I tell wonder-filled stories about hope and healing
Author: Christa Avampato
The short of it:
Writer. Health, education, and art advocate. Theater and film producer. Visual artist. Product geek. Proud alumnae of the University of Pennsylvania (BA) and the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia (MBA). Inspired by ancient wisdom & modern tech. Proliferator of goodness. Opener of doors. Friend to animals. Fan of creative work in all its wondrous forms. I use my business skills to create passion projects that build a better world. I’ve been called the happiest New Yorker, and I try hard to live up to that title every day.
The long of it:
My career has stretched across Capitol Hill, Broadway theatre, education, nonprofit fundraising, health and wellness, and Fortune 500 companies in retail, media, entertainment, technology, and financial services. I’ve been a product developer and product manager, theater manager, strategic consultant, marketer, voice over artist, , teacher, and fundraiser. I use my business and storytelling to support and sustain passion projects that build a better world. In every experience, I’ve used my sense of and respect for elegant design to develop meaningful products, services, programs, and events.
While building a business career, I also built a strong portfolio as a journalist, novelist, freelance writer, interviewer, presenter, and public speaker. My writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, PBS.org, Boston.com, Royal Media Partners publications, and The Motley Fool on a wide range of topics including business, technology, science, health, education, culture, and lifestyle. I have also been an invited speaker at SXSW, Teach for America, Avon headquarters, Games for Change, NYU, Columbia University, Hunter College, and the Alzheimer’s Foundation of America. The first book in my young adult book series, Emerson Page and Where the Light Enters, was acquired by a publisher and launched in November 2017. I’m currently working on the second book in the series.
A recovering multi-tasker, I’m equally at home in front of my Mac, on my yoga mat, walking my rescue dog, Phineas, traveling with a purpose, or practicing the high-art of people watching. I also cut up small bits of paper and put them back together as a collage artist.
My company:
I’m bringing together all of my business and creative career paths as the Founder of Double or Nothing Media:
• I craft products, programs, and projects that make a difference;
• I build the business plans that make what I craft financially sustainable;
• I tell the stories that matter about the people, places, and products that inspire me.
Follow my adventures on Twitter at https://twitter.com/christanyc and Instagram at https://instagram.com/christarosenyc.
“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.
“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?
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.
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.
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.
What gets measured gets done. I think about this idea every day as I run my business. Authors Alistair Kroll and Ben Yoskovitz wrote Lean Analytics to help entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs from companies and organizations of all shapes, sizes, and persuasions to answer the following questions:
1.) What data is important to my work? 2.) Why is it important? 3.) How do I measure it? 4.) What do I do with the results?
In addition to this straight-shooting advice, it’s also chock-full of case studies and interviews, as well as thought-provoking graphics that will have us digging deep into the questions of life, happiness, and the meaning of worthwhile work. It provides readers with a set of exercises to help you ask the right questions of yourself and your team and get to the answers as quickly as possible. My favorite exercise is a one page business plan template that takes 20 minutes. It’s turnkey resources like this that make this book priceless for everyone who desires to build anything of value. It’s useful on a holistic basis, and also for individual projects and teams.
Throughout the book, you’ll find key takeaways clearly highlighted and embedded within the relevant text. Lean Analytics packs a powerful punch of information. These key takeaways keep readers focused and on-track so that the information is highly relevant and immediately useful rather than overwhelming.
Another key feature that so few books have is a section that helps readers figure out the stage of their business or project. Then it goes further by giving us litmus tests to make sure we’ve assessed the situation fairly, are working on the right problems, and measuring our progress accurately. If your business builds a product or service, this book is priceless – it takes you through the discovery, development, build, and testing processes in an approachable, step-by-step manner.
Owning a copy of Lean Analytics is like having a management consultant / cheerleader / truth sayer right by your side every step of the way. Get it and use it well.
I love Anne Lamott. She is among my favorite writers because of her raw, honest turn of phrase and her fearlessness that allows her to cut right to the chase. In her efforts to thoroughly understand herself, she is a mirror for her readers.
In 2009, she wrote this gorgeous article in O, The Oprah Magazine, about how to be who you are meant to be. Her advice is this: stop. Figure out what to stop doing, who to stop pleasing, and where you don’t need to be. It’s akin to the advice that learning what not to do gets us closer to figuring out what to do. And then I would also add that you meditate because while you may be able to stop physically, you need to also give your brain a break from its tireless whirr of thoughts.
Enjoy this article and then tuck it away in your folder labeled “inspiring writing to read when I’m feeling down on my luck.” You are not alone in the pursuit of your own greatness; we’re all here with you, doing exactly the same thing.
“We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be. The only problem is that there is also so much other stuff, typically fixations with how people perceive us, how to get more of the things that we think will make us happy, and with keeping our weight down. So the real issue is how do we gently stop being who we aren’t? How do we relieve ourselves of the false fronts of people-pleasing and affectation, the obsessive need for power and security, the backpack of old pain, and the psychic Spanx that keeps us smaller and contained?
Here’s how I became myself: mess, failure, mistakes, disappointments, and extensive reading; limbo, indecision, setbacks, addiction, public embarrassment, and endless conversations with my best women friends; the loss of people without whom I could not live, the loss of pets that left me reeling, dizzying betrayals but much greater loyalty, and overall, choosing as my motto William Blake’s line that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love.
Oh, yeah, and whenever I could, for as long as I could, I threw away the scales and the sugar.
When I was a young writer, I was talking to an old painter one day about how he came to paint his canvases. He said that he never knew what the completed picture would look like, but he could usually see one quadrant. So he’d make a stab at capturing what he saw on the canvas of his mind, and when it turned out not to be even remotely what he’d imagined, he’d paint it over with white. And each time he figured out what the painting wasn’t, he was one step closer to finding out what it was.
You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don’t think your way into becoming yourself.
I can’t tell you what your next action will be, but mine involved a full stop. I had to stop living unconsciously, as if I had all the time in the world. The love and good and the wild and the peace and creation that are you will reveal themselves, but it is harder when they have to catch up to you in roadrunner mode. So one day I did stop. I began consciously to break the rules I learned in childhood: I wasted more time, as a radical act. I stared off into space more, into the middle distance, like a cat. This is when I have my best ideas, my deepest insights. I wasted more paper, printing out instead of reading things on the computer screen. (Then I sent off more small checks to the Sierra Club.)
Every single day I try to figure out something I no longer agree to do. You get to change your mind—your parents may have accidentally forgotten to mention this to you. I cross one thing off the list of projects I mean to get done that day. I don’t know all that many things that are positively true, but I do know two things for sure: first of all, that no woman over the age of 40 should ever help anyone move, ever again, under any circumstances. You have helped enough. You can say no. No is a complete sentence. Or you might say, “I can’t help you move because of certain promises I have made to myself, but I would be glad to bring sandwiches and soda to everyone on your crew at noon.” Obviously, it is in many people’s best interest for you not to find yourself, but it only matters that it is in yours—and your back’s—and the whole world’s, to proceed.
And, secondly, you are probably going to have to deal with whatever fugitive anger still needs to be examined—it may not look like anger; it may look like compulsive dieting or bingeing or exercising or shopping. But you must find a path and a person to help you deal with that anger. It will not be a Hallmark card. It is not the yellow brick road, with lovely trees on both sides, constant sunshine, birdsong, friends. It is going to be unbelievably hard some days—like the rawness of birth, all that blood and those fluids and shouting horrible terrible things—but then there will be that wonderful child right in the middle. And that wonderful child is you, with your exact mind and butt and thighs and goofy greatness.
Dealing with your rage and grief will give you life. That is both the good news and the bad news: The solution is at hand. Wherever the great dilemma exists is where the great growth is, too. It would be very nice for nervous types like me if things were black-and-white, and you could tell where one thing ended and the next thing began, but as Einstein taught us, everything in the future and the past is right here now. There’s always something ending and something beginning. Yet in the very center is the truth of your spiritual identity: is you. Fabulous, hilarious, darling, screwed-up you. Beloved of God and of your truest deepest self, the self that is revealed when tears wash off the makeup and grime. The self that is revealed when dealing with your anger blows through all the calcification in your soul’s pipes. The self that is reflected in the love of your very best friends’ eyes. The self that is revealed in divine feminine energy, your own, Bette Midler’s, Hillary Clinton’s, Tina Fey’s, Michelle Obama’s, Mary Oliver’s. I mean, you can see that they are divine, right? Well, you are, too. I absolutely promise. I hope you have gotten sufficiently tired of hitting the snooze button; I know that what you need or need to activate in yourself will appear; I pray that your awakening comes with ease and grace, and stamina when the going gets hard. To love yourself as you are is a miracle, and to seek yourself is to have found yourself, for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are.”
About a year ago when I was preparing to leave my corporate job to start my own company, I went to see Brian, my incredibly wise and supportive therapist and coach. I was telling him about all of my concerns and questions as I began this new venture. His few words of advice: “be your own consultant.”
We (myself included) love to give advice to others, but we don’t always apply our advice to our own careers and lives. For example, I decided to mine the social media following of one of my clients as leads for new partnership development opportunities. Why haven’t I done the same, simple task with my own social media following? On Saturday, I sat down and did just that. I’ve had a number of product ideas kicking around in my head and had yet to spec them out. Yesterday, I put (actual) pen to paper, created the user interface design, and sketched a product development timeline and work plan, just as I’ve done for clients and employers many times before. This time, this work was all for me and it felt amazing!
It’s empowering to be my own consultant, to listen and take my own advice. There’s a lot of peace and confidence to be gained in action. Give it a try – it may just be the toughest job you’ll ever love.
Now that I’ve been in my new apartment for almost two weeks, it’s beginning to feel like home. To this point, it’s felt like I’m in a hotel room that I’ll be leaving soon. I’ve had to learn new patterns around my neighborhood and inside my apartment. I didn’t realize how rooted I was in my old apartment. I wondered if I would ever feel at home in this new space. Would I ever settle in mentally and physically?
On Thursday night, I went to bed late after being out to dinner with friends. When I laid down in my bed, I let out a long sigh. I thought to myself, “It feels good to be home.” And then a huge smile found its way onto my face. Home. It had happened. Since Thursday night, I feel gitty every time I walk through my front door. While I have been busy putting everything in its place, this place has been busy transforming itself into more than just a box. It’s a sanctuary. It’s a place of creativity, peace, and joy.
When things are right in our homes, they are right in other areas of our lives, too. Feeling at home these last few days has helped me to see that everything is going to be okay – in my career and my personal life. Just as I’ve been transforming my home, my home has been transforming me. I’m standing taller. I feel like options for opportunity abound, and many of them begin with me just making a choice to reach for them.
Change is good. And change – real, lasting, good-for-you change – begins at home.
Wilfried Hounyo (left) and Golden Rockefeller pictured with Charles Bolden, Administrator of NASA, a retired US Marine Corps General, and former NASA astronaut
From a water filtration system powered by a stationary bike to a writing system that aids those afflicted by neurological hand tremors, the White House was brimming with the creations of young innovators at the third annual White House Science Fair. One hundred students from 40 different states attended the event, proudly accompanied by their teachers, parents, and mentors. It’s hard to overestimate the excitement of being invited to the White House by President Obama. I’m not sure who was more thrilled – the students or the adults – to be in those hallowed halls, sharing our passion for STEM education and careers.
Why would the White House host a science fair? President Obama plainly and earnestly made the case for this event, which he refers to as one of his favorite events of the year.
“If you win the NCAA championship, you come to the White House. Well, if you’re a young person and you produce the best experiment or design, the best hardware or software, you ought to be recognized for that achievement, too.”
Three of the 2012 National STEM Video Game Challenge winners attended the event. Gustavo Zacarias, a middle school student from San Antonio, Texas, built The Dark Labyrinth on Kodu and was invited to exhibit his video game at the fair. The Dark Labyrinth is a 3-D maze that players navigate by solving math challenges. Gustavo began playing video games at age 4, and plans to build a career as a video game designer.
“I never thought I would be exhibiting my game at the White House,” said Gustavo. “I worked very hard during the making of the game and was very happy about winning a national competition, so I’m very excited and thankful for the opportunity to be part of this great event.”
Gustavo was joined by two students from the D.C.-area, Golden Rockefeller and Wilfried Hounyo, who won the Open Platform high school category of the National STEM Video Game Challenge. Golden is now a 16-year old freshman at University of Delaware studying mechanical engineering. Wilfried, a junior in high school, is currently looking at Berkeley, Stanford, and Penn State, where he plans to study computer science as a path to eventually work for NASA. Their game, Electrobob, teaches players about the nature of electrons by combining subject matter from physics, chemistry, and robotics.
Halfway through the fair, all attendees were escorted into the East Room to hear President Obama speak about the importance of STEM education and his continued financial and program support for it. Wilfried and Golden joined President Obama on stage as he repeatedly stated how amazed and inspired he was by all of the students at the fair.
“Young people like this have to make you hopeful about the future,” he said.
The President made several significant announcements during his speech:
The launch of US2020—a campaign by ten leading education nonprofits and U.S. technology companies to encourage companies to commit 20 percent of their STEM employees to 20 hours per year of mentoring or teaching by the year 2020.
The Summer of Making and Connecting program will encompass more than 1,000 summer learning events hosted by leading education-based organizations; the Joan Ganz Cooney Center of Sesame Workshop is one of the organizations involved.
The President concluded the event with a simple, powerful statement that resonated with teachers, parents, and mentors all around the country.
“We’ve got to do everything we can to make sure that we are giving these young people opportunity to pursue their studies and discover new ways of doing things. And we’ve got to make sure that we’re also leaving behind a world that is safer and cleaner and healthier than the one we found. That’s our obligation…students, we could not be prouder of all of you.”
“Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach.” ~ Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes
We want to make an impact in every moment. Everywhere. For everyone. We are a society of immediacy, a nation of broadcasters. We’re about scale, leverage, and reach. Bigger, faster, cheaper, now.
What I’ve found is that there is a lot of beauty and meaning in the small. Compass Yoga, my nonprofit, began with one small class for a handful of people in my sliver of a neighborhood over two years ago. Now we serve over 200 people per week in a dozen classes. We are a slow growth organization and that’s just fine by me because what we are building is deliberate and sustainable over time. We have phenomenal teachers, passionate students, and dedicated partners. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Do what you can do right now, right where you are. The future will find us. It always does. The opportunities will present themselves as long as we put real heart into our work. Help will arrive when we need it as long as we remain authentic and true to who we are.
Every journey of change is built one tiny purposeful step at a time.
“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
Christa Avampato 