But when I watched the video, I didn’t just see the surface. I don’t know if the originators of the gimmick intended any deeper meaning, but I saw one. It probably came from me – from my own experiences, values, worldview, and way of being. I work with people to uncover their natural gifts and talents and develop them so they can live and work authentically. I help people free themselves from the boxes and cubicles other people try to stuff them in and overcome their own limiting beliefs. I help them reconnect with the core of who they are, their individual combination of abilities and perspectives and beliefs and values. I help them find their inner genius and set it free – thank you Barbara Sher for defining genius for all of us as what we were born to do and can do especially well.

So when I saw Jewel dressed as “Karen” in a business suit and a fake nose, I saw a symbol of people who force themselves to fit into corporate guidelines and corporate dress codes, uncomfortable with some aspect of who they are (the fake nose) because it doesn’t match other people’s standards for how they should be. She became the shy, self-doubting, repressed woman uncomfortable with her own inner genius – maybe even a little afraid of her own inner genius.

This really cool thing happens when the crowd senses Karen’s insecure vibe. They become a chorus of encouragement, chanting, “Ka-ren! Ka-ren!” as her friends try to get her onstage. They want her to try. They want her to succeed. They are on her side. That’s the way it is when people find out someone wants to stretch her wings but is a little unsure. Close friends and family might tend to dash her hopes – in her “best interest” – but people who don’t know her so well believe she can do it, and definitely believe she has the right to try.

When Jewel starts singing in her Karen costume, you see the magic. It looks like she reaches way down to her toenails when she sings. I believe she reaches way in when she sings, too, to her core self, where her innate gifts and well-developed talent and comfortable self-acceptance all reside in alignment. She’s not “performing” in a showy way, and she’s no longer holding back being Karen. She’s being Jewel.

It’s definitely hokey to say, “Inside every Karen there’s a Jewel waiting to shine.” That’s an oversimplified exaggeration. But I think inside every person there is a core self, with natural gifts and talents, that can shine when that person learns comfortable self-acceptance, lets go of the restraints, and starts developing and expressing the core.

Want to set your inner genius free?

People with strong reputations say it’s all about the numbers. But I’m pretty sure the list of subscribers for someone with a strong reputation is a lot more responsive than a quickly grown list built by “techniques”.

Seth Godin’s recent post on fans, participants, and spectators confirms my skepticism. The stats he shows for conversions are a little dreary. But he offers a solution.

Top of the list is Ken Robert. Ken was in the first class of people trained in the Profiting From Your Passions career coach program offered by Valerie Young, who also created The Changing Course Club.

Ken settled into a groove for over a year posting fantastic stuff at MildlyCreative.com. He’s tried out different formats and written a lot about struggling to decide what fits and does not fit the theme of that blog. It’s not surprising, because Ken has a lot to say. That’s because Ken has a lot he sees. He’s an explorer. He explores human nature by reading, through conversation, and through observation, but mostly these days through participation. He sketches, he plays music, he’s taken to writing poems, and he finds powerful photographs and music videos and tells the world about them.

Yesterday Ken announced he’s growing again. Instead of deciding if something fits the theme of Mildly Creative, he’s starting a new blog where the theme is “Ken” – or more accurately, “things that interest Ken”. Now, whenever he’s intrigued by something and wants to pass on his observations, or curious and wants to encourage a discussion, he knows the topic will fit the theme.

Thank goodness he didn’t spend a lot of time making things “just right” before launching the new blog! Click over and welcome him to his new home.

Regardless of your religious or spiritual beliefs, this is an important test. When you try to find your calling, are you looking for something that is essential to your fulfillment, something you must do, something that you feel compelled to do by some force greater than yourself, something you were maybe even “designed” to do?

Because if you’re just looking for something that feels happy and nice or entertaining and enjoyable, you might be completely missing out.

Do you think you’re calling is to learn about chocolate because you’re a “chocoholic” and it’s fun to hear about different uses of chocolate in unusual recipes? Maybe chocolate is your calling, but probably not. Maybe you’re just a nut about chocolate (guilty!) and you like learning about history and different cultures (yes, that’s me) and you enjoy adventure (yes again), so these kinds of stories are entertaining to you. Just because a topic engages you and brings you enjoyment doesn’t mean it’s your calling.

But if you think about traveling to exotic places and your only reason is to find the right kind of soil, the right climate, and the right altitude for growing cocoa trees, you’re probably called to work with chocolate. If you find yourself kneeling in dirt, digging up handfuls and lifting them to your face to smell the complex combination of organic material to determine how well cocoa trees would grow there, you’re probably called to work with chocolate. If you know the percentage of cocoa solids and the distinct combinations of background flavors in different cocoa powders and bars of chocolate, and you’re a stickler about exactly which chocolate to use for each specific purpose, you’re probably called to work with chocolate.

I’m thinking about this a lot lately for a couple of reasons (not chocolate, but callings, although I think about chocolate fairly often). One is that I notice how much of my time I spend doing routine things every day. These are things I have to do, like showering and shaving and preparing meals and rinsing off dishes (I have to mow a lot, too, but it’s my labyrinth so I don’t put it in the same category). As I look at the value of my time I notice a lot of it goes to self-care and sorting the junk mail for the recycle bin and putting gas in the car.

Then I notice how much of my time I spend doing things other people say I need to do to help grow my business. A lot of those things don’t feel very important. They’re not consequential. If I just stopped, I don’t think it would matter much. When I’m going through the motions of reading blogs and trying to find some interesting things to Tweet about or mention on Facebook, but I just can’t get into it, I know I’ve gotten away from my calling.

The other reason I’m thinking about this is I’ve realized that many times when people have talked to me about what they believe is their calling, they’re actually talking about a fantasy perfect day. Deciding what you want your life to look like is an important part of life and work design. It helps you respect your natural way of being and get clear about what you value and what you believe. But planning out an ideal day is often a lot more about self-indulgence and comfort than it is about your calling.

When a woman defines her ideal day with a quiet morning at home reading and eating a simple breakfast, followed by a wonderful yoga class, I understand that time for her inner self is important to her. But I’ve heard four different women describe a similar day. Each one has mistakenly concluded that, because she enjoys attending a yoga class, she is called to do yoga. Digging in to how the “calling” would serve other people or become her career, none of these women have had clear answers. They didn’t want to become instructors or to share the philosophy of yoga with other people. They just really enjoyed that part of their day.

I acknowledge there are exceptions to the following, but… You’re probably not called to eat expensive dinners at nice steakhouses, although you might really love doing that, even if you enjoy comparing which one has the best seasoning and which has the tastiest meat and who serves the best side dishes. You’re probably not called to hang out on Saturday afternoons at the movie with your friends and then go talk for a long time at a cool coffee place afterwards. You’re probably not called to have picnics by the river with your sweetheart or your family. These may be great, wonderful, fun things, but they’re probably not your calling.

It’s possible you could turn your interest in upscale restaurants into a profit center writing restaurant guides or teaching cooking classes. It’s possible you could turn the love of movies into creating a social club for movie buffs to share their enjoyment. It’s possible you could turn the enjoyment of picnics by the river into a niche hospitality business, providing custom-designed picnics at parks or organizing day trips for people. But even those things, while they might be fun profit centers, are probably not a calling.

I believe (for now – I am open to being persuaded) that your calling is the thing that gets you by the throat and won’t let you go. It’s the way you see things when you’re not trying to see things in any special way. It’s the thing that you keep going back to, even though you decide you’ll stop spending so much time doing it.

The home designer is automatically thinking that it would have been better for the front door to be placed further back to create a better porch, and the façade of the house could have matched the surrounding landscape if only the owners had chosen a lighter stone, and the dining room off to the side of the entryway seems confined but would be perfect if the back wall were opened up. The creative writer is predicting where the novel or movie or television show is going, feels settled when a scene that “just has to happen” finally happens and feels disappointed when it never does, and is delighted when there’s a new twist on a familiar story line that actually deepens the experience and doesn’t feel like the writer threw in something different just to be different. While listening to a conversation between two people, where one is trying to explain something and the other one is not getting it, the teacher will catch himself thinking of ways to translate information into metaphors or simple descriptions to make it easier to understand. He might step in and try to help explain things, even if he doesn’t know the other people very well. If he feels he should keep quiet and not interrupt, it’ll be one of the hardest things for him to do, because explaining ideas so they can be understood is just what he does.

I don’t think everyone has to find a way to express his or her calling through work. Many people choose a career or a business or different profit center because it is engaging and interesting and fun, not because it’s the thing the person absolutely has to do. But I think everyone has to honor his or her calling and treat it with respect. I think people who aren’t engaged with their calling will feel like life is empty, with little purpose or meaning. It won’t feel consequential. But when they are acting in alignment with their calling, what they are doing will feel like it matters.

Following your calling is not rainbows and sunshine. It’s work – demanding work. You’re not called to have a pleasant day. You’re called to find your core self, develop your gifts and talents, and share them. You’re called to challenge yourself so you continue to grow. You’re called to step outside your comfort zone and take on something that seems really hard. A musician following his calling will keep returning to the piece that he struggles to play. An actor following her calling will eventually choose a role that scares her.

If you’re not willing to commit deeply to something, to say “no” to some things so you can say “yes” to that one thing, you haven’t found your calling. If you’re not willing to struggle with frustration and make mistakes and get better little by little so you can accomplish a goal that seems nearly impossible, you haven’t found your calling. If you’re content to sing the same song, write the same kind of story, design the same kind of equipment, and generally stay at the same level, you haven’t found your calling.

But when something captures you and won’t let you go, when you keep coming back to it because there are always new approaches and new applications to explore and ways to get better, when it’s the pattern by which you understand important things in your life, you’ve found your calling.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

This is officially a theme. I wrote my last post after seeing the Seth Godin post that pointed to the Rich Goidel post. They both wrote about avoiding distractions and getting things finished and shipped.

Today when I checked the Twitter stream to see if anyone is using it for anything other than PR I saw a chirp from Barbara Winter. She linked to this blog post by Scott Ginsberg that is also all about avoiding distractions and getting things finished and shipped.

Maybe it’s time for me to avoid distractions and get things finished and shipped.

I wonder if my followers and friends on Twitter and Facebook will agree?

Maybe I should go ask them.

P.S. (Post-Stupidity) I hit “publish” instead of “preview” before I realized that I credited the wrong person with the chirp on Twitter. But it’s okay with me if you go learn about Ken and his blog anyway. He writes great stuff and finds a lot of cool things he shares on Twitter.

Fortunately I found a powerful and brief analogy for my recurring warning about focusing on chasing the latest new marketing tactic before figuring out your marketing plan. It was a link in a recent blog post by Seth Godin.

Seth referenced a post by Rich Goidel, blogging at “The Back of the Napkin,” titled Playing with turtles. The core message here is to focus on the important thing — marketing message — and not get distracted by secondary things — playing with marketing channels.

I’m writing a corollary. When someone else has written a beautifully concise post that conveys a valuable message to your audience, call it good, link to it, and shut up.

(Bonus to me: I don’t really have time to write a post, much less edit one to make it good.

Bonus to you: You don’t have to read that meandering post I don’t have time to write!)

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

A couple of weeks ago I decided to get back in the habit of posting weekly again to the Travel Log category, which is the descendant of my original blog. If Ken can post often about doing something daily and Darcy can keep trying to write something regularly to see how it works for her, I figured I could easily go back to doing something I was able to do for years.

Last week it was easy. This week I was left drumming my fingers next to the keyboard for days instead of dancing across the keys. Thank God for mowing!

As I turned the back pasture into a labyrinth with my Kubota zero-radius mower, I had grass flying around, bugs flying around, dirt flying around, and thoughts flying around. I found myself thinking about how to structure an information product I’m writing. I realized I want to create a version of it to be used for a training and coaching program, where clients read and do some exercises and then talk with me about what they’ve discovered.

Boom! I drove across a deep rut and sent a cloud of dirt into the air. It seemed to jostle my brain, because a lot of ideas landed on me as the dust was settling. One tap restarted a train of thought triggered originally by a post on a coaches’ forum by Morgana Rae. She said she’s moving her coaching business from “a la carte” coaching, where you buy a session or a month at a time, to coaching packages, where you pay upfront for a full experience that lasts several months. It’s more complete, more expensive, and more clearly defined.

Another idea jostled awake was the memory of a conversation I had with my wife and a good friend many years ago over dinner when he had come back into town. This happened long before I had coach training, when we were in the middle of selling our business and I was thinking about what I would do next. I told them about an idea for doing a form of personal development consultation in a set package. In that plan a program might have eight sections of reading and exercises, and the client would buy the package upfront and schedule a phone call when the first section was done. He could schedule the second phone call when the second section was done, and so on. It would be up to the client to pace himself, taking as much or as little time as he preferred.

Another idea that settled from the dust cloud was the realization that this design was my own, from my own thoughts. I set it aside and nearly forgot it when I started coach training and learned the standard service model of monthly coaching. I have struggled with that model and looked for alternatives for years. I finally came back to my design after being detoured by other people’s ideas for too long.

The bestest idea (not a word, but it should be) was the one that helped resolve a dilemma. I know coaching is a process and won’t work well if it’s systematized. It has to be organic and adaptive to the moment. But teaching and training can be systematized. In fact, education works best when some sort of system is employed.

The idea of coaching people in a fixed way through an ordered series of topics didn’t sit well with me. But the idea of teaching people a topic in sequential steps makes sense. A package that combines systematic teaching for information, plus individualized co-created coaching to help the client absorb and apply the new knowledge to his circumstances, brings these two approaches together.

I figured out a long time ago that I want to coach, but not exclusively, not as a purist. I want coaching as part of my mentorship service model. The idea of creating a mentorship package with defined training materials in a certain number of steps, combined with individualized coaching for personal application, is my “of course” answer. It made so much sense when I thought of it that it seemed like I knew it all along, like I must have thought of it before and forgotten it.

Which, in fact, is what happened.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Sometimes things just flow, but the next day I reread what I wrote and it looks like… it flowed, alright, but for a very different reason. Sometimes I wrestle and fight with a piece and don’t like it very much, but other people give me great feedback. Considering that, I might just be writing some of my best stuff ever right now, because I’m having to unscramble things I originally wrote backwards.

Some of the articles I’ve been writing are based on posts to the forum for coaches in the Profiting From Your Passions™ Career Coach program. Those posts made sense when I wrote them – I swear they did! Other people even seemed to understand them. But as I read through them to pull out the “good stuff” for my articles, I noticed they were written backwards.

It wasn’t strictly backwards. That would have been easy to fix. They were mostly backwards but pretty jumbled, too. For example, I would find a sentence or a three-sentence paragraph and think “keeper,” so I would leave it where it was. After I pulled out the redundant parts (how much time I waste saying the same thing twice or more in the same post!) I looked at the framework that was left.

The jumbled, backwards mess had been hiding behind too many anecdotes and needless repetition. But there it was. The piece opened with a summary paragraph, and the summary statement was the last line of it, not the first. Near the end, after rambling all over the place, I finally stated my main point, as the third sentence in a lengthy paragraph. It was a great main point, the kind you structure an opening paragraph to support, like the appearance of the lead actor early in the play after the stage has been set. But I had just thrown it into the middle of a mishmash paragraph.

Sometimes it was an easy fix. I would put the last sentence of a paragraph first and move the first sentence closer to the end and finally understand what it was I had been trying to say. But most of the time I found material for the beginning of the article written near the end of the post and vice versa. I would fix a paragraph and then move the whole thing to the other end.

I think this happened because my forum posts are the most conversational writing I do. Someone has just asked a question and I start “talking” to that person, typing madly to get an idea out before my brain moves on to the next one. I quick-edit for spelling and grammar before I click “post,” but that’s about it.

I think we tend to talk like we’re filling in different parts of a mind map at the same time. I think that’s why someone can read my jumbled forum post and understand it. We’re used to that pattern in conversation.

I think this hodgepodge style of conversation even explains why I can listen to a presentation and think afterwards it was very compelling with great points, but when I listen again later it seems to go all over the place. Several times I’ve heard a teleclass or recorded workshop and thought it had a brilliant flow of logically connected, inspiring ideas summed up with memorable anecdotes. Listening a second time I realized it was actually disjointed. My own mind had rearranged the parts to find the connections and fill in some pieces, similar to the way we process impressionist art.

This suggests why it can be so important to take notes or jot down thoughts inspired as we hear something being discussed – but it’s okay to throw the notes away afterwards, since triggering your mind to organize thoughts is sometimes the only value of note-taking. It’s why talking about a new idea is important, too. As you tell it to someone else your mind is organizing the information, seeing the connections in it and finding similar patterns in your other experiences. This is part of integrating and assimilating new understanding.

In my writer’s journey, I’m noticing my quick e-mail replies and forum posts are lightly polished and only as structured as my comments in conversation. My blog posts get a little more work, but only a little, because as I write them I practice welcoming ideas and words without the filter of the writing teacher looking over my shoulder. I edit and rearrange to make sure there are coherent ideas presented in an understandable way, but I don’t polish too much. I spend about half as much time editing and rewriting as I do writing the first draft. This is part of my regular exercise to produce and publish in spite of a clamoring tension to make everything as perfect as possible. Seth Godin talks and writes about this a lot, like in this post. He calls it the struggle to get things “shipped.”

I give articles the most attention. I spend a lot more time polishing one than I do writing it. I might move the parts around and reword things multiple times. It’s kind of like deciding how to arrange the furniture in a room by actually moving the sofa here… and then over there, but now the chair won’t fit… so we put it back here but now the window is blocked.

I wonder if a 3G 32-Gig iPad would help me do that better? (See? No filter.)

How are things going for you as you wrestle with your inner writing teacher? Mine gets perplexed a lot and sighs. But I’m being patient with her while she gets used to me.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

But the phrase doesn’t even come close to capturing the joy of experimenting and playing and expanding our minds and our abilities that we experience as the creatively self-employed. That’s what Barbara Winter calls the “Joyfully Jobless life.” It’s joyful because it’s an adventure of self-discovery.

Leave it to Seth Godin to capture this wonderful idea in a high-octane analogy: surfing. In this recent post he compares the joy from work that grows us by developing our gifts and talents with the intoxication of the next wave for the surfer.

I can see the surf breaking in the distance with the sun rising on the horizon behind it as I round the corner on the Twisting Road.