Tiny Revolutions №113: Winging it (literally)

+ Free workshop 12/4! Burn the blueprint 🔥📘

Group IX/SUW, The Swan, No. 1, Hilma af Klimt, 1915

In the grand tradition of sensitive aging women, I’ve fully evolved into a bird lady. I’ve always been bird inclined — fond memories of sitting with my grandma in her breakfast nook while cardinals and robins came to feast at the feeder and all that — but a real affinity has sprung up in recent years. I walk five miles outside most days in my heavily wooded neighborhood, and I’m noticing more and more about these animals.

Lately what I’ve clued into is just how messy an operation flying is. When you watch a bird flying from afar, it looks so seamless, doesn’t it? A confident, purposeful glide. But if you really pay attention, the whole endeavor is much more chaotic.

Ever watched a bird get going? It’s not pretty. There’s an awkward jump and flap takeoff phase where they wobble and shudder before hitting their stride. You can see the effort, and it is indeed a not insignificant effort every time! Even though they do this hundreds (thousands?) of times a day.

Was it just me who thought it was a neater process? Like it’s not til they’re mid-air that things smooth out a bit. But even then they’re still flapping their wings like mad.

And you knew where this was going, surely, but I’m finding it’s a great metaphor for my life during this phase of building a new business.

Most of my energy this fall has been directed at getting my new coaching program off the ground and damn it! It’s hard.

Or let me take that back and say that in some ways it’s the easiest, most natural thing there is — I’ve been coaching people for years in various orgs and capacities — but making it a business of my own is hard. Like the birds, I know what I’m building toward but each little effort is…wait for it…a massive effort! So many new things to start doing, systems to establish, things to tweak and improve upon as I go. It’s truly never-ending.

I love it and it’s fun and exciting but man. Do I want to lie in a pile a lot of the time? Yes, yes I do. Do I also question whether I shouldn’t just go and get a job? Also yes! And yet.

What fascinates me most is the way desire and difficulty are intertwined in this process. Like my bird friends, I'm possessed of this innate drive to take flight, even though my wings strain with each attempt. The pleasure doesn't negate the effort; the effort doesn't diminish the pleasure. They coexist and are dependent upon each other. Every day I watch the birds hurl themselves skyward again and again, and I think: they're not doing it because it's easy. They're doing it because they have to.

All of this is to say that I trust that building this business is the right thing for me right now. But that doesn’t make it easy. Most things worth doing are not, in fact, easy.

But I make this point because I WANT to build this business. Like, bringing this new entity into the world is giving me pleasure and purpose and life. And a lot of discomfort. Both things are true.

Things I love:

• Those moments when a client's eyes light up as they see a new possibility for themselves

• Coming up with ideas for workshops and events that help people and attract prospective clients into my world

• Cultivating a look and feel and vibe to everything I’m doing — taking what can be a really gross-sounding category of business (life coaching) and making it mine, something I’m proud to offer because I know in my bones it has value

Things I don’t love:

• Having to be my own sales/hype woman (I’m probably more adept than most when putting new offers out into the world, but it’s never exactly comfortable)

• Anything involving spreadsheets — that is just not a format my brain readily embraces

• Feeling like I’m surely forgetting something important? All the time???

Do you see what I’m saying? Desire is a funny thing. Sometimes it’s pleasurable, sometimes it isn’t. And it’s easy to get lost when we feel like things should be all one way or another.

Not so ironically, this is what I’m working on with coaching clients. Supporting them in trying new things that sound interesting AND encouraging them to look holistically at how it feels to do them. It’s so seldom we do things we’re 100% wild about, you know? It seems to me that the right things do feel good but are not without their challenges. Like, you could try pickleball and be over the moon about it. And in becoming a person who is wild about pickleball, you discover that while it’s your absolute favorite hobby, you only need to do it a couple of times a week (and with the right people) to be sated.

When we take ourselves out of fantasizing about doing things and actually start running little experiments, we give ourselves a chance to discover whether they fit in our lives, and how. Not only that, we give the other people in our lives an opportunity to respond to the new person we are being. All of this is always enlightening!

Kind of like the birds, you know? I always think of the Mary Oliver line, “what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” If you’re a bird and you’re not flying because it kinda sucks getting off the ground every time, that is about the saddest thing that could happen to you. So the question I’m asking at this point in my life, and the reason I feel convicted about building this blessed/blasted new endeavor, is how might I make it easier for you to do the things you’re meant to do? How might I use my superpowers to clear your flight path?

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Alright enough with the bird business! It’s the end of the year and I’d like to help you get set up for a new one that you can actually get excited about. ‘Cause fuck shoulds.

I have so much to say about desire, which is something I’ve been working with a lot this year. How our desires are so important because they drive our actions, and, as I’ve written about before, our actions are our only belongings. And yet desire can be scary, especially for those of us who are wired to prioritize others (looking at you, middle-aged women). At some point, we can become so alienated from what we truly want that even acknowledging our desires feels dangerous—like opening that door could lead to blowing up our lives.

There’s a skillful way to work with desire that I feel like we don’t talk about enough. A way to operate in the world where you honor the desires that are core to who you are but don’t let them drag you around. Because you need desire. It’s what makes you feel alive, and what else are we going for here in life?

In that spirit, I’m offering this free Zoom workshop on Wednesday, December 4 at 3:00 ET:

Burn the Blueprint: Building 2025 Around What You Truly Want

​What if the key to an energized 2025 isn't making yourself "better," but giving yourself more permission?

​In this end-of-year workshop for women, we'll turn conventional planning on its head. Instead of focusing on goals and resolutions, we'll explore how to tap into and trust your desires as reliable signals for what wants to emerge in your life.

RSVP here

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The Erotic as Power

“Once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”

- Audre Lord in Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

Thanks to my brilliant friend

Danver Chandler

for reminding me of this great essay about the radical power of desire in our writing circle this morning.

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A Tiny Invitation!

What are you always trying to talk yourself out of? Is there something that feels irrational or silly that you want to do or have? Journal about it, see what you uncover.

If it’s not too revealing, share in the comments to this post. There’s something about feeling like the world’s on fire that makes me wonder about what’s on everyone’s mind.

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Thanks for being here, as ever. Attention is sacred and I appreciate you sharing some of yours with me.

😘

Sara

p.s. Tiny Revolutions is free but not cheap. If you’d like to support my work, please share this post with someone who’d appreciate it, or just like this post!