Editing our selves

A friend of mine has embarked on a journey into YouTube and is learning how to broadcast herself using a ‘vlog’. I absolutely love it when I can learn from my friends and this time is no exception. For example, I am blogging here because another friend ventured into blogging and said, ‘look what you can do’. So I looked and then I followed suit.

Friends can challenge us to think

I’m doing the same thing with vlogging, with a little help from my friend. It’s time I posted again and I’m having trouble deciding exactly what I want to say. It’s different from writing, where I can take as long as I like to write my piece and you can’t hear my ‘ums’. Which brings me to editing and the topic of Julie’s last vlog. I thought it was brilliant. Have a look – it’s short!

Editing criterion

I love metaphors and Julie is using editing as a metaphor. Although she doesn’t talk for long, it made me think about what I edit about myself and why. I like to edit out the things that don’t show me in a good light; that’s a given. What’s more interesting though is what I consider as a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ light. It’s probably not what you would see as good or bad about me. I’ve sometimes had feedback to that effect.

Trusting what the reader will decide

For many years, I edited out that I was psychic/intuitive. In the 80s, it didn’t seem to go down well in my workplace and I didn’t want to lose credibility. When I left the corporate jobs I’d had in the 80s, I swore that I was not going to split off that part of myself again and, for the most part, I haven’t.

Developing a reputation

In the intervening years, I have put a lot of time and energy into developing my talent as well as honing my accuracy and discernment to go with it. I’ve also done a lot of work on my ability to work on myself because I have to be able to use myself as the instrument of my craft. I see it as an integral part of my ability to work with my clients, in whatever setting. You could call it my ‘professional development’.

Recently, I have been looking for contract work in the world of organizations, rather than only working one-on-one with coaching and counseling clients as I have been for the last decade. So here comes the question again: do I include this unique skill, one that I have honed over the past 20 years, and present it along with all the other skills and experience that I have? So far, I notice that I have edited this part out.

Unique twist

Given what Julie has invited me to think about in her recent vlog, I might want to reconsider this choice. Instead of just not mentioning it, maybe I ought to present my intuitive ability as my unique twist. I actually have an extra tool and I’ve used it long enough to be good at it. It’s always there, running in the background, and I consider the information I get that way along with the information I get through all the traditional channels.

Any feedback for me?

For those of you who have worked with me in the past, and who have experienced how I use my intuition in the work I’ve done with you, what was it like for you? Was it useful in the work? Did you have confidence in me as a professional, given that I was using a tool that you rarely encounter in the work-a-day world? Did that impression change over the time that we worked together? I’d love to hear abut your experience. If you haven’t worked with me, do you have an opinion that you’d like to share? Please feel free to weigh in on the subject.

New hybrids

I think that we need every single tool available to us, in order to find solutions to the issues of our time. The old strategies don’t seem to be getting us far enough. I believe that ‘hybrid’ techniques like mine, and new tools such as social networking on the internet, are part of our new business and personal growth frontiers. We used to keep things compartmentalized – business and personal life, science and the arts, spirituality and reason. I’m noticing more cross-pollination lately, and I like it. Maybe we should try opening up to some riskier strategies – with discretion, of course!

Book Review: Richard Bach’s Hypnotizing Maria

What a powerful little book! It’s another one of those books that ‘fell off the shelf’ at the library and I just had to take it home. I’ve been reading Richard Bach since I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the hot new book that was being passed around my grade nine class. He captured my imagination by writing about esoteric subjects in fiction, with enough metaphor to allow the richness that I love in a book that is about to expand my consciousness. Richard comes back over and over to the ways in which we create our own reality. I never seem to tire of it!

Richard was friends with the infamous Jane Roberts and Robert Butts of ‘Seth’ fame. I didn’t know that until long after Jane was dead but it figures. The concepts in his books are not all that different from what I was reading in the ‘Seth’ books. Not that I’m accusing Richard of stealing ideas; I think that great ideas makes sense and can be written about by many people and enjoyed and explored by still many more.

This latest book looks at the idea of how we could be creating our own reality and how we might be able to change how we do it. It was a timely book for me to pick up because my most recent blog was about the changes that I expect to see in the near future. This new decade feels important to me because of the huge potential and imperative we have to make changes that can make our lives more peaceful, bountiful, loving and creative. I don’t really want to live in a world that isn’t like that so I have been giving thought to how I can live my life as close to fulfilling what I see as my life purpose as I possibly can.

I see my purpose as helping individuals and groups to find their own unique power so that they can find expression for their talents and share them in their communities. Hopefully, if as many of us as possible can do that, we will be able to build a bridge to the kind of society that I imagine is possible.

Since I regard my life as a petri dish for my ideas, I am constantly looking for ways in which I can become more self-aware and integrate my philosophies into my life. In the weeks since the new year, I have been reading two books. Hypnotizing Maria is one and Sitting in the Fire by Arnold Mindell is the other. Whenever I read books at the same time, I look for how they might be related and I am incubating some theories about these two.

I invite you to watch my latest vlog to see my review of Hypnotizing Maria and what it brings to mind for me. I explain what he means by hypnotizing. Due to the time constraints on YouTube and the space constraints on my web site, as well as here on WordPress, I will let you go to YouTube to watch it.

Right here, in writing, I can expand and say that I think that I have hypnotized myself around two main areas: 1) how acceptable it is for me to say what I really think about the kind of society we have the potential to create and 2) that I am working hard at redefining what the concept of money means to me, relative to what it means in our global economy. Talk about a big challenge for myself in the coming year!

I’ll have to come back on this topic next time. I hope I have inspired you to make the time to read the book and I look forward to your feedback. Happy reading!