Take Back Your Life!

Perhaps this has happened to you. There’s someone you want to call but you feel nervous about it because you either have something to tell this person you think s/he may not want to hear or you’re harboring some negative feelings.

The best solution is to take out a piece of paper and write down 5-10 things you love about this person. Before you call reread the list until you feel nothing but love or warm feelings toward the person you need to call.

This will make all the difference in your own attitude when you call. It will make it easier for you to ask questions so you understand where this person is coming from. Let’s face it everyone is coming from somewhere and it helps if you know where that is. Then you can tell them where you’re coming from.

Makes it easier to find a footpath you can both walk along together.

I used to complain about all sorts of things in my 20’s and early 30’s. My boyfriends, my jobs, my thighs, my roommates. Ugh. It never ended and I never got anywhere. The real problem with complaining is that without a solution, it keeps the complainer in a state of powerlessness & intertia. Yes, there’s a certain kind of camaraderie when you have a complaint-fest, but it’s not particularly healthy to cross complain.

Try taking your complaint and turn it 1) into a positive and 2) into an action to step to alleviate it. For example,

My roommate never buys toilet paper.

I get to buy the kind of toilet paper I like: 2-ply and soft.

I’m going to ask my roommate to buy some toilet paper.

Try this for all your complaints and see if you feel more empowered to take action.

I’m 3/4’s of the way through a writing class. It’s called The Art of Storytelling. Useful class for writers, storytellers, screen writers and even business owners who give talks. You’ll hold the attention of any audience if you can learn to tell a compelling story — a story where the central character changes in some way. This could a story you’re writing about a fictitious character or a story you’re telling about how one of your business clients benefited from your program.

It’s called the transformation. Without a transformation, your story will fall flat. No one will care. That’s a big problem with a lot of talks – the speaker leaves out the transformation. The audience has no idea how you can help them get from emotional point A to emotional point B.

I started a twitter on trees and thought I’d finish it here on my blog.

Loved trees from the moment I was old enough to climb them. Every day I climbed high into the tall pines in my yard. If I couldn’t read the branches I got my father’s step ladder or asked my father to nail a few steps into the barks of my favorites. (Now, I realize that wasn’t good for the trees…)

I had no fear of falling. It never entered my mind that I could tumble down & be hurt. My mother never mentioned it. She just encouraged me to play out side. In fact, she forced us to go outside for at least a few hours each day.

I set my sights on a branch I’d like to sit on and slowly made my way up the tree zigging and zagging from branch to branch. Then I sat on the limb and looked down over my pine needle kingdom.

To this day, I get upset if someone cuts down a healthy tree for an unhealthy reason.

Hello kind readers,

Never thought I’d write about something like this, thought I’d keep it close to the family vest, but decided to share with you. My stepbrother Stuart died in a highway car crash yesterday. He was a really good guy and I will miss seeing him at extended family gatherings. Really easy to talk to. What you saw was what you got. No pretention ever. Although he wasn’t my biological brother I considered him my brother.

Yesterday everything in my life felt good. Today, it’s still good, but there is sadness for Stuart. I hope that he’s found peace on the other side, wherever we go.

For me, it feels like there is one less person on my side. Have you ever  felt that way after the death of a family member or a friend?

Thank you for listening

G.

Put together my first essay writing life shop: Secrets of Personal Essay Writing. Been taking classes myself for years, been published in some good publications, been thinking about doing this for awhile.

So, now it’s done.

At first I resisted writing essays until a friend described them as “conversations” with a friend. The best ones read and sound like an intimate talk, the kind where you reveal yourself, like you do with a good friend.

Holding back, being afraid of revealing yourself makes it impossible to write something worth reading. I like to get things off my chest, because if you keep them on your chest they weigh you down like a concrete block. Your soul just keeps sinking to the bottom of whatever your wallowing in.

What can you reveal today?

In honor of women all over the world fighting for their rights, I’ve resurrected something I wrote several years ago. Hope it inspires you in some way …

I enjoy writing because it forces me to reveal my vulnerable side not only to the reader, but also to myself. Back in my late teens and twenties, I often felt trapped behind a locked emotional door. I’d bang, bang, bang on that little window pane hoping somebody, anybody would unlock it, but no one ever did. Knuckles bruised and bleeding, I’d slump down and wonder, “Is anyone ever going to rescue me?”

Many life experiences later, I discovered that the only person powerful enough to rescue me from behind that door was Giulietta. That I have always been the heroine of my own life.

And so have you.

You see, the “theys” don’t want us to know that each one of us has a pair of ruby slippers tucked away in a locked room. Special designer shoes capable of transforming our tentative girlanistas into confident, powerful heroines who can leap tall solar-powered shopping carts in a single glass pump bound. The “theys” prefer we shuffle around with our heads down waiting to be rescued by a bouquet, a mate, a job title, a compliment, a new hair color.

Ladies, what do you say we unlock that room, put on our personal ruby slippers and do something heroic today? Maybe sign up for that course you’ve been circling in the continuing ed catalog for the past three years or get all fired up and pen that “letter to the editor” about a better way to run “fill-in-the-blank” or go down to your local animal shelter and show some timid feral cats a little love?

Muse thx

Giulietta
(click, click, click)

The best thing about the 30 day power blog challenge is that I’m writing something every day. At first I thought it might be hard, but it’s actually proved to be the opposite. There’s plenty to write about and the constant practice makes the words flow more quickly.

Last week I bought a beautiful card – almost like my Giulietta The Muse colors except it had an overlay of gold swirls and whirls. All it said on the front of the card? BEGIN.

I bought the card for its beauty and also its message. So many times I just didn’t begin. Yet that’s the key to getting the most meaningful mileage out of your life — begin. Get going. Take a baby step. Circle something. Make an informational call. Sign up. Show up.

What can you begin today?

Back in the posting saddle. Went to NYC/Brooklyn to celebrate my birthday and check a few things off my bucket list. Finally rode (survived?) The Cyclone at Coney Island. Glad I didn’t know what was coming.

Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

Hadn’t read up on it, so I got into a roller coaster car and began the chug up to the top not really knowing (or remembering from Space Mountain) what was coming.

That 85 foot drop sure woke me up.

Nothing like feeling you’re doing a freefall with nothing but a padded bar keeping you from being hurtled into the stratosphere.

Top speeds: 60 mph. And it felt like it.

The Cyclone’s been around since 1927. It looks it. It feels like it.

Scary as hell. No make that way scarier than hell. But what a sense of accomplishment when you get off.

Felt brave. Make that real brave.

Hello!

I know that a lot of bloggers write longs posts. You won’t find that here. I enjoy reading shorter posts so I can take it all in. When I’m faced with a long blog post, I read some of it, skip to the end and maybe go back and read another few sentences. It overwhelms me. I wonder how many people really read long, long posts in one setting.

Have you read “Small is Beautiful?” Written in 1989ish, it warned back then about the Earth’s dwindling resources. In the intervening years, everything got bigger, way bigger — houses, cars, monthly budgets, waistlines, egos.

Why not small? Why not manageable? Why not bite size posts to one’s blog?