Chasing Clients

You own the business, you have to have clients. Find them, nurture them, and sometimes humor them. But there are also roads I won’t take for the sake of my coaching clients. This week, I’ve had some specific questions, some of them twice. So it’s time to review the underlying ideas to my coaching set up.

llustration from “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint Exupery

1. Coaching is done over the phone or Skype. I won’t go to your house, have you come to mine, or meet you half way. The reasoning behind this is simple: I was trained to coach over the phone. To listen. To not be distracted by facial expressions, which often are done to mask real emotions. I also take notes and people often get distracted by that. “What are you writing down?” “Can I see your notes?” And the conversation shifts from you to note-taking.

2. No in-person coaching means financial savings for you. If I have to drive to meet you, be there early, coach, then drive home, I’m going to have to charge you for that time. One of my goals for coaching has always been to keep the price of sessions reasonable. Once I start driving, that can’t happen anymore. And frankly, a lot of my coaching is international. And the commute’s really boring.

3. You will phone me for the appointment. When you phone me, I know you are ready, that you have put aside time to pay attention. That your heart is fully in it. If I phone you, you will still be eating, won’t have thought about the session, or ask me to phone back “in a few minutes.” I know, this used to happen.

4. Ask and sign up on your own. I won’t coach your friend, your spouse, or your child because you want me to. Unless the client talks to me directly, coaching is not a good idea. Coaching isn’t a spa day. It’s a soul-deep, life-changing experience. And you can’t make someone else have that.

Having these rules in place creates an amazing combination of heart-and-soul concentration and results. I don’t want to coach people who are lukewarm, vague or not really interested. I want to dig in with people who are aware, alive, and stuck. Who have hit a wall, can’t find their way around an obstacle, or can’t find what they know is there. People who want to work hard to build what they have always wanted. For those people, I will pay full attention, give you all my power and charge up your life. I think it’s smart to have the rules; you will, too.

Read more about coaching with Quinn.

—-Quinn McDonald is a certified creativity coach.

 

I’ll Ride With You

While the hostages were still being held in Sydney and all that was known was that the hostage-taker was Muslim, Central Sydney was in lockdown. And then, as must happen, innocent and good Muslims began to be afraid. Women who wear the hijab wondered what would happen if they rode on public transportation.

I’ve seen this before, right after 9/11, in Washington, D.C. I also know the fear of seeing some crime committed and cringing, holding by breath and thinking, “please don’t let it be [my ethnic group].”

Fear is an ugly thing. Its only reaction is anger. But what I began to see in Sydney gave me real hope for the goodness in people. Tweets began to appear, people volunteering to sit with Muslim women (and men) on public transportation.

People who would provide friendly company and companionship, and yes, protection. Because a White person sitting next to a person of color (or wearing a headscarf) and speaking with them reduces the fear level.

The Tweets grew. The hashtag was #Illridewithyou. Hundreds of people began to post their public transportation routes, to identify themselves with photos, scarves, signs on bags and briefcases.

This was not a sanctioned, public, government movement. It was started by one woman and picked up by others who wanted to help. Because help is something everyone can do. Not a big heroic move, just sitting with someone who is scared. Making them feel normal. Because they are. Reducing fear and anger in others.

We can all do small things to reduce fear and anger. Not passing fear on is one way. Margaret Mead, the anthropologist said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

I might be 7,800 miles from that coffee shop that held hostages, but I love those people I don’t even know. They have heart. Big heart. #I’llridewithyou.

—Quinn McDonald knows that it takes small acts of love to make big moves of courage.

Possibility Starts Now

Peter Callesan is a paper artist who cuts images out of paper and uses both the positive and negative space. CreativeGreed has a series of his work. You can also see different sculptures at Peter Callesan’s website.

Paper art by Peter Callesan

His sense of humor combined with his talent turns ordinary  A4 sheets of paper into clever art.

We all know the commentors on this blog are smart, sharp and verbal. So are my coaching clients. Last week, one of my clients was talking about changing her approach to creativity. She’s done some wrestling with her Inner Critic over the past few weeks. “I want to get back to possibility,” she said.

And just like that, I knew it was a brilliant. We wake up in the morning and start thinking what we are not and what we don’t have–“I’m still tired, I didn’t get enough sleep,” or “I’m late,” or “I don’t have time for breakfast,” or  “It’s not Friday, and I hate work.” Imagine if we woke up and got back to possibility.

“It’s a new day, and I wonder what will happen today?” or “If I don’t check my email, I can get to work on time and avoid the stink eye. That would be nice!” The place of possibility is right under the wet blanket we toss on the smouldering resentment of our lives. You don’t have to fear the place of possibility–it doesn’t obligate you. It just has. . . a fresh possibility.

–-Quinn McDonald thinks possibility is almost as good as a cappuccino first thing in the morning.

Life Tetris

My first computer game was Tetris. My first computer-game skill was to find the sound button and turn it off. I’m not good at spacial relationships, and I was very bad at Tetris. Eventually I outgrew it.

If you have never played Tetris, it is a game in which differently-shaped two-dimensional objects drop down a screen, and you have to fit them together to complete full rows of squares.

Last week, I put it back on my iPad. The paid version. Because I kept thinking I needed it. As I gain skill, no, umm,  practice, waste time with this game, I am getting better. Much faster. What happened?

Two things. In the version I have, you can slow down the time it takes for the tiles to drop. I got familiar with both the shape itself and the negative space that it fills.

The second thing was learning patience. You have to fill in the row completely with whatever shape you get. The more holes you think you’ll get to later, the faster you lose.

I’m now up to a much faster speed, and working quickly.

So why in the world am I going on and on about Tetris? Because I suddenly saw the metaphor in the game:

1. To get better at anything, you need to practice. A lot. Even if people tell you it’s a waste of time.

2. Another word for “practice” is “shaping a habit.” And good habits are good to form. Good habits make life easier.

3. Start slowly–so slowly you feel like an idiot. You learn a lot from going slowly. You have time to observe and learn. You can speed up when you have the hang of the big picture.

4. Be ready to jettison your assumptions. That’s really hard. But when we look at the world expecting certain things, we generally find them. When we approach the world with an open mind, allowing the experience to form new ideas, we begin to see opportunities that we did not see before. Example: There are two Tetris pieces that are mirror images of each other. This confuses me. Every time. I keep putting them in the wrong-shaped space and then

• noticing it doesn’t fit
• then panicking
• then not paying attention
• then losing the game.

To fix this, I decided to try a new way of seeing the board–not by shape, but by color. At first it was confusing, then it got a lot easier. Had I simply berated myself for not being good at spacial relationships, I would have stayed stuck. By working with color, something I understand better, I advanced my skill.

Yes, computer games are time-wasters. But they also have some great metaphors buried in them. And you know how much I love a good metaphor.

—Quinn McDonald is thinking about Tetris synethesia and smiling.

Avoiding Shame

Embarrassment is knowing you screwed up and wishing it had worked out better.

Shame is hating yourself for being who you are.

One way a community–work, friends, even relatives–reacts to you if you show courage, initiate change, stick to your writing or art, start over, is to shame you.

What? Right when you thought you were getting a crown? Yes, that’s the best time to apply shame. Just when you are ready to step up on the podium and reach for the crown. Slap! No crown. Instead, shame. Shame’s purpose is to get you to sit down, lie down, and shut up.

How can you avoid shame?  The easy way is to lie down and be quiet. Being quiet will not get you praise, but others will walk over you and not kick you. Probably. But being quiet is very hard when you have tasted the joy of working on your creative project for your own satisfaction.

The other way to avoid shame is to refuse to accept it. No one can shame you if you don’t accept the baggy sweatshirt with the big S on it and pull it over your head. Yes, this is a very hard idea. Yes, it is a tough reality. You can take the blame for making a mistake, for not hitting the deadline, for not winning the competition, but that’s blame. Shame is another matter.

Courage is continuing your creative work when you aren’t sure what the outcome will be, but the work is invigorating and meaningful, and you are doing it.

Some tips about shame:

1. If your tribe (audience, friends) try to shame you, they are the wrong group for you. Others cannot choose what is important to you. It works the other way around: you choose what is important to you and attract those for whom it is also important.

2. Be careful about thinking you need a mentor. A mentor is not going to discover you, change your life, or make other people respect you. That’s your job. A mentor may act like a tutor–help you figure out what you need, discover where you can get what you need.

3. There is no secret to success. You show up, work hard. You will fail, you will make mistakes, you will have luck, you will be brilliant, you will make progress and then backslide,  all on your way to success. But there is no secret, no one private word that you have to know.

4. It’s hard to be brave. It’s hard to be brave when you are heavily rewarded for shutting your eyes and doing what you are told. Brave is the opposite of shame. Be brave. That’s who you are.

––Quinn McDonald is refusing the baggy sweatshirt of shame.

Retirement? Maybe Not Ever

We were all waiting for our dinners to arrive, when the young couple sharing the restaurant table asked us about the blue wristbands. We’d been at the Desert Botanical Garden’s Las Noches de las Luminarias, which is a beautiful holiday experience. They were both civil engineers planning on driving across the desert tonight to be in Los Angeles tomorrow.

“Are you guys still working?” they asked anxiously. When I confirmed that we were, and that we both owned businesses and weren’t planning on retiring, we got “the look.” After all, a lot of people move to Phoenix to retire. So why aren’t we retired? Retirement is the reward you get after hating your job for 30 years. How horribly sad that thought is.

Many of my friends are taking early retirement. Tired of the work world and

Mural of birds on a wall in downtown Phoenix.

filled with a desire to travel, garden, or enjoy their houses, they are bailing out of the rat race, because, they tell me, the rats are winning.

For the first month, retirement is bliss. Often, though, the dreams about retirement begin to thin out. It’s hard to live without a regular income. Most of my friends aren’t wealthy, and the lack of a regular paycheck can’t easily be replaced by penny pinching.

For the retirees who are wealthy, there is often a vacuum created by a lack of identity. We are our jobs after a while. It’s how we think of ourselves. It’s what we do most of our waking hours. And often, it’s what we ignore our families for.

When your hobby, which was fit into stolen moments, suddenly has to bear the burden of making you feel worthwhile, it can’t hold up its side of the bargain to amuse, entertain, and keep you busy.

At that point, retirement doesn’t look like the promise you’ve pursued all your working life.

I love what I do, and because I do several things–develop training courses, teach those courses, coach creative souls (and those who think they aren’t), and write—I don’t get bored. Work is fascinating because I’m endlessly curious and problem solving is a major part of my work.

Retire? Not me. Working, learning, exploring all fascinate me. I don’t have to work crossword puzzles as long as I’m figuring out how to solve a training problem for one client, researching an article I’m writing, and figuring out what to ask a client who wants to transition into retirement. And I like the boss.

––Quinn McDonald helps people figure out how to change their lives, in retirement, or in the middle of their careers. She did, and will live longer for it.

 

Postcard Swap

The postcard swap iHanna is running is in full swing! I got my postcard list today, and I’m ready to go. Here are the postcards I made, grouped by color or subject.

I made two predominantly red postcards. Red is way out of my comfort zone for me, I own no clothing or shoes in red. So I had to try it. Watercolor and pen.

Then I made three pears, also in watercolor and when I got tired of pears, I resorted to a horned toad, because one of the names I got was in Switzerland and they probably haven’t seen one of those.

Finally, I did a words-and-image with feathers and, of course, to complete the group, a bird. All of them are watercolors–the Brusho dye colors I wrote about earlier. I’m loving this medium for its unpredictability. Hope they travel well!

If you’ve counted, you’ll see there are nine and 10 are needed for the swap. I have another pear and another feather, but there was going to be too much of a good thing. Can’t wait to see the other postcards! (You can get a sneak peek here).

—Quinn McDonald loves a good postcard swap.

Healing the World, One Star at a Time

Over the table in my studio hangs a hand-lettered sign. Sometimes it hangs up there for a day, sometimes for a month. It’s not an affirmation, it’s a question. It helps me think while I work. My studio is my Place Without Noise–no music, no TV, just silence. The question right over my head is sort of  mental chewing gum.

The most recent question is “How Will You Heal the World?” No doubt the world needs healing–Ferguson, Missouri is just one town in a big country with its share of injustice, unfairness, and social imbalance. My own state, just 100 years into statehood, wants to shut down its borders and pretend that Arizona was not part of Mexico or that native tribes did not have a different idea of land ownership.

There is no shortage of damage in the world–in every town, city, country.  Isn’t is ridiculous to think I can help? Me, with no skills in sociology or law?

My mind was a smooth blank as I pulled a piece of paper toward me to cut into shapes for a collage. The paper was a map of the night sky, and there, on one side, was Orion. The hunter himself didn’t have an auspicious, happy beginning among the gods. Orion was born from an ox-skin that various male gods had urinated in. He was blinded by his father-in-law, revived by the goddess Artemis, and then angered the Earth goddess Gaia, who sent a scorpion to kill him. Gaia then placed both Artemis and Orion in the sky as a warning to others not to harm the earth.

Not much healing there, and I don’t want to think about our punishment for all the plastic bottles we put in Gaia’s earth, either.

What I did notice was Orion’s sword. You can see a pinkish star in the knife at his waist. That’s not really a star, it is a whole nebula–an incubator for new stars. The young, forming stars are hot, and heat up the gas around them, causing it to fluoresce–so what we are seeing as a star is a cloud of gas and tiny hot stars 1,500 light-years away.

Maybe a small kindness, a prayer offered when someone asks for one, a small, unexpected generous act, maybe all that is the equivalent of a tiny hot star that helps light up the nebula. Without the star, and others like it, there would be no fluorescing nebula, no sword in Orion’s belt. And of course, if you are a star in a nebula, you don’t see all of Orion. You see something else when you look into the universe–dark sky with distance points of lights.

As my hands smooth over the paper, looking for a spot to cut into the paper, I wonder if the way you heal the world is one tiny, glowing act at a time. They add up over time, and eventually you have a constellation of healing put into the sky as a lesson to everyone else to help out, too.

Here is an excellent article about 12 actions anyone can take to reduce injustice.

–Quinn McDonald is a writer, creativity coach and artist who thinks art heals by scattering stars into the sky, one at a time.

Postcards with Brushos

Once you join up with iHanna’s postcard swap, everything becomes postcard fodder. So when my Brosho paint showed up today, I was off to make postcards.

Never heard of Brusho? Neither had I, until Glenda Waterworth, the genius behind Chocolate Baroque told me about it. Brushos are watercolors–in crystal powder form.

They arrived from Dick Blick in little cardboard containers, ready for you to punch a hole in the top with a ballpoint pen. (If you are a book artist, you’ll have an awl to use).

I’m a completely untrained watercolor artist experimenter, so I didn’t bother to see what others had done with these powder paints. All I knew was that they are non-toxic and that kids in the UK and Europe use them like American kids do fingerpaints. How could I not love them?

Brushos are intensely colored, a little goes a long way. They come in bright, saturated colors in both sets and in 15-gram containers.

Trying to paint a pear seemed like a good beginning. Brushos don’t require a lot of equipment. I pulled together

• watercolor postcards
• spray bottle of water
• pencil
• Pitt pen (size S)
• small water container
• fine watercolor brush, not an expensive one
• Yogurt container lid as palette
• papertowels
• Deli paper (parchment will do)

I started by sketching a pear on a postcard with pencil, then using sketchy light technique to draw the pear in Pitt pen. I didn’t draw it in smoothly and completely to keep the pear from looking like a cartoon pear.

Highlights are added with a wax resist crayon. You can use beeswax or a candle, too. Journey (Peg) Cole introduced me to these, and I think of her every time I see the black and white harlequin pattern on the crayon.

Then sprinkle (lightly) the crystals in the color you want. I chose yellow and purple first.  You can move it with a brush, or just leave it to chance.

Protect part of the postcard with your hand, and spray the rest with water. Start small and see what happens. I overdid the purple, so I simply blotted with a paper towel.

Apologies to watercolor artists who think blotting is a travesty. I wanted to lift up the color, and it worked.

Having decided on purple and yellow, I added the darker colors on the other side of the pear, shielding the side that had color on it already. I sprinkled some brown in the lower left hand corner and spritzed a bit of water to create a shadow. Using the watercolor brush dipped in water, do some careful blending and add shadows.

It’s important to let the card dry before you add any more powder. You can layer effectively if you let the card dry between applications.

This is another card I completed. Not all of them worked out, but I’m experimenting and having fund.

Here are four more experiments. On the bottom right one, I used tape to hold the card flat and give it a tidy edge. I flooded the card with water and dropped the crystals from a brush. This created a sort of instant wash. It didn’t turn out blue-ribbon quality (more likely horrible mention), but again, I’m experimenting. Note the edge of the pear in purple and green. I mixed the Brusho crystals with water and used it as paint when the postcard was dry.

If you want to see someone who is fluent in Brusho paints, check out the work of Joanne Boon Thomas. Now she is an expert in these and her images are wonderful. The image below is an example of her work.

Brusho work © by Joanne Boon Thomas.

See what practice will do?

—Quinn McDonald is a writer having fun with watercolors.

Not Hanging On So Hard

An article in The New York Times reports, “Most girls won’t admit this, but they’d rather you hit on their significant other than their best friend.” (New York Times, ST-2, October 26, 2014).  The article says the advice columnist Julie Klam says  (via the magazine Dame) “When she introduces two friends to each other who she thinks will bond, she says, ‘Now, you may not go off and be friends without me.’ And they laugh . . . and I say, ‘I’m not kidding. No shoppng trips or going out for a drink after work.'”

I read the story twice without believing it. And then I did. Of course, this is fear-based thinking, which is driven by control. And if we lose control of our friends, no telling what will happen. We might be alone. Someone might have a better time than we are. Control is not the best foundation for friendship.

Friends come and go. Some last many years, some a few weeks. Friends are not obligated to check in with anyone to make sure they get approval of their lunch companions.

We don’t own our friends anymore than we own the trees in our yard. And that’s a great way to think of our friendship–like trees. Trees protect us from too much heat, and they require some care to thrive. They put down roots and allow us to stand on them to see the future. Trees change, and require work. So do friends. But we don’t own people anymore than we own the trees that other people see, enjoy and share the shade of.

Patrol your friends and you’ll spend your whole life watching for infractions, keeping spreadsheets on time spent and what it means. Friends don’t thrive all that well with rules, time-enforcing and feelings of ownership. They do better with understanding and introductions to other people in your life. Of course we all need to set boundaries, but a good friend will help you and understand you.

And that sounds like thriving all the way around.

—Quinn McDonald loves the trees in her yard as well as her friends, who have lots of other friends she doesn’t know. And that’s fine with her.