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36 Questions to Fall in Love
How do questions lead to intimacy?
I somehow never posted this but used these questions as a warm up for the GFE session on 11/20 last week and wanted to post the questions here for folks to use now that holiday season is afoot and, well, it might be a good time to get into conversations with folks.
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This you? Not me.
SO as the world opens up, the question came up in the chat about hints for travel and packing. I did a stream about it, took some notes, and opened up a google doc for folks to ask questions. Here is the doc in its entirety, including the links for all the things I talked about. Hope this helps and hope you have safe travels.
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Wouldn’t it be nice if every act of forgiveness was this easy to come across?
Who knew. It’s already halfway through 2022. I came across a workshop called The Art of Forgiveness and thought it would be a good thing to host at this point in the year because we’re on the way out of the door, and might as well give ourselves some grace and space to forgive so we can move on.
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I came across the book The Desire Map at the suggestion of a friend who knew I amy very much in the world of interior work. Interior work, if you have to ask, is the investment of time and energy in understanding one’s motivations, issues, concerns, or worldviews. It can be pretty comprehensive, but the point is that it’s work.
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Happy New Year - yes it’s March and I don’t care.
So, happy 2022. I know it’s been a while since I’ve posted, and I don’t have a lot of excuses to back me up. I’ve been busy, return to work in the office pretty much 4-5 days a week. There’s a little exhaustion in that but I know my productivity is stellar.
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How does looking back help us look forward?
Vision Boards as Reflection Tools
Forgive and Forget?
How to move on and move through, one breath at a time.
We carry around things more than you realize, so pause a moment to recall the things you are carrying with you today. I told a story about how I just toss things in my purse and eventually it starts to feel heavy, so I have to unpack it from time to time. Our thoughts and ruminations are often like that, we carry them around until they feel heavy and we need to deal with them.
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What do you want to stop/
start/
continue?
A dope little exercise in change and honesty.
This process is well known, and I’ve done this exercise with teams big and small. I think this exercise is great for relationships, organizations, projects, etc. We can, from time to time, go into autopilot, and this exercise gives us the opportunity pause the presses and evaluate where we are. Please be mindful about this exercise being one that requires community agreements and grace, space, and pace. Keep those who are introverts aware of what’s happening, but thoughtful about how you introduce the work and facilitate discussion (there will be a lot). I like using sticky notes for this exercise and a large wall. You can replicate it with a piece of paper. Very low tech.
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What if you got hit by a bus?
Questions to ponder about what’s next. Also, I want you to rest like this person is, all secure in knowing his life is taken care of.
As the elder statesperson in the room, thought it’d be nice to talk about grown folks stuff on stream, so we talked about: buying a house, bitcoin, car AND advance directives, wills, living wills, etc. Whew! What a stream!
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Open Up
Taking space to heal is both scary and freeing.
On stream, we did what I call Catch and Release, letting folks type their responses first, and when prompted, hit the enter button, giving everyone a chance to write without editing. We also set up for ourselves the space to reflect and connect, and we have a !godeeper command so folks can be encouraged to tell us more. Only if they want to.
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A few days ago, I saw a recommendation from Maria Popova’s Brainpickings Blog for Lynda Barry’s book Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor (affiliate link). I remembered that I own this book, and that I got it when it came out 7 years ago. It’s a GREAT book if you are a teacher and want to look at ways to engage your students in a way that’s unique and encourages their creativity because let’s face it.
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After an epic two-year journey that included sailing through the Panama Canal, around the Caribbean, and crossing the Atlantic during hurricane season with her husband and 10-year-old son, Jen Massaro had a story to share. But she struggled to tell it in a way that was meaningful for her friends and colleagues. Through the process of refining her story, Jen gained a deeper understanding of what matters most in storytelling.
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Elevators in an atrium of a hotel
Elevator Pitches are 30-60 seconds to describe your thing to someone. That’s about how long a ride in an elevator is with a captive audience, so why not shoot your shot?
Read moreTake a moment to ponder the quote from Elizabeth Gilbert. While our main priority today was talking about time, I really wanted us to think about accessing creative living that already is a possibility within us.
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Sample of zines that we made on stream!
Continuing with the creativity theme, I decided to be a little creative and make some zines. Zines are easy to make, don’t require exotic tools (maybe my bone folder was a little exotic), and are easy ways to make gifts for folks (esp since Mother’s Day is tomorrow!).
Here is the main link for how to make Zines.
Here are the prompts we used. Feel free to use any prompts you feel will bring out your creativity!
Title: Your artist ID
What core values guide your creativity?
Who do you admire?
What drives you to create?
What does a successful career look like?
I wish…
My mantra or self-portrait
I added the new markers/acquisitions to the tools page! Check them out!
When we think of creativity, we think often of things that we ‘make’ - visible, tangle things like artwork or websites. I wanted to include poetry in the creativity space because I think friends don’t realize how poetry can engage our minds in ways that we don’t think about when we think of being creative.
Read moreOn 1 May 2021, we talked about how to spark creativity and talked through some of the important points in The Book of Beautiful Questions by Warren Berger. Check out the book here in my bookstore! We talked about important questions to ask (and not ask!), as well as discussed why we go on walks to clear our minds.
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Late December, I was streaming on Twitch while on vacation in Maui, and I had an idea to do a 31 day stream of doing art. Initially I thought of it as a joke, but the more I talked about what I could do, I started to think about what it could be. Holy moly, could I really do this? So along with my mod extraordinaire Ynotibox we both decided to give it a go together.
I wish I could tell you that it was easy, but when you’re trying to create something in real time for folks you don’t get to see, it came be a little scary, sort of like driving somewhere without a map…and a bunch of funny people in the backseat. I popped up for 31 days straight with the exception of January 2nd because I was travelling back to SF (the thought of streaming while at the airport did cross my mind), and no time in particular. Usually it was around 10PM at night for at least an hour…or two. It sort of depended on when the piece was done. I did my best after every piece to post it on Instagram nightly. Some nights I was just exhausted and wanted to sleep.
Each night had a theme:
And we just talked, and talked, and talked about the theme, asked questions, pushed each other to tell us more. It was revealing, honest, and funny. You learn a lot about people, even remotely, when they are being vulnerable and sharing out loud. You also learn that representation of people of color and diversity of every kind are severly lacking in the spaces where we looked for photos (I would search for photos at the chat’s request and they would also send links to pics). There were hardly any large people or people with disability. There were also rare photos of people of color. It was interesting to search for ‘woman working’ and have few results that were at the top level of Black women. Why is that? /s
I learned, as a streamer, that building something with a community takes work, and it takes being someone that provides value (interest, space, engagement). And sometimes I might have only two people chatting away but that’s good enough for me. When you start to worry about numbers, it loses something. The organic-ness of what I try to do on stream is important to me more than numbers. You’ll notice when you see the art (link below) that we started out as hand lettering, but we moved on to try to create art together. I felt insecure about my artistic ability and thought we could try something new. The first night we tried freemix.com and well, it borked in the middle of the stream, and wow is that awkward. It’s all good though. I don’t mind failing in front of folks, if anything it was nice to be real and not panic. We found another solution that we wound up using for the remainder of the challenge (Adobe Spark).
I would like to do another month-long challenge, but not sure where I want to go with that right now. I did learn a lot this go around, and it does have me excited to do the work. Maybe I’ll see you?
Check out the art we created here.
Scattered assortment of skin care products, rings, and a high heeled shoe on top of a robe.
About 5-7 years ago…probably more…I started to really be thoughtful about my skin care routine. I spent some time researching skin care routines because most of my routine was based on what I thought was important in the media I was consuming (mostly magazines, websites). I never really took the time/energy to learn about the peculiarities about skin care other than use this and then do that.
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I love resumes and cover letters. I mean, it might be unhealthy how much I love them. There’s something fun about reading someone’s work trajectory and trying to get a sense for who they are. As someone who has been on many a search committee, I get to do that often, thank goodness! I know, what a nerd.
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