Since the theme of my articles on creative work and self-employment is the “Twisting Road,” imagine how humbling it was for me to be driving on twisting roads for the first time in several years during my recent trip. It wasn’t very much fun, and it seemed like a huge nuisance. Continue reading →

My first step at communicating about my new career was starting this blog as Chasing Wisdom. I did that before I was even clear what my new career would be. I narrowed my focus to personal development coaching and renamed this blog Twisting Road. I started a Blog-Zine at Chasing Wisdom where I wrote about creative career choices, self-employment, getting along with money, mentorship as leadership, and time management.

A few months back I started an e-mail newsletter, On The Twisting Road, to focus on creative careers, self-employment, and entrepreneurship. That led to some important questions, like What’s the difference between Chasing Wisdom and my e-mail newsletter? and Do I still need both of them? I finally sorted out my ideas and made some big decisions. But why in the world did I choose now to put them in place?
Continue reading →

Talking with other people is an important part of making a wise decision. We all need the additional information and the new perspective of good counsel. But not all counsel is good! We have to listen carefully to tell which part of the response is wisdom. Continue reading →

The Suburban I own is eight years old. It has over 135,000 miles on it. In 2005, when it had about 110,000 miles on it, we drove it from Texas to Minnesota and back for a soccer tournament. After that, I got concerned about reliability and gas prices. Instead of upgrading to a new Suburban, we bought a Honda Accord and kept the old Suburban. Last December I took the Suburban in for a thorough “check-up” and decided it was sound enough for a road trip to Orlando and back. It did great. At the end of June we had a road trip to the beach and then back to San Antonio to drop my son at soccer camp. I took the Suburban, and it did great, especially driving on the sandy beach.

So why did I decide to drive the Accord when my younger son and I went back to San Antonio to pick up my older son? Continue reading →

It’s the end of the month. It’s the end of the quarter. And it also happens to be halfway through the year. The calendar is practically screaming at me that it’s time to review my progress on this year’s goals and adjust them if I need to. Continue reading →

Maybe it’s the heat, which showed up at least three weeks before summer officially arrived. Maybe it’s the culmination of conversations with other people training to be coaches and online forum chats with other people trying to make a creative career change. Maybe it’s writing down the story of my very expensive and foolish misadventures pursuing different “business opportunities” in the past. Something has sapped the urgency and pressure from my schedule for building my business.

It could be something as simple as the fact we’re adding some vacation days to the front end and back end of a trip to drive my older son to soccer camp. There’s nothing like the thought of vacation to send motivation running!

I know times like these come during any large project. There is an ebb and flow to focus and motivation. The accountability and focus of a coaching group (I’m in one) or accountability buddies (I have those in the creative career forum if I just ask) usually help people stay on track, even when it feels like slow plodding through mud. But we’re all being affected in a similar way and not accomplishing much.

I’ve decided just to give in. I’m planning to go with the flow. I’ll kick back and take it easy. Just as soon as it gets easy.

So far, summer has been busy. We had soccer camp and then a soccer tournament. We’re getting a new bed and mattress for the master bedroom so the old ones are going into the guest bedroom/home office. That means it’s in the middle of being rearranged and looks like a storage shed. This all started when I thought about how to rearrange the guest bedroom and talked with my wife about having a real bed for guests should we ever have any. That became the push we needed to go ahead and get the new larger bed for our bedroom and move our old bed into the guest bedroom. In coaching we call things like this “forwarding the action!”

The new bed comes tomorrow so I’ll be moving one and setting the other up. Wednesday the technician comes to fix the phone line on the wall where I relocated the desk in my home office. Thursday we leave for a couple of days of fun before dropping my older son at a university soccer camp for the week.

I thought I had been sweating a lot because of the heat. I’m realizing it’s a combination of rushing around and worrying about getting everything done!

I’ve decided to accept additional coaching clients. I believe I can handle up to three more if I add them slowly. I’ll start contacting my friends and colleagues to let them know later this week and the week I get back from the first trip. I look forward to having some more clients, but I won’t mind if I don’t get any more until August. That will be after the trip to soccer camp, and the trip back to pick up my son from soccer camp, and then our long road trip to North Carolina for – you guessed it – another soccer tournament.

The old laptop’s going with me on all the trips. I’ll be working on my book for people who are deciding if self-employment and entrepreneurship are right for them. With all these other things going on, I’m keeping my work schedule this summer narrowed down to coaching, writing the book, and writing my weekly articles. There’s nothing like the stress of a crowded schedule to bring clarity and purpose to work!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

This past week my younger son had a soccer camp every morning and it was about a half hour drive from our home. I packed up my zippered binder, laptop, and three-ring notebook each day to be able to use some of the camp time for work.

What I didn’t discover was consistently good coffee nearby. I don’t enjoy coffee first thing in the morning and usually have a couple of cups mid-morning during my work. I can’t brew it in my car –yet – so I tried three different places during the week with mediocre results. What I did discover is which parts of my work routine I can pack up and take with me.

My daily planner is in my zippered binder with my monthly targets and weekly steps, so I was able to plan my day while eating breakfast and drinking mediocre coffee. Anything that was planning or list-making, like choosing groups of people to contact as part of my referral seeking program, could be done in the binder. Reading for professional development was obviously portable, also.

I took my laptop along and was able to write drafts of articles and spend time doing creative writing. When the places with coffee were too crowded and noisy for me to write, I learned it was easiest to sit in the back seat of my car, windows down, with a little bit of shade. This worked as long as I had a nice breeze because it’s getting darned hot in north Texas.

I started looking mid-week for places with Wi-Fi to see how it would work to access my web site and autoresponder control panels. I didn’t find anywhere with free Wi-Fi so I didn’t try it out. I left my e-mail time and web site and blog management for the afternoons when I was back in my office. With a little more information and experience I’ll be able to find internet access while I’m out, and with a little bit of effort I’ll be able to learn how to access my business e-mail through the web. Then I’ll be ready to turn any mediocre coffee joint with a shaded parking lot into my office.

This is a boost for me because I was talking about what I want and need in my home office with a coaching colleague this week. We are taking an advanced coaching skills class and were doing some practice to apply the skills when I looked around and realized my home office just happened by default nearly five years ago and I haven’t improved it since. As we talked and she practiced coaching skills, I realized I don’t need an office as much as I need comfortable space and user-friendly materials and equipment. I can write on the computer wherever I can set up my laptop. I can write in a three-ring notebook wherever I can find quiet space and not too much wind. I can brainstorm and arrange ideas wherever I can spread out a few sheets of paper. I can talk to coaching clients wherever I have a good phone connection and no distractions.

Realizing I don’t have to be in my office to work, and that I can plan to work in different areas of my home or at a park or a coffee joint even when my office is available to me, freed me up to design the office I need. I’ve made the cluttered guest-bedroom-turned-home-office into a chaotic mix of boxes, papers, equipment, and frequently moved pieces of furniture. It’s a total mess, especially since I have to wait almost two weeks until the technician can come and hook up the recently disconnected phone line opposite of where I have the phone and fax now. But when that’s set I’ll have a corner of the room for the computer, resources, and bookkeeping, plus a filing cabinet for paperwork. The rest of the room will become a comfortable guest room for when we need that, and I’ll use it as an office for only a few tasks. For me, having much of my work be portable is liberating.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

We got back from the desert Wednesday and I spent the next four days thinking about Spongebob. My kids love the show so I’ve seen a few episodes. From time to time the little guy starts shriveling up because he’s out of the water. That’s how my brain felt. I think it was the slowest to dry out and the last to rehydrate.

My slowly drying brain may be part of the reason I felt so out of it when I thought about my business during the trip. Another reason was the setting. We were in Scottsdale most of the time, staying in a resort hotel. It’s hard to relate to authenticity and people striving to improve themselves mentally, interpersonally, and spiritually in that setting. I realized my drive for authenticity and self-expression was nearly drowned out by the power of the communal rut – of affluence.

Driving past the Mercedes dealership, then the Jaguar dealership, then the BMW dealership and the Range Rover dealership, it’s easy to develop the mistaken belief that fine living is a motivation for people to become solo entrepreneurs. In reality, many of the people enjoying that affluent lifestyle have high-paying jobs and spend a lot of time worrying about keeping them so they can protect their income.

On another level, affluent living not only pushes people to live in ruts to pursue and keep high-paying jobs, it also dictates the rut for enjoying the affluence. The stores, the restaurants, and the resorts all tell us This is how affluent people enjoy their money. Fit in by liking golf, spas, high-end shopping, expensive restaurants, and deserts artificially turned into tropical oases. It’s what all the “cool kids” are doing! Then fit in by getting into the high-paying job rut, and fight like crazy to stay there because it’s tough competition.

This rut thing gets even worse. Over Sunday dinner with my wife’s family we were talking about a news report that Joanna Rowling, Harry Potter creator and billionaires, gave a commencement address at Harvard and there were protests. It seems the ivory tower snobs consider her a second-rate talent and would have preferred someone more literary.

Joanna Rowling is one of my heroes. She had a story to tell and she committed herself to writing it and getting it published. It is, by most accounts, the best-selling book series of all time. At a time when people were giving up on getting kids to read, thinking we had to “dumb down” books and shorten them, kids started reading novels again. As new books came out, longer than before, the kids kept up. Some learned the joy of marathon reading, staying up for hours reading through hundreds of pages.

What a failure! That poor woman will never make it.

I doubt Jo Rowling set out to be a huge financial success with her writing. She probably dreamed of making a million dollars, but could she have conceived of making a billion? She followed her calling and expressed her gifts and talents. She did what she was born to do, and people appreciated it so she was rewarded.

Some trailblazers are making a living, just getting by, but having a great time being rewarded in many other ways. Some have surprising episodes where they make a lot of money and then see the lean times. Some slowly learn more about generating money and increase their pay over time. And some have spectacular financial success and enjoy it so much they do it over and over.

The key difference is the purpose. If they are chasing ways to make money, they are in a rut and they will stay in a rut. They will make money in a rut, they will spend it in a rut, they will be flashy in the rut, they will go into debt in the rut, and they will be afraid of leaving the rut to find themselves.

The trailblazers are discovering and expressing themselves. When they succeed, it’s out of the rut. They spend or save their money as they wish, and they don’t fear losing status and a rut lifestyle so they don’t have to hold back and give up their dreams. They’re free to pursue their dreams and create their own success, by whatever standard they want to measure it.

They know that a rut with beautifully accented handrails is still a rut, and they just won’t settle for that.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Updated 06/10/08 with the Rowling address video links:

Can you feel it? It hangs in the air, like the stuffiness of a closed-up room on a hot, humid day. It’s the pressure to compel graduating high school seniors into a college degree plan, and to compel college graduates into their nicely defined job-boxes.

Having “crossed over,” not only being self-employed but committed to work that helps other people have creative careers and be self-employed, I’m aware of this force all around me. Parents and family and friends of family emanate anxiety when they hear a graduate is still undecided, not sure of the next step. A high school graduate may not go to college right away in the fall. There are quiet gasps and scandalous looks. A college graduate may spend time pursuing more interests to find the right path before choosing a career. What will this do to the balance of nature? Will the earth’s magnetic poles shift, or will our planet wobble in its orbit around the sun?

That collective force acts as if personal freedom and creative choice will bring ominous results. But today’s articles in USA Today sound much more ominous.

“Slow times mean pay cuts for many” tells us bonuses, commission, and tips are falling. “Fuel prices drive some to try four-day workweeks” tells us that some businesses and government agencies are taking the drastic step of cutting back to four-day weeks. Scandal! How do we dare change a work pattern that is several decades old?

Traveling on the Twisting Road takes me above those ruts, so far above that sometimes I forget they are there. From the Road, it looks like you can work on a project at a reasonable pace and finish it, choosing a schedule based on when you are most productive. Up here I see that sometimes work requires a lot of focused hours, and sometimes it’s fewer, less intense hours of follow-up and coordination.

On the Road I bring my laptop when I’m out of town to be able to write the articles for my newsletter and publish them. I don’t spend time working on ongoing writing projects while I’m away, but I still spend a little time to keep up with my publishing schedule. I was even able to attend my advanced coaching class by teleconference today.

With so many of us changing our career focus to do something creative and meaningful in the middle of our lives, isn’t it inevitable that young adults will be more inclined to spend time finding authentic work before they settle into a job-box? It seems likely, and it seems right. At the point of greatest freedom and fewest obligations to hold them back, they can take a little time to find their gifts, talents, and passions and design work that expresses them and honors their values.

We’re in Phoenix for my niece’s high school graduation. I gave her the collection of books I recommended in a recent article in Chasing Wisdom. We also included a gift card, which she found right away, but as she looked through the gift bag she excitedly withdrew Barbara Winter’s Making A Living Without A Job. She was very excited and exclaimed, “Look, Dad! He knew!” They then joked about how she doesn’t want to have to work, but I’m still hopeful that it’s a wish not to be trapped in a boring job-box more than a wish to be able to amble through life with plenty of money and no deeper purpose or focus.

Up here On The Twisting Road we occasionally see people stuck in ruts and reach down to help them up. But many have lived in the ruts so long they can’t imagine there is safety, or provision, or even oxygen outside the rut. If we spread the message to young adults, before they get too settled in their ruts, maybe they’ll hop on the Road and choose blazing trails over wearing ruts into the same old paths.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

An authentic life includes authentic work. Authentic work helps you realize your dreams. It comes out of your gifts and talents and excites your passions.

That was an idea so radical but so obviously true that it grabbed me in a bear hug when I first read it expressed in one of Barbara Sher’s books. I’m hearing it expressed more often now, showing me the power behind the truth of the statement. The first step in finding authentic work is to reconnect with your gifts, talents, and passions, and dreams.

Which is why I can now proudly talk about my “guilty pleasure,” a popular reality show that helped point me to what resonates with my soul.

Don’t stop reading when I tell you it’s American Idol. My discovery of how parts of the show spoke to my core self is proof that you can get to your deepest interests by following wherever your interests lead you.

It wasn’t until the start of this year’s show, season seven, that I took the time to think about what the show taught me about myself. I first got drawn into the show when it started its second season. I was on a business trip in Florida and saw lots of signs about the show, focusing on Simon Cowell being a “monster.” Then I saw the television ads of his harsh comments, plus out-takes of auditions. The humor drew me in.

The format of each season’s earlier episodes is to show the audition process. The producers choose from a variety of comical, strange, interesting, and empathetic people and create short features to introduce them. That’s a joy for me because I love documentaries. The focused features on individual contestants are developed by editing real, unstaged or barely staged footage into a story with a particular viewpoint and emotional tone. That is the heart of documentary filmmaking.

The early episodes include excerpts of auditions of some of the more talented contestants interspersed with the outrageous ones. So while the humor and documentary storytelling draw me in, I start to notice potential waiting to be realized. That’s the big one for me. My passion is advocating personal growth and development, participating in the journey from discovering potential in its unpolished form to seeing it expressed in amazing accomplishments. When people face their fears and stretch their wings to find out what they are capable of doing, I celebrate. So by the time the outrageous auditions are over, I am invested in watching which people will commit to the work of challenging themselves to grow beyond their previous self-imposed limits.

That’s when the documentary quality of the show shifts. From that point on, the individual tales are about people struggling to rise out of poverty, adversity, and lives planned for them by boxes-and-ruts thinking.

It’s also the point where a distinction arises between people who have decent talent but are pursuing fame and wealth above anything else, and those with talent who find joy in developing and expressing it. The former have arrogant attitudes and shun the hard work, blaming others when they fall. The latter find a way to do the best with the challenges they are given. In a few amazing instances some transcend a challenge by finding a very personally expressive and unique way to present a song from their artistic perspective.

The show is cheesy – it’s contrived, inauthentic, and corny at times. The contestants have to perform songs from before they were born in small groups for auditions. They have to perform medleys of songs in musical review style as a group during each results show. Then they are criticized when their individual performances on competition night sound like a show on a cruise ship or at a theme park – a musical review. They are limited to a certain collection of songs by one artist or in one genre, and then they are criticized when they sound like the original. But they are also criticized if the performance is too unique, straying from the way the song was written.

But in the midst of all that unnecessary and inherently conflicted chatter, and the variety show quality of a lot of the “filler” segments, there are beautiful jewels. This year Brooke White sat at the piano and sang Let It Be, and then cried with obvious joy as Paula Abdul – yes, jokes aside, she is capable of amazing insight – put into words what Brooke was experiencing. She was doing what she was born to do, and what she had been planning and striving towards for years, by performing in front of a large live audience and millions watching by television. Paula said, “This is your dream. You’re living it right now.” Brooke melted.

Runner-up David Archuleta provided a few gems along the way, too. His performances of Imagine and Angels were amazing from a seventeen-year-old. His performance under the highest pressure, the night of the final competition, was pretty close to flawless. When he sang Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me I thought he had just given the performance that would make him the winner.

But winner David Cook was the best gem of the entire season. Early on in live competition, he took risks with his song choices, and he used different arrangements of songs in a way that let him express his own artistic style very clearly. Throughout the voting portion of the show, he was increasingly a strong artist, a compelling performer, and a singer who knew his voice well enough to rely on his strengths to express a song and connect with the audience. During the final night of competition he was a little rough and his voice a little raw, but he had already shown the courage of expressing himself as an artist, so people were eager to vote for him.

David Cook was a bartender working in Tulsa, Oklahoma when his brother asked him to accompany him to the auditions in Omaha. He did it to support his brother. During the initial screening round, the producers talked to him about auditioning. He said he hadn’t come to audition, but they talked him into it.

Every time he received critique from the judges, he made eye contact, he listened closely, and he responded with humility. When he was praised, he expressed gratitude. When he was criticized, he never argued or challenged. He displayed maturity and strong character. And each week he got better.

Now he’s going to be doing what he loves and sharing it with millions of people. What’s not to love about that?

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey