Balance – Page 7 – Career Life Institute

Creating a Magical Journal

Most girls begin some form of journaling during the tumultuous teenage years. And for many, their best friend truly was their diary – it was there when they had boy problems, it didn’t gossip on them, it listened when Mom and Dad and the whole world didn’t understand. At that time, too, keeping it secret from prying eyes was no small feat when little brother was as persistent as glue!

Many of us may have set the diary aside as we found the world requiring more and more of our energy. The good news is that a journal can still be your best friend and confidant, there when you most need to explore the questions that inevitably come up.

At a recent “Creating a Magical Journal” class I asked the group, “Why journal?” Their answers covered a wide range of personal exploration, and included:

to chronicle progress and goals;
to find out “Who am I?” and “What do I want, like, feel…?”;
to describe beauty/pain/what I see;
sharing/communicating;
to tap into my inner wisdom;
to express emotions;
clarification for the conscious/subconscious mind;
dreamwork;
questioning;
creating structure;
recording wisdom/ideas;
to process difficulties.

While most of us think of the journal as a place to write things down, it can also become a magical place to explore many different options as we take the time to create a journal that reflects who we are. The first step, as always, is being willing to step outside the box that we believe defines us.

A very simple way to do this is to expand the tools you use in recording your thoughts and ideas. Incorporating colored pens and pencils into the journal process gives your mind the excuse to begin playing more – remember when we were only 5 and the whole world of possibility was there in our box of crayons? Try writing (or printing) in your journal with a crayon – you’ll get a whole different sense of what you’re doing.

Another simple step is to use those wonderful pictures that come in the magazines we get each month. When you’re finished with the magazine, go through it and cut out the pictures that inspire or delight you. You can create a collage for your journal cover, illustrate a specific issue, or (my favorite) you can simply glue them into your journal in random places. When you get to that page of writing, ask yourself how the picture that’s there relates to what you are expressing. You will be surprised by how that can create a new avenue of ideas.

A friend and teacher once told me, “A life worth living is a life worth recording.” Whether you are using your journal for your own dialogue, as a record for your children and grandchildren, or as a place to develop the ideas and answers that support you in the world, your journal is truly as sacred as the spirit of your life. Be flexible, be creative, be adventurous, and be sure to enjoy the process!

Protect Yourself with Adequate Boundaries

As a sole proprietor (well, in my case I have a partnership, but it's still nearly the same) it's vitally important to remember that without YOU, the business doesn't exist. The most important thing you can do for your business is to take care of yourself. It's harder for women because traditionally we're used to taking care of everyone else, first.

So I'm issuing a challenge to all of us: set really good boundaries regarding your work. These can be boundaries about what kinds of work you'll accept, the deadlines you're willing to work under, the expectations others have of you, or simply, how long your workday is. I don't have to tell you where you need to place them – you already know that!!

Boundaries are a simple and powerful way to honor the quality of what we bring to life, and ultimately, what we bring to the workplace, and they help insure we don't end up getting "burnt-out" because of the overwhelming requirements we've taken on. The really interesting thing about boundaries is that we're the only ones who can set, enforce and protect them. Expecting others to understand or honor them requires that we do, too.

Most of us think we have to "power through" on the deadlines, forgetting about lunch, breaks, or sometimes, about sleep. Believe me, the work will still be there waiting for you, regardless of whether you take a break or not.

I've finally begun to really understand how important time away is. I still work many more hours than I thought I would as a small business person (of course I used to work that many hours in corporate, too), but now I make sure that I "close up shop" so to speak at or before 6:30 when my husband comes home from work.

And I've begun to take weekends off, too. In fact, I'm experimenting with half-to-full day Fridays off to compensate for having to teach classes in the evenings. It's fun, and in the past month I've been able to finish a quilt for our new grandchild due in February. Taking this time has given me the chance to finish something that's important to me, my daughter and the new baby. And I've had time to recharge my batteries. What I always notice when I take those breaks from work is that I'm so much more refreshed when I pick up the work again. My creativity comes back, along with my sense of humor!!

I read an alarming statistic not long ago that indicated heart disease, traditionally a "man's" ailment, is on the rise in women. I think that's because we're all facing the same kinds of stresses now that men always faced in the working world. Plus, most of us have even LARGER loads because of our own traditional roles as women. And those of us who work alone don't even have someone to talk about it with!!

So let's be smarter, and learn to be very firm about how and where we set our boundaries. In fact, to be REALLY radical, make your boundary three times bigger than you think you need. That way you'll have a lot more room for the unexpected that always seems to crop up. And be firm about "educating" your environment about exactly where those boundaries begin. A boundary helps to protect the Self in a way that nothing else can. When you set your boundaries out far enough, you have plenty of time to ACT rather than just REACT. You protect yourself and the other person, too.

I have a CPA friend who works from home. When she's working on a project, she puts a money clip on the bulletin board outside her office so that her husband, who also works from home, understands that she's unavailable for chitchat during that time. When the money clip has been moved to inside the office, he can come talk with her about whatever he thinks is important. A creative boundary that supports them both!!

In many of my previous jobs, my downfall was not allowing enough room (time, money, flexibility) for the emergencies. When we set our boundaries and honor ourselves by sticking to them, the "crisis-management" decreases and we stop feeling so jammed up. And when we feel more relaxed about ourselves, it's so much easier to share that wonderful creative spark that's uniquely our own. As women, that sense of contribution is important, so honor yourself, set firm boundaries, and let that spark be more available.

Retirement Planning for the Small Business Owner

Why does the small business owner avoid thinking about retirement planning? Two vivid reasons come to mind: 1) lack of cash, and 2) they assume there is plenty of time, so it can be deferred until the proverbial "tomorrow." Wrong, Wrong, Wrong! The following Table illustrates why "later" is such a drastic mistake.

Savings Goal	Time Frame	Necessary Investment
$250K	30 years	$168/month
$250K	20 years	$424/month
$250K	10 years	$1,367/month
$250K	5 years	$3402/month

Based upon an assumption of equal monthly installments earning 8% compounded monthly over the stated periods.

The two middle examples depict the different monthly investment between a 40-year-old and a 50-year-old to achieve the same amount by age 60. The latter requires over three times as much as the former.

This next example displays the value of time, and what a difference "time" can make in our investment strategies. An early saver deposits $1,000 a year ($83.33 per month) at 8% for just 10 years- nothing more is saved. A late starter does not save anything for ten years and then begins $1,000 a year savings program for forty years. Hence the late saver does not attain the same goal, as Table 2 exhibits.

Year	$1K Deposit @ 8%	Zero Deposit
1 5 10	$1,083 $6,397 $15,939	0 0 0
Year	Build @ 8%	$1K Deposit @ 8%
11 20 30 40 50	$17,267 $35,471 $78,934, $175,656 $390,895	$1,083 $15,939 $51,939 $130,344 $306,000

Now to the topic of "not enough cash" or even worse "no cash". Turn the negative around to the following mantra: " A part of all I earn is mine to keep," and make it real.

The next step requires payment to yourself first. This is a toughie, and may need a concerted effort to "find" money for savings. Here are a few ideas:

When your prices are raised, save the difference. This is the self-employed equivalent to the employee's " when I get a raise, save it".
Examine current outgo for an area with excessive or unnecessary spending. For example: brown bag lunch one day a week versus buying lunch, or one less dining-out monthly expense, or buying clothing more selectively and fewer times during the year.
Place change in a jar daily; I do and save about $500 a year.
Save a tax refund.
Use grocery coupons and drop the coins in a savings jar.
Get a rebate on a purchase, and place this into the jar.
Take $5 from every ATM withdrawal and give it to the jar.

You see the idea, now look for other ways. The third step is: don't waste energy on worrying about not doing anything before; just resolve to do something now! (And then Do It.)

©1996 Fran Roth

Transitions – One Man’s Story

This is the third in a series dealing with the lives of men. Mostly they are short stories/commentaries that are common to almost all men and many women in one way or another. Stories that form the basis of our lives and define who we are and who we might become. They come from many men whose stories touched me in a familiar way and within which are important insights into our growth and happiness.

"When a man possesses his story,
he has all he needs for survival;
but if he loses his story, he's in peril."
– Sir Laurens van der Post

"I was a cop for twenty friggin' years. When I was forty my daughter left home and then two years later my son left. Then I got to see that I didn't have much of a relationship with my wife because I had spent all the years of my marriage working and not really participating with the family. With the kids gone we didn't have much use for each other, I guess. After a couple more years, my wife left and all I had was the damn job. The next year I had my twenty [years] in at age forty-six and had to retire. Nobody wants to have too much to do with ex-cops except other ex-cops but they're tapped out & burned out just like me. I got to know what lonely was real fast. There was no real relationship with the kids, and a fat, middle-aged ex-cop doesn't do too well at those singles things. If it hadn't been for my grandkids I would have ended it right then. I still don't have much going with my son, but my daughter and her kids keep me alive… Somewhere along the line I figure I missed something, and I'd sure like to find it before I die. I'd like to know that my life was worth living." Carl, from a Man In Transition workshop, 1992.

For many modern men, our story is our life. The story that we were told as youngsters, the story that we perceived from the input of our peers as we grew up, the story that our teachers told us about our abilities, the story that we assumed because we believed that we are our results. For too many men it is a story of doing rather than being. The story all too often is a self-imposed isolation that creeps silently into all aspects of our relationships with the outer world. Joseph Jastrab said it perceptively in his book Sacred Manhood/Sacred Earth (Harpers Perennial, 1995), "An isolation sets in, the pain of which is often met by further isolation. Keeping one's story to oneself is painful; it exiles a man from the nurturance of community and robs his culture of the gifts of his humanness. It keeps him confirmed in a well-worn and static story that no longer responds to a changing world. In this guarded secrecy, our wounds fester rather than heal. And by our example of secrecy, we teach our children to be afraid of their own truth."

My friend the ex cop was caught in a story of uselessness. When he no longer had the one thing that he had learned to identify himself with, he lost his story and therefore his self-identity. His solution was to recreate his story. After realizing that all of history is merely a collection of stories that we agree to believe in, he decided that if he were gong to survive he would have to change his story. It really wasn't a difficult thing to do. I met him when he was just miserable enough that literally anything would be better than where he was. But Carl was not sick. He, like so many of us, just needed to be heard. As he listened to himself tell his story he began to see things that he had not seen before, things that he could change. So, he changed his story a little at a time. He did it not by going into denial or lying but by simply changing his perspective. He began to look at what he had accomplished in his career rather than the negatives that had so depressed him. He began referring to himself as an ex Police Officer rather than an ex cop. He joined a health club and became intent upon regaining a reasonable and healthy body, finally became a volunteer trainer at the club specializing in helping senior citizens plan exercise programs. He went back to school at a local community college and earned a certificate in nutrition. Within three years he had changed his story, his life, his reality.

When I last spoke to Carl he had met a delightful and creative woman, had worked hard at reestablishing contact with his son and couldn't get enough of his grandchildren with whom he had created a powerful bond. His life, he told me, was sweet. It was, he confided, very worth living.

Although I didn't know it at the time, Carl was my first coaching client in my own transition from therapist to life coach. I was also holding on to my story about who I was even though it wasn't working for me. What I realized was that there's a little bit of Carl in every one of us, cop, salesman, engineer, professor, CEO or therapist. We can all change, grow in a specific direction, become better, different, whoever we want to become if we are willing to change our story. So, Carl, wherever you are, thanks for helping me make my life worth living.

_____About the Author______________
Article ©Copyright 1999, Kenneth F. Byers
Dr. Ken Byers is a personal coaching professional with a thirty year background in business, industry and therapy. He specializes in telephone based Men's Life Coaching and cross-gender personal coaching.

Ken can be reached at: 415/239-6929
E-mail: mekendar@pacbell.net
www.etropolis.com/coachken/.