Blog - Melissa Dinwiddie | Create the Impossible™ | Innovation Keynote Speaker & Consultant

October 17, 2012

Tapioca Pudding, Gremlins & Game of Thrones

Last Friday I flew home from two amazing weeks in Turkey, where I made a long-held dream come true.

You’d think that coming home from my Playing Around Istanbul creativity workshop would find me filled with inspiration and rarin’ to go. After all:

I just had a 2-week break from “regular life, in one of the most inspiring cities in the world.
(I should be refreshed and ready to charge ahead, right?)
I just had the amazing experience of successfully bringing to life a project that I and my partner and fellow Poobah of Play, Kelly, have been working on for a year.
(I have proof that I/we can do this, and do it well. My enhanced confidence should propel me forward, right?)
I even had four days of genuine vacation after the workshop was over, in one of the most inspiring cities of the world.
(Sheesh — I had a vacation! I really should be refreshed, right?)

In truth, instead of revved up, I feel like I’m slogging through a vat of tapioca pudding.

The sight of my list of Projects I Really Want To Make Happen exhausts more than inspires me. All I really want to do right now is read Game of Thrones.

I feel pulled in a thousand different directions, unsure of my next steps. I know what my overall mission is (empowering people to follow their creative callings, while also following my own, of course!), but the how and what of it feel like a chaotic black hole.

Meanwhile — ironically enough, after the success of the workshop — my gremlin voices are telling me that I’m a failure, that I’ll never reach the big goals that I have for myself and my business. (Oh, those gremlins are a laugh-riot, aren’t they? [She says in a voice dripping with sarcasm.])

Thankfully, almost 46 years on the planet have taught me a lot of things. [BTW, did you know I’m running a birthday campaign to bring clean water to those who need it? I’m giving up my birthday for charity: water, and I’m giving gifts to everyone who donates! Click here.] At this point in my life, feelings are rarely brand new — whatever the feeling, I’ve almost always experienced something similar before. And I’ve learned that feelings don’t always jibe with reality.

Here’s what I know to be true:

There’s almost always some period of let-down after reaching a big goal.
(It eventually passes.)
The slog/stuckness/black hole feeling always precedes a creative flourishing.
(We think that the stuck is a block to creativity, but in fact it’s an essential part. Getting through the stuck IS the creativity!)
Gremlins get loudest whenever you step outside your comfort zone.
(Anytime you accomplish a big goal, you’ve just expanded your comfort zone, so it makes sense your gremlins would be overexcited, yelling untruths in a desperate attempt to shrink back the borders and keep you in your place.)

Twenty years ago I ~~might~~ would have been paralyzed by my sloggy, stuck feeling and gremlin chatter. I’d have read these feelings as a stop sign.

Today, I know they’re just part of the process. Not a message to stop, but perhaps to yield. I know I have to allow myself space between projects. I get to take transition time and I don’t get to beat myself up for it. Trying to brute force my way forward doesn’t work. But neither does collapsing in a heap, surrendering to the gremlins and giving myself up as a failure.

The key (as in most things, I keep discovering) is self-awareness and self-compassion.

Self-awareness is: “What do these feelings remind me of? What do I know to be true?” (See the three points directly above.)

Self-compassion is: accepting where I am and treating myself with love and kindness, rather than beating myself up for not being different than I am.

When I understand that the let-down and slog and gremlins are all part of the process, it makes it ever so much easier to keep moving forward.

I know the stuck and sloggy feeling doesn’t herald the end of my creative life, but rather the start of the next chapter.

So while I ease back into life in Silicon Valley, I’m allowing myself time to cozy up with Game of Thrones and giving myself space to be slow and sloggy.

I always say that everything gets done baby step by baby step, and that includes slogging your way through a vat of tapioca pudding.

Might as well bring a spoon and enjoy the ride.

PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

Image by Andrea_Nguyen at Flickr

October 7, 2012

How to Make a Dream Come True in 6 Easy Steps

I’ve been pinching myself just about every hour this past week.

Today was the final day of Playing Around Istanbul, the creativity workshop I’ve been planning for close to a year with my co-conspirator and fellow Poobah of Play, Kelly Hevel.

For over fifteen years I’ve had a dream of teaching a workshop overseas, something involving creativity and art. For most of that time, the dream seemed far away, maybe even impossible, but this week it came true in vivid, glorious Technicolor.

I’m in Istanbul, listening to the call to prayer as I type this, the magnificent Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque mere steps away from my window. All week Kelly and I have guided our participants in a week of playing in the Creative Sandbox in the mornings, with afternoon excursions to experience the richness of the city.

We’ve written, and painted, seen exquisite miniatures and traditional shadow puppets (and a lot more) in the maze-like Grand Bazaar, smelled and tasted exotic spices in the Spice Bazaar, gawked at glorious mosaics at Chora Church, donned headscarves and doffed shoes to soak up the beauty and serenity of different mosques, drunk Turkish coffee and eaten food that is as delicious as it is unpronounceable, tried our tongues at Turkish phrases, met artists and made friends with Turks of both the human and cat variety, and laughed and laughed and laughed.

In short, it has truly been a dream come true!

Here’s a video that Poobah Kelly took while our group visited “Little Hagia Sophia” mosque yesterday, while strains of Spanish guitar filled the air:

How did I do it? How did I turn the idea of a workshop in Istanbul from a dream into reality?

Six simple steps is all it took. Steps that, when I think about it, apply to every dream I’ve ever manifested in my life. Steps that you can use in your own life, to make your dreams come true, too.

1. First, have a dream.

Allow yourself to dream it, to imagine it. Let yourself feel what it would feel like if/when it comes true.

I’m not of the camp that believes this, alone, is enough, but it is an essential ingredient. When you allow yourself to feel your desire, it energizes and motivates you to press forward and take the actions you need to take to manifest your dream.

2. Be open to opportunities.

Last October, I emailed a brief, personal thank you to a new subscriber. She sent a brief reply, and I noticed that her signature said she was an artist and creativity coach in Istanbul. I emailed back that I’d always dreamed of visiting her city, and soon we were confessing to mutual dreams of creating workshops in inspiring locations around the world.

I could have just said, “Yeah, someday,” and left it that. That certainly would have been the easy thing to do.

Creating a workshop with someone I’d never met? Who lived half-way around the world? Crazy, right?

It sure sounded that way to anyone I mentioned it to, but I was open to the possibility that maybe it wasn’t crazy. And that openness is what allowed this week to happen.

3. Take a leap.

Accomplishing anything of value, no matter how big and overwhelming, is simply a matter of breaking it down into baby steps. In her wonderful course, Playing Big (which I took earlier this year, and for which I’m an affiliate), Tara Mohr calls this leaping.

Kelly and my first leap was not actually to start planning our workshop, but to first meet on Skype, get to know each other, feel each other out, and see if this dream was one that made sense for us to manifest in partnership.

We spent 2 or 3 meetings going over several important questions to see if we were on the same page — we were going to be starting a business partnership, after all, which is a lot like entering into a marriage! Not something to be taken lightly! It was important for us to set expectations in advance about who would take on which responsibilities, and see if we would work well together.

4. Set SMART goals

Once we confirmed that yes, our values and goals were in alignment, we needed to figure out what the specific task were that we’d need to accomplish to make this workshop happen. Things like:

Decide on a name (Playing Around Workshops for our business; Playing Around Istanbul for our Istanbul workshop)
Buy a domain
Create a website
Set a date
Find a venue
Create our content/curriculum
Determine what to do on our afternoon excursions
Figure out our price structure and payment schedule
Get the word out

And on and on… Once we had our goals and target deadlines, we could…

5. Keep leaping forward

Baby step by baby step, baby!

Kelly and I had a standing appointment every Monday to meet on Skype for 90-minutes to two hours, to go over what we wanted to accomplish over the next week, and little by little, our plans moved ahead.

Which brings me to…

6. Persist

They say there are three things that determine the success of a brick and mortar business: location, location, location. I put forth that the three most important things that determine the success of a creative business (or any creative pursuit) are: persistence, persistence, persistence.

Not only do you need to keep up with those leaps and baby steps, but to get something going from zero you’ve got to persist, even when the going gets rough.

I will admit that there was a lot of nail biting re. Playing Around Istanbul. In truth, we did it backwards: the smart thing would probably have been to spend a few years each doing small, local, weekend retreats and workshops, building up an audience of willing attendees and raving participants before attempting a week-long, destination workshop, several thousand miles and an expensive plane ticket away from the bulk of my audience!

But the calling was there, and opportunity knocked, so I opened the door. And the Universe smiled.

One person signed up. Then another. And we decided that even if our workshop became more of a semi-private tour than a group workshop, we were forging ahead with it!

I’m so grateful we did! In the end, we hit our minimum goal of 4 participants, and though we didn’t do much more than break even this time around, the experience has paid us more richly than money ever could. We have learned so much, from the things that have gone well (like the fact that our “pass-around stories” game was a huge hit), from the things that didn’t go so well, and from countless surprises.

Doing the workshop has been the best lesson in how to do workshops! And we’re abuzz with plans and ideas for next year’s Playing Around Istanbul, and scouting for additional locations (southern France is a top contender, but if you know of any inspiring venues there or elsewhere, we’re all ears!)

Wash, rinse, repeat. The six steps above are really what moving from dreaming to doing all boils down to.

Along the way there are numerous tools and techniques to bring into the game (“little things,” like taming the gremlins/Inner Critic; learning to lean into fear and uncertainty; growing a thick skin so that criticism and praise don’t throw you off course… all expertly covered in Tara Mohr’s Playing Big program for women, btw, which starts up soon — check it out here*), but if you follow the six steps outlined here, you’ll be manifesting dreams like nobody’s business.

Let me know how it goes! Me, I’m headed out to the courtyard garden for our Playing Around Istanbul 2012 farewell dinner.

Then tomorrow Kelly and I will start working on making our dreams for next year’s workshop come true.

Are you dreaming of joining us? Use the steps above to start saving and planning to make your dreams real! Click here for info.

* BONUS! I’m proud to be an affiliate for Playing Big, and all the links on my site are affiliate links. This means if you click through and buy, I’ll earn a 50% commission.

I want to see you get the most out of Playing Big, and it would feel good to me to use my commission to help you, so if you do decide to take the program, and you purchase your spot through my affiliate link, I’ll give you a package of 4 one-hour coachsulting sessions, to work with me one-on-one (normally $580). We can schedule our sessions together in any way that works for you during the 6 months of Playing Big (my schedule permitting too, of course! ;)).

If you’re interested in the course and don’t want to send a commission my way, just don’t use one of my links. I’ll never know the difference. 😉

PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

September 21, 2012

Are Your Ready to Play Big? An Interview with Tara Mohr

Note: Scroll down to read about how you can get a 4-pack of one-on-one coachsulting with me for FREE!

As I wrote in my last post, one of my most impactful experiences this year was Tara Mohr’s Playing Big program (aff*). I had the opportunity to interview Tara recently — click on the video above to be a fly on the wall in our recent conversation. Some highlights include:

What led Tara to create the Playing Big program (hint: you might recognize yourself here)
My three biggest takeaways from Playing Big and Tara’s thoughts on each (hint: Inner Critic (Gremlin); praise as poison; the importance of sharing our stories)
How Tara is playing big in her own life these days (hint: part of it involves my very first creative passion!)

I absolutely loved Playing Big, highly recommend it for any woman who wants to play bigger in her life (read my review of the program here) and am delighted to have the opportunity as an alum to participate again this session! Perhaps I’ll see you there.

* BONUS! I’m proud to be an affiliate for Playing Big, and all the links on my site are affiliate links. This means if you click through and buy, I’ll earn a commission.

Because I want to see you get the most out of Playing Big, if you do decide to take the program, and you purchase your spot through my affiliate link, I’ll give you a package of 4 one-hour coachsulting sessions, to work with me one-on-one (normally $580). We can schedule our sessions together in any way that works for you during the 6 months of Playing Big (my schedule permitting too, of course! ;)).

If you’re interested in the course and don’t want to send a commission my way, just don’t use one of my links. I’ll never know the difference. 😉

PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

September 18, 2012

Review: Playing Big & TeachNow

I’ve taken a number of online courses this year, but two in particular stand out: Playing Big and TeachNow. Both are opening up to new participants again, so it seemed timely to share a review.

I should note that I’m very proud to be an affiliate for both of these programs (so yes, that means if you click one of the links here and end up buying, I’ll earn a commission). I’m signed up as an affiliate for all kinds of things, from web hosting to WordPress themes to online courses, but affiliate or not, I’m very choosy about what I actually write about here on the blog, or in my newsletter.

Whether it’s my favorite new music artist, my favorite novelist, an online course, or anything else, unless I love it, I’m not gonna rave about it. And if I do love it, I’m gonna shout it from the rooftops, whether it earns me any money or not!

So consider this a shout from the rooftops!

But as you’ll see, I’ve shared the things I’m not as happy with, too. Read on…

TeachNow Review

First: time-sensitive notice! Jen & Michele are offering a FREE kick-off to TeachNow that you don’t want to miss, and it’s happening TOMORROW, September 19! It’s called The Bottom Line of Teaching: More Contribution, Income, and Evolution. Click here to sign up for this free class!

I’ve taught workshops all over the country, and if there’s one thing I can say about myself with confidence, it’s that I’m a good teacher. But one thing any good teacher will tell you is that they can always get better!

Since teaching is a big part of what I do — whether it’s in the form of a class, a tutorial for a coachsulting client, or a blog post — it was a natural for me to sign up for Jennifer Louden and Michele Lisenbury-Christensen’s TeachNow program.

What you get

TeachNow comes in two versions: a “self-study” option and the “full course,” ~~which as far as I can tell is identical to the self-study version, with the addition of live calls with Jennifer and Michele every month or so, and more recorded interviews with master teachers~~. UPDATE 9/22/12: I just signed up for the full course (yep, I loved it so much, I signed up for TeachNow again!), and it is in fact quite different from the self-study option:

The full course is on the Ruzuku platform, which has the added benefit of online community interaction, and the content is “drip-fed” over the course of 10 weeks. There are also 5 live calls with Michele and Jennifer, and an amazing 45 master teacher interviews (one of my absolute favorite parts of TeachNow — so inspiring!) Plus several yummy bonuses, to boot. Click here to read more.

Whichever option you choose, the bulk of the course resides on the Ruzuku platform, [UPDATE 9/22/12: For this session, only the full course is on Ruzuku; the self-study option is on a separate website] which handily organizes the content on your personal front page so you can see at a glance which “assignments” you’ve completed, and which are still yet to be done.

To the right you can see a screenshot of the top section of my personal TeachNow home page. The darkened dots are assignments I’ve completed; the hollow dots are assignments I haven’t gotten to yet.

There is a LOT of content in this course. Jennifer and Michele have assembled a wealth of interviews with master teachers (I love these!), plus archived recordings of previous TeachNow calls, plus homework invitations and prompts of all kinds to move you forward.

And that doesn’t even touch on the content that is continually being added as TeachNow members contribute their voices to the “conversation” inside Ruzuku.

Yep, there’s a lot of stuff!

Whether you want to bone up on the nuts and bolts of teaching, or how to best care for yourself while you’re giving of yourself to your students, or how to promote and fill your classes, you’ll find gems inside TeachNow.

The downside of a lot of stuff and self-paced programming

You can see from my screenshot that I have a lot of assignments still to get to, and that brings me to one of my few complaints about the course: its self-paced nature.

Not that self-paced is, in itself, a bad thing! I love that I can complete the TeachNow modules on my own time. This is great! Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have signed up for TeachNow when I did if it hadn’t been self-paced, since I already had a lot on my plate. But with a full year to complete the course, I figured I could justify signing up, because I could (ahem) pace myself.

However, I also know that for me, personally, deadlines are magical things. With a supremely busy schedule, the sad truth is that if something doesn’t have a deadline, it often doesn’t get done in my world. And as a year-long membership, TeachNow really has only one deadline: when my membership expires at the end of my term. This means it’s up to me to create my own deadlines for this course. (See update note below.)

So far I haven’t been very consistent about that (my personal preference would be some kind of “drip-feeding,” that delivers content periodically, or even just a suggested schedule delivered regularly via email, with links to the recommended content). However, I’m using TeachNow as a way to strengthen my scheduling muscles, and as my January end-point quickly approaches, I’m motivated to get much better at that! 🙂

If you choose to do TeachNow, I recommend creating a regular time slot on your weekly calendar to interact with the course. Then stick with it. That’s what I’m doing after I get back from Istanbul.

UPDATE 9/22/12: The full course is actually delivered bit by bit, over 10 weeks. This is one of the reasons I decided to sign up for TeachNow again — to take advantage of the modular delivery, AND the bi-weekly calls with Michele and Jennifer!

This brings me to my only other complaint about TeachNow…

My frustration with Ruzuku’s “forum”

Overall, I think Ruzuku is an awesome platform for delivering course content. (I’ve also met some of the people behind it — one of whom was in one of my Creative Ignition Circles — and they are totally cool.) My one big frustration as a user is that there’s no real central forum where course participants can interact. Comments are spread out all over the site, attached to individual pages, which makes carrying on an ongoing conversation really challenging.

The Ruzuku folks have made efforts at improving this, and there is now an Open Discussion page, which posts the first few lines of each new comment in reverse chronological order (newest comments first), alongside the poster’s avatar. It’s better than nothing, but there’s still no way to see, at a glance, what conversations are happening, and where you might like to join in.

It’s too bad, because the people inside TeachNow are smart, creative and interesting, and it would be nice to have an easier way to interact. You may find it less frustrating, but for me, I feel like I have to jump through too many hoops to engage in the way I’d like. Personally, I’d prefer a traditional forum.

(I’ve contemplated using Ruzuku for my own online courses, but community engagement is a big priority for me, and until Ruzuku makes this easier, I’m sticking with hosting my courses myself [not for the faint of heart!] However, if you’re looking for an easy way to get your own course content online and you don’t need a forum, I don’t think you can beat Ruzuku!)

To sum up:

What I like:

the semi-regular phone calls with Jennifer and Michele (I love connecting in real time, even if I don’t “raise my hand.”
the master teacher interviews (and J & M keep adding more!)
the depth and breadth of content
the worksheets, homework invitations and readings Jennifer and Michele have assembled — top notch!
Ruzuku’s visual index page, which allows you to check off each item as you complete it
the people inside — brilliant and loving!

What I don’t like:

the lack of an easy way to interact with other participants (you can leave comments, but there’s no real forum)
the lack of structure in how the content is delivered (with the exception of the scheduled live calls in the full course option, TeachNow is totally self-paced) (UPDATE 9/22/12: I expect this issue to be largely resolved with the full version of this next session of the course, which is delivered bit by bit over a 10-week period.)

The upshot:

If you’re at all interested in sharing what you know, becoming more confident and grounded as a teacher, I highly recommend TeachNow. Five stars!

UPDATE 9/22/12: I’m so impressed with TeachNow, and truly believe it will help you succeed in your dreams to teach, so I’m offering a 1-hour coachsulting session with me if you sign up for the full version of the course via my affiliate link, or a 1/2-hour coachsulting session with me if you sign up for the self-study version via my affiliate link.

—

Playing Big Review

One of the most impactful experiences I’ve had this year was participating in Tara Mohr’s 6-month Playing Big program for women. Tara has crafted a 6-month women’s leadership and professional development journey that any woman can benefit from, regardless of where you’re longing to play bigger in your life.

Among other things, the transformations I experienced as a result of Playing Big helped me appreciate my true value enough to finally make the leap to run my online program for creative women, Time to Glow.

This is no small thing!

Still, I have to admit that the decision to invest in this course back in January was not without some nail-biting on my part. It’s not cheap! God knows I’ve spent a lot of money on things that I regretted — was I going to have buyer’s remorse after clicking that “Add to Cart” button?

I needn’t have worried. As I said in a recent interview with Tara (which I’ll be posting here soon), scarcely a week goes by in which I don’t reference Tara or something I learned in Playing Big, either in a one-on-one coachsulting session, or while teaching a class, or in my Creative Ignition Club clubhouse. That’s how much I got out of this program.

What you get:

Playing Big is much more of a live experience than TeachNow, with a 90-minute group call with Tara every other week for 6 months. Prior to each call, Tara also sends a link to a page of resources, including a reading or worksheet for that module, links to relevant blog posts and books, and several additional guest interviews to watch and/or listen to.

Most of my previous experiences with online courses had a weekly call, and I wasn’t sure how this every-other-week schedule was going to work, but I found it to be the perfect interval to process the material.

By “process,” I don’t mean reading or listening to the material; there was never so much that I felt overwhelmed by it. I mean that 2 weeks was the ideal interval to allow me to absorb the concepts and start to apply them in my life.

Unlike some intensive “boot camp” courses I’ve taken, Playing Big is the kind of program that fosters deep transformation over time.

In addition to the calls and the resource pages, there’s a private Facebook group to engage with other participants, and I found this was where a lot of internal shifts really blossomed. There’s simply nothing like sharing my own experiences, and reading about other people’s, to move me forward! (Which is precisely why I wish TeachNow had a more user-friendly forum.)

That said, I wasn’t totally thrilled with Facebook as a forum, either.

The downside of Facebook as a forum

Facebook is certainly convenient. A lot of people log in daily anyway (hourly, anyone?) And I love how visual it is, and how easy to share content.

It can be a bit… distracting, though, it being so easy to click over to see what’s up in the 27 zillion other groups I belong to, or my comment stream, or…

In addition, for a group of more than 40 or 50 people, Facebook gets a bit unwieldy. Messages fly back and forth at such a rapid-fire pace that it’s easy to miss something as it gets pushed down the stream. There’s no easy way to search for posts, no index, as in a traditional forum, which would once again be my preference.

In an attempt to avoid Overgrown-Facebook-Group-Syndrome, for my session of Playing Big, Tara divided us into three smaller groups. This kept the flow of posts manageable, and made my group easier to interact with.

On the other hand, it also segregated me from all of the other amazing women in Playing Big! I would hear them on the calls, and wish I could interact with them, but I didn’t have access to their Facebook groups, so that made it more challenging. (There was a roster of everyone in the program, however, so it was possible to contact people directly. Just one more hoop to jump through, and sometimes, much as I hate to admit it, one hoop is enough to keep me from doing something.)

Tara is trying out keeping everyone together in one Facebook group for the upcoming Playing Big session (including us “alums” — I am thrilled that I’ll be able to participate in the upcoming version of Playing Big, too, so you’ll see me inside if you sign up). It will be interesting to see how that works.

To sum up:

What I like:

the transformative course content
the bi-weekly pacing
the people inside — diverse, brilliant and loving!

What I don’t like:

Facebook as a forum

The upshot:

Despite my frustrations with Facebook, I really cannot recommend Playing Big more highly. Five stars!

In fact, I believe so strongly in this program, if you decide it’s for you and sign up via my affiliate link, I’ll give you a package of 4 one-hour coachsulting sessions, to be scheduled anytime that works for both of us during the 6 months of Playing Big. (That’s a $580 value.)

Which to choose?

With two 5-star reviews, it just begs the question, doesn’t it? If both of these courses sound perfect for you, how to choose between them?

Well, if you’re like me (remember, I’m a self-confessed over-committer!), you’ll sign up for both.

If money is an object, TeachNow ($200-400 (?)) is significantly less expensive than Playing Big ($874 or $164/mo).

If sheer volume of content is your aim, TeachNow has it (but it’s also got inspiration and transformation).

If you’re looking for regular, live interaction (over the phone), Playing Big has it (though the full version of TeachNow also includes monthly calls with Michele and Jennifer!).

If you’re specifically interested in teaching, go with TeachNow. You won’t regret it. But if you’ve got a niggling feeling that you’re just not playing as big as you’d like in your life and would like to change that, Playing Big‘s your course.

Either way, you really can’t go wrong. These three powerful women have created two rock-solid courses that I would sign up for again in a heartbeat

If you decide to do either of these courses, let me know! I’d love to hear about your experience!
xo, Melissa <3
PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

September 17, 2012

How to Play a Rabbi on TV

One of the great things about being Jewish is that we get not just one, but two New Years.

Last night (Sunday) was the start of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah.

I’m not a “religious” sort myself, though I do happen to help lead my synagogue’s High Holy Days services (what can I say, one’s relationship to religion is a complicated thing). That’s what I was doing for almost four full hours this morning.

You might think a four-hour service was a drag, but I love leading services! In fact, there was a brief period in my late 20s (right after realizing that Judaism and Feminism didn’t have to be mutually exclusive) when I toyed with the idea of becoming a rabbi.

In the end, being an artist (and ultimately a creator in many expressive realms — a Passion Pluralite) was a better fit for me. Still, thanks to my mostly lay-led synagogue, I get to do rabbi-like stuff, without having to actually be a rabbi.

Or as I sometimes joke, “I’m not a real rabbi, I just play one on TV.”

I’d be lying if I said my ego wasn’t involved here. I love being in the spotlight. I love singing for an appreciative audience. I love speaking in public. I love improvising.

In other words, all the things I love about being a performing jazz singer/songwriter are things I love about leading services for High Holy Days.

People who come to our services for the first time usually assume I’m a rabbi. Or a cantor. Which isn’t surprising — after all, I’m up there on the bima, doing stuff that one associates with rabbis and cantors. And I am awfully comfortable up there. There was a lot of improvising this morning, as my co-leader and I hadn’t planned out exactly who was going to saw what, when, and we had to wing it several times.

But that was fun for me! This morning was a treat. A total blast. If you had been there, you might have thought I was born doing this.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

First of all, I never even set foot in a synagogue until college (well, except for one time, around age 10, when I attended the bar mitzvah of a friend of my brother’s). When I first started going to services I had no idea what was going on, but because I’m Jewish, I kinda felt like I should know what was going on.

It was very confusing, and not a little stressful.

I was also far from being comfortable on stage!

It’s true I had a modicum of performance experience, in a handful of childhood recitals, in youth choirs and orchestras, in a couple of college musicals, and as a dancer. But leading a service?? That was an entirely different animal! That required a whole set of skills and a bunch of knowledge that I certainly didn’t have!

I remember, before my synagogue started holding our own High Holy Days services, attending Rosh Hashanah services on the Stanford campus. The rabbi was aided on stage by a very confident student, with a gorgeous voice.

How I envied her poise and confidence! How I wished I could do such a thing — stand comfortably on stage in front of a large crowd of people, and bring them together through the power and beauty of my voice and bearing!

It seemed utterly impossible.

That’s certainly what my Inner Critic Gremlin told me! “You could never do that,” it said.

Little did I know that a handful of years down the road I’d be doing exactly that!

Inner Critic Gremlins are notorious for being wrong. Which is why it’s so important to learn to manage them! If I’d listened to my gremlin, there’s no way I’d be leading services today. (Join me at my Gremlin Training Lab on Wednesday and I’ll teach you my secret “gremlin-whispering” techniques.)

How did this happen? How did I go from dreaming longingly about something that seemed utterly impossible, to mornings like today, when people actually lined up after the service to thank me for leading?

One baby step at a time, that’s how.

First I learned to lead Shabbat services for a tiny group — generally no more than ten to twenty people. And let me tell you, the first several times I did that I was quaking in my boots! My mouth was full of cotton, my armpits were sweating like crazy, I felt dizzy with nerves!

After awhile, leading Shabbat services became normal, and no longer freaked me out. But when my synagogue decided to host our own High Holy Days services, and I was invited to help lead the many rounds we sing throughout the services, it was dry mouth and stage fright all over again!

That’s the way these things work: you push the edge of your comfort zone just a little, until your comfort zone expands. Then you push it a little more.

All of which requires an ability to wrangle that Inner Critic Gremlin, who lives to keep you well inside your comfort zone.

Nowadays, leading a service for a few hundred people doesn’t even make me flinch… except when (like this morning) I’m expected to sing a whole new set of melodies and songs that I don’t completely know by heart yet. (Ack!)

But even stepping onstage in a state of uncertainty like that is something I’ve gotten more used to. (I’m here to tell you, if you wing it enough times, even winging it becomes less scary!)

All I can say is, Hallelujah for pushing beyond your comfort zone!

And take that, gremlin!

Oh, and Happy New Year! May it be a sweet one, filled with expanding boundaries.

PS — Pssst! Know someone who might benefit from seeing this today? Pass it on!

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