Dear Glorious Readers,

After more than a year of hit and miss newsletters - which was the perfect way for me to be writing -- I've entered a new period of clarity about my purpose and how I want to serve.

Notwithstanding an expensive disaster with a business/marketing team I hired last year (more about what I learned in future issues), I've found perfect new support to help me grow down and into my business. What do I mean by down?

Author and Jungian, James Hillman, talks about growing down into your life's purpose, learning to have roots and be connected to the everyday, instead of always flying higher. What I realized a few months back was I've always entertained a fantasy of my career, what business coach Mark Silver calls the "Lottery Syndrome."

Instead of creating a plan to best develop and share my gifts over time, I kept entertaining fantasies of the Big Opportunity. As Mark wrote in his most recent e-zine, "Our culture is caught up in 'lottery syndrome'.The Big Thing that is going to save you and your business, and catapult you to instant fame and fortune. Be careful, because these opportunities have the power to disrupt and distract all of the great foundational, momentum-building work you've been doing on your business."

What I've realized is I never worked very consistently on the 'great foundation'-- it seemed far too boring to me. After all, I'm a writer. A creative type.

I'm working on that foundation now. Stayed tuned for more about that. But for now, know that I'll be coming to you every week on Wednesdays. How is that for foundation?

What are you doing to build your foundation? Share your thoughts with me at Jennifer@ComfortQueen.com. I can't promise that I'll be able to personally reply to each email but, sometimes all we need to move forward with our plans is to tell someone. Tell me.

In gratitude,

Comfort Gift
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Self-Care Minder
Habits and Practices by Jennifer Louden
First Published in Body+Soul Magazine

It's 9 a.m., I'm back from dropping off my daughter at school, and it's time to work on My Novel, the one that I've talked about writing for years and have actually been working on for four. I'm so committed to writing this opus, I've downscaled my life, shrunk my coaching practice, and stopped saying yes to many outside commitments.

But by 9:30, I've already checked my e-mail four times, becoming more and more distracted and less and less engaged with my characters and my story in the process. Once again, I've fallen into the clutches of that bugaboo of human endeavor: bad, or what I prefer to call less-than-optimal, habits, those patterns of repetitive behavior that divert us from doing something truly satisfying, that don't support the life we wish to create or the person we want to become.

It's a universal conundrum--why we choose to repeat behaviors that aren't in our best interest. Eating the tenth cookie--again; passing on exercise--again; surfing the Web ad nauseum. These "shadow comforts" can drain our vitality and impede our most cherished plans. "I'm going to get the watercolors out tonight," we say. "Just let me watch one more Seinfield rerun."

While it's unrealistic (and way too saintly) to think we can get rid of all our less-than-stellar habits, the good news is that we can trade in some of our more pernicious proclivities for patterns of repetitive behavior that do support the life we wish to create--good habits, if you will, or what some leaders in the human-potential field call "intentional practices." Like a bad habit, a good habit is something you do with great consistency but--here’s the key difference... Read more...

Site Delights
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http://jenniferlouden.typepad.com/
and be sure to read some of the insightful comments, too.

Comfort Wishes
Thomas Edison was old and he had a hunger
That had never been quenched,
him being mostly deaf most of his life

So he hired a pianist to come and play great waltzes- and loud.
"Louder, play louder," he shouted.
The man played louder,
and then louder still.
Edison shook his head.

The inventor rolled his desire around on his tongue:
and then he lunged
sunk his teeth into the piano leg and
held on like my dog.

Schubert tuned his vertebrae
Strauss tickled his mandible
Chopin tootled and tingled every phalange and phalanx.
Edison swallowed. Sat back on heels and nodded in time with the beat.

Wishing you enough fierce desire to bite when necessary and enough sense to
let go when full.