As you may know, I’ve been working as a freelance communications consultant for the past year, while blogging about professional shifts and opportunities and my new appreciation for living a bit more organically.

One of my organic opportunities has been getting to know Gretchen DeVault, Eric Quigley, and Emily Butkus at DVQ Studio, a Grand Rapids-based brand and communications agency. After months of talking shop and partnering with them on a new project, I am excited to announce that I am officially joining their team!

A few ingredients have made this the right move:

A commitment to learning and sharing. I’ve started to believe the most telling question you can ask about a potential relationship is how (or whether) the other person or organization learns and shares that learning with others. They do not have to learn exactly like you do, but there is so much to be gained if you value learning in similar ways.

One of the first things Gretchen, Eric, and I discussed was an opportunity for non-profit organizations to learn more about their brands and new communications approaches. In one of the most fun and learning-friendly collaborations I’ve had the privilege to join, we’ve created and are now launching the Emerging Communications Series, a free six-part experience for local non-profits (still time to join us — registration deadline is July 24).

A genuine understanding of collaboration. I’m the fourth team member at DVQ Studio and the first non-designer. I wish I could really express how excited this makes me… too often, design is not fully recognized in strategy and designers are only viewed as implementers. DVQ is the right size and of the right mindset to value each communications discipline in an equitable and strategic way.

A focus on socially-driven organizations. We’ve talked a lot about focusing on non-profit organizations and small businesses that strive to be socially responsible. We believe the unique needs of mission-driven clients call for a special skill set, one that we’ve developed through our collective experiences as non-profit staff members, volunteers, and consultants. I’m eager to support the good work DVQ has already begun with many local non-profits and help them expand that work.

I’ll have more to share as this experience progresses. In the meantime, if you’re interested in communications insight and resources, please give DVQ a follow on Twitter. And if you’re connected to non-profits in West Michigan, we’d love to have your support in spreading the word about the Emerging Communications Series.

For the first time, I feel change and connections happening organically. I’m meeting people and talking about new ideas at a clip that I can almost feel but that I did not “push”.

The challenge with connections and ideas bubbling up like this is that too often, you notice it happening only through a passing glance or in complete retrospect, sometimes when it’s too late to take full advantage of an opportunity, or sometimes when it’s too early and you’re not ready to trust the potential.

In the past, this hasn’t set well with someone like me, who believes challenges should be anticipated, opportunities are everywhere, and personal expectations have to be high to be prepared. I’ve believed that a good plan is the only bridge from where I am now to those opportunities.

This was obvious in how I planned for this year. I said I wanted to have a more creative year. I shaped that goal into a stringent plan, believing the disconnect between my life and its creativity was a matter of structure. What I’ve learned is that my creativity was actually lacking space.

This year feels like it could be one of my most creative yet, despite having abandoned the rigorous system I established for myself, as well as my structured definition of creativity. I wanted to finish a book, write a lot of poetry, and be a creative writer. Instead, I’ve met a lot of new people, identified a lot of new opportunities, and discovered new questions to ask about myself and my community.

I didn’t wake up one morning and decide this would happen. I don’t know what clicked along the way that left me with this approach, but I can point to a few factors that must have been influential:

Space. Without a doubt, working on a mix of projects between my family businesses, consulting, and community groups has allowed me to explore opportunities freely. Time is my own currency now… my success is judged based on the results of my efforts rather than the number of hours invested (and when and where they were invested).

Experience. I’m starting to sense the difference experience makes, and now I want to reframe that word. The mistake we’ve made as it relates to experience is equating it to qualification. The power of my life and professional experiences is not that they make me more or less qualified… instead, they make me more steady and empathetic, help me gain exposure more easily to new people and networks, and in turn reduce some of the risk of living without a tight plan.

Trust. Planning is a great way to cover deficiencies in experience. You might plan more the first time you visit a city than the second time. This urgency to plan and anticipate is connected in some way to matters of trust. I didn’t trust my college advisor and her thoughts on my college journey, so I created a plan that showed her it’s possible to graduate in three years. Ok, impressive maybe. But it reinforced an unhealthy expectation/assumption: if you have a great plan, you’ll get to a great spot, and you’ll get there more efficiently than the next guy. Or, put another way, trust the plan more than the desired outcome.

This isn’t about regret, but it is about reflection. Regret undermines experience, which in turn would change where I am now. And I like where I’m at. Appreciating that one way of living (and planning) got me here helps me realize I’m in the midst of recreating that (or letting it recreate itself, I guess) to see where I land next.

As I’ve thought about this, I’ve mentioned it to some of my favorite older, wiser people locally. One person who essentially makes plans for a living told me she’s never had one for her life… I was probably unreasonably surprised by this. I’m really curious now about other people’s stories and their own process for planning or not planning, identifying new opportunities, etc. Especially as we lose some of the traditional structures for getting from point A to point B, will flexibility and space become the values, rather than structures, formulas, and plans?

Earlier this week I read “The price of saying no at work”, hoping to find practical suggestions for how to say no and still be successful. Instead I discovered the suggestion that for women, career ladders are revealed only for those who say yes and keep saying yes.

The women interviewed agree: you can say no at any time. If you don’t like the consequences of the ambitious “yes” life (which the women say include everything from forgetting birthdays to unleashing “untold brutality” on their marriages) you can opt out. But know that “ you will have narrowed the opportunities,” according to one woman.

Not only do I not agree with this kind of thinking, but if this is the approach older professional women take to career development, then I’m starting to understand why I have observed disconnects around mentoring.

Women’s history can be a guide for why this is happening. From the perspective of my generation: Our great-grandmothers could not vote for part of their lives, and our grandmothers could not work except within strict stereotypes. Our mothers were the first generation of women for which opportunity opened up. It still was not easy or freely given, but it was more than earlier generations had enjoyed. Our mothers’ civic influence was enhanced in the 1970s, their personal development was encouraged by measures like Title IX, their careers were fostered thanks to higher attendance in college (and the social understanding that they would or should have a career at all).

Many of the women who now run companies and mastered the career ladders the article refers to arrived on the professional scene at a time when women could finally attempt to have it all, yet they still had to do it all to make that possible. So it’s not surprising they feel they had to say yes to everything – was there really another option?

But I don’t think this approach is relevant anymore or healthy. Besides the personal turmoil the “yes” life can create, my generation has seen consequences that undermine the supposed rewards of this approach. We’re watching companies crumble, taking the assets and benefits promised to their longstanding employees down with them.

Based on these realities and other factors, I think young women in my generation tend to be more holistic when it comes to decision-making, priority-setting, and to assessing consequences of both. In general, I think  young professionals today are too entrepreneurial and open-minded to perceive “yes” and “no” opportunities. There is never truly a “narrowing” of opportunities. There is only a shifting of opportunities until we get to the life we want, and even the understanding of what we want may change over time.

And at least for me, that’s okay. I left a rewarding job with ample opportunity at a communications firm to work for my family business. I took a 50 percent cut in my pay to do it. Those yes-women would probably be ashamed of me and signed off on my career.

The problem was never the kind of work I was doing – it was how I was doing it and how it aligned with the life I wanted. So a year later, I’ve shifted again, working fewer hours at the family business and providing communications consulting to nonprofits. I’m financially consistent with where I was before despite working less, and I’m thinking of starting a business. These are not my most important indicators of success by any means, but they reassure me that I may have said no to one opportunity, but it was the most catalytic “no” decision I’ve ever made.

So I guess I’ll say what I expected the article to say:

• Knowing yourself well and identifying what you need to be personally happy and professionally fulfilled is a skill – develop it in that way. Self-knowledge will sharpen your intuition when decisions need to be made, and knowing your priorities will give you permission to say “no” when what seems like an opportunity is actually a misfit career or personal move.
• Identifying decision-making points and making intentional decisions is more important than whether your answer is yes or no. If you anticipate opportunities and evaluate them intentionally, you can’t make a bad decision. You can only make the decision that is best for you at that time.
• Our lives are more connected than we know, and our careers are more circular than we know. If you say no now, I believe there is still a chance that opportunity may return at a time when it is a better fit. What matters most are the relationships you keep. Opportunities don’t emerge from businesses or titles; they come from relationships and learning. Stay connected to those who relate to your career ambitions – chances are good they will be your conduits to knowledge or decisions affecting your career.

I believe in soul mates the way Anne of Green Gables swoons over “kindred spirits”. There are some people you meet who seem to be singing to you when the rest of the room is humming in a mess of sporadic conversations.

Sometimes I wonder if the only reason I volunteer, blog, or otherwise engage in community is because I’m a lush for these kinds of connections. Above the din of the work itself, I’ve discovered a few relationships that leave me truly energized, rile my curiosity, and make me believe I’m just one part of a bigger thing, trying to reconnect myself to the whole through other people.

There are primary soul mates, like my husband Carl, who knows me more holistically than anyone ever will. And then there are secondary or supporting soul mates, with whom I connect individually in a particular area of my life, and as a whole, I would say we’re universally connected by a shared understanding of or appreciation for how the world works.

This notion of soul mates always seems to grow in importance to me as I focus on creativity. I think this is partially because I need human connection to tackle creativity. I’ve learned that I can’t do it alone. When I create in isolation, I start to replace my creative outlets with more practical ones. Before I even realize I’ve made this decision (because it’s not a decision – it just happens), my creative side is quiet again.

I guess I’m learning that relationships are an important part of my creative process. Tania, one of my closest friends from college, is teaching me this. I e-mail her one afternoon wondering what’s wrong with me, and she replies telling me exactly what it is. She lives on the other side of the state, and she’s given up on calling me because I hate the telephone and never call anyone back. Yet a couple times a week, through Twitter or our blogs or e-mail, we have these moments where I feel like we must still brush our teeth together in the community bathroom on the third floor of Phillips Hall.

I didn’t know it when we sat next to each other through Diane Wakoski’s grueling critiques of our poetry, but Tania is one of my creative soul mates.

I’m positive you can’t “find” soul mates. You can only put yourself in situations where you are accessible to these connections. This is why soul mates are not the same thing as community, and vice versa. There are many online communities where the whole point is to connect with others who have a shared concern or passion. But connection is not the only variable in being creative, supportive soul mates.

Similarly, inspiration is not the only variable. Inspiration comes from your muse, if you believe in that sort of thing. I believe real people can be muses too – there was a woman in one of my poetry classes in college who had a beautiful name, who read with the most humble, plant-me-in-the-ground-and-I’d-grow-sunflowers voice, whose life experience seemed so big and wise for her being so young. But we rarely talked. She was not a creative soul mate, although I found her incredibly inspiring.

A creative soul mate is a hybrid of these qualities, but with a level of intuition added to the mix. You connect, you inspire each other, but soul mates have an innate ability to anticipate one another. This is what makes the relationship impossible to predict or plan. It is your intuition about what the other person believes, and your sense that it aligns with your own beliefs, that makes you sigh “oh, we’re kindred spirits” like Anne of Green Gables.

Now that I’ve noodled through this and started to take inventory of the other kinds of soul mates in my life, my inevitable next question is: what can I do with them? Maybe they are not a relationship to be managed – maybe I shouldn’t levy that kind of expectation, just like I can’t “find” a soul mate. But I do wonder what the potential creative results are if I am more intentional about building relationships with the creative soul mates I do have?

It’s embarrassing to admit that I didn’t read much of anything last year, by way of literary works. Even when pursuing my English degree, I didn’t read as much as you might expect. I blame this on an unfortunate talent: I’m neurotically systemic and love synthesis. I was efficient and focused in college for the most part, able to craft a thesis and a tight analysis without ever finishing the book.

As a child, my mom told me that if I could write well, I could do anything. I don’t think she was referring to cutting corners in my chosen area of study.

For those writers I have read cover to cover, such as Kate Chopin, John Steinbeck, and Toni Morrison, I offer a kind of feverish allegiance. When I get stuck committing to a work by a different author, I run back to them and ask if we could be together just one more time. If reading was a high school prom, I’d be part wallflower and part creepy/infatuated/semi-stalker kid. 

I know I want to write again, but reading is probably more critical than writing. Writing without reading is running before you know how to walk, or even crawl. I would love to run right now – I even have places in mind I’d like to go, but first, I think it’s important that I crawl through some new books.

So for January, I have chosen Eat, Pray, Love. I bought it last spring, and like so many other books, it has decorated my house and that’s about it. (When it comes to my English degree background, I still try to keep up appearances.)  I am only 50 pages in, but I am so, so glad that I chose this book first, and I am regretting not having read it sooner.

I will say I’m a little startled at some similarities between Elizabeth Gilbert’s circumstances and my own… the prayers in the bathroom, the underlying worries, and so on. Her description of divorce is so on-point I feel like I’m revisiting a person I used to be. 

And I love the use of something as structured as the japa mala to seek and describe balance and meaning in her life. I love this conceptually, as a book, because I find vignettes and poetry to be a much-needed tug away from other, denser literature. And I love this personally, as a way of organizing the journey. A few months ago I moved the rosary my grandfather made for me from my nightstand to my purse, so I’d have it with me for reasons similar to Gilbert’s: as a reminder of balance, meaning, and as a structure for contemplating the two.

I’m grateful for such a good pick to get started – good to the point of distraction. For the first time since I was in high school, I would rather sit and read than imagine doing anything else.

This is the last of three parts about my resolution to develop a creative life in 2009. I’ve shared my reasons for doing this and the realities at play, as well as the requirements and rules. Now it’s time to talk about the goodies — those that will support me during this process and those that await me if I am successful. 

Resources

Much like a business plan, this creativity plan needs resources attached to it. The most critical resource will be my own dedication to the plan, but there are other elements that I feel are important to articulate:

• Time: I estimate that at least 10 to 15 hours will be needed to successfully and happily work this plan. I currently have Fridays off, which is very helpful, but I’ll need to structure my time throughout the week so I don’t simply arrive at Friday and feel uninspired to plow through a day’s worth of creating.
• Money: I think the plan requirements, including events and supplies, will need a budget of about $500 over the course of the year. That’s assuming that every event I attend costs at least $25, but I’m sure I’ll be able to do better than that. I’m not about making this an elite experience, but I do realize that if I want to pursue so many diverse events and opportunities, money will be a factor. (Virginia Woolf got this so right.)
• Support: I am sharing this plan for input, ideas and awareness. I hope my blog will be an informal support, and I will share the plan with my husband Carl, as he’s been very supportive of me getting back in to writing, and I know he’ll enjoy the opportunity to help me be accountable.

Rewards

When I discussed this plan with my friend Tania, she was pretty adamant that a reward system was needed. She probably knows my creative tendencies and barriers better than anyone else, as we spent a lot of time together in poetry workshops and literature classes at Michigan State. So as much as I wanted to dismiss a rewards system (I’m so altruistic like that), I trusted her judgment and created one:

• By the end of the first quarter, if I have met my monthly reading and writing requirements, I will buy a subscription to Poets & Writers. 
• By the end of the second quarter, if I have met my monthly reading and writing requirements, I will buy a new set of nice pens (a budget of $25). 
• By the end of the third quarter, if I have met my monthly reading and writing requirements, I will spend $25 in new music on iTunes.
• By the end of the year, if I have met all my requirements, I will get a new laptop. Yeah. Blammo. Had to run that one by the hubby so I don’t shock our year-end finances. But honestly, if there is anything that I’d really love and that would be a good tool in my ongoing creative pursuits, it’s a new computer. That’s a pretty big reward, but it’s the one thing I can think of that has practical relevance and the thrill of a new toy.

As always, I appreciate your comments and ideas, either here on the blog or on Twitter! I’m starting to dive in to my plan and will continue posting to the blog as a way of keeping myself on task.

Yesterday I shared the first of three parts of my plan for developing a creative life in 2009, basically the initial set-up for why I am approaching the new year in this way… the cozy part where I get honest with myself and think broadly about what this plan means.

But again, I can’t fight my analytical side, so my plan had to have some hard details — a set of requirements that I could quantify and measure, as well as a set of rules to guide me from the start.

Requirements

I would love my goals to simply be to read and write more, but I know I’ll need a lot of structure if I want to do this right and hold myself accountable. Ambiguity creates room for excuses, so I’m calling these “requirements” intentionally… “goals” is surprisingly lofty terminology, when I think about it. So, the requirements for my creative life in 2009 are as follows:

• I will read one book each month. Not 12 books total at any time during the year – at least one each month so I am consistently immersed in someone else’s writing.
• I will write at least 10,000 words each month, of any combination of journaling, blogging, poetry, fiction, etc.
• I will post to my blog on average* at least three times per week.
• I will attend four writing-related events, of any size and style, at any location.
• I will buy a new Moleskine and fill it with doodles and ideas during the year.
• I will pay at least four visits to cultural attractions, such as the art museum.
• I will sing and/or surround myself with music everywhere it is “appropriate” – in the car, at home, at work. (And in the grocery store if Carl can handle that.)
• I will add at least 200 songs to my iPhone. This is arbitrary and probably exceeded by 99% of iPod users on their first sync, but I need a number, so there.
• I will attend four musical events. Concerts are acceptable, but festivals with multiple bands/shows may only count as one event.

So, by the end of 2009, I will have achieved the following:

• 12 books read.
• 120,000 words written.
• 156 blog posts shared.
• 1 Moleskine decked out in doodles.
• 12 creative events attended.
• Many hours of music enjoyed.

Of course, the hope is that by seeking structure in a few creative areas, I will become more open to other creative endeavors. Perhaps by the end of 2009 I’ll be attempting painting, sewing, or a musical instrument. No promises or requirements for that, but it would be a great side effect and indicator of success.

Rules

These are somewhat overarching, and I could call some of them rights as much as I can rules. I believe one of the greatest creative barriers is that of personal permission… I have failed to prioritize creativity in my life, because I haven’t given myself permission to let it matter to me like it once did. With the right rules in place, I will have no choice but to refuse distractions that may have derailed my creativity before:

• This is not about publishing, it’s about creating. There was a time when I had bylines in newspapers. This is not that time, and that is not the goal.
• I may not accept ANY new volunteer work. NONE. I currently serve in four volunteer roles, and it is already more than I can handle. I love volunteering, but it’s the top competitor for my free time, and consequently, my creative time.
• Every week, I must schedule my creative time to the best of my ability and honor that time as if it is a job with a very intolerant boss.
• I may not buy any new books until I have met my quota for the year. I own many books that I have never read, so it’s time I give them some attention. Books received unexpectedly as a gift are allowed, but I may not request books as a gift.
• I must revisit my planning document at the beginning of every month and create a report on my progress.

Tomorrow, I will share the final two segments of my plan: resources and rewards. In the meantime, feedback is welcome on the requirements and rules — are they aggressive enough? Too much to tackle? It’s too late to change them (I have released them to the blogging gods after all), but I always appreciate honest feedback when it comes to this kind of thing. Thanks to everyone who read the first post and shared comments on the blog or Twitter!

* Update on blogging requirement: With some thoughts from some smarties on Twitter (thanks especially to @susiewee), I am shooting for an average of three blog posts weekly, so I can accommodate spurts in blogging and times when I just don’t have a moment to blog or am away.

As I shared recently, the new year has been a catalyst for me to think more intentionally about creativity and my struggle to get it back in to my life in meaningful ways. So today, and over the next few days, I’m going to share my plan to tackle that challenge in 2009.

Even though creativity is often stereotyped as being carefree or willy-nilly, my creative life in 2009 will be anything but haphazard. I need structure to get started and hold myself accountable, so my plan (a 2500+ word document that I’ll edit into small blog posts) consists of the following parts:

• Reasons
• Realities
• Requirements
• Rules
• Resources
• Rewards

Each part will be explained as I share it. Today I’m sharing my reasons for creating this plan and realities to acknowledge as I work on it.

Reasons

Why am I doing this? I want to be a creative person again. I mean creative in a holistic sense. Creativity as a way of thinking and as an approach to living, as well as in the more traditional expressions of creativity: reading, writing, art, music, and so on.

I have not invited creativity and imagination into my life with great intention since college, when coursework kept me focused and provided me with a venue for sharing my progress. I’ve become a more analytical person since college. I’ve always had a tendency to sacrifice anything that could appear to be frivolous when more practical matters or choices demand my attention. My analytical decision-making can be pretty exacting – and it has smothered my creative attempts over the past few years.

Here is the hard truth about my creative life in 2008: I wrote next to nothing, if you don’t count a collection of journal entries. Maybe two poems? I did not read any novels. I read blogs almost exclusively, save for a few books of poetry. I did not listen to music nearly as much as I used to. I doodled a little, tried to teach myself embroidery, but never followed through on much in the way of art. I attended a few performances and events, probably my most active area of creative participation. But that was always as a spectator.

In 2008, the best thing I created was a new excuse for not attempting to be creative. I disallowed myself from participating in creative opportunities because I felt I had not earned it. This sounds really melodramatic, but here’s an example: Billy Collins judged a local poetry contest. Billy Collins is one of my favorite poets. Just getting my work in front of him would be a special thrill, regardless of whether I placed in the contest.

I didn’t allow myself to enter the contest. Maybe it’s a good old Catholic sensibility about guilt and punishment, but I felt that if I wasn’t going to take my writing seriously enough to practice it regularly, I didn’t deserve to start trying just because Billy Collins was judging a contest and I was all starry-eyed about that.

I regret being so stubborn. Stubborn about not writing, stubborn about taking away my own opportunities. Pretty stupid.

So 2009 has to be different. I need to be creative, and I need structure to avoid making excuses or unnecessarily punishing myself. Ironically, creating a plan to do this is a very analytical approach, but perhaps it’s a good exercise in beginning to marry the two parts.

Realities

Intentionally building a creative life is affected by a set of realities. I believe the more I acknowledge these realities at the outset, the less likely I am to make assumptions about my process or take my progress for granted.

• I have stability, support, and flexibility. I know these are luxuries that not everyone has, and I can’t take that for granted. If I do, it will be that much easier to take my creative life for granted.
• This is a personal commitment. No one or nothing else can be held accountable for any stumbles along the way, and in the same way, the successes will be uniquely mine.
• There are only so many hours in a day. I need to stop scheduling my time unrealistically and become more comfortable with the idea that not all time has to be actionable, and not all days need to produce something that makes a big contribution.
• I am human. (Ta da!) The truth is, I have not written or read consistently in a long time. I will make mistakes. I may even produce some crappy stuff. If it bothers me, I’ll make 2010 a year of polishing up and perfecting my craft (although “craft” seems like a highly evolved state from where I am right now, so maybe 2011? 2012?).

I expect these realities to change as I change, and it’s safe to assume I’m operating with more assumptions than I know right now. That’s part of the learning I hope to do… to get familiar with the underlying factors that affect my creativity and figure out how to manage them.

I’d love anyone’s thoughts on any of this, or links to your plans for the new year! My next post will share my requirements and rules for becoming creative in 2009. That means I have one more night to change them before I commit to anything publicly. :)

Almost everything about 2008 was unexpected… in no particular order: weddings, job changes, deaths, divorces, lawsuits, buying a new home, selling another home, etc. I know I underperformed professionally, as a volunteer, and as a blogger, all because I doled out so much emotional energy to everything else that was happening.

I want 2009 to be different. I don’t expect to have any more control over it than I did over 2008, but I’m hoping to give myself permission to pursue some goals and ideas that I never found or made time to tackle this year.

As things settle around the holidays, I’m doing some housekeeping to get started in a fresh direction. First, still working on the name change following the wedding, I snagged this new address, emilystoddardfurrow.com, for my blog. I am deleting old blogs and accounts and have started to consolidate content under this new domain and my new name.

Second, I’m drafting a plan for 2009 that I hope to share here. I create a lot of exercises in my offline journal to figure out where I want to focus and what kind of capacity I need to do what I want. I’ve been thinking of ways I could use the blog to hold myself accountable for certain goals and also share tools and resources with others who might be interested or working on similar issues.

Finally, I’m forgiving myself for everything in 2008 that did not happen as expected and can’t be changed now or doesn’t matter in the same way. I still need to think about some of it, but I’m giving myself permission to adjust my expectations for next year.

I have had a problem with productivity lately… and if you know me at all, you know this would typically threaten 99% of my identity. I’ve been sharing this problem with my dad regularly, going so far as to pound the keyboard once and demand why I couldn’t work like I used to (all the while apologizing for not living up to the expectations I’m sure he had of me when I was hired into the business).

He finally took a marker, approached the whiteboard in my office, and wrote “EVOLVED”. Beneath it, he wrote “Old Emily = Projects. New Emily = Relationships, Family, Love.” He looked at me. “You’re evolving, Emily. You are becoming who I always wanted you to be.”

It reminded me, oddly, of how my dad talked about my grandmother when she was dying. When he first spoke of it, he never said death. He told me she was decaying. Dad and I try to be observers of process—minimizing process could altogether undermine the nuances of an experience. In our minds, people don’t die, and they don’t change. They decay, and they evolve. Semantics to some, but it’s a kind of philosophy to us, I think.

So people like us tend to sense the thunderstorm when others just think the wind’s kicking up. For me, the wind started kicking up some time in 2007, although I know now that I was late in noticing what it meant… for too long, I have been a creature of creation, happily sacrificing most things (especially relationships) in the name of being productive. By 2007, that productivity had landed me in roles that only demanded more and more production. And while I hadn’t exactly woken up dramatically one morning wondering what happened, I expected it would only be a few more years before I did. Life was my personal pressure cooker—I had never been so uncomfortable in a situation I had so intentionally created.

When I decided to do something about that, it required uprooting myself in my own life as I knew it. It started with going to work for the family business, and once that happened, it unrolled from there. And by April of this year, I found myself in a life I had not planned but felt strangely like what I had always hoped for. A lot of formerly unproductive things—friends, family, and love—not only started making sense, but they started taking precedence.

And that’s when my work “suffered”. I went whole days without being able to produce a single scrap of what I would have formerly considered work. Even as I write this post I’m struggling to conclude it in a way that, in my mind, produces value. As if the process of writing it has not had meaning.

To help wrap my arms around the notion of evolution and the process that I am trying to let myself go through, I began thinking of all this as my “personal evolution project” (which I like because it leads to the acronym “PEP”). As part of my PEP (ha—sounds like a motivational speaking program), I guess I’m learning, or trying to understand, a couple things:

• Personal evolution is a not a productive process, in the way we (I) would normally view productivity. In fact, it sometimes demands less productivity. Personal evolution does not need to be justified with outputs.
• Personal evolution has nothing to do with success as we (I) know it. Some people would argue that this is just because society needs to rework its definition of success… I disagree. For me, success will always be somehow tied to the acknowledgement and perception of others. I believe personal evolution is actually about the pursuit of joy. Joy is a very personal thing, which no one else can acknowledge for you, and no one else can understand quite as you do (if or when you discover it).

I’ve been thinking about these things a lot for a long time, drafting them on paper, debating whether they belong in my journal or posted on this blog (now you know the lapse in posts was out of uncertainty and not out of laziness…).  I guess I decided in the end that it’s worth sharing here, in case others are thinking similarly and want to share