Archive | March, 2005

Hello TypePad…

by on March 9, 2005 in Media

Welcome to the new home of the Alchemy of Soulful Work. If you came here via the old blogger address, please adjust your bookmarks or RSS reader. I’m using Feedburner to track my readership so click the link over there on the right side and you should have a set of options for how you want to subscribe. I pretty sure its easy to add this new address to Bloglines, My Yahoo, and other web-based readers. Ultimately, I hope that the transition is fairly easy for me as well as you.

With every transition, there are challenges (transitions seems to be a theme for me lately, huh?). There’s the tricky business of how to deal with
all the previous links to this address hanging out there on other
blogs. I’m considering inserting a meta tag that will automatically
redirect to the new address. The only problem is that it won’t be
permalink specific. Say you click a link to a post from January; the
redirect won’t take you to the corresponding post in TypePad but to the
main page. Any other solutions from folks who made the transition before?

Also, I’ve always preferred
the TypePad method of comments and trackbacks. Another
challenge is that I’m afraid I’m going to lose all the wonderful
comments made in the past few months. I figure one option is to
manually insert each comment in the appropriate place which will take
some time. If anyone knows of a shortcut, please send me an email or
comment below.

So, if you’re a loyal reader, thanks for finding me again. And if you’re a new reader, thanks for visiting and I hope you come back often. Either way, please participate through comments. One voice alone can create a beautiful solo; but a group of soulful voices can create incredible harmonies, adding rich textures and new ways of approaching familiar songs. I’m excited to hear what you bring to the topics of Soulful Work.

Developing Chaordic Confidence

by on March 4, 2005 in Creative

Chris Corrigan at Open Space has a fantastic post from a week ago called Values, tools and authentic facilitation. What immediately pulled me into the post was this:

Work as practice. And by practice I mean something akin to a spiritual practice, whereby one undertakes a life of value and meaning through living in a particular way. When I feel my facilitation practice deepening, I notice that what I do is becoming more and more aligned with who I am.

I can think of no more noble way to approach our work than that. It’s about taking pride in our chosen craft and finding ourselves in our profession.

But, then Chris took it deeper and discussed chaordic confidence, the idea that we have the ability to stay in chaos and trust that order will emerge. Scary, terrifying, liberating, and ultimately a source of the greatest creativity we can generate. It seems to be more than what we do and even how we go about doing it; it’s about getting to the why behind what we do. In terms of Chris’s work as a facilitator, he describes it like this:

Developing chaordic confidence is more than acquiring more tools. It is about integrating an approach to life and work that is anchored in a set of principles and values that serves our clients. For me these values include believing in the wisdom of the group, trusting that chaos produces higher levels of order and seeing conflict as passion that can be harnessed in the service of progress.

He offers a couple of powerful points of reflection…Do we know what our principles and values are? Do they anchor our own approach to life as well as work? Are they principles and values that serve others? Brilliant questions to consider over the weekend.

Happy (Belated) Birthday Dr. Seuss

by on March 3, 2005 in Media

I really meant to write yesterday evening, but life sort of got in the way. Anyway, for those of you who have kiddies, teach kiddies, or are just a big kiddie yourself, you probably know that yesterday (March 2) was Dr. Seuss’s birthday. In honor of this brilliantly whimsical man, the Bailey girls and I read some of our favorites: The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, and There’s a Wocket in My Pocket (unfortunately, we couldn’t find Hop On Pop). Not too long, we’ll introduce them to Oh, The Places You’ll Go.

Earlier, we found Seussvile which is a neat website with games, interactive stories, and all kinds of other fun stuff (I’m kind of partial to Catch a Thing).

I have to admit that I don’t know that much about Theodor Geisel and his biography on the site is a hoot. It seems he was destined to be Dr. Seuss. In his early years, his mother worked at her father’s bakery and would memorize the names of the pies on special each day and then chant them to customers. If young Ted ever had difficulty falling asleep, his mother would do her pie chants. He later credited her "for the rhythms in which I write and the urgency with which I do it." I think I’ll make learning more about him a higher priority.

And did you know this? One of Dr. Seuss’s publishers made him a bet that he couldn’t write a book using 50 words or less. Well, he did. Can you guess which book it is?

Green Eggs and Ham!

We’re all fortunate to have had Dr. Seuss in our world. What a creative, playful soul.