Barbara Brooks created Flamingo Strategies LLC to help clients stand up and stand out, through telling and sharing their stories of impact and purpose.
Hacking Away at Happiness is her blog.
Typically, contestants prepare and rehearse, but I put my name in the hat anyway. The theme of the night was “Tests,” and I was going in cold.
Downtime—because it's so utterly unfamiliar, can be excruciatingly uncomfortable. It can create stress. But it's also a great gift.
Improv—with its cardinal rule of YES, AND..."—provides the safest-possible stage. Then, if no one is judging, why is it so hard to go boldly into a scene?
I toggled back and forth, between the moment and the meta. Am I living? Or am I already writing a story in my head? But I also felt glorious moments of calm.
The Buddha said that we all are basically good. But we probably won’t believe that until we sit still and make friends with ourselves.
We win. We lose. We root for the underdog. And if we're lucky, we might even nail the landing.
We tell ourselves honest lies all the time. Don’t we all—especially we artists and writers—need to believe in the relevance of our work? And don't we ache to be heard?
I say I want him gone. But ambivalence keeps me from getting the job done. And my lack of commitment annoys me more than the empty traps.
Why can't we accord everyone in our lives the same presence of mind we give a climbing partner? Don't we all need focused, unconditional support?
"Whatever love you can get and give, whatever happiness you can filch or provide, every temporary measure of grace, whatever works.”
For 2018, what if we resolve to re-solve? And in that process, we soften? We may see that we haven't always been right. We may see that we don’t have all the answers. And we never did.
Delivering on the promises we make to ourselves—no matter how small—is important. I've procrastinated enough. I need this now more than ever.
Captive to the need to please and the need to know, I had lost touch with my intuition. Evidently this happens a lot. Especially to women.
How can we be 10% truer? 10% more vulnerable? 10% more open? For me, it begins by knowing there IS another 10%.
When we are floundering—especially when we are floundering—how can we find and follow the through line of our lives?
Why must we label our foibles as failures? There are so many ways it’s good to be bad. Why not have fun?
It takes work, but I believe we can learn to live comfortably in the middle way. AND we can also choose to do things the easy way.
By recognizing my choice as something other than failure, it came earlier and with more grace. But something else was different too...
I'm not scared. If I don't earn enough to feed the beast, I will change her diet or find new sources of food. Or both.
Since losing my steady income and free health insurance, I have also lost a lot of stuff. Stuff I didn’t really need and won’t replace. If abundance is such a blessing, why do we fritter it away?
