One of my good friends is a poetry evangelist so I’ve really gotten into poetry in the last few years. Attended a lot of open mic poetry events, took a poetry class and make it a point to read a least two new poems a week. Yesterday, I stumbled on the fantastic Now I Become Myself by May Sarton. For those of you unfamiliar with it, let me share the first four lines:

Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,

The line “worn other people’s faces” stopped me in my dare-to-live-your-own-life tracks. I experienced a lot of difficulty fitting into the prevailing one-size-fits-all lifestyle because I didn’t feel comfortable wearing other folks’ faces. This ran counter to what societal elders had promised, “Put on these faces. They will make your life easier.”  No matter how many times I covered my true face with a borrowed face, I never quite adjusted to the rigidity of the mask. Here are a few I wore with painful results:

The shopaholic face: buy tons of stuff you don’t need to make yourself feel better about living a meaningless life.

The martyr roommate face: never tell your roommate that s/he does things that bother you. Instead, spend thousands of dollars on therapy because you drove yourself crazy suppressing the anger.

The don’t stand up for yourself girlfriend face: let your boyfriend walk all over you because you’re afraid he’ll leave if you ask him to stop. (hard learned lesson: he’s more likely to leave if you don’t say anything.)

The be a “yes” woman employee face: similar to the girlfriend face — do everything your boss tells you to do, even if it’s counter-productive, because you’re afraid of being fired.

The I can’t do anything about the world’s problems face: spend most of your non-work time watching brain-numbing sitcoms instead of participating in your local community where you absolutely can make a difference.

The life’s a bitch and then you die face: Complain to anyone who’ll listen about your awful life instead of permanently ripping off generic, cop-out faces and living the life YOU want to live.

Fortunately, I hoarded all the bits and pieces of emotional strength the Universe sent whizzing my way. When I’d gathered enough, I collected the pile of counterfeit faces and heaved them into the dumpster.

The time had come to wear my own face — full time!

It felt good. It felt right. It felt powerful.

How about you? Did you ever wear someone’s face, even for a short time? Got a name for it? Would love to hear your experiences with phony face-wearing.

Muse thx, Giulietta

I often visit other blog sites for inspiration. I never know what gem I’m going to find. A few weeks ago, I stopped by the fabulous Expressive Hart blog. Ms. Hart’s teaching an e-course called Necessary Fire based on an idea she read in a book called Traveling with Pomegranates (by Sue Monk Kidd and Anne Kidd Taylor.) A mother and daughter travel to Greece and France together, where they discover new truths about themselves.

My husband’s Greek-American and way before I met him I had a wild and crazy time in Greece, so the Greek connection intrigued me enough to order the book. Honestly, I couldn’t put TWP down. Towards the end I stumbled on a paragraph I knew would make a great blog post. Letta, their travel guide says, “People do not come to Greece to rest. They come to gain their days.” Then a paragraph later, Anne, one of the authors, says, “I don’t want to miss out on what the Greeks call Zoe. Life. I want to live all of the whole glorious hazard.”

I fell in love with those lines. Yes, life has hazards. That’s what makes it an adventure to be cherished. I can only speak for myself here, but it’s the hazards I’ve encountered that gave my life texture and meaning. (Ironically, an unexpected hazard happened in Greece. The friend I went to visit had to leave the country the day after I got there when something unexpected came up. I faced three weeks wandering around Greece alone — it forced me to get outgoing pretty quick) Life hazard points gave me opportunities to be “all I could be and then some.”  For the longest time, the blinders I’d been wearing made it impossible to see that hazards were opportunities to start living. Once I tore off the blinders and embraced the hazards, I came alive!

(They’ve got to stop handing out blinders in childhood. Deadly practice.)

Talk again soon …

Muse thx,

Giulietta

I read somewhere that people feel there aren’t any real heroes any more. I don’t agree.

About two years ago, I went to the wake of an elderly relative. The man’s son-in-law gave one of the most beautiful unscripted speeches I’ve ever heard. He told us that his father-in-law had been an “everyday” hero to him because of his devotion to his family. It changed forever my own definition of a hero.

Before that wake, I thought a hero had to be someone who ran into a burning building or something else extraordinary. I know that a lot of folks look up to sports figures as hero’s for breaking records or to billionaire’s for making tons of money.

Now I believe that a hero can be the person next door who takes care of his or her ailing parent or the person who reaches out to someone in need with a kind word. It can be you or me. We can all be heroes and heroines.

My husband is my everyday hero. He can fix anything that goes wrong in this old home of ours, from electrical to internet to plumbing. He keeps this place running and from the enthusiasm he does it with, I can see that it’s one of those labors of love people talk about. Thanks Jimmy!

Who are the everyday hero’s in your life? I’d love to know!

Muse thx, Giulietta

It seems like we’re constantly being told to fix this or fix that about our relationships, our personalities, and our businesses. E-newsletters ask me if I’m procrastinating, if I’m afraid to sell, if I playing small, if I’m holding back, etc.

Maybe it makes more sense to concentrate on what’s really working in our lives and continue to do more of whatever that is. Expanding our greatest strengths forms the core of the burgeoning strengths movement. To keep this movement going, we’ll need to wean ourselves off of measuring everything in our lives to “see how we’re doing” or “how we compare to others.”

The problem with most metrics is that they keep you focused on the negative. Based on the results (often seemingly arbitrary), your boss, your teacher, your doctor or some other person of supposed authority in your life directs you to shore up your alleged weaknesses.

I say alleged because our society tends to fixate on weaknesses. I don’t believe in trying to fix weaknesses. Instead, I prefer to encourage and grow a person’s natural interests and inclinations. It’s pretty futile to force someone to get “good” at something they don’t care for.

Take math. I never liked math. It didn’t interest me. I wasn’t “good” at it. Yet, I spent a lot of time taking all kinds of math classes thinking I needed to be good in math. I even got a job that required me to do quite a bit of math. It started to eat me up alive because I didn’t want to do it.

Looking in life’s rear view mirror I can see now that the time I spent taking math classes kept me from taking more English classes and writing classes or just plain writing.

I loved writing and ended up doing math. Now that I’ve been back writing for about ten years, I feel like I’m where I want to be, where I was meant to be, where I got detoured from.

Our visits to Earth seem increasingly short to me, why not spend most of your precious time on this beautiful planet doing what you enjoy.

I’d love to hear what’s working in your life. What do you want more of in your life?

Muse thx,

Giulietta

I wish for you to see your life not as a chore or something to get through, but rather as an Alice In Wonderland type of adventure.

Will you wake up and feel like you fell down a rabbit hole? Yes. Will strange things happen to you? Yes. Will you meet strange people? Yes. Will you be strange? Yes. Will any of it make sense? Probably not.

Yet, that’s the real beauty of our precious lives. They are not meant to be controlled, to be figured out, to be made 100% safe. They are meant to be wild and crazy journeys where anything can happen because it’s all unscripted.

Forget following other people’s scripts. They have no right to tell you how to live your journey at the bottom of the rabbit hole because there is no right, there is only what is. Remember these folks don’t know any more than you do. It’s all posturing. You know more about you and your life than anyone. Please don’t forget that when they bust into your life screaming and madly waiving their script, accusing you of not following it!

I can almost guarantee that if you start to look at your life as an adventure that you own, you will wake up every morning feeling braver and more powerful!

Muse thx,

Giulietta

I work with a lot of people who want to start a business, make a life change or take up a new creative pursuit. The greatest obstacle they face?

Themselves.

Yup! The hardest person to convince of your worthiness is you. Until you believe a) you can do it and b) you have a right to do it, not much will happen.

I’ve said this before on this blog and I’ll say it again, our society does a terrible job growing people who believe in themselves. We all come into the world feeling “pumped.” By Junior High, you can already see a lot of shut down pumps.

Yeah, people run around getting all excited about collecting careers and titles and credentials. Why? Because we’ve been told those external “things” will make us worthy to others. So, you spend your life jumping through hoops to scavenge all the things on your societal worthiness list. In middle age, you proudly hold up your list for the world to see.

Yet, you may not feel good. In fact, you may feel worse than when you started the list pre-junior high.

Why?

Because it’s a wild human-goose chase. If we “grow” people who believe in themselves, they will follow their own hearts and create their own lists.

I’ve got my custom-designed list. Have you got yours?

Muse thx,

Giulietta

Starting off 2010 with a big dream sounds good to me. This year I’m going to explore and promote “lifeness.” I define “lifeness” as being one self, a seamless merging of the play self and the business self and the classroom self. Why we’ve been taught to put on a different face for work or school makes no sense to me. All it does is promote human misery and unsavory methods to self-anesthetize from the emotional pain it invariably causes.

Being who we are is our natural state or we wouldn’t be born into natural lifeness.

The best way for me to be myself and for you to be yourself is to stop buying into the ridiculous myth that we need to divide and conquer our own personalities to be “successful.” So, I’m supposed to work with and be impressed with the phony you? Conversely, you are supposed to work with and be impressed with the phony me?

Complete garbage!

Here’s to achieving lifeness …

Muse thx,

Giulietta

In 2010, I wish for folks to disobey more. That’s right.

• Stand up and be counted, even if you’re the only one doing so.
• Make a scene.
• Say, “no” to anything that goes against your values.
• Catch all the shoulds flying at you and dump them in the trash can.
• Stop going along with programs you don’t believe in.
• Start being the change you want to see in the world.

People love to use, “I can’t make a difference” as an excuse for not standing up for what they really believe. That’s a big fat lie. You can make a difference – in your own life, in your neighborhood, in your country. The real question becomes, “Do you want to make a difference?”

If your life has no spark, if you feel like a dead-zone inside, if you complain about your situation, if you feel taken advantage of, if you keep asking yourself, “is this all there is to life?” chances are good you’re still that obedient little boy or girl who didn’t make your parents mad.

Perhaps, it’s time to …

Muse thx,

Giulietta

I’m designating today “Flaunt Your Flaws Day.” The intense societal pressure to be perfect can make you do crazy things. It can drive you over the edge of despair. It can make you second guess your every move.

Forget perfect. It’s not achievable or desirable.

I used to think I had to be perfect: say perfect things, look perfect, be in perfect shape, be a perfect employee, be a perfect wife, be a perfect friend, be a perfect daughter, be a perfect small business owner.

Not interested in being perfect anymore. I want to be me with my so called flaws. Flaws get a bad rap. We’re supposed to keep working on them until they disappear. Flaws are the flip side of your greatest strength. You can’t be great without a balancing flaw. To be flawless is to be mediocre, to be unreal, to be dull and boring, to never make anyone mad, to always go along with the program, to live in fear.

The late, great Paul Newman said, “If you don’t have enemies, you don’t have character.”

Society and its institutions try to remove people’s flaws. Yet, if you remove them, you remove what’s unique, different and compelling about a person.

Take me. My greatest strength? You can’t pull the wool over my eyes. I will investigate anything that doesn’t add up and take action. My greatest flaw? You can’t pull the wool over my eyes. I will annoy anyone who does not want the status quo challenged/changed, who does not want anyone to look under the floor boards or take action.

If you get rid of your greatest strength, then you will also get rid of your greatest flaw. For that reason, I say celebrate your flaws!

What strength/flaw can you celebrate? Or maybe you don’t agree. I’d like to hear it and so would my open-minded readers.

Muse thx,

Giulietta

Today’s question by Jamie Ridler: What would you like to embrace? Me, I’d like to take my innate ability to produce idea after idea and create more programs around it. People have always said to me, “You are a great brainstormer.” Despite knowing this in my own heart, I embarked on an occupational journey after college that did not connect with brainstorming. I listened to folks who said, “You can’t make money doing that.” I believed their small-time thinking.

It is only in the last 3 or 4 years that I’ve changed my own thinking enough to realize that, yes, I can make money doing things that come naturally to me, like writing inspirational essays, musing and finding greatness in others. Hey, maybe it’s the small-time thinking that’s all wrong.

The economic downturn presents a good example. So many problems to solve, so many innate gifts, yet we all walk around helplessly looking for others to create jobs that tend to be rigid and often soul-deadening. I wonder where we all learned to be helpless, to not follow our innate talents, to believe that the job categories out there represent what people really need to live fulfilling lives.

Any ideas how we became so helpless?

Muse thx, Giulietta

p.s., I know many of you live out of state. If you want to see where I’m going with combatting helplessness, check out Think Milky Way Big