Kat Eye Studio

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Thrill of Discovery

There is a thrill of discovery that sometimes happens when you go out exploring. On our excursion last weekend (yes, the one with the grumpy pre-teen in the back seat), we happened past this awesome hot dog stand in the middle of nowhere.

“Stop! Turn around!” I exclaimed to my husband, “I need to photograph that.” I couldn’t resist the red, yellow and black and the vintage car. There were so many cool details in this little place! It’s too bad it wasn’t open, they serve Chicago-style hot dogs which are my husband’s favorite. We’ll just have to go back again! I’m sure there is another photograph or two to be captured.

I hope you have a chance to get out this weekend, maybe experience a little thrill of discovery of your own.

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Lessons from Abroad: Focus your Thoughts, Focus your Energy

[Over a year ago I wrote the original Lessons from Abroad series. Since moving back to the US, I’ve found the lessons from living abroad have not abated; just changed. I’ve decided to continue this series with a periodic post on the new lessons as they crystallize for me.]

Venice, Italy

What’s on your mind? Have you thought about where your thoughts are spent? Maybe this Monday morning it’s planning out your week, or revisiting some great moment of the weekend. Maybe you are already into your workday, and your thoughts are on the job. Wherever your thoughts are going, that’s your focus. And wherever you focus, that’s where your energy goes.

This important concept is not new or novel, but it’s one that has been brought home to me in new ways since living in Italy and moving back to the US. I discovered there is nothing like removing yourself from your regular routine for an extended period of time, and then putting yourself back into that routine, to show you where you’ve been spending your thoughts, and consequently, your energy. While in Italy, I had the opportunity to change my thought patterns in unexpected ways. I stopped worrying about some things that had filled my thoughts on (I realize now) a regular basis, such as my weight and money, and created space for new thoughts to arrive. Thoughts about creativity, and photography. Thoughts that have fundamentally shifted my approach to life, and consequently, my focus and energy.

I’ll give a very personal example, that perhaps many of you will identify with: my weight. Since my high school years, I have thought and worried, and at times obsessed, about my weight. Watching what I ate, comparing my body to some unrealistic ideal, always falling short. Dieting, exercising, always keeping my eye on that number on the scale, the size of the clothes. If it was high, I would berate myself. If it was low, I would be full of happiness. The happiness only lasted for the moment… maybe days or months, until the number crept up again.

Then I moved to Italy. My weight had slowly been increasing for years before the move, a stressful job at work, and then preparing for an international move had triggered my stressful eating behaviors. So as we moved to Italy, I packed my “skinny clothes” with the intent to focus on losing weight after the move. I can remember the moment, early on in my time in Italy, when I consciously decided to not worry about it. I looked at those skinny clothes, and said, “To hell with it.” I was not going to spend my time in Italy worrying about what I ate, or my weight. I instinctively knew this would adversely affect my experience. I wanted to experience my life and travels during my time in Italy unfettered. Without the stress and baggage that losing weight would represent. So I put the skinny clothes on a top, unreachable shelf in the wardrobe and put the scale away.

For the first time in over twenty years, I lived without the constant thoughts about my weight. For the first time, my self-worth was not affected by the number on the scale. Sure, my weight increased a bit over the two years but it eventually plateaued. What I gained was so much more than a few pounds though. I gained the space in my thoughts to think of other things… to explore my experience deeply, to discover the call of art and creativity and to see myself in a new way – as an artist. I discovered an almost limitless energy available to me when I focused my thoughts in alignment with my heart. I found an energetic creativity that has touched everything I do, since.

I did not clearly recognize this relationship between my thoughts and my energy until I moved back to the US. You see, in Italy, there was so much going on, it was hard to sort out all of the influences that led to my personal creative renaissance. I had held off the thoughts around weight and other topics by telling myself I would deal with them when I returned home. So guess what happened when I returned home… they came back. Funny thing about thoughts like this coming up after a long absence: you notice them. They are obvious and clear, and felt so out of place in my “new” self. For a time, I succumbed to them. It was easy, part of my “living in Oregon” routine. Then at some point, in those first few months back I stopped and faced those uncomfortable thoughts and said, “I don’t want you anymore. I’ve lived without you for two years, and now I see I don’t need you.” The problem was, I didn’t have the wonderful distraction of living abroad to keep them at bay. This time, I had to deal with them at a fundamental level.

So, I’ve slowly but surely been figuring out ways to deal with these topics as they come up. I’ve had to face each one and find strategies to change my thought patterns. My experience in Italy helped, because I knew the value of letting those thoughts go. I now recognized that these thoughts were draining my energy. It hasn’t been easy though, to define new ways to think while living back here in the old place and routine. Behavior and thought pattern change is hard.

It is also worth it. Because I have learned that were I focus my thoughts, my energy will follow. I want my energy focused on creative things. I want my energy focused on art and photography and empowerment and connection. Things that bring value to my life and to those around me. I imagine you want those same things too.

As with all of my Lessons from Abroad, I hope that you will be able to learn from this lesson along with me. Here are a few ideas, to help you along:

  • Consider where you focus your thoughts.  Do you have any thought patterns that routinely come back to you? For me, a couple of trigger topics have always been weight and money.
  • Notice your thought patterns around a trigger topic you identify. How often are you thinking about this topic? What kind of thoughts come up, are they positive or negative? Can you see how they may be stealing your energy?
  • Try an experiment: For a few weeks tell yourself you are taking a break from this thought pattern. Give yourself a deadline. Then, set the thoughts aside and see what other things arise in that time frame. (You really can trick yourself into doing this, I know, because I did it for two years in Italy.) After your self-imposed deadline, see what happens. Do the thoughts come back? How do they feel to you? How did you feel during that hiatus period, without them?
  • Get help where you need it. Let’s face it, changing thought patterns is difficult and we may not be able to change some of these thought patterns on our own. They involve the people around us, and our interaction with society as a whole. Use all the resources available to you – books, friends, counselors, whatever. For my weight issues, I’ve discovered Intuitive Eating “>Intuitive Eating as a great fit for what I learned in Italy, so I’ve been reading and taking classes to consciously integrate a new approach to eating and weight.
  • Be clear on where you do want to focus your thoughts and your energy. It is much easier to say “no” to the thoughts you don’t want when you have thoughts you very much want to say “yes” to. For me, creativity and photography are so important to me, I don’t want any of these other thoughts diluting my energy. It makes it easier to deal with them. Changing my thoughts is no longer about being someone I think I should be, it’s about who I want to be. It’s a conscious and deliberate choice.

At the end of the day, all the matters is that each and everyone of us align our thoughts and our energy to our hearts. Imagine what our world would be like, if everyone did that. Right now, rather than changing the world, I’ll just settle for imagining my own life in this way.

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Lessons from Abroad: Change up Your Schedule

I am off to Spain and Portugal this week for vacation so I decided to schedule some posts. I recently wrote a series of articles entitled “Lessons from Abroad” for a friend’s coaching newsletter and blog about lessons I’ve learned from my experience living in Italy which helped me find my passion and purpose. I never posted links to the last two articles here, so I decided to repost all of the articles this week to give them a home on my blog as well as share them with you.  Enjoy!
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Lessons from Abroad: Change up Your Schedule
Imagine… dropping out of your normal life for a couple of years, having the chance to completely immerse yourself in something new, and reevaluating your direction in life. And then, when it’s all over, come back to where you started again.
That’s where I am, what I’m doing – living and working in Italy on a two year assignment. Two years ago, my corporate management job led me to a project that would require placing people on temporary assignment abroad. I was to be the hiring manager for two positions, yet after my first business trip to Italy, I found the growing urge to apply for the job myself. Fast forward a few months of family decisions and applications and interviews, and I had the job. Months of immigration applications and paperwork and waiting and waiting later, and I had moved to Italy.
Now what? The plan: Learn to live in Italy with my family. Work. Travel. Then come home a little wiser about the world and ready to take up my career track again. I was all set. But life has a way of surprising us, and I couldn’t have been more wrong. What I’ve discovered in my time in Italy is my true passion, where my heart and purpose lies, and it’s not the management chain in a corporate job.
How did this happen? I wasn’t really looking for this, at least not at the beginning. But somewhere along the way, the changes I have made in my life while living abroad have led me to find something new. I’ve learned to follow my heart, listen to my intuition, and it’s been amazing what I have learned about myself. The move to Italy has, first and foremost, made me more aware: Aware of my surroundings, and how they affect me; Aware of the limitations I have been putting on myself; Aware of the choices I truly have, if I let myself be open to possibilities.
You might be thinking, that’s great and all, but how can translate to me? I’m not ever going to live abroad. I don’t have any plans to just pick up my family and move for two years. I can’t risk the stability of my job, my life, my family in order to seek my path in this way. But I believe that there are some key things that moving to Italy has done to increase my awareness and my ability to understand myself, and it’s not all about living in another culture. I have boiled it town to five things that anyone can do, no matter where you live or what you do for a living. In practicing these you can open up the possibilities, become more aware, and find your true path that lies somewhere deep within.
Over the coming days, I’ll go through each of the five, explaining why these have worked for me and some ideas of how you can use them too. The first key I’ll share today, starts with finding your creative time: Change up Your Schedule
My job in Italy requires an altered work schedule. I still directly work for an organization on the west coast of the United States, with a nine hour time difference from where I live. This means that I have to work both on site in Italy and on the phone back to the US on a daily basis. On one of my early business trips, before the move, I realized that it’s easy to work two full work days in this situation – head into the office in the morning, wrap up the day up with teleconferences in the afternoon, and then, in the evening get on the computer for more work at the same time everyone back in the US is working. While that was sustainable for a week long business trip, that just wouldn’t work for me and my family over the next two years.
The schedule I practice to limit the “two work day” situation is this: I work afternoons, from around noon to six, in the office. Then I head home, have dinner, hang out with my family, do my personal things, tuck my son into bed and get back online and on the phone for a couple of hours of work with my coworkers in the US. This may sound awful, and it certainly makes for short evenings, but the side effect is the most amazing thing – it has freed up my mornings.
I am a morning person, I always have been. I like to get up early, have my quiet time before getting into the day and interacting with people. The morning is also my creative time. Ideas come more readily, I have creative energy and everything just flows. For the first time in my life, on a regular basis more than the weekends, I now have this creative time every day. To do what I want. Read what I want. Journal. Explore and play creatively. Go for a walk.
When I spend my mornings this way, on my creative endeavors and activities of choice – I find that I am refreshed, balanced and ready for the rest of the day. I am able to disconnect with all of the stress that my corporate job brings. I also have found that I have all sorts of ideas that come to me in the morning, along with the time to explore them. I can search for more information, try out something new, build a plan.
The irony is, I’ve always known mornings were my creative, productive time. For years I’ve gone to into the office early in order to have this time to get my best work done. Then I would leave in the afternoon to get home early and spend time with my family, but I never felt creative in the afternoon or evening. It was more about recuperating from the day and getting to bed early so I could do it all over again. By managing my schedule this way, I contributed at a high level to my organization, but the sacrifice was that I was giving my most creative energy to the company. I didn’t have that much left over for me.
Where you spend your creative energy is important. Having some creative energy to spend is one of the keys of finding yourself. How can you find your true path if you don’t have the energy to explore ideas? If you don’t have the open time to imagine, build up and evaluate the dreams that come to you along the way? I had never thought about those things before this change in my schedule, but it makes so much sense now. It’s important to understand what your creative energy schedule is, and then look at how and where you are spending that energy. A simple change in schedule can reap huge rewards.
Now that I’m not spending my most creative time at work, you may wonder if my job performance has suffered. The answer is, really, no. Work takes a different part of my brain, and when I’m working I’m there and focused and productive. I work the same number of hours; I have the same amount of time free as before – it’s just when. I honestly don’t think that anyone at work has even noticed there is a change. The difference for me personally is huge though – I can now disconnect from work, use other parts of my brain, and am more centered. I think this ultimately makes me a better employee, and it certainly has made me a more pleasant person to be around for my family, friends and coworkers.
Here are my ideas about how you can apply this key concept of “Change up Your Schedule” to your life too:
  • Figure out your most creative, productive time of day. I think we might all instinctively know it, as I did. If you are not sure, keep some notes, check in with yourself. Try out some different times of day as “free.”
  • Then, work toward carving out some or all of that time for yourself. Can you rearrange your work schedule? Can you schedule a meeting with yourself? Get out of the office and go for a walk? Start with just a day or two a week, and work up. You don’t have to explain it to anyone else, just do it, if you can.
  • When you get that time, don’t waste it. Use it for things that build you up in some way – engage you creatively, working toward some dream or goal that you might have. That might be as simple as reading a book that sparks your interest or searching out websites that help you in some way. But use that time for you, not for anyone else. You will be surprised what blooms in the garden of time and creative energy that you create.
For me, the next challenge will be protecting this time when the assignment is over, I move back and have to adjust my work schedule again. I’m already strategizing on how to do this. It will mean changing things up from what I did before, and I will have to work through and reset expectations of those who have worked with me for years. But now that I know this important key, this secret to harnessing my creative energy, I’m not about to give it up.
(Photo is from Bologna, Italy)

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