Month: July 2009

change, fear, youth

My Year of Hopefulness – Inspiration from our younger selves

Christa Avampato
“Never let the fear of striking out get in your way.” ~ Babe Ruth

I spent a number of years touring around the country with Broadway shows. I worked on the business side, taking care of everything from contracts to financial statement to company travel. Though I learned so much and enjoyed the job, I got tired of always being on the road. I wanted to live in a community and have a life outside of my job. My sister was also having some health issues, and I was really feeling the need to be with her. So I made a little deal with myself: as soon as I had $50,000 in the bank, I could leave, move to Florida with my sister, and figure out the rest from there. That was January 2003.

When I got to Florida, I spent time with my sister, took a few classes, and had the occasional odd job. And just when I needed a really good job, one miraculously showed up and it set me off on an entirely new path that lead to a move to Washington D.C., then to business school, and finally back to New York City. I just followed my heart every step of the way and made sure my bills were paid. Those were my only two requirements.

So now here I am at a crossroads again, though I’m finding myself unable to strike up a little deal the way I did back in 2003. In my heart, I am feeling a very strong need to write full-time, and yet that leap is much more frightening this time around. Now, it could be that my hesitation is caused by increased financial obligations (business school loans) and that the economy is in shambles. It could also be that, well, I’m scared now and I wasn’t then.

Today I had to remind my 33 year old self of my younger self, that brave, bold woman who was willing to take a risk, who was willing to bank on her ability to build her own path in life. How is it that I was so brave then and more timid now? It could have been foolishness or blind ignorance that made me so brave in 2003. It could be that I just wasn’t capable of doing anything except following my heart. It’s this later explanation that I’m banking on resurrecting.

Last Fall, I wrote a post based on an assignment that I did for business school. It’s a letter I wrote to my younger self. Now what I really need is my younger self to write a letter to me. I thought maybe a letter from my younger self would shake me awake, would give me some courage, would remind me of who I am and who I’d like to be. So here goes:

Dear Christa,
How did you get where you are? I remember when all you could think of was writing and performing and creating. And now when I think of how your days pass by, I wonder what happened. Your path from A to B was not linear. There were twists and turns. My guess is that while you are surviving quite well right now, you are not thriving in all the ways you’d like to be thriving. You’re starting to feel a little trapped and lost and frustrated. That’s only natural when the heart has lost its position as your guide.

I want you to know that it’s okay that this happened. It’s okay that you needed to take care of some necessary evils like paying off loans so that you can be free to pursue your larger mission in life. Sometimes we need to take a step back in order to leap forward. Just make sure you know why you’re taking that step back, how it’s going to help you leap forward, and how long it will be before you leap.

You have big dreams – so big that you might wonder if they’re just too big for you to accomplish. You might be losing a little faith and more than a little confidence. I want you to put your fears aside. I want you to remember how fearless you were climbing trees, racing around on your bike, running so fast that you felt like you might run right out of your own body. And remember how good that fearlessness felt. I want you to remember how good it felt to be free. Completely, hopefully free.

I want you to think of your mom and your grammy, woman who always, always knew you could do anything and told you so. I want you to remember that a lot of people put a lot of faith in you and your potential. You owe it to yourself to reach out for those dreams of yours, and you also owe it to everyone else. It is your obligation, not your option, to use your gifts and talents to leave the world a better place than you found it. Don’t think about your dreams as things you may be able to do; remind yourself that these are things you’re meant to do, that you must do. Because doing anything else except fulfilling your dreams is just wasteful. And you hate to be wasteful.

Your feelings will undoubtedly be hurt from time to time. You will face rejection and sadness and lose your way. When that happens, do what you always did when you were little. Take a look at those stars. Stare at them until you realize how many miracles you’re witnessing, until you recognize that accomplishing your dreams is a small feat when compared to the tremendous work that someone somewhere put into architecting that gorgeous Milky Way. Surely, if someone could line up all those beautiful stars to create something so intricate and perfect, then you can accomplish a handful of dreams, no matter how big they are, right? Right.

Keep your chin up, and give the reins of your life back to you heart.

Love,
Bella

business, change, entrepreneurship, social change, social entrepreneurship

NY Business Strategies Examiner – Interview with Teju Ravilochan of The Unreasonable Institute

Christa Avampato

This week I had the opportunity to interview Teju Ravilochan, Connections Strategist and Co-Founder of The Unreasonable Institute. I found out about The Unreasonable Institute through Social Earth’s Twitter feed and was intrigued by the name. Some of the people I admire most consider themselves unreasonable, those who push boundaries, who work toward building a world that is far better than the world as we know it today. They strive and thrive on their creativity and imagination. Teju and the team at The Unreaonable Institute fit this bill perfectly. The Unreasonable Insttiute’s missions is to intensive training, effective collaboration, and expert guidance to provide Unreasonable social ventures the momentum to take flight.

To read the interview with Teju, click here.

family, gifts, letter, moving, relationships, writing

My Year of Hopefulness – The Things We Keep

Christa Avampato

I’m in the midst of packing up my apartment. I’m amazed at the stuff I’ve got hanging around – old yearbooks, varsity letters from high school, cards, photos, letters, journals, magazine articles I meant to read once upon a time though for the life of me can’t remember why I was interested in reading them in the first place. It’s amazing what we accumulate.

I have two large closets in my front hallway that I have dreaded packing into boxes. I knew it would be a long, arduous process and therefore put it off as long as I could. Finally, I couldn’t sleep because I was so worried about packing them up so I just got up out of bed and started the inevitable sorting, tossing, and packing of their contents. Some of the memories they contain are painful, though most of them are happy. And thankfully, the contents are so old that my mind has gleefully erased most of the sadness, loss, frustration, and unhappiness that some of their contents used to trigger, leaving behind only the good memories in their wake.

I got my love for cards and letter writing from my grandmother, Sadie. She sent cards for every occasion from birthdays to Valentine’s Day to Halloween to First Day of School. I found a stack of them in one of the boxes crammed into the top shelf of my closet. I’d know that handwriting anywhere. My grandmother passed away 9 years ago, and still I miss getting those cards in her perfect cursive handwriting.

As I re-read the cards this week, I was overwhelmed with gratitude that I kept them. It’s my own little piece of her that I can always have. I hear her voice through those cards and am reminded of how much she loved me and cherished me. It’s things like these cards that have become my most cherished possessions. They didn’t cost a lot of money and they didn’t take a lot of time to create. Their simplicity and heartfelt emotion are the only gifts I ever really needed.

entrepreneurship, Examiner, fashion, product development, women

NY Business Strategies Examiner – SPANX

Christa Avampato

One of the things I truly love about this column is that it allows me to promote entrepreneurs and products that I love. This past weekend I went to a friend’s wedding. I needed to buy a formal dress and the undergarments to go with it. I almost reached for the dreaded control-top hose, and picked up a package of SPANX instead.

For the full story of how Sara Blakely, founder of SPANX, got started, click here.

art, books, dreams, love, relationships

My Year of Hopefulness – The Velveteen Rabbit

Christa Avampato

My friend, Eric, got married this weekend. He is one of my closest friends from business school, someone who got me through many tough assignments and helped keep me sane. We also had a lot of fun together. I’m so happy that he found someone as wonderful as he is and that they’ve started their lives together.

The one reading that he and his new wife, Daphne, had at their wedding is from The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams. The quote considers the very pertinent question “What does it mean to be real?”

“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day…

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes. When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once. You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

It is the perfect allegory for starting a relationship with someone that is based on love, and therefore the perfect reading for a wedding. It’s also the perfect thing to consider for our lives in general. Our lives, from beginning to end, are based on the art of becoming.

As we grow older we develop new interests and relationships and dreams. Some we accomplish, others die away without coming to fruition for one reason or another, and still others have yet to be found. The end process of becoming is to be real. Authentically, imperfectly, beautifully an individual who will never be replicated nor replaced.

The process of becoming takes patience, with ourselves and with others. It can’t be rushed. We can’t skip to the end to see how it turns out. We can’t work backwards and engineer our way into the best possible ending. It can only be created forward. There will be unexpected instances that must be folded into the process, some will be welcome changes, strokes of luck and genius, and others may be painful and sad. They all matter and all contribute to the piece of art, the life, we get in the end.

Becoming real is not easy. It takes work and perseverance, compromise and sacrifice. And it requires that we take the long-view, always. There will be moments of great triumph and great loss. Those losses are the risks we take and the price we pay for actively living and participating in the world around us, the risks and price for becoming real. And those triumphs and happy moments, big and small, are what make it all worthwhile.

goals, time

My Year of Hopefulness – Time Remaining

Christa Avampato

I had to take a training class today online and in the lower right-hand corner was the familiar progress bar telling me how much time there was remaining for the session. The training was a little dull so I had plenty of time to think about that progress bar, and how much I’d like to have a progress bar for other areas of my life. While in DC this weekend, I was reminded how calming it is to have those electronic boards that tell passengers many minutes until their trains arrive. Knowing how much longer we have to go through something helps us to manage the process of getting through it.

Trouble is that progress bars in most areas of our life are nonexistent. We don’t know how much longer a job or relationship or our health will last. We usually aren’t able to gauge how much longer it will before we reach a certain goal. There are bumps and twists and turns on every road. Some set us back, some help us leap forward, and some set us on a new course entirely. There’s no electronic board to calm us down.

We could consider that every day is its only small progress bar, and our only goal is to get to the end of the day having given all our activities everything we’ve got. That way no matter how much time we have left, we can be assured that we gave as much as we had, worked as hard as we could, laughed and smiled and enjoyed every minute like it was our last. The best case scenario is that we’ll get to do it all over again tomorrow, making a little more progress in our lives, and the worst case scenario is that we put our best foot forward right up until the end.

blogging, writing

My Year of Hopefulness – How to reach a tipping point

Christa Avampato

This week was a good one in the writing department. I was humming along right at the start of the week, and have been off and running since. It’s a long slow climb to remake ourselves, to truly learn a new skill from the inside out. I started writing every day two years ago, after 31 years of just wanting to be a writer.

I didn’t know what to do so I just began. First with this blog, then with Examiner.com, and now as a guest blogger on sites like Rypple and small call outs in publications like the Wall Street Journal and DailyWorth. Next week I’m joining a new team blogging effort, details to follow in a later post, and this Fall I’ll be writing a blog for the Transport Group on their Fall production of The Boys in the Band.

My friend and mentor, Richard, has been listening to my writing plan for some time now and was the first to say, “at some point, the switch will flip and you’ll find a way to make all this investment in your writing pay off.” He’s talking about a tipping point. Until this week, I didn’t realize that the surest way to that tipping point in writing isn’t only about hunkering down and pounding out the words on my Mac. It’s just as much about connection and kinship with others. To get to a tipping point, we have to let others in and give others the opportunity to invite us in as well.

My writing tipping point may still be a long way off. I’m not there yet, but for the first time in two years, I think I might be getting to that point Richard talks about. At least I see it out there on the horizon. I’m just not sure how far away that horizon is compared to where I am right now. And that’s okay. A little light keeps me going.

The photo above can be found at: http://phlogthat.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/img_7592.jpg

career, creative process, creativity, discovery, entrepreneurship, friendship, invention, job, relationships, science

My Year of Hopefulness – Lots of ideas

Christa Avampato

“The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” ~ Linus Pauling, American scientist

It’s a romantic ideal that in a flash of insight we finally come up with a brilliant idea to overcome some challenge. Truth is it takes us time to wrestle a problem to the ground. Lots of ideas have to be considered, tried, tested, and tweaked to get us to an elegant solution.

While Linus Pauling was referencing his own work in science, his quote applies to many areas. Where we live, where we work, and who we spend our time with can take some trial and error before we strike just the right place and people. This is my third try at living in New York, and I think I got it right this time. There have been a lot of ups and downs over the 10 years since I first moved here. Finally, I found a way to make this place home.

Pauling’s quote also holds up in entrepreneurship, too. I’ve now been doing interviews with a variety of entrepreneurs for five months and I’ve asked each of them for advice to others who are considering starting a business. All of them have said to give it a shot, recognizing that it takes a couple of years to really get a business off the ground. We might need to kick around a number of different ideas for businesses before we hit upon one that makes our hearts sing, that makes us want to dive in with everything we’ve got to make it work.

Having lots of ideas requires patience and persistence. We have to be willing to try and try again, and again and again. We need to be patient with ourselves and believe in the slow steady process that leads to true insight and learning. Flashes of quick genius happen once in a while. What is a much more of a sure bet is that if we keep trying new ideas, one will certainly rise to the top.

The photo above is Linus Pauling holding a molecular model. It can be found at: http://osulibrary.orst.edu/specialcollections/coll/pauling/pauling-qv09-198xi.050.jpg

dreams, friendship, music, New York City

My Year of Hopefulness – New York as Neverland

Christa Avampato

If you’re looking for a fountain of youth, consider living in New York City. If it’s your fervent desire to grow up, be a realist, and take life very seriously then this might not be the place for you. This week in particular I’ve noticed the dreamy quality of New York. It’s a place that cultivates and perpetuates dreams of all kinds. In New York, I always feel possibility just around the corner. You really can be anything here.

During the summer, the many outdoor events remind me of everything that New York has to offer and how many people there are to meet just outside the front door. This week, the New York Philharmonic performs their two annual free concerts in Central Park. In all the years I’ve lived in New York, I’ve never seen one of these concerts until this year. My friend, Brandi, left New York this week for greener pastures in DC and a group of us got together for the concert to bid her a fond farewell which none of us are happy about. Brandi goes to this concert every year, and wanted to make sure to catch this one, her last as a New York City resident.

Brandi arrived first, getting us an excellent space in the middle section. From that vantage point we were in the middle of a wonderfully positive energy. The Park was packed, and during the evening I grew more and more grateful for the great diversity housed in this tiny island. Even on our small blanket, different groups of friends joined together from different walks of life to enjoy the event.

In the middle of the Park, I was reminded just how many people live in New York, and how unique each of their stories are. I could hear the laughter from every corner mixing with the music. People were sharing the details of their days. Reminiscing. Talking about what they hoped for and dreamed of. Some people were celebrating and others explained their gratitude for the amazing weather and the opportunity to be together. Flashbulbs were going off all around us as people snapped photos to remember the occasion.

The New York Phil’s concerts represent New York at its best. The many voices coming together, paths converging. Before we left the park, I took a look around, happy to live in a place that constantly changes and yet always feels like home, a place where anything and everything is possible. As the closing fireworks went off, for a moment I actually believed that I could reach out and touch them if I really wanted to. It’s the happy side effect of being a city that makes you feel like you can fly.

career, economy, Examiner, finance, financing, job, money, personal finance, women, work

NY Business Strategies Examiner – Interview with Amanda Steinberg, Founder of DailyWorth

Christa Avampato

“No one is going to fix financial inequity for women. We have to recognize our own self-worth, ask for higher salaries, invest more aggressively, and build our own wealth.” ~ Amanda Steinberg, DailyWorth Founder

For my interview with Amanda, please visit: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-2901-NY-Business-Strategies-Examiner~y2009m7d15-Interview-with-Amanda-Steinberg-Founder-of-DailyWorth