Facilitating my agenda

I've been noticing how helpful I find it when people help me by facilitating my working through my own agenda. Too often what I experience instead is how frustrating it can be when, although someone is obviously trying to be of help to me, I mostly just feel imposed upon by their agenda. Sometimes the other person's agenda is just about what happens to be going on in the other person's head, but other times it is about imposing their worldview as to how things are or should be in their opinion. I can find the latter especially frustrating.

I've given this a fair amount of thought in terms of when I'm talking with people, because I feel like the easiest way for me to think through things is by talking. I've even devised a format for people to take turns having others help them work through their own agendas:

http://meaningfulaction.org/ScriptForHoldingTheSpaceSessions.pdf

A different area in which I hadn't given this much thought is with getting help with organizing all my papers. This came up the other day when a friend of mine was telling me about how he now has people to help him with organizing that he works well with. He was telling me a story about how he was able to explain to his significant other how he would like to be helped by using an analogy of what if it was him helping her, when I realized that what it boiled down to for me was how helpful it was to him that he was able to get her to facilitate his organizing agenda.

This has made it clearer for me what the common denominator has been in what helps me in many different areas where people are trying to help me: writing, organizing, moving, talking through things, deciding what to do with myself, etc. When people are helping me explore the thoughts I want to explore, make progress on the things I'm eager to do, and stay focused on what I think is important, it makes a world of difference.

Small pieces

The video that I shared in my previous blog entry is a small piece of a longer video. It's the 3rd part of a 4-part video by Ira Glass on storytelling. I posted a blog entry about the 2nd part of the video to my other blog.*

I've been wanting to post to that other blog with reckless abandon, but it just wasn't happening. So, I started this blog and already I'm feeling more hopeful...well, cautiously hopeful... For one thing, the title of this blog, For Sharing, is making quite a difference because it's simpler and more all-encompassing than the title for the old blog, Small Experiments.

The other thing I'm noticing is that posting in small pieces is making a big difference. At first I was trying to combine the content of these first 3 blog entries all into one entry. I'm pretty sure that would not have produced as good results. With my old blog, my goal was to post an entry at least once a week (which quickly morphed into at least once a month). Framing the goal in that way didn't match my more natural style of doing things which is to binge on something when I feel more like doing it (as I've done today with blogging) and then not worry about it until the next wave of enthusiasm for it hits. So with the old blog, I'd find myself holding back on doing more blogging after posting an entry. I'd already met my goal and if I didn't hold back I might not have anything for next week. Whereas with this new blog, I can see how I'm better set up to blog in small simple pieces with reckless abandon.

* Here's the blog entry that was on my Small Experiments blog.  I decided to revamp that blog and start from scratch with it, so I've removed my old blog entries from it.  I moved this one here instead of deleting it:

Exactly what I needed to hear

While doing some unintentional websurfing, I managed to stumble across exactly what I needed to hear.

I've been getting too attached to something I've been writing. I knew I was getting myself in trouble when I found myself obsessively editing and getting really hung up on particular wording...which is a surefire way to end up way too attached to what I've written. Which makes it all the more painful when I now have to kill what I'm attached to.

Hearing what Ira Glass had to say about this will probably save me from trying in vain to salvage that which I need to kill. To hear Ira Glass' words of wisdom yourself, play the 2nd video on the following page:

http://www.yourdailyawesome.com/2007/03/02/ira-glass-on-storytelling/

(The part about having to kill things doesn't happen until about a minute into the video which starts out with "On finding great stories...")

Fighting through the gap

I've been meaning to post a blog entry on this video for a long time now, so I'm just going to do it. In the first two minutes of the video, Ira Glass has done a really good job of spelling out something I've been struggling with a lot. (He talks about it in terms of people who want to make videos...which isn't my thing...but as he says this applies to anyone who's trying to do creative work.)

Here's the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hidvElQ0xE

I've been in the process of finding a way to thrive at doing self-directed stuff for a long time. I really could benefit from having more structure, but I have struggled with finding ways of providing it for myself. I've often had escapist fantasies of becoming a student again so that other people can tell me what hoops to jump through. But, it's become quite clear that that's not the answer for me. The answer lies in figuring out how to get myself to do what it takes to fight through the gap that Ira Glass describes.

Better results without my "try harder" mentality

I was just looking back at an email I wrote to a friend and was struck by how I was talking about figuring out what I can get myself to do with myself. I was struck by how this had my usual "try harder" mentality written all over it. Lately, I've had better success with encouraging myself to use other strategies besides just trying harder. For example, I've been following more what I'm enthusiastic about rather than what I think I'm supposed to be doing.

This blog entry serves as a good example. There was another entry I was working on because I was thinking it might make a better first entry. Fortunately, I didn't get too stalled out by that line of thinking (try harder on what I think I should be doing) and started working on this one instead. Because, after all the best first entry is the one that actually gets posted!