Why things take so long
May 25, 2010 by Juliet Chase
Filed under Pursuit of Happiness
It seems like the “experts” keep telling us it’s easy – whatever it is they’re talking about. Even if you know it’s not, a little bit of that thinking can creep in, particularly if the message seems to be coming from all directions. Not too long ago I was reading an article on the Launch Coach totally an another topic but it brought home the point that we’ve become conditioned to believe that life is supposed to operate on a push button. Life is difficult when you have to write something out by hand and impossible beyond that. No wonder so many people stop in their tracks.
And yet studies are starting to show that what truly makes people happy are challenges, and the accomplishing thereof. We aren’t wired to have life be easy. So if you’re stumped by something that seems impossibly long and hard maybe it’s time to reset the scale.
Balanced contrast
July 26, 2009 by Juliet Chase
Filed under Visual Meditation of the Week
It’s hard to say whether the blue sea makes the ice and snow look whiter or if the white snow makes the sea look bluer. And does it really matter? It wouldn’t be half as beautiful without that level of contrast. Neutral colors are safe but unlikely to attract the people, activities, or progress into your life that you would like to see there. What can you shift from neutral to a saturated color, blinding white, or deepest black?
Somewhere over the north Atlantic, Juliet Chase, all rights reserved
Lessons from the garden – rejuvenation
June 25, 2009 by Juliet Chase
Filed under The Art of Happiness
This last winter was a hard one in my neck of the woods – colder and snowier than normal, it took its tole on the garden and the heating bill. When the snow receded and some plants started to leaf out, others just sat there doing a good impression of dead. And some of them were. Others it turned out were prepared to start over. Not only did my laziness in not ripping things out of the ground right away pay off, but I saw how determined even a plant can be to survive. I will mourn the seven feet of stateliness my bay tree had achieved in the herb garden. That’s all kindling now for next winter, but even though I had to cut it down to the ground, there are new shoots coming up from beneath. It won’t be quite the same tree, there’s no central trunk anymore, and it will take a few years at least to get to any substantial size but it’s alive. And taking a new form.
Surely if a plant can come back from devastation, people can as well. Just in a new form, maybe one designed to survive that type of experience or to take on something completely new.
Diversity versus the easy route
June 8, 2009 by Juliet Chase
Filed under Pursuit of Happiness
I just got the national newsletter for the organization I volunteer with in the mail. I am perturbed by a short profile piece for a group on the other side of the country. Because this is an organization that is part of the court system it varies greatly from state to state and county to county but the core ethos is the same: members of the community advocating for kids ‘in the system’. After having volunteers drop out prematurely and leaving kids in the lurch, the featured group had analyzed their retention of volunteers and decided what characteristics would keep a volunteer involved: over 40, in a relationship, not working full-time, had raised children. Wow- that seems like a pretty homogeneous profile particularly given that I don’t meet a single one of those criteria, love volunteering with my local group and I know I’ve been successful. I can appreciate their motive in wanting volunteers to stick around but are they doing right by recruiting within such a narrow bandwidth? That doesn’t look like a profile of a community to me. Is it really serving the organization or the kids to narrow things down that far? They run the danger of having a single definition of “right”. It’s easy to define diversity as a matter of ethnicity and race and so common in our vernacular that I think people frequently forget that it means more than that. They’ve come to treat diversity like an item on a checklist to be completed as opposed to an ongoing process. It will always be an ongoing and evolving thing because the world is always changing – that doesn’t mean we’re doomed to be racist, just that we have to keep updating our cultural perspective of how we label people.
Why didn’t they look at themselves?
It seems to me that this organization looked only at what made up the profile of the volunteers that stuck around instead of what might make the volunteers that left stay. Why? Because it’s so much easier to evaluate how to change others than how to change ourselves. Odds are good that they’ve gotten comfortable with their office politics and ways of doing things within the team. They don’t want to have to change that. But that’s where diversity becomes possible, where positive and amazing change can happen.
College kids almost always complain about having to take breadth classes outside of their major, I know I did. I just wanted to get on with it and not have to switch mental tracks to something completely different. But that’s what well rounded means and that’s something that never really goes away; it’s less work and less stress to stick with the familiar – people we can easily identify with, subjects we already know something about, places we’ve been to before. And you can live a safe and comfortable life like that but I wouldn’t call it fun, interesting, or rewarding.
Inspiration from irritation
May 4, 2009 by Juliet Chase
Filed under Importance of Motivation
As I’ve been working the kinks out of this site, I’ve been learning some interesting things about myself. I get really embarrassed by what I see as completely avoidable errors; I found six broken links that were broken because I had copied the html code incorrectly. An easy and human kind of mistake and completely fixed within an hour. I’m still struggling with feeling like I should have focused more on those details; never done it in the first place or caught it sooner!
As I was messing around with all the online tools I also solved a mystery. A handful of people have been putting my name in search engines, going to my photography site which has my name as the domain (www.julietchase.com) and then leaving immediately. I could tell the latter because the average time on site was around 1 second. Ouch! It’s hard not to be flattered by strangers googling you, but then for them to leave without even looking at my work?
How would you feel if an adult film actress had recently changed her name to yours?
Quite. I’d probably be more irritated if I didn’t laugh picturing men with umm, certain expectations suddenly staring at landscapes and flowers! No wonder they left so quickly. But on another level, it made me realize that little mistakes are going to happen and what I’m not doing may actually be more serious. There’s a lot more I could be doing to promote my business and thereby dominate the search results for my own name. Instead of feeling defensive, I’m feeling inspired to go the extra mile and keep working to hit that tipping point.
As part of that I’ve been thinking about how to make this site’s content more meaningful and consistent. I thought I’d start by doing more posts and trying to structure them a little more to the days of the week so Inspiration & Motivation on Mondays, Tools & Exercises on Tuesdays, Humor & Fun on Wednesdays, Books on Thursdays, and continuing my Journal on Fridays. For now I’ll continue to take the weekends off. However, if there are things you aren’t finding out there in the great wide world of the web, I’d be interested in hearing about them. Maybe that’s the missing link! I need all the help I can get on this mission:-)
I’m curious to know if something similar has happened to anyone else? Or what you would do if you suddenly found yourself sharing your name like this?
The energy for change often comes from adversity
April 8, 2009 by Juliet Chase
Filed under Importance of Motivation
Mt. Haleakala, HI - Juliet Chase
I remember the moment I decided to take charge of my own unhappiness instead of just hoping that something would come along to fix it. It was a few months after 9/11 when I was working for a large software company famous for its testosterone-driven management style. Not surprisingly they were having trouble retaining female employees so they decided to offer a series of forums open only to women. I think it was supposed to make us happier with our lot or something. I only remember two things the first speaker said; one was to take $50 in $1 bills and scatter them in your sock drawer so that every morning you’d feel wealthy (don’t knock it ’til you try it:-) and the other was that if your manager is publicly undermining you in meetings you need to quit because that’s an unfixable situation. So I did. It took a few months to work up the courage but I did it and I didn’t have another job lined up.
Then I got the speaker’s slim book from the library and ping-ponged through recommended reading lists until I started to realize the difference between a real dream and a rescue fantasy. I doubt I would have done any of that, or attended that talk if I’d just been mildly discontented. I don’t think my story is unique; it seems generally true that peaks are paired with valleys. The more extreme the valley the higher the potential peak. Avoidance will result in no pulse; an even line of endurance often masked with Prozac (at least in the case of some of those software colleagues.)
So if, or rather when, you find yourself in the valley of adversity, let the frustration and the hurt and anything else negative that might be happening fuel you towards positive change. Look at it as starting from the bottom and just open your ears and your mind to new inputs. Check your library listings, community centers, and the local Y for free talks. Walk into the library and just browse the shelves to see what catches your eye. Discretely eavesdrop on conversations on the bus. Actively seek to be listening but let the answers come of their own volition. As long as you aren’t looking for justification for staying down you are bound to find some nugget of advice, some quotation or idea that get your juices flowing again. It probably won’t involve anything quite as drastic as quitting a job, but you’ll know what’s right for you because it will germinate and take root. It will stay with you until you take the appropriate action.
How to solve tough problems with a personalized formula for success
April 2, 2009 by Juliet Chase
Filed under Health and Happiness
I came across an exercise not that long ago that suggested that you figure out how you’ve answered or solved big questions in the past when you were happy with the result. Then you could apply that formula to new problems and at least have something of a road map to go by.
Hmmm, nothing like a little analysis of analysis for fun. When I sat down to do it however, the tricky part was coming up with examples where I had thought it through and was truly satisfied with how things turned out. Lesson 1 was realizing that all too often I’ve not used any kind of a process and grabbed onto the first thing that came along, sometimes with good results and sometimes not. But two major purchasing decisions did fit the requirements; my car and my house, so I used those to figure out how I’d gotten there and sure enough I do have a relatively consistent process!
- Identify the need I’m ready to own my own home
- I make a list, of course I’m a compulsive list maker so this makes sense. But in this case it’s divided into strict requirements, nice-to-have’s, and parameters. The house had to have a basement and be built before 1945, it would be nice to have a fire place, and it should be somewhere quiet and safe.
- Then I research and seek outside expertise real estate listings to see where old houses are available, find an agent via referral, get pre-approved etc.
- Followed by refining the lists in step #2 quiet and safe with the appropriate commute now equals somewhere in the Northwest neighborhood
- Seize timing – this one is harder to predict but it means being really ready and committed; checking real-estate listings daily and making an offer when a house meets the criteria without contributing any new problems
- Fulfill the need – it may seem self-evident but it closes the circle and allows my brain to stop thinking about the problem, stop checking listings and most importantly not going into the land of ‘might-have-been’ or ‘if-only-I-had’.
The challenge now is to get in the habit of using this process to develop satisfactory solutions for problems as they crop up. It doesn’t remove intuition, but rather includes it in a more structured format and keeps it from being confused with fear.
What are your steps?
Context
March 30, 2009 by Juliet Chase
Filed under Visual Meditation of the Week
There are not many places in the world where level ground turns out to be the middle zone in the landscape. People too, often see themselves at the bottom or at the top of any particular endeavor.
Are you giving equal time and perspective to the depths and the heights in your life? Or do you see only the mountains still to be climbed?
Arizona, Juliet Chase, all rights reserved
Putting myself out there
March 5, 2009 by Juliet Chase
Filed under Juliet's Journal
My comfort zone is definitely in the planning and building stages of any project – the parts where failures can be kept private and things done completely on my own schedule. This week marks the beginning of the transition from that phase to the one of public input and reception for my two blogging projects (this site and www.nurdle.net) This week I started posting links to these two sites on the various social networks and next week I’ll start advertising (using my free credits that came with the web host account.) And from this point on I’ve committed to myself to post on a fairly regular schedule so that any new visitors have a reason to return. (No pressure!)
Now public opinion will start impacting my goals. I could still write, publish, do whatever at no additional cost and on my own schedule, but my goal is to make enough money through affiliates, advertising, and other products to provide sufficient income to fund the time to continue at full speed. And that requires a willing public. Not only can’t I control that, but I can’t predict it either!
Time to trust in myself and my instincts and quite frankly the people I’m trying to attract to my sites. It may take a little time, but if there’s real value here, they’ll find their way. The real risk is that I’ll stop myself just short of that goal; that famous one inch away from the vein of gold. I’m determined not to stop there.
What are you waiting for?
March 4, 2009 by Juliet Chase
Filed under Tidbits
I know what it means to feel like you need to be good before starting something so that you can improve to excellent. My high school gymnasium had banners for Olympic medals in addition to the state and regional wins. I didn’t dare try out for anything; ‘just for fun’ wasn’t part of the curriculum. But it should be. So if you find the Nike ads a bit intimidating, maybe this clip will motivate you to try something that you aren’t sure you’ll be good at. Because you just never know:-)
