Our Biggest Assumption

Our Biggest Assumption

minus the Coup de Poing

The biggest assumption each of us makes is to infer that everybody sees life the same way we do. It’s so hard to challenge the expectations we have of others, and accept that they do not think the way we think, feel the way we feel, judge the way we judge, and abuse the way we abuse. They are not us. We can’t even begin to pretend to know how anyone else feels.

This, I think, is why we have a fear of being ourselves around others. We think that everyone will judge us, victimize us, abuse us, and blame us, the same way we do to our Self. We believe we know how others see us. So, before they can have the chance to reject us, we reject our Self, and alter our behaviour.

Our assumptions set us up for suffering, yet we keep on making them, for this is easier than facing our fears, asking questions, and getting the clarification we really need.

photo credit: DerrickT

Dig It, Here Comes the B-Corp

Dig It, Here Comes the B-Corp

B Corporation

Have you heard of the B-Corp (a for-benefit corporation)? They’re companies who have voluntarily revised their bylaws to include social and ecological benefits in their definition of the shareholder value they deliver.

There’s over two hundred and fifty in Canada and the US today.

Seventh Generation’s one. So is Yale School of Management.

The term was coined as a play on S corporations and C Corporations, two legal corporate structures under U.S. federal tax code. Unlike S and C Corporations, B Corporations have no official tax status, though there are efforts to change that.

Why I Started Elastic Mind

Why I Started Elastic Mind

some people call me the joker
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For me.

Before I began writing this blog one year and nine months ago, I’d never published a damn thing under my name. My past writing experiences consisted of:

  • scratching angrily in my journal
  • dreaming up poorly-constructed and never finished Lois & Clark and X-Files fanfiction

AND once I had left the tortured years of teen-dom

  • penning mildly clever marketing copy

When I decided to leave corporate marketing, and shape a business around my vision for my life, what I knew definitively was that I wanted to write more. At the time, I really didn’t care how, I just knew I needed to do it.

So, I thought, to practice and to aid in my ability to get client work for Elastic Mind, I would start publicly journaling all that I was learning about building my own business.

The idea, Innerpreneuring, came later.

I’d been brainstorming about my business direction for a month or so when I noticed Geek Gods, Karma Queens, and Innerpreneurs in the Marketing section of the bookstore. I had been hanging out in the Business section of the bookstore a lot, hoping that by osmosis I would be able to calm my fears and shape my business into one that didn’t totally suck.

The word, Innerpreneur, kept calling to me, but the book seemed a bit silly, so I ignored it. I judged the book by it’s cover… and title. Shame on me. Obviously, on one of my trips I finally opened it, read the description of Innerpreneurs, and was completely compelled. Not only did it describe my vision of how my business could bring meaning to my life, it also described the exact group of people I wanted to work with. Eureka!

I’m no fool.

Having worked in Marketing, specifically online Marketing for years, I knew how the game works. When I learned about us, I knew I had found my niche, the group of people that I could create the most value for.

I was still getting clear on what I could do best (at the time I was offering web content consulting) and discovering our group helped me to see that I wasn’t alone in my values or in my views on entrepreneurship, life and everything in-between.

So I theorized that I could create Rise of the Innerpreneur and:

1. Document my business growth and learning
2. Express my Self and provide myself with a place to practice and publish my writing
3. Help other like-minded business owners (and soon-to-bes)
4. Attract my ideal client to my web content writing web consulting strategic coaching and web development business… it’s taken me a little under two years to get clear on what I do best… and I still feel like I’m discovering it.
5. Be a portfolio of my web wizardness

But it was still a gamble.

I didn’t know if you would care – about my business, about my writing, or about Innerpreneuring – but I needed to take the chance, for me. It was what I felt I needed to do, for my happiness, and I trusted that.

But it did seem like a decent bet that there would be at least one other whackjob Innerpreneur out there, like me, and that I could, perhaps, create some value in their life.

Almost two years later, I and my business continue to grow, and it is exciting and frightening to see how my little gamble pays out.

photo by: monkeyc.net

Let’s Not Form a Cult

Let’s Not Form a Cult

Culte on Flickr
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The cult of ‘creativity’.

I’ve had an issue with the word ‘creativity’ for a long time now. It intimidates me.

I feel like ‘creativity’ is put up on a pedestal. You’ve either ‘got it’ or you don’t.

I take issue with the message that some of us are truly creative, but that most of us aren’t.

‘Creativity’ kinda has an attitude.

The stigma around ‘creativity’ leads many of us to feel like we never create anything, for we feel we don’t emulate the high ideals of what ‘creativity’ is. We don’t see our creations as tour de forces, and we don’t think our talent is otherworldly, so we end up seeing ourselves as somehow less than creative.

I know I did for most of my life.

Looking at ‘creativity’ from a less cult-ish perspective.

If we stop narrowly associating ‘creativity’ with the stigma of great art, or with adult education programs like Introduction to Pottery, and look at the reality of creativity, we see that it’s found in every choice we make.

Each of us is creating daily in the medium of experience. Our gestures, our words, our actions, our objects, they are all choices we make that determine our experience. 

In every aspect of our lives — the good, the bad and the just plain boring, we have a choice in how we think, act, and feel. And we express our creativity through the choices we make.

Our choices are our art.

Believing that you create your reality requires accepting responsibility for your past, your present and your future experience. It means you aren’t a victim, and that others can’t be blamed for your state. Your choices created the life you have today. It’s an empowering, yet utterly painful and uncomfortable reality.

Yet, to me, it feels far better than giving up my power and leaving ‘creativity’ up to the chosen few to enjoy.

photo credit: Remy Saglier – Doubleray

Another Slice of My Freedom

Another Slice of My Freedom

Pie Slice
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I feel more joy being less connected.

A web presence… me using the Internet to communicate to the globe… sometimes, I wonder what I have gotten myself into. I question if an online life is truly sustainable and if I truly enjoy it. Do I really want to be connected and online, daily, for the long term?

Being online, on a computer, doesn’t feel nearly as amazing to me as being in nature, or meditating, or writing, or traveling, or trekking does. I love it, but only in moderation. It’s too easy to get lost in.

I want to be online only sometimes. I don’t want my computer, or my connection to it, to be my life. I am more empowered and centered when I spend my time being connected to my Self, and to nature.

Yet I’ve chosen a career that revolves around being online…

Often I am asked, by people not submerged in the online culture, how I balance working on the web. They mention how addictive being online is… how time seems to disappear… and it’s fair for them to assume that, as I ‘blogger’ and web coach, I must promote a tweeting-emailing-publishing-surfing-updating kinda’ life. A life lived online.

My computer is my tool, not my life.

I don’t promote a life lived online. I use the computer, and what it allows, to create easily and communicate globally. But me, as you see me online, can never completely express my life, nor do I want it to.

My writing is my life, not my tool.

I’ve tried writing to satisfy the belief that regular, scheduled blog postings are my duty, but it doesn’t work for me. Obligating myself into writing has proved rather uninspiring.

The problem is, this blog is for me to practice my writing, and I work best when I practice because I love to. I write for me. Just as your art is for you. It’s your choice to click and read me, but your reaction, I can’t control and can never know. I can only ever know what my words mean to me. I am write for my happiness.

I’m choosing to believe that my only duty to you is to love what I do, not to publish x times a week, on y day. I’m choosing to believe that if I like my words, You‘ll like my words, and, for that reason, You‘ll return to read them. Call me crazy if you like.

photo credit: DigiDi