Author: Sarah K Peck

Spring 2016 Reading List: Fiction, Feminism, and Rethinking Business

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

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This Spring Reading List is brought to you by: excellent fiction, the powers of feminism, rethinking business priorities (can we say sleep, anyone?), and a biting look at what happens when a 50-something Newsweek editor takes on a new job at a 20-something startup.

** Some favorites in narrative and fiction**

The Girl on the Train — by Paula Hawkins.

Creepy, wonderful, entertaining. Nearly kept me up all night to finish the book. A psychological thriller that starts slowly and builds to a delicious entanglement of overlapping characters.

Disrupted: My Misadventures in the Startup Bubble — by Dan Lyons.

What happens when the former technology editor of Newsweek takes a marketing job at the 20-something startup scene that is Hubspot? In a hilarious, serious, and honest look at what technology companies and startups are building today, Dan Lyons offers a smack-down on the way that we’re designing businesses, and directly addresses the problems of ageism and lack of diversity in tech. Is all of content marketing just a race towards adding more crap to the pile of noise on the internet? Perhaps. Afterwards, he did go on to write for the show Silicon Valley.

**What should be required reading for all humans (men, women, and beyond)** 

Men Explain Things To Me — by Rebecca Solnit.

If nothing else, read Chapter 2 for a sobering look at the statistics regarding women, rape, and violence in our country. We continue to treat violence against women as one-off, isolated events. Did you know that more women are killed (by men) every three years than the number of people that died in the 9/11 terror attacks? Obviously this doesn’t mean that men are evil; far from it. It does say, however, that there’s a big problem in our country, and I haven’t seen it articulated this clearly and succinctly many other places. Please, please read this.

Girls and Sex — by Peggy Orenstein.

The way that girls understand, engage in, and feel about sex has changed in many ways over the past thirty years (who knew that giving a blow job was the new “second base”?), and yet the same story lines around power, control, pleasure, and satisfaction are being played out across the sexual landscape of teenagers, college students, and young adults. What does it mean to be a girl and to understand sex? This powerful book interviews 70 young females and tells the stories in nuanced, thoughtful ways. If you’re a “slut” for having sex and a “prude” if you’re a virgin, is it always a losing game if you’re a female? Why does the metaphor of “baseball” imply that there has to be a winning team and a losing team? And when, if you’re a girl, does your own pleasure come into play — or is it all about perceptions, performance, and pleasing others?

Above all, perhaps the most powerful insight I was left with: it’s not about sex at all. It’s about understanding your feelings, knowing how to communicate, and learning how to make decisions. If teenagers can use learning about sex as a way to explore their own feelings, become great at communication, and become effective decision-makers, then we’re doing our young adults a wonderful, wonderful service.

** If you’re exhausted at work and you don’t know why**

Thrive — by Ariana Huffington.

I’m diving into both of Ariana Huffington’s books right now (this and The Sleep Revolution), and while the insights do not feel mind-bogglingly new, they are very, very important. It’s like the thing you keep putting down on your to-do list but never managing to do. How can we begin to rethink our lives so that wonder is an essential component? When will we wake up from the slog and realize that thriving as humans is as essential, if not more, than everything else we’re doing?

The More of Less — by Joshua Becker.

Just out this week, and I’m excited to say that a story of mine is in his book. The beloved author of Becoming Minimalist (blog/website) and books like Clutter Free With Kids, Joshua writes about how having less is ultimately about having a lot more. What we buy and what we own can weigh us down, be it financially, physically, or mentally.

**And of course, I’m plowing through Pregnancy & Parenting books as well, too**

Some of the ever-growing pile of books on my shelf include: Childbirth Without Fear, Pro, Simplicity Parenting, Expecting Better, Work/Pump/Repeat, The Mommy Plan, After Birth, and Here’s The Plan.

Yup, gobbling up books. :)

Would love more fiction recommendations. If you have any fiction books you’ve loved lately, send them my way.

Going to the Coffee Shop

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

In the morning, I love going to the coffee shop. Call it a force of habit, a craving, an addiction — it’s hard for me not to start my day without popping into our corner store. Recently, however, I’ve been limiting my caffeine intake (due to pregnancy and headaches) and I was stuck: do I drink coffee or not? Do I continue the habit? Should I tempt myself by going into the store?

The obvious costs are easy to debate and rebuke — caffeine and $4 a day? You don’t need that!

For me, however, there are a number of other benefits that I love:

Connection. The act of saying hello to people in the morning, and checking in with my neighbors. I know the baristas and the owners of the restaurant, and they are always curious about how I’m doing and how the pregnancy is going.

Walking. Surprisingly, the coffee shop feels so close (it’s just down the block and around the corner), but when I leave the house I tack on another 1,500 steps to my FitBit fitness counter (I’m obsessed with this thing). On a day when I pop out to get a coffee, head to the post office later, and make a stop to the grocery store, I can walk 5,000 steps without feeling like I’ve done anything at all. This surprised and delighted me when I discovered it.

The routine. Something about the habit of my morning routine, and breaking around 8am or 9am to pause, greet the day and the neighbors, and then settle back into work keeps me focused. It clears my head of the junk from the morning and lets me get back to one single focus for the next few hours. There are probably all sorts of triggers and clues wrapped up into the process, and I appreciate them.

So, it’s a decaf almond milk cappuccino for me nowadays, but I still love the taste of coffee. And, more than that, I love the ritual of going to the coffee shop.

Are You Chasing Productivity At The Expense of Your Soul?

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

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I’m struggling with two competing challenges: being present and mindful, while also chasing the ego-driven aims of “success” and “productivity.” Is there a middle ground?

I reached out to my dear friend Mathias Jakobsen, author and creator of Think Clearly, to dissect this competing pull between these two desires. This is the conversation.

Two Competing Challenges: Present vs Future

Sarah: I’m struggling with two competing challenges. It seems there are two challenges affront, ahead of me, right here. I tackle them daily, I deal with them on the regular. They are sworn opposites, or at least, I have not figured out how to accompany them both.

On the left we have Present. Present is my desire to be here, to be present, to be grounded. To touch base with myself, to write, to surrender, to meditate. To dwell in the taste of the now and know that even if I were to do nothing for the rest of my life, the sweetness of being where I am and who I am would be treasure enough.

Present is my desire to be here, to be present, to be grounded. I want to pause and taste the riches of the living, and feel what’s happening right now.

Present is the call that masks itself as adventures and oceans and beaches: to escape, not as escape from reality, but to escape the endless thrust and chase of the ‘productive’ world, the ‘ego’ world, and to sink into being. I want to pause and taste the riches of the living, and feel what’s happening right now. Present reminds me of itself in the call to meditate, to practice yoga, to commune with friends, to taste food fully.

Present is the call to transcend the ego, to transcend the mind.

On the right we have Future. We might also call it Ego or Productivity. Productivity wants me to plan, to build, to dream, to DO. I must do to be worthy; I must create more. Productivity is the siren call of success; the ladder of ascendence.

You are never enough, because you are always climbing.

Our companies and corporations and economies are built on Productivity. We must chase the next goal, the next metric, the next objective, the next project. We champion growth above all else.

The humans at the center of this Productivity Machine are exhausted. They are also — although they don’t know it — expendable, just another part to the machine that doesn’t matter in it’s uniqueness. We can find another human to dispose of and use up.

I work and live in a world that idolizes Productivity. Productivity is all about the future: dreaming of what could be, what can be, and what will be. It manifests as if only, and when, and how. The American Dream is built upon this reality: you can have more things, you can have a bigger house, a bigger backyard, a better job. We are slow to realize that the thing being sold is a dream, and what we’re all really doing is running, running, running in place. We have our arms outstretched, unaware that we are on a treadmill. The focus on the future has left us lost of the present.

How do we wake up from the monotonous strum beat of the future, banging it’s dream so loudly in our faces? How do we let the worries and anxieties, most of which are all born by dreaming in the future and worrying about how to change from where we are to where we want to be — how do we let them go? How do we work within them, or embrace them, without them overtaking us? Is that even possible?

 

Mathias: First, let’s look at this idea of present vs future. This one actually seems rather straightforward to me.

I agree with you on the present-stuff — even though it is extremely hard for me to really taste food when trying to entertain my nine-month old Uma, get some extra food for my 27-month old Noah, wipe up something from the floor, and also have a conversation with my wife.

But it’s practice in headwinds and uphill.

As for the future and productivity and ego stuff I also agree with your analysis. We live in a world dominated by this. But the problem is not that it’s dreams and future. The problem is that we implicitly think that only by making these dreams come true can we feel whole and complete and successful and happy.

The problem is that we implicitly think that only by making these dreams come true can we feel whole and complete and successful and happy.

But here’s my hack: dreaming about the future can also be done very consciously in the present. By dreaming very precisely and without bounds it can be immensely pleasurable to imagine the future. The focus then, is on the dream itself and there is no fear of not being able to manifest this future since the maximum pleasure that can be derived from it is already done in fantasy.

The mistake is the implicit belief that these dreams are only valuable when turned it into goals and plans and actualized.

 

Sarah: Mmm, yes. Dreams aren’t invaluable in and of themselves. It’s when you lose sight of the present, and the process, that the dreams can become unwieldy. Relying on the achievement of a dream, only once actualized, to make us happy, is dangerous.

Mathias: Exactly right. That doesn’t mean that we can’t or shouldn’t actualize our dreams. I’m hugely proud of some of my big dreams that I have made happen.

But I am not deriving joy from the new reality as much as how I have grown in myself along the way. And even if a different future had materialized then I could still have grown in the pursuit and thus found capacity to enjoy the present.

Goals and plans and dreams. It’s amusement. It’s fun. It’s like LEGO. You don’t build with it to make a house you can keep. But you also don’t just put bricks together at random since that’s not particularly interesting (except as one particular experiment maybe once or twice). You build a house to see if you can build a better house today than when you built yesterday. Maybe today better is a bigger house. Or better is taller. Or better is smaller. Or better is more elegant. And you succeed in your pursuit or you don’t.

But it’s just LEGO and tonight you break it apart and tomorrow you build another one. And when you’re satisfied with your houses you begin building cars or planes or something else. But the cars and the planes and the house don’t matter. They only serve to make the building process more fun by giving direction. But building is always in the present.

 

Sarah: Right, the building is again, about the process and the journey. This makes so much sense to me. We lose sight of the purpose of dreaming about the future when we completely let go of the present. But we do not need to forgo dreams and plans, because they can inform who we are and how we behave in the present.

How do you translate this into the working world? What do you do about organizations that are organized around achievement? How do you address the urgency of achievement, the need for more productivity?

Mathias: [In my work], I’m not sure what we are building exactly but I find plenty of pockets to just enjoy the building process and I try to let others enjoy it too. Some do. Others keep being frustrated because they feel that others are getting in the way. But I’m not participating in the war on either side.

As for the kids and future, I think I just look further ahead where there is more clarity and less worries about the mid term. I enjoy little goals in the short term — amusement — ego boosting entertainment. Long term I see this time with kids as a time to try and not accomplish that much in the sense of external achievements, but to build up myself and my character and my spine.

That’s also why I don’t get too worried about my job performance and the conflicts and tensions. They affect me, of course, but when Noah throws up in the middle of the night I know that this is the real growth opportunity. When Uma is sick. This is where I need to be. How to deal with this situation with joy. This is where my wife and I can grow together. This is where we have conflict. Conflict and blame and issues. And then we must solve and dissolve and heal and grow stronger.

This is the real deal. Uphill. Headwinds. Training for the soul. Coffee and coca-cola gets me through a lot of things :-)

But I know we are loving more.

It’s a thrill. It’s for real. I love when I can still be fully present and open and loving and giving with Noah or Uma or Pernille in the midst of craziness. And I forgive myself the many times I can’t. It’s life!

I’m more tired and more alive than ever in my life.

That’s all for now.

What about you?

What does this conversation stir up for you ?What are your take-aways? What will you begin doing? Stop doing? Keep doing but perhaps in a different way?

Mathias Jakobsen is a Learning Designer at Hyper Island and the creator of Think Clearly — a newsletter that helps you get unstuck. He loves notebooks, bakes bread and lives in Brooklyn with his wife, son and daughter.

Loving Yourself

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

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A friend of mine is having a bit of a rough time right now and I sent her a note to check in.

How’s it going, how are you feeling?

One of the ways we exist for each other is to confirm and mirror experience. When we notice a friend or a colleague struggling, we can say empathetically, “this looks hard.”

Sometimes kindness comes in the noticing.

Sometimes just acknowledging where you are can be enough to let yourself say, “Wait, yes, this is exhausting.”

But what happens when you’re weary, sad, or pushing through something insanely difficult and you need to take care of yourself throughout the process?

What if it feels like you can’t lean on everyone else and you need to muster up energy to support yourself?

My friend wrote back:

What small self-care steps would you recommend for feeling: frazzled, overwhelmed, frustrated with family, anxious about getting work done, sad, tired, homesick, confused and turned around?

Sometimes a few self-care motions can make all the difference in the midst of the yuck.

And as hard as it can be to do, as impossible as it can seem, we need to love ourselves.

Love yourself tenderly in the hard moments, like you would a child.

Now is not always the time to beat yourself up, or scold yourself to work harder or just “suck it up.” Sometimes you are already doing all of that — and we need, instead, to extend ourselves compassion.

We have a responsibility to love ourselves, no matter how much we might long to outsource this responsibility. In fact, if we look a bit deeper, we might find and sense that we are made up of love in our atoms and or cells — although in times of pain that can seem faraway, inaccessible.

So what we do is we care for ourselves, tenderly.

For me, as an INFJ, I need plenty of alone time, time away from stimulation, and time to decompress. Time and space to hear my own thoughts.

Travel is noisy and busy and full of other people’s energies. I am a fairly energetically open and receiving person (INFJ will do that to you) and that makes me exhausted being around other people.

My coping and compensation mechanisms are to find really quiet, really still things. I often have to activate them; it’s not enough to just “go be quiet in a room.”

I have to create environments that calm the buzz and the chatter. Dark, white-noise bars do it. Water and saunas and warm baths do it for me. Swimming helps.

These are a few things that help:

  • Alone time. Even if it’s in a bar, around other people. I take myself out to nice meals by myself and read a book. It’s something that feels really ME. For some reason Sushi and Sake at a small corner table do it for me (although not while I’m pregnant right now!).
  • Get someone to touch you. Hugs are needed, and our consumer culture can facilitate this through…
  • Getting your nails done. Particularly a pedicure. It’s a relief to have someone touch your feet. Soak them in warm water. You might want to cry. There’s a thing about Jesus washing people’s feet and I love that story (regardless of religion) because it’s so humbling and kind. Be kind to yourself.
  • Get a $20-$30 Thai massage. There are usually lots of places where you can pop in and get a massage. Get it. It helps with your body and rhythm and restoration.
  • Yoga class or 5 minutes of yoga. Pay attention to how much you may think you don’t want to go and understand that this might be a form of resistance to letting go, giving in.
  • Take a “dark nap.” I like doing “dark naps” in the middle of the day — shutter the curtains, hide in a closet, put earplugs in and an eye mask and do a sensory deprivation. It’s good for the soul, lets you close down to the sounds and noise around you.
  • Wrap yourself into a ball and give yourself a hug. 
  • Massage your temples, scratch your head.
  • Journal it out.
  • Listen to soothing music. 

And for sadness:

  • Sometimes reading really sad things or watching movies that will make me cry (Shawshank Redemption!) actually helps. It’s like you have to move through and with the sadness, not hold it at bay.
  • Crying is therapeutic. It helps clean out our immune systems and re-set our cells (it’s not just a passing idea that it’s useful, it really does do good things for our bodies).

What do you do to take care of yourself?

What practices help you restore, rejuvenate, and work through darker days, sadness, or frustration?

Missing A Day

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

I woke up with a start at 11:30pm on Saturday night. I didn’t post anything today!

I had forgotten to post: so many things swept up to take hold of the day. New York got a blizzard with 22 inches of snow. Alex and I hiked through it to take a 16-hour weekend class on birthing, massage, postpartum, and newborn care. My head was full. My feet were tired.

I didn’t write.

So began the conundrum:

Lying in bed, do I get up and rush to the computer? Do I stay up late, disrupt my routine, insist that the deadline is more important than all else?

Or—and I think arguably this is harder for me—do I find a way to relax into the moment, let it go, and begin anew the next day?

I decided to try to skip posting. My head frantically came up with things to write and say while I was in bed. I exhaled and said, tomorrow. Tomorrow. We can begin again tomorrow.

It is okay to be imperfect.

The challenge for me, and I don’t know how many other people feel this way as well, is not letting one lapse cloud and cluster my judgment. Would missing a day throw me off kilter? Would I backslide and decide that not writing was easier, and I’d just skip a few days, who cared?

The next day, the practice was as follows: rise and wake, and begin again. Every day, we begin again.

Don’t frantically try to “catch up” and write the past essays, or write through every single prompt. Start today, with one essay, with one post.

Every day is a new day.

Here we are.

We begin, again.

50 Things That Make Me Happy

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

In the free series of writing prompts I put together, one of the prompts is to make a list of 50 things that make you happy. I love lists (they’re one of the things that makes me happy!), and I love using lists as a way to kick-start my writing.

It’s not writing, it’s making a list!

Writing lists appeals so much to my desire for organization, neatness, structure, and order.

Today’s prompt is to make a list of things that make you feel good. If you’d like, scratch out your own list, or enjoy perusing my list, below.

1. When the sky fades from baby blue to yellow in one stunning moment, just before the sky dips into brilliant indigo and deepens to darkness. The hint of a highlight of the last moment of sun over the rooftops, indicating the near-closing of a day.

2. The immensity of oceans, water, and the seaside. Sitting by the sound of swelling waves lapping up at your toes. Where the sky meets the waves meet you.

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3. Swimming, being in water, being immersed in water, being hugged by water.

4. Showers, the tickle of rainfall shower heads, the drizzle of an open-air shower on a hot summer day, opening your mouth to capture part of the rain, closing your eyes, dreaming up the best ideas inside a steady trickle of wet noise.

5. Baths. Luxurious, delicious baths. Bath houses. Steam rooms and cold baths and warm baths and Japanese bath houses and Russian-Turkish baths. The community aspect of bath houses in the winter. The solo aspect of rejuvenating your body.

6. Beaches.Sand in your toes. Sand just warm enough to melt you in it, but not too hot to burn your toes. Playing volleyball in the sand.

7. Forests. Canopies of leaves, overhead roofs, green for days. Multiple colors of green, a rainbow of greens, bright and neon to dark and seductive.

8. Hidden trails and hiking adventures. Leaves, trees, and paths beckoning you to follow them. Wandering in the woods on a mindful adventure.

9. Camping. Spending time outdoors. Un-plugging. Doing things more slowly. Cooking food. Stinking up like campfire smoke.

10. Cabins. Wooden cabins, small cabins, cabins with shared kitchens.

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11. Retreats and adventures with close groups of friends. Sharing a home, a meal, a weekend with people you choose to call family.

12. Shared silence. Conversational silence. Understanding the beauty of a pause as rich as the words just spoken beforehand.

13. Parallel play. Being in the same room as someone and not having your attention commanded by the ego or insecurity of the person across from you. Dwelling in collective, simultaneous absorption in a project or task and relishing in the depth of self-thought.

14. Learning how to sing. Music, of all forms. Wiggling your hips to shake off the day.

15. Afghans and blankets! Particularly tossed up over my head and cuddling me up.

16. Cuddles. Hugs and snuggles and couch cuddles. Pile-ups with family and getting 5 people in a bed just for hugs. Promoting hug parties instead of standing and gabbing when I get tired of extroverted party antics.

17. Really, really good conversations. Conversations that unfold over a period of days, exploring an idea, returning to it, delving into it, pausing, becoming something again.

18. The perfect chair to sit in.

19. Reading good books: books that sweep you up and away inside of their ideas or adventures.

20. Exploring new places as a way of staying present with yourself.

21. Sleep that feels just right and wakes you up feeling refreshed.

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22. Fractal patterns and other patterns in nature. Wondering in the beauty of existing forms, creations, and beings. Sinking into the awe of it all.

23. A black hardcover moleskin.

24. Pens! Pilot pens, V5 thickness. Black ink. Plus back-up roller-ball pens for airplanes, because sadly these favorite pens can explode on airplanes.

25. Cards, notepaper, stationary, letters. A box of unwritten cards beckoning to be written. An enveloped of letters stashed away in my backpack. Writing letters to friends as often as daily.

26. Text messages with friends for no reason.

27. Laughing at inside jokes. Being unable to stop laughing. Uncontrollable giggles. Things that make you giggle with their memory, hours and days later.

28. Monthly friend dates with people far away, people all over the world.

29. Someone who sends the perfect Google calendar invitation, knows their way around online organization tools, and is as geeky as you are about email, scheduling, and notifications. You breathe out. They get it. YES.

30. Making friends on the internet without ever moving past the social connection. Just knowing that you know each other are there. Having that be a joy in itself, and enough, for right now.

31. Writing. Writing in my journal, writing 750 words, writing a blog post, writing an email. Writing out my feelings, my ideas, my worries, my anxieties. Even writing in the middle of the night, when I have to — I still love it.

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32.Writing lists!

33. The perfect soup-plate bowl. One plate-bowl to rule them all.

34. Family. Sisters. Brothers. Cousins.

35. Alex’s cuddles, his smile, his hands, his kind spirit. Talking to Alex when I’m having a rough day and knowing he’ll let me cry and he’ll rub my back.

36. Bicycles. Summertime air. Being outdoors.

37. Bourbon or a really delicious cocktail from Three Sisters in Brooklyn. (I’m longing for one — sometime, soon enough, we’ll have another one.)

38. Cooking potluck dinners for friends. Stews made in one large Creuset pot, soaking up flavors all day.

39. The view from up above — aerial views from a plane.

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40. Thanksgiving. Gratitude. Christmas with the family.

41. Snow Fall. Winter boots.

42. All of my Ecco shoes (they are the BEST). A good brand that treats you well. Excellent customer service.

43. The sound of rain when you’re inside.

44. Blossoms bursting open on an early day of Spring. The first signs of winter shaking off it’s cool slumber into the explosive greenery that is Spring. The fierce trumpeting of birds, flowers, and forests in a vibrant sense of newness and noise.

45. Volleyball games outside. Soccer games. Pick-up soccer! The Brooklyn Bridge Waterfront park. Ultimate frisbee. Running in cleats. Bicycling home. Breathing hard.

46. Yoga. Breathwork. Connecting to your self, your mind, your spirit, your body. Union. Refreshing realizations.

47. Meditation. Easy music to put you into a peaceful resting. Finding a place of stillness in your seat and relishing in it. A warm cup of tea and gazing out the window. Letting the thoughts untangle, tumble out. Slowing down. Breathing.

48. Lofts and unexpected nooks and crannies inside of houses.

49. Urban patterns. Architecture. Understanding that everything outside is built, made-up, born of someone’s imagination and patterning. Space, time, movement, and human behavior. Small cities and big bustling metropolis’. Rural farms and tiny cabins.

50. Being connected to each other.

12 Unusual Things to Clean, Organize, and Sort — To Let Go of The Past & Prepare For the New

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

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A few months ago, I started cleaning out unusual things. One bright Saturday morning, I woke to spent the day obsessively cleaning. Not frantically, and not hyperactively. But I did move steadily from one thing to the next, surprising myself with how much I could clean and how much these small, little things were calling me to be organized.

Do the big cleaning moves first

Last Spring, I had a copy of Marie Kondo’s bestselling The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, and we tackled several key projects over a couple of weekends. First were the clothes and closets, since those were easiest for me. We probably removed about half of our clothes and useless items that we weren’t actually using.

Next were the books (before | after), a tangible project that involved getting rid of about a third of our books. The result was surprising: everything on our bookshelves was something we loved, not something we thought we should be reading. Having a bookshelf of cherished collections instead of a bookshelf of admonitions about who you ought to be is surprisingly lightening. Your heart feels excited and eager, not weighty and oppressed. If each book were personified and the author came to life, shouting at you to read and reading quotes from the books to you, what would your space feel like? I want to be surrounded in warm quotes and delicious stories, in a way that feels like a pile of quilts, a cozy winter fire, and hot chocolate chip cookies.

Cleaning is best begun with big items first, big moves that feel concrete and tangible. We tackled the books over a weekend and felt a huge lift by the end. Some of the principles of Marie Kondo’s theory are:

  1. Discard first. First, throw things away. Get rid of things that don’t call to you. You can’t get clean and organized when you have too much stuff, and it’s stuff you don’t even want.
  2. Tidy by category. Pick a category to work on (clothes, books, papers, tools, kitchen) and work only on that. If you try to tackle everything, it’s overwhelming.
  3. Organize with care. When we store and organize things, it should be with pride. We should celebrate what we have and store it carefully.

Then we paused. We didn’t move directly to the next project. We enjoyed the summer, we got pregnant, we focused on our jobs and the work we were building.

When you’re not ready to start something new yet, sometimes you need to sort out the old. Sometimes it takes some reorganization and un-cluttering to freshen up your mind again.

More recently I’ve been cleaning, sorting, and organizing in small projects. It occurs to me that some people call this “nesting,” — but my desire to unpack, let go, and refresh has hit me in a way I haven’t seen before. Usually my cleaning begins with the big things: books, clothes, tidying up the surfaces.

Delicate, intricate, and unusual things to clean: small projects for an open mind

What’s different right now is the delicacy and intricacy of these cleaning projects — and how much they are re-organizing my mind as a result. Nothing seems to change on the outside (the house looks the same), but the refresh button in my brain lights up. I thought I’d share a few of these strange projects for your curiosity and inspiration.

The key here, however, is that this wasn’t rushed. Each of these projects took from an hour to a few hours, and I’ve been doing them as a way to start the day, or a weekend project. I take ten days off, then I dig into the next closet. They’re short and non-intensive. If the project starts to feel too large or burdensome, I’ve taken on too much.

Here are a few things to inspire you on your cleaning quest:

Radio stations

I spent an early morning hour walking through all of my Pandora stations and deleting everything I didn’t use. I had at least 60 or 70 stations and didn’t use most of them. The game involved playing a station, seeing if I liked the first song that came up, and deleting it if not. (In the case of a “meh,” I skipped ahead to the second song to verify.) Did I love the station? Did the name make sense? Delete, rename.

Socks

Over time, my socks pile up and crappy songs mingle with my favorite socks. I dumped the entire drawer onto a bed and ruthlessly got rid of everything that wasn’t a joyous favorite. Yes, joyous favorite! Did I LOVE putting them on? Alright, gone.

My sock drawer sings to me in the morning.

Underwear

Ditto: clean out all your crappy underwear. Chuck them. Get rid of things with holes, loose threads, or more. Chuck ’em. Buy new ones. Tingle. :)

All the crappy fridge bottles you never use

Open up your fridge. Look in the door. That weird maple-lemon marinade sauce you never use? The old soy sauce that’s crunchy on the edges? Chuck them all. Wipe it down. (Just the door! Not the entire fridge.)

Put all the loose books around your house back in their homes

Over a month or two the books wander off the shelves and take place on my nightshelf, my desk, my counter, the fireplace mantle, and other little bits and places. One morning I woke up and walked around the house and picked up all the books and placed them by the bookshelf. Back they go. Books have a home now.

Any old drafts in WordPress you’re not actively working on

Your makeup or medicine cabinet

The silverware drawer

We have lots of loose odds and ends. Go through and get rid of all those forks and spoons that don’t feel right. Unless you have a matching set already and you love it (we don’t), paring down can feel uplifting.

Tupperware

You know when you can’t find the lid to the tupperware? Chuck the unmatched pieces. Get rid of a stack of 16 little containers if you know you’ll only every use 1 or 2 at max.

Jewelry

I had so much fun laying out all of my jewlery across the bar counter and getting rid of half of it. I barely wear much at all, and all I need is a good pearly necklace and a few earring options. I made a pile to donate.

Your day bag or backpack

When was the last time you emptied your pack thoroughly? Marie Kondo says that your bag likes to be emptied every single day, because it gives it a chance to rest and breathe. I do it about once a week and I’m always surprised to find what stowaways are hiding out in there — bonus kleenex packs, nut bars, and other nick-nacks. Give it a good clean-out and feel lighter (literally) tomorrow.

Your card collections or pen collections

Ever stash away too many pens? Have a collection of notecards that you’re constantly rifling through to find a good one? Go through them now and pick out only the ones you love. Donate or recycle the ones that make you feel “meh.”

Reinvent your wardrobe (a la capsule wardrobe)

I moved everything that no longer fits into two big bins under our bed. I can’t wear most of my clothes right now as it is, and tugging down a shirt that’s too-short in the winter makes me feel miserable and cold. Instead, I moved everything out of the closet and my dresser and put only the things that I will wear currently (cold-weather pregnancy wear) into my closet. It’s about 16 hangers: 4 dresses, 4 blouses, 4 long-sleeve shirts, and 4 warm wrap sweaters. I only have one coat that fits right now, and it’s actually very freeing. To see these few hangers slim in my closet and know that I don’t have many decisions about what to wear — and that what I pick will feel great — makes me feel relieved, not worn out, when the day begins.

It’s all about how you feel

Holding onto a bunch of stuff that makes you feel lackluster, weighed down, or indifferent is heavy. When you let go, you lighten up. Tackling small projects can achieve the same effect as tackling big projects. Each time, I’ve found more space cognitively, and I notice that my energy no longer leaks out towards these unfinished and burdensome collections of things.

May this give you inspiration for the new year.

How about you? How does cleaning make you feel? What projects are you working on this year?

Should You Worry Now Or Later?

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

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There are so many unknowns coming ahead on the horizon:

Will we have a baby that sleeps or a baby that cries non stop?
Will I love being a mom or will it be an immense challenge?
Will I bond with my kid right away or will it take time?
Will breastfeeding be hard or easy?
Should we move to be closer to Alex’s work? Or stay because moving is hard?
Will the birth be difficult or not too bad?
How are we going to function on so little sleep?

None of these things are things I can know in advance. None of these things can I plan for — or even remotely change by worrying about them right now.

In fact, the enormity of some of these questions makes worrying about them seem ridiculous. I can’t know yet. I won’t know. There is peace in not knowing.

Alex has been repeating a mantra lately that has been calming and grounding:

Is there anything we can do about it now?

The answer is often no.

So we release the need to hold on to the fear and worry.

We will deal with it when it arrives.

What transpires is trust:

Can we trust our future selves to be able to figure it out? Will we be able to handle it?

The answer is resoundingly yes. We are (you are!) competent, capable, smart, resilient people. We can figure things out in real time. We can be present, knowing that we will make new discoveries when we need them.

Even if we have the hardest year of our lives. Even if nothing turns out as planned. Even if we have a better year than we can ever imagine (because often worry focuses just on the negative: it can also be far better than we know).

We will live through it. We will do the best we can.

I trust my current self to show up and learn and grow. So, too, do I trust my future self to be able to deal with what comes to me as it comes.

We cannot know in advance. That is part of the joy of living.

How to Give (and Get) Great Feedback On Your Writing

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

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A lot of people have asked me about how to get feedback on their essays. How do they publish it? Who should they ask? And why do they cringe and worry so much about whether or not people will be kind and say good things (or terrible things) about their essays?

Part of the fear in publishing is about being taken down by other people and having people hate what you make. Criticism can feel absolutely terrible and really sting. So how do you craft an essay — and share it — in a way that elicits positive responses?

While I can’t ban all internet trolls from existing, I can tell you some strategic tips about asking for feedback. We rarely do it, and it’s really helpful:

Be direct about the type of feedback you want.

How to ask for feedback (as a writer).

As a writer, it’s your job to proactively say exactly what you’re looking for with a review of your essay. It works really well if you are very clear about what feedback you’re looking for.

For example, here are some types of feedback you might be looking for:

  • Idea-based feedback: what do you think of the idea? Should I keep pursuing it? Is it a good direction?
  • Structural / developmental: does it make sense? Is it organized well? Should the ideas be re-arranged or sequenced differently?
  • Copyediting/proofreading: More fine-tuned, looking for lots of little errors and any last-minute typos.

If you’re looking for idea-based feedback, you might tell someone, “Hey, I have a draft with a bunch of typos in it, it’s not polished, but I want a gut-check that the idea is on the right track. Mind taking a look (and ignoring the typos) and letting me know if you think the overall direction is interesting?” 

Because there are so many types of editing and feedback, it’s hard to know whether you want another person to tell them your ideas on the right track — or to nit-pick through the commas and the punctuation.

You have to tell people what you want.

As a writer, it’s our job to give guidance to what we want. For me, this includes sending early drafts to friends that say, “Hey friend! I’m working on a piece and this is a super rough draft. I don’t need any heavy criticism just yet, but I’d love some words of encouragement and if you could tell me if you think this essay has some good pieces in it.”

I also love asking, when I’m ready, for people to “rip it up, tear it apart, let me know how it stands up to critique.”

How to GIVE feedback:

There’s a great essay and resource from the Facebook design team about how to give great feedback. There’s a difference between critique and criticism, and it’s important to understand the difference. From the article:

  • Criticism passes judgement — Critique poses questions
  • Criticism finds fault — Critique uncovers opportunity
  • Criticism is personal — Critique is objective
  • Criticism is vague — Critique is concrete
  • Criticism tears down — Critique builds up
  • Criticism is ego-centric — Critique is altruistic
  • Criticism is adversarial — Critique is cooperative
  • Criticism belittles the designer — Critique improves the design

This is a great list for understanding how to frame your feedback. Rather than saying “your idea is shit,” for example (although why would we say that!?), we could say, “It’s hard for me to understand the idea because the sentences are really long and winding. Can you try again with shorter sentences to unpack the idea more?”

Their guiding principle for giving feedback is that “critique should not serve the purpose of boosting the ego or the agenda of anyone in the meeting.”

When you give another writer feedback, you’re helping them to build up the essay. Consider yourself a collaborator and a coach that’s helping shape and tease out the best of their ideas. What questions can you ask that will help them clarify their ideas? How can they better explain things? Where do they need to give further stories and examples? What could be simplified or seems confusing to you?

This quality of feedback is immensely helpful, and when I get it from fellow editors, I am grateful.

What about you?

When have you asked for feedback? When have you received useful feedback on your writing? What works, and what hasn’t worked? Are you nervous about sharing your writing?

When A Client Says No — Should You Do An Exit Interview?

Posted on by Sarah K Peck

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A friend of mine is a successful independent business owner with high-end corporate clients. After a few deals didn’t close — and she didn’t feel badly about the deals not going through — she wondered:

Should I follow up and ask them for feedback about why they went with another service?

Small business reality: you’re always interviewing.

When you’re a small business owner, a consultant, or a freelancer in the service business, you’re often interviewing new clients on the regular. Part of your marketing and sales allocation (whether it’s in time or dollars) is in networking, outreach, and meeting new faces to add to your business.

It can be a numbers game: you interview a certain number of people, and some percentage of them say yes, and others end up not working with you.

The question is: do you ask every single person for feedback every single time you interview a new client?

In my opinion, I think not.

You don’t need feedback from everyone.

When you seek out everyone’s opinion, you water down the quality of the feedback you get back. The average of everyone’s thoughts will trend towards normal, or mediocre. You want to stand out, to cultivate a body of work, to own your own grounding in who you are.

In writing practice, you don’t ask everyone and anyone to give you feedback. I don’t want someone who has no sense of grammar, style, or punctuation to give me final copy-edit feedback on my book. I’m looking for one or two of the best copyeditors. When I’m working through the idea stage, I want the right subset of people who are interested in similar ideas, with a relevant background, or part of the type of audience I’m looking to connect with.

In your business, you might start by asking everyone for feedback all of the time. Every new client is an opportunity to learn! Yay!

As you grow, however, you’ll learn a lot about what clients want and don’t want, and you can start to hone in on who you ask for feedback.

As your best clients for feedback.

And when you miss closing a deal and you feel really bummed because you think that was a great opportunity for leveling up your business game, ask them how you could do better.

Focus on the areas you want to grow, and the people you want to work with, and collect feedback from these specific people.

In-depth feedback from very specific people who are tailored to your idea or business is better than cursory notes from a wide range of not-so-interested people.

 

When working on your business, remember you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. If it’s not a good fit, and you know that they aren’t your right client, learn from it — by focusing on the types of clients you want to attract, and spending your time and energy on them.

What do you think?

Where do you look for feedback? When do you decide not to get feedback? How do you decide what feedback to listen to, and what to ignore? Have you ever had a time when someone gave you feedback and you decided to do something differently?

Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.