Perspective Switch

One of the techniques I use in coaching is shifting perspective. We develop a point of view, and we reinforce it with beliefs and ideas. Pretty soon it’s not only the “right” way, but the “only” way. When a client gets stuck, it’s often a perspective issue. See if any of these sentences are ones you’ve said:

“That woman [man] hates me. I can’t do anything about it.”
“My boss [mother, mother-in-law, spouse, child, teacher] is out to get me. They are always criticizing me.”
“I can’t meet all your demands, it’s just too much.”
“I won’t ever be able to do that. I’m not up to it.”

All of those are perspectives. Your beliefs are certainly true for you at this moment. It’s your reality. But as my recent drawing classes have shown, if you move, even slightly, you will get a different view. And that viewpoint might shift your beliefs. If you see things differently, you can have a fresh look at them, maybe see something you didn’t see before.

Shifting your perspective is an exercise that asks the client to step into a different viewpoint. It’s not always easy, but it’s always enlightening. I’ll ask a client to pretend they are the other party, or to pretend they are in another part of their lives. Sometimes I even ask them to shift to a different position while they are talking to me. That is often enough to get them away from being stuck.

In the picture on the left, you can see an older house. You can see it has agaves growing in front of it, a grated door, and a typical desert front yard. You could draw all sorts of conclusions looking at the picture. If you are from the lush, green East, you could think the people are poor and have a dirt yard.

Now look at the photo below. The only change is that I took three steps backwards to take the photo. Exactly the same spot, just a different perspective. Now you can see the stucco and block fence that runs outside the house. You might think the person is closed off, maybe hates outsiders. You could add this to the idea that the person is poor, and you have a fairly unflattering picture of the owner.

Until you add the information that the house is in the desert Southwest, where almost every house is surrounded by a fence like this. Originally the fences kept out the wandering javelinas (wild pigs) that rooted up the gardens and attacked pets. Now, because most houses in this area are build close to each other to save resources, the fences provide boundaries and assure privacy. The landscape style suits the desert climate. It’s called xeriscaping, using only native desert plants and using sand and rocks as ground cover. Grass requires a lot of water, which isn’t plentiful in the Sonoran desert.

To get a different perspective, I often think of taking a photograph of my opinion, writing down a few viewpoints. Then I mentally turn, step back, or put a different light on it and take another mental picture. Voila! a new perspective. It doesn’t always result in an Aha! moment, but it does add important information to my decision making process.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. She also develops and leads seminars on communicating better with office colleagues and friends. Image: Quinn took the photos. (c) 2008 All rights reserved.

Get the Most From Your Coaching Session

When someone becomes a life- or creativity coaching client of mine, I send them a letter of agreement. It explains the details in coaching that are important–the telephone number to use for the call, how long a session lasts, and a few requests that surprise people.

Almost no one expects that coaching focuses on one thing at a time. It’s difficult to persuade people that multi-tasking is a myth. The way to prove this is to try coaching people who are deeply involved in multi-tasking.

Coaching happens (for my clients) on the phone. After I developed neck and shoulder problems, I used a headset, which gives me crystal clear sound. It amplifies the crunching, chewing, and drinking noises of clients snacking or eating an entire meal while being coached. It also amplified the keyboard clicks of clients who check their emails, text message, read IMs and yes, play games during a coaching session.

Here’s how you can get the most out of your coaching session:

—Coaching is an activity that requires listening, answering questions, thinking through complex emotions and motivations and connecting behaviors with consequences. Come prepared to take some notes, maybe in a notebook or journal, so all the notes stay together.

—Before you make the call, get a drink, grab a snack, go to the bathroom. Then you are ready to spend time on the phone without distractions.

— You can’t concentrate on an email and think about your life. Put other people aside and focus just on your needs for the moment.

—Let your other calls go to voicemail. You can’t talk to your coach, shift your concentration and energy to another phone call and pick up where you left off with the coach. Get back to your life when you are finished with a coaching session.

—A lot of coaching involves asking questions. I don’t demand instant answers. Take time to think. If I ask you, “When is your energy low?” I don’t expect you to have the answer instantly. I am willing to wait while you think. However, if I hear you keyboard clicking, I will think you are Googling for an answer. Hint: it’s not on Google.

—Ask questions if you don’t understand what I am asking. If I ask, “When is your energy low?” and you don’t know if I mean after what activity or what time of day, ask. If you answer every question with “I don’t know, tell me,” I’ll be happy to give you examples, but your questions make the answer clearer for you.

—I don’t give advice. We can explore choices, options, and your ideas. If you are out of ideas, I’m happy to toss out some for you to react to. But I don’t tell you what to do, think, or be. That is always your choice. If I toss out an idea, it is not a directive. Generally I’ll ask what you think about the idea. You are not required to like it. You can hate it, use part of it, or come back with another idea you like better.

—Coaching is about you. If I tell you what to do and you blindly do it, then you aren’t involved in your future. If making decisions is new to you, you might find the idea of trying out ideas interesting or intimidating. Let me know how you feel and we can explore choices. That’s the joy of coaching. It involves support, encouragement, choices and consequences. You’ll have time to think and be silent. So will I.

If every second is filled with something, there is no time to process information, think of consequences, or process information to compare and contrast ideas and results. Thanks to the way the human brain processes multiple simultaneous activities, it’s apparently becoming rare to really delve deeply into any one subject or relationship, so while the electronically connected are collecting information about a wide range of topics, the depth just isn’t there anymore.

When you work with me, it’s all about you. And I’ll ask you to get away from your computer, TV, DVD player, iPod and every other electronic gadget. I’ve had clients make huge leaps when they concentrate on themselves. And that’s how it should be.

–Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach, writer, and seminar leader. See her work at QuinnCreative.com (c) 2008. All rights reserved.

Image: www.setfocus.it

Fighting to Change

Even when you want to change, it isn’t easy. What makes change hard? Two major factors: yourself and others. The rest is easy. When you decide to change, you have your past to wrestle with. You choose the path to change and suddenly your inner voice pipes up. “What’s so wrong with who you are now?” “Love yourself the way you are, change is a sign of self-hatred.” “Can you really keep up this behavior?”

If you want to change a habit, you’ll have to substitute the new behavior for about two month. That’s as long as it will take you to establish the new habit in place of the old. No doubt about it, they will be the longest two months of your life. You will invent a thousand reasons to go back to the old behavior–it’s your birthday, you just started a diet, you are stressed, now is not a good time. But like having a baby, there is never a perfect time, you have to gear up, crank up your determination and get busy.

Just when you do, your friends will start chipping away at your resolve. They will give you excuses to fail. They will tell you they like you the way you are. They will whine that you don’t need to change. Why are your friends so focused on sabotage? Because if you change, they will have to change. They will have to get to know the new you, they will have to change the way they treat you . And your friends don’t want to change. It’s too much work. It is a lot less work to complain until you quit changing.

Your friends can be persistent and threatening. Most people don’t like confrontation, and they do like their friends, so they cave in and go back to being “normal.” And there goes the path to success.

If you are determined to change, tell your friends you plan ahead of time and enlist their help. Ask them to support you before the chorus of complaints begins. Often asking for support not only makes friends understand that this is important to you, it helps you be clear about what you want. And talking about the change helps you be clear about what you want for your future.

That doesn’t mean your friends will always support you, but it gives you a better start. And a good start is the best way to start toward a good finish.

–Image: www.triathletemag.com

–Quinn McDonald is a life coach and certified creativity coach. See her work at QuinnCreative.com (c) 2008 All rights reserved.

Coaching: The unasked question

In the life of a person being coached, there is a question that raises its head. More than a few people have accused me, in a moment of anger, of being in it for the money. Of talking to them only because they pay me to.

On the face of the accusation (it’s never just a statement), they are right. My clients find me, they call me, and they pay me. Because coaching is intimate work, it is often easy to confuse coaching with talking to a stubborn friend who is totally involved in you and keeps asking questions about things that interest you.

I admire most of my clients. It takes guts to call on someone for help. I appreciate all of them. The struggle is almost always worth it—I’ve got the letters of amazement to prove it. “You didn’t give up on me.” “You showed me how to believe in myself.” And I do.

Coaching is a calling. I didn’t have a divine light come from the sky. I wanted to help creative people be comfortable with their creativity–being creative writers, illustrators, parents, employers, speakers–whatever life they choose. My life has been one of change, rejection, acceptance, and making peace with being creative in a time when ‘cheap price’ wins over ‘well-done’ every time. It’s not an easy path, but I’ve walked it, and I enjoy helping people make the choices they can live with happily.

And yes, I charge for doing this. In our culture, time is money. We get up and go to work in the morning because we need to eat, pay a mortgage, and drive a car. If you didn’t need to earn money, would you still go to your daily job? If you could do whatever you wanted in life, would you still go to your office? Exactly.

And so I charge for my talent, my experience, my time and effort. For years, I had clients whom I coached for free. Over time, I noticed that clients who didn’t pay often weren’t invested in their own progress. They missed calls. They forgot to call on time, then complained when I ended their session on time. They didn’t do their weekly work, would refuse to think through a question, simply repeating “I don’t know. Tell me.”
The answer was always, “I don’t ‘tell you’. If I give advice you will spend too much effort telling me why you can’t follow it. If you create your own solutions, and fail, you’ll learn why and then succeed.”

People who were not required to pay quit after a few weeks, blaming me that “coaching doesn’t work.” People who believed in themselves enough to pay, worked hard and succeeded.

And for some people, those who are working hard and struggling, there is extra time on a session. Or a lot of emails between sessions. And sometimes, an extra session I never charge for.

And that is wonderful for both of us. It’s the reason I coach–you can change, if you want to do the work.

–Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach. See her work at QuinnCreative.com (c) 2008. All rights reserved. Image–Quinn McDonald. Under the same copyright.

The Many People We Can Be

“ Don’t I know you from somewhere?” the woman asked me. She was in my booth at an art show. I had recognized her when she came in, but I knew that in this different context, she would not recognize me. “I was your trainer two weeks ago, ‘Problem Solving for Leadership,’ I said.

She looked horrified. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m an artist, too,” I explained. I left out creativity coach, life coach and writer. One thing at a time.

“You can’t do that,” she said in a stern tone, “You can’t be both. What are you really?”

Who Are You Today?
It’s an interesting question. We are many people—spouses, parents, significant others, neighbors, organ donors, —but we see ourselves as one person at a time. During the day we are what we do—corporate employee—and when we leave work we become the “real” us. And if we’ve integrated what we do with who we are, we favor identifying ourselves by our work. “I’m an accountant,” or “I’m an engineer,” is something we hear more often than, “I’m intrigued by the idea that there is a great deal of similarity among the origination story of different religions.”

Learning How to Be You
Two generations ago, most schools prepared us for life—we took languages, world history, art, music, science, math and philosophy. We learned how to reason abstractly and think creatively. Now schools prepare us for a job—engineer, lawyer, journalist. We learn only those facts that can be proven to be necessary—either on the next test, or for the job.

But most of the things that have served me best in life—compassion, understanding, listening, exploring possibilities—aren’t taught in school anymore. They can’t be quantified enough to be put into a multiple-choice test. But life, it turns out, is not a multiple-choice test, it’s a series of essay exams.

Think Big: Be More
But experience can’t be summarized in a sound bite. Life doesn’t fit a three-word definition of who you are and how you fit into society.

As we speed up life, we have just enough time, it seems, to get one job done right. And our culture tells us that getting it right is very important, so we’d better not have time to learn about more possibilities. Instead, we’d better prove that we are worthy of regular title promotions and salary increases.

Think Creative, Live Creative
You can, of course, be someone else as a hobby. But hobbies need to be controlled and preferably quantifiable, like collecting something. Once you start to make money at a hobby, you better have a name for your company and be ready to fill out a form C for the IRS—and make a decision about what you really want to do.

Barbara Kingsolver, author of The Poisonwood Bible, The Bean Trees, and Animal Dreams, found strong disapproval when she gave in to her need to play music and joined the Rock Bottom Remainders with Amy Tan, Dave Berry and Stephen King. Of that experience, she writes “As I get comfortable with the middle stretch of my life, though, it’s occurred to me that this is the only one I’m going to get. I’d better open the closet door and invite my other selves to the table, even if it looks undignified or flaky. . .I’m not looking for a new me, just owning up to all the old ones. . . . The Rock Bottom Remainders went on record as half-bad musicians having wholehearted lives.”

One Life, Many Lives
I’m well past the halfway part of my life, and there are still several lives, ideas, paths, to try out. I don’t want to say ‘no’ to any of them. There is a lot to do in the time I have left and a mind clear enough to do it. I want to look forward. Looking back is comforting because we are no longer there, and because we know everything we are looking at. Looking ahead is full of mystery and the unknown. But I would rather spend my time looking square-on at today’s mystery than looking back on things that can’t be changed.

–Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach, writer and trainer in how to communicate in the corporate world. See her work at QuinnCreative.com 

Coaching: Choosing Your Work

Whether you work for yourself, for others, or are contemplating a set of interviews to choose a new job, there are some important thoughts to get in line.

1. Any time you interview for a job, it’s a two-way street. You are interviewing to prove you will be an asset to the company, but you are also interviewing them to see if this company meets your values. As a coach, the problem I see most often is people taking a job that doesn’t honor their values and then wondering why they hate the job.

Values are what you like and hate in life. Here are examples: you like helping others; you dislike working with children; you like to work in the background, not calling attention to yourself; you want monetary recognition for your ideas.

2. Doubt is just doubt, not a sign from above. If you own your business, or if you are working for someone else, any time you make a direction decision, you immediately begin to doubt yourself about making the “best” decision. “Should I have really accepted that promotion?” “Should I have turned down that client for this client?” are both direction decisions.

3. A lot of decisions are set in stone. (Having a child, getting married, signing a contract). They eliminate other choices. Doors shut. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. Go in one direction and explore it thoroughly. If it isn’t right, make a correction. But don’t dither back and forth.

4. Not every job is a lot of money at first. Not every job needs to supply you with a ton of money. You can live on less than you think.

5. Not everything that is money is worthwhile doing. If you are spending a lot of that income you wanted to much on retail therapy because you hate your job, rethink Item 4.

6. Know your motives. If you are going to do something for not a lot of money, know what you are getting from it–experience you don’t have, contacts, resume improvement.

7. Be honest about your needs. No matter how much “fun” something is, if there isn’t money in it, and the only thing you need is money, think it through before you commit a lot of your life to it. The opposite is also true. Do not take any job just because it pays well. If it doesn’t honor your values, it will sink you over time.

–Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach and a life coach. She’s a writer who owns QuinnCreative.com (c) 2007. All rights reserved.

Image: www.gluttonsess.com

Writing Isn’t Free

There are a lot of jobs available for writers. Unfortunately, many of them don’t pay. I don’t get it. America is all about money–we love the big cars, the latest fads. We go to movies and if we add popcorn and a drink, the price tag can easily add up to dinner for two in a decent restaurant.

So why are all these writers jobs so low paying? It’s not a mystery, it’s because people want your talent for a small amount of money so they take the profit. Essentially, that’s what the writer’s strike is about.

Writers want to get paid when their work gets put in a different form–they write for shows, but want to be paid for their writing when it becomes another format for viewing: DVD, Internet, movies. When a DVD sells for $28, the writer will get about $0.04 of that. What they want is $0.08 of that. The comedian Tim Kazurinsky explains it quite well.

The same companies that told advertisers that they get millions of views and that the Internet was the next big market for their products, calmly turned around and told writers that there wasn’t any proof that writing works, and the person to take the hit for doubt had to be writers.

I’ve answered several internet ads for writers, but have yet to find one that pays decently, let alone well. One wanted me to produce a series of restaurant reviews, 8 per week (who eats out that much?) and write a 200-word review, with picture. The pay? I get to be published. I can publish myself and not pay myself, neatly cutting out the middleman.

Now my articles are getting picked up all the time, to fill the blogs of other writers, who are desperate to meet their goals. One such place offered to pay $0.12 per day, but they own the copyright. That was based on click-throughs per article, so I’d have to write a huge amount to make minimum wage.

As a writer, who has made a living from writing for most of my adult life, I’d like to pass on encouragement and a warning. Get paid for your work. Do not work for free. When you give it away, no one will respect you in the morning.

And the warning: Writing well is hard. You have to know grammar. You have to be able to think analytically. You have to be able to reason logically. Just because you can keyboard your thoughts doesn’t make you a good writer. Get paid what you are worth. Walk away from scams, underpayment and empty promises. You’ll respect yourself in the morning.

–Image: www.sheezyart.com

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and creativity coach. See her work at QuinnCreative.com (c) 2007 All rights reserved.

What’s Creativity Coaching About?

Of all the questions I hear about what I do, the one most often asked is “What’s creativity coaching like?” It’s hard to answer that question, because coaching is an experience, not a product. It’s easy to describe a banana because it’s a physical thing. It’s hard to describe what a banana tastes like, because it is a personal experience.

Life coaching, or creativity coaching for that matter, are about improving your experience of day to day living. Here are three things that I try to bring to my coaching clients:

1.Deep Listening
Listening at a deep level is vital. In our work culture, we are trained to have answers, so we listen until we can say something back. It may be tangential, but it shows we are listening. In coaching, deep listening means not thinking about anything but what the client means, rather than what the client is saying. That means listening with your whole body.

Because coaching is done on the phone, I often close my eyes to concentrate completely on the client’s emphasis, voice timbre, inflections. Those qualities often tell a different story than the words the client speaks. When I ask a client how the week went, and I hear a catch in the voice, a sigh, and “OK,” I can ask, “What’s wrong?” Often clients think I’m highly intuitive. It’s really just deep listening.

2. Not knowing
Each time a client says something important, it’s easy to think I know what it means. But that’s my conclusion, and not theirs. So when a client says, “I don’t have time to work on my art,” I’ll ask, “Tell me how you work,” or “Tell me about how you feel the instant you decide not to work one day.” The answer brings rich information the client knew but I didn’t. “Tell me more about that,” or, “Tell me what X means to you,” or “How did you know that?” or, “Where did that decision come from?” opens many more possibilities than my saying, “I know what you mean.” I usually don’t, till I ask.

3. Acknowledgment
There are times I think that the only time a client gets listened to fully is in coaching. At work, as employees, you have to posture and always know. Failure is bad. Not knowing is dangerous. At home, parents must always have a schedule, an answer, a solution. In coaching, clients get listened to and don’t have to know. A simple acknowledgement—“Are you noticing how you are making progress in finding time to write?” can have amazing results. I try to fit one acknowledgment into each session. It has built many a bridge to trust and honesty, and the client knows I’m listening and I care.

Quinn McDonald is an artist, writer and certified creativity coach. See her work at QuinnCreative.com (c) 2007 All rights reserved.

Marketing When You Don’t Have Time

Whether you are an artist, freelance writer, or any small business owner, you know you have to market yourself and your work.  And as soon as this crush slows down a bit, you plan on doing just that.

Now it’s too late. The time to do marketing is when you don’t need to because you are busy, when you don’t have free time. Once you have free time, it takes weeks for the marketing to work and money isn’t coming in. I hate hearing it; I hate saying it, and it’s true. So I devised a way to get around the roadblocks and market.

One of the ways I market my work is to publish articles in magazines and ezines. Published work not only displays your talent and expertise, but the clips also help you market your work to others. There is a certain amount of drudgery involved in pitching your work,  getting rejections, finding another magazine, re-writing and then re-pitching your work.

I write an article–just getting down the ideas. What Ann Lamott calls a “zero draft”–not even a first draft. If the article is longer than a page, I staple it together and stick it in the yellow folder in my bag. When I’m in line at the post office, the grocery store, or waiting at the dentist, I pull out the folder and read through the articles. Sometimes I circle a paragraph and mark it for deletion, other times I’ll write notes in the margin. I don’t line edit it. I’m not ready for that, I’m still working on the idea stage.

When I’m waiting for a client to call back, when I can’t read another email, when I have a few minutes of time, but no more, I pull out the zero draft and review the notes. Sometimes the zero draft is really two different articles. Sometimes the zero draft is not worth keeping. If the article has promise, I’ll write the first draft, and toss it back into the folder. Over time, creativity wins out. The articles get written, re-written, edited and polished.

When I send them out, I am no longer attached to them. Rejections don’t crush my spirit. And because there are more of them in the folder, if one is rejected, another one can go out. Or the rejected one can be rewritten.

The marketing benefit comes from producing publishable articles without setting aside weeks of time to do it. The emotional benefit is that staying objective about the articles helps you pitch and rewrite more efficiently. There is the added benefit of not buying candy while you are in the supermarket line and not being as anxious when the dentist calls your name.

It’s a slow process that makes the most of how creativity works. Your brain keeps working on the writing, even if you are not focusing on it directly, and the process moves forward in small, but definite steps. When you get an article accepted, it seems like a bonus. Over time, I’ve noticed that I get more and more accepted, and the checks are an incentive to keep working.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and certified creativity coach. See her work at QuinnCreative.com

Make a Decision

Anne was trying to decide whether to stay in a relationship or go. There were plenty of reasons to leave–she didn’t feel heard, she felt belittled, her boyfriend didn’t want to go for counseling and didn’t want her to go either. On the other hand, she had spent a year in the relationship and had put effort into making it work. Her boyfriend was funny and made her laugh, even at herself.

To stay or to leave? Would leaving seem like giving up? Was she being a quitter instead of someone who worked out problems? Was staying in a bad relationship a sign she didn’t care about herself? Couldn’t admit she had made a mistake and move on?

Anne was tortured with her choices. And she kept piling up more reasons without knowing which direction to take. Watching this was torture. I suggested she might feel comfortable writing Carolyn Hax, who writes the syndicated column, “Tell Me About It” for the Washington Post.

“I should be able to sort this out by myself,” Anne said. “I don’t know how come I can’t make a decision.”

Sometimes making a decision is tough because with the decision comes the consequence. Either staying or leaving brings on a pile of consequences that you choose the instant you make the deicision, and often you are afraid of consequences you don’t know about yet. So you put off the decision, and begin to drown in your own life.

I gave Anne a coin. “Heads you stay, tails you leave,” I said.
“You’re kidding, right?” she said, looking at me as if I were nuts.
“Well, this is the simplest way for you to get to a decision. It takes thinking out of the problem. Let’s see what happens,” I said.

She flipped the coin. Heads. Anne broke into tears. Hurts and agonies months in the making poured out. I handed her a Kleenex. At the end of the sobbing came the sentence, “I can’t stay. I’ll die if I stay.” As soon as she sobbed it out, Anne had her answer. By coming up wiht endless possibibilities and choices, Anne has supressed the answer she already knew. By taking thinking out of the pattern that she had developed, she suddenly collided with her emotions and knew the answer she had been supressing.

Anne left her boyfriend, and although there were many tears and a few hard days and nights, over time she knew the decision had been right. Looking back she saw that a lot of her indecision was rooted in not wanting to change because change made her feel as uncertain as she felt in staying.

It’s not the tossing of the coin that helps you make a decision, but the emotions that follow it. Emotions often inform clear decisions, because they allow you to focus on what is important to you. We often block our values because we are scared of honoring them. The coin toss works, even if you know about its purpose, because it make your own feelings clear to you. Our ability to provide many scenarios of the future blocks a clear view sometimes, and tapping into raw emotions provides the only clear view. A coin toss will put you in touch with what you are hiding from yourself. The coin isn’t leading you, the coin gives you permission to see one decision and gauge your choices instead of balancing one pro with another con.

It clears the way to sorting through the issue at hand instead of the fear of making a decision.

—Quinn McDonald is a life- and creativity coach. She knows that choosing can be as hard as admitting a bad choice. And she loves the thought of the sufi poet and fool, Mullah Nasiruddin, who said, “Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment.” (c) 2007. All rights reserved.