Category: writing

change, writing

Step 23: Replicating Authenticity

Christa Avampato

In yesterday’s post I talked about positive deviance, the practice of finding bright spots in a situation, in our lives, and replicating them like mad to create further improvements. And then I promised you a personal revelation for today’s post that demonstrates where and how I’d like to use positive deviance in my own life.

Think of one area of your life that you really love, that’s going so well that you smile every time it pops into your head. What do you love about it? Be very specific on this – get down to the meat of what makes you really happy about this part of your life. Now, how can this exact same paradigm be ported over to other areas of your life?

For me, one area that’s going really well is my writing. I love the design of this new site, the new people it helps me to meet, everything I learn from the research and writing, and its tangible nature. Now for the specifics: I run the site and get to call all of the shots on content and design. Yes, I certainly take and love input, and at the end of the day I physically make all of the updates myself. I get to tell my stories and share what’s happening in my life. It’s the one part of my life where I do exactly what I want, when I want, how I want. It’s the area of my life where I am the most authentic. Brian is going to be thrilled to hear this – this is the exact work we’ve been focusing on for the past few months. I’m going to become an authenticity addict.

Now, what implications does this have for other parts of my life? I’ve been settling. Lots and lots of settling. Settling’s comfortable, it reduces stress, it lowers expectations, and reduces disappointments. It’s also boring and at the end of the day it amounts to almost nothing. And that has to change. More of my life has to be how I want it to be, not just how it is. The other areas of my life have to have as much meaning and authenticity as my writing. I have to accept that this will be difficult, scary terrain. I will have to trust myself more and follow my gut. I will have to lose my grip on comfort in order to seek and find more meaning in the other parts of my life. I will have to jump off the cliff, arms spread wide, and trust that I can fly.

I should be more frightened by this, though if I look back over my life, history is on my side:
1.) I worked very hard as a student so that I could build a better life by getting a quality education. It worked; I have reaped the great rewards of a solid career, financial stability, and the genuine curiosity that an incredible education bears. I wasn’t always sure how I’d afford this education, nor did I know precisely where it would take me. I made it up as I went along, and it all worked out better than fine.

2.) I have been willing to take new jobs, despite a lower salary and less stability, because I followed my heart and did the work I wanted to do. It worked; I’ve always done the work I love and I’ve gotten to achieve many of the things on my childhood dreams list.

One of the very bright spots of my life in the past few years has been my writing because I show up everyday to convey an honest, poignant story. I take off the blinders, drop my guard, and go for broke. In this part of my life I’m not trying to impress anyone, nor am I trying to be any more or any less than me. Every time I just trust myself, my life always works out better than I ever imagined it could be. It’s a bright spot worth replicating.

blogging, writing

I’ve Moved to a New On-line Home

Christa Avampato

After almost 3 wonderful years of blogging on Blogger, I made the move over to WordPress. Same content for the blog, highlights on other projects I’m working on, and a new design. I’ve ported over all of the posts and comments from here onto the new site so none of the content has been lost. It’s a party – come on over and see me at http://www.christainnewyork.com.

blogging, career, technology, writing

Step 17: A New Place to Call (My On-line) Home

Christa Avampato

I thought that this step would be coming much later in the year. I had planned to study and take my GRE, get my after-school program with Citizen Schools underway, and then work on converting my blog from Blogger to WordPress. I got it completely backwards. Yesterday I spent most of the day setting up this site for prime time, the after-school program starts at the end of January, and then I take my GRE on February 6th. The best laid plans…

I just couldn’t help myself with this new site. Professionally I needed to showcase the big projects I’m working on in a way that Blogger couldn’t do for me without significant time and financial investments. While I’m finding WordPress a bit more complicated than Blogger, my expert media friends tell me it’s worth it so I sat down and got it done yesterday. I expect it to be a work in progress for many months to come.

So let me show you around:

– My main page is my blog since my writing is the project that’s most important to me and where I spend the most time.

– I added a “Help Haiti” tab. On it, you will find a link to the U.S. State Department which is coordinating the U.S. relief effort. I’ve also included some other excellent sources of information on the situation in Haiti. I’ll keep adding to it as I find new info. If there’s a link you think I should include, let me know.

– “About Me” gives my short bio and the first of one of a few photos of me. The photos on the site were taken by my good pal, Dan Fortune, who spins a mean mix of classic hits like you’ve never heard them before and is a whiz with a camera.

– “Other Writing” gives a short description of other publications where I’ve been published and featured. When my e-book is finished it will get its own tab. More to come on that in the next month.

– “Innovation Station” is the after-school project I am piloting with Citizens Schools this spring. My goal is to use product development and entrepreneurship to engage children in their studies. Now that this conversion to WordPress is complete, I’ll turn my attention to Innovation Station. This page will look radically different in the next few months.

Just to the right, you’ll find a sidebar that allows readers to subscribe via email (you can subscribe via RSS at the top of the page), join me on Twitter, see my 5 most recent posts, search via category cloud that shows my most common writing topics, a blogroll of some of my favorite sites, and an archive.

I tried to keep the design simple and clean, eliminating the unnecessary so the necessary may speak. Let me know what you think in the comment section, via Twitter, or via email. I look forward to the continued changes and conversation!

dreams, writing

Step 16: Little Black Book

Christa Avampato

On Friday I organized an innovation session at work to get a broad cross-section of my business partners to consider new product ideas that we should explore in 2010. Each exercise we did had a prize associated with it, and for one of those exercises I won a black moleskin appointment book. I keep all of my appointments in my calendar in my phone, so I wasn’t quite sure what to do with this appointment book. It’s much too sleek to let it go to waste.

I decided to record my daily “big thoughts” – inspirations for these blog posts, things I did especially well each day, and great opportunities for learnings. For the past two days, I’ve found myself recording new ideas and resources that I should tap for my various projects. This tiny black book has become a book of intentions.

For some time now I’ve been searching for and crafting the perfect filing system – a single place to keep all of my links, magazine articles, references grouped by project. I haven’t been able to find that place just yet. I’ve tried my own excel spreadsheets, my Google inbox, Evernote, a number of online resources, an intricate paper filing system, etc. It seems I’ve tried just about every option and each falls short a bit. With the entry of this little black book, I realized that maybe that perfect filing system doesn’t exist, and maybe it doesn’t have to. Perhaps items of interest can, and should, be stored separately.

I started to image this little black book a year from now, pages and pages filled with inspirations, or at least pieces of inspirations. I imagined myself flipping back through its pages and being inspired all over again by the notes and messages scrawled across its pages in my own handwriting. Perhaps to build an extraordinary life we all need a place to record our wildest learnings and dreams. Perhaps in our commitment to write down these dreams, we have the greatest chance of bringing them to life.

blog, education, teaching, writing, yoga

Step 8: Yogoer.com

Christa Avampato

With my yoga teacher training starting on February 27th, I’ve been thinking about how to document that journey. I’ve been practicing yoga for 10 years and in 2004 I took a 30-hour weekend course that gave me a very basic certification. I used that certification to teach free yoga classes to my stressed out classmates at Darden Business School. I’ve been wanting to build on that training for several years in the hopes of opening a studio, running a yoga retreat, or using yoga for medicinal purposes and athletic training.

When I moved back to New York in 2007, I started looking around for a studio program that was Yoga Alliance Certified. I found them to be very expensive – far beyond my means – so I had to put that dream on hold for a bit. About a year ago, I stumbled upon Sonic Yoga in Hell’s Kitchen, which runs an affordable program expressly because they feel that many of the current programs are too expensive for most people. They are also incredibly flexible with the timing of the class and off a night and weekend program for people who work full-time. After attending classes and meeting with one of the instructors, I knew the program was the right fit for me.

Now that I am registered for the training, I wanted to share my experience of becoming a Yoga Alliance certified teacher and was struggling a bit with where to do that. On this blog, I really want to focus on my 365 steps toward an extraordinary life. Some of those will absolutely be linked to the yoga teacher training, though I didn’t feel that this was the best venue to record the full process of getting certified. So I went hunting for a better place.

It didn’t take long before I found Yogoer.com, a site run by Erica Heinz, a freelance graphic artist, wellness blogger, and Huffington Post columnist. I will be featuring Erica and Yogoer.com in an upcoming Examiner.com piece. With all of its incredible information about yoga in New York City, Yogoer.com seemed like an ideal place for me to record my training process and connect with other yogis.

My first piece is up on Yogoer.com today and talks about some of the preparation work I’m doing for the training. You will be able to view a full set of my posts here. I will post on this blog each time I have a new post on Yogoer.com. I hope you’ll join me over there as I start this new journey and check out everything that the site and its iPhone app have to offer! Ommmmm…..

dreams, hope, inspiration, nature, writing

My Year of Hopefulness – Castles in the Air

Christa Avampato

“Do not worry if you have built your castles in the air. They are where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” ~ Henry David Thoreau

This is my 365th day of actively seeking out and writing about hope. This was my one New Year’s Resolution for 2009: to feel more hopeful and record what I found here on this blog to help others feel more hopeful, too.

On this day last year, I had no idea that my life would look as it does today, in any respect. I can say with great confidence that this has been a year filled with more change than any other year I have had. Part of me wonders if that is actually my doing: did I precipitate all of this change or did the change just happen to me? I suspect it’s a mix of the two. I can also say with great confidence that today I feel exponentially more hopeful than I did one year ago. And I hope that these 365 blog posts have made others a little more hopeful, too. If so, then I achieved what I set out to do in my writing in 2009.

There are so many reflections I have on this year of writing about hope, so many things I’ve learned about myself, about others, about my community, and about the world as a whole. However, one revelation stands far above the others: when I actively, passionately search for something, I will inevitably find it because I will not give up until my task is done. And the truly remarkable thing is that yes, if I span the globe I can find millions of pieces of hope “out there”, though the pieces of hope that mean the most to me are with me all the time. I carry them inside of me.

Now what will I do next? I’ve got overflowing buckets of hope; how can they be put to the best use? My pal, Laura, asked me this question about two months ago while we were at dinner. Without missing a beat, I told her that for the next year I’d do one thing every day that used all that hope to build an extraordinary life. The answer just sprang from my mouth, no thought required. It was a wish my heart made.

So here we go: beginning tomorrow, I will write a post every day in 2010 that will describe the one thing I did that day that put me one tiny step (or one great leap) closer to living an extraordinary life. The wheels of change are well greased from the events of 2009, so I expect more big changes in 2010. My friend, Kelly, has had a mantra all year of “begin again in 2010.” She’s a wise woman, someone who is both a friend and a mentor, and I’m taking her advice.

The final thought I have as I close out this year relates to nature, a topic from which I’ve drawn a lot of hopeful examples. It’s a butterfly analogy, though not the stereotypical one of beautiful re-birth. When a tiny caterpillar wraps itself up in a cocoon, it purposely constructs the cocoon to be very tight so that the butterfly has to struggle to emerge. It has to wiggle and turn and twist, completing exhausting itself inside the too-tight casing. There are oils on the inside of the cocoon and when the butterfly struggles the oils are distributed over its wings. It will not be able to free itself until the oils are distributed evenly over its wings. Those oils build a layer over the butterfly’s wings that keep the wings from breaking apart when it flies. Without the oil coating on its wings, the butterfly would break apart the moment it tried to fly.

I think about my own struggles, and the struggles of the world, through the lens of the butterfly. The twisting and turning is a painful process. It wears me out, and yet that struggle is so necessary to my development and success. I would never be able to fly without the distribution of its lessons throughout my life. I have struggled long enough and my struggles have done an excellent job of building up the foundation of my life. So let the flight begin toward my castles in the air.

art, career, dreams, writing, yoga

My Year of Hopefulness – The Center

Christa Avampato

“The artists’ role is to do what’s honest for them. So if you’re in New York and everyone is looking at the floor, you can look up. It’s not your role to follow the others. It’s your role to go to your center and then reflect that, not just to be a mirror to what’s happening.” ~ James Hubbell

Here is a tricky balance to keep: how can we be mindful of what’s happening around us and also learn to follow our own hearts? It’s easy to get swept up in the moment, in the emotions and circumstances of others. In its best form, we know this as empathy. In its worst form, we know this as distraction. How can we see the whole picture, and also our own role in it? How can we see both the forest and the trees? The role of the artist, in any medium, demands this balance, and that balance is our Center.

Our Center is an elusive thing. We clearly know when we have moved away from our Center: it’s apparent in our lack of energy, enthusiasm, and joy. Finding and holding the Center, particularly in our daily adventures in chaos, is a tough thing because it sometimes requires that we disappoint others to be true to ourselves. It requires that we believe in ourselves and in our own abilities more than we believe in anything else. It asks us to take our future into our own hands.

There are three ways to know if we’ve found our Center:
1.) It makes time pass by so quickly and effortlessly that we barely notice how long we’ve been there.

2.) The activities we perform at our Center give us energy and we never grow tired of them.

3.) Our Center is the summation of the very best gifts we have to offer to the world.

For me, my Center is found in writing and yoga. I’ve been writing daily for three and a half years, and intermittently as far back into my childhood as I can remember. I’ve had a steady yoga practice for 10 years. Time has flown! These activities give me boundless energy and let me show my most joyful face to the world.

And so, I am taking James Hubbell’s: in 2010, I will go to my Center and reflect what is there. By the time 2010 is singing its swan song, I’ll find a way to make writing and yoga the Center of my life. I’ll find a way to earn my living through them. The ‘fierce urgency of now’ is calling me far too clearly to spend my life any other way.

books, childhood, Christmas, dreams, gratitude, Randy Pausch, writer, writing

My Year of Hopefulness – Thanks for Making My Childhood Dream Come True

Christa Avampato

Last year I wrote a few posts about Randy Pausch’s Last Lecture. I first watched him give the Last Lecture on YouTube through tear-filled eyes and had to take myself for a long walk 3 months later when I read about his passing. His Last Lecture, devoted entirely to his pursuit of childhood dreams, reminded me of how important our earliest dreams are and how they shape us in adulthood. Randy Pausch reconfirmed my belief that childhood dreams, those daring, bold expressions of our deepest desire before we ever realize we have limitations, are some of the most valuable things we own. We should celebrate them and go for them with gusto, no matter what our age is.

This morning, I watched Lorelei, my two year old niece, open her gifts with wild abandon. She threw her head back and laughed with each one, regardless of how big or small it was. She liked the wrapping paper and boxes as much as the gifts inside. Watching her, I wondered how she would remember our Christmases together when she gets older. I want to do everything possible to make her childhood a blissfully happy period of her life, a time when great dreams were formed inside her beautiful heart.

Children change us, whether those children are our own, in our family, part of our friends’ families, or children we work with in our communities. We rediscover a sense of wonder and magic through their eyes, and Christmas magnifies that wonder. They use that same wonder about the world to formulate the ideas that will become their childhood dreams, and if we spend enough time with them we’ll find that they can help us formulate new dreams, too, while also reminding us of everything we dreamed of as children.

When I made up my list of childhood dreams, one of the big things I wanted to do was to be a published author. I thought that meant convincing a publisher that I was good enough for print. I never imagined there would be free (on-line) tools that would make this dream possible to achieve regardless of whether or not any publisher believed in me. I did spend a good amount of time worrying that no one would ever read what I wrote. In the past two and a half years writing this blog, I realized this incredible childhood dream with your help and support, and I wish I knew how to thank you all enough.

This Christmas, I am deeply grateful to all of you who have come to this blog to read about my journey. Your comments, emails, text messages, conversations, and face-to-face opinions and advice mean more to me than I could ever adequately explain. You made one of the great dreams of my life come true – you made me a writer. I hope you’ll stick with me, and that my writing will continue to be helpful to you. I hope we’ll be able to build some more dreams together. Wishing you a very Merry Christmas, this year and always.
The image above is not my own. It can be found here.
Christmas, family, holiday, travel, writing

My Year of Hopefulness – Balancing Writing and Living in Alabama

Christa Avampato

Writing has a funny little dichotomy: it is a mostly solitary activity whose content is greatly influenced by social interaction. That balance between living life and writing about it can be a tricky one to manage, particularly if you write on a part-time basis while working at another full-time job. And yet, that balance is critical to creating a body of writing that is poignant and relevant. Without the social interaction piece, writing becomes flat and dull.

This week I’m in Florida with my sister, brother-in-law, and niece. They are packing up on Christmas afternoon to head to Alabama to see his family and I was planning to stay here at their home to study for the GRE and to write. Yesterday at lunch, we started talking about the possibility of me going to Alabama along with them. As it turns out, that ride will give me a lot of time to study and I’ll have my own toasty bedroom to write and learn GRE vocabulary words until my heart’s content.

At first, I immediately thought that there is just no way I can go to Alabama. I have a to-do list that needs doin’. And it’s so much time in the car, and I’m already traveling to Fort Lauderdale to celebrate the New Year with friends. I mean, I need my rest!

And then I thought, well, what exactly is it that I’m resting up for? Should I stay home alone with my GRE book and my computer, or would it be better to be with people I love and get all of my work done, too? With that thought, what other choice was there? Staying home alone just felt like a horribly empty option, especially at this time of year. All I could think of was an image of the Grinch high up in his home, alone for the holidays. Life was a lot sweeter when he came down off his mountain, and I bet his writing was better, too.

For me, the holidays are about family and friends and dashing here and there and loving it. My writing is about that, too. So my books, my laptop, and my family are hitting the road to Sweet Home Alabama in about 24 hours to see what we can find. If nothing else, it’s got to make for some interesting writing and fun holiday memories.
Christmas, dreams, finance, holiday, wealth, writing

My Year of Hopefulness – I’m Rich

Christa Avampato

“Wealth consists not in having great possessions but in having few wants.” ~ Esther de Waal, author of Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict

Trish Scott, one of the readers of this blog (and a wonderful blogger herself), recently left a comment that got me thinking and connecting some disparate dots that have been showing up in my life. She asked me to consider how I might feel about leaving empty moments empty for a little while. Especially during this time of year, there is an urge and a propensity to fill up everything to the brim: stockings, large holiday dinner plates, space under the tree, our schedules, and the list goes on. Hurry hurry hurry – Christmas is only x number of days away and you’re in your house missing out on all the cheer outside of your door. No wonder we all settle down for a long winter’s nap on December 26th. We’re exhausted! So what if we could just sit, for a moment, and be glad to feel a little empty? What would that do for us?

This Christmas I didn’t make a wish list. For the first time ever I realized I am rich because there isn’t anything I need that I don’t already have. I’m now exactly where I always wanted to be in my financial life. I don’t want for anything; I feel steady and secure financially, despite that the economy is in constant turmoil. With this thought, I felt a tidal wave of gratitude. By Esther de Waal’s beautiful definition of wealth, I am rich. I sat for a moment today and took that feeling in. After so many years of working so hard, wanting so much to not worry about money, I realized I had arrived at my destination. Today, I got there. My heart started humming.

And then I took a look at my busy December. I didn’t get to see everyone I wanted to see. I didn’t get to every outing I was invited to, nor every holiday gathering. I had to take some time for myself, and to do some selfless volunteer work which is so needed at this time of year. So I missed out on some experiences. And yet, I feel so extraordinarily lucky that I have so many incredible people in my life to spend my time with, that I have so many projects that I am happy to spend my time on, that I have places to be where I am needed and wanted. I sat for a moment today and took that feeling in. About this time 7 years ago, I decided to leave my job to settle in one place and start to build a life, a community where I felt like I belonged. Today, I realized I had gotten exactly that after so many years of building. What an amazing feat! My heart began to sing.

So now we wait indoors for the Blizzard of 2009 to arrive any minute. We’re supposed to be snowed in with 12 inches of gorgeous, puffy, white snowflakes. Let it be. Snow me in, world. Make me sit down and reflect on the many, many blessings I have in my life. Some of them were hard won, and others showed up like little miracles from thin air. For all of them I am thankful. So here I’ll sit for a bit today, sip some tea, listen to Christmas carols, light a candle that smells like cinnamon, and be glad to just be right here, right now, pinching myself to make sure that this rich and magical life I lead is real.