Tag: wellbeing

Topics on feeling alive, healthy, real, and good.

Dynamic Duos

Some years back, I noticed that the Completing & Creating questions pair in interesting ways. I tend to answer the Completing side in sets. The first and second prompts speak to each other, as do three and four, and so on.

The items work across the columns, too. To use the first prompt that way, I ask what achievements am I coming from, and which ones are next up? For prompt two, what was I truly proud of this round, and does that change ahead?

Taking on the topics in a twosome, that’s good too. I jot notes in order to listen better. Hearing the words verbatim and/or getting them back as notes can be a gift. Brief is best, I think. I usually capture words and phrases that sparkle. Listen for common verbal cues, too. If your partner prefaces with a phrase like, the point is… quietly write down the exact words that come next :)

Doing two a week makes a certain sense. Or, touching lightly on them all one week and ignoring them the next. Also valid.

You get my point. Taking things in twos seems to cause a tumbling motion in the mind and heart. Have a tea and talk with you and yourself.

A creative circle is a good place to do this tandem work, too. I use the chart below nearly every day! We’ll go over this approach to listening early next year, and practice prompt questions that don’t sound canned.

Completing this Cycle and Creating the Path Ahead

For me, the Completing & Creating cycle is aligned with the winter season, woven among the family time, holiday rituals, and colder weather. Reflecting back, the questions elicit gratitude, affirm limits, and tend to relationships. Looking forward, the opportunity is to carry on from the sacred center of somewhere in a somewhat sensible way.

Over the years, my management practice improved through this routine, though I often found it difficult to ‘complete’ against the demands of year-end fundraising. In those days, I savored my thoughts and feelings in a Sunday morning journal but did little about it until late January. Then, I cloistered away for a long weekend to make measure. The MLK holiday is often the chance to move in the creative direction.

All together now has been an important mantra this year, so I’m hosting a circle and holding the weekly Wednesday online studio space for the completing and creating process. The simple scaffold is useful to me, and of course, the experience itself unfolds in wonder among friends.

Serving as host (not leader, teacher, or guru) is intentional. The exchange model is dāna, the secular Buddhist practice of balanced exchange. Practitioners contribute a modest amount to the host, what they feel is right and can offer joyfully. The equivalent management practice is PWYW, pay what you wish. For our purposes, there is a small fee to join a circle, and a tip jar to share more if you like.

It’s a model that rests in abundance, respects personal limits, and gestures outward toward opportunity. You’re in to begin without hassle. Your presence is a gift itself. What you contribute (or don’t) is entirely your decision.

Self-directed inquiry is the basic practice with tools I provide, like the Creating & Completing questions. I have adapted the practice and tools over decades learning alongside mentors and coaches. In my time, I made the questions more cyclical, less finite, and carefully unwired notions of obligation. I love to write my responses and often explore other media. I’ve added visual thinking tools that I will share. Movement, music, cooking, crafting – it all adds to the experience.

Gratitude, personal growth, accountability, renewal, and imagination are common touchstones. Grief, guilt, overwhelm, and upset come for visits, too. We don’t fix, crosstalk, or endgame with each other. Rather, we keep that quiet, open space for reflection. We listen as you unfold the insights.

Some of the best leaders tell their own stories so that others can learn. This is a sort of self-leadership that prepares the way.

Or not. Hold on gently is another helpful notion. In an era where rest and recovery are urgent social prescriptions, my work includes unlearning old management habits and states of mind that drive negative loops in life. Moving from vicious cycles to virtuous ones — grace and patience are the main ingredients, alongside the desire to take a dip in divine ambiguity.

To begin, think about the period of time or cycle just closing. Is it simply the calendar, or something different? Then, what about the time ahead? Set your thoughts to the time envelope of what you’re creating.

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Here’s a list of writing and discussion prompts to close one chapter and open another. Do you begin at the beginning? If not, start with a question that has energy in it. One at a time, with inner attention.Download

Twilight Insights in the ER

When a local corporate hospital merged their Women’s and Children’s wings, they took the opportunity to integrate the arts into both the facility design and the wellness program. This is big news in my circles. Arts and healthcare collaborators are reaching a tipping point based on five decades of practice and lab research.

My fall reading recommendation — Your Brain on Art — is a primer for everyone interested in the neuroscience behind creativity.

Dad ended up in this new hospital wing for no reason having to do with women and children. Rather, he was overflow from the regular hospital, recently discharged from an ill-informed ER experience. The culprit, me. A common UTI developing in him caught me off-guard.

He’s 88, and I’m his last born child. At 52, my professional role shifted this year from CEO to stay-at-home daughter.

On that Friday morning, I was already up early working from temporary housing, a residence hotel where Dad and I had been staying. A few weeks earlier, the roof blew off his Tempe townhome in a catastrophic weather event. Insurance moved us both down the road, and a long way from anything we knew as normal. 

I quickly settled into working from home at the hotel. When Dad’s pain crisis began, I was tucked into the grungy lounge chair contemplating the day ahead and the tennis court view from the bedroom window. Sensing I might be here awhile, I set up my own tiny C-suite.

He called my name from the other room, Anne! 

He never does this.

Stepping through the doorway into the kitchenette, Dad was doubled over in 7-level pain, unable to sit, stand, or lay down comfortably. What he described as a belly ache turned out to be an acute urinary infection combined with equipment malfunction. The mental fog resulting from serious dehydration left him only barely conscious with few words or corporeal capacities to help himself.

He was out of it the day before, but this was different. Symptoms were sudden and the pressure seemed unbearable. This was my first serious pain event with Dad. I was a novice against his medical dilemma. At the time, my strength was to be a daughter fiercely determined to help him.

That morning, I also received what would become scores of emotionally-criminal emails from work. I won’t repeat, except to say that toxifying my work climate over the next 90 days was both aim and effect. One nasty email began with, Sorry about your dad, but…

I took Dad straight to the ER and stayed overnight through the weekend. The bullying emails poured in as I watched him sleep and receive fluids, passing the hours by the alarms and alerts of his heart, lung, and blood monitors. Middle of the night intrusions built up a grief-filled gratitude for the nurses, CNAs, lab attendants, food service workers, and cleaning staff who walked through the door. Each greeted my father by name and did hard work gently.

I noticed something else, too. The mood lighting I’d set for Dad had an effect on his caregivers. They mentioned how nice the mellow music sounded. Shoulders dropped and personalities emerged. I chatted to warm the room and translated as Dad struggled to communicate through accents and cultures. All but one of his caregivers were mid-career women of color, speakers of multiple languages beyond English. 

They know what I’m doing helps Dad. As practitioners, it isn’t hard to put the arts and healthcare combinations together. An integrative environment with multiple medical, social, and neuroaesthetic tools benefits him — and it helps caregivers, support pros, and families, too. Only an industrialist would try to pull it apart.

I admire nurses, along with archivists, crossing guards, and the plant stand lady down the street. Saving the last of anything old, technical direction at critical moments, and a sense of how sustainable communities grow over time. As with nursing, humane service is the motivation and integrative care is the point.

The life-supporting collaborations in my Dad’s hospital room provided a courageous contrast to the D-league political actors exhausting themselves on my work screen. I noticed what I did for Dad out of love (and humble ignorance) and what countless professional caregivers do everyday. 

Versus… this?

I know abuse. You cut it loose. I understood, as anyone who has been derisively sneered at knows. They don’t disagree, they hate me. 

I lost that job. No newsflash there. My creative response at the time. 

Thankfully, Dad recovered, and I’ve learned even more about eldercare this year. My career was damaged and my story transformed. Revealed to me in dim hospital light – where creative practice is valued and where it is not.