Hey, it looks like you're new here. Enjoy reading and remember to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for stopping by!

Jim B L

I had just finished my last appointment and it was late. Evening was already falling crisply as I left the building and walked to my car. A light breeze caught in my hair as I went, ruffling my bangs with the cool scent of humus. It was only February and we still had snow, but there was a definite tinge of spring in the air. I smiled, thinking of all the wonderful garden things soon coming my way.

The afternoon had been long and I was looking forward to getting home and  spending the evening with some friends. We were meeting for our semi-regular Gin Rummy evening and it was my turn to be host. I’d need to hurry, if I were to get everything ready in time. I threw my car in gear and pulled out of the parking lot, into the darkening street.

I drove through the dimly lit city onto the highway and thought back on my day. My client was the very capable leader of a large development team within an international company. She had worked her way up in a male dominated technical world to reach the position she now had – and it hadn’t always been easy. But her ambition and ability to set and achieve goals had given her the edge over her colleagues and added to her technical knowledge, this had allowed her to become a future minded leader, capable of reaching the objectives the company set for her and her team.

Now, however, things had begun to seem hard for her. She had suffered the loss of several key team-members and this, coupled with various technological challenges, had led to the failure to meet several important customer project deadlines. She was beginning to get frustrated and was having difficulty finding her usual confident attitude. The certainty that once marked her manner, had turned to uncertainty. Decisions had become difficult to make and the problems, it seemed, were coming at her quicker than she could deal with.

‘It’s so hard’, she told me. ‘Everything seems to be going wrong. I’m seriously considering quitting and doing something else. Maybe I’m just not cut out for this after all.’  She was so caught up in the problems that life was handing her that it was becoming more and more difficult for her to look beyond and develop a strategy.

I drove down the dusky highway towards home and thought about the upcoming evening. We had a fairly long tradition of Gin Rummy and every couple of months or so we would meet to play, chat and have a good time. We didn’t take it all very seriously, but it was a great way to spend the evening in good company. We always were careful to keep score though, because at the end of the Gin Rummy year (midsummer) the player with the least amount of points would take the others out for dinner.

This year I was probably safe. I had been having a good year, so the chances of me landing at the bottom of the list were slim at best. Nevertheless, you never knew, so I was already planning my tactics for the evening as I drove and dreamt of the steak I would eat around mid-summer.

Playing cards is a game of chance and strategy. Cards are dealt to you and then you play. Sometimes you’ve got good cards, and sometimes you don’t. But ask any good Gin Rummy player, it’s not the cards you’re dealt that matters, it’s the way you play them that makes or breaks the game. Even if you don’t have perfect cards, you can make the best out of the hand you have and look forward to the next deal.

Life and work are much the same. Sometimes you’re holding aces and sometimes you’re not, but you’re already sitting at the table so you might as well play. And even if the cards you’re holding seem rotten at best, take comfort in the fact that in life as in Gin Rummy, you’re always dealt new cards and new chances.

So remember, it’s not the cards you’ve got in your hand that make you successful, but instead it’s what you do with them that counts.

Happy Shuffling,
Lisa

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

smartwentcrazy

‘I have nothing to wear! I can’t believe it! ‘

I stomped out of my bedroom, glaring at my closet as I passed. I had an important appointment and had nothing to wear. How frustrating! And it was an important appointment, too. I had been invited to present my workshops at a large company in Vienna and I was nervous. Would I be able to sell myself? Would I find the right words? The closer the day of the appointment had come, the more nervous I became.

The feeling of doubt had slowly begun to creep into my mind. I wasn’t sure of myself anymore and this was making me very irritable

I went down to the laundry room to see if there was anything interesting down there. There were several t-shirts, a few blouses, a pair of slacks or two, but nothing good or interesting. Just old things that had pretty much taken up residence down there because they hadn’t been worn for so long. Their absence upstairs had, until today, gone largely unnoticed.

I went up stairs again, grabbed my tea and went back to my bedroom to have another look in my closet. There must be something I could wear. I wanted something serious and businesslike, but not too conservative. Something that showed open mindedness, but not too casual. But an old familiar feeling of nervousness crept up my back when I thought about the appointment. Darn it! I thought I had dealt with these issues ages ago! But this old doubt in myself, this self-uncertainty was evidently still there, and had been hiding in the back of my mind, and now it had come back out and sat in the middle of the room watching me.

Hadn’t I already worked on my self-confidence? Hadn’t I already found more constructive ways of thinking? This old self-doubt issue was certainly not going to help me be successful during my appointment. I needed to have access to a more productive and supportive belief.

I forced the closet doors open, pushing back a stack of old sweaters that threatened to fall out. I ran my fingers over the hangers which were wedged together like sardines in a can and extracted a white blouse with pretty stitching on the sleeves. Nope, that one didn’t fit anymore. I attempted to shove it back in, but no go. I hung in on the back of the door. I could hang it away later, when I had more time.

Next I pulled out a cream colored blouse with wide lapels. Naw, that one really wasn’t my look anymore. I hung it up with the pretty white blouse. I rummaged around a bit more and pulled 5 or 6 assorted blouses out. I rejected each one in turn – didn’t fit, wrong style, not my color anymore, out of date. This was getting difficult. I proceeded to the pants, hoping to have more luck there. After much digging, I found high-waisted slacks (yuk), tight leather jeans (not very businesslike) and slacks from old forgotten suits. Sigh. Was there nothing I could wear in here? It was hard to say because the closet was so full.

How frustrating. I couldn’t find anything. I had some nice clothes – I knew that, but I couldn’t find them and I needed new clothes, but I had no place to hang them. I had kept so much old hanging around that I couldn’t find a thing. I had to get rid of the old before I could find anything good or buy anything new.

Wow, I guess that’s really true.

I needed to get rid of the old clothing, and the old belief systems, before I could have, and use, new ones (and really call them my own). If the closet is full, you’ll never find anything and you have no room for new. Just piling new thing in on top of old, doesn’t leave you much room. Everything just becomes wrinkled, ruined or lost. First you have to throw the old out, before you can have room for (and find) the new.

Old belief systems, just like old clothes, hang in the closets of our minds and clutter our thoughts. We can’t really find positive thought patterns, supportive belief systems or nice pants if they are squished in too tight. My self-doubt, just like my old high-waisted pants, had been hanging around in the corners of my mind getting in the way of the new, more appropriate (and snazzier) self-confidence. I needed to take each piece out, the pants and the beliefs, have a good look at them and decide if they were worth keeping. Reducing the clutter in my closets and in my mind makes it easier to find the appropriate pieces for any successful appointment.

So if you’re finding your closets a bit too full of old clothes and your mind too full of old beliefs, then do what I’m doing – really throwing out the old (not just hiding it in the back), and making room for the new.

Happy un-cluttering,
Lisa

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

tomk32

The wind whipped my hair back and whistled in my ears as we came round the last bend. Udo was already breathing hard, but he hadn’t slowed down a bit. He knew this stretch. He knew that we still had a few hundred meters or so before we reached the top of the hill and he wasn’t going to even think about stopping until then. I had given him his head and was enjoying the feeling of his massive shoulders reaching up and forward with every stride as we galloped up the hill through the snow. The sweet smell of warm horse and fir trees mingled in my nose and the tears from my eyes streaked straight back into my hair, freezing immediately. I guessed our speed to be about mach 9 as we topped the hill. We then slowed to a canter, a trot, and stopped and turned to look back just in time to see my friend Nicole gallop up. Niklas was not far behind her, barking and panting wildly. ‘Let’s do it again! Let’s do it again!’, he seemed to say.

But it was cold and it was getting dark, so Nicole and I decided to walk back to the barn, feed the horses and have some tea. We could sit in the club room and warm up while they were having their dinner. A hot cup of tea and a functional heater was the nicest way I knew of to end a winter ride in the woods.

We quickly unsaddled and filled the buckets with odd assorted ingredients, supplements, warm water (it was cold outside) and a few apples and carrots (for the vitamins) and carried them out to the waiting horses. And while Nicole swept out the grooming area, I went into the club room to turn on the heater and make tea. I rummaged around the cabinets a bit and found some cranberry tea and the last two clean mugs. One was new and shiny, sporting a smiley and some silly saying and the other one was a typical barn mug – cracked and stained, something somebody had weeded out of their own kitchen years ago, but still whole and useful. I poured the tea into the mugs, set them on the table and went out to get a tissue for my nose.

I came back in to find Nicole sitting in front of the heater with a steaming mug between her hands. ‘I left you the good tea’, she said generously. I looked over at the table and saw the shiny smiley mug steaming all alone. ‘What?’, I said. I wasn’t sure what she meant. ‘I left you the good tea’, she repeated. ‘I took the bad tea and left you the good one.’ She showed me the old, stained mug in her hands.

‘But it’s the same tea’, I said. ‘They’re both cranberry tea. They came out of the same pot.’

‘I know. But the one mug is nicer.’

Isn’t that silly – thinking that the one tea is better than the other just because the mug is nicer. The mug has nothing to do with the tea. A strange sort of thing to think.

Or is it?

Maybe many of us think this. If life is tea, then money, houses, cars and stuff like that are mugs. These things, just like mugs, only surround our lives, they don’t define our lives. And the quality of our life has very little to do with the kind of mug it’s in.

If we only focus on the mug, we run the risk of not enjoying the tea. Granted, a nice new smiley mug can be great to look at, but alone it’s empty. It’s the tea that warms, soothes and pleases.

Enjoying your life, and your tea, doesn’t mean that your mug has to be new and perfect, an old stained one will hold just as much. So look past your mug and let the flavors flow.

Happy tea time,
Lisa

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I was visiting a friend the other day to do some catching up. Sylvia and I hadn’t seen each other in quite a while, so I was looking forward to seeing her again and hearing about happenings. I was also looking forward to seeing her little boy, Andreas. He had turned 3 since the last [...]

My car slipped around the corner as if I were driving on soap and glided gracefully to the left and then to the right as I attempted to stay in my lane, or at least on my side of the road. I wasn’t being particular, but I did want to survive. Fortunately, I was pretty [...]

It was a beautiful, azure blue sky that smiled down on me as I walked out of the gardening store with my potted rose bush. I was tired of winter, now that Xmas had come and gone. I was looking forward to spring and although the sky was blue, the temperatures were still not very [...]

It was cold as I walked. Freezing cold.  The wind bit into my skin like icy teeth and cut through my thermal trousers as if they were silk pajamas. I shivered and pulled my jacket tighter around me. Even my ultra-thick high-tech down jacket was no match for the chill, because, unfortunately, it couldn’t cover [...]

It was the middle of the night when I heard it. It was a strange sort of noise, the kind you don’t expect to hear in the middle of the night. A scratching, almost pawing sort of a noise. Definitely out of place.
There it was again.
I shot to an upright sitting position in my bed; [...]