by kate swoboda

We could put this in the “What I Think I Know For Sure” file: Life will present you with lots of opportunities to tell the world who you want to be.

It was an average Wednesday. I fired up the computer in the morning, checked email, my personal Facebook page, and then my Facebook fan page–where I discovered that someone had reported every single individual link I’d posted to the fan page as “abusive.” Thus, anyone clicking on the link would see a message that the link had been reported as abusive, and that was that. Why someone would do this when not a single link I’d provided violates Facebook terms of use (that is, unless they’ve now established a moratorium on writing about love, connection, acceptance, and the like!) was beyond me. Why Facebook shut down the links without sending so much as an email message to me to say something is also beyond me.

I sighed. Annoying. I started searching through the links to contact Facebook and report that I’d been reported. A half-hour later I finally managed to find a way to contact them, and having done that? I commenced with “The Script.”

The Script. We all have one. It’s the thoughts that come to us, usually in the same order, right after we feel we’ve been wronged, gotten a bum deal, or had our asses handed to us. The Script will vary from person to person, but fundamentally it’s Victim Radio: All Victim, All The Time.

Any of the following could be part of your Script when things don’t go well: Why did that happen to me? Why do these things always happen? Can’t anything go right? People are assholes. I’m sick of this. What’s wrong with people? _________ is stupid. _______ can’t be counted on. I can’t believe this. It’s not fair. I’m going to tell ______ what a jerk they are. I’m not speaking to ______ anymore.

The Script usually runs on auto-pilot until we start getting savvy to its game. Getting conscious about your Script is Tool #1. Otherwise, it can run for hours. Days. Weeks. Months. Lifetimes.

I was pretty aware that my Script was running because–for instance–I was thinking things like, “Man, I’m just not going to use Facebook anymore.” Laughable! As if my boycott of Facebook would make this any better! I was also in “People are assholes,” mode, angry that someone had decided to be passive-aggressive, as opposed to just writing me and sharing their thoughts.

Tool #2: After you’ve noticed The Script, notice the predominant emotion. For me, anger was coming up more than anything. And if there’s anything I’ve learned, it’s that underneath anger there is, 99% of the time, some sadness. So even though it felt vulnerable, I dug a bit deeper. I found the part of me that was thinking, “Why did that happen to me?” The part of me that felt hurt, and tender, and a little picked on. The part of me that yearns to be connected to all people in some way, and that was feeling disconnected in this moment–the part of me that was a little hurt, and sad.

But I didn’t want to stay there forever, either. I decided that I’d get out of the house for a bit to do my most-est favorite-est thing: grab a small soy chai latte (no foam).

Then I pulled out Tool #3: Move. In the car, I listened to Corinne Bailey Rae’s song, “Put your Records On” followed by Cold Cave’s “Life Magazine” and KT Tungstall’s “Suddenly I See.” My butt bopped in the seat a bit as I drove.

This lightened the mood enough for a little whisper to come in, a soft voice that asked: “Kate, who do you want to be in this situation?”

And there it was. I contemplated. I didn’t want to give my power away to this situation. I didn’t want to spend the day mucking around in it. I wanted to trust that it’d all work out. I remembered what two of my personal heroes, Rich and Yvonne Dutra-St.John of Challenge Day (www.challengeday.org) say about criticism: it’s often a sign that in some way, you’re making yourself seen, and that’s the mark of a leader. Visibility.

Tool #4: Ask, “Who do I want to be?”

Then, of course, there was my tattoo. A few months before, I’d taken a deep breath and had “love + acceptance” tattooed on my arm, in a highly visible spot. I’d done that because that’s who I want to be in all moments. It’s my highest vision. I don’t want to forget it, even in my most frustrating moments.

So who do I want to be in this situation? I want to be love and acceptance. As I said before, life will present all of us with lots of opportunities to show the world who we want to be. I’ll consider this to be one of mine.

Right then, life felt too short to care about Facebook fan pages. The music sounded good. I had a chai latte in my hand, a home to return to, a loving partner who I knew would give me a hug, Poppy the wonderkitty sleeping on a chair in my office, a day before me of doing work that I love, an interview scheduled with someone who really inspires me.

And that didn’t sound half-bad.

So that’s what I’m declaring myself to be, today. How about you?

by kate swoboda

by kate swooboda

As I type this, I am sitting at the Alameda Free Library in Alameda, California. The local school district has just finished a unit on ancient Egypt, and set up on a nearby table is a display of cardboard pyramids and clay-modeled. All of them are lopsided; all of them are unevenly painted. One pyramid near me has glitter on it, and something tells me that while the Pharaohs might have had gold, they weren’t inclined to dust it all over the pyramids (though maybe some fifth-grader who just finished the unit on ancient Egypt knows more about that than I do).

The thought occurred to me as I was walking by these displays: “Maybe we’re never supposed to stop learning and living that way.” The visual way. The creative way. The lopsided and uneven way. The way where we immerse our hands in something sticky and colorful and where, since we’re not going to replicate real Egyptian pyramids to scale anyway, we might as well have fun. Bring on the glitter!

As a former teacher of English, the thing that broke my heart the most was that I met so many students who “hated English.” They “hated” reading, they said. Ooof! In goes the knife. They “hated” writing. Ooof! The knife has been twisted. I didn’t take it personally, but it was sad to see and I hoped to change it. I wanted them to see that reading and writing were fun, an escape, an opportunity to temporarily live the lives of others, a powerful exercise in putting your life in your own hands, a chance to speak your truth. Somewhere along the line, the classrooms of children who oooh! and aaaahhh! at each twist and turn of a book at story time grow up and become people who don’t want to write an essay in which they demonstrate critical thinking (with perfect grammar. And thesis statements. And topic sentences).

And who can blame them? I hated grading those essays, so my guess is that they hated writing them. And what else was there to assign, with an educational system that seemingly says, somewhere around the age of ten, that we are no longer to bother with moving our bodies, or with creativity, or with matters of the heart and spirit—no, now we need the right answers. We begin to exist from the neck, up.

Many of us don’t shift out of that space after school. For instance, this is fairly common in my coaching practice:  A client reports something fantastic on our call. “That’s great!” I’ll say, because it is. “How did you celebrate yourself?”

The line suddenly grows quiet. “I hadn’t even thought about that,” they might say.

We grow older and, unless we start consciously steering ourselves differently, it can be easy to start existing from the neck, up. Living from the heart? Ridiculous! How “Pollyanna”! Trusting that inner “YES” inside? Be realistic! Celebrate yourself? How arrogant! Reward yourself? What a waste of money! Do you think you’re supposed to get a reward for everything? Life doesn’t work that way!

Then we wonder why it can be hard to make our lives take flight in the way that we want them to. Why would we want to risk dreaming when, along the way, we’re going to deny ourselves periods of rest before going on, or we’re not going to get time to play, or we’re going to tell ourselves that what we feel isn’t as valuable as what we think? Living from the neck up is a recipe for burnout.

Now, if you recognize yourself in any of this, please know that I say none of this to condemn, or to admonish you into putting “Reward myself” on the to-do list. In fact, I actually think that the first step in this whole process of shifting so that we stop living from the neck up is to laugh. Yes, laugh. Consciously. It’s one of the tools that I use daily—taking one minute to do a laugh session where I simply laugh at nothing at all. Usually, when I invite clients into this they admit that they feel foolish. I know I certainly did, the first time I tried it with my own coach. What could be more foolish that laughing out loud, at nothing in particular?

Well, perhaps it is foolish—and few things are more fun. Babies laugh hundreds of times a day, while adults laugh only a few. Try a one-minute laugh session. Literally set a timer for one minute and then force yourself to laugh. Really get into it. Slap your knee. Guffaw. Laugh like Julia Child or Bart Simpson. Just force those puffs of air and then laugh at the silliness of it all.

Congratulations. You just took one step towards living from your whole body, not just from the neck up and all of the great things that logic and clear thinking can give you, but also from that place of inner joy that is in us all, that gets covered up easily by too many admonishments to “Be realistic.” (And in case you do want realistic reasons for laughing, there are studies to be found that say it supports blood flow, the immune system, etc.)

So often, I meet people who believe that to integrate creativity into their lives or to live with passion or to see dreams come true, there is this (often massive) list of  steps. “I just need to sit down and make myself do it,” someone might say of starting a creative practice. This sounds uncannily like my former students, sighing, wishing that they didn’t need to write a paper. The students who wrote the best papers found some passion for the argument, in order to write a good argumentative paper. Otherwise, the sentences marched along like ants in a row, and a few more trees were killed along the way.

Our educational system may still require formal writing almost to the exclusion of creative or expressive writing, but you, reading this, get to choose how you want to experience this day. I would even argue that dreams are not always the thing to go after. Stepping into practices that have some powerful purpose—a purpose like joy—naturally brings about what it is that we want. We don’t “do the stuff” to get to the joy—that’s thinking from the neck up. We step into the joy with where we are right now, and the doing or having of the stuff is a byproduct.

So where do you want to live, right now? Neck up, or whole body? Anyone want to join me for a laugh session?

By Kate Swoboda

Okay. So you’ve set a goal. Or you have an idea in mind for something you want to change. Maybe you’ve even laid out a few action steps. It feels heady, this goal-setting business. There’s a kind of a rush, whether it comes from finally getting over the fear that surrounded admitting you wanted something, or realizing that you’re completely stoked to have it and ready to dive in.

“It will take time,” some cautionary voice inside of us warns. Perhaps some more fear crops up then, too, and then when we push that away there’s a new surge of that great feeling. You did it! You set a goal! You identified a dream! You’re going to make it happen!

Days, weeks, months pass. Then perhaps you realize: Shit. It really does take time. Maybe lots of time. Maybe the kind of time where I don’t know what the hell to do with myself now that the bubbly rush feeling is gone and (WARNING: BOAT METAPHOR AHEAD) I’ve got one foot on the boat and one foot on the dock. That boat isn’t setting sail yet, so I need one food on the dock, and yet it kind of is, so I need one foot on the boat, and I’ve got a groin muscle that is seriously complaining right now.

And somewhere, in some part of ourselves that we don’t want to acknowledge (usually, anyway), we are bummed that the goal did not happen instantly, with a snap of the fingers. If you are anything like me, you might even have moments where you want to claw at the walls and cry, “Does this mean it’s not meant to BE?” (Caution: this is the moment when most of us go out to buy a new self-help book, commit to a meditation practice that we won’t follow, sabotage ourselves by talking to someone who doesn’t really support us, consult a psychic, passively quit, or actually quit).

passively quitting: not out and out quitting, but slacking off on doing whatever needs to be done to a degree that things start to sputter and stall, or retreating into complaints and defeat, until things get worse so that you can more legitimately say “Well, it wasn’t working.” Think of men in relationships who grow inexplicably distant and stop returning phone calls so that you will do the dirty work of breaking up with them, and you get the idea.

I confess that I have experienced this phenomenon myself in the past few months (this is the bummer realization about becoming a Coach—learning about ways to change behavior and hold space for others in the midst of a rough patch does not automatically translate into my own problem-free, reaction-free, rough-patch-free life).

I wanted to declare that I was starting a new career path of coaching + retreats + e-courses, and I (secretly, of course) wanted everything to be wildly successful. In my mind, this meant a completely full coaching slate, retreats that sold out within a few weeks of announcing them, e-courses that also sold out within a few days of announcing them. Also, everyone would be wildly pleased with everything I did. I told myself that this was a “reasonable” thing to expect, because after all, (imagine me puffed up with pride for not being “perfectionistic” about it) I wasn’t saying things needed to sell out in a few hours. I was saying a few weeks. Also, I really liked this word: wildly when attached to this other word: successful.

In reality, clients have come and gone at the same rate that they always have, some retreats have filled easily while others have not, and my e-courses have filled over weeks, not days. In reality, I was being perfectionistic about it, an old habit, even though I didn’t want to admit it to myself. The past few months have been an experience of living in Trigger City. I had expectations, and if they weren’t met, I needed to keep having Talks With Myself about perfectionism and boundaries and not telling myself a Story that I was failing if I didn’t automatically have the same level of financial security working for myself that I had had working for someone else. I kept fretting about how I wanted to make a living supporting myself, forgetting that duh—I am supporting myself. That rent check each month? Written by me. Not a sugar-daddy. Me.

I make it a practice to “look for the gold,” to find out where in life’s challenges there’s something of value, and from that place—and of course I can only speak of this now because I’ve made quite a bit of headway and processed through many of the feelings—I see a lot of value in my experience in the past few months. Talk about practicing acceptance. Talk about practicing Letting Go. If you ever feel like diving into those practices, start a business.

But the biggest thing that I have needed to acknowledge is that I Wanted It Done Now, and I forgot that I Am Doing It.

(Now, before you start wondering if I left my career as an English teacher because I am challenged by proper capitalization, let me just add the disclaimer that I’m aware of how to properly capitalize things.)

I Am Doing It. I’m in process. I’m doing everything that needs to be done, and have had a number of successes along the way.

Remember the metaphorical boat? When I get stuck in I Want it Done Now I actually maintain the fearful, spread-legged, “I’m going to fall into a pond of duck shit” feeling. When I step into I Am Doing It, a sort of thrilling realization hits me:

The boat has left the dock, baby.

Both feet are in. We’re sailing.

Time to enjoy the ride rather than skip over the part where I’m out on the open water.

From a really deep place, I am now excited to see what is before me. I mean, how cool is this—I have started to work for myself. There will never again be a year like this one, my first year. Never again will I have quite the same freshness of beginner’s mind that I have now. This is something worth savoring before it transforms into something else.

And how neat it is that I can already look back over the past few months and see, and feel, a real shift in who I am that has resulted purely from taking this leap. I can even see how, based on the experience I’ve had with this, I would be a better teacher should I ever decide to return to the classroom. I can see how I am a better partner, a better friend, a better human being on the planet, walking with more patience and more insight and more willingness to trust and a drastically expanded comfort zone around taking risks.

by kate swoboda

Why, hello there! It’s great to be here.

At the beginning of any relationship there are usually introductions to be made, and this is where we first begin sharing the stories of who we are. There’s something interesting to me about the parts that we humans include, and the way we include those parts, when we tell stories. There’s something even more interesting to me in the parts that we choose to omit. Most of all, I love how often I realize that we can be “seen,” even when we choose carefully what we say, because something essential about who you are and who I am always shows up, even when we think that we’re very carefully keeping things “normal” and hiding our individuality.

Before I share anything about myself, I’m curious: Who are you? Here’s why I want to know: For six years, I taught English at the community college level. I learned a lot from that experience, namely that while my students did want to know about me—would I yell at them if they were late? what was my policy on texting?—what they really wanted to know was what kind of relationship we would have. I liked to start off that relationship with learning about them. I wanted to know what would make them unique. I wanted to know what their dreams were, the things they wanted most deeply, because it wasn’t the threat of an “F” that would motivate them so much as it would be the possibility of getting to that dream. The more I knew about them, the more I could be of service in motivating them to stay the course.

Also, I liked to joke, I was curious to know who had family members who were on the local police force, because I wasn’t above tapping my students for parking ticket fixes.

So I’ll start this writer-reader relationship in the same way. Who are you? What do you yearn for most deeply? What moves you? Where would you like to be in one year? Who is the biggest supporter in your life, and where in your life is there an energy drain you’d like to get rid of? What is the most courageous thing you’ve ever done? How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop? What do you think Scarlett Johanssen whispered in Bill Murray’s ear at the end of Lost in Translation?

My name is Kate, originally Katherine. I was named after Katharine Hepburn, but in post-labor exhaustion the spelling was accidentally changed. I was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri, though I now call the San Francisco area my home. My Catholic conservative father and atheist liberal mother divorced when I was seven; reading and writing saved my life because they gave me a place to escape to and a place to tell my truth, in that order. We lived in a neighborhood where we heard gunshots; where drug deals took place on the street; where I dared not wear too short of shorts in the summertime for fear of cat-calls or, worse, rape.

Until I was nine, I wanted more than anything to write and illustrate children’s books, but in third grade I went head to head in a drawing competition with Brad Busby, whose mother was a doctor. Brad Busby practiced drawing the skeletal system from his mother’s textbooks; I drew rainbow butterflies. Brad was declared the winner and as I compared our work, I knew that his was “better” and in that moment, gave up. My enthusiasm for art moved to music. I had been playing the piano since I was 5, and would later add the flute, clarinet, cello, violin, and viola. This became my passion; I practiced for hours each day and competed. I got a job one week after I turned fifteen and a half, the legal working age in Missouri, and began working evenings and saving money for the two things that would get me out of Kansas City: a car, and college. There were a series of jobs: I made gyros at the mall, slung pizza, changed watch batteries, cashiered at a drugstore, and folded denim at The Gap.

I went to a small college just outside of Chicago, where I got into computers and started blogging. This was before blogging was even remotely deemed acceptable, when it still carried with it the stigma of being something that only skinny high school geeks did, in between playing Magik and Dungeons and Dragons. I ate dinner sometimes with a group of people who talked about the virtual world they had created via something called the MUCK: Multi-User Character Kingdom. But how else does one survive a Chicago winter?

On my summer breaks, I worked for an insurance company that underwrote worker’s compensation policies for a restaurant chain, and I read the claims to pass the time. The weirdest one I ever saw was this: an employee filed a claim because he was bitten by a stray kitten. It occurs to me only now that I was blogging this entire time, but never once wrote about such oddities as this. Talk about a missed opportunity!

I’ll quickly sum up the rest: I finished college; went to graduate school in California for writing; became an English teacher; met my sweetie; grew increasingly frustrated by the limitations of the current educational institution to meet the needs of remedial, second-language, and multi-cultural learners; realized that if I spent the rest of my life teaching thesis statements I’d probably need to take up drinking; trained to become a life coach, and a few months ago, let go of teaching in order to become a full-time coach, retreat leader, and e-course developer.

FIN.

But here’s what I left out: bulimia at fourteen; a history of depression and suicidal tendencies that didn’t stop until I was 22; anxiety; worry; perfectionism; lost relationships; anger; rage. Also: falling completely in love; opening my heart; dropping the snarck; processing out the anger; studying Zen Buddhism; receiving reiki transmission; traveling to Italy; meeting my coach/guru Matthew; volunteering for Challenge Day (www.challengeday.org); finally arriving at a place where I could leave laundry on the floor and clutter up the kitchen counter with dirty dishes without bursting a vein (YES! Victory!).

I find this last paragraph to be inherently more interesting than all of the DOing stuff that came before it. Lately, I am far more interested in BEing, and that’s part of why I want to know about you. DOing is solitary; BEing is collaborative.

I’m curious about you because I think that you matter. I think that there is something courageous that shows up within each of as we get up to face the day, armed with our complicated and imperfectly beautiful histories and baggage, and I love it when we share our stories of who we BE rather than what we DO.

So in your story of who you are: Who do you BE? What parts of your story are most important to include, and how complete are they? How much room do you make in your story for imperfection, and how much room do you make for how perfectly it all turned out? What parts of your story are you most inclined to omit? If you’re so moved, consider this the subject of a blog post for your own blog; link back here in the comments and we can get a lovely amalgamation of inspiration going.

I’m so excited and grateful to be a part of this space! Thank you for having me and I look forward to seeing what comes!