Fankle 1#

You know how sometimes you are ready to pop – to leave the old stuck encrusted place and get your love going? I coach ready-to-pop people and last week I coached Lisa Sonora Beam and she is popping and flying and you can benefit.

Introducing her Creative Entrepreneur Strategy Sessions

You want a systematic, doable, step-by-step plan to develop a very healthy relationship with your creative process and your business, so you can follow your bliss? Hello! Of course you do.

Lisa, I’m dancing with you!

Fankle 2#

Thanks to Claire for this:

I read the phrase “Satisfaction Finder and I’ve never read anything which resonated more!  I love it!  It’s so simple, and it’s where its grace lies – little by little, small step by small step.  Thank you Jen, for reminding us that we are “enough”!

And Vicki,  your Comfort Cafe post made me grin and grin,

I’m already am beginning to feel happier.  I don’t have to do it all, and I certainly don’t have to do it all right now!!  That realization was HUGE for me.  Thank you, Jen!”

It’s only been two weeks and the kit is flying out the door – 121 sold as of 5/25/10 – but you know what really makes me hop and twirl and leap around my studio? Your life is no longer spilling away while you fret about what is enough or what to choose or how to feel good about what you are doing!

I talked to a coaching client yesterday who bought the bonus package (I think there is one session left) and she had all these great insights from reading The Satisfaction Finder, and we spent the hour working on her freedom to want what she wants, to do the things that get her excited, for the love of it.

Her courage and insight and resolve took my breath away.

In the end, that’s the coolest thing about knowing how to find satisfaction –  you get to declare happiness for yourself.

Fankle #3

Havi is my guest teacher again this year The Luscious, Nurturing Get Your Writing Done While Laughing Your Butt Off and Maybe Crying a little Too Writer’s Retreat which is the best thing ever. I love doing Shiva Nata with her and her wisdom brings an extra lovely shine of learning and permission to the retreat.

Havi’s doing this sweet small thing, opening her own yoga studio, in Portland, OR. She needs help. So get some of her groovy stuff so she can get a floor installed so I can drive down and do Shiva Nata with her and then hang out with Mark and Charlie and maybe finally meet Chris and Jolie, then go down to Salem and hug Naseem.

Fankle #4

Speaking of Naseem, she has written the best novel I have read in years. It is the perfect book club book, the perfect book to read with your family this summer - oh my god, read this with your family – that would be so brilliant! She is my new friend and I love her. But her writing? It will change you so deeply and call you out of the cave of your heart to love even more.

Fankle #5

Pace and Kyeli are hosting this incredibly well organized, deeply amazing World Changing Writing Workshop with the wisest bloggers and writers teaching… and me. If you write, you must check it out.

What’s your wiry fankle? Tell me what’s up in your world, what you are excited about, I’d love to hear!

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.

to save a file to your computer, right-click or option (apple) click on the link, and choose “Safe File As…” or “Save Link As…”

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…
• 13 heart-expanding mini-retreats with world-renowned authors and healers over three days.
• Easy-to-download recordings and transcripts of each mini-retreat – so you can come and go as you please. And use the material for years to come.

If you sign up before February 5th, you get a $50 discount!

Save Texas retreat save 30$ before February 6th, Wisconsin retreat is almost full.

Fankle 1# – Tribal Authors

I’ve had a crush on Jonathan Fields ever since I bought his yoga video oh probably 10 years ago. I love a guy in a bandanna who is gently telling me what to do with my body. (coy blush)

Fast forward a year or so ago and we connected via Twitter over his first book, Career Renegade.  He didn’t contact me so I could help him — he wanted to see if he could help me! Major mensch.

Watching Jonathan develop his kickassiness via his blog this year has been so enlightening but you know what made me fall in love even more with him?  When a client o’ mine signed up for his Tribal Author Camp and then had a family emergency and instead of him saying, “Shine it on baby,” he gave her the recordings for the entire weekend. As we say around my house, “Good form! Good form!”

Jonathan interviewed me via video Skype last week on my Tribal Author Book Biz Plan – watch me admit that I don’t have one and talk about what I’m doing to keep reinventing myself.

Thanks bandanna man, I love learning from you.

Fankle 2# – She Does it Again

How does Cairene MacDonald keep doing it?  I want to be her when I grow up!  She takes ideas that could be so surface and pat and she digs into them and makes you see new ways of being.

Lots of my peeps at the Comfort Cafe are big fans. She was one of our Wise Persons last year (we have a call every month with someone, um wise, who teaches us something wise – get the theme?).

Picture this: I’m hanging out with my Lillian (she’s 15) and we’re talking about how she can’t decide whether to date this boy and how making decisions is hard for her in general (I’m talking even ordering in a resturant) I’m trying to explain to her “good enough is good enough” and how you have to leave the not quite right and be in the unknown so the right stuff can find you (can you imagine how annoying it is to have me as a mother?) and then

THIS POST ARRIVES IN MY IN-BOX.

Oh. How. Perfect.

(and no, not because she talks about me.)

Fankle #3

I’m all et-up (as my grandmom used to say) with retreats these days.  The Virtual Retreat and my live mini-retreats. I’m on fire with new material to help people end the dreaded deadly cycle of depletion.

Then I read Andrea Lee‘s last newsletter in which she says, “If you’re stuck in any way, or even if you’re not stuck but you want to amp up your flow of energy, ask yourself:

In what way could I be applying the things I sell, teach or stand for, to myself?”

I remembered I have canceled not one, but two, retreats this month.

I got a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.

But I have so much to do!

I have to keep pushing through!

Oh my god, I will not believe that lie again!

So here is the word: Starting Friday at noon, 24 hours of total retreat time.

I will not be a liar who sells one thing and does another.

P.S. Next two live retreats are soon:

Wisconsin, near Madison.

Texas, near Dallas. Early bird price for Texas goes up February 27th. I’ve added local beloved yoga teacher Brandie Werner to our day – easy restorative yoga, yes ma’am!

Fankle #4 – Another Mensch!

Charlie Gilkey has been my coach and he is certainly my friend.

I love him because he is so smart and yet he still wants to talk to me.

I love him because he is so smart but gives away too much stuff (like me) and refuses to do sleazy marketing stuff (hopefully like me).

Let me admit right now: I am a planner whore — and I created a few myself back in the days when The Life Organizer was a date book.

Isn’t there something so Garden of Eden about hoping you will find the perfect planner?

Charlie thinks so too (or he’s a planner whore, too,  you’ll have to ask him) so he keeps creating these cool planners for creative types.

It’s all about chunking it down to the smallest action.

Action, people, action. Which might make some planner whores uneasy because you would actually not just be planning but creating.

Please check out Charlie’s hip and helpful planners for creative people.