More Brainstorming Questions

Following are a few questions from my book, Transformational Thinking, that can jump start the pursuit of your dreams. Use them for brainstorming or first-thought writing. Try to come up with 2-3 ideas for each question. Brainstorming quickly without judgment stops the inner critic from sabotaging your efforts before you've begun. When you've finished brainstorming, pick the top three ideas and create an action plan—a detailed list of things to do, then decide a date to accomplish the first thing on your list. We move our dreams forward when we identify the smallest step to take each week. Imagine - Detail - Set a timetable. Michael Gerber suggests, "Great people create their lives actively while everyone else is created by their lives passively, waiting to see where live takes them next."

• What makes me happy? Curious?

• What makes me sit up and pay attention?

• What gets me outside of myself?

• What do I want more of in life? What do I want less of?

• What habits, energy-drainers, or fears are holding me back?

• What encourages possibility for me?

• What dreams are sitting on the sidelines?

• What would I like to learn spiritually, financially, intellectually, or technically?

• How much money will I need to do the things I want to do? By when will I need it?

• What would have to change in my current working environment for me to be happier?

• What would I like to be doing two years from now? 10 years from now? 20 years?

• How will I live intentionally and with joy?

• What legacy do I want to leave?

Learning a new piecing pattern

I'm often intrigued with a new quilt pattern, as long as it doesn't contain triangles. I recently found this pattern and learned an easy way to make triangles by putting two contrasting squares right sides together, sewing two lines diagonally down the center, and cutting them apart. I ended up with a black & white square, or in the case of this quilt, a red & white square. (And as usual enough left-over fabric to make another one someday.) The pattern is from Turning Twenty, book 1 and I changed it from a queen to a lap-quilt size—quite a math project!

A Whole New Mind (Why Right Brainers Will Rule the World)

This book by Daniel H. Pink explains why right-brainers will rule the world. One of the trademarks of the new era our country is entering—Conceptual Age—is the outsourcing of traditional white-collar jobs such as law, accounting, computer programming, and engineering to less-expensive overseas workers, particularly in Asia. In many professions, what used to matter most were abilities associated with the left side of the brain: linear, sequential, spreadsheet kind of faculties. These still matter, but they're not enough. What's important now are the characteristics of the brain's right hemisphere: artistry, empathy, creativity, inventiveness, and big-picture thinking. This book is easy to digest and contains lots of great exercises, tools, and extra reading at the end of the chapters. A must-read for anyone in business or thinking about getting an MBA.

The Four Laws of Debt-free Prosperity

This book is a story about a man whose financial situation is a disaster and how following these four laws transformed his life. As I’ve been reading the first couple of short chapters in this book, I’m reminded again how easy it to become mindless about spending. It’s not that we don’t budget for certain monthly expenses and manage those. It’s that if anything else comes up, we get in the habit of spending or charging without considering the consequences, or without thinking about saving for it if we don’t have the money in hand. Saving for what you want is called delayed gratification. We practiced that with with our children, who were frustrated sometimes when we said, we needed to wait until we had saved money for what you want.

I like the sprinkling of quotes that are part of each chapter. I haven’t had any financial goals for a while and it’s showing. I really believe that when I don’t know where I’m going, I’ll end up in a place I don’t expect—the result of default planning. So it’s good to be tracking our expenses and see where we can trim things up for the next few months. I really like 1) the idea related to kids—“that if they can only account for half of what you give them, when allowance time rolls around again, you will only give them half as much, and 2) that running up overdrawn check charges was like using $20 bills to test paper shredders.

In the chapter, “The First Law,” there's a story about Lee Nelson about making tracking into a game and I’m thinking I’d like to plan some kind of incentive if I track and am able to save money over the next five months. Not sure what that will be yet. p. 26, “Progress in our financial lives is directly related to the ability to measure.” p. 28 “Smart people find the exact places their cash flew when they thought it was going to flow. They backtrack along the pipeline looking for leaks, knowing that if they can find the leaks, they can fix them. You’ve got to measure it before you can manage it.”

Generations of Faith

“Look forward. Turn what has been done into a better path.

Think about the impact of your decision on seven generations into the future.”

—Wilma Mankiller, Chief of the Cherokee

This quote has stayed with me ever since I heard it at a workshop in Rapid City, South Dakota in 1996. I had not considered the legacy I would leave for generations to come. This Native American concept emphasizes the interconnectedness of all life, respect for previous generations, and nurturance of future ones. These generations—our great-grandparents, grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and our own generation—were considered in every decision made. The concern for the well being of generations reflects itself in a better world for all.

In the past several years, I've been impressed to identify the women seven generations back from my daughters and their cousins. By bringing these stories together in one volume, our children can familiarize themselves with the names and experiences of thirty female ancestors identified from the lineage of my mother’s mother and father: Jennie Eldora Barlow and Clarence Duffin, and my father’s mother and father: Alice Cloe Larsen and Thomas Ross Wilson.

My daughters and their cousins stand on the shoulders of these generations of women who came before them, primarily from England, Scotland, Ireland, Sweden, and Denmark. My purpose is to portray the richness of our heritage by giving these women’s lives visibility. As I have researched these generations of women, pieced together and in some cases invented their stories, characters and situations that reach beyond reality to express what might have happened, they have come alive.

We stand at a pivotal point—as each generation does—a place where we can look backward and forward. We can view our own contribution as insignificant and justify our reasons for not illuminating it, or we can truthfully acknowledge that we were born into this earth-life experience at a critical time that allows us to have a lasting influence on generations to come. We have received a legacy of goodness, integrity, and perseverance that has been passed down and those who have gone before remain vitally interested in our spiritual and temporal well being.

More about the energy of our feelings

I read this story recently in a book by Catherine Thomas entitled, Light in the Wilderness. It impressed me because again, it illustrates the impact of the expression of our emotions. Jacques Lusseyran, a blind Frenchman, tells his story which begins just before the Second World War in France, when seven years into a happy childhood, he suffered an accident at school in which he was totally and permanently blinded. In his autobiography he writes:

“Barely ten days after the accident that blinded me, I made the basic discovery. I am still entranced by it. The only way I can describe that experience is in clear and direct words. I had completely lost the sight of my eyes; I could not see the light of the world any more. Yet the light was still there. . . . All the world around me was convinced that I had lost it forever. But I found it again in another place. I found it in myself and what a miracle—it was intact. . . .

“I felt it [the light] gushing forth every moment and brimming over; I felt how it wanted to spread out over the world. I had only to receive it. It was unavoidably there. It was all there, and I found again its movements and shades, that is, its colors, which I had loved so passionately a few weeks before. Yet I had to make the effort to find my way between doors, walls, human beings, and trees. As happens to all blind persons, I hurt myself often. But I quickly learned that I knocked against things only when I forgot the light. When I paid constant attention to the light, I ran a much smaller risk. The second great discovery came almost immediately afterwards. There was only one way to see the inner light, and that was to love.

“The light I was able to perceive changed with my own inner emotional state. When I was sad or afraid, everything became indistinct. But when I was joyous and attentive, the light would return. Anger, remorse plunged everything into darkness. But a magnanimous resolution, a courageous decision, radiated a beam of light. By and by I learned to understand that love meant seeing and that hate was night. . . . Sadness, hate, or fear not only darkened my universe, but also made it smaller. . . . Outwardly I could not avoid running against doors and furniture. I was punished very thoroughly and very quickly. I found that impatience seemed to surround things by some sort of smoke or fog, but that joy clarified everything. When I was content, I had eyes all around my head, and then, truly, I was no longer blind. . . . And it was all because I was content.

“Because of my blindness, I had developed a new faculty. Strictly speaking, all men have it, but almost all forget to use it. That faculty is attention. In order to live without eyes it is necessary to be very attentive, to remain hour after hour in a state of wakefulness, of receptiveness and activity. Indeed, attention is a state of being. In its truest sense it is the listening post of the universe.”

Vibrational Energy of our Feelings

In my Life Design workshops and work with individuals, I often use a chart that illustrates the difference between the language of resistance and the language of possibility (see Transformational Thinking, pp. 68-69). The phrasing of our thoughts and feelings has more impact than we realize. Everything in this world carries an energy vibration, including our emotions that go out from us in electromagnetic waves. Each of us has developed habitual patterns of thinking and feeling. And our feelings bounce all over the place—happy one minute and worried or fractured the next.

Thoughts and feelings that project low vibrational frequencies include guilt, anger, worry, frustration, anxiety, scarcity, doubt, and resentment. These lead us into a downward spiral of fear and resistance. When I stay in these feelings, my world shrinks and creates more and more resistance, more limitation. I am now aware that each time this happens, I come to a point of choice and it is inside of myself that the transformation must happen.

If we do carry a negative pattern of thinking in our hearts, such as a tendency toward extreme worry or ruminating, for instance, that is where the housecleaning must begin, initially with gentle and nonjudgmental observation. We may resist changing our thinking because we believe that outward circumstances and people cause our problems. Resistance often surfaces in unconscious phrases that focus on what we can’t do, can’t control, or should do (and usually won’t). They accompany complaints, blame, and rationalizations. If we feel resistance and observe a tendency to close down, we block options and our deepest desires.

Harville Hendrix writes, “Energy follows attention. Every time we ‘invest’ in the negative (It’s not working, I’m not good enough, perfect enough . . .) we are honing our ability to detect faults. Our energy amplifies the annoying and we create the conditions that allow our problems to grow like weeds in an unkempt field.”

High vibrational frequencies include gratitude, praise, appreciation, delight, enthusiasm, generosity, reverence, love, and abundance. These encourage us upward into possibility, even in the face of difficulty or challenge. These qualities feed and thus enlarge our souls. We also face with courage the subtle suggestions for change that keep us in touch with our authentic self. We begin to see the light within us that has always existed there, offering assurance and direction constantly and without fail.