I Don't Work Fridays - An intentional decision to change my life balance

This posted in January 9, 2015. 

“Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” (American Proverb) I remember seeing this saying on a poster in college, profound for me as Never Trust Anyone Over Thirty. And today, I begin a new day, knowing that I didn’t know a lot back then about the future… like I might turn thirty some day… but at least today, I know that I don’t know what ten years from now looks like. I only know that I have more time in my weeks to use well. Today is my first free Friday in my four-day work week.

It sounds great, right? For now, and with intention, I no longer work a traditional five-day work week. I find it a bit daunting now that it finally arrived. 

I don’t remember seeing this T. S. Eliot saying on a poster, but it speaks to me: “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” (First, I like that the poet ends his sentence in a preposition. More importantly, I like the idea he ends up with.) Since my first meeting on Monday morning of this past week, when It took three reminders to my colleagues that I work a 4 day week, I created a mantra   to cement this new fact of my work life, “I don’t work Fridays.” It turns out that I needed to use the saying every single day when looking at calendars to schedule meetings and calls. Reactions were for the most part positive. They spanned from a smile and congratulations, to encouragement and reminders to protect it. There were challenges too. That same person who told me to protect it, told me I should attend a meeting because it was important. I don’t work Fridays, was all I said.  A while later another person who'd heard me say it asked me in an email, after I declined an e-invitation to a meeting for today. I am pretty sure she was yanking my chain. I responded with, I don’t work Fridays.

Reality set in as this week unfolded, by Wednesday afternoon, I realized that it would be difficult to get all my tasks checked off my list. In the olden days, (last week), I might finish projects in the evening or on the weekend. Now that I am intentionally working a four-day work week, I realize that my intention isn't about jamming in a five day work week into four. My objective now is to focus on exactly what I need to do to be considered successful in my work. Today, the first day of the rest of my life, I declare that I am no longer ambitious for growth in my career. I am leaving behind fears of being passed over, settling and complacency. I am embracing being relevant and highly valuable today in my job. This is hugely freeing. It may be the key to allowing me to be everything I have wanted all along.

The plan began August 2014 while developing strategy and budgets for 2015. I offered up 20% of my salary to make ends meet... though it may have sounded precipitous, it wasn't without thought. A catalyst for this decision began much earlier as I wanted more time to explore  what I am meant to do in life. I feel it… a flow… a moment of peace, maybe success, a full deep breath. I am driven to know that more. I like what the French painter/sculptor, Jean Dubuffet* said,  “Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.” So this morning, I have no intention of wearing away myself, though I do expect extinction. Instead, I’d like to wear myself… to fully express myself. On the first day of the rest of my life I am booking a trip to Spain… talking to a friend about an investment, breaking a loaf of bread, taking lunch to someone shut in after a work out, and working on a painting. Tomorrow is the weekend, when, ok, I’ll admit it, I might sneak a peek at my emails, because, I don’t work Fridays. 

It's a beginning.

*Sculpture at the State of Illinois building, Randolph and Dearborn, Chicago

Visioning My Future - A Tactical and Practical Guide for the Next 12 Months

Happy New Year!

It’s January 1, 2016- and I am thinking about how this upcoming year will unfold and what I want it to hold. This post outlines my process for planning out five years and tactics for 2015. Ever since 1982 with Shakti Gawain’s Creating Visualization as a guide, I’ve spent time on (or around) New Years day alone or sometimes with friends creating a vision for the year.  I've collected them in journals, on legal pads and on poster, foam core and cork-boards. Sometimes they’ve been built with pen and ink bullets, photos, collage-style and personal sketches. 

This year, a new chapter in my life is manifesting. I see a future that is shorter than the years I’ve already lived and I recognize there are things I want to do that I must initiate soon to see to fruition, or develop competence to leave a legacy. I am aware that this shift encompasses all aspects of my life as I now live it, including career.

Career for me is about accomplishment, social interaction, contribution, competence, livelihood and creativity. In other words, no matter if I was entry level, the boss, the owner, in subservient or leadership positions, there is value for me in  work… most of the time. Overcoming obstacles, dealing with stress, inventing ideas and processes, making connections… every experience enhances my life in and outside of work.

Like squeezing a balloon, I feel less pressure for building career and more on creating a life and legacy beyond employed work. I can’t ignore the building pressure.

As a first and most concrete step to reduce the tension, beginning January 5^th, I arranged to work only four days a week, creating an entire day to use in development of this new lifestyle. In addition, because of circumstances regarding space where I work, I gave up my office for a hotel space and will work 2-3 days a week from home; giving me an extra 4-6 hours every week for use as I see fit. Though the loss of the day also means a 20% cut in salary and vacation time, it’s a cost well spent.

With the New Year and new life immediate, it’s imperative I initiate a visioning process that provides direction for both.  Age, retirement and sense of purpose are driving the need for me to work on this. I’ve devised an outline that I thought might be helpful to others who are intentionally defining their future and tactically designing the next twelve months to work toward achieving the future.

Visioning My Future - A Tactical and Practical Guide for the Next 12 Months to Achieve It 

The goal of this process is to establish a dynamic vision of the future – for now, about five years out – 2020 and identify the items I need to accomplish this year to achieve the vision or redefine it.

Currently, rather than the boards I mentioned above, I'm working in a 14”x17” spiral sketchbook that I found in my closet with seven pages of sketches done in 1999. I like the spiral notebook because it opens flat and works as a single page or an extra large spread across both pages. A smaller sketchbook could be used too. I found from my work in creativity and innovation and as a visual person, I learned that I like to cut pictures and headlines and develop a collage to capture the essence of the vision. The process of looking through magazines helps me identify motifs and themes. The process also allows me to see how much of what attracts or interests me is omnipresent in the media and should be considered suspect of my true interest. Besides the pictures, I add my own sketches and notes, and sometime stamps and ink.

Beginning today, I am spending time setting up the book and filling in my top-of-mind ideas. In the next few days, I will build out the vision of the future. I know there are things to create in my life and others to leave behind. I will use the book to capture evidence of things I do through out the year that enable the future to emerge… like ticket stubs, photos or notes.  For example, I joined a new health club and went for the first time yesterday. I will affix the club’s name to the pages to show evidence of two goals in 2015: to ensure I have a social connection as I begin my more isolating work schedule; and preparation for a lengthy bike ride with my bike-riding friend, Nancy next summer. I can imagine writing in words or even glimmers of ideas. The book will become a scrapbook, calendar and soothsayer.

Here is the outline I am using. It is loosely based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs which is a simple and elegant way of encompassing most of the areas I consider. I’ve tried to apply other organizational structures, like the dimensions of wellness (Physical, Social, Spiritual, Emotional, Vocational, Environmental and Intellectual) but Maslow's structure, for me takes each dimension a step further suggesting less overlap and confusion. If you want more here is a post from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs.

Visioning My Future

(In the parenthesis below, I sprinkled notes to give you a sense of how I think about some of these. They aren't meant for you to use)

• 2-page spread [  |  ]  for 5 years from now - Visioning My Future 2020
• 1 page for Existence Needs covering: [ |
• Air (Don't really need to say a lot about this, unless you live in a highly polluted area; or you want to support efforts to improve air standards and reduce climate change)
• Water 
• Shelter (This is a big unknown for me, as I struggle with the question where and how I want to live in retirement - should I buy a cabin, land, place in the city now while I have an income to show a mortgage company?)
• Clothing

•   1 page for Safety and Security | ]

• Personal security
• Financial security (I might make a separate page just for this one as it is the big mother of all my issues)
• Health and wellbeing
• Safety net against disaster and disease

•   2 page spread for Growth  [  |  ]  

• Love and Belonging
• Friendship/Social Groups
• Intimacy (I'm continue to look for this)
• Family (What about a dog?)
• Esteem 
• Need to feel respected by self and others 
• Acceptance and valued
• Sense of contribution from work or hobby 
• Gaining an inner competence through experience - of strength, competence, mastery, self-confidence, independence, and freedom
• Self Actualization
• Identifying and realizing one's full potential (How does work fit into this?)
• Accomplishing everything one can, to be the most one can be athletically, or be an ideal parent
• Expression of self (painting, inventions)
• Self Transcendence 
• The self only finds its actualization in giving itself to some higher goal outside oneself
• Altruism 
• Spirituality
• 1 or more pages on a year in my life in the future state (how many trips, classes and pages written or paintings painted)
• 1 or more pages on a day in my life (What do I want my day to contain?)
• 2 or more page spread on 2015 - what I want for this year that also helps me evolve to 2020. 

                                           #####

If you are doing planning in any form, please let me know your process and how it’s going.

This post is reposted from 2015.

Sweet Insanity

At a friend’s birthday party recently, cake was offered to another friend to take home. Her response was, Oh sure, the skinny girl pushes off the cake to the fat girl. The odd thing was that the skinny girl wasn’t skinny and the fat girl wasn’t fat, and neither were girls. They were sixty-year old women.

Yesterday, at the end of a department holiday party, a manager offered remaining decorated cupcakes to a co-worker. She responded with, and this is a paraphrase, as another co-worker told me about this exchange, You mean you want to give the poor black woman the leftovers? The white manager stuttered for a response… something like, No, you have five kids, I thought they’d like them. Then, she walked away. I understand that there was an apology a little later from the women with the kids. I don’t know who took home the desserts. The manager was white and a woman. The other person was black, a woman and mother of five children.

I do know that these are both examples of dots connecting to places never expected.

A few weeks ago, I completed a two-day course on diversity taught by a sixty-year old white male and an ageless black woman who told us she was older than her teaching partner. The course offered multiple opportunities to identify the filters by which we see, hear and react to people. One exercise instructed the participants to stand by a sign that made them feel most uncomfortable when discussing it. I found it difficult to choose between all of them, race, age, sexual preference, gender, religion, height, weight, able bodiedness or socio-economic status. For another exercise, participants stood on a masking tape line, then move a step forward or back for life experiences that presumably helped or hindered a person to succeed by conventional standards... getting educated, having access to transportation, money worries. It reminded me of the game Mother May I where one takes baby steps or giant steps forward, but if caught, you had to start over. I grew up mostly with all giant steps forward. One person barely left the line and other went so far behind the line that again, I was glad we had an opportunity to talk right there about the gap between us. The course continues to come to mind as the news shows the murders of black men by white policeman. 

Top of mind perceptions of how the world sees us triggered the quick and biting response in the two instances in my life. I might have determined that there was a unifying reason that catalyzed the hurtful words spoken... cake. I mean, I know the people involved, it’s hard for me to think that any of them meant ill will for the other. Yet, the words spilled out.

The murders were the same issues taken to exponential lengths. Sons died. Sons shot other sons. There are people who defend the deaths.  There are people who gather together to rally against the deaths. When and where are we sitting down and discussing it?  The conversation might be nice over a piece of cake. 

You Calling My Art a Hobby?

Last Saturday was the first day of a figure drawing class at that Palette and Chisel. I loved every second of it. Each two-minute and five-minute sketch felt like a second, the hour-long pose felt like a minute. If we weren't offered a break, I wouldn't take one. It didn't matter whether my depictions sucked. It was three hours of peace, of breathing in and out and feeling whole and flowing.

The teacher is in his 40s tall and serious, there's a guy in the class in his 30s and there's two people in art school likely still in their teens and me. One of youngest asked me if "this"... art was a hobby? I took immediate offense at the question.  If I was in a sit com, I would've jumped back, ala Chandler, and said, "whahaha?" I had a reaction but it wasn't to her. My response filtered through years of other experiences. I know, because I recently took a mandated course at work called, Crucial Conversations and they said so.

Future - she didn't picture a future for me. She didn't see that I could be like her, in or considering a career. Old came next. She just met me and I presented as an old person. Okay, I'll give her older... 40 years or so. I could be two generations ahead of her. In my self-aware state I recognize that I don't say, even to myself, grandmother. I am definitely filtering. Then again, her choice of a word felt like a paper cut.

When I heard the word hobby,  it reminded me of an argument with my former husband about my business, when early in its life it wasn't making money. He called it a hobby. I took umbrage then too. He wanted me to close it. He wanted to take vacations. He wanted me to get a real job and not invest any more of our money into it. We discussed and argued. I realized he meant the future value of my earning power. The business gained momentum, but still, as new businesses go, required financial reinvestment. I stood my ground. A battle won... at all cost. He left and I dug in. I would
prove it was worth it. I completely retooled. I let go staff and refocused the business model. What business I was in was decided and the business took off and went on for another fifteen years. I may have proved him wrong, but I didn't prove me right. Damn.

Still mulling about the meaning of hobby, I asked my wise friend Lynn for her definition. She said, it's what brings us peak moments... when time stands still, where your mind finds rest. It's not work. Peace.

In an NPR's Morning Edition story recently, they asked rock-star scientist, Neil deGrasse Tyson to fact check the time (relativity) effects of gravity in the new movie Interstellar. The stronger the gravity, the more time slows. The time on our phones that go through the far out GPS satellites has to be calculated and slowed to account for the difference in the speed of time in space. My time is slowed when I'm drawn to drawing.

Now that I think about it, that young woman may have done me a big service. The word hobby for me obviously triggers a reaction. It's clearly time to rethink and retool, to find a response that speaks of my experience of flow, joy and peace.

Thanks for the provocative words, Kurt Vonnegut.

"If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don't have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts. I'm not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possible can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something." Kurt Vonnegut

The Secret History of Wonder Woman

During the past week, I've heard various interviews about the new book, The Secret History of Wonder Woman. At first it reminded me of Allison and her homage to Wonder Woman on her desk and Shari with her fierceness in the Optimistic Divorcees and Sarah with her early employment and loyalty to Planned Parenthood. Though repetitive, the interviews of the author Jill LePore connected more dots.

Watching the traditions and hearing the conversations in our office surrounding two women getting married fascinate and disturb me. The role of wife and the meaning of marriage seem to be pre- suffragist or maybe not considered at all. Last week, I bluntly (and probably too directly) asked someone I’d just met who said she was getting married, why she would change her name. She said, "tradition." Not mine, I thought.  The guy in the room, also a Boomer, said his wife didn't, nor did many of my close friends. We were in our 20s and 30s in the '70s then.

In those days, I wore suits, ties, clunky wing-tip Bass shoes and custom men's shirts with darts to fit and show my female parts. I had my own little WW on my desk to motivate me. We were supposed to dress up like the 70s for our Halloween festivities this year. I chose not to wear what we really wore then… it no longer fit.

My ex husband Lee teased me and the women we hung with, by calling us "80s Ladies" after the song by KT Oslin. 80s Ladies tells the story perfectly of what made us who we were then. "More than our names got changed… Been educated, got liberated and complicated matters with men… We said I do and signed I don’t and swore we’d never do that again… We burned our bras and we burned our dinners and we burned our candles at both ends…. There ain’t much these ladies ain’t tried."

Jill LePore reminds me that there were many women who came before, both real and illustrated who led their own lives, not in the reflection of nor in service to men. The Secret History talks about the women who innovated “Birth Control” and founded and sustained Planned Parenthood to give women an opportunity to follow their dreams and build lives for themselves with or without a partner. Wonder Woman as originally drawn was the embodiment of a woman of self destiny and power. Later generations of her story-tellers relegated her to less than.

Some conversations around the office make me think that stories of fierce women aren’t known and the possibilities don't seem possible. The media, gaming and entertainment industries still show women in subservient, objectified positions. Recently a Hooters knock off opened near where I live - Twin Peaks. I’m floored, horrified even, that no one (including me) has cried foul.

All this is to say, I am very interested in a discussion about how woman are viewed today and more important how we view ourselves. Are we who we want to be? Are we dressing for our selves, in reflection of someone else or someone's ideals. With the prevalence of selfies, I am fascinated by the poses... I want to know who are they for and what's the outcome wanted? We need to talk.

The lyrics of the 80s Ladies song tells my story exactly. I was in my 30s in the 80s right along with KT Oslin’s song, (the video shows high school graduation as 67, we were 69.) I’d like to write the lyrics for the subsequent decades as 90s, oughts and ought-teens. I’d also love to hear how my women friends would write their lyrics.

Links:

An interview at the end of the Colbert Report with Jill LePore author of The Secret History of WonderWoman http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/full-episodes/ft09kr/october-29--2014---jill-lepore.The interview prior to her is about Gamergate - women looking to de objectify women in video games like Grand Theft Auto. 

About Jill LePore http://scholar.harvard.edu/jlepore/home

New Yorker Article: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/22/last-amazon