Find the Magic and Do the Work Even When Your Creativity Freezes Up

The Sovereign Standard, Issue 3

Margaret Atwood wrote an ode to this frozen month.

“February,” she declares, “month of despair, with a skewered heart in the centre.”

Even if snow hasn’t been swirling ‘round your front door, there’s a texture to February that has people across the northern hemisphere yearning to hide under the covers. But “despair”? There are plenty who really suffer from seasonal affective disorder - it’s real, and it’s hard - but what about the rest of us who are just grouchy and feeling off our game?

We don’t have time to feel skewered when there’s a business to run and children to be entertained and a book that isn’t going to write itself.

We have to push through. But first we must acknowledge that it can be hard to find the silver in this gray and white world.

Make Friends With Reality: Reclaim the Snow Day

Remember when snow days weren’t just kids’ stuff (and massive productivity drains because there’s work to do and childcare to provide)?

Jesse Singal writes and elegy for the adult snow day in New York Magazine:

The grown-up world has a tendency to strip things of their magic a bit, but the snow day still served as a wonderful stop sign from the heavens for myopic, overworked adults. What else could grind to a halt, even temporarily, the exhausting, striving adult world of meetings and reports and office memos? What else could not only suggest to the workaholic that he take a day off, but force him to because the roads were too icy, the subways all closed? What else could unite father and son on a sled on a snowy hill in the middle of a weekday?

I too mourn the loss of the snow day and believe I’d be a better business owner and a better human if I let myself take a few more of them. While researching this week’s Sovereign Standard, I read way too many sunshine and sparkles blog posts from small business owners declaring "I don't need snow days because I love my work and my clients so much!"

Oh, please.  Let's admit:

1. all this snow and cold is making us feel less than... optimal
2. we feel cheated of our rights to snow days (after all, it’s one of the few consolations we have when it’s so cold you can’t make it to the mailbox without the skin on your knuckles cracking)
3. playing hooky as Mother Nature intends would do the business, the family, and the creative work a world of good

 Everyday Creative Magic: Reclaiming the Spark of Aliveness

Again, we’re not here to despair, even as we recognize that this is the season of our discontent. Nor are we here to whine as our “bored” children home for the third day in a week are taking care of that already.

We’re here to recover some of that everyday creative magic (the kind that Singal notes has been stripped from our grown up world).

Let’s consider summer for a moment… Here in New York’s Hudson Valley, we have a treasure of an organization called Wild Earth. Many families stare down our fear of poison ivy and Lyme disease and send our kids to their camp in July.

The few and the bold send their teenagers to overnight in the woods in the middle of this deep freeze. Tyler McNamara reveals the vital pulse at the heart of winter and why experiencing and yes, embracing, this dangerous cold is essential to being alive in this piece about eighteen young adventurers.  

But maybe we don’t need to sleep outdoors in order to find meaning in this dark season. Suzi Banks Baum of Laundry Line Divine shares notes from her winter retreat.

Where YOU are IS your point of entry, in to inner attention.

Wherever you are, mired in wild living or utter sameness, each are invitations to slow down, for even a few breaths and listen to what your heart requires of you. For even in the thrall of the clock, your voice is there, masked by the chaos perhaps, but it is there.

And if it isn’t the right time for you to sleep in a subzero tent or enjoy the luxury of solitude, there this sweet interview with artist, designer, and mom Johanna Winter-Harper at www.craftingconnections.net, a site dedicated to creating art with your kids. It gave me hope that it’s possible to make and mother amidst the mess. 

Message: It's Never Too Frigid to Speak

“Writing forces people to reconstrue whatever is troubling them and find new meaning in it.” So says a UVA psychologist professor quoted in the New York Times blog post Writing Your Way to Happiness. Studies show that students who engaged in “expressive writing” were healthier and performed better in school

But we know this. Writing reveals what we really thing and who we really are (eventually). Writing is hope. Writing is healing.

Earlier this week, I dove into the places that need plenty of exploratory, personal writing, but which just aren’t the stuff of a public online presence. In Online Visibility, Transparency, and Authenticity When You’ve Got Other Things On Your Mind I hope to give you the permission to admit you’re human and that your human experience will get in front of your entrepreneurial imperatives to be visible and authentic.

Read on for a few suggestions about how to show up even when you’ve got a case of the Februaries.

Livelihood: How Winter Impacts Work

 Finally, a few practicalities about winter and the business world...

Economists don’t really know if snow storms negatively impact the economy. Apparently, “it’s more an art than a science” to figure out whether lost wages, delayed purchases, and all those flight delays have a long term impact.

If you run a brick and mortar business when the roads are closed or have remote employees who can’t work because an ice storm knocked out their power, do you pay them? This article from Entrepreneur is a place to start.

 Ultimately, How Will You Survive February?

 Clinical psychologist Paul Lichtenberg posts on his Facebook page:

It reminds us that self-care: in the boiling of the tea, rinsing with salt, epsom baths, sitting, gentle restorative yoga, soup, slow mindful walking, self-massage, asking for help; all these minute-to-minute actions with the intention to heal bodymind bring us back to the most simple message: be kind to oneself, be gentle, care for the body and quiet mind. That is healing.

In this case, Paul is talking about coping with mortality, but we can use this wisdom to navigate the last weeks of this frozen world.

And so, we can move through, taking what medicine is available and appropriate to our temperament. We can occupy the present moment and actively seek healing and vitality, rather than mere survival.

Or, write a hot harangue at a poor blameless cat. Atwood’s “February” that opened this week’s issue is actually addressed to a feline who insists on sneaking into her bed. Proof that “kick the cat” syndrome is real, even in Booker Prize winners:

Cat, enough of your greedy whining and your small pink bumhole. Off my face! You’re the life principle, more or less, so get going on a little optimism around here. Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

Online Visibility, Transparency, and Authenticity When You’ve Got Other Things On Your Mind

Entrepreneurship springs from optimism. You believe in the vitality of the marketplace and your own potential. You understand that your livelihood relies on your energy and vision. You have a faith in yourself and your tribe and the world as a whole. But what if you’re just not feeling it right now?

We get stuck in the doldrums sometimes. Maybe it's due to illness or the needs of the family or this endless winter (this week’s Sovereign Standard offers balm for the snowed-in February soul).

Regardless of the source, these low periods are real and sometimes you can't just put on a happy face and push through, business as usual.

You Can Keep Sailing Your Professional Ship - Despite Private Tidal Waves

Maybe you’re one of those unflappable people whose personal relationships or interior monologues never gets in the way of her work. Maybe. But I doubt you’d click on a blog post with this title if you were. For the purpose of full transparency, you and I probably won’t be soul mates if you’re the Unsinkable Molly Brown type.

Time for more disclosure: I have big feelings and big ideas and sometimes they cause huge waves that threaten overturn my little professional skiff.

You too? Wonderful. Keep reading - there’s some ideas for how to survive these internal tempests and an extended boating metaphor in it for you!

Decide What You’ll Throw Overboard BEFORE the Storm Hits

You set out on the entrepreneurial journey with dual goals: adventure and prosperity. You were prepared to do the creative work as well as the grunt work. Your vision would become a service or product that filled a need and was worthy of your clients’ investment.

Though you may not have thought about it in any detailed way, you planned on showing up fully as you. After all, the reason you’re taking the risk of self-employment is for the ultimate fringe benefit: independence and the freedom to plot your own course.

The thing about being you - about being human: stuff happens. Storms hit. And the best laid professional plans are practically worthless when you’re in survival mode.

Well, those professional plans aren’t totally worthless. Before crises hit you can set priorities, develop systems, and hire back up so that clients won’t feel seasick when you're caught in a riptide.

And you can decide what’s on the bottom of your list.

This post is to help you decide what to cut loose before the ship starts going down. My suggestion? Your online presence.

Yes, the woman whose business is based on writing, content creation, and feeding the hungry internet beast in a graceful, sustainable way just told you to put your online presence last.

Note: that doesn’t mean that you put your writing last. Goodness knows the only way to survive a personal crisis is often a nice glass of red and a long session with your journal, but I digress…

Why Your All-Important Online Presence Isn’t All That Important Sometimes

You build an online presence in order to increase your visibility. If you’re not being seen you’re not building brand recognition or accruing those vital “know, like, and trust” points.

Does that make the online world sound way too much like appearing at a high school hangout on Friday nights? I meant for you to squirm a little with that one.

As important as visibility is, it’s also a bit trivial. Was one missed party social suicide when you were a sophomore? Is one week without Twitter going to damn you to obscurity?

Of course not. If you completely vanish from, the scene the conversation will eventually move on without you. But if you stick around your professional online haunts even when you feel like an emotionally crippled zombie, you risk your sanity - and potentially your reputation.

But What About Transparency and Authenticity?

Transparency and authenticity are two of the buzziest buzz words out there when people talk about how to “do” social media. They’re also some of the most flexibly defined words in the modern lexicon.

Let’s consult the bona fide word experts at Merriam Webster:

Transparency:  the quality or state of being transparent: able to be seen through; easy to notice or understand; honest and open; not secretive

Authenticity:  the quality or state of being authentic: to be real or genuine : not copied or false

Remember, friend, in this particular scenario, you’re a mess. You want to crawl into your bunk with a big thick book (this one features a shipwreck in keeping with our theme) or take up permanent residence on a desert island.

When you're wracked with doubt or swept up in a personal hurricane, transparency is not necessarily your ally. You don’t want or need to share all the details of this process just because you’re dedicated to being “real” online.

Lots of smart people have explored the intersections of transparency and authenticity (Gina Fiedel offers two of my favorites here  and here.

Transparency is Optional. Authenticity is Mandatory.

You’ve got a lot of discretion when it comes to what you reveal, but as a creative entrepreneur whose work is fueled by your passions, authenticity isn’t something that you want to start skimping on.

Your child is sick. You’re dealing with a mental health issue. Your mother-in-law just moved in. These situations are casting some long shadows over your optimism right now. It may feel good to step into the light of the always glowing digital world and talk about growth and hope, but you may also feel like an underpaid actress desperately pretending the script isn’t flat and the working conditions aren’t horrible.

Sometimes the most authentic, connected thing you can do is gracefully step away from the screen.

You may want to post a little note to the effect of "gone fishin'" or you may simply trust that you'll be back soon enough and your dedicated online community will greet you with open arms when the time is right.

Alternatives to a Complete Digital Hiatus: 3 Ways to Keep Up Online Appearances

Sometimes you need to just pull away. Being online when you feel vulnerable can make you feel too exposed - even if you’re not talking about anything personal. But if you can get your head around doing some simple online chores there are ways to keep up appearances:

• Post from your archives: You barely remember what you wrote last fall, so there’s a good chance that your older material will feel fresh to your readers. Plan ahead and make this easy on yourself: create a spreadsheet and record every post’s title, category, keywords, and meta description so you don’t just start picking old blog posts at random.

• Create media with the books that are getting you through: If a novel or a gripping work of non-fiction is your solace during this tough time, pull some quotes and use WordSwag to create a neat little graphic that’s easy to Instagram and share across social media.

• Build a list of ten or more trusted allies' sites and repost their content: Sharing others’ content may be a natural part of your day when you’re stopping by Facebook regularly, but think ahead for the times when you’re away from your usual digital hang outs. Create a list in Feedly or Twitter and repost content from your savvy friends and wise colleagues.

Despite the fact that I’ve barely been outside in months, I’m still keeping my ship afloat. Check out this week’s Sovereign Standard and subscribe to see you’re not the only one suffering during this long winter and to pick up some inspiration for finding warmth in the endless white veld.

How Business and Creativity Thrive When You Go Beyond the Online/Offline Divide

There are no barriers between the real world, the digital world, and the creative world Remember how there used to be was a wall between “real life” and our internet habits?

Maybe you had a blog you never talked about with friends.  Perhaps you used to feel like your connection to online business contacts was somehow different from your relationship to local clients and colleagues.

Those barriers and distinctions have all but vanished. And with the disappearance of the fourth wall between our online and offline lives, everything has gotten simultaneously more simple and more complicated.

We are both actors and spectators in the electronic and the terrestrial world. We can't go on believing that one space is make believe and the other reality and hope one has no influence upon the other.

When I first started asking questions about the way we performed in our digital and in our analog (read: real) lives, I was troubled that most people didn't seem invested in the topic. Finally, its time has come and we’re all thinking about what the phones and the social media presence is doing to our relationships, our work, and our creativity.

What Photos and Videos Offer… and What They Take Away

Last spring, when typing was nearly impossible thanks to the infant in my arms, I experimented a lot with video. Despite the low production value product, it was an important exercise in visibility and finding my voice in a time that might otherwise have been very insular and isolated.

Online and Offline Balance in Business, Life, and Family highlights the questions I was asking related to the future of Online Empowerment (which is having its own exciting new future without me), but I lay some much bigger questions on the table thanks to inspiration from David Amerland’s Semantic Search:

Forward thinking questions aside, it's worth noting that I have absolutely no memory of making that video. Was it mommy brain (see that I was holding a sweet faced girl who was still working to keep her head up!) or was it "photo-taking impairment effect"?

This NPR story talks about how capturing an image alters the quality of our memories and experiences is part of a bigger conversation going on about how cell phones are squelching creativity.

So, if our brains are being repatterned by our tech habits, what does that do to our business practices?

Livelihood: Thank Goodness We’re Not Digital Marketers!

At this point, we’re pretty much past the question of whether you can build a brand or a platform without social media (though it still gets asked).

Instead we’re seeing that online marketing is so ubiquitous that people are catching attention with headlines like Social Media Has Killed Consumer Trust.

According to Sensei Marketing, the “pendulum has swung back to traditional word of mouth and away from “the wisdom of crowds.’” That means we’re done using “likes” as barometers of quality and are re-dedicating ourselves to the tried and true “ask a friend” approach.

But as creative entrepreneurs, aren’t we “digital marketers”? We blog and tweet and sweat out our online visibility because we know it’s how we’ll grow a business and share our unique wisdom with those who need it most.

This is when we must remember we’re always going to rely on relationships and personal recommendations in a way that the digital marketing behemoths cannot. You are not Coke or Apple (thank the gods!). You are you, and that is so much more attractive to the individual clients you wish to reach.

By virtue of being a real person you are already bridging the real life/digital divide. Now, just be yourself.

Remember: that fourth wall between actor and audience, digital you and real people has fallen down - permanently. There has never been a better time to be a human being talking to another human being, regardless of whether it's face-to-face or over Facebook.

Message: How to Play Nice and Learn Something, Regardless of Medium

There’s a simple way to break down that final barrier between our online and offline consciousness: Stop believing there’s a difference between them. Lany Sullivan reminds us that the social side of media is not different from the social side of life.

That brings us to my favorite post of the week: Building up your swipe copy files: how to make the most of the B-school bombardment. Tanja Gardner of Crystal Clarity Copywriting makes the ultimate lemonade from the Marie Forleo-stamped lemons that will start filling our inboxes and newsfeeds.

Tanja's response - to watch and learn rather than grouse and delete - felt like a grounded, “real life” reaction to unwanted solicitation.  After all, when you meet someone at a networking meeting and they’re promoting something that doesn’t interest you, you can’t just roll your eyes and click delete or unsubscribe. Instead, you find a way to engage and find the point of connection (because really, the person pushing B School is probably still awesome even if she’s obviously motivated by a nice affiliate fee).

Everyday Creative Magic: Knowing When to Engage & When to Turn Within

Every breathing moment is part of our reality, regardless of whether we're glued to a screen or wholly entranced by a sunset, but we still need to protect the primal realms will forever resist hashtaggery.

Our creativity depends on quiet incubation time that can’t yet stand the light of day - or the glare of the screen. Jeffrey Davis offers this video on how to shape online and offline time to balance the “in the woods” and “in the sun” time.

If you’re in the flow and the BIG IDEAS are filling up the journal, please don’t stop writing. When you do emerge from your writer’s den, however, you don’t necessarily have to spread yourself thinner to show up on social media - unless you want to.  You have (at least) four choices about how to approach digital publishing and your online platform when you’re working on the bigger story.

And if you’re feeling like that private creative flow is elusive and you’re being drained by all the digital obligations and distractions, open yourself up to Nancy Seibel’s list of creativity boosters that don’t require a WiFi connection.

The “Problematizer”

One of my favorite college professors coined the term “problematizer” and generally used it to describe any person or idea that disrupted business as usual in Catholic Ireland. The problematizer tended to tip over a few sacred cows, and that's important to the Sovereign Standard ethos too - though we don't limit ourselves to topics in Irish studies!

For all this conscious examination of the online/offline continuum and the reality of both spheres, there are times we like using the online world as a wall to hide behind.

Scary Mommy boldly owns the truth: we use our devices to escape boring, painful situations. Maybe we're goofing off and spacing out. Often we're preoccupied with the phone because we just need to get some work done so we have a shot at cooking dinner instead of serving up another frozen pizza.

And sometimes, that’s gotta be OK too.

This is the second issue of the weekly curated publication, The Sovereign Standard. Get the next issues delivered to your inbox by signing up today.

How to Decide What to Publish When You're Writing the Bigger Story

You’ve been writing. The thoughts are flowing into the journal or popping forth in Evernote-ready snippets. There’s so much excitement around these emerging ideas, but there’s frustration too. Brilliant as the initial flashes of inspiration have been, these new concepts aren’t ready for prime time. You just want to keep up the momentum and ensure that the seeds continue to fall on fertile ground.

And yet there are days when it’s hard to sustain this private garden of possibility. You've got a broader vision and you’re impatient sometimes. Every time you expose yourself to social media's digital torrent of “content” you feel a little more stressed, a little more worried that you’ll be left behind.

“Everyone” is writing and pushing out content constantly - or so it seems. You’re already drowning in information and you’re sure that your ideal reader is overwhelmed too.

You’re caught between the trust in your process and your need to leave some footprints on the digital trail before it's too late.

Whenever that is.

Do You Need to Carry “Publish or Perish” Stress?

Once upon a time, I remember nodding my seventeen year-old head as a worldly college senior talked about the personal attention you’d receive from the faculty at their itty bitty liberal arts school.

With pride, he told our tour group that this place wasn’t “publish or perish.”

I still envision a flock of wizened academic buzzards picking at the bones of the young assistant professors who didn’t grace the pages of some obscure literary journal only read by fourteen other people in the field.

Back then, I dreamed of a life in academia, so I was a little spooked by this early lesson in survival of the fittest. Then I left that world and eventually made my way to entrepreneurship - the proverbial out of the frying pan into the fire, right?

Only You Know What You Must Write

Did you leave a career track full of obligations to start your own creative business adventure only to find that you were prey to countless experts with a new universe of what you “should” do?

At the top of the list is “do content marketing.” It’s a beautiful concept - educate, entertain, and inspire rather than advertise in order to win a community of prospective customers. But the reality is that you start to feel like you’re in a perpetual race to publish to the blog (and to Facebook and to LinkedIn, and…) or perish in obscurity.

This “gotta pen, produce, and publicize” drive is a distraction and downer for anyone, but it is even worse if you find yourself enjoying unprecedented - yet unpublishable - productivity.

Truth is, neither the content marketing imperative or the people who try to sell you easy ways to blog understand what's truly important to your story - especially if you’re filling notebooks with ideas in progress.

You're the only one who can put your bigger dreams above the short term gains of feeding the hungry online content beast.

You Have Choices. But First Acknowledge You Have No Choice

There’s one thing you have no choice about: You must keep writing.

This inspiration that propels you into each day and keeps you up late at night is a gift and your success and growth needs you to protect and cultivate these powers.

But then, you have 4 choices about how to approach publishing and your platform when you're working on the bigger story:

• Write even more: Keep doing what you’re doing in the journal in in the smartphone notes, but then dedicate more time to writing simpler, audience-ready posts based on what you already know.It may be hard to detangle your existing stock of knowledge from the emerging insights, but spend some time developing beginner’s mind and going back to basics. Sometimes the easiest thing to do is to create content in response to your clients’ questions. Dare to make it easy and accessible. This is what people need when they’re first getting to know you. Think of it as preparing to blow their minds when your magnum opus is ready

• Find a different way to be visible: I know that a #365project can make you a better writer. It enables you to be visible and to see your life in a more focused way. Here are two posts that may inspire you to keep writing your own stuff while you find creative ways to connect with your online community each day: The 365 Project as a Creative Process and A 365 Project that Inspires You to Love the Life You Live.

• Work the discovery writing in a more deliberate way: Trust the process. Love the process. Live the process. Keep writing into those ideas! But also appreciate your desire to get these out of the thinking stage and onto the page in a structured way that opens your work to the people who need your work. Find a mastermind partner or learn more about the Message Discovery and Development Process.

• Chill out and explore: Buck the "productivity at all cost" trend and simply allow. Use your online platform in a way that nurtures but does not distract you. If that means taking a social media hiatus, I promise you that everyone will still be here when you return.

If you want to make more time for your own writing and still immerse yourself in what leading thinkers in business, creativity, and progressive leadership are saying, please subscribe to the weekly Sovereign Standard.

Set Your Own Sovereign Standard

You know those magical creative moments when it all just flows? The story or the business idea or the picture emerges and it’s like it was just waiting for you to finally discover it. That’s what it was like for The Sovereign Standard, this new weekly curated newsletter.

In the midst of a typical family Saturdaymorning, the idea announced itself:

Set your own Sovereign Standard - livelihood, message, everyday creative magic

The Sovereign Standard takes its stand at intersection of livelihood, message, and everyday creative magic and aims to give creative entrepreneurs access to noteworthy insights from across the web.

But you know how it is - you careen from visionary brilliance to obsessive wordsmithing. All the initial genius leaches out and the concept begins to feel overanalyzed and underdeveloped.

Sometimes the fault line in an idea stems from a single word.

The flaw in the initial Sovereign Standard “download”? “Intersection.”

Intersection indicates that business and communication and creativity all merge, but it also implies that they’re distinct tracks that are only drawn together from time-to-time by a project like this one.

In truth, you're constantly braiding together of all those strands - all of the elements of life and work, body and soul.  To set your own Sovereign Standard, you take all aspects of your life into account and, consciously as you can, integrate them all.

Why Would a Writer Want to Curate Other People’s Stuff?

Thanks for starting with me from the very beginning. Here’s a window into the “why” of this new Sovereign Standard adventure.

In a word: connection.

The goal of a weekly round up + commentary is to expand your connections in a meaningful way by introducing you to fellow creative entrepreneurs as well as leading thinkers in business, creativity, and progressive leadership.

The Sovereign Standard community may be rich with solo entrepreneurs, but this is not a bastion of the DIY mindset. To borrow a term from a great community builder, Jeffrey Davis of Tracking Wonder, it’s about DIT - Do It Together.

Jeffrey names the contradiction  that so many creative entrepreneurs face: “We want to feel supported in our work, but when we receive it, we don't know what to do with it. We don’t trust it.” In this detailed and, yes, lengthy piece he lays down a compelling case for why support and collaboration are vital to even the most brilliant solo acts.

That support may be found in hiring a WordPress whiz or a writing coach. You may get the support you need by simply opting into the e-newsletters that really speak to you.

In the process of building up this publication, I’ll also build my own connections as I read with your needs in mind. I get to create relationships with smart, tuned-in writers and media makers who are saying things that matter.

And, yes, I admit that I am working to build my email newsletter list. I trust that the insights carefully gathered from at least a dozen other sources will be more compelling than sending you the same single voice each week.

These aren't new ideas. They don't have to be.

Curation encourages connection and community

Think you may want to build community in a similar way? You wouldn't be copying me. You’d be joining a growing cadre of content curators who understand that their tribe is plagued by information overload. Your tribe would appreciate it if someone they trust would handpick some “must reads” each week.

I trust Copyblogger products and after investing many car rides in the Rainmaker podcast, I can tell you I trust their CEO Brian Clark’s instincts.

He has launched his own new curation project. The process is detailed in three episodes beginning with this on Content Curation Positioning. I immersed myself in this topic over the last few weeks and can also recommend an earlier episode that gives an overview of the entire curation as content concept.

Soon you’ll notice that many of the people you trust most on the web are building a community by assembling useful, compelling resources all the time.

The day before I announced a weekly feature that would speak to livelihood, message, and creativity, I came across Gina Fiedel’s article that drew those exact ideas together - and curated the hell out of some quality content too.

Her post, which ostensibly focuses on how to connect to your creativity even when trying to feed the content beast blossoms into a chorus that celebrates the blending of writing and marketing, creativity and productivity, and work and play.

Gina offers: “Here’s a secret I told myself. If I start with play and if I continue in that vein, what I end up with contains more overall creative style and elements than if I hadn't done that. I achieve both creative process and (hopefully) a creative product.”

This is the delightful pivot point. All this writing, all this curating, all this community building that our work depends on is enlivened by play.

Play is How We Make Friends and Build Connections

"We are fully human only while playing, and we play only when we are human in the truest sense of the word." - Rudolf Steiner

Play is the space we learn how to engage with others.  Play is also the space we learn to engage with ourselves.

Play makes taking risks feel less threatening. Play is riddled with successes and failures.  It’s suppose to be. Failing means learning.

Play is how we learn and grow; long into adulthood. Play is a doing activity, not a trying activity. We don’t try to play, we play.

When you're hooked on productivity, play seems like a chore. We work to build community (yep, I say above that I am "working to build my email list"). But really, do we win friends through work or play? Really, any newsletter list worth having is full of people you'd like to call friends.

Better to attract new friends to your hive with the sweetness of play rather than the sweat of work, right?

Recently I’ve been redefining play in my house to make for our collective imagination and really see one another. If knocking a few Disney Princesses off their thrones appeals to you, check out When You Wish Upon Someone Else’s Marketing Star.

Saundra Goldman of The Creative Mix is a self-professed “serious girl” (but I can attest she has a great laugh!). She is making 2015 the year of #ContinuousPractice. This #365project is intended to document her daily writing practice and to encourage others to show up to their creative endeavors each day.

Though not ostensibly about play, sharing evidence of your daily practice can build connections in much the same way that playing can… You show your authentic self and you dare to be vulnerable. You invite people close in a way that efforting never quite permits. Since you're not a photographer it's ok if every image isn't perfect.

It’s an honor to know that Saundra credits me with inspiring her photo-a-day project. My 365 Project as a Creative Process appeared on her blog recently. Just a few other creatives who have picked up the 365 habit include Brenna Layne (#rootsandwings), Ginny Lee Taylor (#livetrue), Deirdre Walsh (#justbreathe), and Lauren Ayer.

As Saundra asks, “What would it take to make today Day One?” If you need a little more encouragement or incentive to consider launching your own #365 project, here’s a post on how daily photos make you a better writer. If it feels overwhelming you may want to modify the yearlong project to suit your needs and resources.

But Is Everything Supposed to Be Integrated?

I’m a self-avowed #365project evangelist, but what are the downsides to all that photo snapping and sharing? Is it play or process? Is it obsessive brand building? Is it an exploitation of your own intimate moments?

In When a Picture Breeds A Thousand Questions Blair Glaser asks some probing questions about why we’re motivated to capture a sunset and then share it. Blair concludes “I write this post not as a judge, but as a witness: A witness to the changes that are happening in my business, in my brain, in my life, and in the way our culture is shaping these changes.”

#365SovereignReality blank slate for the #newtechcity Bored and Brilliant challenge

She then introduces the Bored and Brilliant project from WNYC’s New Tech City podcast. It’s a collective experiment in putting down the phone and embracing the power of daydreaming. This is “challenge week” and they’re putting out daily podcasts encouraging you to change your phone behavior.

Tuesday’s challenge: don’t take a photo.  Not only do I have a photo-a-day commitment, but it was my daughter’s first birthday, so I failed miserably (but cheerfully).

Listen to the episode (only 6 minutes) and make up your own mind about the “photo taking impairment effect” and whether it’s detracting from life as you’re living it. I won’t be quitting my #365SovereignReality practice, but I will be monitoring how I’m using the camera to witness the moment and decide if I'm shortchanging my senses and my memories.

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