a pumpkin.
It’s not a small one either – this is a real mother of a pumpkin, staring up at you out of the box in a round and vaguely malevolent way. It’s a nice pumpkin, and no doubt it tastes exquisite. Well, great. Well, nice. Well, OK. Well actually I don’t really like pumpkin all that much, truth be told. The saving grace of a pumpkin is however, that you are under absolutely no obligation to do anything with it right away. Your friends will be gone soon, and it can sit there in the corner, staring at you in a round and vaguely malevolent way while you ponder the meaning of its life. Eventually it rots and you throw it away – around about the time when you ring your friends up and tell them it was absolutely delicious as soup.
Next time, a year or so on, there’s another visit, and another pumpkin, because we all have friends who live in the country, and they always bring pumpkins when they come to town.
This, dear reader, is Pumpkin Theory. You know it. I know it. So, when it’s my turn to go and reacquaint myself with the quaint country charm of wherever it is they’re living – the termite ridden fence posts, Ethel the goat who, despite all evidence to the contrary, is still alive, and the dry, dry ground, well I like to indulge in what we’ll call Reverse Pumpkin Theory.
It’s the nobless oblige of city / country relations – the rich man / poor man saga writ large in the dusty window of the Holden station wagon parked for several years now, in big shed. Reverse Pumpkin Theory involves bearing gifts to our poor country cousins – not a pumpkin of course, because that would just be Pumpkin Theory in reverse, which is a different thing entirely, but instead the very crème de la crème of epicurean delights.
David Jones is a good place to start, assuming there’s a Food Hall, natch. Perhaps some gently spiced goat’s cheese (the like of which Ethel could never hope to produce), a new variant on the scale of dried / sun-dried / semi-dried tomatoes in triple virgin olive oil perhaps (you can never have too many virgins associated with your food), the finest Belgian dark chocolate with 85% cocoa butter from Columbia, or is it Brazil? Perhaps a special salad dressing from a famous local restaurant – a steal at only $25 for 375 ml. Is that French truffle oil or a local Tasmanian version? That sort of thing.
It’s not hard to fill up a basket with such wonders – and it’s fun. You get to buy things that perhaps you’d otherwise be too afraid to tangle with on your own, and watch to see if they’re actually edible.
You arrive, your basket piled high – and they’re very glad to see you. It’s Saturday, mid-afternoon. You’re stressed from the constant bumping of fifty or so kilometres of corrugated goat track. They show you the shower, although asking if perhaps you could not spend more than a minute in it due to the drought, and they slip a fine bottle of something into the freezer.
You emerge half an hour later, human. Almost normal. The basket is presented. You explain Reverse Pumpkin Theory – as a thank you for all those lovely pumpkins they’ve bought down over the years, you’ve bought some real food for them to eat. It never occurs to either your friends or yourself that you’ve brought it merely so that you can ensure that you yourself will eat well whilst staying with them.
The cellophane wrapping is removed and the contents lovingly spread on the kitchen table whilst you sip a brisk young New Zealand sauvignon blanc not of your providing that’s not only many cuts above the Ben Ean Moselle you were expecting, but gets you wondering how, living in such a crusty old backwater, they managed to get hold of it.
One of your friends picks up a jar of hand picked Peruvian high altitude special large capers in rice vinegar and says, “You know, these are absolutely my favourite capers. They’re just a touch saltier than the standard ones you get at Woollies – and it’s more a sea salt than a rock salt flavour, while putting them in rice vinegar gives them a subtle sweetness that I’ve not tasted in inferior brands. I get them all the time from the new deli in town.”
“Oh… and I love these too,” she says, moving onto the next impossible-to-procure-in-the-country item that you’ve spent the best part of last Saturday tracking down in an obscure Portugese deli in Newtown that a friend told you about only if you promised not to let the secret out to the hoi polloi… “and these are just darling….”
Damn the global marketplace…
Filed under Different Thinking, Musings/p
June 10, 2007 at 7:49 pm ·
This month, I’ve really noticed the challenge of how easy it is to talk about embracing change, yet how difficult it can actually be to really do it! I have had my laptop for almost 5 years – it’s my primary business tool, and some of the letters on the keypad have worn off with constant use. The battery has seen better days, and it began to just shut down at inconvenient times, causing me to lose my work. I went and bought a lovely new replacement model. Updated software, much faster, better, newer, more efficient. I brought it home and put it next to my “old” one.
What do you think I did next? Yes, I started it, did all the configuration steps, began to transfer files, and then as I tried to use it, realised how uncomfortable it felt. The keys were stiff, the screen looked alien, the windows operating system is different. I had to learn a new navigation system, and it wasn’t fun! Even though my old one was unreliable and dodgy at best, I kept going back to use it, because it “felt part of me”. I was willing to lose work / take longer to complete things just because it felt familiar.
I know the new one is better. I know it is more stable, will deliver faster and smarter results. Yet, I need a transition time… a time where I can “say goodbye” to my old habits and familiar ways of doing things, and make a gradual change to the new one. So too with organisational change. Just because we know we need to move to new and better ways of doing things doesn’t mean we can do it easily.
I turned to the wise advice of William Bridges, author of “Managing Transitions – Making the most of change”, who suggests it’s not the change we’re afraid of, it’s the transition. He offers that transition consists of three phases: Ending, Losing, Letting Go / The neutral zone / The new Beginning. Changes of any sort, even though they’re better for us, finally succeed or fail on the basis of whether the people affected do things differently. How do we let go of how we’ve always done things, go through that tough time between the old and the new, and come out doing things the new way?
Filed under Different Thinking, Musings/p
April 13, 2007 at 6:50 pm ·
Our Easter break was shared with family – including five children under ten yrs old. Needless to say, the Easter bunny
was rather busy in our house. We are still sweeping up sand, picking up little bits of foil from easter eggs, and finding little chocolate handprints on most clear surfaces!
This morning, as I poised with Windex and cloth in hand, ready to “clean up” and put things “back into order” I felt the prick of tears and a lump in my throat. Yesterday, my own little girl celebrated her 22nd birthday and it really doesn’t feel like such a long time since I was wiping her sticky fingerprints off the glass, hurrying her up to get ready for school, rushing her through her homework, and longing for her to grow up and be independent so I could get on with whatever was important at the time (which you can be sure wasn’t related to cleaning clear surfaces). It prompted me to search for the famous little poem that most parents receive with a handprint from their kids in Year Two.
“Sometimes you get discouraged
Because I am so small
And always leave my fingerprints
On furniture and walls
But every day I’m growing
I’ll be grown up some day
And all those tiny handprints
Will surely fade away
So here’s a little handprint
Just so you can recall
Exactly how my fingers looked
When I was very small.”
I learned a lot during this last few days from five very young teachers. Sally taught me to examine everything up really close – especially your sticky hands. She also taught me to laugh outrageously at nothing really obvious, and to roll in the sand. Angus demonstrated the importance of being an adventurer, of pursuing your passion with energy and not to be discouraged by the odd bump on the head or falling flat on your face in the water. Timmy encouraged me to be creative with food – that things that at first glance don’t appear to go together can be quite delicious! Lily reminded me to just pick up the pencils and draw without being anxious if you have the right colours, or have put the lines in the wrong place. Lara showed me the benefits of flexibility and adaptability – that if you are open and willing, everyone can be a great playmate. If you have diverse interests you’ll always have a friend to share the fun with.
It’s Friday afternoon – I’m off now to roll in the sand while there’s still some light.
Filed under Values, Musings/p
March 15, 2007 at 8:42 am ·
Last week I had the pleasure of working with a group of leaders in a country town – a vibrant community in Australia’s glorious Hunter Valley whose livelihood depends mostly on the mining, wine and tourism industries. Each person in the workshop is actively involved in community service, their energy, optimism and commitment to service is inspirational.
We were discussing the attitudes of “locals” to “blow-ins” (i.e. people who reside in the town who were actually born there, as were their parents and grandparents before them) versus those who had come from outside – the “transients”. Despite having settled there, building homes, having children and sending them to the local schools (some of these people have been in the community for more than twenty years) they are still just “blow-ins”. Interestingly enough, these very same people were the majority on the boards of the local service organisations, the ones who give generously of their time and expertise to ensure that there is a prosperous future for their children (and all the children in the town). One of my participants shared the story of having a “local who was born there” explain to him very seriously that he couldn’t consider himself a “real local” unless he was here for the 1955 flood!
As I drove the few hundred kilometres home, I couldn’t help but reflect on how these ingrained attitudes, whilst appearing to be said lightheartedly, perhaps even delivered with the good old friendly Aussie back-slap, continue to separate and divide. In our organisations, how often do we diminish and ignore fresh ideas when they come from “newbies”? In our lives, how often do we reject “new wisdom” because “you just don’t know what it’s really like – you haven’t been here long enough!”
In a workshop the following day (same company) a talented young man dismissed his opinion by saying, “… but I’m just a trainee”. I challenged the use of the word just… after all, what better place to view an organisation from than that of an enthusiastic new “trainee” - keen to learn everything about his new role, thrilled to have been considered for a position straight out of school, and filled with a passion for possibility that hasn’t yet felt the sting of rejection often enough to stop putting forth his ideas. Then, it gave me an excuse to refer to the delicious Johnny Depp in “Finding Neverland” - the scene where he dances with his dog, Porthos, explaining that he is a dancing bear in the circus. Little Peter dismisses the act by saying,
“That’s absurd. He’s just a dog”… and in his most gorgeous accent, Johnny Depp stops horrified….”just a dog? Porthos dreams of being a bear, and you want to shatter those dreams by saying he’s “just” a dog? What a horrible candle-snuffing word. That’s like saying, “He can’t climb that mountain, he’s just a man”, or “That’s not a diamond, it’s just a rock.”
Just.
Filed under Different Thinking, Musings/p
March 8, 2007 at 7:41 pm ·
After eagerly anticipating my site “going live” and the chance to blog regularly, I find that ever since the wonderful Leah Maclean showed me the way and set me free to write to my heart’s content, I have had a brain-freeze. I have started numerous posts, only to be lost for words, and reluctantly log-off without publishing. I imagined entertaining, educational and life-changing words of wisdom would just flow from my fingertips (just like they seem to for Patti Digh) once I had the tools - if only that was all I needed.
So, contemplating my plight, I reflected on how much my inner perfectionist keeps me a prisoner offline too - I pick up the paintbrush all excited, only to find it stops just short of making a bold statement on the canvas. I start another chapter in my book, then stop when the inner perfectionist starts harping on about the irrelevance and pointlessness (is that a word?) of my words. I agonise over writing proposals, taking up every single minute till the deadline - making life *hell* for myself and those nearest and dearest as I struggle to make it “perfect”.
Enough! This is my public declaration that I am evicting this tiresome tenant that has been in residence in my life for far too long… I look forward to writing more regularly - keep an eye out for the spelling misteaks.
Filed under Musings/p
