My head’s been stuffed absolutely full of wonderful productivity and strategizing ideas lately.

During Lift Off, Pam and Charlie spent a lot of time working with us (and helping us to work with ourselves and each other) on our plans for our lives and for our businesses. They wanted to know: what were our superpowers? What did we bring to the world that mattered deeply to us? What was the work we loved?

More difficult to answer were these questions: how will you actually bring your magic and your medicine into the world? How will you show people what you do, and get paid for doing it? How will you create your workspace, your website, your environment, and your marketing so that it resonates with YOU-ness (and, of course, pays the bills)?

Making a plan has always been hard for me, in spite of how I see the world.

I’m a big-picture person. Ali Hale talks about this on Charlie’s blog today – specifically, the differences between a more masculine, detail-oriented, get-that-shit-done mentality and a more feminine, big picture, do-the-things-that-matter-in-the-end way of seeing the world.

(I totally just summarized a post that deserves your undivided attention, so please don’t forget to go there and read it!)

I’ve always been better and zooming out and seeing things from a Google Earth kind of view. I can see the patterns between things, and intuitively know how those patterns are working together now, and how they will probably work together in the future.

However, it’s hard for me to do anything but dream big dreams, write down semi-vague intentions, and then be sad later when I realize that while I WANTED to make something happen, I never really figured out how to do it.

Dreams without plans can never come true, and plans without dreams are a waste of time.

On the last day of Lift Off, we paired off in sets like this: people who were big-picture dreamers with people who were focus-down detailers. Kyle (a very awesome and totally non-scary tax attorney) and I sat together and hammered out some specific plans for the next four to six weeks.

What I realized then, and understood again when I came home and did more strategic planning with Sarah, is this: my dreams and my plans complement each other, and I can do both. Not only that, but I can’t have one without the other.

Dreams without plans can never come true, and plans without dreams are a waste of time.

Making my plan freed me from needing the plan

My next epiphany came after I realized that planning was in line with dreaming, after I spent several hours writing down my dreams for the year, and daring myself to dream even bigger.

When I combined the ephemeral, in-my-head fluidity of my deepest wishes and hopes for my business and my life with the concrete black-and-white-ness of pen on paper, something shifted in me.

I had finally internalized my dreaming in such a way that I knew HOW to make the dream a reality. I realize now that I must have been subconsciously assuming that my dreams would never come true, because I had always held them inside and away from any real path to completion. And now that I had my plan, following it was as easy as breathing.

I don’t need a plan to tell me what to do any more. I don’t need someone (or something) to give me directions, because I wrote my own down and now I know where I’m going.

In short: plans are good, because they’re a tool that makes your dream real.

My to-do list doesn’t rule me now, because I know why it’s there. I know the WHY behind the WHAT, and that’s because I decided which WHY actually matters.

I’d love to hear your personal philosophy on planning and dreaming and productivity. Go crazy!

It’s a beautiful old hymn that I used to sing in church when I was a girl. I can still hear the tinny piano music and the voices of the sweet older ladies, earnestly harmonizing together to make a beautiful haunting sound on a Sunday morning.

Love lifted me… love lifted me… when nothing else could help, love lifted me.

This past weekend, while the snow fell and covered the roads here in my town, I got on a plane and went to Arizona.

Arizona, the land of warm red rocks and clear bright air. Arizona, where my heart often dwells in homesick nostalgia. Where mountains hold the land in peaceful saftey, and the sun shines down hard and hot.

I was excited – jumping-out-of-my-skin excited – when I found out I’d be able to go. The Lift Off retreat was a huge deal to consider, let alone ATTEND AT ALL. When I realized that I’d be MEETING PAM SLIM, and MEETING CHARLIE GILKEY, and probably HUGGING THEM BOTH, I could hardly contain my giddy anticipatory joy.

When I finally arrived, I immediately reverted to my shy, outsider, I’m-not-that-cool self. The self that doesn’t think she’s awesome at all, that believes she’s ridiculously awkward, and feels like an uneducated hick who doesn’t know how to use silverware. (Yes, I’m aware that none of that is true – but it doesn’t change feeling like it is.)

But then – I don’t know exactly when it happened, but it was probably partway through some shared laughter, or in the middle of one of the many hugs we all shared during the weekend – I suddenly felt loved.

I felt understood. I felt cared about, surrounded, and supported. I felt lifted up.

All my life, I’ve been the weird one. I read books and climbed trees as a child, and grew up on a farm while being homeschooled. We didn’t have a TV, and I played the piano for fun. My friends were few and far between, and most of them couldn’t relate to my way of being.

As an adult, I put aside wanting to do what my heart wanted, and did the things that were expected of me: I married early, started having kids, tried to learn housekeeping and billpaying and other wife-y stuff. When my first husband took off like the bastard he turned out to be, my world shifted in a huge way.

I learned how to be strong (like I already was). I learned how to find ways to make things happen (like I already knew how to do).

Years have passed since that first shift, and I’ve experienced many more. The most recent shift in my world was my entrance into that special club of entrepreneurs, those people who have their own businesses, who spend more time loving their work than they used to spend hating their jobs.

And then, I met a whole bunch of other people just like me. Fourteen others, in fact, not including Pam and Charlie. And I was home.

What I learned from the weekend cannot be summed up here, it cannot be bullet-pointed, and it sure as hell cannot be expressed in any coherent way except by my life and my actions and the way my world makes sense again. I met people who, by their love and their creativity and their innate them-ness, reminded me and retaught me that we were meant to live in community.

We need each other, and not just because we get lonely. We need each other because you can’t always see how amazing you are, but I can see it. We need each other because I can help you, but I can’t help myself – I need you for that.

Love lifted me this past weekend, and I won’t ever forget it. It’s part of me now, and it will always be woven into the fabric of my life.

P.S. I love you too.

I just wanted to let you know that, thanks to the beautiful awesomeness of my ninja assistant (or is that assistant ninja?), I did NOT work last evening, and instead I curled up on the couch with my husband and we watched a movie.

Thank you, Sarah, for the extra time. It’s priceless. (I don’t think I’m paying you enough!)

I noticed something today.

A lot of you are having a bad case of Everything Sucks. Ugh.

And actually, I was having it too (I woke up feeling all sick-ish and my throat is kinda scritchy and sore and I keep sneezing, which does not make me feel happy), and then, quite by accident, I tried cheering up a few of my beautiful friends on Twitter.

(I bet you know what happened next.)

I feel better! Ha. And now, for your enjoyment (and cheering-up-ness), is a list of Stuff That Doesn’t Suck.

Stuff That Doesn’t Suck: Monday Edition

1) An online western serial novel called A Savage Wilde, which is written by my friend Becca (she’s my FRIEND now, even though I’ve been stalking her for ages, haha), and is completely MADE OF AWESOME.

2) My favorite MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role-playing game) of all time, Guild Wars. I play this when I need some down time but can’t really leave my office or I’ll get distracted from whatever-it-is that I’m trying to brain my way through.

3) Making up phrases like ‘brain my way through,’ and expecting you to know what I mean.

4) Working from home, because I can give myself an easy day if I wake up sick. LIKE THIS MORNING.

5) Charlie Gilkey’s free planners, as well as the awesome all-in-a-set planners he just released that are REALLY STINKING CHEAP, for serious.

6) The growing list of my favorite people on Twitter.

7) You guys! Seriously. None of you suck, and I love you ALL.

What About You?

What doesn’t suck today, amongst all the stuff that DOES suck? I’m sure there’s at least one teeny thing. :)

I woke up to the wind blowing so hard it sounded like it was trying to take the roof off the house altogether, or at least bully it into falling off by itself. I also woke up to some small person in the bathroom, although whoever-it-was was trying very hard to be quiet, so points for that.

I got up, drank water, went to the bathroom, washed my face. I put in my contact lenses. I exercised (for only about five minutes), I made a pot of coffee. I drank more water.

Now I am upstairs in my robe, at my computer, and I just finished sorting my morning email. My new office – Joey’s old room – is filled with lovely morning light. The sun is shining against the trees at the edge of the road like it was a flashlight pointing at them. The sky is light-light porcelain blue, with some very long stretched-out clouds across it. People are driving and going places and getting things done, I imagine.

And I sit here, comfy in my office, at my desk, in my cozy robe, listening to my children trying to be quiet until it’s time to get up. I sit here and I dream and I wonder what is the next big thing for me, for us; I have the luxury of being awake and alive at a time of my own choosing.

I am so thankful to be here. So grateful. The world cannot contain my gratefulness.

It has taken me years to realize that my children do not have to be happy all the time, or be mirror representations of myself, to be ‘okay’ or ‘great’ or even the elusive ‘good’. I realize, now, that they are four different and unique people. Sometimes they don’t respond to life’s twisty-turny-ness the way that I would (or will). Sometimes they learn a lesson eagerly and move on joyfully. Sometimes they get stuck, can’t see their way out, and won’t listen to anyone no matter how helpful or wise. Sometimes they do the same boneheaded behavior over and over (even and especially when that behavior is a no-no around here), and can’t understand why they keep running up against it.

Sometimes they are like me, and sometimes they are wildly not-me. I only compare them to myself because I am their mother, their beginning, and all the things I taught them have made an impression somewhere upon their souls, no matter how slight. I see them as part of the canvas of my being, and it is not always easy to see them as a separate thing: a canvas all their own, pasted with fingerpaints and torn-out comics from the funny pages and the broken treasures found under beds and behind doors.

And now the point of all this ruminating is really this: I am an entrepreneur who is also a mother and a wife. Being an entrepreneur - master of my own island domain, creator of my own crown – means that my life is lived as a stunningly vivid example of how to do business (and how not to do business). Living this example-life in my home, day in and out, where the little-people-becoming-big-people see me every day and can observe with their spider senses how I am doing, means two great and terrible things.

1. It means that their idea of freelancing, or self-employment, or entrepreneurship, is fully informed by what they see me doing; and 2. it means that their idea of motherhood is fully informed by how they see me acting.

Do I behave like this is all too hard? Do I complain about my clients? Do I complain about household chores or grocery trips or getting their schoolwork together? Do I whine about the time I have to spend working, and spend all my waking moments inside my office, ignoring the world (and the people who are my world)?

Or, do I model rising to the challenge? Do I show them that it’s possible to be a really great business-person AND be a really great mother? Do I use positive language about my work and my clients and my never-ending task lists? Do I express my joy in my job, through my words and my body language? Do I put everything aside to take care of whoever needs it, when my mommy-ness is needed? Do I cook dinner for everyone and read stories to them and go for walks together?

When people say that their children made them better people, they were truth-telling indeed. There is no deeper soul-truth than this: my children make me better. And in so doing, I am able to shape their betterness as well.

Good light, good day. :)

So this hair! It’s odd, guys.

By now, I am used to not having any. It doesn’t brush my shoulders or my neck. It doesn’t get in my way, EVER. It’s easy to wash, easy to forget about. For the first few weeks, I actually kept forgetting to take SHOWERS because I was accustomed to my dirty hair reminding me to go wash up. (No, I didn’t forget for two weeks straight! Ewww.)

Sometimes it’s very soft to the touch, and other times it seems very wiry. I have insanely thick hair and also, apparently, numerous cowlicks that I didn’t know about. NOW I know why my bangs never cooperate without severe disciplinary action, and why my hair really only likes to go in one particular sort of way.

Also, I’ve mostly gotten over my apprehension about my looks. For a girl who’s had long-ish hair most of her life, and who defined some of her beauty by what kind of good-or-bad hair day she was having, it’s so very odd not to have much hair to speak of. It’s not that I feel like a different person now – it’s more that I realized that my hair has nothing whatsoever to do with my attractiveness.

My beauty is in the way I speak, the way I act, the way I walk and look at people and what makes me laugh. My beauty is in my eyes, my smile, the dimple I love (that I inherited from my Dad’s side of the family). My beauty is in the curves I have that I’ve accepted after so many years of hating them. My beauty is in my attitude.

In a weird and surprising way, I am grateful that we had lice in our house in December. Without that stress, and without my last-ditch attempt at sanity (by shaving my own head), I would never have discovered this gift:

That I am myself no matter what I look like.