Practiced isn’t false. Rehearsed isn’t inauthentic. Preparation is a peace-building gift to yourself and to others.
(And so is style. A friend of mine, remarking upon a mutual acquaintance who is sartorially splendid – her undeniably modern yet dandy-inspired ensembles are detailed and dapper - said: “Her style makes you feel special. Like, all of that is for me?!”)
That’s why canned speeches are like canned peaches: delicious.
Except no one needs canned peaches.
But we all need canned speeches. For business, elevators, interviews, first impressions, cocktail parties, first dates…
…and even predictably and potentially awkward conversations with intimates.
And having a practiced patter doesn’t mean you’re inauthentic. Instead, it means you’re ready to give good convo. It means you’re able to turn potentially fraught interactions into amusing and often surprising connections. It means you invite connection.
To wit, an example. A deeply personal one.
After a failed attempt to see The Help (sold out, alas) my generous mama mediated my disappointment by treating me, my house-guest and my sister for drinks. They ordered margaritas while I pondered my pregnancy-induced deprivation. I wanted alcohol. I wanted something festive adorned with a tiny paper umbrella and a sense of occasion. I may have said so (I don’t ponder deprivation with a lot of discretion) whilst resentfully muttering “I’ll probably have to have a Shirley Temple.”
And so, when the waitress took our order, I asked for her advice. I said, “I can’t have any alcohol, but I want a fancy-schmancy fun and frivolous drink. What do you recommend?”
She paused, then offered, hesitantly, “Maybe a Shirley Temple?”
I had a Shirley Temple.
There was no little stick with a cherry, no umbrella, no bedazzled orange peels. It was loudly disappointing. Or maybe that was me being loudly disappointed.
I digress.
Confession 1: I have a raw spot about being pregnant and unmarried. Not because it conflicts with my moral values or I’m disappointed that my loverloverman hasn’t offered up an entirely unromantic shotgun wedding, but because I’m continually anticipating judgement.
Confession 2: I have an even rawer spot about the imminent prospect of having three children with two different men. The unmarried thing compounds it. I feel quite exposed.
So, my darlings, do you sense a potential flashpoint?
Back to drinks. We’re talking about my girls, the baby, baby names. My sister noted that the children will have to go to different schools because, based on their paternity, my girls have a Charter right to an education in French and therefore attend a Francophone school. The new baby’s papa is not Francophone so he’ll not be allowed to attend the same school.
I hadn’t thought about that. My sister was right. She was observing reality. She was utterly inoffensive in intent and delivery, and I wasn’t put out at all. But my raw spots tingled – not from injury. From contact. As the kids these days say, that’s my shit.
And then my mom, in an equally utterly inoffensive way, noted that all of my children will have different last names. Again true, and by choice – my first two daughters have the same daddy and we deliberately chose to give them similar but different surnames. But when you add baby #3 with a third surname fathered by a different man to whom I am not married…
…and…
Raw spot. Contact. Ouch.
Confession #3: In my younger, more tempestuous days, like last month, I would have taken this observation as not a slight but a grievous injury complete with malicious intent. And I would have reared up like a wounded bear and used my fearsome claws, which is to say my words, to carve something irreversibly damaging into the psyche of my mother who intended and offered no harm.
But.
I recently read a Salon piece about a married couple, Cecilia Jethe and Christopher Ryan, who co-authored Sex at Dawn, a book examining monogamy via anthropology – and reframing some evolutionary theories of sexuality along the way, hallelujah [1] - and was struck by their sensibility. Clearly, once the book was published, they’d be doing media interviews. Obviously, since they are married and writing about monogamy, they would be asked about their own marriage. It only made sense to be prepared. So they prepared an answer that was both informative and unsalacious: “Our relationship is informed by our research.”
Brilliant. Boundary-setting. Marriage is sacred and the details of their intimate lives are theirs to share, if they care to. Or care not to.
Imagine though, if they hadn’t prepared an answer and just hoped no one would articulate the question we’re all thinking and wondering. They would have been unsurprisingly surprised and perhaps even rawly offended when the question inevitably came up, over and over again. The interviews would have been a trial. The answers would have been worse. They could have come off as prickly and reactive.
Possibly I know a lil’ sumthin’ sumthin’ about prickly and reactive and raw.
But, because I had read that piece – and because I regularly preach to my Red Shoe Blogger peeps the importance of an elevator speech – I didn’t go grizzly when people brushed by my invisible scrapes.
Instead, I quipped, “I like to err on the side of trashy.” And I laughed, for real.
And so did everyone else.
And no fragile egos were flayed in the making of a delightful evening.
———-
1. Yo, God Bless Darwin. Yay, evolution. However evolutionary psychology, in my extravagant opinion, is more often used to justify contemporary and hind-sightedly hierarchical gender relations than explain anything and can kiss my fat ‘n fabulous ass.
2. You don’t have to be promoting a book or a business to prepare artful, amusing and invitational responses to predictable inquiries. Having ready answers doesn’t mean you’re a great, big phony. It means you’re prepared not to be a skinless aggressor/defender who attacks and alienates the people you love.
3. Elevator Speech tip #1: Get one. You’re not self-aggrandizing, you’re giving people an opportunity to understand you. And, done heartfully and artfully, you’re also creating an invitation to meaningful conversation. You’re givomg someone an opportunity to ask questions and really connect.
4. Elevator Speech tip#2: Thanks to a tip from my magnificent friend Astarte Sands I regularly recommend the Wow, How, Now approach to my Red Shoe Bloggers. Watch it and work it – because it does work. Beautifully.
5. Elevator Speech tip #3: It’s critical. It’s how you present yourself in the world. It’s more important than a business card (I don’t even have a business card). And so it’s worth investing in. And so if you’re struggling to define and practice your magnetic, compelling, follow-up and meaning-inducing pitch, you must work with Dyana Valentine. Her Pitch Perfect (she has a wildly useful self-guided program as well as a catalytic one-on-one pitch-perfecting phone session and an intensive workshop that produces not one but several multi-purpose speeches) is, well, purrrrfect. I regularly, wholeheartedly and enthusiastically recommend her to my peeps.
And to you.
I get off on being the bad girl because I’m accorded the privilege of being good. And so because I’m safe, I like sexually charged language, curse words and brazen confession. I like to be the change I want to see the world and I want women to own it. Own their sexualities. Own their power. Own their voices. Own themselves.
I want women to be badasses rather than bad – ‘cuz fuck the good girl/bad girl madonna/whore dichotomy. I’m not either. I’m both.
And so sometimes I delight in the shiver of appropriating pimp-and-ho language for my suburban biz. It’s kind of sexy-shocking-funny for a seemingly whitebread mama to describe the sacrifices she makes to pay the bills while growing her gig as “whoring”.
Except it’s not, really.
For a while I’ve worried about pimp-and-ho analogies and language. We use the metaphor casually, comedically - but it seems that the only people (like moi) who do that are those far removed from the exploitation and violence inherent in the pimp/ho dynamic.
And so…suburban mamas, bootstrapping entrepeneurs, emerging artists and privileged peeps: let’s think about what it means before we say it.
Think about the woman getting stomped by a man for not handing over the money she made on her back being used by another man.
Think about the girls and women in captivity. Not just far away in other countries but a few streets over.
Think about what it means for a violent man to instruct “his” woman not to look him in the eye. And what happens if she does.
Think deeply and carefully before comparing your freely chosen sacrifice and hustle to pimping or being pimped.
Scattered, fragmented, fractured, frenzied, spinning, doing-doing-doing and doing too much: it’s a great sign.
It’s a sign that you’re being practical.
It’s a sign your vision is so large, grandiose and wildy impractical that you’ve backed away from it because how do you make a living at that?
(Please tell me you viscerally resisted agreeing with that last line.)
It’s a sign that you have a calling. (Callings are rarely practical.)
I’m being unfair. I dig practical. We’re homies from way back and Practical has almost always had my back.
You know this drumbeat: Ditch your job. It’s a prison. It’s shackling your artistic impulses.
Well my trumpet has a clarion call answer to that:
HAH!
IF your job IS a prison and it’s killing you, then by all means ditch it. Just have a way to eat. Starving won’t serve your art.
Sometimes it is better to quit. Better to exit the profession that’s killing you and find a temporary gig that’ll keep the bills paid while your Real Career begins to blossom. Better to paint all day and sling beer in a bar on Friday nights than serve time five days a week as a ___________.
BUT.
Having a day job, having an interim career – or a decades-long one – that keeps you fed and clothed and watered and well WILL serve your art if you let it. I find freedom in security. I created a business and grew my skills as an artist while working five days a week in an office job. And knowing that each month my bills were paid (and then some) is what allowed me the freedom to create. It also allowed me to buy books and tools and courses and coaching and childcare.
A moment of reverence, please, for children and childcare.
It also gave me something to push against. It gave me structure. After the kids went to bed, I had two hours a night, five days a week to create. And that was it. If I let those hours waste away, they were indeed wasted. They were all I had. And like a stubborn boyfriend who warns you that he’s like a train and only goes in one direction – forward – once those available hours are gone they won’t come back.
And so I cancelled my cable and most of my social life and I got down to it. Writing. Creating. Learning. Getting better. Getting a business together. Every night.
So: you don’t have to quit your day job to be an artist or an entrepreneur. You can do both or all three until someone in the threesome demands more – and offers more.
Offering more, and being more is an answer. Doing more just to do more is not.
Contradictory, yes? Perhaps even paradoxical, since I just said, do more. Do your day job and your art and your business all at once.
Here’s when doing more is effective and productive: when all three serve your Big Blue Sky Mission.
When developing your skills as an artist and entrepreneur requires a certain level of security and solvency, your job can be an act of devotion. It can be consistent with your Big Blue Sky Mission. And when that’s the case, all your activities, your doing, your busy-ness cohere. They’re foundational. They’re serving – and subordinate to – your calling.
And here’s the thing. Six months of twice-daily Red Shoe Blogger sessions with driven dreamers and ambitious revolutionaires and mild-mannered malcontents (oh how I adore the malcontents: they quietly insist on sitting in the front seat and resist scaling back their wildly impractical dreams of justice) has taught me something profound:
You already know what to do.
But the magnitude of your magnificent vision intimidates you. Or it doesn’t offer a clear money-making path. Or it includes a controversial element that is daring, destabilizing, taboo-breaking.
And that element is essential.
And so there will be fallout. It’s predictable. You can predict it. Your neighbour will be astonished. Your best friend will be scandalized. Your mother will send you concerned e-mails. Your sister will raise her eyebrows. Your lovers – all of the former – will worry. The haters – and oh God, sometimes your lovers and haters are one and the same – will hate.
And your accurate predictions force you – you think – to neuter your dynamic, daring, generative mission into something practical and palatable.
Because if you commit to kissing the sky you will abandon safe ground. It will be impossible to please everyone. You will polarize. You will pioneer. You will often be alone with only your vision to comfort you. You will spend long low times in The Dip, otherwise known as depression. Financial. Mental. Social.
But you will do that thing only you can do.
And you already know what it is.
Give yourself permission. To dream, to do, to dream, to do, to do too much for your dreamy dream. Devote all your practical doings to your wildly impractical dream.
That’s what I do.
———————————
This piece is dedicated to an extraordinary Red Shoe Blogger who heard – really heard – and then acted on the hard and true thing I told her: that she was fracturing her efforts and needed to focus all of her activites – even if they continued to be many – on realizing her Big Blue Sky Mission. You can do many things and flounder and hope one is a winning lottery ticket and, well, you know how that usually turns out.
Or.
You can be and do many things – and yes, sometimes you have to – but you must ensure that all your activities and efforts interlock into a wall that holds up your big blue sky.
And that’s the test around doing too much. Only do too much if all the doing is an act of devotion to your dream.
Hey you. Artist. Entrepreneur. Earner. Do-gooder. Seeker.
Let’s talk about your money.
Money is deeply personal. Our relationship with our money is directly connected to our relationship with our creativity. Getting right with money means that you can get right with your contribution to the world. Getting right with money means you can better practice your art.You can create more. Offer more. Give more.
More abundance, more art, more you. Money is CENTRAL.
Faith: that the people commanding the highest prices will not hoard their wealth nor will they flaunt it. They will use it.
You will use it.
I want you to be one of the people who use their wealth because I trust you and I love you.
Faith: that the value of what I provide far outstrips the price I charge. I’m not extracting a luxurious lifestyle from unsuspecting clients; I’m delivering services and products that help people earn and create more than they pay.
Your gain is not your customer’s loss.
Faith: in your abilities and talents; in your customers and their circumstances; in a system that is changing more quickly than we can keep up with.
Faith. Fear.
Our relationship with money is often just that: we want more but fear what will happen when we get it. So we keep our prices low, we don’t offer for sale all that we could, we “neglect” to tell people we’re in business at all. We leave money on the table and, with it, our ability to be truly feeling, creative, and in-our-own-power. It’s a nasty cycle and it’s not all about money.
It’s about our fear of greatness and fear of all we can truly become. It’s about our fear of the greatness we can bring into the world.
The antidote: faith. In yourself and your abilities. In your customers. In your art and your contribution.
Because once you believe – and this isn’t an airy-fairy wish-it-were-so affirmation, but a declaration borne of experience, offer and contribution – that the value of what you provide far outstrips the price you charge, money gets easy. Faith-full.
————————————–
Friend Much by Theilr
You know those magnetic poem puzzles? The box of words you arrange and rearrange on your refrigerator door?
This piece is that. I extracted and rearranged almost every single word and phrase from Tara Gentile’s 79 page guide/practical money manifesta, The Art of Earning.
(And so if this found poem/money manifesta affected you and your urge to do and be and earn more, imagine the full impact of the guide, itself.)
In the last several months – when I turned my tanking business around by fueling it with oranges, offerings and shiny gold coins – I’ve wondered if we (yes “we”, we’re definitely in this together) get comfortable with broke. If we stay at the survival line because we know how to live there. We know how to cope with lack and so lack the skills to manage lots.
I’ve wondered if earning more so you can do more requires giving yourself permission to ask for more.
Mostly, of yourself.
And that’s what Tara’s The Art of Earning is about.
(I know because I contributed to it. I’m promoting it. I’m telling you because I believe in it - and in Tara Gentile’s ethics and business coaching acumen.)
The Art of Earning is about more. More art, more earning, more faith.
If you’ve ever been embarrassed to post your offer at the bottom of a blog post; hesitant to charge people for your services – hell, charge at all – or starved your art and your business and yourself because you’re undercharging, you need this guide. We all do. The Art of Earning is about getting your head right so your money can follow. And it’s for you, dear Artist, Entrepreneur, Do-Gooder, Seeker, Contributor, Earner, Sharer.
——-
image credit: Friend Much by Theilr
In the 1940s, when Jackson Pollock was using sticks, hardened paint brushes and syringes to drip liquid enamel paint – common house paint – onto canvases laid out on the floor, did he think “A lot of people are going to hate this”?
He probably did.
He did it anyway.
Hallelujah.
————–
I learned this - and do this – by consciously, repeatedly ignoring that voice in my head that says “What will your father think about this piece???!” –
- the words and works of righteous babe Ani DiFranco and the wisdom of Danielle LaPorte reinforced that message as legitimate and necessary –
- and at dinner Saturday night the deep and divine thinkers Pema Teeter and Lianne Raymond drove it from the back, back, back of my mind to the front-and-center.
Where it needs to be, always.
Yesterday was Blue Monday. The holidays are over, holiday credit card bills have just arrived, resolutions have unravelled. Researchers say it is the saddest day of the year.
And it’s still winter: grey, grim, dark and cold.
Perfect time to light your fire.
————————–
June 9, 2009. Sunshine. I’m driving the winding road to Whistler and appreciating everything in my path. I’m grateful for the good road, the great weather, having a paid day off from my salaried job, and having a salary so I can pay for days like this. I’m on the road to where I want to be. The music is hot, the sun is warm on my skin and two hours into it, I admit, Fuck it. I’m an artist.
Then, during a group firestarter session with Danielle LaPorte, I mainline her white hot truths for surviving and thriving as a solo entrepreneur and an artist: Build an online platform. Your art requires an audience and your business needs customers (and they need you). Guest post. Know your squeak-by number (the minimum amount of money you need to live) and then go get the money, honey. When designing your site ensure that whatever makes you the most money gets the most virtual real estate. Craft your conversation-sparking elevator speech and deliver it. Organically grow your twitter following like this: give. Ruthlessly and relentlessly hone your vision and your mission. Exercise your askus requestus muscle (ask. ask for what you want. ask for what you need. ask. keep asking. ask). Protect your time and assume the divine responsibility of self-care. Have integrity. Be faithful to your vision and your people. Do what you say you’re going to do. Always.
But I swear everything Danielle said sounds like this:
you’reanartistyou’reanartistyou’reanartist
youcandoityoucandoityoucandoit
doitdoitdoit
Everything she says sounds like she’s saying it just for me. I get tear-y.
I cry the happy cry all the way home and then I get terrified. I have two kids to feed. They don’t eat words.
At home I check my e-mail and there’s a note from Danielle. It says: you’re hot shit and the real deal and you should be getting your ass published as widely as possible.
More tears.
Months later Danielle DM’s me:
leap
Months later, I do.
————————–
“Lonely? Lonely is my most faithful companion,” I chirped, my words entirely at odds with my tone. That seemingly-tossed off sentence had been simmering for months. I give good quote.
And so I spoke shiny, glossy, bloody truth.
Lonely is my most enduring relationship. We met when I was born, torn from warm water into cold air. When I kept a flesh secret for the family spider, when my best friend made out with her boyfriend at lunch and left me to eat alone, when I scanned the call display while my man was in the shower, when I was barely, begrudgingly, miserably pregnant but lost the baby without anyone to hold me, then Lonely was my only lover.
I cheat on him with turnstile dating, frantic sex, bids for attention, comfort food, gossip, good friends, gorgeous children and copious amounts of writing, but he is my soul’s 4am. We meet every night.
It isn’t just me. I’m convinced it is the human condition. We’re skinned entities, almost always distinct from each other. Separate. And yet we cannot exist with each other. We are meant to be together. We are one. And one, we all know, is the loneliest number.
So when my friend told me he “conquered loneliness in 2004″, I was astonished, then envious.
He suggested I do the same.
Later, he told me “conquered” wasn’t really the right word. It was more about coming to terms with lonely as an emotion, and emotions are transient and temporary feelings rather than a permanent state of being.
But for me, lonely is neither an emotion nor a state of being. Lonely is a shadow. He goes where I go.
So, what if, instead of conquering him – that sounds like such a protracted mess – I confront him? Maybe even make peace?
What if I say,
Yes, we are going to be together forever. It’s you ‘n me, Lonely.
Maybe I won’t ever marry again.
Maybe I will be on my own for the rest of my life.
What then?
Then I would have to
- double my income instead of hoping a hypothetical man will bring in half what I want
- save for retirement (do people do that anymore? Retire?)
- find ways to work or volunteer with babies
- consider adopting or fostering a child
- take myself off the unfulfilling-relationship hamster-wheel
- finally take up salsa
- travel more
- buy a house or a condo or just something, dammit
- be a better friend, sister, mother and daughter
- forgive the ones who harmed me
- forgive myself – because it will be a long walk and I’d like to enjoy my own company
- get a dog
- find God
Maybe lonely could be my best friend, if only I’d let him.
I’ve been sorting out what money means to me and the answer is this:
mostly, not much.
This might explain why I’m not rolling in filthy lucre.
I’ve written about it before: money isn’t really my currency.
When I think about the money part of my business, I get bored.
When I think about the things I ought to do with my money – buy a house, buy a better car, save for vacations and retirement (ha! as if I’ll retire from writing!) – I get even more bored.
Because I’m disenchanted with those conventional ends, the means (money) don’t mean much.
But when I started thinking about what having more money means I can do for other people, or how I could use money to serve Life As A Grand Adventure rather than a mortgage (french: mort = death), I realize,
Money is commitment.
(thunderclap! lightning bolt! gregorian chants!)
There’s a reason we say “put your money where your mouth is.” Where we put our resources – time, love, cash – on a daily basis creates, demonstrates and confirms our commitments.
I put most of my money into providing a stable, suburban infrastructure for my children. Because I’m unwaveringly committed to them.
(And legally and morally obliged. But mostly because I love them and so I don’t mind giving them all my money. It’s a privilege.)
(And by this measure, my next most committed relationship is with Starbucks.)
But committed, and commitment, is not the same thing as sacrifice – although lots of relationship experts, money gurus and spiritual leaders tell us otherwise.
We’re often encouraged to “sacrifice” for the long game, the portfolio of riches, or to get to heaven.
Sacrifice spending now so that you can save for later. Sacrifice dating and independence for marriage. Sacrifice TV time for blogging. Sacrifice a tidy house for a generative creative life. Sacrifice freedom for a day job. Sacrifice a day job to be an entrepreneur. Sacrifice your time to run errands for a lover who’s swamped.
And all of these things are valuable and necessary to accomplish your goals and support your loved ones.
But they aren’t sacrifice.
Sacrifice is when you trade something dearly attractive for something unattractive.
Get under your desk. The world is upside down. I’m about to quote Ayn Rand.
“Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. “Sacrifice” does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. “Sacrifice” is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don’t.
If you exchange a penny for a dollar, it is not a sacrifice; if you exchange a dollar for a penny, it is. If you achieve the career you wanted, after years of struggle, it is not a sacrifice; if you then renounce it for the sake of a rival, it is. If you own a bottle of milk and give it to your starving child, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to your neighbor’s child and let your own die, it is.
If you give money to help a friend, it is not a sacrifice; if you give it to a worthless stranger, it is. If you give your friend a sum you can afford, it is not a sacrifice; if you give him money at the cost of your own discomfort…if you give him money at the cost of disaster to yourself—that is…sacrifice in full.
…A sacrifice is the surrender of a value.
So, then, according to Rand (seriously, I cannot believe I’m doing this!), sacrifice is the surrender of value, and specifically of a higher value to a lower one.
- When we forgo going out at night to work on a project for school or work, we’re not sacrificing.
- When, instead of buying hot and unnecessary new shoes for ourselves we buy our children new coats and rainboots, we’re not sacrificing.
- When we do not put that trip on the credit card and instead take a debt-free tour of a national park, we’re not sacrificing.
- When we decide to ignore the crumbs on the floor so we can knock out an extraordinary essay/painting/consultation, we’re not sacrificing.
We’re delaying gratification.
We’re trading the things that are low in value for things that are high in value.
We’re INVESTING – in ourselves, our loved ones, our dreams, our reality.
And that’s commitment.
Commitment is not sacrifice.
Commitment is trading the things that don’t mean much for the things that do.
Commitment is putting your money where your heart is.
———–
Challenge:
think about money ‘n commitment, and tell us in the comments:
what does the way you spend your money say about your commitments?
does the way you earn your money line up with your commitments?
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