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Start and See What Happens

by Walt | Oct 5, 2023 | Success | 0 Comments

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.

— Goethe

It didn’t matter that I had sealed the seams. Or that we had a tub floor. Or that I had put a tarp over the site. Water was everywhere.

The torrential rains had come just after midnight. The sound on the tent wall was deafening. And depressing.

I could only coax a few of the group to start out into that dank October dawn. A summit looked improbable.

The rain poured unrelentingly. The trail ran like a river. Within minutes, I was soaked. And miserable.

Up the slick talus we struggled. The temperature near freezing. The visibility a few hundred feet at best.

And suddenly, the three of us broke through the mist, into a crystal clear windless sky. The sun warmed us and dried us. Snow flakes shot upward from the cloud deck below like crystal fireworks. Everywhere we looked, rainbows shimmered and danced.

It was as if we had been transported across time to a parallel universe. Nothing was as it had been. And it was like nothing we had ever seen.

We reveled in our good fortune and marveled in our own private paradise.

Hours later, standing once again in the rain outside our soggy tents, words failed us as we tried to share with our friends who had stayed behind the wonders that we had seen.

Those who didn’t start out could never know.

I learn this lesson time and time again. From getting out the door for the morning run, to the looming research project, to the unpleasant conversation that needs to happen, to the weights at the gym and the blog that wants to be written.

You gotta at least start.

Julia Cameron in her wonderful timeless book The Artist’s Way says that our job is to show up on the page.

Whether we want to or not, we show up and start out.

It’s what makes a “pro” says Steven Pressfield in the War of Art. An amateur capitulates to resistance; an amateur is always willing to negotiate the project away.

Whether you’re tired or not, whether it’s raining or not, whether you’re fearful or not, whether you’re feeling fat or not, whether you’re racked with doubt or not, whether you hate your job or not, whether you’re motivated or not, whether you’re in shape or not, whether it’s too early or too late, or not, whether you’re inspired or not; it is irrelevant. If you’re a pro, you make up your mind and you do it. You just do it.

Cameron says, “Leap and the net will appear.” There is a magic in the starting out. The way unfolds in a manner that can never be imagined locked in inertia.

Goethe writes, “The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves as well. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise occur. A stream of events issues from that decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen accidents, meetings and material assistance that no one could of dreamed would come their way.”

“What I have learned from this simple philosophy is this,” writes Mel Robbins in this month’s Success magazine. “When it comes to being master of your life, you are never going to feel like doing what you need to do. It will feel wrong to ask for help. It will make you afraid to present your business plan. You won’t want to run when it’s raining outside. Getting out of bed can feel downright radical simply because you don’t want to. But you have to.” When the alarm rings, stand up, she says.

I have hit the snooze more times than I care to admit.

But I have walked ridges sculpted by the hand of God, stumbled upon the most beautiful dawns, discovered images in my viewfinder, and found entire stories upon my page, simply by starting out.

Start out. You don’t need to see the whole way. Just start. And see what happens.

The Secret Recipe

by Walt | Sep 28, 2023 | Success | 0 Comments

Brené Brown, in her beautiful book The Gifts of Imperfection, has a wonderful exercise: List your “ingredients for joy and meaning,” she instructs.

It’s a powerful exercise because, for most of us, the ingredients are pretty simple; and they don’t cost very much. For me, they’re a long gentle trail run, feeling the wind on my face on a mountaintop, having the time to read a good book, sitting on my deck watching the sunlight fade, or sharing a simple meal with my wife, my best bud, Ann.

But, for some reason, many of us lose track of our ingredients. Instead we race around looking for new and exciting places to go, and the latest shiny toys to buy. (Don’t get me wrong, I love to travel, and I really like nice toys.) You plan grand things and then, all too often, end up exhausted and depleted. (Do you remember that last vacation when you had to go back to work to rest up from?) And you wonder why you’re missing out on joy and meaning.

You focus single-mindedly on the destination (as success driven folks tend to do); and neglect the journey. You get lost in the doing rather than the being.

Maybe Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz had it right. Maybe your heart’s desires isn’t so far away after all.

Maybe joy and meaning are here. Right in front of you.

As you live into this last quarter of the year, it might be worthwhile to remember the ingredients. Your ingredients.

Will you do that?

The Things I Am Sad About

by Walt | Sep 21, 2023 | Success | 3 Comments

I’m sad that I can’t call my dad and hear his voice.

I’m sad that my precious daughter is grappling with an unimaginable tragedy.

I’m sad that my dearest friend and I don’t see each other as often as I would like.

I’m sad that someone dear to me is struggling with horrible addiction.

I’m sad that my mom and I were at odds in the last years of her life.

I’m sad that there is so much hatred in the world.

I’m sad that all of us lost so much in the pandemic.

I’m sad that the wife of a dear client lost her father.

I’m sad that a magnificent glacier on a favorite mountain of mine has disappeared.

I’m sad that I haven’t spoken to one of my sons in months.

I’m sad that we left our beautiful home in Ireland.

I’m sad that so many people have lost so much in Maui, and Morocco, and Libya.

I’m sad that families with children in our affluent valley are without homes.

I’m sad that people are fighting and dying every day in Ukraine.

I’m sad that time seems to fly by way too fast.

I’m sad that injury kept me from doing what brings me joy for so long.

I’m sad that everything I love I will someday lose.

When I write these things – and feel these things – I cry.

Holy tears they call them in grief work.

But really, they wholly suck.

Because I don’t like sad.

(Who does?)

Being sad is a buzzkill.

I like happy.

I focus on the good.

I say upbeat affirmations.

I’m a goal-driven success junkie.

I keep a gratitude journal, dammit.

So, why bother even saying that I feel sad?

Because sad is real.

If you don’t feel the feels, they come out sideways.

In self-medication and addiction.

In anxiety, anger, hatred, violence, and rage.

I lost my dad in the pandemic. He was the best dad. I couldn’t be with him when he died. When I could finally travel again, all I found was a barren lump of frozen ground.

I had such deep sadness. Such loneliness. So much anger.

For two years, I kept it bottled up inside.

Ann would say, “You need to pay attention to your grief.”

I’d say, “Fuck my grief.”

Over and over and over again, like rogue waves, the grief would blindside me and knock me down.

Until unexpectedly (unintentionally truth be told), I had the opportunity – the gift – of doing deep work around my grief. In one miraculous moment, that cloud of darkness was lifted from me.

This from your card-carrying purveyor of toxic positivity:

Sad is an ever-present, constant companion on this our mortal journey.

There can be no happy without the sad.

No light without the dark.

In our grief-phobic culture, we are called to tend to grief. To connect with sadness. To name it. To make (uneasy) friends with it. To be present to it. To really feel it. For ourselves, and for those around us.

In that way, you will become whole.

You can heal.

We all can heal.

A broken world needs that. Now more than ever.

Achieve No Thing

by Walt | Sep 14, 2023 | Success | 0 Comments

Achieve nothing. Kind of like jumbo shrimp.

As I stretched out for my run the other morning, I began to read an article in the Buddhist publication Tricycle on the spiritual pitfalls of multi-tasking.

Tricycle is an excellent quarterly filled with wonderful writings from wise thinkers on such topics as “nothingness” and “meditation” and “enlightenment.”

Turning to stretch my other leg, I noticed that this month’s issue of Success magazine was also sitting on the counter.

I love Success. It’s stuffed with dynamic articles on “business” and “leadership” and “wealth” from leaders and teachers like Sarah Blakely, Jack Canfield and John Maxwell. Like Tricycle, it’s one of the few publications that I read from cover to cover every month.

Strange combination of magazines, isn’t it?

When I look in my library, I see a similar cacophony: a significant collection of books on theology and on Eastern thought; an equally impressive mix of business-related titles written by the likes of Richard Branson, Malcolm Gladwell and Warren Buffet.

Weird.

Maybe.

As Westerners, we are programed for success. Here in the Northeast, we might even say that we are driven for success. And yet, as fellow journeyers along the path, we search to understand the ultimate as well.

The question is: How do you strive to achieve your goals and at the same time stay true to your heart? How do you pay the bills and accumulate the resources to have the freedom you want, and not lose sight of what is truly important? How do you achieve and still stay sane?

Finding the balance is the key, I guess. Although that sounds so trite. And seems next to impossible. Not to mention the fact that “finding” seems to require the “achievement” of something.

It’s important to have goals. It’s necessary to have money. You need to meet your responsibilities. You want to be able to enjoy the opportunities that life presents to you.

And yet, at the end of the day, the person with the most toys doesn’t win.

Darren Hardy, once the publisher of Success, tells the story of visiting a family friend who had accumulated a “staggering fortune” who now lay dying from cancer. As Hardy was leaving, the man called him back to the beside and grabbed his arm. “Don’t miss the point like I did,” he told Hardy. “I wish I’d spent as much time and energy accumulating relationships as I had houses. I wish I had invested my heart as aggressively as I did my money. Only now do I understand true wealth, and none of it appears on a balance sheet.”

When I first started in law practice, the standard to achieve was 1800 billable hours a year. For young professionals starting out today, it is not unusual to hear of expectations of 2000 billable hours and more.

And yet at the end of the path, no one is going to wish they had billed more time.

Achieving. And not achieving. Being.

Jack Kornfield writes, “What matters most is how we live. This is why it is so difficult and so important to ask this question of ourselves: ‘am I living my path fully, do I live without regret?’ so that I can say on whatever day is the end of my life, “Yes, I have lived my path with heart.”

“The quality of your action depends on the quality of your being,” writes Thich Nhat Hanh . He says,

“Look at the tree in the front yard. The tree doesn’t seem to be doing anything. It stands there vigorous, fresh and beautiful, and everyone profits from it. That’s the miracle of being. If a tree were less than a tree, all of us would be in trouble. But if a tree is just a real tree, then there’s hope and joy. That’s why if you can be yourself, that is already action. Action is based on non-action; action is being.”

Oh, by the way, while running on the elliptical, I finished that article in the Buddhist review on the spiritual dangers of multi-tasking. Achieving nothing.

Over and Done

by Walt | Sep 7, 2023 | Success | 2 Comments

Ok people, it’s done.

Summer’s over. The vacation’s behind you. No more lazy lunches. No more casual Fridays.

It’s time to put away the Dockers… and the swimmies. It’s time to get back to it.

Fall is here. Time to get busy; time to get serious.

No more leisure, no more playtime.

It’s time for work.

Uhhh, wait a minute: I object. I don’t want to give up playtime!

It is a busy time of year. But perhaps we can take some of summer with us?

In summer, it seems, time is more expansive; the rules more flexible; the boundaries softer.

And then September comes and – maybe it’s a holdover from going back to school – it seems like the time for fun is over.

We move back into our busy lives, our schedules chock full, shuttling around the kids, out to soccer games and swim practices, with evening meetings, volunteer activities and board commitments.

Many of my coaching clients feel like they’re moving back into the forest fire armed only with their squirt guns; their lives turned into an out-of-control carnival game of whack-a-mole. Reacting endlessly, and breathlessly, to the urgent.

Never really getting to what is really, truly the important in their lives.

And summer slips silently into the rear view mirror with perhaps some vague hope for respite and reprieve on some distant unencumbered weekend… or maybe in February on that “vacation.”

There is a different way.

But it requires that you become a control freak.

That’s right, a control freak: someone who takes control of their lives!

No one else is gonna do it for you. You’ve gotta do it for yourself.

And this means that you need a bit of courage and audacity.

I know. I live it too. Bombarded by unceasing demands and expectations in every area of our lives. Inundated by inputs. Juggling multiple modalities of communication. Over committed and suffused with the anxiety of dropping the ball.

But here’s the truth: the in-box will always be full. None of us will ever get it all done. If you died tomorrow, you’d be replaced.

So why not pay attention to what truly matters?

People ask me how it is that I take so much time away traveling and adventuring. The answer: it’s a choice.

Last year, I took 8 weeks off. There were no disasters. No one missed me. The world went on.

And, damn, it was fun.

So here are some practices to consider before September gets too crazy:

Decide what really, really matters to you. Spend time on that. Get rid of the rest.
Get really good at saying no; if you find yourself saying you “should” do something, you probably shouldn’t.
Carve out time for yourself – every single day. No one else is going to do it for you.
Get up an hour early and enjoy the quiet. Use it to read and write and meditate and create.
Plan your weeks; and plan each day; actually schedule in the time for the things that matter most to you.
Turn off the TV at night and focus on the life you really want.

Here’s the scoop: at the end of our lives, no one is going to wish they spent more time in the office, billed more hours, sold more product, sat on more boards, went to more PTO meetings, or volunteered for more committees. It won’t matter whether you went to one more network group, whether your Facebook status was up to date, or whether you were well LinkedIn. What will matter will be the experiences you have had, the love you have shared, the lives you have touched.

What will matter will be whether you showed up in each and every moment to know the fullness and the joy of your life.

What will matter is whether you have lived without regret.

For that to happen, you’ll need to become a control freak.