Are you starting the year slightly unravelled?

MyWord 2023 - Balance

If you are starting the year slightly unravelled well you are not alone. Resolutions are ill advised but selecting a word to live by through out the next 365 days has been a foundation for me for a few years now.

This year after much thought I am needing to go with ‘Balance’.

On Jan 1st I reached 11.15am before my first wave of anxiety passed over me. This years word and it’s application to my life ‘Balance’ has many meditations before it.

I have plans for 2023. There is uncharted territory. There is perspective to recognise and secure. ToDo lists to compile and close. Balance to be pursued in my work and my life. Balance in how long I spend on tasks and assign to projects. I currently struggle with balance.

Tread lightly in January. Listen to your head and heart. I am resilient yet fragile. Delicate yet resolute. #MyWord for 2023 is Balance. What is yours?

It needs no explaining. One word. No requirement to copy paste and share but you are free to do so. My image was created using Canva perhaps you would like to make a #MyWord image for yourself. Print it as a card for you wallet or purse. Use it as your desktop wallpaper.

Previous words I have lived with… Boundaries (2020), Mindfulness (2021), Posture (2022).

I spent December in ‘overwhelmed on a rollercoaster’ mode!

Welcome to 2023… on my terms with a new resolve.

See you around.

My Silent Scream

The prospect of making my own work is daunting but I don’t feel I have any other option when I don’t feel smart enough, clever enough, young enough, experienced enough… just not enough, to be employed to do what I love and what I feel I’m really good at.

Its all knowledge and insight and skill that no one seems to want yet I continually enter conversations where employers can’t find employable candidates.

I can’t do all I can do at once but no one wants any part of me it seems. Lack of disposable income to make work makes me less prolific than I’m capable of being.

If I was well funded and prolific I wouldn’t be needing a job. I’d actually like a job and be part of a team. Producing and consulting is a lonely pursuit.

There lies my inner sense of failure

Perhaps I’m just not very good and any sense of value to others I have is self deluded.

My Silent Scream

The prospect of making my own work is daunting but I don’t feel I have any other option when I don’t feel smart enough, clever enough, young enough, experienced enough… just not enough, to be employed to do what I love and what I feel I’m really good at.

Its all knowledge and insight and skill that no one seems to want yet I continually enter conversations where employers can’t find employable candidates.

I can’t do all I can do at once but no one wants any part of me it seems. Lack of disposable income to make work makes me less prolific than I’m capable of being.

If I was well funded and prolific I wouldn’t be needing a job. I’d actually like a job and be part of a team. Producing and consulting is a lonely pursuit.

There lies my inner sense of failure

Perhaps I’m just not very good and any sense of value to others I have is self deluded.

Posture - #MyWord2022

General Physical and Mental Health conditioning. It’s a curiosity. Can reflection influence practice? As a creative producer it most certainly does. This is a very selfish reflection. Words for the year are soul search deep.

It starts with plain simple searches on Google. I think I know what it means but returning to dictionary definitions is very important.

So… Posture

noun: posture; plural noun: postures
1. the position in which someone holds their body when standing or sitting."I got out of the car in an alert posture"

2. a particular approach or attitude. "trade unions adopted a more militant posture in wage negotiations"

verb: posture; 3rd person present: postures; past tense: postured; past participle: postured; gerund or present participle: posturing

1. behave in a way that is intended to impress or mislead."a billionaire posturing as a hero of the working class"

ARCHAIC
place (someone) in a particular attitude or pose. "and still these two were postured motionless"

It’s dual definition is why I was attracted to the word. It encompasses Health, Condition and Fitness as well as extending my thought processes around my word from 2021, Mindfulness and my place in my own mind and in the world. Posturing and positioning of others. There proposition and intent.

I don’t always understand. I do take pride in my posture. Learning to read posture is vital. A collective capacity to interpret posture and present continued positive direction has to be governance and policy.

This year is going to be a great deal more philosophical that anticipated.

What is your word for 2022 going to be?

Listen for fullstops

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Is there something you do that annoys you so much but have no idea how to change it. It’s an adaption of the fundamental unconscious.

 

I interrupt the end of others sentences after perceiving I have heard what they are saying. It’s actually quite debilitating to my professional mobility. I think too loudly, I react too vehemently, I over think, over and over.

 

How do you listen for full stops?

 

It’s not intentional, it’s not impatience, I do fear I’ll forget all my words if I don’t speak in response when I do. I know the full stop hasn’t come no to mention the pause that follows. 

 

What is that? Is that anything?

 

Knowledge Crystals

You can’t give knowledge away they have to want it.

Audience development is not about crowd gathering it’s about compiling an engaging offer and delivering it in a way people are compelled to gather and consume it, learn from it, return to it, share it, remember it, recreate it. Leave them wanting more is the often recited intention. 

“Just because it’s there” might work for those wanting to climb Everest or run the London Marathon. The time will arrive in the not too distant future that the Outside in the the company of others will be “there”.

In the literal meantime, planning and dreaming is the luxury many in the events and entertainment industry longed for.

The cycle is arriving... this time last year COVID was arriving. 

The news story playing in the background as I write is about the first patients who died in a Newcastle hospital. Three became thousands which as the time I write this is touching 100,000.

“When the lights go on again” War Time song comes to mind.

We need a version for our age.

Conspiracies

I have always been fascinated by the supernatural and conspiracies. The ultimate blend emerging over recent years being the Mandela Effect. The collective recollection of an event or object being recalled differently than the majority consciousness. See Bernstein Bears, KitKat and Nelson Mandela’s Funeral.

But my interest is not in the conspiracy or unexplained occurrence but in why people want or need the conspiracy. The mutated sentiment of the closest collaboration, to conspire, to plan in privacy, the joy of surprise, the presentation of spectacle, the magic of theatre. All swept away when debased by obsessional thinking.

Why do people believe, insist and argue to the contrary that the planet is a flat disc? Why do some want to insist the moon was not landed upon in 1969? There is enough uncertainty in life. What purpose can these extremes of thinking serve?

Complacency should not be entertained. Anomalous incongruous displays of power should be questioned. Due diligence on every story should be equal to facilitate objective perspective. But just as YouTube proliferates the conspiracy videos it is burgeoning with thought provoking exposition. Quirky stories, remarkable coincidences, extraordinary histories, adverse triumphs, morose consequences, the faceted human experience and society reacting across the ages.

During a recent Tuttle online conversation QAnon and David Ike raised the question. I recalled a video from a favourite YouTuber on mine. Has a YouTube channel empire of insights. Simon Whistler was a great foundation for a search for videos on why.

Search based on a youtube I follow - Simon Whistler. Why do people believe conspiracy theories?

Simon has a portfolio of channels.

TodayIFoundOut - http://www.todayifoundout.com/

TopTenz - https://www.toptenz.net/

Visual Politik EN

Biographics - https://biographics.org/

Geographics

Business Blaze

Megaprojects - https://www.megaprojects.net/

Sideprojects

Do you?

Do you get enough sleep?

Last night after an angst ridden day juggling deliverables and deadlines I had a early night, exhausted after deflecting a panic attack with a few tears and a multitude of magnificent hugs.

Mindfulness... it’s the name of the game right now and I am enjoying the journey. 

I slept! 

I’m using an app called Reflectly. Is where the quotes I post come from. It’s pure mindfulness.

Simple, clean and usable.

Check it out - https://reflectly.app/

Metronomic Mindfulness

Overlap, Interlace.

Keeping pace.

You have a chronometer, a metronome... your own Rhythm

The white noise of the world sits beneath the cacophony of civility.

Your metronome, your time signature. Claim it, respect it, be mindful of it.

Living in the NOW

There are times when advice you have received and given become relevant. That’s tends to be during an encounter where you feel that moment shared will resonate and inform someone you are with in this moment. It’s a reassurance that what they are experiencing is timely, will pass and like you they will triumph.

Your lived experience bringing hope to those who have yet to accumulate theirs.
I don’t know how my lived experience is relevant in the time of Covid.

My reflection is specifically turning to career, exams and further / higher education before the career path begins.

A world away today. A distant past that on occasion seems like yesterday and on others faded slight remembrances. 

I was always a little disappointed by my uni experience but in the light is 2020 and the dawn of 2021 want consolation can I provide? What vision of beyond the limited horizon of youth can I give?

Life will go on? Passion will endure? Love will conquer all? Listen to your head but follow your heart? 

The most influential bit of advice I ever received that truly shaped my early career in my mid to late 20’s was “don’t take a job because there’s nothing else, chase and take the jobs you want.”

It served me well in career phase one. I thought it would be just that way for the duration then I’d retire. In between there would be life, love, family and folly along side work, life and culture.

Career 2 emerged in the wake of emerging social technology. I was definitely in the wrong place at the right time! Always trying to find my place. Absorbing adulthood and learning business, adapting and adopting digital, Its potential joyously screaming community, audiences, freedom, connection. 

That time was dark with diamonds.The kick in the teeth was Brexit. The light came with lockdown.

How do I give insight that goes in the face if normalcy? I feel baffled by the present. With all my focus I failed to work and find sustained employment. All my attempts to actively find work and further my career was hard and bore minimal fruit.

Now I see possibility as I am entering career 3 it was Jan 2020 I gave in to circumstance. By March we were in the now.

This now. The story continues.