A Transformation Six Months in the Making

It was a really busy weekend with long days. I helped a friend at her show in Petaluma on Saturday, after being up 'til late with Bad Art Night on Friday. All day on my feet making sales in her booth, then a couple of hours of rest and a cold drink, then back at it at a vendor night.

Sunday I was up at the crack of dawn again to take my artist in residence to the start line of the Half Moon Bay International Marathon. I did sneak back into bed for about an hour, then went to cheer her on at the half-way point, which just happened to be a block from my house. The afternoon was beautiful and we had a lovely dinner of grilled salmon, rice pilaf and broccoli I prepared for my twin daughters' birthday.

But, I need to get more sleep, and get at it before 11 pm. I've been burning the candle at both ends.

In March I did a guided visualization for myself. It was all about what's next for me. I saw myself suffocating, energetically, then able to transform into a new me, woven from the old me.

It's been an extraordinarly challenging six months since I did that visualization. Life as I have known it for the past 35 years has been changing. The change, looking back over six months, could be viewed as gradual, but it has felt more sudden. The good news is that it feels like a major shift occurred last week. An insight. An Aha! The rebuilding has begun.

I was on a roll at the art faire on Saturday. I felt connected and powerful and in the groove with this group of people in a way I had not before. I feel competent and worthy. I feel I am one of them, not less than. In coaching, we call that conscious competence. It is a great place to be.

I have a food idea and read an article this morning about the founder of Chobani Yogurt and thought, I should call that guy up and ask him to mentor me about my food idea. We need mentors in life and I am not at all afraid to ask him. He can always say no.

I also proceeded on submitting an art action program proposal last week by finding someone I think is the right person to lead that opportunity. I feel good about putting what I see and want out there without hesitation. She said yes too!

These actions - my reaching out - feel like the new, rebuilt me. All the parts that were the former me - the engineer, the MBA, the artist - are all threads that are becoming the new me in a way I could never have predicted.

Analog Day - Working With Dad in the Garage

If you know me or even if you just follow me on Facebook, you will "get" that I am very attached to technology and by technology, I mean my internet. I have a personal WIFI hotspot on my phone and I swear that is the best thing ever invented. I am never without a connection. Almost never.

Yesterday, I took at little road trip with my sister and dad up to fetch some things from Arnold, CA. Arnold is a beautiful resort town in the foothills of the Sierras, about 20 miles east of Angel's Camp. This is where a lot of gold rush activity happened in the mid-1800s. The towns are small and quaint and everything is really chill.

We were in Blue Lake Springs, which is frequented heavily by lots of people from the Bay Area/Silicon Valley. They have a golf course, pools and lots of cabins. And no AT&T coverage. None. One time a few years ago, my youngest daughter and I slept in the car overnight in the pool parking lot because I couldn't find my dad's house and there was no cell phone coverage and god knows where you find a real pay phone these days.

I was able to do a lot of work on the way up in the car, but I was scrambling because I knew what would happen when we reached Angels Camp. It would go dark, so to speak. And it did, right on cue.

We were on our way to help my dad retrieve an emergency generator. It's a big engine inside the bed of a small truck that has been rigged to be towed.

My dad is 87 now and he toys with the idea he can still go take care of these jobs all by himself, but my sister knew it would be better for us to go with him, even if just to help drive and feed him lunch and he was happy for the company and help.

We got there and my dad got right to work on assessing the situation. The tow hitch had sat out in the heat, snow and rain for several years and needed to be removed and cleaned. Dad is so cute and always has been about tools. He has great tools - being a mechanical engineer - he has everything needed. The place we were at had a nice little garage workshop too.

We got the hitch off the trailer and brought it into the garage and put it in the vise. Dad took it all apart and decided this little metal piece needed to be restored. That piece, along with some washers, a bolt, a spring, and a metal tab, all help the hitch come down onto the ball and when tightened, grab it.

It has been a long long time since I've done anything mechanical like that. Taking that simple hitch apart with my dad reminded me of working out in the garage with him when I was a kid. I couldn't have a car until I was able to change the spark plugs (including gapping them) and change the oil myself. My sister was impressed that I knew the names of all the parts and how they went together. My dad was grateful for my good eyesight and manual dexterity in helping hold all the parts together.

I was thinking about engineers while we were working and how this little collection of metal pieces weighing about 5 pounds allows you to take a generator several hundred miles on the highway safely. Putting all the parts back together properly keeps the generator from flying off the back of the truck and into someone else's car. These are small things that engineers do that make the world a better place.

Working with my dad yesterday was so analog. The 100-foot tall pine trees and the crisp nip of fall were rejuvenating. Getting my hands greasy and into the metal was satisfying. The smell of the oil coming out of the little pump can was a throwback to those days out the garage working on my car with my dad.  Not having internet for a few hours was fine. I survived. In fact, I thrived.

Empty Nest - Good Eggs

This is the week that a lot of people I know have kids going off to college for the first time. Getting all their stuff together, making the trip, getting them settled into their dorms or apartments. Big steps for the little people and their parents.

I went through it last year when my youngest left for Monterey. True to form, she did not want me to go with her. She moved the week or two before actually leaving and the day of her final move, timed it perfectly so that I was on a conference call and could not even hug her goodbye. It may have been all that jagged crying spontaneously at breakfast in the weeks leading up to that day that had her decide it would be best for both of us if the long goodbye was removed from the equation.

We have a funny little thing in our family, and especially between youngest one and me: I miss you already. Just this morning, in the midst of some more argumentive times we've had this week, she said she wants to miss me before I go on my trip in a week.

What is this we have about missing someone even when we are with them? It sounds a little like being together with friends or family for dinner, then spending the whole time on a cell phone checking emails and sending messages to others, or even those we are with in person.

She jumped in her car and took off and I continued my conference call with my jaw dropped wide open. I didn't know she would pick that time to leave and was at once surprised and relieved. I would have done a poor job of hugging her goodbye, probably crying a lot and saying something unhelpful.

As soon as the call was over, and after weeks of me not knowing how I might manage being all alone and missing my baby, I suddenly got over it. I went out to her room, finished cleaning it and hung up art on the walls. I put out fresh linens that I'd been saving up to make the room into a vacation retreat for visiting family and friends.

I spent the next few months with my mom visiting and that was nice. She enjoyed the new room, and then she left too. And then I was alone for the first time since a short time in college when I had an apartment and was between roommates and not yet married. I was engaged, but my husband to be lived in Northern California and I was in LA. I enjoyed that time alone and being alone again 35 years later was similar though now I'm not in a relationship, so I am truly alone.

No one to tell you when to eat, what to watch on television, when to go to bed, or when to get up. I was able to just be with myself and the two little dogs. I was able to hear the cadence of my own breathing and cycles, and see for myself what caused me to be irritable or grumpy, happy, elated. What made me laugh out loud or cry. I felt liberated and unencumbered.

I will never stop being a mom to my four children and caring for and about them. But I have learned to appreciate the nest that is mostly empty of open little mouths, instead now visited by self-sufficient adults that my children have become. They make me breakfast, take me out to dinner, and just sit and talk to me about what is going on in their lives and ask me about what I'm up to.

The nest is empty and then full, and then empty again.

Mondays Are So Open...To This or That

I'm developing a theory about creativity and Mondays: we hopefully spend time over the weekend relaxing, hanging out with family and friends, and indulging in some art viewing or art-related activities.

For me, by Monday, I am open and porous, a creative sponge. I am relaxed and my mind is flowing with ideas about what I can do next, creatively.

Today, I went to see a man about a kiln. I have long had a secret desire to make three dimensional objects. I see them at art shows and love them, admire them, fondle them and sometimes buy them. So admitting I want to make them is a relief.

I got an email from this biz-nessy guru, Ramit Sethi, this morning about fear and the reasons why we hold back from doing something. My logic and reasoning, which he pointed out is just fancy camouflage for fear, is that someone else has done what I want to do thus I don't need my stuff out there in the world too. This fear is sandwiched between two nice layers of how I am inspired and also appropriate in my art to a huge degree. I am still looking for and finding my own voice. The post today about fear was helpful because honestly, so few people see the work of artists anyway, that me adding to that universe of work would not be noticed by others in any negative way.

Instead, I should do the work and get myself into the zone of unique voice and creativity and let it all flow from there. So despite all the logical thinking to the contrary, I am going to get a kiln and a drying rack and a clay roller device and some porcelain clay and start making things I can see in my head.

I believe they will be fantastic. I know when I see something this clearly, as a vision, I am meant to do it. Here I go with my creative process!

Eyes Opening Wider

There's a post from Harvard Business Review out this morning on creativity that has me thinking.

The credo here in Silicon Valley and business from my MBA studies is "innovate or die." It's so harsh. Die. And yet, this is true - if you have a product or service and you don't continue to keep it fresh and updated, you lose your competitive advantage and die just a little each day, leading to being lost in the weeds while your competitor out-advances you and scoops market share and revenue. Ugh.

That's one scenario anyway. And along the way, creativity has been co-opted as THE WAY to discover these innovations and stay in front of the pack.

My life work - engineering the liberation of creativity - has me thinking today about what I am meant to do in the context of "innovate or die" thinking. How do I help people be more creative and why are they wanting to be creative?

I discovered a book a couple of weeks ago that was, titularly at least, in my sweet spot. I thought Joseph Berk's book*, Unleashing Engineering Creativity was going to be my book - my thing. I ordered it, terrified to open and read it, thinking "here we go again, you have no original thoughts."

Inside, I discovered a wonderful set of tools and methods for helping engineers work through the creative process in a very analytical way. It was as though the very essence of creativity got distilled back down into analytical - all linear, and process-y. It was a fun read and I know has valuable nuggets, but it is NOT what I'm up to at all. It is everything I'm trying to run away from - the structure, the process, the documenting of it all. I wonder how you can be in a room full of people asking them to bring forth their creativity while you charge and document the whole thing. It SEEMS logical, but intuitively, I know this isn't entirely how creativity works.

My experience is that creativity happens when there is NO structure. Instead, when there are a few colored pencils and some paper, a chill atmosphere with some light music in the background and some like-minded people immersed in the soup of their own interests and creativity.

This is what happens at Bad Art Night every two weeks at my house: people come here with something they are working on. It is usually not their main area of art. For example a women who weaves and knits very competently may be here to work on necklaces or collaged boxes. She works quietly while chatting. She is paying enough attention to her work to get the glue on the box or the beads on the thread, but she is not consumed in her own world thinking hard about how to make this the next good thing. Instead, she is chatting, sipping some tea, loosely observing someone across from her who is painting or cutting out shapes - doing their own thing. Meanwhile, she is innovating. Maybe her next new necklace design, innovating ahead of her competition, is in the making. She isn't working hard at it through a rubric of think this, brainstorm that, write down possible designs, evaluate them and eliminate/refine. She's just making the next best necklace out of her intuitive knowing and skill and talent.

My "job" is to create the right environment for this type of creative R&D to be able to happen. The atmosphere - the room, the lighting and the music and vibe I have some control over physically. I sweep the floor, put out tea, clear the table each night before people arrive. That's the physical. Easy.

What I really do to have this happen is BE. I am the creative person I want to see all of them be. I am open to possibilities. I dive in and try new things looking for where my art will next innovate. I work with reckless abandon, and I keep working something over until I am happy with it. I hold in my heart the love of creativity and the possibility that everyone is creative and that their creativity feeds their art and personal happiness.

Oprah was onto unleashing creativity in 2011 which I did not know until I started this blog entry and did a search for Joseph Berk's book. Even Peggy Orenstein's take on creativity has suggestions for coming up with  how many ways you can use a egg carton in five minutes.

I guess because I don't perform well under pressure, at least creatively, this approach overwhelms me. Instead, I would rather sit at my art table with some paints or ink and paper, and my pen, and start doodling. I keep my "problem to be solved" in the background, but don't head on dwell on it. Instead, I noodle and doodle and like journaling can help people, the answer comes to me directly, or I relax enough into my creative thinking that it will pop up in a dream or a bit later.

I'm not wanting to bash this head-on methodology because it can and does work for a lot of people and even me, sometimes. It's just that I find the indirect soup of a creative and nurturing environment better in the long run.

That's how I help people liberate their creativity. I invite them to be in that nurturing environment and believe in them that their next best idea will come out.

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*In his latest book, author and educator Joseph Berk explores the best techniques for stimulating creative thinking, creating new products, improving existing products, and solving design challenges. Surprisingly, even those of us who are paid to be creative often need help. Most of us lose much of our natural creativity by the time we finish high school, but we can regain it through the techniques included in Unleashing Engineering Creativity. This is exciting and fun material, and Unleashing Engineering Creativity presents it in an interesting and engaging manner. Many organizations and engineers rely on brainstorming as their primary creative and inventive tool, but this simplistic approach often fails to stimulate creativity in a meaningful way. Unleashing Engineering Creativity goes far beyond brainstorming. This book explores powerful new creativity stimulation approaches and provides recommendations for overcoming self-imposed obstacles. The title says it all. If you want to unleash your engineering creativity, this book will help you and your organization attain significant creativity improvements.