30-Day Economic Stability Challenge: The power of serenity

I'm not a calm person by nature. I like to keep myself in a state of cat-like readiness so I can deal with problems as they come up. There usually aren't enough problems to keep my mind busy, which I think is part of why I enjoy freelancing--at least my fears tend to be real.

That natural nervousness is why I need this challenge. But my serenity practice is what helps me deal with any financial situation, particularly the one I experienced last month when a check from a longtime and cherished client bounced.

My serenity practice usually consists of:

• Eating healthy food;
• Trying to sleep eight hours a night (though I don't always make it);
• Daily 10-20 minutes of mindfulness meditation;
• Daily housecleaning of the mental kind--writing out all my fears and praying to let go of them;
• Regular exercise, including cardio at the gym and yoga; and
• Regular meetings/phone calls with a wide network of other freelancers.

It's a lot of work, but it also pays amazing dividends. I learned this last month, when that check, most of my money for the month, disappeared from my account, leaving me with a negative balance. For one weekend, I had $13.

But I got through it without making it worse. I maintained a positive relationship with my client, I continued to do my work, and I didn't borrow money or use a credit card to get over it. In future posts, I'll explain why that's important for me.

Today, I'll explain how I did it:
I called lots and lots of self-employed colleagues.
There's a place for rage and fear and confusion and hopelessness, but it's not with your clients. I called friends who were Realtors, writers and career coaches. When I had to send a pointed email to my client, I ran it past several more veteran freelancers to make sure it was based in reason, not emotion. I spewed my spleen with my friends and loved ones. I broke down more than once and called friends and colleagues hysterical. But because of my daily serenity work with writing, meditating and yoga, those moments of hysteria were shorter than they've ever been in my life.

I did loving kindness meditation for my client.
I've written about this before, and I know it's the last thing you want to do when you've been wronged despite doing everything right. But the fact is that I just wanted the problem to be solved, and I don't like how I feel when I'm enraged and full of self-pity and self-righteousness. Those aren't feelings I can afford to nurture, so instead I prayed that my client would have everything I wanted for myself. That goes for my bank, too.

I did the paperwork.
When I got the email from my bank saying I had a negative balance, I thought it was a phishing scam. When I realized it was real, I knew just what to do:

• Email my client and ask what happened and for a new check;
• Call the people to whom I'd written checks to see if they had deposited them and if they could hold them. They could. I even called a magazine to whom I'd sent a check and asked them if they could hold it. They couldn't but I tried;
• I called my bank; and
• I transferred funds from other savings accounts to cover myself in the meantime.

I could do all of this because I both knew the checks I had sent and knew where to find their information. Being organized is a godsend in this situation.

I was persistent.
Persistence doesn't just pay off in querying. In a situation like this, willingness to keep showing up for the next piece of bureaucratic monitoring--calling the bank, checking to see when the reissued check would arrive, calling the bank again, visiting the bank--meant the issue got resolved. I did what I could. Then I used my serenity practices to try to let go of the rest.

I exercised.
Even though I was emotionally wrought and just wanted to sleep, I forced myself to keep up my writing, meditating and exercise regimens because I knew they'd help me recover faster. And they did. The writing and exercise helped me express my feelings in constructive ways. The meditating soothed my very frayed nerves. I even added one more meditation practice onto my week for extra care.

I prayed.
I know it sounds hokey (again), but I know in these times to be a self-employed person takes faith. My faith has been shaken by this situation, but I tried to bolster it by practicing gratitude. In my morning writing, after writing about my anger, I focused on the good things I had instead of the things I lacked, and thanked god for them.

Outcome

The result is that my account is flush again, thanks to quick action by my client and my own advocacy with my bank. I also stayed on track with my other clients, kept querying for more work, completed the last blog challenge and continued to meet with friends. I didn't do any of this perfectly, of course, and I definitely felt the need for more sleep. My nerves are still a little shot and I need a day off. But it could have been worse, and I could be feeling much worse now--still resentful, self-righteous and completely distracted from what my clients need from me.

And the best part is that I could see how much support I really have, how strong I've become and learned how much i really know about managing my business.

How do you cope with economic crises?

Photo by zieak.

Serenity Tools for the Recession: Metta to the rescue

If you listen to news reports, you know the gloomy--even terrifying--financial predictions for the year: It'll get worse before it gets better; the economy won't rebound till 2010 at the earliest; blah blah blah. It's enough to make a self-employed individual hide under her low-overhead desk. But I'm a pragmatist, and if I want to keep my mind clear and focused on work--and motivated to market--I need tools. My tools, it just so happen, are of the yogic variety. This is an occasional series of tips and tools for maintaining calm and serenity despite economic forecasts. Have a tip of your own? Comment below.

Here's a sign of the economic times: You're waiting for a check. You got a particularly heinous set of edits. Or, you're trying to cram 2000 words into an 800-wordcount story. How do those feel in your body? I don't know about you, but I harden myself. I steel myself for confrontation.

That's why Metta practice is so important.

Metta is a form of guided meditation designed specifically to soften your heart.

Now, for you more practical types, this may sound too namby-pamby for you. But I challenge you: Visit Lisa Dale Miller's Web site and download her 20-minute Metta meditations for beginners.

There are lots of places you can learn loving-kindness meditation, but I found these in iTunes' podcast search, and I like them because they're free, easy to follow, and her voice is relaxing and melodic. Plus, she encourages you to pile up a bunch of pillows on your bed and relax during meditation.

There are two Metta meditations Miller offers:

• One that opens your heart to someone you love unconditionally, as well as to yourself.
• One that opens your heart to someone about whom you have neutral feelings, as well as someone with whom you may have conflicts.

Can you see where I'm going with this?

It's not that that publisher who hasn't paid you doesn't deserve your ire--but you deserve freedom from rage and the blocked energy that comes with it. With a soft heart, you may find yourself more flexible, more able to focus on what you can control and, by extension, more serene.

Who knows: Your marketing to increase, your ease around contacting your editor, her publisher or an attorney to get easier. That's what you have control over, and that's what serenity is all about.

A Year of Self-Employed Serenity: Editor's Picks

Happy Holidays, all! To spread the joy off the season, I've linked below to the posts that make me feel most serene, most loved and most connected, even in my business life. This is a follow up to a post I made last week about the most popular posts during the first year of this blog. Consider this a gift of serenity, loving-kindness and gratitude for letting me share what I've learned over the past year.

What Serenity Isn't. Serenity won't fix you. Putting it in perspective, though, will make it more accessible.

What Serenity Is. Finding serenity is an oft-overused phrase. Let's get to the heart of what it can mean practically to you in your business.

What's Your 1 Percent? Want to know if you're about to lose your serenity by focusing on something out of your control? Use this as your guide.

Serenity Tip: Resiliency. We can't plan for everything--no matter how good our business plan. What we can do is cultivate a life that supports us bouncing back from difficult situations.

Serenity Enemy: Deprivation. As you look at the enormity of the task ahead--especially if you're aware that you need to increase your income drastically--you may be feeling especially poor, especially stress and especially deprived. Here are some ways to cope with that feeling.

The Serenity of Support. It's not just Karen who gets a lot out of support for her business. I find it crucial to my ability to focus on what I can control and let go of what I can't. Here's how.

The Serenity Muscle. Developing serenity in your business, just like developing a thriving career, takes discipline.

The Letting Go Tool Kit. Surrendering what you have no control of is especially hard when it can determine whether your business succeeds. Do it anyway. Here's how.

Cultivating Persistence. A little word of wisdom about passion from This American Life's Ira Glass.

A Word About Forgiveness. A meditation practice for those days when your clients, your sources and your colleagues are just driving you up a wall.

Serenity Check In: Are You of Service to Your Clients?

Last week I was sick. It's a long story, and ends with surgery next week. Don't worry. It's nothing serious. Jus an outpatient procedure. Still, it's serious enough to cause me to miss work and freak out quite a bit. I couldn't sit at my desk, I was worried sick. I was cranky that I didn't know what caused it or what would happen next. And I couldn't get a single, coherent answer from my healthcare providers.

So it was that I went to the gym on Sunday, in a bad mood and in pain.

I walked out of the gym and ran into some tourists looking for directions to public transit. I showed them the way and we struck up a conversation. It was a beautiful day. And at the end of it, I felt happier and more relaxed.

What happened? I got out of myself and helped someone else.

So while I wait for the surgery, and worry about the results, I'm keeping in mind this week that those five minutes when I was giving directions were five minutes when I wasn't worrying about myself, my health or anything else. It's not that health isn't a totally valid thing to worry about, but frankly, I was burned out on my own self-obsession. It felt good to help someone else and let go of the drama I was creating around myself.

So the name of the game for me this week, and hopefully beyond, is to be of service.

If there's something you're worrying about--if your work is slow, if your bank account is low, if the recession is eating into your sleep--take a tip from me. Be of service.

If you catch yourself obsessing about things out of your control, scan this list and do one:

Be of service to your clients. Have work to do? Do it. Don't think about yourself, and how doing this article or finishing that project will make you a rich and lead to accolades. Just do the work. You're helping your client by focusing all your attention on their needs and their readers' needs. That's what's important right now.
Be of service to your household. Often, I'm too busy fretting to get to that pile of laundry or to wash my dishes. I figure I'm a very busy and important person. I don't have time to do the dishes. Dude, get over yourself. Stop thinking about yourself and just do the dishes. You are providing a service to the people you live with.
Be of service to your loved ones. You may not believe this, but just calling a loved one and telling them you love them is providing them with a huge service. They could be having a horrible day and your call could restore some sanity to their day, too. Just remember: Don't bitch about what's wrong in your day. Listen to *them.* This is about service, not feeding your own drama.
Be of service to yourself. You still and always matter. So when I'm obsessing, I try to break out of it and do the following: I call the doctor to arrange an appointment if I need to. I dye my hair. I go to the gym. I buy and cook healthy food. These are services I do for myself that don't feed whatever I'm obsessed about.

Consider it a mini-holiday from the doom-and-gloom. I write a lot about loving kindness, but that can seem a little to airy-fairy to grasp. Service is much easier. You are spreading loving kindness when you replace your negative obsessions with loving service. And, by the way, you're creating a better world for yourself and those around you.

Namaste.

A Meditation for Letting Go

I'm preparing to send a query this morning to a dream market. For the writers in the audience, the feeling associated with such a task is well known: The panic beforehand, the self-doubt, the obsessive thinking about it (whether it's loving the idea or fearing the response). For non-writers, it's the same as targeting some marketing at a big fish. You feel that it could change your life.

OK, now send the marketing and let it go.

.... Right.

Knowing that today is the day, I started the day with some writing:

* What am I afraid of when I think of sending the query?
* What's also true?

What I found was that I was telling myself all kinds of negative things about my talents and skills--that I shouldn't bother because it won't work anyway. And then I reminded myself of a few key truths:

* I'm powerless over my clients' workflow, cashflow, and other priorities--including whether my story works for them or not.
* Fear is normal before stepping outside your comfort zone.

And then I settled in for morning meditation. Here's the meditation I do every morning, and can be applied to anything in your life--but is especially important when you're getting ready to do marketing:

1. Settle in to your spot. Take several deep breaths, close your eyes and focus your thoughts on the middle distance, the cloudy fantasy world behind your eyes.

2. Now imagine yourself standing someplace serene and open your arms out to the side.

3. Think of the things you need to let go of: This can be the query, that fight you had with your mother-in-law or partner, your ego about another pitch getting rejected. But what I did this morning was envision my query--a single sheet of paper--unfurling from my center (the gut, or solar-plexus chakra, house of your power), unraveling up my chest, down my arm and away from my hand.

4. Keep breathing. As you let it go, take a deep exhale.

5. Imagine it now floating away. Feel what it feels like for it to leave you and for you to have no more control over it. Whatever panic, fear, etc., that comes up, notice it. But let that go, too--as if it were the strings hanging from a kite.

6. Take more deep breaths and keep imagining it till your anxiety response lessens and disappears.

7. Focus on that disappearing query with your mind's eye and fill it with love. Wish it well on its journey.

8. Imagine an unseen force scooping it up and taking it away. It belongs to your higher power now. Let it go. It's being taken care of.

Rinse and repeat. In other words, you may need to do this for up to two weeks before it takes. Letting go is a process not an event. Keep working at it--and then come up with alternative markets for your query, prepare it to go should your dream market foolishly pass on it, and talk talk talk to colleagues about it.

Monday's Mantra: Being a Good Steward

This week, when you're stressed and doubtful, repeat this mantra:

I am a good steward of my gifts and to share them with the community in loving kindness.

To believe that mantra you have to take on faith (or at least agree with) the following suppositions:

1. That there is some talent you offer that's unique and special.
2. That they are gifts freely given by the Entity of your choice.
3. That to keep them to yourself is a breach of your contract with that Entity.
4. That your job is to make your gifts available and that by doing so you are a force for good in the world.
5. That you can have both fulfilling work that showcases your talents and enough money to live on. They aren't mutually exclusive.

These can all sound namby-pamby and hopelessly naive.

I disagree on both counts. This is a really important part of why I do the work I do and it affects how I approach it, especially in the fact of rejection. This week, I'll be writing a lot about rejection so I think it's important to frame that discussion with a new way of looking at our work.

So let's break it down:

* Yes, talent is only a small part of any self-employed person's success. I know: I work really hard at my business. I spend a lot of hours querying and writing and rewriting. None of that is about talent. It's about perserverance and drive and being willing to sit my butt in the chair and write.

* My talents, however, are something esle. They are gifts I didn't have to earn or learn. Being articulate (though perhaps not in this particular post), being curious, being interested in helping people transform their lives and knowing how to translate those values into words on the page, are things I didn't have to work for. I'm grateful every day to have them.

* Not everything you do must be fulfilling. There's always going to be servicable work. But when I market myself, I'm often writing queries to dream markets on subjects I love. I have to believe in this work to do it--and to keep doing it in the face of rejection.

* If the idea that keeping your talents to yourself out of fear or self-judgment sounds too hippie-dippy for you... well, then you may not enjoy the rest of this particular blog. But you can also think of it as a motivational tool. Especially is you're of the state of mind that you want to be helpful, the idea that keeping your special talents and value to yourself is selfish may push you outside your comfort zone enough to write that query you've been stalling on.

So when you're feeling, as I sometimes do, that you're reaching too far outside your comfort zone, remember that it's not about you. It's about treating your gifts like the precious things they are, and being a good steward to them by creating a structure that allows them to flourish. That means rejection sometimes--because marketing is about rejection more than anything else.

Think about what feeds your talents this week. For me, it's everything from contact with other freelancers to following up on invoicing in order to sustain this work to reading books that expand my skills.

How are you a steward to your talent?

Serenity Tools: The Sounds of Serenity

Until I became self-employed, the sounds around me were irrrelevant. I had no control over them so mostly ignored them. It wasn't until I was in a quiet room that I realized the constant screaming across the newsroom, the static-y police scanner and the hum of the computer did nothing but make me tense. Add to that my general propensity at the time to overwork and not set boundaries and what you had was the sound of stress.

So I wondered: How can you create the sound of serenity in your office?

There's actual research behind this. For nurses, for instance, researchers have found that abnormal sound levels contribute to stress and may even impede healing in the sick.

Another study found that the opposite may also be true: Pleasant sounds may mimic positive experiences:

We suggest that music specifically induces an emotional response similar to a pleasant experience or happiness. Moreover, we demonstrated the typical asymmetrical pattern of stress responses in upper temporal cortex areas, and suggested that happiness/sadness emotional processing might be related to stress reduction by music.

Having said that, I'm not much of a classical music gal. I much more favor wacky girl rock or emo rock on a regular basis. But when I have to work, none of that is very helpful. And one of the joys of self-employment is the ability to listen to music while I work.

So here is some music that helps me concentrate, get today's work done and remain calm:

Essential Beethoven
The Essential Tchaikovsky
Relaxing Vibes, Slavic Kulpowicz

What music gets you in a productive frame of mind?

Preparing Yourself for a Hard Week

We all have them: We're staring down the barrel of a stressful, productivity-required week. What do you do?

* A massive to-do list?
* A flowchart of when to do everything?
* Plan on working nights and weekends until the stress is over?

Those are all good options, as they give you clarity about what's in front of you to do. But it's also the time to invite your Higher Power (whatever that looks like) into the situation. If you don't believe in one, consider your support network your higher power. The point is not to walk into the dark forest of your fears and stress alone.

Just like recovering from overwhelm, planning for a busy week can leave you feeling not good enough and compulsively overworking with the hope that that will solve your problems.

Hey, I've been there. As the charter member of of the workaholic's club, I've had more than a few obsessive weeks where I've done nothing but work and gone to sleep panicky and had bad dreams full of what I forgot to do.

Today, happily, we all have more choices. Ask yourself the following:

* What is absolutely necessary today?
* What's ONE thing I can do today to make tomorrow go smoother? (Limit yourself to one or two things. Making a list of 10 means you're trying to do today's work and tomorrow's work at the same time. It doesn't work.)
* What's one thing you can do to take care of yourself today so that you're calmer tomorrow?
* What will your work hours be today? Set them and then stick to them, except in an emergency (and by emergency I don't mean that worried feeling you have. I mean an emergency that's be verified as such by someone objective).
* What do you need to ask for help on?
* Where can you get this help?

Start your day with these simple questions and you'll be more likely to finish the day happy. I always try to remember this objective:

By the end of the week, the work will be done one way or another; how much do you want to suffer in the process?

This is a shift in thinking: It isn't just about the product; it's about the process. One of my favorite lines in the wonderful book Eat Pray Love comes from the Balinese medicine man. When asked to describe Hell and Heaven, he explains that both end up in the same spot; it's just that you go through hell to get to it or you go through bliss to get to it.

The choice is up to you, to some extent. You can't control others, but you can control how you treat yourself and others in the meantime.

A Word about Forgiveness

When things aren't going your way--when a prospective client strings you along only to turn down your marketing efforts, when the computer breaks, when your kids are driving you nuts, when your deadline is approaching and a subcontractor flakes--that's the time when it can feel hardest to practice nongrasping or detachment.

But will you be surprised to hear that that's the time it can benefit you the most?

We cling so hard sometimes to our resentments--hoping that by sheer force of energy those by whom we feel wronged will get a flat tire or develop a dental emergency. But usually all that does is cause our own suffering and keep us from focusing on our 1 percent.

So instead, try something counter intuitive. Forgive them.

I know they're wrong and they should burn in the fiery pits. Forgive them anyway. I know they deserve a voodoo doll full of long, dull and painful pins.

Still forgive them.

Need help? Consider practicing metta, or loving-kindness.

Here's how it works: In the simplest sense, it's wishing good things for those you'd most like to see file bankruptcy (or perhaps just get a really nasty hangnail).

In the traditional Buddhist sense, it's a specific type of meditation in which you pray for specific things for the person you resent. The way I was taught it was to pray the following:

May you be free of pain.
May your body know peace.
May you be filled with loving-kindness.

I think there's a line or two in there I've forgotten since my first yoga teacher introduced me to it years ago.

So here's a more complete loving-kindness prayer, courtesy of YouTube: