No Safety Guarantees

After the police arrested the Marathon Bomber in Boston, one of the students interviewed said, “Now we can go back to our life. We don’t have to be scared anymore. There is nothing to fear.” He’s so very wrong. The idea that two bombers caught make the problem go away is a false one. And every time a terrorist attack occurs, we (understandably) want it to be over so we can have our lives back. Go back to what we were doing before we had to think about dying. But that isn’t real, and our lives have changed forever already. There is no going back. There is no closure. People died. People had their legs blown off.

And still, there is a huge difference between living IN fear and living WITH fear. When we live with fear, we understand the world around us is unsteady and not in our control. We promote kindness, compassion and understanding because that is what we can do at the individual level. We understand that death is not within our control, and that someday we, our family and friends will die–maybe of old age, maybe of disease, maybe because a terrorist bomb found us.

Fear, from beaconblog.com

When we live in fear, we become suspicious, angry and controlling. We trade essential freedoms for the hope of safety, and wind up with missing freedoms and no guarantee of safety.  We refuse to think about death as anything except a cruel cheat, and something that happens to others. And we lose our creativity.

Fear is the big scourge of creativity. Fear robs us of flexibility, agility, choices, and the glory of uncertainty. When we live in fear, uncertainty is the enemy (along with almost everything else.) Instead of spending time in creative thinking, we spend time in isolation, developing rationalizations for “them” and “us” thinking. Anything different, unusual, or non-conforming is suspicious, maybe even dangerous.

The very root of creativity is in different, risky, and strange. There are many countries whose citizens have had to adapt to war–Somalia, the Sudan, Mali, Palestine, Israel, Pakistan, Afghanistan–all have innocent citizens whose lives are directed by war they don’t want, and don’t agree with. But yet, there they are, in the middle of a war, still trying to feed the family and provide a normal life for their children.

Creativity is both exciting and calming, involved in giving up and expanding anew. But let fear in the studio, and it vanishes. Fear makes you small. It takes courage to be creative. But it’s worth it.

—Quinn McDonald’s mother was lost to fear. She doesn’t want to follow in those footsteps.

Getting Up, Again

Many of my coaching clients think I live a charmed life. I’m so patient. I have such insight. How could my life not be bliss-laden and peaceful? When I sold my artwork at art festivals people would come up to me and say, “You are so lucky!

Nope, it’s not upside down, it’s a cold front reflected in a puddle.

You get to do fun things all day long, never have a worry in the world.” I learned to reply, “Yes, I do get to make art, and I’m grateful every day.” I never yelled at them, “Do you have any idea how hard it is to come up with idea and make a bunch of mistakes before your figure it out and then fix it before it works?” I did not do that because I would not have ever sold another piece in my entire art festival existence.

Other people’s lives seem easier, less stressed, not as hard, and certainly not as complicated as our own. That’s a better thing to believe than that everyone’s life could be sold as damaged seconds and someone else would be foolish enough to snap it up.

Everyone who is living a real life makes huge mistakes, does not learn from them the first time, makes them again. I wouldn’t want to work with anyone who has not risked and lost.

The reason this blog has insights, tips, Aha! moments and how-to’s is because I made the mistakes it took to learn them. All of them. Several times over. It is more important for clients (and readers)—to know that it’s not how often you feel stupid, but how often you get up, dust yourself off and start over. Learning is the heart of creativity, and risking is the brain.

So when the bombings happened in Boston yesterday, I did feel fear. I was in D.C. when the plane ran into the Pentagon. Yes, I felt fear. You did, too. What we (who are not in charge, but who feel unsure about life) can do to fight terrorism is to be fair to everyone in our work and play, to be kind, to be generous. That’s enough. Be the person who calms, not stirs the pot. Be the person who steers the conversation to interesting ideas and away from speculation.

We can’t control our fear when we hear bad news. But we can always control our actions in the wake of fear.

-–Quinn McDonald is happy she is teaching grammar again tomorrow. There is something solid about teaching sentence structure in a time of uncertainty.

 

Laying the Blame

It may be a few days before I get back to Facebook. Although I knew this was going to happen–in time of a tragedy, our natural reaction is to find someone to blame. Guns. Criminals. The mentally ill. The health care system. And finally, yes, it came down to: Mothers. “His mother was rigid.” “His mother was too strict,” the comments read on the killings in Connecticut.

Yes, there are mothers that don’t do a good job. Ones that probably shouldn’t have had children. But there is a much more pervasive problem here–a culture that demands that moms take care of kids, have money-producing jobs, take care of a house, make sure the kids have play dates and are in sports, music and summer camps. (And do it smiling in heels and coordinated outfits). Add to that the clothes and food shopping (better comparison shop or use coupons), homework supervision and religious education, and then, don’t forget yourself, so we can be the woman who has it all. And if you are not a mother, you better do a lot more, because there is an obligation to be a mother, as well.

You can’t have it all. You can’t be all things to all people. Not at the same time, maybe not all in your one lifetime.

The messages we get from our magazines (cook like the Barefoot Contessa! Be

Image from http://www.ebaumsworld.com

organized like Martha Stewart! Run a blog, take care of a farm and farm hands  like Pioneer Woman! Run an empire, write books and take coaches on training sessions like Martha Beck! Look and dance like Beyonce!) are constantly showing us what we are not and need to be.

Sure, some moms get help from the children’s father. As they should. But even with help, meeting all those expectations is impossible. The effort alone is exhausting.

We wake up and our first thought is “I’m late,” or “I didn’t get enough sleep,” or “I didn’t finish that report for work.” The first hour of the day, the one in which we are most creative, is spent giving ourselves messages of “not enough,” and “hurry up.” No wonder creativity gets shoved into a corner as a chore rather than as personal growth.  No wonder we are tired, frustrated, and chronically at the end of our rope. The demands to be everything, have everything, and do everything is constant.

Instead, we are not enough of anything consistently. We take a dash at creativity by assembling a kit, we hand our kids a video game instead of reading to them, we put preservative-loaded food on our table and we worry about our family and our image all the time.

Playing along with a culture of perfection, fear and blame doesn’t make us perfect, courageous, and bold. It makes us shaky, angry and scared. It makes us look around for someone to blame when a corner of our world crumbles. “We have met the enemy he is us,” Walt Kelley wrote in the long-vanished comic strip Pogo. It’s time to change our culture, and it starts with you.

—Quinn McDonald helps people through re-invention and change. She is a life and creativity coach and far from perfect.

The Crafty Inner Critic

Our inner critic is no fool. Playing on fear is how s/he gets our attention. Fear reactions are deep and visceral and often feel like safety, when often they are simply more fear. A reaction to fear is anger, and to anger doubt. You can see where that leads without much explanation.

When I saw the image with Marianne Williamson quote on Facebook, it made me smile. We are also afraid of love. Love is work. Love is commitment. Love is not guaranteed. If we fail, it will hurt.

All that is true.

Love can hurt if we fail at it.

But fear hurts when we succeed at it.

—Quinn McDonald has felt both love and fear, so she is writing a book about the inner critic.

The Cat and the Bag

Like most cats, Buster loves paper bags. He likes plastic bags, too, but those are for licking. Paper bags are for pouncing on, climbing into and creating cat-forts.

Buster, in a calmer mood.

Buster is a rescue cat. He was mistreated before we got him, and although he’s been with us many years, he still fears having something grab him by the neck. He wears a collar, but that took 18 months of careful work. Despite that, he loves being a lap cat and is the most fearless foolhardy of our cats.

After I emptied the groceries from Trader Joe’s, I dropped the bag on the floor. Buster was in heaven–he crawled into it, he rattled around it, he jumped on top of it, slid down the length, and stuck his head through the handle. In the split second before it happened, I knew it had been a mistake to leave the bag handles intact.

Buster now had his head through the bag handle, and while there was plenty of

Buster loves watching bacon. Just in case you drop some.

room, he was wearing the bag, and for Buster that meant the bag had him by the neck. Old fears roared to life. Buster headed down the hall full-tilt, the bag in pursuit. I tried to grab the bag as he went by, but that made it worse–now I was lunging for him. At least in his imagination.

As he came by again my comforting voice was lost in the bag rattling and flapping. The sliding door screen simply popped off the track as he burst through the open door and started a frantic lap around the pool. I hoped he wasn’t going to fall in, it’s too cold to voluntarily jump in, even after a cat. The pool towels were still outside, so I grabbed one, and when Buster made his second lap of the pool, I dropped the towel over him and scooped him up. He was so terrified he wet himself, the towel, and me.

In a second, I had the bad off his head, and sat down with a wet, shivering, terrified cat. With the bag gone, Buster did what Buster does when someone is holding him and saying calming things to him–he began to purr. In a few minutes his heart rate settled down and he let me give him a sponge bath. Particularly because I kept the bag of cat treats in view, and rewarded him when we were done.

After the drama, I began to think about his reaction. At first I thought, “he knows that bag won’t attack him; he knows it’s not alive.” But then I realized that I do the same thing. Well, not with a bag, but with old memories that still scare me. Given a trigger to set off anger, fear, or shame, I run around emotionally, not capable of calming myself, not caring what I do as long as I try to outrun the painful emotion.

The solution, of course, is to stop running, sit with the emotion and notice that it no longer has a hold on me. It never did. All I needed to do was pull it over my head. But calm thinking and planning is not what happens when old triggers are pushed. Panic and frantic emotions take over. At that moment, we need a calmer, cooler head that can see the bigger picture to hold us, comfort us and assure us we are safe. And until we learn to do that for ourselves, we will be no smarter than Buster.

–Quinn McDonald learns something every day, even if it’s from Buster. She teaches what she knows through coaching or writing classes.

Fear Factor

On July 4, I wrote a blog post about fear-based culture. It’s an exhausting way to live, and it creates a circle of anger, resentment, control, and giving up.

Because I work with words, and words are an easy weapon, I looked around to find titles and situations in our popular culture that ignite the fuse on the anger circle. The words we use casually become part of our lives.

“War”  We now have a war on women, a war on religion, and yes, Craft Wars on TV.  It’s offensive to use the devastation of war to describe a disagreement and a competitive TV show. Remember when “awesome”  meant extremely impressive or daunting? Now it’s used as a filler word, used to mean “I heard what you just said.”  Soon “war” will be another shrug-off word. We’ll be mildly interested in the collateral damage, but it won’t shock us.

Every successful TV show spins off a competitive one, where one team has to demolish the other. The winning team gets to lord it over the losers. Apprentice, American Pickers (the competitive version), Cajun Justice, Fear Factor,  all the competitive cooking shows, all the race-from-one-place-to-another shows–it’s not just about winning, it’s about making the other team lose. The leftover resentment, anger, ridicule is now part of the American Dream. If you are on the winning side.

From the New York Times Hardcover Bestseller List: 50 Shades of Gray (a trilogy on sadomasochism), Wicked Business, Wild, Cowards, Killing Lincoln. Don’t forget the softcover selections: Explosive Eighteen, Afraid to Die, In the Garden of Beasts.

Best Selling Video Games:  Total War, Bioshock, Mortal Kombat.

Words are important. In the movie Iron Lady,  Margaret Thatcher ‘s attributed this wisdom to her father:

Watch your thoughts, for they become words.Watch your words, for they become actions. Watch your actions, for they become habits. Watch your habits, for they become your character. And watch your character, for it becomes your destiny. What we think, we become.

I know that violence is more interesting than compassion, drama has more frisson than contemplation, and reading about tragedy is more exciting that reading about self-awareness. It does us no good to avoid gluten if we are stuffing our minds with gore.

Do the hard thing and give up your anger, your control, and your threats. Fill your time with creativity. It soothes, heals, inspires and makes you feel like you have achieved something worthwhile. Because you have.

—Quinn McDonald is a creativity coach who is giving up control, one day at a time.

Memory of 9/11

When TV shows us images of September 11, 2001, we see New York. It’s where 3,000 people died. It’s where the iconic towers of American commerce were attacked. But there were two more places that figured in the 9/11 attacks–Washington, D.C. and a field in Pennsylvania where, for the bravery of airplane passengers, the third plane did not reach its target.

I lived in Washington, D.C. in 2001, and I remember that rare and brilliant blue day. I can’t forget the people scattered across the lawn of the Pentagon, I can’t forget the images on TV, or people jumping from the towers because choosing their death was better than burning to death.

And I remember papers. Papers floating down from the sky. Important papers. Unimportant papers. Papers that the day before had held contracts, employment records, financial records. In a second, they were not important anymore. There was no one to need them, no one to ask about them.

Papers, light and dark. © Quinn McDonald 2011

That day changed our country forever. We began to make decisions based on fear. We became suspicious and frightened, We were happy to give up freedoms for safety, but no one could make us safe from our own fear. Our President told us to go back to shopping.  Shopping. It was a defining moment. For a few weeks after 9/11, people cared more, came together more, believed more. And then we changed back to consumers. Frightened consumers. I can’t bear to talk about it much, but I spent a day in the studio working on art. It’s better than shopping for me.

I keep seeing those drifting paper in my nightmares. So I cut out hundreds of squares of paper. I piled them up and stacks and stitched them to watercolor paper. There are two pieces–two contrasts.

Hand-stitched gampi, text block, washi and handmade papers.

One is made of pieces of white paper, stitched with ivory waxed linen. I chose different shades of white to represent the passing of time, the aging of paper.

Dark papers: mulberry paper, text, book pages, washi papers stitched with black pearl cotton.

The second piece is dark. It represents the people who will never come back for their papers, those who will never need the loan, the passport. It represents everything in a life we can lose so easily. It represents who we are and who we can be.

–Quinn McDonald still believes in the innate goodness of people. She won’t give it up, no matter how many papers fall from the sky. She became a life coach after 9/11 and finds the work far more rewarding than shopping.

Fear and the Freelancer

Freelancers make a basic decision before they ever open the door:  What the core principles and values will be that holds up the company.  You use the same principles you use for your personal life. When you own the business, it takes on your fingerprints.

Some of the values were easy for me to choose when I began: Be honest. Be fair. Ask before you

Fear is never a silent partner, accept it and will own your business.

spend the client’s money. Don’t jump to conclusions. Listen.

Then came the giant one: no fear. Do not make business decisions out of fear. Don’t make any decision out of fear.

It’s hard to keep that one. I had made business decisions based in fear for a long time–fear of my boss, fear of not being perfect, fear of being talked about behind my back, fear of people disliking me, fear of getting fired. And it was that fear that made me a lousy corporate employee. So, on my own, I decided–no fear. I decided to stand and deliver my best or turn down the business. Sounds easier than it is.

There are plenty of things to be afraid of when you own your business–not making a profit, getting underbid, outperformed and over cautious. But fear was the big “Aha!” in my business life.

A decision based on fear is frequently loaded with other weak motives. Revenge, neediness, lack of control. If you take fear off the table, you get a different picture.

“What if my competition underbids me?” Became “How much do I need to earn to make a fair profit and do the job well?” If it costs me $10,000 to do the job, and I underbid on purpose and then get the job for $8,000, I am not getting an $8,000 job, I’m losing $2,000. That’s fear.

“I hate Client X, she’s always blaming me for her own mistakes.” I can choose
to work with Client X and be clear on responsibilities or I can pass on the job. But if I continue to let her blame me for her own mistakes, I’m letting fear make my decisions. At the end of the job, she’ll either blame me anyway or I won’t respect myself for taking on blame that isn’t mine.

Fear undermines us. It justifies bad behavior. It is the road to the collapse of self-respect. I can’t live my life without fear, but there are a million great reasons to make decisions and always one lousy one–I did it because I was scared.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer and creativity coach. (c) 2009-2010 Image: © Quinn McDonald. All rights reserved. No additional use without express permission of the artist.

Danger or Drama? Sometimes the Lizard Isn’t Lying.

The reptilian brain is a leftover from our fight-or-flight days. There are still neurons wrapped around our brain stem that scream messages of lack and attack at us. Our inner critic is plugged into the reptilian brain, and the lizard yells at us with negative self-talk. You know the drill:

“You’ll never get that promotion, you just aren’t good enough.”

“You keep screwing up relationships, you keep picking the same losers, you will never be happy.”

“You aren’t nearly smart enough to steer through office politics.”

We struggle with negative self-talk every day, fighting it with positive replacement thoughts, affirmations, acknowledgments. It’s a long struggle, and we  still think we are going to wind up as bag ladies (men use the same phrase).

Howling at the moon? Nope, just sunning. Italian wall lizard from reptilis.net

Refuting the lizard is a popular coaching technique, but I’d like to suggest something much more difficult. (I hear you sighing heavily, even from behind the computer screen.) Sometimes the lizard is right. Sometimes there are dangers around us. We do repeat mistakes. And, in fact, there are bag ladies (and men).

So the trick with the lizard is knowing when it’s just spouting off and when there may be truth in the mental warnings we feed ourselves. Yes, if we run with scissors, we can put out an eye. If the scissors are the blunt-edged ones and still in the box, the likelihood approaches zero.  In the way of the lizard, it yells the same way in either case–long, sharp scissors held in one hand while running down a marble-floored, sloping hallways in wool socks or blunted scissors in a box. The lizard doesn’t discern. The lizard yells lack and attack messages.

What if the lizard whispers fear messages in your ear and they seem plausible?  Luckily, the lizard isn’t all that versatile, so a few questions might make a difference. Here are some you may ask:

–Is this warning for something I’ve done before that ended badly?  Let’s say it’s Yes.

–At what moment exactly, did I make the decision that took me in the wrong direction? Am I there again?

–What decision could you have made to make the earlier disaster end differently? Does that apply here? If both of the second answers are No, move on, it was the lizard. If the answers were “No”, followed by  “but” and anger or drama, it’s just the lizard. Real danger has immediacy and clarity to it.

–If the answer to the first question was “No,” ask yourself, “If I act as if I am in danger, what could go wrong?” If all the answers are desperate and loaded with drama, become suspicious.

–If any of the thought is connected to anger or revenge, it’s the lizard.

–Define the solution you want to pursue. Think it through to the conclusion. Would you suggest this solution to your best friend or your boss?  Many times, panic is connected to emotional triggers, and we want to punish the offender rather than solve the problem. If the answer seems good just for you, but you would never suggest it to your best friend, it’s most likely the lizard.

Of course there are times when you are in immediate danger. And yes, there are people who don’t like you and may want to work out their anger to their benefit and you happen to cross their sight, so you get pulled into the mix. But most of our messes are caused by repeating our old stories and keeping them in place because we are comfortable with them. Knowing what is dangerous and what is fear and anger based and treating it differently will make life a lot calmer.

Running From Fear

"The path to the moon" acrylic paint, ink, cut paper on paper © Quinn McDonald

Some years ago, I worked for a small company that did good work. It hit a rough patch, and the president decided that we all had to help the company save money. We had to be frugal with office supplies, print on both sides of a page, turn off lights when we weren’t in our offices. I spent a lot of time scouring the hallways looking for dropped paperclips. Probably enough time to cut into the time I could have been working productively. I saved the company about $0.75  on paper clips that quarter, in several hours of looking for old ones.

The cutbacks became serious. We had some benefits cut. And eventually, the company stopped paying its contractors on time. The time went from 30 days to 45, to 60. I spoke to the president.
“We have to pay the people who contribute to customer satisfaction, to bringing new clients into the company.” The president looked at me as if I were a simple child.
“We have to save money to make the company last long enough to get out of the problem.”
“We can’t save our way out of a growth problem,” I suggested. “Pay the people who are keeping us competitive, they are keeping us alive.” It was useless. The president believed that not spending would save us. It did not. You can imagine the rest of the story. It was an inevitable downward spiral.

Finding your purpose in life and finding satisfaction follows the same standards. We listen to our fears, giving more value to our biggest fears. We avoid the work that would bring us success, we run from the decisions that demand us to face down fears. We think of it in terms of “being safe,” or “avoiding risk.” That’s the same mistake the company president made. The company couldn’t save its way out of a growth problem, we can’t get satisfaction, joy and energy in our lives by avoiding fear. We reach satisfaction in our life, we realize the purpose of our life by facing fear, and making choices that free us, not those that avoid fear. When we act with courage, face our fears, refuse to quit just because it’s hard, that’s when we can see the purpose in life. Running away from fear is not the path to your destiny. Staying on the path to your destiny with determination and courage will bring you light and clarity.

–Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach and life coach. She is writing a book for people who are afraid.