adventure, journey, yoga

Step 340: Fear and Taking Action

Christa Avampato

“Action expresses priorities.” ~ Gandhi

I spent a good part of the weekend looking into spaces to rent for my regular yoga classes starting in March. It’s my biggest priority in getting these classes set up – without the right space, there’s no class. I found some that were perfect and too expensive, and others that were priced right but didn’t feel like the right space. A few times this weekend, I got scared. I could feel that tiny painful twinge in my stomach. I hesitated. “Am I really going to do this?” I asked myself.

And then I got an amazing email from a yoga studio in a good location that’s interested in helping me grow the business rather than just renting me space. They found a lot of common ground with me by reviewing my website. I’m hoping to see the space this week. The reviews on-line are glowing. The space is reportedly beautiful and tranquil, and the community is happy and welcoming. By all accounts, it sounds like a hand and glove fit for me. The only thing to do now is to see it with my own eyes and see if I personally feel good in the space.

The act of searching high and low for just the right location feels like a spiritual journey as well as a practical one. It’s a quest to find just the right combination of elements that will foster creativity, awareness, and above all, peace. This is a special part of my life. My students are special and dear to me. I want what’s best for them, and that means finding a space where they practice that helps them feel healthy and whole. If I just focus on that intent, my fear melts and I can take action with great confidence. I’ll keep looking and the right space will come along.

The image above is not my own. It can be found here.

holiday, peace, stress, tradition

Step 339: Take the Stress Out of Togetherness

Christa Avampato

“Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.” ~ Henry Ford

The holiday season brings about a lot of thinking around the importance of togetherness. Why we come together and how much happiness we gain from being part of a community, particularly a community of our own design. Togetherness can bring stress as well especially around the holidays. There’s an old age that goes something like “If you want to test your level of enlightenment, go spend a week with your family.” As much as we like to think that the holidays are nothing but love and light, they can bring tensions, old and new. And then to top it off, we feel guilty about those tensions because we think every family in the world is perfect and content while ours is the one that isn’t.

Over the years, I’ve found that there could be nothing further from the truth. Every family has its own secrets and myths, its rivalries and competitions. No family is perfect. Every family has its complexities and idiosyncracies. If you feel tensions creeping in at all during family or friend gatherings over the next few weeks, here are 3 ways to keep it from getting the best of you and those around you:

1.) Make meals easy. If togetherness is really the important thing to you, forget about all of the fuss. The table and food don’t need to be perfect and special – it just needs to be heartfelt. You don’t need to become an overnight gourmet, or even a cook at all. Focus on being together, not on the table settings. Martha Stewart’s way isn’t the only way to a happy holiday meal.

2.) Ease up on the gifts. The economy is still in very tough shape. Every day there are conflicting job reports, and with every ounce of good economic news, there’s a hefty dose of reality, too. Maybe this is a year to ease up on all of the shopping craziness. I’d be much happier knowing that a donation was made in my name to people who really need help this holiday season. I really don’t need anything – I’m more than fine. I’m much happier with a fun experience than a wrapped box under the tree.

3.) No one ever said the holidays are only about togetherness. Take some time out for you. Make it your gift to yourself to relax and unwind. Take a yoga class, go get a massage, or take a long walk. Enjoy an afternoon at home with a good book and a yummy beverage. A little down time will help you relax into the time you have with others and appreciate that togetherness even more.

What tips have helped you calm holiday stress?

encouragement, frustration, future, goals, growth, passion, patience

Step 338: Rainbows and Rain

Christa Avampato

“The way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain.” ~ Dolly Parton

When I was in Florida, rainbows were popping up everywhere. It had been a long time since I’d seen a rainbow, and in many ways I felt like the ones I saw in Florida were a sign that I’m going in the right direction. This year is my one year anniversary working with Brian. For a year I’ve been working hard on myself, digging deep into what I’ve come from, where I really am, and where I want to go. In one year, I’ve seen a huge transformation in my life: my confidence has grown, my authenticity has come shining through, and I feel positioned to live my very best life going forward.

The road to self-discovery can be difficult. I had dinner with my friend, Michael, this week and we talked about how much effort and energy it takes to find the work we’re truly meant to do. It’s much easier to take what comes our way, but it’s another thing entirely seek out and fulfill a personal mission. It can feel risky to build our own road rather than travel the one laid out before us, though ultimately a truly fulfilling and extraordinary life is one we live by our own self-designed principles.

There will be a lot of rain that falls as we build our own road, one small brick at a time. The pace of progress, particularly in the beginning, can seem slow and frustrating. I encourage you to please keep going, keep seeking. This world needs the very best of each of us, and we owe it to ourselves in this lifetime to find out what it is we are meant to do. Building strength, courage, and skill takes time, but the rewards we can reap once we have them are invaluable. The rainbow is out there.

The photo above is a picture of a double-Rainbow I took at Disney World last month.

business, community, community service, nonprofit, philanthropy

Step 337: Get Involved with Taproot Foundation

Christa Avampato

Today I went to an orientation for new Taproot Foundation consultants. Taproot Foundation matches professionals with nonprofit organizations to create functional and sustainable products, services, and programs in human resources, strategy, marketing and technology. Taproot consultants donate 100 hours of their time over 6 months, an equivalent of $12,000 of services per consultant. To-date Taproot consultants have completed over 1,300 projects in 5 major markets across the country.

What impresses me most about Taproot is their commitment to create meaning, structured work in which effort and talent is so respected. They are filling the gap between professionals who want to help in tangible high-impact ways and nonprofits who want the expertise outside professionals can bring to their missions and stakeholders. They are professionals of the highest order and expect the same from all of their partners. To keep pace with all the requests they receive from vetted nonprofits, they need to add 250 consultants every quarter. Here are 3 more reasons to get involved:

1.) Have a positive impact on your community. Taproot consultants work with nonprofits based in the cities where they live so their work directly affects their communities.

2.) Explore new career paths. Many professionals have aspirations of making a professional move into the nonprofit sector. Doing a pro-bono consulting project can help provide professionals with a clearer picture of what a career with a nonprofit can look like.

3.) Networking. Taproot has created an active online community and provides consultants with the opportunity to work in close-knit teams toward a common goal with very reputable, vetted organizations. It’s an opportunity to meet passionate, talented people who care about making this world a better place.

Apply here.

routine, time, to-do lists, work

Step 336: Balance Over Time

Christa Avampato

In business school a friend of mine famously said, “I think you can have it all, you just can’t have it all, all the time.” We beat the heck out of ourselves when it comes to work life balance. We make ourselves crazy by wanting balance every day, at every moment, and if we can’t get ourselves there we assume there’s something wrong with us, that we are somehow inept. The General Counsel of my company talked at a recent lunch about the idea of attaining balance over time, not balance all the time.

Some days, some week are just going to be packed to the gills. That’s life. Projects ramp up, the holidays come around, guests are in town. Certain times in our lives can just be crazy. Crazy fun or crazy not-so-fun. If that crazy happens over a long, sustained period of time, then yes, we do have a problem that we need to quickly remedy. But just because life is not as balance as we’d like it to be for a few days doesn’t mean we’ve failed. It just means we’ve got active lives.

This idea calmed me down, and it was a message I needed this week. Work has consumed more of my time than it usually does and I was cursing it a bit. Reflecting on the idea of balance over time reminded me to be grateful. I’m ridiculously lucky to have a job that interesting most of the time, that pays well, and doesn’t consume much of my time after 5:30. This week I’ve had a few late nights. I’m getting some new projects up on their feet and it’s taking more time than the typical 9-5 day allows. Thanks to the idea of balance over time, I took the extra time crunch in stride. And when the lull hits, which will inevitably happen, I’ll remember to offer my thanks for peace and quiet.

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.

Christmas, holiday

Step 332: Magic In Believing

Christa Avampato

“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.” ~ Roald Dahl via the very cool art blog http://prettygoodforagirl.blogspot.com/

This always feels like a magical time of year, when anything and everything is possible. The snow sparkles and the music, food, and decorations bring us back to simpler times. Smiles come easy and people give the best of themselves, to those they love and to those they will never meet. We give our best during this time of year, whether or not Christmas is a part of our faith.

As much as I wish this special feeling would last all year, it never does. Maybe this kind of merriment just isn’t sustainable. Maybe it needs to ebb and flow to keep itself fresh and new. Every year just before Thanksgiving, I run out of steam a bit. I feel a little heavy in the heart. In some small way I always lament the passing of another year. Maybe because I see the time ticking by too clearly. Time passing assures that change is coming, too. I get a little quiet during this time. I listen and watch.

As my thoughts turn to all things Christmas, my spirit feels renewed. My energy picks back up. Somehow Christmas makes even the most ordinary things special. A party has a little more cheer. A shared holiday meal has more significance. We remind ourselves how grateful and lucky we are to have people we love in our lives. As practical as I am, I really do think that there’s always magic working in the background of our days, pointing the way, nudging us in the direction we’re meant to take. I just feel the magic a bit more in December than I do at any other time of year. I’m not really sure if the world itself actually changes in December, but I know my heart does, just when I need it most.

The image above can be found here.

generosity, leadership

Step 331: Giving Our Best

Christa Avampato

“You get the best out of others when you give the best of yourself.” ~ Harvey S. Firestone

“The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.” ~ Sue Monk Kidd

I’ve been thinking a lot about leadership recently, and its elusive, mutable nature. I believe that the very best leadership is rooted in a deep desire to serve others. Though in its final expression it is outwardly focused on others, if we are to lead well we must have a deep understanding of what lies within us first. We must learn to enjoy and respect the company we keep in the empty moments before we can fully engage with others. We must know our own heart’s longing before we can uncover the same in others. To bring forward the very best in others, we must know and cultivate the very best within ourselves. To know ourselves, to really come face to face with who we are, who we mean to be, and how we should spend our time this time around is a lifetime endeavor.

Amid the stresses of daily life, how do we ensure that we leading a life composed of the very best we have to give? How do we make our days and years really matter? Here are 5 ways that I measure the quality of what I’m giving:

1.) Does an activity give me energy? I’m all for a good work out that leads me to a long, restful sleep, but aside from that I’m more interested in activities that boost me up rather than ones that leave me feeling depleted. If I start to feel my mind going numb, it’s best for me to move on.

2.) Am I giving and receiving something positive simultaneously? I may do a service project that helps someone else and makes me feel good about contributing to my community. I may write a blog post that helps me work out a challenge I’m having while also helping someone else. When I hang out with my nieces, the hope is that we’re all having a great time. If I’m doing anything that doesn’t strike this balance most of the time, chances are I’m not putting my best into the world.

3.) Is there laughter involved? By nature, I tend more toward the serious side of life more than the humorous side. (I’m working on balancing that out in 2011 – more details to come in a later post.) I can always rest easy when the activity I’m doing is somehow triggering laughter. Of course, always better to have people laughing with us than at us, but I’ve also been known to never be above self-deprecation if it increases the chances of a happy ending. Humility doesn’t get all the respect it deserves.

4.) Is what I’m doing furthering one of my larger goals? My blog posts are a great example of this principle. Each post isn’t in and of itself an audacious goal, but each one is adding to my goal of living a writer’s life. Smalls steps make the journey.

5.) Am I resting easy? My sleep cycle is my greatest signal of the value of my daily activities. I had insomnia for a good chunk of my life and my yoga training really helped to correct that, as did a lot of the work I’ve done with Brian. When my heart’s at peace, my mind and body follow. A day well-lived leads me into a night well-slept.

How do you measure what really matters and how do you keep track of whether or not you’re on the right path?