Month: May 2013

celebration

Beautiful: Something to Celebrate

Christa Avampato

“Those who wish to sing, always find a song.” ~ Swedish proverb

If ever you find yourself with nothing to celebrate, here’s a list that I hope will help:

The sunshine and the rain
Trees draped in leaves of any color or in snow
Smiles and tears that remind us how deeply we can love
Times of plenty and not-so-plenty because they help us appreciate what we have
Dreams fulfilled and those we must release because they show us that a new dream is just a thought away
Courage and fear because they let us know that we are on the right track

As long as we’re learning, every experience has value. Give it its due.

change, time

Beautiful: There is No Great Rush to Change so Take Your Time

Christa Avampato

In yoga, we hold postures for a very specific reason – when we ask our bodies to assume a posture, our muscles have an initial reaction. As we hold the posture, it develops. Our muscles give a bit more ground. Our minds settle down. We give ourselves time to adjust, and with that time we find that we can go further. In waiting and holding, we have time to reflect. Reflection helps us find our edge and our potential.

There is certainly a time for action, for embracing change even when it seems like it’s coming at us fast and furious. But there is also a lot of value in giving ourselves time to adjust. Just because change has arrived does not mean that we have to take all of it at once. In truth, we don’t have to take any of it. The only thing we have to do is consider it and let the answer rise up organically. In other words, we hold and wait for more information.

Often holding and waiting is equated with stagnation, and sometimes that association is valid. But it’s not the only association that can be made. Even in the midst of swirling, whirling change, it’s okay to slow down. It’s okay to take it easy and give ourselves time to decide which parts of the change we really want. Change is not an all or nothing game. It’s a menu. We choose which parts of that menu work best for us.

Rarely is change precipitated by some magical force from beyond that forces us down one path or the other. Most of the time, our lives change through our own deliberate actions. Yes, there will be things that happen that are beyond our control. But we always govern our actions in response to what happens in the world around us. We build our own road, and we’d be wise to put some speed bumps in there. Take all the time you need.

books, eating, food, health

Beautiful: Mark Bittman, My Parents, and I Are Part-Time Vegans

Christa Avampato

“Hi Gang! Guess what? Oh, you’ll never guess in a million years so I’ll just tell you. We’re becoming vegans and tonight we launched the operation.” This from my mother who is 71 glorious years old and a passionate omnivore. Their chiropractor has recommended a vegan diet to improve overall health so they’re going for it. If Bill Clinton, fast food’s most loyal customer, can do it, so can we. Somewhere, Mark Bittman is smiling wide.

Ironically (or as my therapist, Brian, would say – synchronistically), when my mother’s email arrived I had just started reading Mark Bittman’s new book, VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health . . . for Good. Her email flew into my inbox about 6 hours after I read the intro to Mark’s book and I thought, “You know, I should send this book to my mom.” Oh, Universe…

I’ve failed at being a vegan, and for that matter being a vegetarian, for many years. That Mister Softee song starts playing on my block, and I’m done for. (Mister Softee and Access Hollywood Live – my guilty pleasures.) It’s been a sore point with me for some time and I had all but resigned myself to never being able to live up to my dietary potential. I know being a vegan is better for me and for the planet. And I love animals, very often more than I love people, so why couldn’t I just do it?!

And then Mark Bittman gave me permission to try on veganism on a part-time basis. Now this kind of deal is music to my ears. His plan is simple – give up highly processed food (okay, I can let go of Mister Softee in favor of real ice cream but do not ask me to give up Billy Bush!), eat more plants, and be a vegan until 6pm. Once 6pm rolls around, I’m free to eat whatever I want. There’s nothing magical about 6pm. There isn’t even anything magical about making dinner your non-vegan meal. He’s saying give yourself one meal to have whatever you want and then be a vegan the rest of the time. He even gave me permission to slip up and fall flat on my face off the vegan wagon once in a while. And then he told me that I can always just start again.

This is similar to the advice that I got when I first really started to learn how to meditate. I had tried for a number of years, wouldn’t feel anything happening, and give up. Then, I read some advice from Sri Swami Satchidananda. “When you notice your mind wandering, just come back. It happens to everyone. You don’t have to give up. Just start again.” Now three years later, I’m still practicing meditation and teaching it to others without any kind of angst or sense of inadequacy. Failure is only permanent if we allow it to be.

And so, I started right then and there to be a part-time vegan, after beginning Mark’s book and reading my mom’s email. I didn’t need to plan to start. It wasn’t hard; I didn’t need to analyze it and make a pro / con / consequences / “oh crap, what am I going to do if this doesn’t work out” list. I just decided to begin. Want to join me?

community, karma, kindness, time

Beautiful: It’s Time to Do Your Bit of Goodness

Christa Avampato
From Pinterest

“Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.” ~ Desmond Tutu

You’re a kind and generous person. You have empathy and compassion and you want to make it all better for everyone everywhere. It’s noble, but also a path to paralysis.

We can be overwhelmed by all of the people in the world who need what we have to offer and what we’re willing to give. We often feel like the problems we face as a society are so large that we can’t fix them. And so we wait. We stall. We hope that one day we’ll wake up with that one brilliant idea that will let us have the degree of impact we want to have.

Whenever I feel like this, and it’s more often than I’d like it to be, I remind myself of this quote by Mr. Tutu.

Today we will not fix the whole world. Tomorrow we probably won’t do that either. But today, right now, there is something we can do. Something small, right where we are. We have to remind ourselves of the ripple effect – that beautiful phenomenon that causes the kindness of one person to become contagious and inspire kind acts of others.

We also have to remember that one small good act is not any better than any other. What you do for one person right now is as valuable as what you do for 100, 1,000, or 1,000,000 people because to that one person it might just mean everything. It might just turn their day around, their life around, and there are so many people who will benefit from that, most of whom we will never know and never meet.

What you can do is enough. The important thing is that you do it. Let the Universe worry about how your goodness ripples through the world. You just make sure that the goodness exists.

career, dreams, time

Beautiful: My Summer by the Sea in Santa Monica, California

Christa Avampato

I found a way to get my summer by the sea. In January, I wrote a blog post about my wish to spend the summer in California. Less than a month later, I received a comment on that post asking me if I’d be interested in a free place to stay in Santa Monica. I thought a friend of mine must have written it and was pulling my leg. It was no joke. It’s a done deal – I’ll be spending 8 weeks in Santa Monica, California this summer. The moral of the story – if you have a wish, shout about it. Someone will hear you and help you.

“What are you going to do out there?” many people have asked. My number one priority will be to take a break and re-calibrate my life and career goals. I started my own consulting practice almost a year ago and I didn’t take any time off between leaving my corporate job and starting my business. I’m now that kind of tired that sleep can’t fix. I need to get away, clear my head, and rest. I also need to go hiking in the canyons, do a lot of yoga and meditation, walk barefoot on the beach with Phin bounding in and out of the surf, and cook ridiculously delicious fresh food thanks to Santa Monica’s gorgeous farmers market. I’ve also got some side trips planned as well – Hawaii, I’m on my way!

And then….I’ve got a lot of plans that are still in their infancy. I’m sorting through all of the options, but here’s what is on the table:

1.) Continue my work learning how to code via a number of free online options like Codecademy so that I can better appreciate the role of programmers in technology-driven businesses. Having worked on the business side of tech for a number of years, I believe that every business person has to have a deep understanding of technology if she wants to be competitive in the marketplace. Eventually, knowing how to code will be as common place as knowing word processing. I want to be well-prepared when that day arrives, and it’s not too far off.

2.) Connect with the startup and design communities in LA via the General Assembly office that is conveniently located down the street from the condo where I’ll be staying. They also offer great classes and events where I hope to meet a lot of good people.

3.) Work on writing projects that have been on the back burner for too long.

4.) Cultivate partnerships, products, and programs for Compass Yoga.

5.) Work on some new business ideas that focus on products I’ll produce rather than services like consulting.

6.) Decide if I will continue down the consulting path in the second year of my business, pivot and move to a product model, or return to working full-time or part-time in a leadership role at a small company with a solid mission to make the world a better place.

In the next 7 and a half weeks, I’ve got some decisions to make and plans to put in place. One thing’s for certain – this is going to be a summer to remember!

business, corporation, philanthropy, yoga

Beautiful: Compass Yoga Begins a Corporate Yoga and Meditation Program To Further Our Mission

Christa Avampato

Compass Yoga is working hard to get more yoga to more people in more places. We now teach well over 200 people per week in a dozen classes with a team of a dozen tremendously talented teachers. We’ve been applying for grant funding so that we can expand our reach online and off.

In addition to philanthropic funds, we have also started to reach out to companies to establish corporate yoga programs that will generate a new revenue stream to support our work in the community.

Why companies should partner with Compass:
It is daunting for a company to construct, manage, and assess a yoga program. I have worked for the Walt Disney Company, The Home Depot, Toys R Us, and American Express as a product developer. I know first-hand that corporate employess are increasingly being asked to do more with less, and that is particularly true for human resource professionals inside these companies.

Enter Compass Yoga, a New York City-based nonprofit that focuses on improving the health of all people by teaching therapeutic yoga and meditation classes. For two years, we have partnered with the New York Public Library to bring over a dozen weekly classes to communities in Manhattan. Our incredibly talented and dedicated group of teachers provides open level classes that are suitable for all levels from beginner to advanced.

What companies get by partnering with Compass:
– Receive open-level yoga and meditation classes, pre- and post-natal, and therapeutics for those who have health challenges.

– Support a nonprofit that is helping underserved communities where your employees live and work. Currently we teach open level classes, senior chair yoga classes, and we are putting together the city’s first free pre- and post-natal evening yoga program through the New York Public Library.

– Benefit from the highest levels of professionalism and customer service in the yoga industry as well as regular qualitative and quantitative assessments of the program to help us craft a customized program that perfectly suits your company.

Why companies need corporate yoga:
On Tuesday, March 19th, Arianna Huffington co-hosted Squawk Box. Her guest that day was Mark Bertolini, CEO of Aetna. To increase both the quality of life for its employees and its bottom line, Aetna has invested in a corporate yoga program for all of its 30,000 employees to help them decreased stress levels and health care costs while increasing creativity, productivity, and performance.

The research
A quick snapshot of the costs of chronic stress are astonishing and explains why Mr. Bertolini has placed wellness at the forefront of his human resources strategy:

– The World Health Organization puts the cost of stress to American businesses is as high as $300 billion per year.

– The CDC estimates that 75% of all health care spending goes toward preventable chronic illnesses like diabetes and high blood pressure. High blood pressure alone costs $130 billion per year to treat. 

– The American Academy of Family Physicians found that 2/3 of doctor visits are for preventable stress-related conditions.

Additionally, Michael Porter, Elizabeth Teisberg, and Scott Wallace recently published research findings in HBS Working Knowledge, that showed that U.S employers spend 200 – 300% more for the indirect costs of health care — in the form of absenteeism, sick days, and lower productivity — than they do on actual health care payments. Their main recommendation to employers is to “mount an aggressive approach to wellness, prevention, screening and active management of chronic conditions.”

If your company would like to find out more, we’d love to hear from you! Contact us. 

choices, decision-making, generosity, grateful, gratitude, story

Beautiful: Share Your Good News

Christa Avampato

“Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be. How much you can love. What you can accomplish. And what your potential is.” ~ Anne Frank

It’s important to share your dreams and triumphs. First, people who love you and care about you want to hear about them. I would argue that more importantly you never know just who will be inspired by them and how much that inspiration will alter the course of someone else’s life. You’ve lived your story; the life you’ve created is the result. Stories in and of themselves do not have value. It is the sharing of those stories that makes them valuable. Sharing gives us time to reflect on them and it lets others do the same. When we keep our stories to ourselves, we never realize their full potential.

So go up to the highest mountain top and shout about it. Tell people what you’ve done, and how and why and what you plan to do with everything you learned in the process. Listen to their questions and do your best to answer them. Tell them what your fears were and how you overcame them. Explain your gratitude and thank those who helped you along the way. Talk about your choices and their consequences. Share what you would do differently the next time around. Help others learn from your mistakes.

We have so much to gain by telling our tales and others have so much to learn from hearing them. Be a hero. Share your news.

choices, decision-making, time

Beautiful: The Time It Takes to Make a Decision

Christa Avampato
From Pinterest

“A peacefulness follows any decision, even the wrong one.” ~ Rita Mae Brown, American writer

Decision-making can be an agonizing process. We flip-flop between choices, write pro-con lists until our hands cramp, lose sleep, and wrestle with opportunity costs of going one way or the other. However, whenever I actually make a choice, I find that a peace settles over me, regardless of the choice I make.

When I began to consider leaving my corporate job to go out on my own as a freelancer, my mind began an endless debate of “should I or shouldn’t I?” When I first started Compass Yoga and was trying to settle on the appropriate business model, I would make a choice, try it out, assess its value, and then change it until I found that a nonprofit model worked best. These were two very different processes because the stakes for each were very different. Despite the difference in the stakes, I learned so much about the process of decision-making and its effect on my psyche.

Even though I tried many different ideas with Compass, I never experienced the angst I had with making the decision to leave my corporate job. I made a number of choices early on with Compass that weren’t quite right but I never regretted any of those decisions. When it was clear that my choice wasn’t the right one, I just let it go and quickly made a different choice. With my corporate job, I took a long time to make one choice. The feeling of angst had nothing to do with the stakes; it had everything to do with the time it took me to make a choice.

We often delay decisions because we are afraid of making the wrong choice. The truth is that we can’t think our way through this process. We have to make a choice, sit with it, and see how it feels. If I can make a decision quickly and confidently, I do it. (Hint: meditation helps!) I know that no matter what the outcome, I am strong enough to change course if need be. If a quick decision isn’t possible and I really can’t see a clear path, I try this trick: I make a choice in my mind and walk around with it for a few days. That simple act lets me see how the decision sits with me, in my body and my mind. If it feels right, then I go with it. If it doesn’t, then I make another choice and start the process again.

What do you do when you have a decision to make and can’t clearly see which option is the best for you? 

learning, technology, time

Beautiful: Taking My Time – My (Slow) Adventures as a Novice Computer Programmer

Christa Avampato

I have re-started my adventures in computer programming. I’ve worked on the business and user experience side of tech projects for 5 years, though I’ve never learned to program. I’ve had a couple of stops and starts over the past year or so. I’ve been working on acquiring basic HTML and CSS skills, and that’s been fairly easy to pick up. Now with MOOCs (Massive Online Open Courses such as those on Coursera) and wonderful online services like Codecademy and Skillcrush, anyone can learn just about anything online and for free. This is particularly true for people like me who want to learn how to program.

After writing a review of a book about Python (a program language that is touted as bring especially friendly due to its plain-speaking syntax) by No Starch Press, I became interested in learning this powerful, yet approachable, programming language. I signed up for a Python program with Coursera. I really enjoyed the lectures, but when it came to completing the assignments, I couldn’t keep up. The lectures and resources from the course are fantastic but they move from one topic to the other much too quickly for me.

As any programmer will tell you, coding is a contact sport. You actually have to do it, not just read and hear about it, in order to really understand it. I needed to learn at a slower pace than what was possible with Coursera. I’m a beginner and this new learning adventure is tough for me. I need to take one step at a time at my own pace. The basics in any subject are important, and this is especially true for programming. If you don’t understand the basics, you literally can’t understand anything beyond the basics. It’s a brick-by-brick process. You need the foundation to be steady and stable before you can build your programming house. There’s no bs’ing it in programming. Either you can write code that returns the results you want, or you can’t. (There are certainly plenty of open source resources to copy from, but even with those you have to know what you’re looking for in order to find something that’s of value to you.) 

I went back to my old standby, Codecademy, where I started learning basic HTML and CSS, and to my delight they have added Python and Ruby (another language I would like to learn) to their offering. Codecademy is just what I need. Practical, straight-forward exercises that give bite-size pieces of new knowledge that I can acquire at my own pace. Additionally, they have added a groups functionality to the site so users can join different groups based upon their interests and levels of experience in different programming languages.

I feel good about the decision to leave Coursera for later work and focus on getting through the Codecademy curriculum. As I did 6 years ago when I decided I wanted to learn how to write well, I’m making a commitment to do at least one small Codecademy lesson every day and periodically I’ll share what I’m learning with all of you. (Maybe some of you fearless souls would lIke to join me? If so, ping me!) A daily commitment did wonders for my writing and I now make a portion of my living from it. Why not do the same thing for programming? Copy, paste, success.

friendship, Life, love, relationships, stress, work, youth

Beautiful: How to Survive a Quarter Life Crisis

Christa Avampato

I am a trendsetter – I was having a quarter life crisis long before it was in fashion. 25 year olds, I hear you. I know exactly how it feels to be sitting at your desk that you busted your ass to get by working hard in school and plunging yourself deep into student loan debt, and be haunted by the thought, “Is this it?” (For the record, there are plenty of people of all ages in companies large and small who are thinking the exact same thing and they don’t have any answers wiser than yours.)

Now that you’re 3 years out of college, you may have officially established a fair amount of distance from a friend circle that is literally next door. People get busy. They change. And sometimes we don’t change with them. This is an awful truth about aging of any degree. Times change us.

Maybe you’re in a great relationship, a bad relationship, or no relationship at all. Unfortunately, we’re bombarded in our society by images of happy couples that have no problems and are eternally in love, expect of course in all of the tabloids that we can’t get away from that show love is miserable for everyone. Either way, we’re getting really ugly messages about love and they’re causing us to have unrealistic and harmful expectations, both good and bad, of ourselves and others. In 37 years, this is what I’ve learned about love: we can only expect to get what we give freely.

Add all of this up – the job, the friends, the relationship – and who wouldn’t have a quarter life crisis?

I’ve got one magic bullet for you and you’re not going to like it but it got me through my quarter life crisis (and my 1/3 life crisis, for that matter) and I hope it helps you, too. Stop everything. Put aside your work, friends, relationships, family, bills, responsibilities, worries, disappointments, and fears for 5 minutes every day. Close your eyes, one hand on the heart, one hand on the belly. Breathe so loud in and out through your nose that you drown out the noise of your brain. Get lost in your breath and the absolute f’ing miracle that is you.  

Your parents, friends, teachers, the media, and even our President have told you can do anything you want to do. They told you that you can be anything you want to be. And you can, but here’s the part they didn’t tell you – no one is going to make it happen for you. You have to make it happen for you. Don’t bet on someone else to help you get the life you want. Betting on yourself is a much better bet. You can create it with your own two hands. And that process begins by slowing down.

I know this is not the answer you wanted. It’s certainly not the answer I wanted because it was going to take too long, be too hard, and no one seemed to be willing to guarantee results for me. But I tried everything else, and I mean EVERYTHING else, and it didn’t work. Peace is a daily process; we must constantly tend to it and the only thing that makes that possible is to go in, slow down, and listen to our breath and the beat of our hearts. It’s still the only thing that works for me even today, many years post quarter life.

From one quarter life crisis survivor to another, just try it. Try it for a week. See how it feels. And if you’ve got questions, contact me. Seriously. I want to hear from you and I want to help.