It’s time for a little announcement: TOOT TOOT.

The Writing Gym is open! This one focuses on blogging.

Here’s what membership entails. Plus: It’s almost stinkin’ free for the month of February.  

So who joins this gym?

Writers and professionals who have started a blog that supports a business, a book idea or to share ideas and experiences—and would like to keep the damn thing going!

The benefits of membership?

• You want the kind of playful kick in your pants that will get—and keep—your writing going, and help your blog grow and develop into something exciting and suprising.
• You could use both 1) coaching to move past the fear and stuck spots and 2) writing tips and creative idea generating.
• You’d like to be part of a community of writers—but without it being a time drain or even having to leave home.
•  You’d like to find the right first-person voice that feels comfortable—and supports the purpose of your blog.
• You’d like to get over the fear of being exposed in public as a writer.
•  You’d like to know how on earth you can keep coming up with ideas, topics and different ways to write your pieces.

What a Writing Gym Membership includes: 

• 1 x month group coaching call: 12pm – 1pm Pacific time, the last Thursday of the month. Includes: A short talk on a writing issue; Q&As and some writing time. Each call will end with an assignment for writers to bring to their blogs the  next month. (The calls will be recorded.)
•  Bi-weekly “try-this” emails with a tip or idea to use in your writing.
• Feedback on one one-page piece of writing/month
• Unlimited email access
• Cost: $15 for February. $32/month through July.

To get the most out of your membership 

Be  prepared to give a minimum of two hours a month to your writing. This includes the one-hour phone call. Be prepared to write a minimum of one blog posting a month.  The gym will help you find a way to sustain your blog writing in a way that works for your life, schedule and personality.  All you have to do is be committed to giving it a shot and seeing the fun in it.

The point here is to get strong, sinewy writing muscles and have a great time doing it.  To join the gym, email me to sign up:

tatyana@tatyanamishel.com

COMING SOON: Paypal and a proper online sign up form.THANK YOU! 

 

Kids bring a splash of passion to daily life.

A while ago I was at a dinner and got cornered by a woman, newly divorced after a long marriage and a bit tipsy on wine and tequila who was in that What-Do-I-Do-Now threshold. She asked me this  question:

“Tell me, what are you passionate about?”

Oh, Jesus, I thought. Really? Aren’t we past all that now? Instead I  mumbled back, “Oh, I’ve stopped hanging my hat on that kind of thinking.” It seems everyone was chasing after passion around Y2K and now the frenzy has died.

Passion. Everyone wants it. And why? Did you know “Passion” is from the latin word “Passio” which means to Suffer? (To suffer for what you love, actually; I learned this on an Easter radio broadcast of Bach’s Passion of the Christ.)

Here’s my 2c: Passion doesn’t have to be about WHAT you do. Why not make it about HOW you do; how you exist inside your skin and move through life and absord the world around you, connect with people you care about. Look at kids and how passionately they express themselves. They’re not hanging their hats on one THING that makes them passionate. It’s just how they are.

OK, so yes, I get it —  it adds purpose to life to be passionate about something. But if you can tap into a current of deep feeling and caring inside yourself, you’ll find passion is tied to the simple things in life starting with being alive and connecting to whatever it is you find beautiful.

If you’ve lost your passion compass, my advice: Slow down and start paying attention to the little things that bring you into the moment with deep appreciation: a beautiful piece of writing, music, the sunrise, a conversation with someone you love, rewatching a favorite movie, staring at the water or your child’s face. You name it.

Passion? It’s inside you. Find it there first and then protect it and share it and nurture it.

And have fun with it, LOTS of fun.

I wrote a post a while back on my dislike of the elevator pitch. Why do we have to sum up What We Do and Who We Are in one canned self-promoting snap?

So hallelujah to my smart biz/communications consultant friend Therese Beale who helps businesses get their stories straight. She writes a great blog post on a kinder, gentler more human approach to how we talk about what we do in Skip the Elevator Pitch: What’s Your Sentence?

It’s important, especially as a small biz owner or an entrepreneur, to speak clearly and visually about what you do, why you do it and the killer benefits. And to convey the juice of what you do in a way that raises intrigue and antennae and gets people thinking about everyone that might need your services.

It’s also important to find a way to talk about what you do in a way that feels natural and conversational and includes the other person in the conversation.

A parting hint: How do you answer “What do you do?” in a way where you’re talking with someone rather than at them?

And how about experimenting  and playing around with your sentence(s) in a fun and creative way?

Have fun talking about what you do this week!

Going line for line with Frank Bidart

You know how it is when you haven’t written for a while?

Sounds of creak creak coming from the creative well and whispers of Can I still do this rising from the doubting monkey mind.

• Went to Poetry Daily to get  a poem. Thankfully it was a poem by a poet I love, Frank Bidart.
• Went to my local cafe and sat down with a printed out copy of the poem. I read it and then wrote to it line-by-line with this formula: I inverted every word and phrase of Bidart’s poem.
• Wrote to the end and then started to revise.
• Did I feel incompetent and out of shape and frustrated? HELL NO. It felt damn good to sit there communing with poetry. If you were at the Madison Park Starbucks on Dec 30th, and saw a woman sitting by a window with tears in her eyes, well — that was me.

Most of the time we’re writing, it’s the process that matters. We can pull in our critical selves when it’s time to do the revising and editing and prep a piece for public viewing. Until then, what matters is the doing, discovering, playing. Lock the judge in her bedroom until you’re ready for her. But back to kick starting yourself.

Use other writers, their work — or some of your previous work — as support, a writing partner or scaffolding.

Write in between the lines of a poem: write your version of each image or phrase; write the opposite, (as I did in the above example); use the lines  simply as company so you don’t have white space in front of you.

Or, write your version of the next line of that poem all the way through. When you’re done, remove the original poem and see what you have. Even if it feels like it’s going to be nonsensical, you’ll be surprised.

And if it helps to write with someone else’s poem or opening novel paragraph or brilliant essay passage, do it.

In today's world, we're all writers

Are you a writer? Hell yeah!

In today’s world where most of us spend our days writing emails and status reports, texts, tweets, blogs, and simply expressing ourselves and our ideas and intentions with colleagues and friends in some form of written communication — we’re all writers. Or what I call everyday writers.

On this note, I’d like to announce that going forward, my coaching is going to focus on helping people with their writing lives.

So, Tatyana Mishel Coaching is now called Everyday Writer: Coaching for People Who Write. People who write = everyone from formalist poets to creative professionals, solopreneurs and anyone who wants to have a more confident or playful or expressive relationship to their daily writing life, whatever that may be (writing poems, status reports, emails, love letters, blogs, business Web sites).

The coaching work  focuses on everything from how to write with more ease and find your voice to personal coaching around creative blocks and time management.

One of my projects, along with coaching packages, is to create a Writing Gym — a place where people can come together to work their writing muscle in a community and get tips and support and helpful perspectives on expressing themselves in their perfect voice and learning to fly with it. 

This is all new and if you’d like to be a part of it and let me know what you think as it moves along I welcome your thoughts!  I’m in the process of  updating the Web site content to reflect the writing focus.

Here’s to all your creative, expressive endeavors — personal and professional! Because you are creative.

If you wrote your own personal Best Of 2009 List, what would be on it?

I just wrote mine and like any really honest inventory there’s always something revealed: what really matters and a theme or two.

There were plenty of events and accomplishments I could have put down on my Best-Of list that would make sense, such as: having written a novel (albeit at the speed of light). But in my heart it wasn’t fulfilling. I actually felt more moved and excited by the first poem I finally wrote this year, just yesterday. There’s a message here obviously.

What a Best Of list can show you is a potpourri of: What you did; a theme of a year; movement and direction; and point to goals/themes/commitments/devotions/whatever-you-call-them for 2010.

So, I invite you to write your heart-felt personal Best Of* list for 2009. See what you find there.

*What counts as a best-of? Some examples to get you started:

A big-ass accomplishment: You arrived somewhere new and great in your work life, personal life, creative life, spiritual life, child- and pet-raising life.

The internal stuff: You reacted to that same ol’ button-pushing situation in a new and improved way. And YOU know it. Or, you had a conversation that was at a higher level even if for five minutes.

Courage: What did you do that took courage and faith?

Action: Where did you take action to begin to move in the direction of your dreams (even if dreams are fuzzy)? In-the-moment moments: Did you walk in the dusk and stop to look at the silver fairy dust and ethereal light and declare, “Oh WOW”? Because stopping to notice this beauty, some might say, is mastery.

Anything else that whispers in your ear. Trust your instincts of what counts for a 2009 Growth-worthy Best-Of Accomplishment.

Here’s to a kick-ass 2010. You’ve earned it, don’t you think?

After dinner theater at the Mishel household, where they sometimes say "I'm not creative."

I’ve hear this way too often:

“I”m not creative.”

Well let me renounce this type of proclamation with a quick story:

About ten years ago I’m working at a dot-com start up in a creative director positon. I need an idea and I’m talking to one of the smart IT guys and he gives me a pearl of an idea: simple, elegant, perfect — creative to the T.

And then he says, “But what do I know, you’re the creative one.”

This moment has stayed with me as a whisper, a temptation to wonder: What would people do with their working days, their daily lives, their yearly goals if they saw themselves as innately creative?

Imagine if everyone woke up in the morning and went through the day believing they had access to a creative state that they could harness whenever they wanted to — what would your life look like?

My credo is: If you breathe, you’re creative.

Being creative isn’t about being an artiste. It’s about how you express yourself that is uniquely you, and rising to your full potential to move through this chaotic, messy, wonderful, heartbreaking and exhilerating experience of life.

So, as you consider your bad-ass creative self, I’d like to give you a list of all the things you do that are creative. Why? Because you are always creating something: an act, a product, an expression, a thought. And it’s all you. Some acts are more creative than others. And leveraging that creativity is when life comes more easily, we have breakthroughs, we communicate more flexibily with others and we just have more goddamn fun.

Here are all the ways you are being creative in your work and life:

Walking down the street

Having a conversation

Balancing your checkbook

Managing other people’s money

Staring at your screaming kid and wondering what to do now

Figuring out how to write that email to your boss worded in just the right way

Lying in bed at night chasing your thoughts

Reading a book

Taking a photo or posing for one

Having a really bad day or week or even year and reaching for all the ways you can get through it

Giving someone a hug. Receiving a hug. 

Cooking a meal or walking up and down the grocery aisles

Getting out of bed in the morning

Getting dressed

Driving around town

Saying hello to a stranger you walk by on the street

Picking up the phone to call a good friend

Writing your status on Facebook

Buttering your bread

Reading this

Breathing

Hey, I’m no doctor. But I’m going to say this anyway.

There is a LOT of talk right now about the pros and cons of getting a swine flu shot.

What if we put our attention on staying healthy rather than preventing illness?

What would happen if most of our news and information was about all the great ways we could stay healthy and we all focused on that?

Here are a few tips I’ve learned recently for good health*:

Take Vitamin D3. If you have sufficient Vitamin D3 levels, your chance of getting sick goes way down.

Get probiotics in your diet. That’s yogurty stuff and there’s also the supplement form. I don’t know much more about the details here. But probiotics help keep the flora well-balanced in our gut so our digestive system stays nice and healthy which = higher immunity system.

Stay hydrated. Yes, it’s still about 8 glasses of water a day and drink the first one upon waking.

Sleep. Make it sacred. If it’s a choice between working out and sleep, pick sleep as a default.

Don’t forget to laugh. And breathe. And do the things you like to do. And play. Be creative.

Very few things in life are as serious as doing the things that keep you feeling whole, healthy and relational.

Here’s to thinking about how to BE HEALTHY rather than preventing illness.

*Thanks to Dr. Mark Adams of onvo for the great health tips.

Gomez Mishel, RIP

This is a tale about the power of creative thinking. And a beloved family dog, Gomez, RIP.

Last night my niece, Taya called me in tears. Her family dog, Gomez age 11, died that day. She was heartbroken, and crying her little heart out. After one lame-o comment about death being the cycle of life (pathetic, right?) I asked her to tell me everything she wanted to tell me in that moment. 

She started telling me in detail about a memorial project the family was going to make and display under Gomez’s favorite willow tree. Suddenly the crying quiver was gone and her voice carried a sense of strength and excitement. She couldn’t hold the sadness while her focus was on the act of creation. Ah, the power of the creative mind!

Next, I started telling stories of spending time with Gomez, and of course they included her, too. And the next thing I know, she was giggling and laughing. I was surprised, I admit it.

The point is, she had her cry, I let her feel sad but when we decided together to go into creative mode – her telling me about the memorial art project and me telling a story — there was a joyful presence hanging out in this space, instead of all dark, wallowing sadness. I mean, how many times can you say “I’m so sorry” and not feel a bit lame.

It reminds me how focusing on the act of creative thinking and doing is so good for a human heart and soul.

So, what are you going to create today?

Taya, getting creative for the camera