As the sugar haze from the xmas pudding begins to fade and a new year scuttles towards us, it is perhaps timely to reflect upon the last 12 months. End of year reflection is not only about working out what you’re NOT going to do in the new year but also acknowledging the things you have done this year, what you’ve learned and what positive things you’re taking with you into the next phase of life.
There are plenty of end of year reflection questions but the ones I’ve been using this year are an adaptation of questions by coach Shirley Anderson (who runs the Coaching Salon – which is fabulous BTW). I like these questions because they’re not just about achievements but coming back to what’s most important – doing things that are in sync with our values, being surrounded by people we care about, letting go of the shit that doesn’t serve us, being grateful for the life we have …
Grab a cuppa (or a glass of sparkly) and give the following some thought over the coming week:
Year End Questions
What are the 25 things I’m most proud of accomplishing this year?
What were my disappointments and what did let go of?
Who am I most happy to have in my life?
What is the most significant area of personal growth for me?
What would I have done differently, and what is the lesson I got from it?
What 5 things am I most grateful for, and how will I show it?
(adapted from questions by Shirley Anderson of the Coaching Salon)
I’ve written previously on the brilliance of mindfulness and thought it might be time to start sharing some of the resources that I’ve found most beneficial over the years.
Today’s resource is a 10 minute mindfulness meditation and is based on the meditations of Jon Kabat Zinn (the guy who brought mindfulness into the western secular mainstream more than 20 years ago with his Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction programme at the Uni of Massachusetts Medical Centre).
If you’ve not done any mindfulness practice before then the following short guided meditation is a gentle introduction. It gets you started by helping you focus on your breath which you can then use as an anchor for calm throughout the rest of your day.
To begin your mindfulness practice, set aside ten minutes today, find a quiet place you can sit and not be disturbed, and listen to the audio. Repeat tomorrow. And the next day. And so on for 7 days.
If you are interested in developing your mindfulness practice further, I’ll be sharing longer body scans and full mindfulness meditations with you over the coming weeks. So, be sure to subscribe to the monthly Brilliant! Ideas for Work and Life newsletter, the worklifedesign RSS feed or follow @worklifedesign on Twitter to receive notification when I upload them.
Somewhere in the space between that which exists and that which has yet to be imagined, sparks of Brilliance fly.
Happy end of the month (or is it beginning of the new month?)! Here are the Brilliant! posts from November.
BRILLIANT! A BLOG, A ONLINE MAG AND A MOOK: THREE BRILLIANT PUBLICATIONS
Brilliant ideas are all around us. The challenge today seems to be identifying those that can actually provide some insight into the questions or issues that we are facing.
To sort through the chaff, I find I will listen to the recommendations by colleagues, clients, family, friends and trusted interweb sources. They’ll often mention magazines, books, blogs, websites, events or simply ideas that are inspiring them.
Three of these little gems have really impressed me this year. … read more…
BRILLIANT! WHERE GOOD IDEAS COME FROM
Finding innovative solutions to problems is a common challenge in work and in life.
In most circumstances the way to proceed is often clear or doesn’t take long to become clear through asking a few simple questions. But other times no matter how many lists of possibilities I roll through, the answer doesn’t appear.
A current situation for me is the naming of a new project. I am fairly clear in what I want the name to communicate but do you think I can find ‘the name’? The frustrating thing is that I know it exists, it’s just not existing in my view yet.
With this in mind, I watched the TED talk, above, by Steven Johnson (a different Steven Johnson from last month) entitled “Where good ideas come from” to see if I could crack my own good idea… read more …
AND, IN THE STUDIO THIS MONTH …
THE STUDIO: CLARITY AND DIRECTION WITH THE OMG! WHAT AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE?! EBOOK
With the silly season fast approaching, I thought it might be timely to share with you my little all-in-one resource for those who may be scheduling some existential angst or career crisis over the coming months.
This 30-page ebook helps you work out what you want from life and how you can start making it happen.
To download your very own copy of OMG!WAIDWML (catchy, hey?)
THE STUDIO: CREATE A VIBRANT, COMPELLING VISION FOR YOUR LIFE WITH YOUR FUTURE LETTER : EXERCISE
WHERE ARE YOU HEADED?
This is one of the four basic questions I always ask someone who wants to change some part of their life or work. I find that we can be very good at detailing what’s wrong or what we don’t want or how things should be different, but very few people are clear about what they do want. So is it any surprise that we have difficulty making decisions when we have nothing to guide us? Today’s Studio treat is an exercise that is surprisingly simple and yet quite powerful… The Future Letter
Brilliant! Ideas For Work and Life is written and collated by Trish Weston. Everything in it is her opinion, with a smattering of facts to make it hold together. If you have any suggestions or comments please feel free to email trish AT worklifedesign DOT com DOT au
Brilliant ideas are all around us. The challenge today seems to be identifying those that can actually provide some insight into the questions or issues that we are facing.
To sort through the chaff, I find I will listen to the recommendations by colleagues, clients, family, friends and trusted interweb sources. They’ll often mention magazines, books, blogs, websites, events or simply ideas that are inspiring them.
Three of these little gems have really impressed me this year.
the design files
type blog
www.thedesignfiles.net
Caste your mind back to a time before the internet… drift … drift … drift … Did you ever cut out photos, ads, illustrations, products, etc from magazines and keep a file of your cherished desired items? No? Oh well, I’ve been a long time fan of The File and I love seeing what’s in Lucy Feagin’s File on all things designie. She interviews all sorts of creative types about their work and life and also features interiors of homes that are alive with their occupants’ obsessions, passions and personalities. One of my favourite posts this year has been on notebooks (you know, those things some of us still scribble in) but I’m just as taken by the furniture, fabrics and art of local makers. Lucy is truly gifted in finding the gorgeous and often simple objects that make our spaces full of wonder and beauty. [the design files: recommended by Kate James]
dumbo feather, pass it on
type mook
www.dumbofeather.com
I’m fairly new to the dumbo feather world but it is certainly a place that I intend to regularly visit. dumbo feather is a mook (sort of a magazine, sort of a book) and each quarterly issue features the stories of five ‘remarkable individuals’. There a side-articles within each feature which draw out some of the ideas touched on a little more. I find as I bounce from one article to the next, I keep being struck by a strange feeling. It’s the feeling that something very special is being said. It’s the feeling that this little mook is quite brilliant – not only in the people and ideas it gives space but how it does it. It looks and feels beautiful. [dumbo feather: recommended by Kate James]
fear.less
type online mag
www.fearlessstories.com
Fear is one of those things that most of us are well acquainted with. It holds us back, makes us do stupid things and usually oversteps its purpose of keeping us alive. So this magazine, that features the unique stories of people overcoming fear, is such a treasure. I like it because it has interviews with people I greatly admire such as Robert Thurman, Sharon Salzberg, Karen Armstron, Ben Zander and Howard Zinn as well as people I’ve never heard of who are just getting out there and living (as the blurb says) ‘remarkable lives’. fear.less is a free monthly online magazine that you can download or view online. [fear.less recommended by Christine McDougall]
How stories can help you remember what’s important
Sometimes I discover new ideas or designs or artists or writers through these publications, but mostly they help me remember.
I’ll be looking through the photos of someone’s home in The Design Files and remember that I really like a particular period of furniture design, or art, or fabric or the way light can be used to change the mood of a room. I remember how physical objects impact upon my space.
I’ll be looking at an issue of fear.less and remember that I really quite like the way Seth Godin formats his ebooks in landscape so you don’t have to scroll down and down and down and down. Or, I’ll remember that ebooks don’t have to look like books but can have their very own style which makes them easy to read and easy on the eye.
I’ll be looking at dumbo feather and remember that writing doesn’t have to be so minimalist. I’ll remember that stories that inspire don’t have to be “woo I’ve made it. I’m so cool.” but can have doubts and obstacles and heartache. In fact they are better if they do because they are more realistic and show the resilience and creativity of the human spirit. In the face of all this crap, this person continues.
It’s brilliant ideas like this that help me remember what’s important, and being aware of that makes all the difference in how I work and live.
You can receive a roundup of Brilliant! Ideas for Work and Life in your Inbox every month by subscribing to the Brilliant! newsletter here
OMG! What am I doing with my life! The DIY Life Guide to creating a life and work you love
Free ebook for subscribers
With the silly season fast approaching, I thought it might be timely to share with you my little all-in-one resource for those who may be scheduling some existential angst or career crisis over the coming months.
This 30-page ebook helps you work out what you want from life and how you can start making it happen. You can work through the eight steps in an afternoon or use it to guide your change over the next eight weeks or eight months.
Each of the steps, from defining your vision to working out what you’re doing about it today, comes with exercises and/or worksheets to help you get your thoughts (and what your committing to!) on paper. Some of the exercises are old friends (hello Future Letter!) and some are new to The Studio (such as Discovering Your Strengths, FeelThinkDo, and more).
You can get access to the free download of OMG! What am I doing with my life! The DIY Life Guide to creating a life and work you love by subscribing to Brilliant!
If you’re a current Brilliant! subscriber, you’ll receive your direct link to the ebook in this month’s Brilliant! newsletter in your Inbox tomorrow.
If you would like to receive monthly updates of what’s new in The Studio, just subscribe to our monthly ezine, Brilliant! Ideas for Work and Life.
Steven Johnson’s TEDtalk: Where do good ideas come from?
Finding innovative solutions to problems is a common challenge in work and in life.
I find in most circumstances the way to proceed is often clear or doesn’t take long to become clear through asking a few simple questions. But other times no matter how many lists of possibilities I roll through, the answer doesn’t appear.
A current situation for me is the naming of a new project. I am fairly clear in what I want the name to communicate but do you think I can find ‘the name’? The frustrating thing is that I know it exists, it’s just not existing in my view yet.
With this in mind, I watched the TED talk, above, by Steven Johnson (a different Steven Johnson from last month) entitled “Where good ideas come from”.
Johnson is interested in the environments that allow high levels of innovation. He believes that, contrary to popular thought, most good ideas aren’t lightbulb or eureka moments but instead, an idea is a network cobbled together from all the other ideas around it. Good ideas come from the ideas having a space to mature and, in his words, have sex with other ideas.
Johnson uses the example of the first British coffee houses’ influence on the Age of Enlightenment. The introduction of caffeine into a population used to alcohol as their beverage of choice, along with the space where these newly stimulated minds could come together and debate, argue and reason with each other, set forth a subculture of ideas that changed history.
Johnson is also keen on the concept of the slow hunch where an idea has a very long incubation period. As an example, he refers to Darwin’s evolutionary ideas, which existed in his writings well before he presented them as a clear theory.
So what’s this mean for us? How do we tap into these idea networks? Do we need to imbibe stimulants in the company of others to find our solutions?
While I’m quite fond of an occasional caffeinated beverage in a public house, I don’t think it’s necessary. For me, the key is asking the question and then being open to the ideas around me interacting with the original idea. So that might happen by having a conversation with a friend or colleague, reading a paper or a magazine, participating in an online forum, wandering through the library or just sitting on the beach.
It’s about creating the space for the idea to form.
Which is what I think Johnson is getting at – whether it’s a physical space, social space, mental space or temporal space.
So where does that leave me with my project name? Well, I’ve been asking lots of questions of lots of people lately but it’s all come back to “Here’s my dilemma. What do you think?” The answers have been diverse and sometimes unexpected.
While I still don’t have “the name”, the process has been excellent for helping me clarify the boundaries as well as the possibilities for the project.
Perhaps all I now need to accept is that this project may need a slow incubation.
Or a lot more caffeine.
Or mindfulness.
Or trips to the beach.
Or…
You can receive a roundup of Brilliant! Ideas for Work and Life in your Inbox every month by subscribing to the Brilliant! newsletter here
This is one of the four basic questions I always ask someone who wants to change some part of their life or work.
I find that we can be very good at detailing what’s wrong or what we don’t want or how things should be different, but very few people are clear about what they do want. Even if they are clear about aspects of it, there’s no overall vision for how it is integrated with the rest of their life.
So is it any surprise that we have difficulty making decisions when we have nothing to guide us?
Today’s Studio treat is an exercise that is surprisingly simple and yet quite powerful. The Future Letter asks you to write a letter, dated one year hence, to someone you care about. It asks you
What do you want your life to look like in twelve months?
How will you feel?
What will you be doing?
and other questions to help you get all those hopes and dreams and possibilities that have been swimming around in your head written down.
It also helps you to start bringing your values to life.
This exercise will be enhanced if you’ve already done your Wheel of Life, Sorting Out Your Values and your MyLand Visualisation but you can also just dive in to the Future Letter and explore your values and life domains more fully later.
Get on your bike! Pedal-powered Ridgefield Fitness Club photo by Green Revolution
It all started with the 1973 dystopian science fiction film, Soylent Green. Most people who see this film remember the food stuff of the title but I remember scene with the bicycle-powered electricity. For years after watching the film I wondered how you could rig a bike to generate enough electricity to run a small appliance such as a tv or a computer.
I know the idea of people power is not new. History-textbook images easily spring to mind of roman galleons powered by oar-wielding humans and huge stones being dragged up a pyramid by, yes, humans. And, indeed, in our contemporary lives we still have humans behind most actions, slavishly pushing those keys on the keyboard or maneouvring those hulking great mining dump trucks.
But much work today has been automated to minimise human energy required and maximise the use of our treasured energy resources. While the smart and savvy are exploring alternative sources of energy (such as the sun, the wind or some other thing we’d need to dig out of the ground), I wonder where could we passively harness human energy and convert it to electricity?
Football fields? Dance floors? City streets?
StepperWash by Stephen M Johnson
Steven M Johnson has also spent a lot of time contemplating the question of harnessing human power. His illustrations of human-powered appliances are brilliant. The Pedal Wash, Stepper Wash, Wash Cycle and Vanity Cycle may not have contemporary apple-styling but I love the way Steven has imagined the possibilities. Okay, the Exervac is somewhat disturbing but I think that’s more to do with the 80s-style leotard.
During some of the hundreds of hours I’ve spent sweating it out on a bike or rowing machine at the gym I’ve often thought it would be great to harness some of this. When a gym manager was telling me how he was addressing the gym’s skyrocketing electricity costs by turning off all lights when they weren’t needed, I had a hunch that the idea of the people-powered gym might become a reality. I looked at the banks of bikes, steppers, and rowing machines and thought, “That’s where your electricity could be coming from”. Energy in, energy out and where’s it going? Nowhere.
Well, I’m happy to tell you that the people-powered gym is now a reality. A number of gyms around the world are tapping the energy of their members and it seems that it’s win-win-win all round. Less fossil-fuel electricity is used, the energy generated by the members is used to run the machines and lights of the gym, and in some cases, the members get credits for energy they’ve contributed to the system. It a beautiful whole-system approach to business, fitness and the environment.
It’s also heartening to see some of these gyms promoting their human power globally. The more people who see that it’s possible then the more it will be adopted or adapted. Perhaps even my friend the gym owner, who recently refurbed his entire gym with brand new energy-guzzling, tv-on-every-machine equipment might even see its potential.
You might ask, how important is it to reduce the energy consumption of the gymnasiums of the wealthy? Well, every little bit helps but really this is about the development and promotion of the ideas.
When this little butterfly of an idea flaps its wings, it takes very little for it to become a pedal-powered water pump that dramatically changes the lives of a community in India or a remote area of Australia.
You never know where a brilliant, life-saving idea will come from.
‘The real act of discovery is not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.’ Marcel Proust
The use of metaphor is a powerful way to discover who we are and find our place in the world. It can be the lens which brings what’s important or what’s really going on into sharp focus. One of my favourite visualisations, My Land, uses the metaphor of our inner landscape as a country – complete with its own values, traditions, celebrations and border control.
I love this visualisation. It takes a right-brain approach and quickly taps into the values and beliefs that are important in our lives. It reminds us that we each have our own “land” but we often can’t see it – or assume that we live in the same “land” as others.
I first encountered My Land about five years ago. It was one of the excellent self-discovery exercises introduced to me by my coach at the time, Fernando Lopez.
I’ve been wanting to “check in” with My Land ever since and see if anything has changed – but it’s just not the same when you’re reading the text. So I recorded it for myself – and found it still works a treat. This time, I found that while a lot of the terrain is familiar (vibrant, cosmopolitan, almost boho), I’m much clearer about who “my people” are and was surprised to realise that MyLand is very similar to a place I lived 15 years ago.
So, I share it with you here for you to see your own land with new eyes. Who knows what you might discover …
If you could only own 100 things, what would be on your list?
Do I really need five towels? 15 pairs of shoes? A different shirt for each day of the month? What would it be like to live with so few possessions?
I realise that a great proportion of the world’s population probably already does so but, for those of us in the West who have been reared on a high-fat diet of consumption, this is almost unthinkable.
But I am starting to think about it.
Over on on my personal blog, I’ve been exploring what my 100 things are. The “100” number and the idea to explore the limits of my own material possessions came from a couple of brilliant life experiments that have been getting a bit of attention lately.
Kelly Sutton, at The Cult of Less, has been selling off his material possessions online over the last year. If you check out his website, you’ll get an idea of what he’s found important by the types of items he keeps, sells and gives away. Kelly’s goal is to reduce his possession to two bags and two boxes.
Could you imagine all your possessions fitting into two bags and two boxes?
This idea does my mind in. I can barely imagine it – let alone imagine doing it. But then I’m very new to this. I have been an out and proud hoarder all my life.
But seeing as Spring Cleaning has been on my mind lately and as I’ve been living between two homes (and thus out of a backpack) for the last few months, I’ve started observing my “must have” items. These are the things that travel back and forth with me or I have one of each at both locations. But what else would be in my two boxes and two bags?
That’s brought me to Dave Bruno’s 100 Thing Challenge. In 2007, Dave set himself the challenge to reduce his possession count to 100 – and then live 12 months with only 100 possessions.
By setting a number, you set up one of your “design limitations” and start working around it – and in that place I’ve found that it becomes really clear what’s important to have around me all the time and what are the things that are nice but I don’t need.
What I love about both of these approaches to minimising “stuff” is that it shakes up our cultural assumptions about material possessions and consumption. Mainly, that to consume is to live, or, that our freedom comes from our freedom to consume.
Plus, there’s nothing like de-cluttering your life and opening up the space (physical, psychological, emotional) to with as you want. As Kelly says, the greatest thing he’s got from his minimalist life is freedom.
Or is it simply, less is more.
You can receive a roundup of Brilliant! ideas for work and life in your Inbox every month by subscribing to the Brilliant! newsletter here
