“What saves us is to take a step. Then another step.”~ C. S. Lewis
A lot of people take about the day they made a change, a big decision, a new commitment.
But what about the day after? Do they wake up panicked by what they’ve done? Does their conviction grow each day after? Here is how I felt: just fine. Oddly fine.
Sometimes people fear staying too long in a situation that no longer suits them. I believe in my case I stayed just the right amount of time. I got my finances in order, my direction became clear and focused, and then leaping was the next logical step.
There were certainly moments of trepidation and fear. I’m sure there will continue to be these moments. They do pass. I just take another step, and keep going. Today is that second step, the second step on a new path. Of course it will feel rocky and of course I will feel unsure. It is new. It doesn’t know me. And I don’t know it. Yet. But we will grow together.
“I am not afraid. I was born to do this.”~ Joan of Arc
On January 1st, I started down the path that would culminate in a leap from my current job. I thought it would be December by the time I actually made the leap but yesterday I gave my notice and my last day at my job will be June 15th. My co-workers are sad and disappointed as much as they are proud and excited to see me give my dream a real shot at coming true. I am so grateful for the lessons I’ve learned there and excited for the next chapter.
For the past 4 years I have been working full-time as a product developer for a financial services company and now I will turn utilize my experience toward teaching, writing, and creative product development projects, particularly (but not exclusively) focusing on technology in the healthcare and education spaces.
When I graduated from business school 5 years ago, I never imagined that I would contemplate working for myself. I made excuses: I’m too young; I don’t have enough experience; I’ll never make enough money to support myself. They are all valid fears, but there was one fear that was greater than all of these combined. What if I never devote my time to the projects that really light me up? How would I reflect on my life knowing that I didn’t do everything I could to merge my work with my passions?
And then the answer became simple – I have to at least try and that means letting go of what seems stable and secure for the sake of following the path that is most authentic. In actuality, the latter is the safest road. When we put ourselves in charge of our futures, we find renewed energy, strength, and creativity. We understand the true value of our time. We find our greatest worth.
So now as this chapter comes to a close, a bright, shiny, new one begins. Thank you so much for sharing this journey with me, for all of your support and encouragement, for believing that we can all be exactly the people we are meant to be, living the lives we are meant to live. We’re on our way. We’re building our wings.
“What we need is not the will to believe but the will to find out.”~ Bertrand Russell
A company I know recently went through a very large reorganization due to significant changes in leadership. My friends there who kept their roles are being asked to trust the vision and strategy of the new leadership team on blind faith. They are being asked to believe in something that has not yet been proven, that doesn’t even have any results on which to base their belief. In the face of such significant change, this is a tall order.
The company recently surveyed the current employees to ask how they feel about the new strategy. Many felt positive about the changes, though they had a lot of doubt about the ability of the new leadership team to make good on their promises. I smiled when my friends told me that. It is exactly the right answer. We may not be able to control all of our circumstances, at work or in life, but we always have the right to our curiosity. We always have the right, and I would go so far as to say the obligation, to say, “Let’s see how it all unfolds.”
Any time we are going through change, we experience a bit of seizing up. That seizing up can be physical, emotional, or mental. It is just resistance, and we can breathe through it. It’s a very natural part of change. It’s from fear of the unknown. It’s meant as a protective device, though too often it becomes a weight around our necks that keeps us from moving in the direction we’re meant to go.
Our curiosity is a potent tool to use during these moments of seizing up, second only to our breath. When that resistance to change finds us, as it always does, we take a big inhale, then exhale, and then give ourselves the permission to be curious about the outcome. Have the will not to believe that this is the right thing to happen but the will to find out if it’s the right thing to happen to us right now.
Let the questions rise up. Why? How? When? Where? With whom? Dig in to the answers and don’t let anyone tell you that you must follow along simply because they said so. Question until you get answers you can believe in. And if your questions aren’t met satisfactorily, you have the right to walk out and carve your own path. Only you own your time and only you get to decide how it’s best spent. Seek, and eventually, you will find.
When I was a kid, Memorial Day was a big deal. Everyone in our small town went to the parade because everyone in my town was somehow connected to the military – either personally or through friends or family. Most of the men had served at one point or another, particularly the ones who were of the generations who fought in WWII and Korea. At the end of the parade there was a 21 gun salute at the cemetery and people always cried during that piece. As a kid I didn’t understand why that was such an emotional moment for so many people. Now, of course, I do. Particularly given our last decade. So much has been given, so much has been lost. It is overwhelming and I am humbled by their sacrifice and courage.
This Memorial Day as we’re chowing down and enjoying the freedom and happiness that is associated with official kick-off of summer, let’s take a moment to remember those who fought for us so that we could have days like this. They’ve so much for all of us for so long. Let’s take the time to remember them, thanks them, and support them and their families.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood, and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” ~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Over the last few days, I’ve been reflecting on how to rally a community around an idea that has not yet taken root in popular culture. I’ve been thinking about revolution, a revolution of consciousness.
It doesn’t get started with tactics, project plans, and the divvying up of roles and responsibilities. And it doesn’t get accomplished that way either. Each individual has to feel a personal sense responsibility for seeing that vision through to fruition. They have to want it from the very depths of their souls for their own reasons.
Corporate executive who say stupid things are making it easy for us to set sail on our own venture adventures. While I am angered by their behavior, I’m thankful for our ability to turn the situation around and invest in our own business ideas. When things are falling apart (corporate culture), pieces are often falling into place (new start-ups.)
However, my latest example of corporate idiocy is worth a detailed explanation for the lesson it teaches us about where and with whom to spend out time. This is a story that has to be told. Just when I thought I had seen and heard it all when it comes to the idiotic behavior of some (though certainly not all) corporate executives, another one comes along and delivers another shocking display of poor behavior. Women of the world, brace yourselves for this one.
I recently had the opportunity to hear Jennifer Hyman, Co-Founder of Rent the Runway, on a panel of entrepreneurs. Rent the Runway rents the latest women’s special occasion fashions for a fraction of the purchase price. A passionate, intelligent, and creative woman, Jennifer explained that her company is about more than fashion. It’s about empowering women to create extraordinary lives while looking and feeling their best. She explained that the mission of Rent the Runway was so compelling that she and her co-founder were the first female entrepreneurs funded by Bain Capital.
The corporate executive moderating the panel saw this incredible accomplishment as an opportunity to put his ignorance on display for all to see. His response to Jennifer’s story?“Was that Bain pre- or post-Romney?”
And the entire audience (made up largely of the corporate executive’s employees) went silent. No one knew what to say, where to look, nor how to feel. Everyone’s face just dropped. Was he trying to funny? Was he using humor to veil his own insecurities about female entrepreneurs? After spending 30 minutes prior to the panel discussing the value of a growth mind-set to large corporations, why would he insult a guest he invited to speak on the topic? Did he feel threatened by her confidence and ingenuity? (Incidentally, Jennifer was the only female on the panel and the only one to receive this kind of comment from the moderator.)
Jennifer handled the situation with grace, the way I believe she must handle every business situation she faces. Still, my anger was up, way up, until I realized the tremendous gift that this corporate executive delivered to everyone in the audience. Why would anyone continue to work hard for him every day? Why would anyone pledge their loyalty to someone whose ignorance causes him to behave so poorly?
You could see everyone’s wheels turning with the idea, “I need to get out of here and follow the lead of the entrepreneurs on the panel.” And all I could think in response was, “Yes. Yes you do. Give your own business ideas a fair shot at success. Leap!”
This executive is already getting the result he deserves – a complete loss of loyalty from his team; he just doesn’t know it yet. But he will. It won’t be the first time a suit, stuck in his ways, totally misjudged the future of our economy and I have a feeling it won’t be the last. Investors, place your bets. I know which way I’m going. Do you?
I absolutely love this post today from A Charmed Yogi. The wisdom of Erma Bombeck and a cute dog picture relating to yoga. What else does a good blog post need? Enjoy!
For those of you under the age of 40 (yea, I can say that now), you may not know who Erma Bombeck is. She was a humorist and newspaper columnist from the 1960s through the 1990s. She wrote a column after she found out that she had cancer entitled, “If I Had My Life to Live Over.”
In the piece, she talks about all of the little things that she took for granted that she would embrace if she had to do it over. Two of my favorite lines are, “I would have burned the pink candle sculpted like a rose before it melted in storage,” and, “I would have sat on the lawn with my children and not worried about grass stains.” Well, my children have four legs and fur, but I still love how she articulates “seizing the moment.”
“As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world as in being able to remake ourselves.”~ Mahatma Gandhi
Yesterday someone asked me what situation in the world bothers me the most. My answer rose up immediately – I hate to see people give up on their dreams before they even try to make them come true. It’s an answer with a very personal angle. Prior to my decision to take a leap and work for myself, I epitomized exactly the situation that bothers me the most. If I wanted to see a change in the world, I needed to be that change, too. I had to set the wheels in motion to leap, for myself and for others.
We are our greatest creation. The lives we build are works of art that should be constructed thoughtfully, passionately, and purposefully. We are not depots that accept any and every train that pulls into the station. Our days and the people, places, and events that fill them are choices. Our choices.
Right now I am deeply engaged in the process of transformation. While I’ve been thinking of this time as something special and finite, Gandhi’s quote reminds me that every day we are remaking who we are – physically, mentally, and emotionally. I know that we each have the power to transform the world, but that process begins internally, not externally. We need to embrace personal change before we can generate societal change.
So have a look around. What is it about the world that really bugs you? Now take a look at your own life and see if in some small way the thing in the world that you detest actually resides within you. Root it out. Once you commit to personal change, change will begin to happen all around you. When you take up the act of personal transformation, everyone who comes into contact with you will begin to transform, too. That’s how we start a revolution, a revolution of consciousness. Light it up!
The New York Times ran a story over the weekend about Google’s efforts to increase mindfulness among its employees. The story, Ok, Google, Take a Deep Breath, featured Chade-Meng Tan (Meng), an engineer at Google and the creator of the Google team course, “Search Inside Yourself.” I clicked the link to watch a sample class on YouTube and I was both disappointed and annoyed.
Meng explains that he wanted to see a dramatic shift in world towards peace. Given the company’s policy to let all employees work on personal areas of research for a certain percentage of their work hours, Meng decided that the best investment of his time would come from figuring out how to generate world peace. It’s an insightful idea. What I hated about it was his conclusion that to get individuals and companies to care about world peace, we have to help them understand what’s in it for them. Meng went on to explain that no one is going to create peace just because it’s a good thing for society. They have to get something out of it on a personal level before they care about peace. We need to tap into people’s individual needs that make the objective of world peace an inevitable by-product.
Gross.
I hate that conclusion. Is that what we’ve amounted to? A collection of 6 billion bodies who only care about themselves? I stewed on that as I ate my lunch, determined to prove that though Meng may be a very bright engineer, his conclusion on how to bring about peace was unfounded.
I couldn’t. I got more annoyed.
Thankfully, my post from yesterday on the value of having our personal philosophies unsettled was still top of mind. Why did Meng’s conclusion, one that I had a hard time refuting, bother me so much and what could I learn from it? Could I apply it to my own work? Was I already subconsciously already applying it to my own work?
A New York Times column that Thomas Friedman wrote for after 9/11. In it he explained that, “If you don’t visit a bad neighborhood, it will visit you. “ In other words, get out there and do something that’s good for you and good for others. The trick we have to benefit individually as much as we do collectively in order to get community efforts and acts of goodwill to be sustainable.
Environmental sustainability and corporate social responsibility really took off when companies realized they could benefit financially and in terms of customer and employee loyalty. In these efforts, the win-win is what tipped the scales. We are beginning to see these same seeds planted in healthcare. Our current healthcare system is no longer sustainable, so we are beginning to see more emphasis on preventative health measures that give people a way to be well before they ever get sick. The same is true in education. We are beginning to see a proliferation of new channels for learning because entrepreneurs realized that they could profit from disrupting the traditional education system.
In all these examples, the answer to the question “what’s in it for me?” came into balance with the answer to the question “why is this good for society?” We need both side of the equation to really make an impact. Thanks, Meng, for stating the cold, hard facts, for not letting us let ourselves off the hook, and for showing us that we can make a positive impact on humanity by truly understanding humanity.
Universe, I hear you. The theme of change continues to show up in my life on a very regular basis. And my regular I mean hourly.
My Monday post, We Have to Let Go to Be Free, was about the acceptance and release of emotions to generate transformation. At its essence, this idea gets at what it means to change. We fully believe in change; we crave it; we just have a hard time changing ourselves.
Just after my post went live, I got 3 emails that fell in line with this sentiment of change:
One on the state of French politics:“The situation is so catastrophic that whoever wins it won’t make much difference. The French want change but only on the condition that it doesn’t change anything for them.” ~ Marie-Claude Noel, 72, who said she voted for France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, in the first round of presidential election
One from Mary McManus, a lovely yogi and reader of this blog who wrote the following comment on my Monday post: “This was the theme in my yoga classes this weekend. Love the synchronicity. Love how you so eloquently and succinctly wrote about your experience. Detachment and freedom — it’s so amazing when we let go and feel that freedom creating the space for our Spirit to dance and sing our life song. Here is my blog post about the very same theme — enjoy!”
One from DailyGood: “People don’t resist change. They resist being changed!” ~ Peter Senge
The collective message is clear:What we wish to see manifested on a large-scale must first be manifested on a personal scale.
This idea caused me to really think long and hard about the mechanics of change. It comes down to personal responsibility and the willingness to make an internal shift. My friend, Michael, is an incredible example of someone who wants to see a massive shift in the way we live on and care for our planet. He’s passionate about the sustainability movement and has constructed his life to create as small a carbon footprint as possible. His life is about people and experience, not about the accumulation of tangible stuff. His personal dedication to changing himself and his lifestyle inspires me and challenges me to constantly think about my own dedication to change.
What are you willing to change about your own life to bring about a larger societal change? Can you walk the walk?
Christa Avampato 