Last week, I spoke to a gathering of women in advertising and marketing; the theme was “The Balancing Act” – you know, the old work-life balance thing. This is adapted from the talk I gave.

My mom is watching my kid tonight and she asked me what I was speaking about, and when I told her the theme was “life balance,” she broke out in uncontrollable laughter.

So that gives you some idea of just how much of an expert I am on this topic.

The horrifying thing about being asked to speak about life balance is that it makes you feel like you need to have your act totally together. Let me be the first to tell you: I don’t have my act totally together. But I do have some thoughts to share about what makes for a balanced life.

The Time I Wrote a Book with an RSI

A few years ago, I was running a successful, growing digital agency and my business partner and I decided to write a book. This meant that on top of running a business full-time – which, for those of you who are entrepreneurs, you know is a bit more than a full-time gig – we were dedicating one day a week to writing, for several months.

I also had a repetitive strain injury that was aggravated by computer use. 

My day job required me to spend all day at a computer, and now I was planning on adding a whole bunch more time at a computer. So I went to my chiropractor and asked her advice on how to do all of this without aggravating my RSI.

I knew that if I did this wrong, I could wind up completely derailing my career. I’m pretty sure no one wants to hire a web designer who is unable to use a computer.

She told me that I’d better get my ass to the gym and get into the best shape of my life. And I thought she was clearly not listening to me, because how could she possibly suggest that I commit a whole bunch of time to working out, when obviously I was going to be insanely busy with this whole book thing?

But she had evidence to back up her advice, so I considered the alternative, and I decided I’d better try this gym thing. And it turned out, I had way more energy, and felt bouncy and fabulous and capable of running a business and writing a book and being fit – all at the same time.

Of course, part of this is because exercise makes you high on endorphins, but mostly I think it really boiled down to the fact that I was doing things that really mattered to me.

Paradoxically, I learned that adding more things to my plate was not stressful, when they were all things I was totally committed to, heart & soul. So that’s been my touchstone ever since.

It’s not about not being busy. It’s about feeling like everything is flowing in the right direction.

What Balance Looks Like. (It’s Not a Yoga Pose You Hold Forever.)

So: First of all, let’s define terms.

Life balance, for me, is about equilibrium – not holding a single, perfect yoga pose forever, but more of a martial arts thing – the ability to flow with changing energies as they move towards and through us.

It’s about having a strong core, and the ability to stay centered and bounce back when you’re thrown off your feet.

You can’t have it all, but you can have everything that matters most to you. The trick is to make your choices. Or, as Yogi Berra so eloquently put it:

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

Conscious Choices Beget Presence.

Here’s what I notice about the people who appear to me to lead well-balanced lives: They pay attention. They’re fully present in whatever it is they’re doing.

They can do that, because they’ve made a conscious choice to prioritize the stuff that matters to them.

They aren’t running around like chickens with their heads cut off, allowing themselves to be constantly distracted. That doesn’t mean they never check Facebook – it means that by and large, their energy is allocated in a conscious way.

Balanced ≠ Undemanding

I’ve come to believe that the key to feeling balanced is to live a life that aligns with your values and priorities. And to become conscious of the stuff that brings you most alive, that allows you to feel like:

YES, this is the most important thing I could be doing right now.

When we know we are doing stuff that matters to us, we could be pulling late nights and early mornings, we can be awake with our kid for the umpteenth time to soothe their fever, we can do amazing creative work, we could be doing parkour. And we can feel balanced and energized, even amidst a life that others might see as demanding.

A Note on “Have To”

Of course, we all have “have to’s.”

There’s this wonderful movie from the ‘80s called Parenthood, where Steve Martin plays this awesome dad who juggles work and parenting and coaching little league, and at one point in the movie, he’s arguing with his wife and he has to head off to his son’s baseball practice, and his wife goes, “Do you really have to go?” – and he yells, “MY WHOLE LIFE IS HAVE TO!”

I can’t tell you how often I’ve felt this way. Let’s just say a lot.

But I’ve worked really hard to eliminate the words “Have To” from my vocabulary. Because the reality is, I’m choosing to. I’m choosing to show up and meet my commitments. I could blow them all off if I wanted to. I could choose differently. So I’ve made it my priority only to commit to things that I can do wholeheartedly.

That doesn’t mean I go to the dentist feeling the cosmic beauty of it all, but it does mean that I relish the fact that I have free will, and the means to go to the dentist, and the ability to take care of my health. You know?

Your Very Own Life Mission

So, if the goal is to make more conscious choices – to focus on our own priorities instead of letting the “have-to’s” win the day, to get that “this is the most important thing I could be doing right now” feeling – how do we get there?

All of us are creative women, communications professionals. We are so good at developing strategies & project plans for our clients.

We are not always great at applying said strategies to our lives.

You know how the first and most critical step in a creative project is to define its purpose? Some people call this a project mission. It exists to remind us, down the road, when we’re in the thick of arguing over font choices, why we’re bothering, and who we’re serving, and what we want to achieve.

You deserve to know what your project mission is. For your life.

It will help a lot when you’re in the thick of arguing over font choices. Well, maybe not font choices, but stuff like career direction, crossroads in relationships, and all the daily choices we make that add up to a life.

The One Question You Must Ask

Here’s how I figured out what my project mission was.

A couple of years ago, everybody seemed to be making bucket lists. And I couldn’t for the life of me come up with much. Mine had two things on it: Visit the Rothko Chapel, and see Bruce Springsteen live – and now I’ve done the second one. So I have the world’s shortest bucket list.

The thing with bucket lists is, they’re all about doing stuff. Whereas I prefer to twist the underlying question a bit.

So instead of making a bucket list, I asked myself a question that has shifted the way I look at everything. It may seem a little dark, at first. But it’s a great shortcut to getting clear on what matters most to you. The question is this:

When you’re on your deathbed, what do you need to have experienced in order to feel you’ve lived a good and fulfilling life?

Here are a few highlights from my answer to that question:

• My family – biological and chosen – knows I love them in the deepest roots of their beings and can feel that love even after I am gone.
• I will have raised children who surprise and delight me with their curiosity, creativity, and courage, and whom I raised with respect for their individuality and freedom.
• Through my work, I will have helped individuals and organizations ask better questions, access and use their internal strengths to greater advantage, and become more efficient and effective at doing good in the world.

There’s more, but you get the idea.

How would you answer? Seriously, this is a big question, and it deserves your time and attention. It is maybe THE big question we must answer if we want to live a fulfilling life.

(If thoughts are springing to mind, you have my permission to tune me out & joy them down in a notebook or on your phone. Or if you’d rather mull it over in private, feel free to snap a photo of that question & come back to it later.)

Another way you can look at it is this: What do you want to be remembered for? Or this:

• Who do you want to be?
• What do you want to do?
• What do you want to have?

Don’t Let Someone Else’s Goals Get in Your Way.

You’re all brilliant, creative women. You know how to turn ideas from a scribble on a napkin into a multi-faceted marketing campaign.

And I don’t need to tell you that the best-laid plans don’t mean a thing if you don’t have a clear, focused vision of where you want to go. You spend your days telling your clients that. That’s what they hire you for.

But we don’t often take the time to look inward and ask ourselves where we want to be going.

We inherit some second-hand goals from other people: Get rich. Get a better body. Look good to other people. But those goals don’t light us up. They don’t give us that well-balanced look, that look of, “Yes, this is the most important thing I could be doing right now.” The only goals that do that are the ones that whisper to us when we dare to ask our hearts what we want our legacy to be.

Because I guarantee you, while you may want to leave a financial legacy behind, or live a long, healthy life, your deathbed wish is unlikely to be that you’d worn trendier shoes or had a firmer ass. Those are not strategic goals. They’re distractions from thinking about the deathbed question at all.

Less “Have To”; More Focus.

When I got clarity on what I wanted to be remembered for, it changed everything. I mean, for starters, I could see clear as day that my loved ones are as important to me as my work. So I make them a priority. (That means saying no to work, sometimes.)

And I could see that my deepest passion in my work was not reflected in the work I was doing. So I designed a strategy to make a major career transition.

And now, whenever an opportunity presents itself, I hold it up to my life goals and I ask myself, Where does this fit in?

It makes things a hell of a lot clearer.

I mean, I still go to the dentist – you know. And I still want a firmer ass from time to time. But by and large, I’m living much more on purpose than ever before.

And I have a whole lot less “have to” and more joyful focus.

When you’re on your deathbed, what do you need to have experienced in order to feel you’ve lived a good and fulfilling life?

What do you want to be remembered for?

Clarity begets focus. Focus your attention, and you’ll find your balance. Not some idealized version of balance where you’re going to yoga X times a week and working 4 hour work weeks while raking in six or seven figures.

Your balance.

So go home. Ask yourself the question.

See what comes. And start to consider how your life might look different if you prioritized this way.

If you want to share your answers, I’d love to read them. Feel free to post them below, or share them with me via Twitter or email: lb at laurenbacon dot com.

Postscript: A friend posted this quote from Eleanor Roosevelt on Facebook today, from her book, You Learn By Living: 

To be mature you have to realize what you value most. It is extraordinary to discover that comparatively few people reach this level of maturity. They seem never to have paused to consider what has value for them. They spend great effort and sometimes make great sacrifices for values that, fundamentally, meet no real needs of their own. Perhaps they have imbibed the values of their particular profession or job, of their community or their neighbors, of their parents or family. Not to arrive at a clear understanding of one’s own values is a tragic waste. You have missed the whole point of what life is for.

How do you make your best decisions?

For many years, I bought into the cultural myth (thanks, Plato) that rational, analytical decision-making was good, and intuitive, emotional decision-making (AKA following your gut) was bad. I diligently drew up lists of pros and cons, and tried to weigh them from as dispassionate a perspective as I could muster.

Then, sometime in my early adulthood, I learned about how that whole rational decision-making idea has been roundly debunked by neuroscientists, and in fact we need our emotions to make decisions well. That certainly helped me understand why, in retrospect, a lot of my attempts at rational decision-making looked more like rationalizations of profoundly emotional choices.

Of late, my thinking about how to make better decisions has broadened further: In addition to “What do I think?” and “How do I feel?”, I consider other inputs as well: Namely, my body, and what I would call my intuition. (A tip of the hat, here, to Bonnie Foley-Wong, who refined my thinking about this quartet of internal touchstones.)

Now, intuition is a slippery thing to talk about. Some of you might think of it as right-brain thinking; others will connect it to something bigger than any individual, that each of us taps into. For my part, I’ve decided that for now, I’m okay with not defining it one way or another – but in my experience, most people use their intuitive sense on a very regular basis (though they may not call it that).

A simple example of an intuitive exercise might be to consider a situation you’re in, by sitting in stillness, and allowing an image to come to mind. Once the image is clear, you can look at it from various angles: What is the image showing you? How does it relate to the situation? How do you feel about the image? How might you look at the image – or situation – differently? And so on.

I’ve been drawn to this kind of work all my life, but was extremely shy about sharing it, because it always seemed like it edged a little too close to the “woo-woo” side of things for comfort. But as I move into middle age, I’m learning that not only do most people see the value in integrating intuition into their lives and work, but that when I drop my shyness about it, I give others permission to talk about it, too – and the doors open to richer conversations.

All of this is a preamble to sharing a conversation I had last week with my wonderful friend Kate Sutherland, who has thought more deeply about what she calls “inner work” – i.e. accessing our inner dimension – than just about anyone I know. She’s a brilliant and wise woman who is as masterful doing organizational development for community health organizations as she is at illuminating how intuition and perception can be woven into our lives to enrich our ways of being and doing.

Since I met Kate and started using the tools she’s taught me, I have been more purposeful, efficient and effective in my work – and decisions that would have felt onerous before now feel lighter and easier than I would have thought possible. It’s a night-and-day shift: From feeling caught between the monkey mind of my rational thought processes and the sometimes swampy depths of my emotional states, to finding a stable and serene centre from which I can integrate analysis, emotion and intuition.

And if all of that sounds too heady for you, let me assure you that her approach is anything but: She’s warm, accessible and profoundly down-to-earth.

I think most of us know that there’s more to sound decision-making than just analysis and emotion. The fundamental shift for me came when I moved from “What do I think?” and “How do I feel?” to adding two other questions: “Does this align with my purpose?” and “How might this serve the highest for all involved?”

I apply these questions to decisions ranging from “What tasks should I work on today?” to “Should I pursue this work opportunity?” – and the results have been unfailingly amazing.

I would love to see more entrepreneurs tuning in as part of their decision-making processes. Kate’s work is the most accessible entrance I know into learning how to access your intuition and work with it, so I recommend her books regularly to purpose-driven entrepreneurs and leaders.

If any of this intrigues you, I invite you to watch my recent conversation with Kate. In it, we answer questions like:

• What is inner work?
• What approaches help with specific tasks?
• How can you learn to trust working with intuition?

Enjoy!

I received an email recently from a reader who is working with a question that I know is shared by a lot of people – and at its heart, the question is this:

How do I know when it’s time to start following my dream?

This reader has a vision for a business she wants to start, and she is weighing the possibility of starting it now, or pursuing an opportunity to return to the corporate world, where she could sock away some cash for a couple of years and start her business with a bigger financial cushion.

I think all of us can relate to the question on some level – whether we have a dream for a new business, a project, or a big life change, there comes a time when we need to decide when to take the leap into the unknown.

Something about this reader’s question prompted me to think of Elizabeth Crook. Elizabeth is a strategist and advisor to entrepreneurs – I worked with her at my last company – and she is both an incredibly brilliant businesswoman and one of the warmest, most big-hearted people I know. She’s also got a whole website dedicated to “Discovering your yippee,” which is all about finding work you love – so I know she’s been thinking deeply about this question.

So I hopped on a Google Hangout with Elizabeth, and we recorded our chat for you to watch. We share some key questions to ask yourself if you’re facing a similar dilemma, and frameworks you can use to evaluate your options.

(That third thumbnail you see below the video is the fabulous Heidi Hartman, who sat in with us to help us through our first recorded Hangout… obviously we didn’t realize the thumbnails would be shown!)

This is our first time doing this by video (and as you’ll see, it’s a little rough around the edges), so we welcome your feedback. And if you have ideas or questions for next time, please feel free to leave them in the comments, or email me at lb at laurenbacon dot com.

Your turn: How did you know when it was time to follow your dream? I welcome your thoughts in the comments.

Yesterday, I spoke at Ubizo, a conference for small business owners workshopping business challenges with peers and mentors. This is the written version of the talk I gave, which is a little different than the version I actually gave. I was asked to speak about a challenge I overcame in my entrepreneur’s journey. It’s about discerning when it’s time to go with the flow, and when it’s time to push yourself to do things differently. And about the biggest turning point in my business and my career.

I discovered coding by accident. I was in university & I started doing it in my spare time, learning it from a roommate. I just thought it was fun. I started building websites, designing things in Photoshop. We were collaborating on websites just for the fun of it.

Meanwhile, in my “on purpose” life, I was going to grad school, trying to make something out of the music degree I had completed a year earlier – trying to turn it into a “real career,” because I didn’t want those 4 years of university to go to waste. I was horrified at the prospect of admitting that those 4 years had been spent doing something that wasn’t going to turn into a full-time profession, even though I knew that I wasn’t cut out for a career as a musician. My rational mind wouldn’t let me admit that music was not in the cards for me, and that my undergraduate education didn’t really matter that much.

I dropped out of grad school by accident. Because I took this day job coding for my friend, who had now started his own company. I moved back to Vancouver. I told my thesis supervisor I’d be working on my thesis in my spare time, and I figured this was just a nice way to earn some money and pass the time while I figured out what I really wanted to do with my life.

I fell in love with web design by accident. And I dropped out of grad school to focus on my work, which had become my passion.

I started my own company by accident. I was out for a walk with one of my coworkers, who had become a very close friend. We were talking about what we liked and didn’t like about the company we were working for, and how it was growing a little faster than we’d like. And we were having trouble keeping up with the constant shifts in the workplace. We longed for the personal touch that we used to be able to give to each of our clients. And without thinking, I blurted out, “You know, we could start our own company and this could all be different.” And our eyes met, and I blushed, knowing I couldn’t take it back, I couldn’t un-think the thought. And Raised Eyebrow Web Studio was born. Two months later, we left our jobs, set up desks in the corner of my bedroom, and got to work building something new.

This whole going-with-the-flow, living-life-by-accident thing was working pretty well so far.

But then about three years in, we found ourselves stressed beyond belief. We’d been struggling against our own success. We got very, very busy. One of the principles we had started our company on was that we wanted to work a regular 9-to-5 schedule. The tech industry is infamous for long hours, so we had gotten used to an overtime culture, but we didn’t like it and we wanted something different. So we had set as one of our core measures of success that we didn’t want to work weekends, that we wanted our evenings to ourselves. And yet, we found ourselves 3 years in, compromising on the kind of success we wanted.

Everyone we spoke to told us it was time to hire some help. We resisted.

We resisted for all kinds of reasons, which I’ll get to in a minute. And the fact was, our resistance wasn’t rational, and it wasn’t good for our business – or for us. So, finally, after two years of battling this exhaustion, at the 5 year mark of our business, we gave in and hired someone part-time, 20 hours a week, on a 3-month contract, to code.

Once we made that change, it changed EVERYTHING.

This was a big turning point – not just in my business, but for me. Because what happened was, the guy we hired to code for 20 hours a week for 3 months turned our business around.

He made freedom achievable again. He was a delightful human being. He was a better coder than I could ever hope to be – because I was too distracted by all of the other things I was doing, like designing all of the websites we created, and running the business – and because he was able to do nothing but code, he was way more efficient than I was. And I got to focus on the stuff I did best, and he made the company more profitable. Our cash flow improved, because we were able to turn around projects that much faster, and invoice more quickly. Our profitability improved, because we were able to charge him out at a higher price per hour than we paid him. And stress started to leave our bodies. There were all kinds of great business reasons to do this.

So at this point, you’re probably thinking that I’m trying to sell you on the value of hiring staff – but that’s not where I’m going with this. I don’t think everyone needs to hire staff. Your path is your own and maybe it involves staff, and maybe it doesn’t. But the big lesson is this: When you are overwhelmed, overworked, and overinvested in maintaining the status quo – when you find yourself resisting change even though what you’re doing right now isn’t really working – that is a sign you are not fully in charge of your life. You are letting things happen to you by accident. I have been in that place, and it’s not fruitful.

The juicy part of this story isn’t the happy ending of how hiring staff saved the day. It’s what took place in those two years between the point where I hit overload, and the point when I finally hired someone.

Something shifted in me – something had to shift, in order for me to step into the boss role. To be not just the boss of me, but someone else’s boss. It took me nearly two years to wrap my head around it, because it was a huge inner transformation. This was big, heart-and-mind stuff – the kind of stuff we don’t get comfortable with overnight.

I had to do 3 things:

First, I had to give myself permission to change my mind about how I wanted to run my business.

Up until that point, we had a cozy little 2-person friends-and-coworkers vibe. We had a ton of flexibility, both of us collaborated on every project, and our clients got a ton of personal attention. That was our vision when we started out. We had thought we wanted to work like that forever.

It took a while for us to admit to ourselves that what we’d been doing up ‘til then wasn’t working anymore – and to admit that maybe it was time to embrace a new vision.

Second, I had to move out of my comfort zone – because this kind of perspective shift doesn’t happen without hard work. I was terrified of taking responsibility for someone else’s paycheque – and even more terrified of loosening my grip on my perfectionistic, control-freak tendencies and opening up to new ways of doing things.

Overcoming those fears, and learning how to stop letting them limit my vision, took a lot of work. And it was a huge step forward into living on purpose rather than just living by accident.

The third thing I had to do was make peace with being in a position of power. I had to learn how to be a good boss, cleanse myself of my bad-boss traumas, and get ready to be a real, honest-to-goodness boss.

This meant letting go of my desire to be everyone’s friend. It meant accepting that I would need to make tough calls about hiring and firing people. It meant learning how to instill values and vision into a team environment. It meant being lonely sometimes – because the tough calls fall to the boss.

Those 3 things – giving myself permission to change my mind; moving out of my comfort zone; and making peace with power – were things I had to fight for, and I’m constantly thankful for the lessons they taught me.

I don’t want to make it sound like the most important stuff is always hard. There is a beautiful ease that has woven itself through many aspects of my entrepreneurial journey, and I’m a firm believer that ease is a key metric of success – it’s just that it’s the nature of the easy stuff that we take it for granted, and it’s the nature of the tough parts that they stand out (and make a better story).

Looking back, I can see that I learned to code because I loved it; that I dropped out of grad school because I was just biding my time; that I fell in love with web design because it allowed me to connect world-changing people and organizations to their communities in meaningful ways; that I started my own company because I was born bossy and stayed that way; that I stopped coding not just because I couldn’t squeeze it into my schedule, but because I wanted to be involved in strategic decision-making on every project. And that I became a boss because I was ready to build something bigger, because it served my higher purpose of building a company that did better things than I could do with a smaller team, and because I loved going to work every day with the smartest, most wonderful people I knew.

It’s easier to see the meaning of things when we’re looking back on them. I now see love and purpose woven through every part of that story.

And I now look back on that time when I was fighting against the flow, using every ounce of my strength to cling to my old vision and avoid facing my fears, as a real coming-of-age moment.

Because I re-engineered my vision of success with purpose – dismantling the old, outdated dream that no longer served me, and designing a new one.

Because I faced my fears with purpose, working with mentors and coaches to chip away at them until I felt brave enough to move forward in a new direction.

And because I chose to become a boss with purpose – and only slightly by accident.

When I was in Grade 9, I had a fantastic science teacher named Mr. Ali, who I remember for his fabulous Indian accent (his rolled r’s in “ribonucleic acid” were unforgettably delicious), large ears, and small stature – and the fact that when we studied the menstrual cycle, he established a rule that only the boys would be called on to answer questions aloud in class. We girls all giggled and felt we were getting away with something, while the boys blushed and groaned; but Mr. Ali’s ploy worked, and the boys learned the science of menstrual cycles thoroughly while we girls sat back comfortably and enjoyed the show. I suspect Mr. Ali trusted that we young women would be interested enough in learning how our ovaries worked that we’d pay sufficient attention – and while I can’t speak for all of my classmates, that was certainly true for me. I was rather fascinated by the corpus lutem and the ebbs and flows of estrogen and progesterone.

It wasn’t the first time I showed an interest in human sexuality. Years earlier, in grade school, I remember bringing a book to school that my parents had given me to explain sex – so that the other kids could benefit from the knowledge I was pretty sure their parents weren’t sharing with them. (Thank you, lovely parents of mine, for your matter-of-fact willingness to answer my questions.)

And it wasn’t the last, either: Later, in first-year university, I vividly remember a day when Freud was up for discussion and a girl in my class raised her hand to ask what an erection was. Her naivete prompted shocked expressions on everyone’s faces. “Let’s grab coffee after class,” I offered – and was honoured to be the one to fill in the gaps left behind by her parents, who’d forbidden her to attend her high school’s sex ed classes.

All this to say: I’ve always been curious about sex, fascinated by the science of it, and confident about my depth of knowledge on the subject. I always thought I was one of the better-informed people on the planet when it came to things like ovulation, contraception, and so on.

There were known unknowns, of course, in my internal sexual-scientific encyclopedia: obscure fetishes and other things that didn’t particularly interest me. What I didn’t realize, of course – what no one realizes, by definition – was that there were also unknown unknowns: things I had no idea were missing. Moreover, those unknown unknowns were hugely significant – and are significant to huge numbers of women.

No one ever teaches us this stuff in sex ed class. And I really, really wish they would. It would save so much heartache and confusion.

There are four open secrets that no one ever tells most women:

1. It is a myth that women ovulate on Day 14 of their cycle (that is, 14 days after the first day of their period). That number is an average, not a law, with most women ovulating anywhere from Day 8 to Day 20.
2. Because an ovum lives only 12-24 hours after ovulation, while sperm can live up to 5 days inside the vagina, your greatest chance of getting pregnant is in the 4 days leading up to ovulation, and the 24 hours immediately following it. (Most people – even some doctors – will tell you, incorrectly, that your most fertile days follow ovulation.)
3. The best way to learn your personal pattern of fertile and infertile days is to learn how to chart your fertility signs, by tracking two pieces of data: Your basal body temperature (which fluctuates with your progesterone levels), and your cervical fluid (which correlates to estrogen).
4. Once you learn how to chart your fertility (and assuming you are in the majority of women who don’t have a fertility problem), you can plan pregnancies, and/or avoid them, with far greater accuracy than you will otherwise.

I learned all this by reading Toni Weschler’s wonderful book, Taking Charge of Your Fertility, which I passionately believe should be taught to every girl when she reaches puberty. I didn’t read it until I was a grown woman, and it is not an overstatement to say that I was outraged at the misinformation I had received at the hands of medical professionals, sex ed teachers, and mass media up until that point.

The key realization for me was that I couldn’t rely on averages or statistics to figure out what was going on in my body (and neither can any of us). If I wanted to understand my cycle, I would have to learn to pay close attention. And because I’m geeky, I found I enjoyed the process of recording the data my body provided for me.

I started charting when I decided, around age thirty, to go off the pill and give my body a break from artificial hormones. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I didn’t consider beforehand that I hadn’t had a normal menstrual cycle in ten years – so I didn’t recognize the signs my body was giving me now that I was ovulating again. Charting helped me learn what the heck those signs meant. I learned to identify my fertile days so I could be extra-careful with contraception – and my non-fertile days when there was effectively zero chance of conception, so I could afford to be a little more relaxed.

And years later, when my partner and I decided to try and have a baby, my charts provided me with very solid data that helped us plan our sex schedule (or GOFing, my new favourite term) – which, you know, sounds clinical and un-fun, but was particularly helpful for us since my partner travels a ton for work. My cycles are pretty predictable, so I put a recurring 5-day flag in his work calendar (“Green light: Go!”) that helped him plan his home-and-away schedule.

We were fortunate: I got pregnant right away, and carried the baby to term. Not everyone has that experience, I know – and a lot of factors went into that, including genetics & good old-fashioned luck. But I also know that my odds of getting pregnant when I wanted to were way higher because I understood my fertility signs, knew my cycle, and had tracked my data.

I know my story isn’t universal. I know lots of women who have wildly irregular cycles that simply cannot be predicted. I know lots of women who have charted the hell out of everything and been unable to get pregnant. I know women who are on the pill for lots of good reasons and have no interest in going off it. And so on.

But I want women to understand the fundamentals of how this works, because it is powerful. I don’t care if you never chart a cycle in your life – I still want you to learn the basics of what your cycle looks like, the ebbs and flows of cervical fluid (which, yes, needs a new name), the ups and downs of your cervix, and how those things relate to your fertility. Learn it. Own it. Know what your body is telling you. And make the most informed, empowered decisions you can.

And if you know anyone who’s in charge of designing sex ed curriculum, send them my way.

Disclosure: I am currently an advisor to Kindara Fertility, a company that makes the best fertility charting app I’ve seen. My passion for charting, as should be clear from this article, predates my relationship with Kindara by a long, long while. In fact, I connected with them precisely because a friend sent me a link to their app, knowing I would freak out with joy that someone had finally designed a beautiful, easy-to-use, and scientifically sound charting app. I did (freak out with joy, that is), and I ended up coming on as an advisor because I believe so strongly in what they’re doing. I don’t get any kickbacks for you downloading or using their app, although I have a little bit of stock in the company and am doing my best to help them take over the world. That said, at the end of the day, I am not attached to how you choose to chart, so long as your system gives you reliable information and helps you understand your body. 

I’m a big fan of systems. Especially the ones that promise to help me make fewer mistakes (or at least, learn from my mistakes more quickly), become more efficient, and/or love my life more. I mean, I looooove a good system. I read Gretchen Rubin’s wonderful book, The Happiness Project, and I thought: Finally! A step-by-step, practical toolkit for becoming happier! I got so excited about her gigantic checklist/grid thingy that I immediately decided I needed to make one… except that I was several months pregnant at the time, and I thought, Well, I can’t commit to planning the next twelve months. Who knows what unexpected disruptions will occur, and mess up the system? So then I put the system on the shelf until the perfect moment arrived, and – you guessed it – I have yet to create a happiness project of my own.

I read David Allen’s Getting Things Done and it changed my life… sort of. Because I don’t always have the discipline to work the system the way it was intended to be used – and when you only use it halfway, it only works halfway.

Every system, every tool, every theory – on life, business, or whatever – has seemed perfect and world-changing… until I try and put it into practice.

For a while, I thought I was to blame for this. Then I stopped trying to blame someone and decided I was more interested in digging beneath the surface-level “why” for a deeper “why”: Instead of  answering the question,”Why isn’t this working?” with “Because I suck,” I chose to acknowledge that perhaps I was not alone in finding it challenging to consistently implement my perfect systems – and instead, perhaps it would behoove me to work on the points of resistance I was encountering.

For example: My two biggest challenges with using Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology are that 1. I resist doing mind sweeps (a tool for getting all of your intended actions out of your head and down on paper), and 2. I don’t make time for weekly reviews (where you look over all of your active projects and decide which ones should stay active, which should be put on hold, and which should be dropped). I resist the former because I lack the discipline to slot it into my schedule, and I resist the latter because I hate dropping projects – it feels like failure.

Understanding the deeper points of resistance – the second- and third-level “whys” – has made a huge difference to my ability to use the GTD system effectively. I now put mind sweeps on my to-do list every Monday, and I try to turn the weekly reviews into a balancing act – for every “yes” there should be a “no” (or a “not right now”) of equal size.

I’m a big believer in asking “why” more than once, in many contexts; it’s one of simplest and best ways I know of deepening one’s learning. So I was delighted when I found that Eric Ries’s The Lean Startup advocates using a process called “The Five Whys” in businesses. (You can read about what a Five Whys process is over here.)

But… I have worked on technical teams for a long time now, and while I have always loved a good project post-mortem, I have also seen a ton of resistance points to actually doing them – and doing them well. Which is why when Dan Milstein stepped up to the podium at the Lean Startup Conference earlier this week, I cheered.

What I love about his talk was that he acknowledges the human side of business, and the importance of addressing the humanity of your team members. Lean Startup methodology is all about validating decisions with data, and while I totally believe in that approach, I also know from experience that humans don’t make data-informed decisions unless our fragile human egos are in a state of equilibrium. In other words, it’s a lot easier to make smart decisions when you’re not busy stroking your own ego, or working like crazy to avoid feeling ashamed and flawed.

So how do you engage in a potentially emotional process like a project post-mortem – where you evaluate the success of the project, and attempt to identify and learn from mistakes, in a group of work colleagues – in a way that actually gets you the results you want, and avoids plunging people into shame-based behaviour? How do you work around the fact that humans’ default tendency is to want to avoid facing mistakes, and reduce the shame of fallibility?

Here is Dan Milstein’s fantastic, smart, and entertaining talk, “How to Run a Five Whys (With Humans, Not Robots)”:

His slide deck is here:

Thank you, Dan Milstein, for making Lean Startup work better for fallible humans.

Related: Tracking the Numbers That Actually Matter

One of my other favorite talks that day (and there were many) came courtesy of Ivory Madison from Red Room. Her talk is titled, “Bonfire of the Vanity Metrics,” and it’s all about ditching the meaningless stats many of us get attached to (what Eric Ries calls “success theater”), and focusing on your real performance indicators. Again, she manages to be both highly intelligent and engaging at the same time. Here she is on the futility of tracking your business’s Facebook “likes”:

“Is this your business model? No.

“Do you get paid for this? No.

“Is it Facebook’s business model? Yes.

“Do they get paid for this? Yes!

“Are you Mark Zuckerberg? No.”

One of the wonderful things about this talk is how candid she is about what metrics she used to use, despite knowing they had no connection to her business model. So while she doesn’t speak directly to how we can get over our own desire to make our numbers look good, she does acknowledge her own fallibility, and her process for arriving at the meaningful metrics. Highly recommended.

Here is the moment from last night’s Bruce Springsteen concert that I want to remember.

He worked the crowd like an old-fashioned revival preacher, at times using the language of church – “Can you feel the spirit? Give me a ‘Yeah!’” – and in other ways more obliquely, walking into the crowd for the laying-on of hands. I grew up in church, and I find this stuff both familiar and discomforting, achingly beautiful (how I long to feel close to the sublime, to lose myself in the gospel-choir backup singers’ ecstasy) and dancing on the edge of frightening mob mentality (twenty thousand pairs of hands raised in the air at the bidding of a single charismatic figure).

The first hour or so was all fire and brimstone, big anthems excoriating the perpetrators of social injustice, intermingled with big, crowd-pleasing singalong numbers. Then he changed the pace, introducing “My City of Ruins,” saying that he had written it in honour of Asbury Park, New Jersey, a town that had experienced a 25-year period where it had been sapped of its life force, a shell of its former self. He said the band had performed it for a wide range of occasions, but tonight… tonight it was simply a song “from our ghosts to your ghosts.”

When we’re kids, he said, we’re scared of ghosts. But as we get older, and we start losing the people we love, we begin to collect our ghosts, to hold them close to us, walk around with them wherever we go. And we’re comforted by their presence.

“Are we missing anybody tonight?” he called.

Cries erupted around the arena. We all had ghosts we wanted to remember.

“Are we missing anybody here tonight?”

I couldn’t shout, couldn’t clap, couldn’t even move. I was falling apart, dissolving in tears as the preacher led us in a prayer for our dead. The only kind of prayer I can bear these days, since I stopped feeling at home in church. Grieving my lost friend, crying at a rock concert, awash in sadness while those around me hooted and swayed to the music.

“I said, are we missing anybody tonight?”

I knew – we all knew – the band was missing members. Clarence Clemons, The Big Man, died last year, and Danny Federici a couple of years prior. Bruce was missing people tonight. And all of us were missing someone tonight. I wasn’t alone – I was in a sea of people who were walking with their ghosts. That familiar-discomforting feeling deepened.

And then, Bruce leaned into the mike and crooned:

I’m in a sad mood tonight… I’m in a sad mood…
I’m in a sad mood tonight… I’m in a sad mood…

And that was the moment. The moment where you feel: He just did that for me, and me alone. How did he know? Two lines of a Sam Cooke song. No one else seemed to notice. Sam Cooke, one of my favourite singers of all time – and another wounded, flawed preacher-performer, who left the church and gospel music to sing worldly soul. Sam Cooke, who never sounded more real or more raw than when he cut loose with “Nearer My God to Thee,” loading it up with every ounce of longing for the sublime anyone ever felt.

I’m not going to say I was healed. I didn’t experience a miracle. But I might have felt something like communion: A sense of not being alone, of sharing a bittersweet cup with an assembly of people who were taking a moment to remember the missing and the dead.

And for that I am thankful.

I have a bucket list. It has exactly two things on it:

1. See Bruce Springsteen live.
2. Visit the Rothko Chapel.

And I’m crossing item #1 off my list tonight. So I think it’s safe to say that the remaining item does not meet the minimum requirements of a “list.”

I have friends with great bucket lists. I get excited for them when I read them. Somehow, though, I could never get into the project for myself, and I wasn’t sure why, exactly.

Historically, I’ve been big on goals, targets, and aspirations. I do a lot of visioning, both personally and professionally. But in the past year or two, I’ve hit on a different way of working that’s more about focusing on aligning with my core purpose – and allowing life, serendipity, the universe, and what have you, to bring opportunities along that I might not have dreamed of yet.

We all know that life rarely serves up exactly what we ordered. Very few of us set out to be one particular thing when we were very young, and wound up being exactly that. (I suspect this is part of why we are blown away by star athletes, classical musicians, and other performers who had to start training when they were insanely young and stay focused on The One Thing until they were adults: We know that path is incredibly rare, genes and innate talent aside. How many of us can say we always knew what we wanted to be when we grew up – and then became that thing? I bow to those shining few who fall into that camp.) My career path has been anything but a straight line; on the contrary, it’s been a serious exercise in zigzags. Classical singing – zig. HTML programming – zag. Entrepreneurship, writing a book, public speaking… zig, zig, zag. These opportunities found me, and none of them were in my mind’s eye before they happened.

But it’s not all happenstance, either. We need an inner compass that allows us to evaluate the opportunities when they come our way. Ambition and big dreams have their place – it’s about holding them lightly enough that when life shifts, we can sway gracefully with the dance, and keep our footing.

So, how do you design, build, and polish that inner compass? As with all good things, there are many paths – but a very, very good one has just made itself known to me.

Danielle Laporte, known for her bestselling book, The Fire Starter Sessions, and her wonderful blog, is about to release a new program called The Desire Map. I’ve been lucky enough to get a preview copy of the e-book & workbook, and it is a thing of beauty and wisdom.

Danielle’s premise is that when we set goals, what we’re really doing is dreaming up things that we think will make us feel a certain way – and that if we were to focus on those feelings first, rather than the goals, we’d get a lot farther. It’s one of those notions that reframes things in a seemingly subtle way – but once you shift your way of looking at it, there’s no going back.

Let’s say, for example, I’ve got a goal of hitting the NYT Bestsellers list with my book. I might examine that goal and ask myself: Why do I want that? What will that feel like? Immediately, I get back answers: Validation that my ideas are good; social status; financial success; approval; something I can tell my parents so they’ll be proud. I’ll feel resonant, successful, intelligent, peaceful. And I expect my inner critic will be silent, if only for a moment.

It’s enormously helpful to uncover the desires beneath the goals. Perhaps there are other ways of fulfilling them, that deserve to be included on my list of goals. Perhaps I might notice some desires that deserve a different kind of attention. (Making my parents proud, for instance: Could be time to check in with my folks and see what they actually want for me.) I might also notice that some of the desires are just surface-level and mask deeper desires. (How will financial success make me feel? What does that look like?)

Thanks to Danielle, I’ve been making this shift gradually over the past couple of years. The Fire Starter Sessions contains a worksheet called The Strategy of Desire, that asks, among other things, the critical question: How do you want to feel? It’s a simple but transformative exercise. And when you allow it to sink into your everyday life, it’s powerful.

I’m not giving up my to-do lists (unlike Danielle, I love ‘em) but when it comes to the big stuff – the bucket lists and the New Year’s goal-setting and the birthday self-reflections – I’m shifting to working with core desired feelings (as Danielle puts it), rather than hitching my happiness to specific external goals.

The bucket list, and the specific, measurable goals – those come second. They are examples of what might help me attain my core desired feelings. They aren’t the be-all-and-end-all. Because who knows what other, better options might come along – and how sad would it be if I were so attached to my specific goals that I couldn’t see the other, better option for what it is?

I’m all about measurable, data-informed decision-making on some stuff (everything to do with user interfaces, for example) – but when it comes to the big life stuff, it’s not about the exact number of widgets you sell, or for that matter, the number of items you cross off your bucket list. It’s about love, and happiness, and feeling right with yourself. And the only way to figure that stuff out is to ask yourself how you really want to feel.

If you want to dive deeper into this, you should sign up for Danielle’s Desire Map event on December 5th. The full program, when it launches, will include a printed book, as well as e-book and audio versions, an app, and multimedia contemplations – a complete toolkit for transforming your relationship to goal-setting. I highly recommend it.

Full disclosure: I’m a friend of Danielle’s, as well as a fan, and I’ve signed up as an affiliate for this program, because I think it’s excellent. I’m very choosy about doing the affiliate thing: I only do it when I have complete confidence in the quality and integrity of the stuff I’m helping to sell, and I think it will be of interest to my readers. I’ve known Danielle for over a decade, I trust her integrity, and I love her work. I hope you will, too.

I attended a course recently where one of the central tenets we were asked to hold was, “People are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole.” That may seem benign enough to you, but as I sat with the invitation to believe this – really believe it – I realized it was staggeringly hard for me to do. You see, I struggle with a longstanding habit of what might charitably be termed hyperresponsibility, or less charitably, control-freak tendencies.

That habit (which I’ve been working on breaking for some time now, with fair-to-middling success) stems from insecurity, of course – and one of the ways it manifests is in a belief that people need my help.

Well, people don’t need my help, of course. The world does manage to turn without me. And yet I’ve spent countless days of my life fretting about what I need to do in order to manage things, to control chaos, or to make people feel better.

Of course, I could see I was projecting stuff onto other people, trying to control what was not mine to control. But what was I projecting? It has taken me years to see it.

Not only have I not believed that people were naturally creative, resourceful, and whole; I haven’t believed I was naturally creative, resourceful, and whole.

So long as I saw other people as having problems I needed to solve, I could ignore my shame about being flawed myself. I could distract myself with the comparison game – ooh, look, his problems are bigger than mine, so why don’t I just go and help fix him? I could boost my ego by convincing myself I was serving other people and therefore a good, selfless person. (I grew up with a bit of a black-and-white perspective on selflessness (yay, martyrdom!) and selfishness (boo, anything else!) that has definitely not served me well.)

It also meant that I have tended to look outside myself for solutions to my own challenges.

The irony that I have spent the last fifteen years of my life as a consultant, i.e. trying to fix other people’s problems for a living, does not escape me.

This is a multi-generational problem. I’ve been on the receiving end of the same things I’ve projected onto other people. It’s not fun. I haven’t enjoyed it. But still, the habit persisted. Despite therapy, coaching, deep, empathetic talks with wonderful friends and partners.

And then, when I least expect it – I walk into a nondescript meeting room in a nondescript downtown hotel, nod hello to a bunch of strangers, and within minutes, am confronted with this humongous reality check. We believe that people are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole. Thud. Right in the gut.

Can I believe that? Moreover: What if I can’t? What does the world look like if I don’t believe it?

(Answer: Pretty frigging dark. A world full of walking-wounded people, unable to heal themselves? Yikes. Sounds like the zombie apocalypse is already here.)

OK, so… if I would like to believe it, I’d better start acting like I do.

I spent three days in the class trying my damnedest to believe that my colleagues were capable of solving their own problems – not a huge stretch, as it turns out, since they’re a wonderful bunch. And something amazing happened. They’d share something they wanted to shift in their lives. I’d listen, ask questions, and most importantly, refrain from offering solutions. And you know what happened?

They came up with far better solutions than I ever could. Solutions that came from within, and spoke to their unique personalities and circumstances. Solutions that I believed would work for them, and that they would actually implement, and that would make their lives better.

My ego was crushed – but the rest of me marveled at what I had witnessed. I’m still reeling, and savouring the experience.

This isn’t a neatly-tied-up-in-a-bow story. It’s in progress. It’s also not intended as a poor-me story (Alas! I never believed I was good enough!), though I recognize it may read that way. I’m sharing it because:

1. I want to stop this crazy freight train of a belief system, and I hear that public pledges are good for that sort of thing.

And 2. I suspect I’m not alone in having this old, habitual belief.

Oh, and also 3. I’ve seen how shifting one’s mindset can transform not just individuals, but groups. And I would love to see what might happen in our communities if we could hold each other’s natural creativity, resourcefulness, and wholeness sacred.

Could be huge. Could be good. Let’s find out.

I’m at a conference, looking forward to learning from the experts at the front of the room. The topic is right up my alley: something I practice, but want to get better at. The session begins, and twenty minutes later, I haven’t heard anything new. Unbidden, a thought pops into my head: “Well, this isn’t teaching me anything new. I could’ve led this session.”

The fifth, or tenth, or thirtieth time this happened, I finally woke up and realized I should be pitching sessions to conferences and standing up at the front of the room. It took me a long time to figure out that it wasn’t that the other speakers were lacking – it was that I had real expertise that was ready to be shared with others.

Oh, but that took chutzpah to admit. I had to do battle with my inner critic – the one saying, “Oh, you’re an expert now. I guess you’ve got it all figured out, huh? Next you’ll be calling yourself a guru. Ugh, blech, and barf. Just wait until they figure out how little you actually know, and laugh you out of the conference.”

The voice asking, “Aren’t you a little goofy to be an expert? May I remind you that you don’t even own a suit? Who’s going to take you seriously?”

That utter douchebag inside my head saying, “That’s some ego you’ve got. Now you’ve got another excuse to hold forth. Blah, blah, blah – can’t you just sit back and listen for a minute? And who wants to listen to you, anyway?”

Yeah, that guy sucks. So I did battle with my inner d-bag and went for it anyway, and it turned out that I was ready to get up and speak, and I did have knowledge to share, and people were grateful for it, and some of them said thank you, and occasionally paid me for it, and everything.

Later, I learned the phrase “imposter syndrome,” and I went, “Ohhhhhh.”

And then, about a year ago, I got a really killer reminder of just how deep this goes, and how fiercely I intend to stand up and fight that inner critic from here on in. It came courtesy of my mother, a brilliant and successful woman who has spent her entire career in the nonprofit housing sector, and who runs an organization that she has built up from a small nonprofit with a few apartment buildings to a multimillion dollar, large-scale social enterprise that has inspired hundreds of social housing advocates.

She is amazing. And she has a terror of public speaking.

I was on the phone with her about a year ago, and she said, “Someone asked me to come and speak on this panel for [such-and-such conference]. And I said yes, but I don’t know what they hell I’m going to talk about, because it’s about social enterprise, and nonprofits and government working together, and I don’t know anything about that stuff!”

I sat in shocked silence at the other end of the phone. Two gears turned in my head. Click. One: My mother couldn’t possibly be more of an expert authority on these topics. Two: That is exactly what I hear in my head when I am invited to do something I haven’t done before.

“Mom?” I said. “How long have you been doing this work?”

“Thirty years.”

“How long do you think you need to do it before you’ll feel like an expert?”

Laughter. The laughter of recognition, of nervousness, of “Oh, right.” We laughed together, because we both knew the feeling.

And we both knew she was ready. She was beyond ready.

The thing with this is, unless you want to stick with doing familiar things your whole life, you’re going to have to keep doing battle with the inner d-bag. And you’re going to have to decide at some point that you’re ready (probably beyond ready). (This might require a little fake-it-til-you-become-it mojo – which, by the way, really works.)

If my amazing mama needs encouragement to step up to the mic, how many others are waiting in the wings? And how much wisdom are we holding back by waiting until we feel expert enough?

It’s time. The mic is waiting. We want to hear your voice.

Step up.