Learning Curve II

Yesterday I was greatly distressed in my inability to follow my "blog i 360" class. I actually was in tears more than once. I did attend all sessions and got an overview of what could be done but watched the clock count down the minutes until it was over. Whew!

Today I boldly downloaded an audio tape of one of the early classes onto my mp3 player. It actually worked! I know for many of you downloading something is as easy as turning on a light switch but for me....I did a little dance and song. I listened to it and followed it in real time. I wrote down some terms like wysiwyg and technorati to ask someone about but I was able to follow the directions. What a relief!

My blog now has a title page and you can check out my progress. www.askpatriciaz.com/blog

So here's to the agony of learning and the joy of having a live link to this blog!
Let's see how I progress from here.

What in your life was once hard and now it is so easy you take it for granted?
Besides walking, speaking, dancing, reading, driving.....

The Learning Curve I

I am learning to use Blog i360 and how to link it to social sites , aweber it, affiliate markets and the like. It was a 3 day class. I signed up to have a systematic approach to working on the internet. I thought the focus would be good for me.

Thursday 3PM: Call 1. Questions, OK, I am on board. I don't understand much of it but assume I will.

Thursday 6PM: Call 2. I realize I can't get into the blog site because I didn't redirect my DNS. I redirect and listen to the call. Dead in the water. I can't even attempt action.

Thursday 8PM: Call 3. More of the same.

Friday calls 4 & 5. The behinder I get the more discouraged I become. There are too many different user names and passwords. I can't get any combination to work and ask for yet another password.

Friday call 6: Writing content. This is something I can finally understand.

Sat 4AM: I still can't get into my new blog site. I recheck the DNS redirection and put in a support ticket. So much for catching up in th early morning. I did register for a-weber and a couple of social bookmarking sites. I sent positive posts to other members of my team.

Sat 8:20AM miracles happened and the site became live. I even got an e-mail telling me which user name and password to use. Eureka!

Sat 8:30AM I have a client for the morning.

Sat 11AM Call time. I have my Dashboard open on my blog and a-weber installed and active. I am ready to go. By the end of the call I am in tears and again thinking of quitting.

Sat 1:40 PM I am figuring what is my best course of action:
A. Listen to each tape and follow along until I get it no matter how many times I have to listen.
B. Listen to all 9 tapes in a row and keep listening until I familiarize myself with the material and I get it.
C. Go back and listen to the pre seminar calls in case I missed something basic.
D. Just quit messing with the internet business idea altogether.
E. Throw another temper tantrum and pick one of the above.

Right now, "E" looks good. Anyone have any ice cream bars to help me numb myself?

This is the behind the scenes look at what happens between the high points of realizing I love my life. Maybe I don't like the training before the event very much.
I hate it that I think quiting is an option.

Learning about myself

I have a knee jerk withdraw and shut down reaction when I don't feel able to keep up with a project. I joined a 3 day intensive on web 2.0 and blog i360 http://www.blogi360.com/jamaffiliates/id/1917. we are on calls for 90 minute segments 3 times a day for 3 days. I went dead in the water in hydroplane lingo at call number 2. I failed to redirect my DNS to my new blog and had to wait. Since then I have been listening to the calls and observing my reactions.

So far I have been through a blame phase as in "he should have explained more clearly", an anger phase I might call Woman on a Rampage, total despair and self flagellation was close on its heels. Now I am feeling numb and wanting to be rescued. Here I am blogging instead of trying to do something. I am thinking learning about my default reactions is as valuable as learning the blogging material, though it does nothing to assist my cash flow.

In one way it is like language immersion programs where one lives with a foreign speaking family. The difference is there is a built in human community. Someone to sit on the bed with you and babble sympathetically. There is an attempt at a community in terms of a master mind team built into this class as well but what am I going to do, yell at them, cry, act pitiful? The home front thinks I am crazy to be learning in this way already and the home front is getting the frustrated fallout.

I don't yet know what I love about this process. My current gut take on it is, "This sucks". Yet I am not willing to throw in the towel and say I am unable to do it. The infant doesn't stop getting up while learning to walk even tough she falls a thousand times. Of course she probably doesn't yet have that little voice inside calling her names and telling her it is beyond her ability. In fact, everyone around her takes it for granted that one day she will be able to walk without falling. They applaud every little progress.

So for myself, it is time to go make one tiny little step to applaud.

What Do You Get When..

...You cross a sleepless night with an alka-seltzer moment of: "I can't believe I ate the whole thing"? That little box of fudge was over the top and I was feeling multiple shades of green. I went to bed to sleep it off. It is harder for me to be gentle with myself when I do something so very stupid. I knew while I was scarfing down the fudge that I would regret it late. More than that, I didn't really savor and enjoy the gift. So I lost out on 2 fronts.

This experience is drawing my attention to how my little unconscious choices shape my life. In this case I wasn't so very unconscious as I watched myself do it and didn't stop myself. But in this moment my choices are about how I pick myself up and move along. Can I get my lesson and keep moving into an enjoyable and productive day today or will I indulge my self pity and remorse and use it to make more indigestible choices today?

In the past 10 days I have been developing my exercise program for keeping hands and shoulders nimble, supple, fluid and strong. I pulled together my outline and did an impromptu seminar for a handful of my clients and videoed it. My program was well received and I am studying the video to upgrade my presentation. Today I am reworking the flow of my material. So I am up early with my ginger tea to soothe my tummy and playing with my project.

Loving my life doesn't always mean great things are happening. Sometimes it means falling down and getting back up, even if the pivotal event is dietary indiscretion.
Enjoy the holidays. Learn from my experience. Savoring a taste is more satisfying than eating the whole thing.

Succeeds Never

In the age of "The Secret" I am about to step off the deep end of contrarian expression.

To explain, there exists the art and science of homeopathy which identifies an aberration within a person's vital force by observing how the reflection of the imbalance plays out in life. Each observed trait is called a rubric. The rubrics are combined and recombined until a remedy is chosen that fits the essential nature the person is exhibiting.

All this is to say that I had a follow up with my homeopath last month and we were discussing the rubric "succeeds never" in relation to my life path. It was from the perspective of not living up to my potential. While it is true I have had many successes in my life I would also be the first to note I am holding back from my potential. That night I spent repeating the phrase "succeeds never" over and over. I repeated "I love succeeds never because..." until I couldn't even make up any more responses. I did anything I could think of to bring that statement into my conscious reality.

This exercise was not based on a negative self image nor feeding negativity. This was my way of taking responsibility for the thoughts, feelings, judgments and criticisms
that also create my experience. I am reflecting back on the statement, " What you resist persists". I swapped resisting with embracing.

What happened? The next day I had 3 home health referrals equaling 20 visits and 3 additional private clients hours. This was like rain following a drought since I had not had any home health referrals in six weeks.

Since then I recall the words "succeeds never" to mind every time I feel discouraged or overwhelmed. It is like my new "baby blanky". I am not sure why it motivates me or how it removes my perceived barriers but for now it does. My actions are those of a person moving forward with passion. My fear is not now running the show but travels at my side.

Without getting into the psychology of it all, positive thinking alone does not move me forward. I seem to need to embrace the shadow part of myself to harvest the power to behave differently. Maybe my homeopathic remedy is working as in it is bringing patterns to my attention for fresh decisions. In any case,this is why I love my life so much.

Glowing

What does it mean to glow in the sense of choosing to glow at will. I know there are times I associate with glowing like parents at the time of a birth. Maybe it is the flush one gets after a success following long effort. Is it a radiation of love and peace? I wish it for everyone.

In recent days I have read many glowing tributes to a colleague who passed away abruptly. I knew of him and had met him. He and his wife were active in the broader community. He is worthy of the tribute.

This death draws my attention back to the other deaths this year of men close to me. It gets me to thinking about my own death. I recently read Gloria Page's account of some women being given tombstone shaped paper. On the front each wrote her own epitaph according to what other people would say about her. On the other side each wrote what she wished others would say about her. Very interesting.

My mother died when I was 19. That event probably shaped me more than I care to imagine. No one else close to me died until this year,36 years later. I developed a pragmatic and functional view of death in my aloof kind of way. I had little use for funerals. Didn't plan on having one myself. After all, I'm gone.

My involvement with my dad's funeral was transformative for me. Even though I had worked at healing my relationship with him, much healing happened in preparing for and speaking at the funeral. It was important to attend my martial art instructor's funeral. I am thinking my feelings about my own funeral were colored by feeling who would come, how would people know that I had died. My communities are diverse and often distant. Often I lurk instead of participate. It brings me back to the value of communication I spoke of in the last post. What would people say? What do I want them to say? How do I need to let people in in order for people to feel that about me?

Often people don't know how they touch my life. I doubt I realize how I touch the lives of others. What would it be like to really let them know and would they hear that sentiment from me? Somehow I would like to think people's lights would glow a little brighter from having come in contact with me. I now would like people to know that my light glows a little brighter because of who they are and how they touch me now. Why does my life-light glow as much as it does? Because of you.

Rollercoaster Thrills

For the past month I have been in Sterling Valentine's Power Month. Every member sets a target, works towards it and posts about it every day. In addition we reply and respond to each other's posts so no-one feels that they are tromping through the nether-gloom alone. The process brought me to some genuine self discovery.

I got great feedback on my blog writing, made my first Internet sale, and learned about interacting with others in asking for help, getting help, and giving assistance. I used to have an image of myself as a loner. Even writing this blog is rather insular even though I am sharing my inner questing. I come down from my ivory tower to be present to others in my work but I rarely get "involved".

Early on in the power month I really made it a point to respond to other's posts. I stretched beyond my comfort zone. I even found myself reaching out to others more in my daily life. I was reminded yet again that I am the one who holds back rather than others not "liking" me. My aloofness sends a leave me alone message. Something about that is shifting.

In the second part of the month I hit the wall where I didn't feel like working on my project. Holiday distractions, long client filled work days, and hitting the I don't feel like it wall took its toll. I had to do something because I had agreed to post. So I did. I didn't invest the time to respond to others pasts as I had in the beginning and now, looking back, I think that it was my loss though I still have contact info to follow up on if I choose. It wasn't quite as fun when I became more self-focused.

Holding myself accountable to the group and taking daily action, together with insights from Sterling did create a momentum. I now have 4 prototypes of my gourd work to use in creating my "gourdbatik how to" DVDs. I am setting something up with a production team now. And something more happened. There was 15 hours, 37 minutes of power month remaining when I woke at 4AM with a very clear vision of what I was doing with the project, what steps needed to be done and in what order. That was a rush. I don't think I like adrenalin much but it was a great rush. I got up and made notes.

Later that day, I had a hour between clients and created a flow plan. And another idea revealed itself. I can marry my art and my healing by creating an exercise DVD for artists and crafters. I have the best self treatment techniques to keep fingers nimble and functioning, to relieve carpal tunnel, to get rid of that nagging neck and shoulder tension. Everyone I have spoken to really likes that idea. And those who have seen my gourds want to learn that as well. I am even in discussion to teach a class to a local art guild! (I need to be careful her about choosing my focus and not get scattered. Michael Angier said the next new idea can be the death of my current project.)

All of this in one short month!. There is another Power Month starting next week. You can Google "Power Month" if you are interested. Bring your marbles and get ready to play. The ups and the downs, my roller coaster thrills, are all part of why I love my life so much.