Category: choices

choices, dogs, experience

Beginning: A Lesson Along the Snowy Path

Christa Avampato

Listen to a podcast of this post on Cinch.

Phineas and I took our first walk in the snow last week. He’s pretty psyched about snow and not at all psyched about slush and wet pavement. For some reason, the snow really agrees with him and because he’s only 6 inches at the shoulder, it wears him out, too. (Imagine how tired we’d be if we always had to walk in snow up to our waists!)

Over at Riverside Park, you can frequently find us frolicking in the meadows, hanging out with other dogs and dog owners, and taking in the view. We love that park, maybe even more than we love Central Park. Its slow pace, river-facing views, and arching trees make us happy in every season.

On our first snowy walk together, I chose the safe path, the one shoveled and cleared by others because I thought it would be easier for Phin. He, however, chose the snowy path because it was more fun. He dove right into that snow with wild abandon, made little snow angels (more appropriately snow dachshunds), and tossed the snow up in the air with his ample nose. It was glorious to watch him living so fully. And inspired me to do the same.

The heck with the well-traveled path. Like Phin in the snow, I want to carve my own. (And then after all that work, a nap is in order!)

The photos in this post are, respectively, Phin dashing around in the snow (tough to catch on camera – he’s a fast little guy!) and then coming home and promptly finding his blanket to settle in for his afternoon nap.

This blog is part of the 2011 WordPress Post Every Day Challenge.

choices, decision-making

Beginning: My Non-Resolutions – What I Won’t Do in 2011

Christa Avampato

Listen to a podcast of this post on Cinch.

Last week I spoke with Drew Allen over at Scoutmob NYC. Scoutmob NYC is an amazing resource to give New Yorkers local deals without asking them to make an upfront payment. Good for us. Good for local businesses.

During our conversation, Drew and I talked about New Year’s resolutions. I’m not sure how we got on that subject but it was a wonderful, enlightening conversation. “Even more important than New Year’s Resolutions,” Drew said, “are our non-resolutions. What will be decide not to do in 2011?” That got me thinking, which always leads me to list-making. How I love, love, love lists.

Here are my non-resolutions for 2011:
1.) I will not beat myself up for trying something new, either before I try it or if it turns out to be less-than-a-great experience
2.) I will not focus on success – mine or that of others. Instead, I will focus on value.
3.) I will not pack my schedule at a dizzying rate.
4.) I will not forget to breath deeply, especially when I feel stress creeping in.
5.) I will not dwell on dreams and forget to live. (Thank you Albus Dumbledore for that bit of wisdom.) I will live, truly live, every moment with mindfulness.

This blog is part of the 2011 WordPress Post Every Day Challenge.

adventure, books, career, celebration, change, choices, creativity, discovery, experience, family, friendship, grateful, gratitude, growth, happiness, ideas, meditation, New York City, story, writing, yoga

Step 365: What’s Possible? A 2010 Wrap-up.

Christa Avampato

“I am neither an optimist nor pessimist, but a possibilist.” ~ Max Lerner

As I cross over the finish line of 365 days of living and writing about an extraordinary life, I marvel at the passing of another year. On December 31, 2009, I wrote a post explaining that in 2010 I wanted to record something every day that put me one step closer to an extraordinary life.

This December 31st post is always fun to write because it’s a chance for me to reflect on the past year and realize how much has happened. Just like flipping through the New York Times’s Year in Pictures helps us remember what’s happened in the world around us, flipping through my posts from the last year lets me remember all the tiny steps that brought me to do this day.

My road to recovery from my apartment building fire:
I was in denial about the true effect it had on me and that brought me to Brian, my coach and therapist, who has helped my life grow in leaps and bounds. By June, I finally felt safe in my home again and could make my apartment feel like a peaceful space.

Stepping into the writing life:
I moved my blog over to WordPress and for the first time in the 3 years since I seriously began to contemplate living a writer’s life, earned enough money to be a freelance writer for hire. This year I connected with so many talented writers – Josh, Laura, Amanda, Erica, Sharni, Will, Sara, the Wordcount Blogathon writers, Katherine, the fab team at Owning Pink, Elephant Journal, and Michael.

I wrote and published my first e-book, Hope in Progress: 27 Entrepreneurs Who Inspired Me During the Great Recessions, a compilation of 27 of my interviews that I conducted with entrepreneurs through my Examiner column.

Yoga at the forefront of my life:
I completed my 200 hour yoga teacher training at Sonicstarted Compass Yoga, my own small teaching company, and will begin teaching a regular Sunday night yoga class at Pearl Studios NYC. Through Sonic I was inspired by the incredible teachers and the 23 amazing women in my class whom I hold so dear after our journey together. My yoga teacher training helped me to establish a regular meditation practice and cured the insomnia I’ve lived with all of my life. I found the joyful noise of kirtan, which re-ignited my interest in music. Yoga led me toward a true contemplation of my faith and spirituality that continues down a very healthy, peaceful path. There are not words enough to thank the people at Sonic for how much joy they brought to my life, but I gave it a shot in this post about our last class and the closing ritual of the training. I am forever and happily indebted to them.

Some wrong turns, too:
I studied for my GRE and despite doing well on the exam, Columbia sent me an email that began “we regret to inform you that you have not been accepted” [into a PhD program in education]. I wrote a curriculum for LIM College that I was tremendously excited about, and then the class was canceled at the 11th hour for reasons that still make me shake my head. I was so excited to be selected to serve on a jury and sadly realized just how imperfect our system is. I still think about the case on a regular basis.

Making peace with New York living:
In 2010 I fell in love with New York City, again and again and again. It became my home. Our love hate relationship ended its many years of turmoil and now we’re living together in a general state of bliss, with an occasional side dish of annoyance, just for good measure and because, well, it’s a very New York thing to do.

A few unexpected journeys:
I conquered my fear of swimming in open water while on a yoga retreat in Greece. I found that mistakes can be joyful.

Wonderful new additions to my family:
We happily welcomed my new little niece Aubree and after years of wondering whether or not I should get a dog, Phineas, a sweet little dachshund, has graced my life via the Humane Society and New York dachshund rescue.

And 10 valuable life lessons that I’m grateful for:
1.) Goodness is created and remembered by sharing what we have with others.
2.) Shouting dreams helps bring them into being.
3.) Stubborness can be a beautiful thing.
4.) We get what we settle for.
5.) Obstacles in our lives are valuable.
6.) We never have to wait to live the life we want.
7.) Letting go is sometimes the bravest and best thing to do
8.) Trusting our gut is the best way to get to get to the decision that’s right for us.
9.) Be thankful for less.

My favorite and most treasured discovery of 2010:
10.) Truly extraordinary living is found in very ordinary moments.

Wishing you a very happy start to 2011. Thanks so much for being with me on this journey that was 2010.

The image above makes me feel free. Find it here.

choices, courage, creativity, curiosity, decision-making, design, work

Step 351: Beauty – One of Life’s Non-negotiables

Christa Avampato

“I think “beauty” has a (prominent) place in every project.” ~ Tom Peters

I’d go one step further than Tom Peters and say if you are living somewhere, doing something, or learning something and you can’t find any beauty it, then move, do something else, and pick another topic. I know that this week I espoused about how life is long and we have more time and space than we actually realize. But your life and the amount of time you have is not enough to warrant the wasting of it.

I’m one of those efficiency junkies. I despise waste of any kind, whether the resource is tangible or intangible. I especially hate having my time wasted. I kind of self-implode without a vertical learning curve. Actually, I don’t know how to live without one so if I feel even a tinge of boredom, my mind is off and running. What never fails to captivate me is beauty, and I especially treasure ironic beauty – moment and places that don’t seem beautiful on the surface but with a little digging have a great abundance of beauty underneath.

In 2011, I’m not doing a single personal project that doesn’t have a kind of beauty that inspires me. Truly, I refuse to struggle through projects or experiences or someone else’s decisions that don’t make any sense to me. I can’t do that anymore. I’m done with dreading any place, or project, or event. If what I’m doing isn’t useful to me, or you, or the world at-large, then I’m going to find something else to do. The world needs so much help right now and we need eachother.

I have a lot to offer in the way of resources. We all do. Talent, time, experience, care, and concern (perhaps the most underrated resource of all!) We can no longer afford to do work that doesn’t matter. We are what we do.

The beautiful image above is not my own but I think it’s stunning. It can be found here.

choices, clarity, meditation, wellness, work, yoga

Step 345: A Meditation to Find Purpose By Following Energy

Christa Avampato

“From the spiritual perspective, all disease is undiscovered purpose.” ~ Nan Lu

I’m wrestling now with purpose. At 34, I thought that piece would be figured out and that I could then turn my attention toward working for that purpose. What I’m learning is that like happiness and balance and peace, purpose seems to be less of a destination and more of a daily trip we’re taking. I’ve been going too small with my idea of purpose. Maybe it isn’t a certain career or activity or population I’d like to help but a broader, less specific concept. “Make ’em laugh” sounds like a worthy purpose. “Inspire storytelling” would be another. Maybe that’s a better, more achievable direction for purpose – a flexible structure.

This week I talked to Brian about my continued quest for purpose. “What am I supposed to be doing?” I asked him. And in his very-Brian way, he took me toward point B so I could learn something that would help me get myself to point A. He helped me frame up my own question by asking me to focus on a friend of mine who is going through the same cycle I am to find his own purpose. It was amazing that when I thought about the advice I’d give my friend, I found my own answers, too. “You have to follow the work that gives you energy and ditch the activities that drain you. Your body already knows how your heart should spend its time.”

Sometimes we think about the body as this very superficial structure that is merely meant to house the spirit, maybe because the body won’t last forever and we are really hoping that the spirit will. The greatest lesson that yoga has taught me is that the two work together. The body is so much wiser than we give it credit for. It knows what it needs. When we are doing an activity we aren’t meant to do, our body will grow tired no matter how much sleep we’ve gotten. When we are on the right path, the body moves with ease. If we follow our energy, will it lead us to our purpose?

Meditation technique to find purpose
Take a comfortable seat. Deep gorgeous inhales. Deep calming exhales. Scan the body and wherever you feel tightness or pain, focus the breath there, one area at a time, until those muscles relax. And then once you’ve focused the breath on each stressed area of the body, allow your lips to take the faintest smile, maybe just turning up the corners of your mouth slightly. Focus only on what it feels like to have your entire body relaxed. After a few minutes, gently open the eyes and take that feeling with you out into the world.

Focus on finding activities that allow the body to feel as relaxed as they do in meditation, even when we’re in motion. Those activities, I believe, will lead us to our purpose, one day at a time. I’m going to give it a shot. Will you join me and let me know how it goes? I promise to do the same.

The image above is from thebuddhagarden.com

choices, decision-making, goals

Step 335: Focus on the Heart

Christa Avampato

The lunch with the General Counsel at my company yesterday spurred a few other ideas that I’ll detail in blog posts today and tomorrow. the one for today revolves around focus. The company I work tried to be all things to all people for a very long time. If you wanted a financial product or service, we had something for you. The trouble is when we spread ourselves so thin and try to be a jack of all trades, we end up not really doing any one thing particularly well.

Eventually, we divested most of our ancillary business lines and focused our attention on what we knew we could do really well. Yes, we gave up some potential opportunities, but we realized huge benefits with our focus. In all honesty it’s that focus more than anything else that helped us to survive the recession more or less intact and what is driving our growth, even though the economy now is so sluggish.

This example begs the question of not what should we do, but what should we stop doing or not take up at all? I’m looking at all of my projects and interests now as I turn the corner of December and look straight into the eyes of 2011. What am I doing with my time? Where am I focusing my energy?

In 2011, I am not going to pursue my afterschool curriculum about product development. I love the idea. I really want to bring it to life. But now is not the right moment. I don’t have the time I really need to devote to it to get it to go. It’s a full-time job. If I really follow my heart, it always leads me back to my yoga and my writing. Those are the projects that have me dancing for joy, and I love joy. Those two interests fit together well; they feed one another and they feed my soul. So that’s where my energy and my time are going.

How about you? If you really just follow your heart, where does it lead you?

choices, creative, creative process, creativity, decision-making, design

Step 334: An Impossible Goal

Christa Avampato

Today I had lunch with General Counsel of the company I work for. I asked her how she fostered creativity among her team and she told an interesting anecdote. One of her teams manages a very large portfolio of patents, and while valuable they are very expensive to obtain and maintain. She challenged her team to devise a solution to cut the cost of the patent program in half, a ridiculously provocative goal (her words, not mine.) While she has a great deal of confidence in the talent of her team, she had serious doubts about being able to reach that goal.

So why did she do it? Why set a team up to “fail”? She wanted them to really get into the problem and find a new way of doing things. If she had set the goal at 10%, they probably could have made a few tweaks here and there, and met the goal. She wanted radical transformation and extreme creativity to come into play. To get at that, she needed to set the bar so high that it seemed out of reach. Even if they didn’t hit it, she was certain that they’d find a new way forward that would be beneficial.

And with the ingenuity of her team operating on all cylinders, they did find a new ways forward and they did hit that crazy goal of a 50% cost reduction. And as an added benefit, they also liked the new system much better because it was much easier to manage.

Impossible goals can be very valuable. They can push us to our edge and then some. They ask us to not tinker, but to go out to the wide open white space of our minds, into areas that we would likely never even approach because our logical minds would get in the way. If we make a goal far out of sight, it ceases to be a roadblock to our creativity. It can actually free us to do our very best work, to imagine a whole new world of possibilities.

choices, decision-making, design, goals, imagination, inspiration

Step 333: Harry Potter, Muhammad Yunus, and How to Build a Business

Christa Avampato

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of think about small bets and goals, and the enormous benefits that can be gained by an individual and an entire community. Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank and one of my social entrepreneurship idols, is famous for saying that he didn’t set out to help the whole world, or even his whole country of Bangladesh through microfinance. He wanted to help one village of 10 people in 1976 (incidentally, the same year I was born.) 34 years later, it’s deposits now stand at ~$1.4B and the organization has helped 8.3M people out of poverty, 97% of them women. (For more indicators of Grameen’s impact, click here.) He advises entrepreneurs not to build enormous business plans to scale. He tells them to just set one simple intention – help 5 people out of poverty.

Over the weekend, I took my family to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, part of Universal’s Islands of Adventure Theme Park. What they’ve done with the tiny bit of land set aside for Harry Potter is truly wonderful, with a few exceptions which I’m detailing in a letter to send to their President as guest feedback. What was abundantly clear is that they don’t believe that the appeal of Harry Potter will last too long. The Harry Potter part of the park is adjacent to several junky exhibits that should have been ripped out and used to expand the Harry Potter section. With such rich content, an entire park could have been built around that franchise, rather than just a sliver of an existing park land-locked between exhibits with little appeal. So much opportunity wasted due to a lack of belief by Universal in the powerful connection that fans feel to Harry Potter. Sometimes you need to bet the farm, or in Universal’s case at least the Islands of Adventure.

What does Harry Potter have to do with Muhammad Yunus? Quite a bit when we think about passion, belief, and priorities, and how those 3 pieces come together to form a new product that inspires and ignites creativity. Universal went small on an idea that warranted a far bigger bet. Muhammad Yunus bet small, knowing that his success could be replicated the world over if he could help his original group of 10.

The moral of the story – bet small on a brand new idea, but don’t go so small that you paint yourself into a corner.

choices, decision-making, goals, love

Step 330: Focus on Small Intentions

Christa Avampato

“We can do no great things, only small things with great love.” ~ Mother Teresa

There is a desire in our culture to make everything big, to have all experiences be life altering. We want the very best of everything, always. We are not by nature happy with incremental change and improvement. We are a society focused on drastic shifts; we like to go to extremes.

As I’m reflecting on 2010 and thinking about 2011 goals, I feel that temptation toward big ambitions. And then today I read the quote above and reminded myself about the incredible accomplishments that can come from doing a small handful of things really well. So rather than saying I’ll own my own yoga studio, I’ll rent a tiny space in someone else’s studio and see how it goes. I’ll continue to try to make connections in the medical field to teach yoga as part of an integrative approach to health and wellness – and I’ll do it for free if need be. I’ll put together a book that uses some lessons of yoga to teach basic personal finance.

I’ll go into 2011 one small step at a time and take each step with a lot of love and care. This will be a whole new experiment for me. I’m not good at taking my time. I’m not good at being still, or even just slowing down. Despite my physical stature, small is not a common word in my vocabulary. When people meet me for the first time, they often remark that they thought I’d be taller. To be honest, I wish I was. I make up for it with a personality and opinions that are big and bold. This coming year I’m going to try to lead with my heart first. Small intentions, big love.

The image above can be found here.

career, celebration, choices, decision-making, opportunity

Step 323: Let Go and Swim

Christa Avampato

This past weekend I was flipping through my yoga teacher training manual from Sonic Yoga. Though we got through a good deal of it, there’s still so much to learn. With 6,000 years of yoga history prior to my first hearing of it, I feel like I’ll always be a beginner in my yoga practice. There will always be much more to learn when it come to the infinite knowledge of the subtle body.

In the back of my teacher’s manual there are a collection of poems and quotes that are especially significant to my teachers at Sonic. One of them is from the Hopi Nation and it addresses the idea of letting go in order to survive. I’ve been thinking a lot about this idea. It’s so tempting to believe that if we can just dig our nails into the shore and hold on for dear life, then we will be safe. In the poem, a Hopi Elder explains his philosophy on why it’s so much safer, and ultimately more beneficial to our personal development to let go.

When I was in Greece this past summer, I got over my fear of the open water. I let go of the shore and felt lighter for it. I didn’t learn to swim until I was 30 so the while I love the water, I certainly have never seen it as my friend. Now rather than seeing the water as an enemy and something to be feared, I see it as an amazing, immense teacher, just like my yoga practice.

Out on the open waters of Greece, I found that it wasn’t the open water itself that scared me; it was the actual act of letting go that was compounded with so much fear. What would happen to me if I couldn’t latch on to the shore? It was a lack of confidence on my part. And then as the sea crashed against the shore a bit harder, I found that yes, it was easier once I let go. I could roll with the open water instead of being thrashed by it.

Sometimes, we get too attached to dreams and plans and ideas. When life doesn’t seem to be supporting our direction, the instinct may kick up to fight, fight, fight until we get what we want. And sometimes that instinct is dead-on, and other times, it’s the universe’s way of telling us that there is another way we need to go.

So how do we know the difference? How do we know when to let go and when to hang on? This little test works for me: am I using so much energy to just hang on that I have no more energy to accomplish anything else? Is hanging on becoming the battle of my life, and if so, is that battle worth sacrificing every other dream I have? Again, as always, it comes down to priorities.

“To my fellow swimmers:
There is a river flowing now very fast.
It is so great and swift,
that there are those who will be afraid.
They will try to hold on to the shore,
they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly.
Know that the river has its destination.
The elders say we must let go of the shore,
push off into the middle of the river,
keep our heads above water.
And I say see who is there with you and celebrate.
At this time in history,
we are to take nothing personally,
least of all ourselves,
for the moment that we do,
our spiritual growth and journey come to a halt.
The time of the lone wolf is over.
Gather yourselves.
Banish the word struggle from your attitude and vocabulary.
All that we do now must be done
in a sacred manner and in celebration.
WE ARE THE ONES WE HAVE BEEN WAITING FOR.”