What would you do if you could not fail? … What would you do even though you might fail?*
Bernadette Jiwa

creativity starts with engaging the world on our own terms, noticing what others miss, and attending to what most matters to you**
Rob Walker

When you begin to see the You
perhaps had not noticed before,
The curious and interested and fascinated You,
The You who gets lost in probing
and questioning and
wondering and
imagining and
hoping and
experimenting, then
you have moved the focus from:
What would you do if you could not fail?, to the
heavier and more promising question:
What would you do even though
you might fail?

*Bernadette Jawa’s The Story of Telling blog: On Doing the Work That is Calling To Us;
**Rob Walker’s The Art of Noticing blog: Useless and Valuable.

If a reader cannot create a book with the writer, the book will never come to life.*
Madeleine L’Engle

Because you can create only from what’s already in your mind, your work is strictly limited to the contents of your unthought thoughts**
Robert McKee

Whilst Confession is a personal
expression,
The second critical C that is Communion
allows for
the uncovering of the more within and
co-creation without.

*Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking On Water;
**Robert McKee’s Character.

I have no idea how to get my students to build a self or become a soul … and in the hundreds of faculty appointments I have participated in, we’ve never evaluated a candidate on how well he or she could accomplish it.*
Steven Pinker

The unearthing of an unseen likeness is the most beautiful gift one mind can give another.**
Robert McKee

An unrushed, open and flowing
conversation around
talents and energies and
values is a great place to begin
finding the self and
growing a soul.

*David Brooks’ The Second Mountain;
**Robert McKee’s Character.

we are diminished, and we forget that we are more than we know*
Madeleine L’Engle

A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.**
David Epstein

When we accept that we are
diminished and more than we know,
we place ourselves within a powerful and
dynamic tension,
Positioning ourselves serendipitously within
a diminished and more than we know world:
Our success has a lot to do
with how we dance with conditions
that aren’t quite perfect.^

This is our humble confession,
The first of three critical Cs –
Confession not about the bad but
the good.

*Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water;
David Epstein’s Range;
^Seth Godin’s blog: The perfect conditions.

To be someone, as an artist, means: to be able to speak to one’s self. … For everything that is unique to an individual, if it does not wish to remain silent, needs its proper language … To say the same with the same words does not constitute progress.*
Rainer Maria Rilke

Sometimes the words others use just
aren’t the right ones for us –
Example:
My work includes elements of
coaching and mentoring, but
I am not a coach and
I am not a mentor;
I needed to find the word
dreamwhisperer to open a door into
the work I love.

I share these things because
I suspect it will be the same for you:
Play with your words,
Find your language.

Note forward:
I am not a spiritual director,
Though I recognise there are elements of
directing in the work that I do, so
I am finding new words for
a new development:
In Irish it is cogar anam:
Soul whisperer –
More to follow.

*Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters On Life.

Plot-driven stories put major turning points, especially the inciting incident, beyond the character’s control. … Character driven stories do the opposite. They put major events in the character’s hands.*
Robert McKee

When language becomes exhausted, our freedom dwindles – we cannot think; we do not recognise danger, injustice strikes us no more than “the ways things are.”**
Madeleine L’Engle

Our lives are full of
both plot-driven and
character-driven stories;
Most important, then, is the
development of those qualities and
characteristics that allow us to
respond and pre-spond
in the most hopeful ways:
Talents,
Energies,
Values:
It’s the work I love
helping people with –
There’s always so much to discover.

*Robert McKee’s Character;
**Madeleine L’Engle’s Walking on Water.

Firstly, creativity thrives on isolation and disconnection. Second, creativity flourishes in marginal spaces and liminal spaces. Finally, creativity thrives on chaos.*
Oliver Burkeman

From the disparity between the immensity of the possible and the smallness of the human being there springs the torment and the energy of the flâneur. Persecuted by frustration, he is sentenced to a sort of perpetual motion.**
Frederico Castigliano

Absence makes the
imagination grow stronger,
Disappearing us into the unnoticed and
unexplored places, ideas, and lives that
both grows the Self and
possibility:
First we have to persuade ourselves
we can make make pigs fly;
only then do we have a chance of
helping them fly.^

The flâneur and flâneuse
show us the way.

*Oliver Burkeman’s Life Is In the Transitions;
**Frederico Castigliano’s Flâneur;
^Oliver Burkeman’s Life Is In the Transitions, reflecting upon John Steinbeck’s “Pigasus” logo.

Which is better? Feeling like you were right the first time or actually being correct now?*
Seth Godin

Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.**
James Baldwin

Talent isn’t insignificant, but
it is overrated;
It requires all of
James Baldwin’s other words to
be fully activated and become
the correct answer our lives can be –
Our lives are rarely the first answer
we come up with.

*Seth Godin’s blog: The right answer;
**Bruce Feiler’s Life Is In the Transitions.

Movement gets us unstuck. It restores agency by giving us a feeling we’re acting on our situation.*
Bruce Feiler

although it may appear paradoxical, in order to acquire a profound view of things, you must first of all move randomly**
Federico Castigliano

When stuck,
Don’t stay where you are,
Don’t try and double-down on forced focus –
Move,
Wander,
Discover,
Imagine,
Create, and then,
Return.

*Bruce Feiler’s Life Is In the Transitions;
**Federico Castigliano’s Flâneur.

The fairy godmother replied that true magic is to help each thing become it’s best and most free self.*
Rebecca Solnit

A daemon is a calling, obsession, a source of lasting and sometimes manic energy. … when you are looking for a vocation, you are looking for a daemon. … You are trying to find that tension or problem that arouses great waves of moral, spiritual and relational energy.**
David Brooks

To become our best self –
Our True Self –
It is highly likely that
we will need to identify a cause:
Not any old cause,
Not someone else’s cause,
But one that is deeply personal
and will make the world better.

*Rebecca Solnit’s Cinderella Liberator;
**David Brooks’ The Second Mountain.