Travel Dreams

I just came across my favourite recent picture of myself and I want to share it. It’s me in Florence, Italy with the famous Ponte Vecchio bridge in the background and my arm resting on the wall that banks the side of the Arno River.

Compositionally, it’s not great and it sure isn’t that flattering, but the reason I love it is that I was in a city I adore and I had just had the thought, “I should buy an apartment here!” Buying an apartment in Italy is not practical for so many reasons and I have since discounted that as an idea, in favour of renting a place when I go to Florence. But what I love about the picture is that I had this idea that expanded what is possible for me, from being a tourist who wistfully leaves after way too few days to being someone who brings work gear and rents a place for a few months as she works on a large project. I imagine mornings spent working on the laptop, and afternoons of exploring, enjoying and lattes in quaint piazzas.

This is more than realistic. My former coach, Cynthia Morris, spent a year travelling around Europe writing, coaching and being outrageously creative and chronicled it all in her blog Journey JuJu. She was inspired by Timothy Ferris, who wrote the best-seller The Four-Hour Workweek. In this mobile information age, location isn’t a restriction to travelling and living a life that delights and inspires. Just check out Cynthia and Timothy and then get started on creating your own travel dream.

The Power of Joy

I recently read an impressive book called If I Am So Smart, Why Can’t I Lose Weight? Tools to Get It Done! by weight-loss coach Brooke Castillo. In it she presented a process that isn’t about food or exercise but about the beliefs and habits that keep us stuck in self-destructive patterns.

Brooke’s discussion about joy really spoke to me. While it’s natural and healthy to derive some pleasure from eating, getting too much joy from food, will make it extremely difficult to give up. However, if I have joy in my life from a lot of sources, the need to eat for the joy of it will drop. Brooke challenged her readers to estimate how much of their total joy came from food and eating, and then to build into their lives additional things that would give them joy, so that food would contribute a smaller proportion.

I can’t help thinking that this has applications beyond food. Activities such as mindless television and computer games can work like food to give us low-level joy when we haven’t build enough really satisfying pleasure into our lives. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have so many things in our lives that we truly love that we don’t care about the Doritos or who’s dancing with the stars?

So, what about you? Is there enough pleasure in your life? What would really give you joy? What would you love to be doing? When are you going to start building it in?

For myself, I hosted a games night last Friday, I’ve started a sewing project to revel in my creativity, I’ve planned more visits with my nieces and nephews and more fun time with my husband, and I’ve recognized that, for now, joy also looks like a good book and a latte at Starbucks and I’m giving myself permission to indulge in that joy, too.

And Then, The Crash

I started 2010 with lists of what I was going to do, who I was going to be, habits I was going to embrace. I wasn’t naïve enough to think that when I did/was all of these things, my life would be perfect, but I sure did think I’d created some good plans. But my wounded little girl and/or my soul and/or my heart wasn’t impressed. It rebelled. Hugely.

Everything I did that first full week of 2010 didn’t work out. Start on the new actions I wanted to take. Nope. Focus on the habits. Nope. OK, then just meditate and pray all day! Nope. It was as if my soul was saying, “Just give yourself a break. Wait.”

During that week, I read an article by life coach Cheryl Richardson (www.cherylrichardson.com) in which she counselled doing just that – wait for the energy to move you. She said that rather than struggling with a huge pile of papers that needed to be filed, she waited until she felt like doing it and the project got done easily and in much less time than it would have if she had slogged through it.

Admittedly, we can’t just wait on everything in our lives but I’ve been giving the concept a try and it has been working for me. I had been dreading reorganizing my clothes closet but the energy moved me last weekend and I was able to complete the project in a way that was fun and productive.

As far as those great lists for 2010, I’m focusing on them now and having success. I think it’s because I honoured my resistance, allowed it to be OK and waited until the energy was there.

My Planning Getaway

Every year, my husband Don and I take some time to review where we are with our lives and set intentions for the coming year. We usually go away for a night or two. It’s an opportunity for us to connect and to share deeply about what is most important to us.

This year, we left on New Year’s Day, which was a Friday, and spent two nights in a hotel offering great weekend rates. We identified our most important intentions and then created 25-, 10-, 5-, 1-year and 90-day action steps that would take us in the direction of our intentions. We identified qualities we wanted to develop in the coming year. We asked ourselves questions that shifted our thinking. For example, I asked Don what had made our summer projects in the garden so successful. We saw that we had a long-term vision, which we chunked into weekends. Each Saturday had a list of steps and we were able to see the results of our work at the end of the day. We can now use the approach we used in the garden to create other projects in the future.

The value of our annual getaway is that we focus on what we want to create and we support each other in making it happen. It’s a real benefit to do the planning somewhere away from home because it creates a full break from the ordinary, and from the errands and projects that inevitably grab our attention when we are at home.

I appreciate being focused and clear about what is important to me as I begin the new year. And I appreciate beginning the new year with a clear vision that my husband and I can share.