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I got to meet, hug, feed and give laundry to the stupendously wise, beautiful and compassionate Susan Piver Saturday night.

Another reason Twitter rules!

I had loved Susan’s work for years but I was too shy to approach her.

But along comes Twitter and we start tweeting and then Susan had a question for me and suddenly, we were comparing birthdays (one day apart) and numbers on the Enneagram (we’re both 4’s) and book business blues.

Finding a new friend.

Then along comes her new book The Wisdom of a Broken Heart(buy it, trust me,) and her drive-around-the-country book tour (she may be coming to your town) and presto! She’s in my house, doing laundry and eating Bob’s risotto.

Isn’t life grand?

We set down for a quick video chat before Susan headed to Canada. She’s an extraordinary speaker and we give you a peek at our new project so watch and hopefully, our conversation will give you inspiration for choosing your life this week.

Info on Susan’s tour. Go see her, she’s the best!

I was raised in the religion called “Self-Employment.”

As a child, I remember many a summer evening, lounging on the floor of my uncle Walter’s house in Bedford, Indiana, listening to my dad and Walter and Uncle Pryce talk business.

No. Not talk, pontificate. Extol. Preach.

The theme was always the same: be in business for yourself. Business was god. With a small g.

But still, god. (Yes, we went to church, too.)

When I got my first job out of film school, as an assistant to a literary agent in LA, my dad said, “Why did you get a job? I thought you wanted to be a writer?“

Oh no, Dad was not a patron of the arts. He believed that I would make more money working for myself than working for the Man.

My Dad did not have in his possession the statistics that most writers earn poop.

This week I feel like I returned to my family roots by writing about being self-employed.

It may be a new direction for me, working with self-employed women (and maybe men, I like men, I live with two of them and they are very lovely) around the inner work of being self-employed.

I’m feeling such a nice tickling about this idea.

In the meantime, in case you missed them, here are some great things to know about – not just for the self-employed.

Swooning

I’ve only been reading Danielle LaPorte for a few months. Oh the grief over all the juicy good I have missed. She’s sexy, truthful and loving. Good stuff.

Swigging Tequila

I sometimes paint myself into a corner with my writing, feeling I have to be serious or comforting or… Why do I tell myself that? That’s a topic for another post.

I love reading the very naughty Naomi Dunford’s very very very popular blog.

(I wrote a guest post this week. I don’t really swig tequila. It’s a metaphor. Or a joke. Or both. )

Admitting Mistakes

I’m putting on the Big Virtual Retreat next week. I made some marketing mistakes promoting it. I feel bad about them. Here is where I talk with the uber smart and very grounded Dave Navarro about what I learned doing this project.

Do I really make these faces?

You know Molly Gordon’s brilliance, right? If not, you are missing out big time.  I made a video blog post for her and you have to got to see the very odd expression the video froze on.  I laughed out loud when I clicked over.

Everybody loves Christine!

Christine Kane and I met when we did an event together a few years back. I fell in love with her immediately, everybody does. But what has made me sit up and take notice is how she has gone from struggling artist to paying off her mortgage!  Read my post about depletion, and learn more about the amazing Ms. Kane!

Hungry Ghosts, Part 2

Where the sexy sharp ass Jennifer Howard tells you how everything is really going to be alright. This woman has a brain and half. Plus she’s intuitive! Plus she’s really really cool.

I hope all these goodies help you remember that life is a wondrous game for playing and failure is just another label.

The lovely Dr. Jennifer Howard, gifted psychotherapist, spiritual teacher and all around sharp ass (like a smart ass only smarter), and I befriended each other after admiring each other’s Tweets for a year or so.

Dr. Jennifer and I recorded a half convo/ half rant about why we get stuck, why we burn out, and what it might have to do with our energy patterns. Here’s the transcribed, annotated version, part 1.

We whined chatted for a minute (or fifteen) about work challenges and our bowels, then launched into the first question:

Jen Louden: Dr. Jennifer, you have the Ph.D., o wise one, tell me, how do you help people— especially soloprenuers – when they’re feeling utterly stuck and burned out?

Dr. Jennifer Howard: (Laughs, then takes a deep breath and wonders what she has gotten herself into) Jen, you know there are so many layers to feeling stuck and burned out. One layer is that I would have my clients look at their business in general and how it is organized. Then, I would ask how they’ve run their energy in the past in their lives.

Jen makes little murmuring noises, which would be very annoying were you actually listening to the recording. So be glad you aren’t.

Jen: What do you mean by run your energy? Immediately my little ears perk up.

Dr. Jennifer: We all run our energy in different ways that either serve us or burn us out. We distort our auras according to our psychological defenses. Your characterology (isn’t that a cool word?) will habitually block your energy flow. The way you close down different parts of your body – the way you aren’t in your legs (How did you know that about me Dr. Jennifer, Jen thinks and shivers)– different chakras get out of balance.

You know, a lot of entrepreneurs are very high-energy, driven people and that comes from personal strengths as well as different childhood woundings.

Jen wonders what her childhood wounds are because she is the most driven Comfort Queen she’s ever met. Did someone beat her with very plush pillows? Jen searches her memory.

These might cause them to feel not good enough so there can be an experience of perpetual chasing something, that terrible hungry ghost feeling of not enough. “I’m not enough, it’s not enough, gotta get more, gotta get more…”

It’s hard to find balance unless you have dealt with what’s keeping you from embodying it to begin with.

Dr. Jennifer thinks about how never ending that hungry ghost feeling can be. Jen does the same on her end.

Dr. Jennifer: Now…then there’s other people who do the opposite and they don’t generally become entrepreneurs.  They’re people who hold back on life.  They might look at the lives of entrepreneurs and say, ‘I’m not taking all that on. Let me just get a job.’  Who’d blame them?

General cackling. Moment of silence while both J’s consider their secret work fantasies: Jen’s is working in a fancy cheese store where she can be a cheese snob; Dr. Jennifer’s is teaching dance classes.

Jen: That’s a very interesting thought, that people who do decide to be entrepreneurs might have a different set of challenges to deal with around burnout. We might need to learn more ways to ground ourselves.

Dr. Jennifer: And to learn to be reasonable – I know for myself, sometimes I can take on more than is humanly possible.

Jen snorts her agreement. It sounds like a piglet snuffling. Dr. Jennifer graciously laughs. Both are wondering if they will ever get this “humanly possible” limit in their life times.

Jen: So how would you coach me to stop doing more than is humanly possible?

Jen is always talking to experts and trying to get free advice. Shameless self-help hussy.

Dr. Jennifer: I would ask you to talk about when it all began. Go back to when you remember this starting. Did mom and dad say or imply you weren’t good enough? Maybe you had to compete with other siblings or other people in your community? I would want you to look at what the driving force was back then, that now has the negative consequences that you can’t listen to yourself.

For me, I think it is based on having been on asthma medication as a kid, which was like uppers. This really distorted my own ability to tap into my own limits.

Jen: For me it’s a combination of wanting to be like my Dad, having a ton of creative energy and nobody to help me harness it as a kid, but also getting shamed a bit for being so big, so much. I still have a lot of creative shame.

Dr. Jennifer makes empathetic sounds and Jen feels less ashamed.

Dr. Jennifer: I think it was my own learned biological pushing for breath, feeling the meds in my body and waiting to live in a more normal way. I’d have this engine driving me even when I was exhausted.

For many of us on a real practical level, it’s also about infrastructure. The internal infrastructure and the external infrastructure of support and systems.

Jen: Somebody said to me once, ‘You have to sometimes slow down to speed up later.’ It really makes sense and what I love about what you just said is that if you’re having a hard time figuring out how to ground and slow down you might need to untangle an old pattern and you might need mechanical help, like a good VA or a bookkeeper.

So let’s say if you’re constantly planning too much and you decide that you need a better calendar system and a better VA– you get those things in place and things don’t shift, then you know there’s an underlying pattern that you’re dealing with.

Here is where Part 1 ends. And you want more.

Part 2 continues tomorrow on Dr. Jennifer Howard’s blog. On behalf of both Jennifer’s (one of whom is me), I hope you’ve enjoyed this peek into our brains and you’ll join Dr. Jennifer for more peeking tomorrow.

I’ve been contemplating depletion a lot lately.

Partially because I’m offering five retreats in the next four months and partially because I’ve been on the brink of burning out myself.

And because I’ve talked to so many clients and friends lately who have wondrous lives but can’t enjoy them because they are crispy fried.

Charred.

I’m a learner, learning is what I do, so I reached out to Dr. Charlie Gilkey for a smart guy’s perspective on self-care and comfort. When I start to chew my own tail, I know I need an outside perspective.

We recorded a great conversation – it’s worth your time. Charlie’s witty insights include:

You understand replenishing with your mind but you don’t understand it deeply if you’re not doing it a lot. You know you need self-care intellectually but until you do it and see the results, you don’t get it.

You grow through discomfort but if you’re too uncomfortable, you can’t grow. (Thanks Charlie for summing up my 19 years of work so succinctly. This is why I dig you so much.)

You can’t package comfort like McDonald’s fries. What resources and fills you up has to be tailored to you and your actual challenges.

Retreating gives you the same thing good coaching does – an outside observer and process so you get past your blind spots.

When you do a retreat, there is a trust you place in the people who creating it that you don’t always place in  yourself. You haven’t harnessed your own resources yet so you don’t trust yourself.  A retreat is a way to stop questioning everything you are thinking and doing, you can be just in the process and thus renew yourself.

Listen in for lots more groovy insights.

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Virtual_Retreat_Call with Charlie and Jen

P.S.

Love yourself INTO action and OUT OF depletion with me and 12 other world famous teachers… without even getting out of your pj’s!
The Virtual Retreat package includes:

•  A copy of “How To Retreat,” an eBook that helps you let go of the fear and shows you how to create the time.
•  Gentle ‘Get Ready’ emails – to help you prepare for your self-caring-est weekend ever.
•  Exclusive access to a members-only blog, where you will get untold amounts of support and encouragement, PLUS…
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