Strut Your Stuff in 2017

A message to you from me and Dr Rosemary McCallum:

Happy New Year to fabulous YOU! And what a year it is going to be!

If 2016 seemed a little hectic that was because it was a Universal 9 Year, which is all about endings so it was a crazy ride from beginning to end as things that needed to be ended, finished or tidied up kept rolling forth, swamping many people if they weren’t ready for it. Phew – it was an exhausting year!

But can I let you in on a secret about 2017?

This is a Universal 1 year– a year of brand new beginnings, a wipe-the-slate-clean year and a start-to-create-a-life-of-choice year. How absolutely cool is that!

As we approach the end of January even more amazing energy emerges as The Year of the Rooster takes pride of place in the Chinese New Year calendar! Well, what the heck is that all about?

Jump on this link https://www.eventbrite.com/e/strut-your-stuff-in-2017-year-of-the-rooster-tickets-30402821658 and get the low down on what a super amazing powerful year it is going to be.

I'll be there learning from Rosemary, and I hope we will have the pleasure of sharing the day with you too, so you get to see how Rooster will affect you personally and, more importantly, how you can use the energy of the Rooster to get clarity, industriousness and willingness to “Strut Your Stuff in 2017” – in this amazing Universal 1 Year of “Creativity & Confidence”!

On the day, we will look at how you integrate your personal number cycle so that you get a solid vision of who you want to BE in 2017 and how this will set YOU up for the next 9 years.

PS. Be smart like the Rooster and get in on the early bird special.

Revenge of the Nerds – Are You Keeping Up With Technology?

I gave a talk last Sunday at Unity New Thought Centre in Burwood about 'Change', and began with a story about my husband Derek and I clashing over my battle with  technology. Here's a brief excerpt from the talk:

'Derek and I share an office and for the most part, this works quite well. It certainly works for me having ‘Tech Support’ within touching and hearing distance… For me, technology is often tedious and frustrating and mysterious and irritating. Like you, I’ve learnt to use a computer and send emails and search things on the web, and I’ve made a Facebook page and done some social media and learnt how to make e-newsletters and slide presentations and use the content management system of the website and I’m developing webinars and online trainings… so you know, I’m having a go! But I often get frustrated by how much there is to learn and master, and the time it takes and the problems with it when it doesn’t work. I get frustrated because I can’t get on with my creative work because I’m tied up learning practical technical stuff.

'Well, it turned out that Derek was feeling annoyed witnessing me fight and struggle with it – hearing me sigh and exclaim and curse each time I struck a challenging technical issue because remember, his desk is just… over… there… and I tend to express myself very easily and quite loudly, while he is very quiet and moderate.  

'What you resist persists, right? So there I was, fighting and resisting all this new technology and getting more and more het up in fruitless frustration since technology is not going away any time soon… Thinking about that, I had a bit of a light bulb moment as to how to explain how I was feeling to Derek. I said, “We are living in the era of ‘Revenge of the Nerds’ when in order to succeed you have to master technology. But what if, in order to succeed, you had to be able to write novels? Huh?!"

'Derek heard me and was less critical after that, and I felt less resistant to technology; I came out of that conversation feeling more willing to ‘suck it up’, surrender, embrace the nerdy stuff… and while I do still sigh and exclaim at times, I think it’s a little less often.'

When I think about the nerdy people at school, I have to grin: they really are getting their own back! And somehow, we do have to just 'suck it up' because technology isn't going away any time soon and is a blessing in many ways. I have to remind myself of that on the days when I want to join the Amish...

You can watch the talk on Unity of Melbourne's website, and if you'd like me to present it to your own group, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or call 03 9018 9724.

Photo credit: avatar-1 via Visual hunt / CC BY-SA

'Children teach us that love... is a kind of service'

‘Maturity means acknowledging that Romantic love might constitute only a narrow, and perhaps rather mean-minded, aspect of emotional life, one principally focused on a quest to find love rather than to give it; to be loved rather than to love.

'Children may end up being the unexpected teachers of people many times their age, to whom they offer - through their exhaustive dependence, egoism and vulnerability - an advanced education in a wholly new sort of love, on in which reciprocation is never jealously demanded or fractiously regretted and in which the true goal is nothing less than the transcendence of oneself for the sake of another. 

‘Children teach us that love is, in its purest form, a kind of service. The word has grown freighted with negative connotations. An individualistic self-gratifying culture cannot easily equate contentment with being at someone else’s call. We are used to loving others in return for what they can do for us, for their capacity to entertain, charm or soothe us. Yet babies can do precisely nothing. There is, as slightly older children sometimes conclude with a sense of serious discomfort, no ‘point’ to them; that is their point. They teach us to give without expecting anything in return, simply because they need help badly - and we are in a position to provide it. We are inducted into a love based not on an admiration for strength, but on a compassion for weakness, a vulnerability common to every member of the species and one which has been and will eventually again be our own. Because it is always tempting to overemphasise autonomy and independence, these helpless creatures are here to remind us that no one is, in the end, ‘self-made’; we are all heavily in someone’s debt. We realise that life depends - quite literally - on the capacity for love.

‘We learn, too, that being another’s servant is not humiliating, quite the opposite, for it sets us free from the wearying responsibility of continuously catering to our own twisted, insatiable natures. We learn the relief and privilege of being granted something more important to live for than ourselves.'

- from The Course of Love by Alain de Botton

I take on Stephen King

I haven’t read any Stephen King books because I’m not into the thriller/horror/mystery genre, but I decided I wanted to read his On Writing, and I’m really enjoying it. The man values the literary arts more than I had expected. His turn of phrase is entertaining and delightful. I particularly love his humility in sharing an excerpt of his own work, unedited and then rewritten, for the reader to see how he goes about the process of refining his work.

But when he gets to the heart of his book and states that while he believes an incompetent writer can become competent, a good writer can never be great, I cannot agree.

To begin with, there is no such thing as an absolute standard of ‘great' that all readers around the world hold to. There are plenty of ‘great’ books that leave me cold, while others make me laugh, cry, or ponder; the number of famous, best-selling and classic authors who were rejected, often rudely and often for a long period of time before making their mark, is significant, suggesting that there is not widespread agreement about what makes writing ‘great’.

I’ve often shared a story with my writing students about the time I attended a panel discussion at the Writers Victoria Centre in Melbourne. The panel consisted of a publisher, a literary agent and another ‘expert’. One of the audience asked the question, ‘How do you know when you’ve come across a great work?’ or something to that effect, and the publisher answered it by saying, ‘I get a tingle down my spine.’

How ridiculous, I thought. How utterly absurd!

The rest of this article is in my blog – I'd love to read your thoughts!