I am a raving fan of Pam Slim’s Escape from Cubicle Nation blog. Today she published “The Work Manifesto” which I absolutely love. It captures the passion and presence that I believe we each need in our professional lives. Here’s a snippet from the item Work is Your Real Life:

Work is your real life. It is the way you translate your feelings, your thoughts, your hopes and your desires into something valuable, tangible and useful every day. You can choose to make work into a dreaded, necessary evil that you can’t wait to finish so that you can get busy with your “real life.” Why not just do work you love?

While I often make a distinction between work life and personal (”real”) life, I totally agree with Pam that doing work you love is the best way to go. We spend so much of our lives working and earning a living whether we work for someone or are our own boss that we may as well enjoy it. Otherwise, you’re throwing away the better part of your life for some tradeoff of misery. Anyone who has been stuck in a cube and hated it knows what I mean by misery. And, if you are miserable on the job it ripples through and affects your health, well-being, relationships, and ability to enjoy your free time.

I’ll share just one more that I love that that is Owning is Better than Renting.

Owning is better than renting. While you may feel “safer” renting out your skills for a paycheck and benefits, you often sell all your energy this way and have nothing left at the end of the day. If you don’t get what you need in this employment arrangement in terms of money, recognition, power or responsibility, you feel angry and frustrated. Own the means of production and the factory, and at least your glorious disasters will be your disasters. Accountability breeds passion and desire.

Safety is an illusion. Pick up any magazine or talk to anyone you know and you’re sure to find a story about someone who worked many years, long hours, and had great performance reviews who was simply laid off in a blink of an eye. It’s not personal, it’s not “fair”, but it is reality. While a regular paycheck and benefits is certainly more predictable it is by no means safer, not now, and not in the long run. Even if you thrive working for someone else, treat yourself as a CEO of “You, Inc.” and adopt the entrepreneurial mindset.

I encourage you to hop on over and read the rest. With a manifesto item that reads Good work will improve your sex life you can’t afford to miss it.

Oftentimes people will seek me out because they feel stuck. They feel like a hamster on the wheel, running like hell every day but truly going nowhere in the grander scheme of their life. Sometimes it is not so much because they dislike what they’re doing (for work) or who they are with (at home) but simply because they feel stale like week-old bread or they have outgrown their current circumstance. Either way the daily grind drags them down and they are left surviving instead of thriving.

Our friends in the plant world have a perfect lesson to teach us in these instances. Have you ever had a plant that grew and thrived and then all of a sudden looked a little lifeless? Maybe their roots started creeping out the bottom of the pot? What did you do to help out that little green friend? You re-potted it. Chances are if you re-potted it gently and gave it some extra TLC once it got in its new environment, it started to thrive again. The same holds true for us. Read the rest of this entry »

In the December 2006 issue of Out Magazine, Martina Navratilova is profiled as one of the “100 Men and Women Who Rocked 2006″. In the article is a quote from Martina that so very much sums up my philosophy on coming out.

“If you don’t come out, you are living in a self-inflicted prison. That is no way to live.”

Trying to be someone you’re not and living a lie is a self-inflicted prison whether it pertains to your sexuality or any other part of your authentic self. And, I know for a fact that from a self-inflicted prison it is pretty darn hard to truly be successful. Oh, you might “fool ‘em” for a while and experience some external trappings of success, but at what cost? And eventually the truth comes around full circle one way or another.

You might think… that’s easy for her to say, she’s Martina after all — tennis goddess, fit, beautiful, successful, established in her career. That is all true now, but not at the time she boldly went where no woman ever went before in professional tennis and publicly came out. Not only did she risk her entire career but she also risked her home and safety because of the conditions in her native country. And, my bet is she pissed off more than her fair share of people in the US as well. But, could you see Martina being anyone but Martina? Not really, and that is the beauty of being authentic.

It takes courage to come out but courage is a small price to pay for feeling free and confident in who you are. Are you feeling like a prisoner in one or more areas of your life? If so, what are you waiting for? If you’re scared or unsure, that is certainly understandable. If that’s the case, get the support you need — a trusted friend, therapist, online resource, or coach – and start taking steps to remove the walls that keep you stuck in a life that doesn’t quite feel right.

It seems everywhere you turn someone is ogling at a celebrity or famous person. We spend more time worrying about the details of other peoples lives than we do our own. We hear a speaker, listen to a musician, or see a movie and think, “Wow, I wish I could be like her!” Well, you CAN. And in many ways you already ARE.

Do this Exercise:

1. Think of three people that you admire and write their names down. They can be people you know or someone famous.
2. List what qualities they possess that attract your admiration.
3. Now, ask yourself — where in your life do you demonstrate these same qualities (either now or in the past)?

Read the rest of this entry »

For the last few months I have been a regular contributing writer to Queercents. I’ve waxed poetic about how much I love their site before on this blog and still feel just as strongly now that I’m part of the team. Well, as I’ve been merrily writing away about financial topics, I’ve had the opportunity to be included in a number of finance carnivals around the internet and I wanted to direct you to the latest for your reading pleasure.

Since how we treat our finances is a direct reflection of how we treat ourselves in so many ways, it is a critical aspect to living your best life. Money is a powerful topic on so many levels. My own personal interest in financial topics coupled with my work as a life and business coach makes for a perfect match. So, I encourage you to hop over to Queercents and check out some articles.

Most recently I am included in the Festival of Frugality #48 round up over at Experiments in Finance. I talk about one of my favorite topics — experiencing “NYC on a Budget” . There are a number of other great articles and super cartoons in the carnival so I highly recommend checking it out.