Category: career

business, career, dreams, fear, feelings, wishes

Leap: Outrunning Fear

Christa Avampato

“What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. It is always the same step, but you have to take it.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry via Daily Good

Beginning is the hard part, and every project, idea, wish, relationship begins the same way: setting an intention. That is the hard part. Loudly and proudly saying, “World, this is what I want and come hell or high water I’m going to make it happen.” Getting up the energy and gumption to make that commitment is the very hardest part. It’s not that there won’t be challenges and obstacles to making it happen. Implementation is tough stuff, but just getting the courage to try is the very hardest part.

Why? Why is it so hard for us to give our wildest dream a try? Sadly, we don’t live in a world of unending encouragement. There will always be people, sometimes people very close to you, who for one reason or another will tell you that your dream is too big. We don’t take a first step because we worry that it’s the only step we’ll take, proving all those naysayers right. Our dream was too big. We couldn’t do what we set out to do, and so we’ll have to slunk back to where we came from to take our seat next to the naysayers who never tried to make their dreams come true either.

That’s the fear talking and the only way to get over it is to get it out. Write it all down. Every last fear you have about your biggest, wildest dream belongs on a piece of paper so it can be torn up into pieces and burned into ashes. That very first step requires only one thing – the ability to silence fear. Maybe not permanently, but at least long enough to give us the confidence to take a second step, and then another and another and another.

And pretty soon, before we know it, we’re running. One foot in front of the other, again and again. So fast and so strong, that the fear won’t even have a chance to catch us.

career, change, grateful, gratitude

Leap: A Graceful Exit is Always Possible

Christa Avampato

In any transition, we often focus on the end goal. In my year of leaping into full-time entrepreneurship, I’ve spent a lot of time planning how to successfully complete that transition: personal financial planning, long-term strategy for Compass Yoga, funding, and partnerships that will grow our programming. But there’s an often overlooked detail when we make any change – we need to mind our exit.

Exits can be fast or slow. They can be in phases or a jump with both feet in the air at once. They can be handled with style and grace or they can be botched with anger, disappointment, and resentment. I’m not sure of the speed or pace of my exit from corporate life just yet, but I know I want it be graceful and grateful.

I learned a lot in journey along the corporate road. I worked with some very smart people who spent a lot of time investing in me, as a person and as a professional. My leaving has very little to do with them and everything to do with me – I need to do the work of my life and that work lies in a different direction. There’s no excuse for anything less than grace when I close that door for the very last time.

I thought a lot about endings as Phin and I took our final 2011 walk through Central Park on December 31st. It was a 3-hour venture through the North Woods, and no matter how long the walk, Phineas always wishes it could be longer. It was sunny and mild, ringing in at 55 degrees. Despite all of 2011’s troubles, it found a way to leave a good last impression.

And if a year as tough as 2011 can do that, then so can we.

adventure, business, career, creativity, New Years Eve, New York, New York City, wishes, writing, yoga

Leap: My 2012 Resolution, Four and a Half Years in the Making

Christa Avampato

In 2007, I graduated from business school, where I wrote a few feature columns for my school’s newspaper thanks to my friend, Alice, who was the Editor-in-Chief. I had always wanted to be a writer but was never sure I was talented enough to make a go of it. I really enjoyed the writing and a lot of my classmates complimented the columns. At graduation, my friend, Stephen, asked me if I intended to keep writing. I smiled, looked down at the ground, and said I wasn’t sure. “You should start a blog,” he said. I laughed. “Who would read it?” I asked. “I would read it,” he said. One reader was enough for me. It was a start, a beginning, and that was really all I needed.

The week after graduation, I sat on the couch in my living room in Charlottesville surrounded by moving boxes, opened Google, and typed in “free blogging software.” Blogger came up. I had an account from when I started my first blog, Eyes and Ears Wide Open, way back in 2004. It was private because I wasn’t sure at that time that I wanted strangers reading about my life. (How funny that seems now that I live much of my life online!) I reactivated my account and started the blog Christa In New York as a way of unleashing a writer who had been kicking around in me for many, many years.

How I learned to write
After a year and a half of bumbling around learning how to write, I decided I wanted to become a really good writer and the only way I knew how to make that happen was to practice every day. And the sure-fire way to make that happen would be to publicly promise as my 2009 resolution that I would write and publish every day. I kept my resolution and in 2009, I wrote every day about hope. My greatest lesson from that writing journey was that the more often we look for hope, the more likely we are to find it.

In 2010, I bundled up all of that hope and put my daily efforts toward crafting an extraordinary life. I discovered the truth that we build an extraordinary life by finding something extraordinary in ordinary moments.

To amp up my extraordinary living, I used 2011 as a year of new beginnings so that I could get into a beginner’s mindset – exploring, experimenting, and tinkering. As 2011 drew to a close, I wondered for a long time about how I could best make use of this beginner’s mindset. Where would I go from here?

Was there an ending in all this beginning?
I wondered if this would be the end of this blog altogether. I wondered if all this beginning was leading me toward an ending of this chapter. To experiment with that idea, I gave up writing on the weekends for a couple of weeks. I missed posting every day so much that I quickly reversed that decision. Four and a half years later, writing has become an integral part of who I am and how I spent my time. It brings me a lot of joy – and that’s the #1 reason I keep at it.

Perhaps another ending was in order. I briefly considered leaving New York and relocating to the west coast. That caused me to look differently at my city. Was I really ready to move? Could I really leave behind 4+ years worth of effort building a life I love? In about a month’s time, I reversed that decision, too. New York is my home, as crazy and unpredictable as it is. It’s where I belong and that’s a joyful thing to feel.

To solve this riddle, I began to look around at the other areas of my life assessing what brings me joy and what doesn’t. I love my yoga teaching and the healthcare field fascinates me. I adore stories – written, spoken, acted, and sung. I’m passionate about doing good work for people who need help and don’t know where or to whom to turn. I’m happiest when I’m making my own choices.

An ending found
The area of my life that seems to deplete me the most is the place where I spend 40+ hours / week. Though I’m incredibly grateful for the financial stability and experience I’ve gained as part of a large company, the work doesn’t inspire me and it’s not the best use of my skills. I’ve made a number of very good friends there whom I’m sure I will know all of my life. I’ve learned so much there, about the economy, the world, and myself. As 2011 drew to a close, I became acutely aware that I have learned all that I want to learn there. It’s time to move on.

I began to look around, applying to jobs that seemed mildly interesting. I interviewed and received a few offers, though in the end they all seemed to be variations on a theme, a theme I already had in my current job. After a few months, I could see myself in those new roles, unhappy with the circumstances and no better off than I am at my current job. If I wanted the job of my dreams, I would have to build it.

A beginning that was here all along
And so I realized that Compass Yoga could provide me with everything I wanted in a job – I could teach, write, be part of the healthcare field, and help people who really needed the help. I had the job I wanted all along. The trick is now to turn how I make a life into making a living.

So there it is, my 2012 resolution: to make the leap from my job into Compass Yoga full-time. It’s going to be a long and winding road, with many different twists, turns, stops, and starts along the way. I’ll be securing my footing along the path that I know I’m supposed to walk even though I’m not yet sure of all the steps I’ll need to take. Every day in 2012, I’ll be writing about this journey and I hope you’ll join me as this path is paved. Welcome to the beginning of a transformation a long time in the making. And happy new year!

art, career, choices, creativity

Beginning: The Art Born of Life

Christa Avampato

“If you want to work on your art, work on your life.” – Chekhov

I spent a lot of 2011 in a mode of planning and personal development. At turns, I would get frustrated with what appeared to be a lack of progress, or at least a lack of progress at the pace I wanted. And when it comes to my personal development, I always want to pick up the pace. What I didn’t realize is that in those times when we think we aren’t making any progress, the progress is really happening under cover beneath the surface. This is the most crucial kind of progress, the kind we need to really move forward.

Think of a cut or scrape. Beneath the surface of the skin, the tissue begins to repair itself immediately after the injury occurs. It starts knitting back together one tiny cell at a time, healing from the inside out. All we can see is the outward face of the injury, the very last thing to heal, but without that inner healing, healing on the surface wouldn’t matter. In fact, if we healed from the outside in, then we would be more likely to incur a repeat injury.

Think of a house. The building process begins deep within the ground where the foundation is laid. For a long time, it may look like very little progress is being made, as if all the work is for naught. But once a strong foundation is put in place, the rest of the building goes quite smoothly. And it lasts.

We need to live our art, creativity, and dreams in their own unique and beautiful form. Spending our lives any other way guarantees only that we will wish we made different choices. Living our dreams takes time time and planning. To give our all to our art, whatever that art may be, we have to spend time honing our craft and getting other areas of our lives in proper order. We may not always see the progress, but if we are diligently working toward our goal, we can rest assured that progress is happening and will reveal itself in its own good time.

Compass Yoga was like that. My writing was like that. My education was like that. My whole life, my greatest work of art, has been like that. Progress was slow and not always apparent but it was there. Piece by piece, I was knitting together the threads of my life that would form my foundation for my life, and from my life came my art.

Our art is always born out of our lives. You wish for an artistic breakthrough? Start with a life breakthrough. And then you can get to the fun part – with the foundation in place, it’s time to build that castle in the sky.

art, career, commitment, determination, passion, theatre

Beginning: My Only Talent Is My Tenaciousness

Christa Avampato
Paul Newman, the man who never stopped trying

“Acting doesn’t come natural to me. I’m very cerebral about it, unlike Joanne (Woodward), who is an intuitive actor. Acting to me is like dredging a river. It’s a painful experience. I simply do not have the intuitive talent. I worry about acting and constantly complain to myself about my own performance…and this doesn’t fall into the area of self-deprecation. I don’t know the things I have a gift for except tenaciousness…I never felt I had any gift at all to perform but it was something that I wanted badly enough so I kept after it.” ~ Paul Newman, Inside the Actor’s Studio

I had lunch with my dear friend, Trevin, yesterday. Eventually, he will be the Editor of The New York Times Theatre section because he knows just about every historical fact there is to know about the theatre. He tipped me off to the first episode of Inside the Actors Studio, on which Paul Newman was a guest. I found the episode in its entirety on YouTube and for the first time, I heard someone articulate how I feel about my own career and craft. My only real gift is tenaciousness. And I finally stopped feeling badly about that because I’m in good company with Paul Newman.

If I want something badly enough, I will figure out how to make it happen. It was true through all of my schooling, in every job I’ve ever had, in my writing, teaching, and business work. None of it came naturally or easily but I wanted my successes so much that I just refused to give up. And as Babe Ruth famously said, “It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.” (Incidentally, this is incredibly true for yoga instructors as I wrote about on a post back in May.) I’ve never understood the idea that we should take the road of least resistance. All of the roads before me, if they were even built at all, were riddled with obstacles and resistance. I just decided to get around, over, under, and through them with every tool I could find.

I also tried very hard for my failures. I’ve failed at a good many things in my life, but it was never for lack of trying. Only a lack of truly wanting. I eventually failed at those things because I simply didn’t want to keep trying to get better at them. I found that they just weren’t worth all of the effort I would need to extend to make them happen. I moved on.

People have asked me if this year of beginnings has been frightening or discouraging to me. After all, I purposely put myself in the beginners seat and as if that weren’t enough, I shared all of it every day here on my blog for the entire world to read and judge (if they chose to.) For some I guess this process would have been frightening. For me, it was a year filled with days like all the days of my life.

I started each morning of this year exactly the same way as I’ve started every morning of my life – as someone who had to try very hard at every moment to make my life work the way I wanted it to work. Some days I was successful and some days I failed miserably. When each day was done and I put myself to bed, I was grateful for every single one no matter the outcome.

I am a perpetual beginner: always curious, never satisfied, and in constant search of my edge and my limitations. I guess you could say I’m a professional beginner because it’s the only thing I’ve ever really been. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.

adventure, career, celebration, change, creative process, creativity, yoga

Beginning: Move Toward the Obstacles

Christa Avampato
Ganesha - our great friend and the keeper of obstacles

“The obstacle is the path.” ~  Zen proverb

On Sunday I was thumbing through the new prAna catalog and found this proverb. Obstacles tend to be things we want to jump over, crawl through, duck under, go around, or blow up into miniscule pieces. And with good reason – they prevent us from doing exactly what we want to do exactly when we want to do it.

Or do they?

What if we could find a way to weave our obstacles together like cobblestones that form a path up and away from where we are right now and on to the path we’re meant to take? Obstacles, just like triumphs, are teachers. And they are generous. They force creativity, give us grit, and usually necessitate the formation of partnerships and relationships to overcome.

My path has been loaded with obstacles of all shapes and sizes. They have made it difficult to navigate, and yet I am now a better navigator for having them on my course. I wouldn’t trade them; I needed their presence so that I could work with my yoga students with compassion, authenticity, and empathy. To make the decision to pursue Compass Yoga full-time, I had to face obstacles in the other areas of my professional life. If that other way had been free of challenges, I may have never found the courage to leap.

This is how life goes – in the moment, we don’t understand all of the change swirling around us. In hindsight, the pieces settle and we understand why the exact path we took was exactly the path we had to take. Those obstacles are the inflection points that caused us to take a necessary turn so that we could live up to our potential.

May your road and mine be littered with obstacles of real value!

career, television, work, writing

Beginning: Career Advice from Andy Rooney

Christa Avampato
Andy Rooney as we will always remember him

Last week we lost a great icon of opinion writing. I will never forget the 60 Minutes episode in 2010 where Andy Rooney went to the Super Bowl, a pilgrimage for him for over 40 years running. I loved getting a glimpse of him out from behind his now-famous desk and in the world – driving his car, going through the stadium turnstile, and making his way to his seat. Episodes like this let us know that the Andy we knew and loved on television was exactly as he appeared to be – nothing more and nothing less.

When he stepped down from his post at 60 Minutes, I got the same horrible feeling I had when Steve Jobs stepped down from his post at Apple. He loved his job so much that this could only mean one thing: his time with us was coming to a close in every sense. Though we know him for his curmudgionly opinions and writing, he was also a solid defacto career coach.

At every age, he presented exactly who he was. He never towed any company line and he never tried to make nice for the sake of politics. His opinions were strong and well-researched. Disagree with him all you want, but there was no way to refute his intellect. Sometimes this “area of development”, as some would unfortunately term it, cost him his job. It’s also what made him distinctive and memorable. There will never be another Andy Rooney.

Most people I know scorn the idea of being defined by their jobs. Not Andy. He had a secret: if you work at what you love, then there’s no problem with the job defining who you are. The job is who you are. Like it or not, most of us spend a great deal of our waking lives at work. And if we’re going to spend that many hours working, then we might as well like it.

Andy persistently and adamantly did only work he loved. On Sunday’s edition of 60 Minutes, we watched Morley Safer interview Andy Rooney on the eve of his retirement. Watching the piece, it seemed so strange to me that he is no longer among us. Just weeks ago, he was so full of life, wit, and yes, opinions. Morley asked him what he’d do with his time if he had his career to do over again. Without missing a beat, Andy replied, “I’d get a weekly spot on 60 Minutes where I’d give my opinion about anything I wanted to talk about. I’d write it and I’d say it. I complain about a lot of things, but one thing I can’t complain about is my life.”

When my days are up, I hope I feel the same way. And I hope I have the chance to work at doing something I love until the ripe old age of 92 or beyond. What more from life, or a career, could we ask for? Thanks, Andy, for this final lesson. You will be missed.

business, career, change, time, writing

Beginning: My New Content Plan

Christa Avampato

For the past few years, my daily posts have revolved around a specific theme. In 2009, I wrote about my quest to have more hope. In 2010, I chronicled my steps toward building an extraordinary life. This year, I’ve taken up the challenge to become an expert beginner. As of late, I’ve found myself preoccupied, in writing and in living, with raising a call to action. In 2009, I learned the very painful and abundantly helpful truth that we are here on borrowed time. My apartment building fire cost me almost all of my belongings and nearly cost me my life. We don’t get to choose how long we’re here, and so if we’re waiting to do what we really want to do then we’re just wasting time.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how my content will evolve in 2012. What should my theme be? Who am I trying to help? What’s the biggest challenge I’m trying to overcome? I started to panic. No lightbulb moment seemed to find me. And then I remember the one simple question that starts every new product development project – “What gives you pain?”

By the end of 2012, I want to control how I spend all of my time. So my next journey is toward the goal of being my own boss and you’re invited to join me on this wild ride. To this end, my posts are going to take on a decidedly different direction. They’ll be a little punchier, a little more opinionated. I’ll let you in on what I’m reading, using, and doing to turn this idea into a reality. And it will all be related to the idea of “making business make sense.” Hence, this site’s new tagline. “Curating a Creative Life” served me well for 4. 5 years and I learned so much from it. Now it’s time to move on and embrace a new frontier that combines my love for business, creativity, and simplicity.

Taking my own advice, I decided not to wait until 2012 to kick off this new content strategy. Waiting never got anyone anywhere. The only way to move forward is to take a step in that direction, so here I go. Compass Yoga is taking off quickly, and I need to respond to this stroke of good fortune.

The greatest thing I learned in my year of beginnings is that NOW is the best time for a new beginning. Don’t wait for the calendar to turn to make a resolution, to dive into a new project, to seize the lucky moment. And in this moment, the world is asking for the business world to be simpler and more straight-forward. I can serve that mission; this moment was made for me.

As an editorial aside, taking control of all of my time means that I’ll be doing a considerable amount of other writing projects and business development work, particularly because Compass Yoga’s incorporation status moved much faster than I expected. To give myself that space and time, I’ll publish on this site 5 times per week – Monday to Friday, excluding major holidays – effective immediately.

Here’s to action!    

business, career, creativity, ideas, yoga

Beginning: Start A Business by Starting with Your Best You

Christa Avampato

A few of my friends are in the midst of starting to craft their own businesses, either as incremental income streams or as a replacement for their full-time jobs working for someone else. The companies vary from an online stationery store to career coaching to senior care, and some have mentioned that they’re worried about the originality of their ideas. Differentiation is important. A wholly original idea is not.

Facebook was not the first social network. The iPod was not the first MP3 player. Amazon was not the first online retailer nor the first online bookseller. These founders saw an idea in the market that met a need and then they used their own spin on the idea to delight customers. It’s that delight factor that truly made the difference.

There are a lot of yoga teachers in the world. There are a number of them who are interested in working on the healthcare industry. I know Compass Yoga isn’t unique in that pursuit but we’ve got a few surprising insights, and a few plans to set us apart and help more people in the process. And that’s really all anyone needs to get going on a new venture. Just be your best version of you.

career

Beginning: Hire Me

Christa Avampato

Last weekend I had lunch with my friend, Sara, and she told me I needed to talk myself up more. I hate doing this. I much prefer to talk up other people. After some reflection, I realized that if I talked myself up in a way that showed others how I could help them and their ideas shine, then that would be a very worthwhile cause. This is a follow on to my conversation with Brian in which he advised me to put my creativity to work to build my career by my own design.

So I did it. I created a “Hire Me” page on this blog. This is a big flipping deal for me because I’ve never done anything like this before. And it was actually fun to do. A true creative confidence builder. I highly recommend you give it a whirl, too.

Two days in and already I am getting a few bites via the contact form on the page. I should have done this sooner. Better late than never.

Click the tab above or here to check it out. Let me know what you think! (And tell your friends, family members, co-workers, neighbors, and Tweeple, too.)