Happy Halloween. May all your candy-getting, scare-inducing dreams come true. My Halloween costume? Karma baby. Karma. Be safe, trick-or-treaters!
Beautiful: This Halloween, I’ll Be Karma
Month: October 2013
Beautiful: With Time and Commitment, We Get the Lives and Careers We Want
About 10 years ago, my sister, Weez, had a difficult health issue. (Don’t worry – she is completely healed, healthy, and sassy now.) In those scary days, her doctor said something that has always struck me as quite possibly the best thing that any doctor has ever said to anyone facing an illness. “I don’t fish. I don’t play golf. I am a doctor. This is my hobby. It’s all I do.” For all the talk about balance between work and life, this doctor’s maniacal focus on his work was exactly what my sister needed to hear.
Rather than building careers that we need a break from, that wear us out and deplete us to the point that a vacation is the only remedy, what if we find a way to build careers that build us up and give us energy? What if we all had careers that mattered so much to us that a separation between work and life was unnecessary, unwanted?
I know this may sound like la-la land to some people. It certainly did to me a few years ago, though now this is exactly the career I have. I wake up every day and write. What I used to do as a hobby on the side is now my focus. I write early in the morning and late into the night. I shut it down when my eyes grow tired or when Phineas lets me know it’s time for his late evening walk before he puts himself to bed, whichever comes first. I work a lot of hours, every day, and I don’t mind at all because I work at the craft that helped me build a life I love, no balancing act required.
I want you to know it’s possible. Even if you have a lot of difficulties, even if all you’ve known is difficulties, it can happen. The only reason I can say this with such confidence is because I came from very tough circumstances. Every step on this journey was tough and took a great deal of effort, and that’s okay. I wanted this enough to work hard for it. It takes planning, patience, time, and passion. I have to commit every day to this path, and it’s still not easy. It is always worth it. Every day, I wrap it up and say thank you because I know just how amazing it is to finally be right here, in this place, doing exactly what I love. I’m a writer, a working writer, exactly what I always wanted to be.
Beautiful: Don’t Hedge. Commit. Be Yoda.
A few weeks ago, I watched an interview with Bryan Cranston of Breaking Bad fame. When he first started out, he met a lot of people who said they were giving their creative dream a shot for a year. If they didn’t have any success in a year, then they would pack up and go home. “That was amazing to me,” he said. “It takes so much longer than a year to realize a dream.”
This is exactly the reason I’m working on a new book, Your Second Step. You’ve taken your first step – you’ve identified your dream and you’ve started working on it – maybe part-time, maybe full-time. Maybe you haven’t seen the success you’d hoped for in the timeline you planned. So should you pack it in? Should you start to work on something else and come back to it later? In other words, should you hedge your bets?
Put aside any disappointment. Go back to the dream itself. Does it still matter to you? If the answer is yes, then don’t hedge and don’t give up. Commit. Double down. Invest more time and more energy, not less. Be Yoda. Don’t try. Do. And keep doing. Don’t back down now. You’re closer to your dream than you think.
Looking for 20 College Students to Write Essays for CentralPark.com
I just started a new project for CentralPark.com. I am curating 20 essays about Central Park written by college students. Essays will be roughly 500 words and can be about any aspect of Central Park. The essays can be from a wide variety of angles – a treasured memory of the park, the meaning of Central Park to the student, a recent event or experience the student had in Central Park, the history of the park, etc. Do you know a college student who is a good writer and interested in submitting a piece for consideration? Please send them my way – christa.avampato@gmail.com. Thank you!
Beautiful: We Have to Close Our Eyes to Really See
“Here is my secret. It is very simple. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry from The Little Prince
“70% of our perception of the outside world comes through the eyes,” said my yoga teacher, Julia. I didn’t realize it was that disproportionate. The eyes are so powerful, so sophisticated that they overpower our other senses if we let them. Close the eyes, and we can hear, feel, smell, and taste with greater intensity. The information from these 4 senses is just as important as our sense of sight. Our combined senses lead us into our emotional intelligence. We need this give-and-take between our internal and external experiences. Together, they create the whole picture of our existence and help us to “see” clearly.
For a few minutes every day, I close my eyes during my waking hours and tap in. I scan my body for signs of change. I feel the ebb and flow of my breath. One of my favorite meditations is a sensory exploration. I imagine a place I’ve been or a place I’d like to go and I rotate through all of the senses to create a complete picture. What does the beach look like? How does it sound? What scents does it have? How does it taste? What does it feel like? And finally, how does it make me feel? This only takes a couple of minutes, and when I finally do open my eyes again, I find that a little piece of the beach is still with me. I carry right there, in my heart, and also in my nose, on my skin, in my mind’s eyes and ears, and even on my tongue.
From there, my experience of the world around me is richer because of what I’ve been able to imagine. Now I see not only what’s right in front of me, but also what’s possible which is almost always invisible to the eyes alone.
Beautiful: Practice and Invest in Yourself – More Lessons from Voice Over Land
These are my two big lessons from voice over land this week:
1.) Practice pays off.
2.) When we’re trying to develop a new skill, private classes help us move ahead faster than collective, generic classes.
A couple of years ago I took a group voice over class and it was fun. I learned some basic skills, general guidelines about commercial voice over work, and details about the voice over market in New York. What I didn’t get, and needed, was refinement. I needed specific feedback on my work. When I was in California this summer, I started to think about pursuing voice overs more seriously. I phoned my voice over teacher from the class and inquired about taking the next step. He suggested private lessons.
I hesitated for a split second because private lessons aren’t cheap. Neither is making a demo. I quickly realized that if I really wanted to make a go of this, or at least give it my all, I needed to think of this money as an investment, not a cost. So I bit the financial bullet and went for it.
So far, so good. In four private lessons, and with a solid number of hours of listening to commercials, transcribing them, recording myself performing them, and listening to the playback, I’m now ready to make a demo. My coach’s advice and attention in private lessons has been invaluable and my own investment of time and effort to listen, practice, and self-critique have helped me grow by leaps and bounds in a very short period of time. If all goes according to plan, a demo leads to an agent and an agent (along with personally pounding the proverbial pavement) leads to paid work.
I’m only at step 2 – I’ll record my demo November 11th with my coach and hopefully get this show on the road. Here we go – preparing for take off. Let’s see where this path takes me next. You’ll get the news as it happens…
Beautiful: I Dream About Recording History As It Happens
Yesterday I sat up in bed before my early alarm, grabbed by iPad, and wrote down this post as it gushed into my brain:
“Snap your pictures. Get down these lines of text. Record history as it happens. Some day you’ll need this to see how far you’ve come, to bring you comfort when you feel like you still have so far to go, when you feel like everything is lost.
Time is a plastic surgeon. It does funny things to us, to our memory of yesterday. And all the yesterdays that came before. It covers the bumps and bruises and scrapes. It dulls the pain. It sands the rough edges and rounds out the sharp and jagged corners that were so hard to navigate. It makes everything soft. When we record our days as they happen, when we literally chart our experience, we get the real story.
And we need the real story. We need to remember what we’ve been through so we can fully appreciate where we are and all of the people who made the journey possible.”
I’m not sure where this came from, but I’m sure glad these words and the ideas they convey arrived.
Beautiful: Yes, I Want to Help You
“I know you’re busy but can I ask for your advice on….”
I get a lot of inquiries from friends and readers that start this way. They ask if they can ask me for advice about their project. My answer, always: YES, a thousand times yes. I want to help you and promote you and hear your ideas. A business idea, a product idea, a blog idea, a social media project. I am busy; everyone is. I make time to support others. It matters that much.
My Social Media Strategy: Wrapping It Up with LinkedIn, Tumblr, Vine, Google+, and Klout
Over the last few days, I’ve talked about why social media is so important to me and how I think about and use my existing channels. Here are a few others that I use with less frequency and focus, though they certainly are worthy of mention:
LinkedIn – My account: Christa Avampato
I am active on LinkedIn in terms of accepting and sending connection requests. Though it’s making a lot of improvements, I still find it to be much clunkier than a lot of other platforms. Because it is a professional social network, I accept 99.9% of all connection requests. I don’t post personal information there and mostly use it when I am searching for a contact in my network at a specific company.
Tumblr – My blog: Born Into Color
Because I house my long form blog here on WordPress, I’m not 100% sure how to incorporate Tumblr into my social media strategy for my business. I certainly am having fun with it. The beauty of Tumblr is that it is incredibly easy to upload many different varieties of content. Ironically, the form of content that doesn’t seem to get as much traction on Tumblr is long-form writing like I do here on my blog. (Of course there are certainly exceptions to this!) On Tumblr, I post pictures, video, quotes, art, and I reblog a lot of content that I find interesting and intriguing. Re-blogging is incredibly easy on Tumblr. It also easily connects to Instagram so I do a bit of cross-posting between the two platforms.
Vine
Vine is Twitter’s video tool. When they launched it in January they described it as, “a mobile service that lets you capture and share short looping videos. Like Tweets, the brevity of videos on Vine (6 seconds or less) inspires creativity.” I literally just downloaded the app this week so I’ve not yet populated it with any original content though I plan to start doing some quick videos in the next couple of week. Once your download the vine app, you’ll find me as @christanyc, the same handle as my Twitter feed.
Google+ – My account: Christa Avampato
Google pretty much runs my life – my calendars, my contacts, my email for all of my accounts, my smart phone, and my shared documents. It keeps track of where I need to go, who I need to see, and what I need to do. So it’s with a little surprise that I just can’t seem to figure out why Google+ should be important to me. I’ve read oodles of article on it and spent a fair amount of time playing around with its capabilities. It still seems rather shallow to me and not up-to-par with the steady stream brilliance that flows from Google. If you have advice on this platform, I will gladly take it!
And now…a word about Klout
On Monday I wrote an article on Klout in preparation for the ad:tech conference. (It’s already received almost 6,000 views, which is a testament to people’s curiosity about it!) Klout is a social media tools that traffic’s social influence of individuals. It’s becoming a powerful tool for brands, agencies, and individuals alike. Given its success, we are likely to see many more tools like it in the coming years. You can read my post here on Klout: http://www.allvoices.com/contributed-news/15788893-got-klout-the-meaning-behind-your-social-media-numbers
I hope this series on social media has been helpful in thinking about your own social strategies and channels. I’m always glad to answer questions, offer advice, and hear suggestions so feel free to ping me at christa (at) chasingdownthemuse (dot) com. The social media world is a lot like the lottery – you’ve gotta be in it to win it. Let’s connect!
Beautiful: A Lesson in Yoga – Anxiety and Grief Need to Be Exercised Before We Can Breathe
Lately I’ve had unexpected opportunities to talk about yoga and meditation in the context of the health challenges I faced following my apartment building fire. Yesterday my eyes were closed but I could feel the hush of the whirling, swirling minds as I taught meditation to a room full of community aid workers who continue to assist people affected by Hurricane Sandy. My job was to give them a set of tools to use in their work.
After a few techniques, I opened up the floor for questions. One woman asked me how to help people who are in throes of heavy anxiety. In the moments when we need it most, access to our breath as a tool to calm down can fail us. It’s also true that in the deep dark moments of my own PTSD if someone had told me to “close my eyes and just breathe”, I would told them to F- off. And then I would have apologized profusely for being so rude and then explained that I couldn’t help it because in a state of high anxiety, my mind and body are not my own.
In the aftermath of my fire, I would run long distances, working my body to the point of total exhaustion. I would do 20, 30, 40 sun salutations on my yoga mat until I collapsed in a heap on the floor. Only then could I access my breath. Only then would that awful continuous loop of “what if” scenarios stop playing in my mind. I needed to be worn down to the bone, laid bare to the world in order to give myself the help I needed, to find my breath.
I wish this wasn’t true. I wish we could somehow sit ourselves down, invoke our inner Cher a la Moonstruck, slap ourselves across the face,and say, “Snap out of it.” It doesn’t work that way. Anxiety is a strange mistress. It consumes you, tries to destroy you, and then becomes an odd kind of comfort because it does chase away something far worse – the numbness that follows a traumatic event. That lack of feeling, the void, the shock, is worse. It leaves you hollow. And you’ll do anything to keep that at bay.
Here was my advice on breathing and anxiety: give people a way to work with the frantic energy. Help them work it out in the body. Give them a safe space to do whatever they need to do to physically process their grief. Let them talk and say whatever they want to say without fear of being judged. That is a part of moving through it. It cannot be asked to sit. It cannot be asked to breathe. We must allow anxiety and grief to just be for a while. We must recognize it as legitimate. Only then can we move past it. Only then can we find a way to move on. The breath is a tool, but it must be used in the proper place at the proper time.
Christa Avampato 