Habit of Thought

Writing as Spiritual Practice

I don't care what your faith is--or whether you even have a "faith" or follow a religion--but take any opportunity you may have to hear Barbara Brown Taylor speak. Or better yet, take a workshop from her. She makes spirituality real, practical, and most of all, fun.

A friend told me about Taylor's workshop on writing as a spiritual practice which took place today in the beautiful St. Paul's Episcopal Church just outside downtown Rochester. It was the first time I had ever heard of Barbara.

Writing As Work

By vocation Taylor is an Episcopal priest, so it's part of her job description to be a writer and speaker / preacher. I have heard my share of priests, ministers, and pastors speak and have read some of their writing. As with almost any job, not everyone seeks excellence in the skills required to carry out their responsibilities. Taylor clearly takes those responsibilities to heart and has developed not just an incredible mastery but a love of both.

The Joy of Expression

About 60 or so people participated today, yet the workshop was not frenzied, noisy, or distracting due to such a large crowd. Taylor engaged every single one of us through her humor (never at our expense), her humility about her own journey, and her passion for words. When we all were writing, the only sound was the typing of those who brought laptops. Those of us using pen and paper barely registered. When we were discussing our writing with our table mates, the room was abuzz with energy, warmth, and above all, laughter. Barbara created a perfect learning environment and set things up so all would feel safe and knew we had the right just to listen if we didn't want to share anything.

What I Learned About Writing As a Spiritual Practice

Trust the spirit. If there is ever a time to turn off the critic in your head, writing is it. No matter what your subject (or endeavor, for that matter), that voice is there to reduce risk, keep you safe, and save you from being hurt. The problem is, embracing those things also eliminates the possibility of growth.

Barbara took us through an exercise in which we named our critic (mine is DK, which stands for "don't know," as in "I don't know his name"). She also told us to tell him or her or it to go away and come back at 3pm, which is when the workshop was to end. Crazy as it sounds, this really worked. (I have also asked DK to go away while I write this and come back just before I click "publish.")

The other part is to literally go where your spirit takes you. It is common to start writing based on an assignment or idea. But if what you are writing starts to go in a different direction, follow it. Honor it. The writing assignment's sole purpose is just to prime the pump.

Embody the Word. If you want to connect through the written or spoken word with anyone else or especially yourself, go through the body. Describe things using words that connect to your senses.

For example, if you are trying to communicate about faith, describe it through touch, taste, smell, sound, and eyes. My answer to that exercise was: faith is a whisper (sound), a flowery scent (smell), a cookie (taste), warm and cold (temperature), and seeing two married 80-year-olds holding hands (eyes). Note that your sense choices don't have to make sense to anyone but you.

Show, Don't Tell. This is an oldie-but-a-goodie in writing circles. Ever see the movie "Armageddon"? It stars Bruce Willis as Harry Stamper, a driller extraordinare who is called upon by the US government to save the planet from an earth-killing meteorite. In just the first five minutes of dialogue and action, you know Stamper's position on Greenpeace, that his relationship with his daughter, Grace, is problematic, and his star employee, AJ, has the disagreeable habit of routinely disobeying Harry's orders, to Harry's great displeasure.

For example, I can write "I am tired." Or, I can write "I feel as if I spent the entire day pushing boulders around."

"I loved my mom very much." Or, "I spent one weekend a month with Mom for the last three years of her life, taking her to garage sales, going visiting with her to her friends' homes, or just talking with her over endless cups of tea at home."

Want to Get Started?

This part wasn't covered in the workshop, and I offer it to any reader who perhaps hasn't journaled before.  Experienced journal keepers may also find an intriguing idea here to freshen their approach to their own spiritual writing journey.

Simplest: A pad of paper or spiral notebook. A pencil or pen.

Make It Special: Indulge in one of the thousands of journals available from Walmart, Target, Barnes & Noble or dozens of other stores. If you are more visual, get a bunch of colored pens and a sketchbook, which you can also find at any of those stores or at your local art store or art gallery.

I find writing in a Moleskine notebook with a fountain pen (disposable or classic) literally makes my words flow.

Let the Dogs Out: Create an altered book. Jump into the scrapbooking craze or create one out of a simple blank notebook. Get into fabric and create a journal quilt. Just be careful not to let the medium become the point instead of spiritual exploration.

Resources Suggested at Workshop

• Author Elizabeth Gilbert's TED Talk
• Writing the Sacred Journey: The Art and Practice of Spiritual Memoir by Elizabeth Andrews and her web site, www.spiritualmemoir.com
• www.ThisIBelieve.com
• www.AbbeyoftheArts.com (Recommended by a participant)
• The 3 A.M. Epiphany: Uncommon Writing Exercises that Transform Your Fiction by Brian Kiteley
• A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver

Ok, DK, it's fine to come back into the room now... 

Work-Life Balance: It's All About the Container

Work-life balance is lot like fashion. Its definition changes with seasons, trends, the economy, gender roles, and cultures.

The problem is, our life's container is time, which we perceive through the concept of a 24-hour day. All of those other influences come and go, but no one, not even Einstein and his theory of relativity, has found a way to increase the hours in a day.

Balance as a Life Stabilizer

The definition of success I work with includes goals that are stabilized by balance. Creating a dream inventory where you wish and brainstorm to your heart's content is one thing. Flooding your to-do list with tasks is another. Your sense of balance in your life is your thermostat telling you when to adjust how many goals and tasks you have in play at one time. Too many goals overwhelm you; too few goals give you little sense of fulfillment.

What Balance Is Not

All areas of your life, e.g., work, children, aging parents, home repair, finances, social life, hobbies, professional development, do not have to get equal time in order to have balance. Trying to do so will guarantee you won't have any sense of balance at all.

What makes you feel a sense of balance will change with time, life circumstances, your health, your finances, and other aspects.

There is no one perfect balance to strive for. This is where the "if onlies" can really derail you: if only I had more time, made more money, exercised more; if only the kids would clean up around the house; if only I had a more understanding boss; and so on.

The Big Rocks Story

Steven Covey in his book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, tells a story learned from an associate who attended a seminar. The seminar presenter used a glass jar, rocks, sand, and water. The jar represents your life. If you fill the jar with sand and water to fill every conceivable space (the tons of little stuff that lands on your desk), then you have no room to put in your big rocks (the people and activities that mean something to you).

Building a sense of balance in your life requires recognizing that you are dealing with an inflexible, limited boundary we call time. Just as jamming too many rocks into a glass jar will shatter it, putting too much in your life can cause painful breaks in your health and relationships.

A Practical View of the Time Container

I will go into more detail on this in a later post, but through another book I discovered that using Microsoft Outlook 2007's weekly calendar view as my "jar" works wonders in my ability to manage my time, and therefore, my sense of balance. Dealing with my life in weekly chunks with occasional forays into months and the whole year has made a world of difference in managing what I need to do and what I need to let go of.

I cannot locate the originator of my favorite definition of balance, but here it is anyway:

Balance is time for your passions.

How much time are you spending on your passions?

The Magic of "Next Action" Steps

I'm in love with David Allen. (Yes, my husband knows.) Or rather, I'm in love with his work. His book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity is now a classic in the productivity and time management fields.

I would take this book with me even if I were marooned on a desert island with no one else but a volley ball to talk to like Tom Hanks in "Cast Away."

Next Action

One notion alone makes the book worth buying and reading: Allen's definition of next action, which is the next physical, visible activity required to move a situation forward. A next action stands alone; it has no dependencies.

Project

Allen defines a project as any task that requires 2 or more next actions to complete. The book tells you how to use a Weekly Review process to clear your head. A big piece of that is to think through each project to determine the next action and a pretty good idea of when you will do it (if you're the one who's going to do it).

Pure genius.

The Typical To-Do List

Let's say you are a typical business owner, and this is your current to-do list:

1. Prep for meeting on <date> with Prospect A.
 
2. Call Client X about overdue invoice.

Of these 2 items, only #2 looks like it could be a next action. It is if you have Client X's phone number and invoice at hand for reference during the call.

In item 1, "prep" is too generic a term. That could mean anything from simply making sure you have a pad of paper and a pen to take with you to the meeting to performing hours of research on the prospect's company and industry. The former is a next action; the latter is a project.

When I understood "next action" versus a "project," it revolutionized my whole life, not just my work. Next actions and projects are two separate things entirely, yet we usually treat them the same way, that is, we put them both on our to-do list as if they require little time and effort. Then we are frustrated when we can never seem to complete the list when we set aside time to get things done.

Physical AND Visible

The crucial aspects of a next action are that it is "physical" AND "visible." As Merlin Mann points out in his blog 43 Folders, understanding this distinction wakes you up to the landmines waiting for you in your to-do list.

Don't take my word for this. You don't even need to read Allen's book to put this concept immediately to work. Take this concept for a spin. What have you got to lose besides a little time? Here are your next actions:

1. Find your to-do list. (Or write one if you don't have a list.)
2. Find / open your calendar.
3. Circle everything on the list that meets the definition of next action. (Everything else is a project.)
4. Decide how long each next action will take.
5. Assign a time and date on your calendar to each next action.

For the advanced practitioner, combine the next action concept with the 7 steps of writing a goal, and watch your productivity soar.

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What's your to-do list like? Could it use a tune-up?

Tracking Great Ideas

Is there anyone out there who truly lacks for great ideas, whether you need one for business, professional, or personal challenges?

My problem is definitely not lack of ideas. It's that there are too many of them and more coming every day from blogs, Twitter, e-newsletters, conferences I've attended, meetings, books I've read, and even some I've dreamed up myself.

This morning, while looking for something else, I stumbled across the idea journals I started when I began my business ten years ago this month. The journals worked well to collect the ideas. As I skimmed through them, though, it was clear I hadn't done much with them.

When I Google "tracking great ideas," it offers over 8 million links. The first two are go to the same article about the US Department of Defense "Great Ideas" competition. A scan through the next couple of search results pages provided no sites devoted to the idea of how to track great ideas.

After a bit of experimentation with search terms, "capturing ideas" finally brought up what I was looking for. LifeDev gives 25 Tools for Capturing Ideas Anywhere. Now, if I only had a place to download all those ideas...

As an aficionado and disciple of Getting Things Done (Amazon) by David Allen, I know the book would suggest setting up one or more file folders, one idea per 8 1/2 x 11 page. But that feels too cumbersome and requires use of paper, not very green. And I still need something to collect the idea when it hits, which more often than not is not when I'm in my office.

My main idea collector today is my Outlook Task List, which conveniently synchs with my Blackberry Tour. The Task List has become a bit of a dumping ground, though. Sorting through it for ideas means I have to ignore all those tasks with past-due dates.

So, I declare my first 2010 resolution to be:

1. Establish a system to (a) capture ideas as they come along.
2. Establish a place to store ideas I want to keep for consideration.
3. Review the list monthly to select ones to implement, archiving or discarding the rest.

How do you capture great ideas? How often do you review them and select one to do? Any suggestions?