A post entitled, Embracing Uncertainty, suggested an alternative description of the practices often recommended to support resilience.

It has become clear that the language helping professionals use, is often one of the most significant obstacles to supporting significant life and career change.

So, if you’ve embraced mindfulness, a daily meditation practice or have already found your way into a supportive recovery community – this post is not for you.

If you’ve explored mindfulness, worked with a trainer, have made multiple attempts to adopted a healthier and more balanced lifestyle, yet find it is difficult or impossible to maintain – this post is for you.

If you’re struggling with periods of malaise, outright depression, anxiety or physical symptoms which might be stress related, or if you have a sense that your work/home life could be better – this post is for you.

And if you’re living well, but have a niggling feeling that something is missing – keep reading. It can’t hurt.

Personal Change Management

Change management has been formally studied and implemented in business and industry for over half a century. In the early days it was characterized by a top-down exercise in defining goals and strategies; in recent decades the focus has moved toward ‘stakeholder-driven’ change.

This shift is important to note. Industry has determined that sustainable change and innovation follows bottom-up management by individuals, team leaders and ‘change champions’.

Our personal top-down change management system appears to need updating as well. New Year’s Resolutions are a great example:

• I’m going on a diet
• I’m looking for a new job
• I’m training for a marathon

Good in theory, but arguably top-down. There’s a ring of “the boss says I should” to it.

Personal Change Champion

What would bottom-up personal goal setting look like? How different would it be when you, the ‘stakeholder’, is in charge?

• Would you decide to diet, or would ask yourself what pain you are medicating by overeating or not exercising?
  Ask: What feelings are you shovelling down or numbing with sugar, carbs, drink or drugs?
• Should you get a new job, or could you confront the stressors at this one?
  Ask: Are you bored? Is it the right field for you? Do you ask for what you need? Do you bring your best self to the workplace – or simply punch a clock?
• Planning to train for your first or fifth marathon?
  Ask: Are you doing it to benefit from the exercise, discipline and camaraderie – or are you running away from something or for the sense of accomplishment? “Accomplishing” seems more like work than self-care.

Setting achievable goals and ultimately moving from knowing what you don’t want to what you do want, begins with more than a few tough questions.

It requires us to fine tune or re-calibrate our ‘receivers’.  Specific obstacles that have undermined us in the past, become apparent when we learn to listen in a whole new way.

Fine Tuning Receivers

Bandwidth. It’s a perfect metaphor for our attention span and focus. It’s not limitless. Which station are you tuned into? Favourite programme on 88.5? you can hear it on 88.6 or 88.4 – but through some static. In re-calibrating our receivers, it’s the static we’re out to eliminate; the noise characterised by that judging voice and negative self-talk that reinforces the message: why bother?

The Method

Take one small action every day on your own behalf. The tools outlined below are designed to be adopted into your daily life and routine.

The process is fundamentally the same as the  “DMAIC” model used for Change Management in industry – Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control.

If you’re in “I’ll do it myself” mode, we’re inviting you to embrace one small change at a time!

The Tools

These are modified slightly from their source for introductory purposes, links to the original work follow.

Morning Pages

The best case I can make for adopting this practice is laid out in journalist Oliver Burkeman’s 2014 Guardian article.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised at how powerful Morning Pages proved, from day one, at calming anxieties, producing insights and resolving dilemmas. After all, the psychological benefits of externalising thoughts via journalling are well-established. And that bleary-eyed morning time has been shown to be associated with more creative thinking: with the brain’s inhibitory processes still weak, “A-ha!” moments come more readily.

Julia Cameron, who devised the practice, calls it “meditation for Westerners”. Absent our habit of embracing stillness or silence, three pages written in those early moments of wakefulness between dreams and consciousness, we can achieve the same effect. In her words –

“They are a trail that we follow into our own interior…”

After nearly two decades of doing them, I can attest that the days I write them go far better than the days I do not.

Simply put they are three hand written pages of whatever comes to mind – think of it as a stream of un-consciousness. Some mornings they flow, other mornings they look like a petty list of gripes, a to-do list for the day or a silly unreadable scrawl. They are meant to be private and not shared. They are rarely even re-read.

There is no wrong way to do them. Put your inner critic to the side, take pen to paper and focus on the fact that “done is better than perfect”. Perhaps you can consider them “mourning pages” –

“…a farewell to life as you knew it, and an introduction to life as it’s going to be”

Still skeptical? For more in the author’s own words you can listen to a brief description on her site .

It may just be simpler to try it!

Walking

Introduced in Cameron’s subsequent books, with this tool, she reminds us that

“…walking is a time-honored spiritual tradition. Native Americans walk on vision quests, Aborigines go on walkabouts…Walking brings a welcome sense of connection…optimism and ….a sense of health and well-being.”

Make it a point to take a walk of at least 20 minutes, twice a week.

“Walking is a luxury, an escape from our frantic pace. When we walk, we experience the richness of the world”.

Time Out

Relax. It’s doable – it’s only five minutes!

Once in the morning and once at night – sit quietly for five minutes. Check in with yourself. It’s an opportunity “for self-appraisal and self-approval”.

Set a timer, make an appointment, silence your inner critic and listen. Simply ask yourself, “How am I feeling and why?”

Play Date

Yes, I know Cameron calls it an “Artist Date“, but it is the single most resisted tool, usually while clients are emphatically insisting they are not “artists”. We’re taking liberty in describing it, as even Cameron calls it “assigned play”.

“Artist Dates fire up the imagination. They spark whimsy. They encourage play.”

And they need not be adventurous – a hour or two at a gallery, take in a film or a play, head off to an antique show, gaming convention or go berry picking. Just a few hours away, on our own and without a phone or technology is good for re-charging.

Techniques

The process is simple, but not necessarily easy. So choose one of the tools above and try it. If it serves you well, make a habit of it and add another. If you are struggling with one, add a different one and come back to it. And don’t go it alone!

The method, tools and techniques described are outlined in a series of books on creativity, resilience, perseverance, writing, abundance, money and starting over. Published over the last 3 decades and grounded in Julia Cameron’s own recovery, the techniques have evolved over the years, been embraced by millions worldwide and reflect much of the mindfulness based interventions for emotional well being.

You can find all of them from her first, The Artist’s Way to her most recent It’s Never Too Late to Begin Again online and in most bookshops.

Her intention was that small groups would come together into “creative clusters” and work through one chapter a week for 12 weeks at a time. There is information available on forming a cluster, joining a facilitated group, or individual coaching here.

For inspiration you can follow the hashtags #morningpages #artistdate on Twitter.

Thank you to our friends at CoasteeringNI and Firewalking Ireland for challenging us to play and push outside our comfort zone.

So said Julia Cameron in her introduction to The Right to Write.

We should write because it is human nature to write. Writing claims our world. It makes us directly and specifically our own. We should write because humans are spiritual beings and writing is a powerful form of prayer and mediation, connecting us both to our own insights and to a higher and deeper level of inner guidance as well.

Cameron’s best know tome is The Artist’s Way and it is regularly referenced in lists on the best books on writing. “Show up at the page” is the message – both in pursuit of your art and in the discipline of the “morning pages“. She uses the habit of three long hand pages of writing every morning on awakening as a means to clear the mind of distractions and anxieties, freeing up space for creativity to flourish.

She concludes her introduction to the Right to Write with:

It is my hope that this book will help to heal writers who are broken, initiate writers who are afraid, and entice writers who are standing at the river’s edge waiting to put a toe in.

I have a fantasy. It’s the pearly gates. St. Peter has out his questionnaire, he asks me the Big Question, “What did you do that we should let you in?”

“I convinced people they should write,” I tell him. The great gates swing open.

I share her fantasy.

For over a dozen years now I have facilitated groups exploring both The Artist’s Way and her three subsequent books on writing – The Right to Write (1998), The Sound of Paper (2004), the latest Write For Life (2023).

The lastest is the third in her series of 6 week/6 chapter explorations of The Artist’s Way.

It’s may be subtitled “A Toolkit for Writers” but what comes through is the generosity of spirit and goodwill in sharing her methods and process.

It does read like her “love letter to writing”.

If you’d like support in showing up at the page, get in touch!

Email, Book a Discovery Call, or join Empowering-Change in The Artist’s Way

There it was in my #MorningPages, something so clearly observed while emerging into consciousness.

I am grateful for my unanswered prayers.

At this writing, I am now fully awake with intellect engaged. It is different. It feels like some parent just sent me off on an unpleasant assignment.

That would be the loving, all-knowing parent who knows that the wisdom – retrieved from my unconscious needs to be processed.

This “morning pages” discipline often includes a list of things for which I am grateful. After all, there is a gift in counting the things that have gone well- before I rise and start measuring the bad.

Face it, we all complain about the rain as though our very existence didn’t depend on it.  Yet if I acknowledge the beauty in the blooms or the view of the mountain, I have taken back the power of the rain to bring me down.

Grateful for unanswered prayers, but why?

I have learned to honor why they went unanswered.

Self-will was obviously problematic through the ages.

“Thy will be done” is over two centuries old. It was a powerful and empowering closing to The Lord’s Prayer for the same people who were simultaneously reminding the divine to send daily bread and forgive their trespasses.

Thy will, not mine.

Humbly, I’ll remember that…

“I am rarely granted what I ask for but always given what I need.”

Keeping Score

I’d written a litany of unanswered prayers, and a few were noteworthy.

Indeed, I’d asked for relief and healing in my marriage, a sense of my own financial security when my children were small, and life for children unborn.

What might answered prayers have looked like?

Well, because the Divine has a sense of humor – I have had to face this head-on.

• My children’s father has remarried. He is well-loved, and they’ve been embraced by a new extended family, with the added benefit of step-siblings. He and I no longer know love qualified by our disappointment. We found each other very young and thought what we saw in each other was what we wanted (largely to be different people from our parents).It was not what we could deliver after our children were born. The imprints of our original families were overwhelming.  Imposing my will to “make it work” would not have allowed any of us to move happily forward.
• “Enough money” – well, we do come to learn there is never enough (10% more would surely make life easier). Whatever I thought enough was, I wouldn’t have learned the assortment of skills gained while working myriad part-time jobs. Moving into this life stage, I find I am grateful. Not a single one of the skills I learned or contacts I made goes untapped. I needed every one of those lessons and experiences.
• Life for children unborn; I have the gift of three grown children for whom my attentions are frightfully inadequate (back to enough, I know). They all want something more or different from me – and had there been four or five of them, would the stories of these three be as they were meant to be?

Above all, I know now that the reality of the “what if” would have been disastrous.

Oh, I’d have gotten my way and…

None of the happiness I now know could have come to be.

Even with this proof, I rise every morning struggling to get out of the way of my willful, judging self.

I rise wanting other people to treat me better (really, their world is about me?)

I want specific opportunities to become apparent (really, isn’t it arrogant to think I have envisioned the best of all possibilities?)

And I want sunny days! (really, next winter’s sweater will come from a thirsty sheep?).

Lastly, I now know to begin with – “Deliver me from the evil that is my willfulness into the redemption that is simply letting go“.

For more on #MorningPages see – Personal Change Management, The Tools or Guardian columnist Oliver Burkeman’s article: This column will change your life: Morning Pages.