Ink on my fingers

~ My Creative Life: Danielle LaPorte ~

I first discovered my next Creative Life interviewee when her book, Style Statement, was recommended to me a few months ago. Tumbling happily into the land of writer & speaker Danielle LaPorte, I started reading her blog, invested in a Fire Starter session for my business and found so much inspiration from how unashamedly she walks her talk. In her varied career she's been the executive director of a Washington-based think tank and run her own communications company for 10 years, so it's no wonder budding entrepreneurs will travel far and wide to hear her speak about everything from guerrilla marketing to life purpose. She's also a commentator on the CBC TV show, Connect With Mark Kelley.

It's an honour to have Danielle on my blog today, and, just for fun, I'm sharing some thoughts over on her blog today too - on video, no less! Two for the price of one.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the white hot truth of Ms Danielle LaPorte...

SC:  Yours seems like truly vocational work – how did you get to this place?

DL: I think you should be mindful of how you refer to your work in the world (career, j-o-b, chore, calling, service...) and so I love the word "Vocation." It's rooted in voice. I got to this place - this place of earning my living by voicing my perspective - in part due to a severe allergy to conventional business and bullshit corporate policies. So that pretty much kept me from ever getting a real job. I got here by asking, relentlessly, for what I wanted, whether it was for a better position, a new gig, a better rate at the bank, or asking the universe to help me realize my dreams. I asked. And I believed.

Speaking in public is most people’s worst nightmare – how you prepare to blow your audience’s mind?

I intend to be useful, really useful. I'm clear that I'm there to teach, so there can be plenty of poetry and theater (that's where kimonos and killer boots come in,) but everything has to circle back to being practical. No filler.

I prepare. I think about four key nuggets that I'm most inspired about and I make sure I hit those notes no matter what. I'm transparent. I tell my story with plenty of vulnerability. I'm righteous. I don't apologize for my very strong opinions. And I pray. Before I get on stage, I say micro-prayer, it's one word: shine. I want us all to be shining and radiating and high on life by the end of our time together. So far, so good.
Describe a typical workday.

- Wake up in a cuddle pile with the kid and the man, and the dog at the end of the bed.
- Check email quickly to see if anything stupendous has happened overnight. Immediately feel guilty about checking my email.
- Look for Spiderman or Batman paraphernalia, and walk the munchkin to school.
- Call a girlfriend on the walk home. Usually Candis.
- Stretch. Pray or read something inspirational (or trashy.) Make pot of Yogi Indian Spice Tea with Honey.
- Crank my "Devotion Emotion" or "TranceBoomYa" i-Pod playlists.
- Depending on the day (I do the Entrepreneurial Time Management System) I'm at my Mac writing, jamming, you know, rocking the world. If I'm not writing for my site or others', I'm doing Fire Starter Sessions with clients, or working on distributing my new stationery line. And when I'm not doing those things, I'm lost in creating my next book - and selling it.
- On Wednesdays I record my segment of a new CBC TV show, Connect With Mark Kelley. And that evening, if my husband isn't doing a night shift (he's a fire fighter,) I do a 5 Rhythms  dance class and sweat my prayers out.
- Most days involve milk chocolate. On the days when I have to cook, I stress out about it and wish that the man were cooking that night, and then I suggest that we go for sushi.
- Hot bath with lavender.
- Stay up too late watching the newest documentary DVD.
 
What does true success look like to you?

Creative freedom. Deeply nourishing relationships. Fat cash. Helping to create aha's and ease for people. Social responsibility and effective philanthropy. Stirring the cosmic melting pot. Thick gold hoop earrings. Trust.

How has motherhood changed your way of living/working/creating?

When my son was born, I realized on a very deep level that, if I was going to teach him to live according to his own agency, that I myself had better up my game. And I committed to live more artfully and passionately. I became more creative when he came into my life. And less willing to suffer fools.

What books/music/blogs etc do you love?

READ:
Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estes
The Astonishing Power of Emotions by Abraham-Hicks
Anything by Krishnamurti, Alan Watts and Pema Chodron
Grace and Grit by Ken Wilber
Beauty by John O'Donahue

LISTEN:
Antony & The Johnsons
Stadium Arcadium - the Red Hot Chilli Peppers
Big Time Sensuality - Bjork
The latest Jason Mraz
American Prayers - The Doors

CLICK:
Seth Godin
The TED talks
Abraham Hicks

How do you balance your online life with you off-line life?

I don't. And I don't believe in "balance." Balance is not the stuff of greatness, and the pursuit of it causes stress. I believe in proportion. A lot of love, a heaping amount of focus, and plenty of room to follow my heart and take a nap when I need one.
 
What three things could a creative entrepreneur do to make their business rock even harder?

1. get clear on your core desired feelings - they're driving everything whether you're conscious of it or not.
2. know your Hedgehog Concept, or call me for a Fire Starter Session.
3. always be the giver.

You're having a dinner party and can invite six famous people from the past or present - who would you choose?

Bruce Mau, Leonard Cohen, Jesus, Oprah, Isis, Meister Eckhart, Joan of Arc
 
What is the message you want to share with the world? (in other words, what do you consider to be your life’s work?)

Truth is freedom. Freedom is all.

* * * * *

Danielle, thank you so much for sharing with us today. I love that you're a fire starter, and your husband is a fire fighter - sounds like a passionate combination to me :)

[photo of Danielle by Anastasia Photography}

~ On being an auntie ~

This is a Polaroid of me from around 1981; i asked my mum to dig it out for me, and it is exactly as I remember it - the green jacket, the stiff denim jeans, the little sticker on my ear that I pretended was an earring. I remember how the snake felt in my hands, warm and supple, not cold and slimy as I was expecting. We were visiting a wildlife centre somewhere in the south of England, and if you paid a pound you'd get a Polaroid taken with the snake. My sister did it too.

This is the same sister who we found out last week is carrying a boy - my nephew. She rang me as soon as she left the hospital, and when she said the words i really did scream. A boy! A baby! It's suddenly all feeling very real. So many of my friends have children, you'd think i'd be used to it by now, but this is something different. This is family. This is my sister. We think the same; at times we are the same. And yet now she has embarked on a very different road from me, and it has brought up a lot of stuff.

After she rang me from the hospital, i sat in my chair, reeling. I felt such an intense rush of emotion, it was unexpected and overwhelming. At the heart of it all was love - love for a little baby that i haven't met yet. Now i knew he was a HE and real and on his way, i could feel my heart expand as i took it all in. I could imagine how i'd play with him, and take him to the park, and teach him about girls and buy him the futuristic equivalent of an iPod. I could see Christmases and birthdays with my family gathered round, a family that has been just the three of us for so long. Boyfriends and fiances have found their way into our tiny tribe, but now there's someone new. Someone connected to me by blood.

I was truly happy for my sister when she fell pregnant as i knew that was what she wanted, but at my age you can't help but look at your own life and compare.  I don't know if i will ever have children. In all honesty, i don't know if i want to. The urge comes and goes, often off the back of an assumption of how my life should be unfolding, but when i look into my heart i don't know if motherhood is something i truly want. Maybe if i was in a relationship things would look different (and predictably everyone says that to me all the time) but i know myself well enough by now to know that i see a different path ahead of me, one that has a partner-in-crime, a thriving work life, a chance to explore the world, and a nephew i will dote on. Being an auntie feels like such a gift to be given - when i felt that ache of love for the baby my beautiful sister is carrying, i saw my world take on a new shape. I wonder if anyone has ever written a book about being an auntie - the Art of Auntiehood. How we get the honour of helping bring up a child without the sleepless nights. Now I know someone will visit me* when i'm old and grey and surrounded by cats - my handsome sensitive and talented nephew :)

Maybe all this sounds silly, but it's comforting to get a glimpse into a possible future. After five years of independent living you find yourself existing in the moment more and more, the future a mystery when you don't know who you'll spend it with, if at all. Our society is so wrapped up around the family, around relationships, around 2.4 kids and the school run and the woman in the bank calling me "Mrs Conway" so once again i have to correct her. My 37th birthday is fast approaching and still i do not feel the urge to have a child, and a part of me wonders if my books will be my babies, just as my nephew will be my little pal. The thought of it makes me smile. Whatever happens, I'm sure it will be okay, either way.

* fingers crossed.

~ Polaphrenia ~

Polaphrenia, noun, a clinical obsession with Polaroid film and cameras, often accompanied by an inability to control oneself when faced with a large stash of expired 600 film and a sunny day. There is currently no known cure for this condition, but in general most sufferers deny they have a problem (also known as Pola-denial). Polaphrenics rarely have fresh groceries in their house as they use their fridge to store their film stash. See also debt, bankruptcy, RSI.

Farewell Roid Week, it's been fun. Some more of my favourites are over here.

1. house of polaroid, 2. Polaroid : Victoria to Seattle, 3. jen and diana, 4. Untitled

~ Roid Week: Montreal ~

~ My Creative Life: Gwen Bell ~

Entrepreneur, educator and speaker, Gwen Bell is your go-to girl for social media know-how. Recently named one of the 25 Most Powerful and Influential Women in Social Media, she co-created the fabulously useful Unconventional Guide to the Social Web with Chris Guillebeau and is a partner at Kirtsy; she's also a yoga teacher, salsa dancer and karaoke freak (so i know we'd have a great night out together!)

Ladies and gentlemen: Ms Gwen Bell...

You’ve been called a social media rock star, which I love! Could you tell us about your path into this career, and what your job involves?

It started when I lived in Japan. I fired up my first blog (on LiveJournal) right before I flew to Tokyo for the first time. I moved to Japan to teach but stayed on after opening a yoga studio (now in its fourth year) in Yokohama. A few years into my time in the country I began missing some of the intimacy of sharing with my peers and I heard about a social networking site through Yoga Journal. The name of the site at the time was Zaadz (later acquired by Gaiam - it's now called Gaia). I started out as a passionate user, then became an ambassador and later went to work for the company on a freelance basis.

That was my introduction to social media. I used it to do what I am most passionate about - connect, inspire and ask a whole lot of questions. My job involves showing up and listening to where people are at. And innovating from there.

What element of social media do you enjoy the most?

I love that you never know who you're going to meet next. I love when what I can share is able to help you in some way.
Please describe a typical day – do you have many routines?
 
When I wake up (usually around eight) I do some meditation, yoga and writing. The writing is a page, free-form, but usually based on what's happening in my mind. What came up in meditation often shows up on the page. I then write down the three goals I'd like to accomplish during the day (and check to make sure they have some correlation to my personal manifesto).

The rest of the morning is spent on networks - catching up with emails (I'm doing my best to migrate off email altogether by encouraging people to reach me on Twitter via direct message). I spend as little time as possible on the phone. As a visual learner, I need eye contact when conversing.

Afternoons are spent on projects. Blogging, tweeting, meeting, speaking engagements. I speak, on average, twice a month. Usually I do some traveling for the engagement, so I have travel routines for when I'm on the road. When I get to the airport for travel I 'become an employee of the airport.' I mimic the way the airport employees behave and do my best to be a model traveler. Even during difficult times. I see them as part of the travel experience.

In the evenings I will sometimes do dinner with friends, sometimes take a yoga class, sometimes have date night with Joel. Every Sunday is family night at Joel's parent's house. He is the eldest of seven kids (and his younger sister is expecting her first baby) so we've always got something to celebrate on the weekends. Joel and I watch Psych, read books (I'm currently reading Twyla Tharp's fantastic book, The Creative Habit. Can't recommend it highly enough.)

The computer is off by ten. I try not to stretch it past ten, even if a project deadline approaches. After ten, my emails are crap anyway. I aim for having my legs up the wall by 11:30 and lights out by midnight. This doesn't apply on nights I'm salsa dancing until two.

When starting a new project, how do you begin to gather your ideas/inspirations? How do you record them?

Every day is an opportunity to create and I am always ready (except for when I forget my pen and that's the opposite of awesome). I record images with my iPhone camera if I don't have my digital SLR on me (Canon T1i/50 mm). I have a notebook that I got from Muji (stocked up on them during my most recent trip to Japan). I use it as my bucket in David Allen terms. It has a transparent, zippered pouch for a cover. All the little bits and bobs I discover along the way? They go in the front pocket.

I used Moleskines for several years to capture my ideas for projects. They are great but I found I got a bit precious about what I wrote down. If I didn't think it would be Hemingway-approved, it didn't make it to the page. Ha!

I have started using a transparent box at the beginning of a project, in addition to my Muji notebooks. I create vision maps. I stop reading blogs and consuming content if I'm in a true incubation stage. I think there is a certain amount of self-imposed isolation that must accompany the creative process. We just have to know when it's time to come out of incubation and begin iterating. This is difficult to discover for ourselves. It's one reason I like to work on projects with a partner. They remind us to take it light - to go have a beer and seek inspiration at the pub level.

You met your husband on Twitter – you gotta tell us more about that!

I have a great post explaining how it all went down!

Why yoga?

I started taking yoga classes as a freshman undergraduate at UNC in Chapel Hill. I had struggled for a few years with bursitis in my hips and was seeking relief with yoga and acupuncture. I either outgrew or healed from the bursitis but stuck with the yoga.

It's difficult for me to talk about yoga in an abstract way without getting woo woo about it. You know, it's a practice. All it asks of you is to keep showing up to the mat. Yoga doesn't ask, "why didn't you show up yesterday?" It has allowed me to grow in my forgiveness of myself and of others. I bump up against the limitations of my own body and see those limitations in others. And I take life a bit less seriously when I'm meditating or practicing yoga.

So what we do know is this. We know life is difficult. I believe self-knowledge is the way through. I believe yoga is one of the most forgiving ways on the path to that place of self-knowledge.
 
What books/music/blogs etc do you love? Could you share some recommendations?

The best way to answer that is to share my Twitter lists with you.

What achievement are you most proud of?

Getting back on the mat
How do you balance your online life with your off-line life?

To start, I don't see balance as a final destination. We'll never 'be balanced.' I see us all as practicing balance-in-process. Some moments we touch balance. Sometimes we discover balance on the mat, sometimes we discover balance on the web.

I think we freak when we're overwhelmed (our feed readers hit 1,000 unread items, our in-boxes burst at the seams on Monday mornings) because we think the point is to bring our lives to a place of 'balance.' I'm not sure that state exists for more than a few moments at a time.

In Japan there's a doll.  The daruma doll. It has a phrase associated with it: '7 times down, 8 times up.' An image to bear in mind. The point is we keep coming back to our (digital) center. When I was doing my yoga teacher training our teacher had us relax our toes when we were standing on one leg. Relax the toes of the standing foot, the foot that's grounding you. It's hard. Your body grips and over-engages when you're out of balance. If we can relax our toes when we're experiencing difficulty, that's balance.
 
What are you working on at the moment?

- Mind body tech workshops. These are one part web-based work (tech), one part yoga (body openers to counteract hacker back/balance asanas to relieve imbalance that accompanies online life), one part vision mapping.  (For now, dates are in Vancouver and Seattle in 2009)
- Rock star jump start sessions for the social web (Unconventional Guide to the Social Web with Chris Guillebeau)
-  speaking engagements around the nation on how to get started with the social web (I'm represented by The Speakers Group)
- consulting with businesses and academic institutions on strategy on the social web
- combing the web for bits to share, expand on in a blog post, add to a speaking deck or teaching plan
- sometimes I go to my studio in Japan to teach yoga. I miss it when I'm away too long
- the last one's a secret
How do imagine social media will evolve over the next five years?

That question explodes my mind. Five years ago we couldn't have imagined Twitter would become what it has, could we? I'm a consultant in this space and I see two kinds of people: one is desperately trying to catch up to the technology. The other is creating it. If you're not creating the technology, I'm sorry to say, you're always going to be behind. No, I'm not suggesting all creatives run out and start learning how to program in Java. We don't need more programmers, necessarily, but we do need our creatives (and yoginis and healers) to be on the social web, interacting with and helping to create the technology.

There are a few trends that I think we'll see evolve over the next few years. One is more emphasis on real-time experience. The other is the semantic web. As technology becomes more sophisticated the question will no longer be should we incorporate this or that into our lives. The question will be how best can we incorporate it? How can we live seamlessly with technology? One answer, I believe, will be to evolve our technology to be more humane. We'll learn that simplifying and relaxing our toes is part of the answer.
 
You're having a dinner party and can invite six famous people from the past or present - who would you choose and why? (and will there be karaoke?)
 
Coco Chanel. She'll wear something outlandishly well-tailored. She'll bring a bottle of expensive champagne with her. She'll sing Ne Me Quitte Pas.

Eleanor Roosevelt. She'll be the one who says just a few things but all of them will have the weight of the world in them. She'll sing something by Natalie Imbruglia.

Madonna. She'll wear a bodysuit made of diamonds and sapphires. She'll sing We Belong by Pat Benatar (because I'm going to request it).

Steve Jobs. He'll entertain us with his maniacal genius. He will sing Domo Arigato Mr. Roboto.

Albert Einstein. He'll give us his take on where we're headed as a society. He'll sing something by Chicago. Probably, Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?

Leonardo da Vinci. He won't sing. He'll sketch quietly in the corner, sipping a glass of wine.

The party will last until the wee hours. Naturally.

* * * * *

Thank you so much for sharing with us today, Gwen - I now want an invite to your dinner party (and i'll be bringing lots of cameras!)

[All photographs by Gwen Bell]

~ Roid Week: Day One ~

Yes, that's right, my friends, it's going to be a week of Polaroids on this blog, so if you're sick of me talking about those instant squares of goodness then I apologise now. But hey, it's Fall Roid Week on Flickr this week and that makes me very happy indeed. Simple things please simple minds... isn't that what they say? :) 1. United Nations, 2. polaroid_egypt08, 3. always remember to set fireflies free, 4. Concord, NH