Fall in love with your purpose

What is your purpose?

The question is one to step into as a journey.
It can be easy. Here’s how:
Be curious. Be open to being surprised by what you discover.
Gently raise your purpose to your ear and listen.

Your purpose lives and changes just like you… savor each fleeting moment.

Carry your purpose with you wherever you go, in front of you, near your heart.
Spend time with your purpose. Indulge it. Forgive it. Romance it. Connect to it on a cellular and physical level.

Allow everything that transpires to be a gift in service of you and your divine purpose.

Then play, play, play.
What fun can you have with this?
What adventures might your purpose lead you into today?
Ease and passion coexist where purpose meets your physical presence, your actions, your mind.

Trust your purpose, and enjoy the ride!

Video: On Gratitude and Hating Homework

It’s 7:30 a.m. I just woke up, and I’m wiped out. I had food poisoning yesterday. And it made me realize how grateful I am for how I normally feel. In the spirit of gratitude, I picked up this gratitude journal. It was a gift from my brother-in-law Devon, who’s a master of personal development and growth. Every day there are some questions you fill out.

Three in the morning:
1. I am grateful for…
2. What would make today great?
3. Daily affirmations

Two in the evening:
1. Three amazing things that happened today…
2. How could I make today even better?

There’s a bunch of information in the front of the book about how these questions are scientifically proven to help you live a better and happier life. And it’s making me wonder if these practices are something that I should be asking my coaching clients to take on. I notice that I really shy away from giving a lot of homework because I hate homework. I think that comes from a really self-limiting belief that I don’t do homework. In elementary school, I would be sent home with these little blue notes that I was supposed to give to my parents that said “ Guess whose goose is cooked?” And I would put them in my backpack, which was just a pile of disorganized paper, and eventually a stack of these blue notes would fall out and I’d give them to my parents. Luckily, my parents were pretty cool about that. I did well in school, but I wasn’t into homework.

This self-limiting belief is also rooted in scarcity. That there’s not enough time, that I don’t have enough time, that my clients don’t have enough time to do all of these things. And I don’t want to reinforce that in them. So I’m really going to pay attention now to how are my limiting beliefs about myself impacting the way I interact with clients, and am I challenging them enough? I think coaching is super powerful. I know that they see huge changes in their lives through the insights they get and the assignments I do give them. But in terms of habits and daily practices, I think I could really ramp that up. Because there’s so much evidence that these things really work: gratitude, meditation, exercise, getting enough sleep, drinking water first thing in the morning. It’s low hanging fruit. I’m inspired to make a menu of different habits I can offer my clients that they might volunteer to take on and check in with me about.

I’d love to hear if any of you have healthy habits or have worked with a coach or trainer or a program to develop them. There’s lot of tools and programs out there, and apps. I want to see what works for you. And I will check in and let you know what I’m doing.

Have a great Fourth of July!

Video: I’m going to be honest with you

Hi my friends,

I’m back! Last year, I promised to share more of my work and thoughts with all of you, since I knew it was going to be a big year of change. But my pace of personal evolution has been so fast that I haven’t had time to reflect on what is happening.

Now, that I am getting my footing, I feel like I have so much to tell you and so much I want to say about my executive coaching work and how it has continued to evolve and grow. Plus, LIFE and personal development and insights about being a woman and a mom and an entrepreneur… There are a million stories to share! It’s a bit overwhelming. And perfection is the enemy of sharing here, hence….

I have a plan: I am going to start using this blog, the Caneelian, for sharing my rough drafts.

I just re-read the Cult of Done for about the 15th time, which reminded me if I can’t press publish before I stand up I’m never going to publish.

So, I am going to do more video, update unfinished work, out incomplete drafts up here, really personal stuff, and strange things that come to me in middle of the night.

If you want to come along for the ride, you’re invited to read all of it and share what comes up for you. I will be looking at comments as I always do and integrating them into more finished drafts for a more polished place, which I’ll tell you about later.

My intention is to open up my creative flow, and in spirit of modeling vulnerability — which I believe is the essence of powerful leadership — I’m going to be using this to show you behind the curtain.

My goal is to do 3 posts somewhere online at least once a month, at least 1 of those being here.

If you want to start your own brand experiment or are already doing something like this, please comment and we can follow each other.

Thanks for watching! See you again soon!

Motherhood changed my perspective—and elevated my career

Back in January, I wrote about why I was ready to be braver this year. That post was me saying ‘this is going to be a big year for me.’ Ten months later, I can confidently say I was right. I transformed my coaching and consulting company, Kickass Enterprises, and it continues to transform my life. I reexamined many of the goals I held at the beginning of the year. Many of these have morphed as I’ve learned more about myself and connected more fully with my passion. I want to update you on that here and share some of what I learned from going all in and changing the way I do business.

My ah-ha moment(s)

My first son prompted me to leave my job as a professor at the London School of Economics and move my family back to California to return to my first love—working with startups (which I surprisingly found to be more friendly to women than academia).

This time motherhood prompted me to hone my focus even more.

As I was holding my three-week-old daughter, Arrow, in my arms in the middle of the night almost a year ago, I had a revelation. I was wrestling with the fact that I was already itching to get back to work, while I was simultaneously aware that every moment of that short newborn period is so precious and delicious that there’s nothing worth doing more than savoring and enjoying it. When you’re priorities are so clear, you achieve a preternatural insight into yourself and your goals. I remember thinking— “Whatever I choose to go back to doing, it better be f**king worth it.”

This post on Medium is written by another women in tech, who during her maternity leave also thought deeply about how she spends her time and how she wants to improve it. Maternity leave is not a ‘break’, but it is a big shift — a change in both your day-to-day and in your lifelong identity which creates a different level of perspective. You are forced by the nature of early motherhood to stay fully present. You must be tuned into your body and the emotions and needs of another in a complete way. This presence creates space to consider things in a new light. It helps you see opportunity, and engage in radical self inquiry. In fact, it forces you to do this.

Leaning into my strength

My mission is to help creative people and entrepreneurs bring their vision and ideas into the world. And, thanks to the perspective I gained during my maternity leave, I was able to realize that 90% of the value I was creating for clients was coming from about 5% of the time I was spending with them. Coaching was actually something I was sneaking in back door of my consulting practice at that point. I was doing growth strategy, and, upon examining my successes with clients, I found that the biggest business growth came when the founder was able to unlock their own potential, to explore their deeper fears, to lean into the most challenges aspects of their humanity and their leadership. It was time for me to take the advice I have given founders so many times and cut out the features that only diluted my offering, and reduce complexity in order to serve more powerfully. So, I decided to pivot towards authenticity: ‘What if I strip away everything non-essential and only do the 5% that creates profound value— the coaching?’

While I still do strategy and organizational design, I now do it through coaching startup execs and founders. Calling myself a “coach” was difficult as first. But that was silly, frightened, ego stuff. Worth feeling, but not being guided by. Because it’s only when the leaders I work with are open to deep personal transformation that any other strategies and tactics would make any difference. For most leaders, unlocking growth and creating an epic company that fulfills their deepest vision is not an A to B process, but rather a personal shift in perspective that allows them to unlock the creativity and courage necessary for them to catalyze business growth. Great work is a spiritual journey.

Find your passion

I am excited to introduce you to this new shift in my business. By deciding to be pure and honest in what I’m offering, I have been able to kickstart growth for my clients. And once I started doing this, growth started happening for me and for my business, too. Here’s a post about what happens when you connect fully with your purpose, inspired by what happened to me when I had the space and time to be fully present and achieve this. Check it out and see if it resonates with you. And if you’re interested in working with me to unlock your creativity and step into your full power, you can get in touch with me here.

Why I’m Ready to Be Braver This Year

We’re already 14 days into the new year – are you on track? I AM! Know my secret? I didn’t make any resolutions. (I never do.)  So thus far I’m 100% on track, haha. 🙂 No, I don’t have resolutions but I do have some big goals. And they feel so aspirational that they are scary.

This is an unusual post for me. Against many wise friends’ advice, I still feel compelled to share it with you. I have tried to understand why. The best sense I can make of this compulsion is that I have no idea if I can actually do any of these goals. This might be the last I see of them! So in case they are fleeting, I want to mark the occasion and enjoy the optimism while it lasts.

Also I feel I need to own these goals in order to achieve them, even though I might fail. This level of thinking and risk feels like shift in me, and that shift is one I’ve witnessed, wistfully, in a lot of friends before me. I’d always crazy admired their bravery for trying things they might fail at, but I never thought I’d experience the courage to attempt it myself. Still don’t know if I have the courage to follow through but at least today I have the courage to admit that I’m thinking about it.

Now: merely talking about doing something means very little, we all know that. Action is all that matters. But like an addict must admit they have a problem, admitting you have a goal seems like a necessary first step in recovery. For me, this is the first step in many towards the recovery of being true to myself, as an artist.

For me 2015 was a year of huge progress. My husband Roy, 3 year old son Soren and I moved from San Francisco to Los Angeles just in time to have our second child. Continue reading “Why I’m Ready to Be Braver This Year”

I want to share ideas more freely

…and so I am going to start writing MORE often LESS perfectly.  Not to imply in any way that I have ever achieved anything close to the P-word!  It’s an elusive self illusion maintained to protect the ego….   so I must let it go and practice what I preach and share my ideas before they’re “ready.”

I am going to start writing more PUBLICLY.  After half-reading The Artists Way by Julia Cameron, I always write my morning pages.  When I don’t write my three pages of drivel first thing in the morning,
I feel rushed and scattered, especially if my day is unstructured by meetings and teaching – and I’m sure it’s not just a scattered feeling but that it’s apparent in my behavior as well.  Because I have to manage my self, my projects, and my own time, I need to manage my mind.  So I write.

But because I’m kind of a scaredy-cat, I don’t share.  I keep wonderful private journals that nobody can read.

So now I’m going to start the habit of writing drivel that I share publicly in the hopes that what I learn and think day to day might somehow someday help someone someway.

I hope you enjoy and read and comment and share yourself.  Here goes.  Vanity, be gone.