Collective Genius!

A sticky web we weave

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I don't like spiders. I've been afraid of them my entire life. So writing about them is not something that would normally occur to me, but when I read about this topic the image of the spider kept coming back to me so strongly I had to explore it.

Spider silk has the tensile strength of steel, but far less density and weight. Spider webs are very sticky to prey. Spiders spin webs of mixed sticky and non-sticky thread. They have to be careful to run on the smooth thread so they don't get trapped in their own web.

So what might this mean for us? I think sometimes we fail to see the smooth path through the web. We forget that the sticky part is there for one simple purpose – to feed us. We get so hung up looking at the staggering complexity of the web that we forget we spun it in the first place and know our way around. (Unexpected things happen in spiders' lives just as they do in ours. They incorporate this into the spinning of their webs; the web design remains their own.)

Look at the web of your life carefully. If you find yourself stuck then ask what you are doing there. Is there a reward (a nice juicy fly!) in the stickiness or is it a place the flies have got wise to and don't get trapped in any more? Do you need to find a smooth thread and run along to a more rewarding spot? What is the point of being where you are: does it hold any lessons for you, is it helping you in some way, are you afraid of moving to another part of the web? Think about these questions.

I'll finish with a piece of information I read somewhere very recently: spiders can apparently travel very long distances. They do it by casting a length of spider silk into the wind and allow the wind to carry the silk where it will, with the spider attached to it, using the silk like a little parachute. They don't have any idea where they're going, they just trust to the spider silk to carry them on their adventures.

Teresa Marshall

October 2006 topic: Getting unstuck

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Welcome to October's edition of Collective Genius! This month's focus is "getting unstuck."

Like it or not, we all hit Stuckville at some point in our lives. And when we're there, it can be extraordinarily frustrating. For this month's Collective Genius! I want to tap into your amazing insights on getting unstuck, and making sure you stay that way.

Here are some questions to prime the pump for potential posts...

• What techniques have do you used to get unstuck.
• What gets you stuck? How do you get past it?
• Looking back at times when you have been stuck, what kept you stuck? What would you have done differently in hindsight?
• What are some reasons you see other people getting stuck? What suggestions do you have for ways around them?
• What are some tips for maximizing flow and reducing the risk of stuckness in your life?

As always, that's just to get the juices flowing. No need to limit yourself to those questions if you've got something else to share on the topic.

I'm looking forward to your insights!

Check here for more details on how to share your words o' wisdom on Collective Genius!

Willing Change

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Over the years I've read, and been given, lots of great advice about making personal changes. How to make it happen. How to make changes fast. How to make changes gradually. The whole nine yards. It's all valid advice. But it's all dependent on one thing.

Willing change.

You have to be willing to change. No one ever quit smoking (see Nick Kempinski, another Collective Genius contributor), lost weight (see Kirstie Alley), got off drugs (see Robert Downey, Jr.), changed work habits (see me), stopped procrastinating and wrote the book they'd always wanted to write (see Gretchen Stahlman, another Collective Genius contributor), or anything else, until they were willing to change. No amount of warning from the Surgeon General, the American Heart Association, or Narcotics Anonymous was going to sway Nick, Kirstie, or Robert until they were really willing to change. No amount of stress management advice or motivational essays from Natalie Goldberg were going to get me and Gretchen to change our patterns until we were really willing to change. 

Willingness to change, that submission to the realization that change is necessary for our survival, often seems borne of thoughts like:

• I'm so sick of being me.
• I'm so sick of being this version of me.
• This is not how I want my life to stay.
• I'm afraid to stay this way.

Until you have that moment when you say something like this to yourself, nothing's going to happen.

Sometimes, The Universe gives you space and time to make a change (proactive change). Sometimes, The Universe gets exasperated and executes a karmic kick in the arse to force us to change (reactive change). Louise Fletcher and I stayed too long in jobs that fit like outgrown coats. To borrow her words, we stayed because we didn't have enough faith in our own abilities. The Universe had other plans for each of us that we were both too slow to get on with, so It set in motion the events that led to our being laid off; we could curl up and hide, or we could make lemonade out of our lemons. Things worked out for me, but having been through Willing Change and Reactive Change, I'll pick the former any day.

Once you're willing to change, you have to will things to change. Willing change to happen, willing it to stay on course, requires strategies and tricks that work with your unique mindset. Nick quit smoking gradually, others quit cold turkey. Some people conquer workaholic tendencies by seemingly flipping a switch and diving into a 9-to-5 schedule. Others have to cut back gradually, first cutting out an hour a day of overtime, then cutting out Saturdays, and so on. If will had faltered at any point, the mission to change would have derailed.

The old saying "Where there's a will there's a way" applies here. If you want something bad enough, nothing will be able to stop you. You might have to adjust the pace at which you work toward change in order to allow the necessary pieces to fall into their right places. But at the end of the day, if you want something enough, you'll find a way to make it happen.

Whitney Potsus
Writer/Teacher/Animal Rescue Volunteer

Deal with the Change Vampires

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You know who they are, don't you? The ones who pour cold water on all your plans. The ones who say things like "Well that's just how people are, you can't change them". The ones who say they love you just as you are.

You may not realise that someone you love is a Change Vampire. You just find yourself strangely reluctant to tell them things;  when you have, you feel as if all the energy and enthusiasm has been sucked out of you.

If you can, avoid these people. But that isn't always possible. If you must deal with them, I have two tips for walking away strengthened:

1. Understand that they are almost certainly frightened of change themselves, and are projecting that fear onto you. Or they're scared that if you change for the better, you'll leave them behind. So for them, you've become something to be afraid of: the sunshine dispelling their familiar vampire night. Once you realise this, you'll understand that actually you are the one with the power.
   
   
2. Listen to them. Yup, that's right. Often people like this have power over you because they know you very well. Or at least they know the current, unimproved you. And negative people are often really good at seeing dangers lurking round the corner.
   Perhaps your new life plan involves getting up at 3 a.m. every day, going to the wholesale flower market and buying produce for the bijou florist's shop you're opening in the expensive part of town.
   Your mother understands that you love flowers and have good visual sense. But for years she's watched your active social life that means you're rarely asleep before midnight; and she shops in that part of town and knows a florist who had to close down eight months ago because there simply wasn't enough passing trade. You get the picture.

Make it part of your changing life to get to know yourself very well indeed. Make changing your circumstances part of changing your life, but change from a position of real knowledge, understanding and compassion for yourself and others.

And be realistic. I sort of subscribe to the "argue for your limitations and they're yours" school of thought, but you need to take it with a large pinch of salt and some humour. I'm 52 years old, and perhaps if I just believed in it strongly enough I could begin now from a standing start and become the prima ballerina that my five-year-old self dreamed of for about two weeks. But come on, it ain't gonna happen, right? But it is entirely likely that if I practice enough, I can learn to bake the best chocolate cake on the planet. (And you'll be invited to have a slice!)

Teresa Marshall

Pro-active Change

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Earlier this year a relationship that I was in ended.  A couple months later I got laid off from my job.  In both cases change happened to me.  Most of the time these changes that come into our lives and are out of our control.  I was thinking that I need to be more proactive about change.  Instead of it just happening to me, why don't I just take the bull by the horns and initiate the change?  This is easier said than done, but I think it would make me a happier person.

A Season for Change

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For me, at this time of year, the air is charged with possibility. As the seasons here in the US flow into Fall, I begin to yearn for change. It's like a train coming, the whistle off in the distance. Since I was young, I always thought of the Fall in this way - as possibility approaching. And possibility is simply change waiting to happen.

Coincidently last week, Kate Yandoh over at Worthwhile magazine posted something similar. In my comment on the post, I share my theory about why I think the fall seems to be teeming with possibility for some. As the leaves begin to change, essentially dying away, we see the seasons of our own lives more clearly. Change is inevitable. As we see how nature embraces the change of the seasons, it offers us hope, as we embark on our own forthcoming adventures.

Change can be a scary thing, but nothing grows without it. I don't want it to be summer all the time (which is why I moved out of South Florida ;). Status quo is comfortable... and it's also boring. By ceasing the struggle against impending changes, we can welcome the new season, and simply allow the changes to happen. We can do this knowing that if we don't like what manifests, that another change is just around the corner. We can also know that we have the power to initiate it.

So as fall approaches, new opportunities come with it. We can choose to fight it, fear it, deny it, or embrace it. Change is going to happen - it's one of the few things we can be certain of. Learning to model nature's acceptance of the inevitable, can give us something to look forward to. The promise of new possibilities.

Tony D. Clark
Success from the Nest

Be a star!

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Often, when I'm unsure of a thing, I look at its opposite. Often, that is so appalling, that it blows my uncertainty away.

Take change, for example. Or rather, not change. Everything the same, day after day. Riding in a car but the scenery never changes. The weather is always the same. Same breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Same conversations over and over.

It reminds me of Groundhog Day, that movie with Bill Murray. He's stuck on the same day, living it over and over, but he's the only one who realizes it. Everyone around him is doing the exact same thing they did the day before without variation.

Seems to me that the Bill Murray character had two choices in that movie: Do as everyone else is doing -- same old, same old, or do something new and different every day. He chooses change. He reads books, he learns to play the piano, he talks to people and now really listens to what they have to say. He changes, he grows, he becomes a better person.

But what if he had chosen not-change? What if he had continued to do the same things one day after another?

Would you have watched the movie?

Bill Murray would have blended into the masses. That movie needed a star.

We can think of our own lives as movies, a great, continuous showing of each day of our lives. We're the writer, director, and actor. We can make our life-movies whatever we want them to be. Same old scene, action, and dialog day after day? Who wants to watch that? Or worse, live that?

Imagine how great, how fascinating our life-movies would be if we incorporated some change into it every day. Not always a big change -- maybe just trying a new food, or talking to a stranger. Sometimes bigger changes -- heading off to school, or to a distant place. Change is essential to making a life-movie worth watching and, more importantly, worth starring in.

The camera is rolling. Are you ready for your close-up?

Gretchen Stahlman -- The Year in Red

The Zen of Change

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Change is as inevitable as the sun rising and setting each day. I believe if we're not changing, we're dying on some level, and to embrace change is to embrace life and all its facets. When we fear or resist change, it becomes more difficult to deal with. Imagine fearing the sunrise. It's going to happen. You can either live with it or make yourself miserable trying to resist it.

If we accept that change happens, and accept it when it happens, we prepare ourselves to function in the new reality, whatever it may be, rather than expending our energy railing against it. Much of the change in our lives is simply beyond our control, and to rail against it is as futile as tilting at windmills. It is better to accept that change happens and roll with it, all the while spending time and energy on the parts of our lives that are within our control.

Monica Ricci - Your Life. Organized.

My Sky Has Five Directions

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What is Change?

To be somewhere else, to be something, someone else. To be other. To become other.

We don't like what we are and have now. We don't like where we are now. And so we strive to change that.

Change - and Personal Change especially - is often seen as a movement towards a different, better place.

We take out our maps of the world and our compasses, and plot our direction. We see four basic directions to choose and combine: North, East, South and West. That is how we understand our modern world, and so we start moving to change.

But in many old cultures the people had not four, but five directions.  In addition to the four we define, they all thought the 'Here' to be equally as valid as a direction.

In context of Personal Change, the Here is very important. It gives the basis for the Change. Knowing where you stand is paramount to knowing the direction in which you want to move, as all directions are relative. What is North to me might very well be South to you, seen from where we stand in relation to each other.

But I would like to take the idea of Here even further, and explore it as a valid direction to move towards, and not only from. Have you considered the question of "Who are you?" lately. Changes are that you have, and didn't like the answer. So you set out to change who you are. I think there are several layers of who we are: Who we are - on the outside. The face we show the world. Who we are - on the inside. The person we hide from the world, whom we fear to expose. And then there is the person who we were meant to be. The one person only we can be, but maybe never actually were.

Focusing on the Here we might consider these facets of ourselves. And Personal Change might become not "Becoming someone else" but "Becoming who we really are".

traumwind

Change is a way of life

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For some unknown reason, I'm having a devil of a time writing to this month's topic. My mother has told me for years that I am unable to cope with change. Like any good Southern Belle, I've smiled gracefully and said, "All right, Mother."

Inside, I've seethed every time she's ever said that to me. I spent high school in a boarding school. Every couple of months, I packed up my most precious possessions and shifted between school and home. I deliberately selected a college in another state and embraced the move. In fact, I've settled into this pattern where I move every couple of years.

Yes, this means that every eighteen to twenty-four months, something compels me to pack up everything I own and willfully inflict change on myself.

Not bad for someone who supposedly doesn't handle change well.

Truth be told, change has been a part of who I am since I was a teenager. It's part of my lifestyle. It's part of my personal life (my home is a revolving door). It's part of my professional life (things are constantly changing at work, and part of my job is to make sure the changes are invisible). And while there are random times when I wish that everything wouldn't change at the exact same time, I embrace change.

For me, each change is a learning experience. It's a chance to see a new place, to meet new people, to learn new skills. It's also a chance to flex my muscles, find a new way to use my well-honed skills. Regardless of how a change comes about or the nature of the change, it is a powerful motivator and instigator of personal growth. I wouldn't be nearly the resource I am if change weren't such a commonplace part of my life.

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Rebecca Thomas