Serenity Tool for the Recession: Breathe

If you listen to news reports, you know the gloomy--even terrifying--financial predictions for the year. Well, 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 happens, are of the yogic variety. This is an occasional series of tips and tools for maintaining calm and serenity despite the economic forecast. Have a tip of your own? Comment below.

I don't know about you, but when I read about the number of publications going under or taking all their work in house, I catch my breathe unintentionally. I don't think I'm alone on this. Indeed, the Freelance Nation may be one populated by shallow breathers. But now's the time to exhale, says writer and consultant Ally Peltier:

My uncle, who stood on his head and meditated every morning my entire childhood (he died when I was in college), often just looked at me in the midst of a rushed stream of words and said, "Breathe." It's simple, but effective. While it's important to be savvy and work hard, you reach a certain point where you've done everything you can do, and the rest (like the downturning economy) is out of your control. Worrying is futile and destructive to your health. So, when I feel anxious about what's going to happen, I just remember: "Breathe."

This is another one of those pieces of advice that can come off as trite or a platitude. But in the yogic world, it isn't code for "quit complaining" or "chill out, man." It's a direction to engage in a real practice, just like Sun Salutations or, in the business world, following your business plan.

Yogic breathe work is called pranyama, the fourth of yoga's eight limbs that also include asana (what we Westerners think of as "yoga" but is actually the physical postures). A March 2008 study confirms what yogis have known for centuries: Practicing it can increase oxygen in the blood, calms the nervous system, lowers blood pressure and improve cardiac response.

It's good for you, and it feels good.

The type of breathing that one yogi recommended to me for today's economic troubles is Nadi Shodhan (Alternate Nostril Breath). I like to practice this especially when I'm in a sauna or steam room, because if feel like it really clears out my sinuses while calming me. But you can do it at any time and it takes two minutes:

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.

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.

Where Does Your Happiness Come From?

The May issue of Yoga Journal just arrived in my mailbox this week (May? In March? Really. I don't know why, either.) and with it a great story on happiness. What writer Phillip Moffitt says is that there are three kinds of happiness:

1. Happiness when things go your way
2. A sense of well-being even when things go horribly awry
3. Joy that comes from "no longer being identified with your ego sense of self. You become liberated from the fear and suffering that inevitably comes when you're identified with the ego, which is always coping with the fragility, uncertainly and unavoidable losses of physical life."

Fragility. Uncertainty. Unavoidable losses.

Sound familiar? As a self-employed person this is part of every single day. We can't know what's going to happen next. What Moffitt offers is that we don't have to be a slave to this fact.

Let's apply this way of thinking to rejection:

Of course we're happiest when our marketing efforts are accepted, celebrated and our every email is given a ticker-tape parade down 5th Avenue. But the cold, dim reality of my daily life is that only 10 percent of any of my queries sell.

Yes, it's true. I've been tracking in on a handy-dandy spreadsheet.

There are lots of things I can do with this fact. One of them is invest in becoming better at querying. But the other is cultivating what Moffitt calls a sense of mindfulness over the joy and happiness in our lives.

Here's what I want you to do:

* Make a list of all the ways in which you've been taken care of in the past when you're marketing efforts have been rejected.
* Take a look at your list of regular clients and think about how they've sustained you.
* Scan through your list of queries that are out there right now.

I don't know what this does for you, but what it does for me is put rejection in context. Yes, that great query I'm in love with didn't fit with the publication for which I thought it would be perfect. That's sad. But I can look at the ways in which I'm still getting to write about the things I love. And I'll look at the query and prepare to send it out again.

This is not to say I'm perfect at this. Far from it. Freelancers in San Francisco will know that one of the hardest things for me is to turn around and resend a query after a rejection. I lose steam.

But one of the things I'm working on is drafting more than one angle for a query at a time so that if it gets rejected, I don't have to labor over a new version. It's a way of keeping my marketing--and my business--vital.

This practice, of remembering that we're taken care of when those rejections come pouring in, is the second kind of happiness Moffitt describes. Sure we'd all love to get to a point where we don't invest in the ego's fears, worries, resentments and regrets. But what's most helpful to me in the face of rejection is the memory and experience of being okay every other time this has happened.

So when I get rejections and take it personally--as I inevitably do--I remember that feeling of being taken care of, of continued well-being despite circumstances.

Mantra Check-in: So How'd You Do?

This week I asked you to consider whether your well-laid plans were really the best way for you to go. Or, to put it another way, I asked you to consider whether not following those plans--or fate intervening--was really a problem.

And then we talked about recession. Coincidence?

You know the drill.

So how did it work for you?

It was the best mantra I could have chosen for myself this week. In this roller-coaster world of self-employment, you never know what's going to happen: You're busy until you're really, really not. You've got a new client... until you see the contract. You have a steady gig... until they go in a different direction. I feel like this week has been a lesson in the figurative bobbing and weaving involved in the freelance life. You've got to stay on your toes. You've got to stay nimble, and you've got to keep moving. If you stay behind to focus on what just happened and how it doesn't fit with your plans, you stagnate.

So just for today, keep going. I know I will.

More on Managing Serenity During Recession

If you haven't seen it already, Erik Sherman has a very smart post about how to adjust your work worldview during a recession.

What I think is most helpful about his suggestions, which include marketing more, being less picky about projects and looking for clients that are financially stable, is that the focus is on what you can control--not what is happening out there in the world that you can't control.

We can't control our clients' work flow (when they can assign a project, for example.)

We can't control our clients' cashflow--but we can do our best to seek out clients that seem stable.

We can't control--or even really know--what pressure our clients are getting from higher-ups.

That's not our job. Our job is to make their jobs easier by being professional, upfront and enthusiastic about what we can control: the work in front of us.

It's that old 1 percent rule again.

What can you focus on today that's in your control and possible today?

Serenity Tip: Diversify

How many clients do you have? Does any one of them account for more than a quarter of your income?

If you're like most people, your answer is yes. As we head into a shrinking economy (or maybe we're already there--who knows) diversifying your clients is more important than ever. And it doesn't just make business sense. It makes sense for your serenity, too.

I'll give you an example: One of my favorite clients is also my longest-running clients. The money isn't phenomenal, but it's a steady stream of work on things I love to do. Then cut to yesterday, when I got that email. You know the one: The dear-john email:

Thank you for your years of service. We love working with you but we're taking this work in another direction and we won't be needing your content anymore.

Obviously, you could have knocked me over with a feather.

When I came-to this morning, I looked around me, at all the other amazing clients I also have. Of course it's upsetting to lose this client. I love them. They've been a true joy to work for. But this loss is not going to keep me up at nights. It's not going to leave me panicking and looking through my spreadsheets for how I'm going to make ends meet. It's not going to leave me worrying about things I can't control, like what I did wrong and how many other clients are going to go the same way. It's simply a very sad change in my workflow.

That, my friends, is serenity.

It's not getting and keeping your clients forever, because you can't do that. It's simply impossible. It's getting clients you love, doing your work with love and then looking for other clients.

This just happens to be the first client I've ever had drop me. But I guarantee you it won't be the last. It's part of the business. What was this week's mantra again? Just because things aren't going as planned doesn't mean they're going haywire.

So where are you looking for new clients? Are you prepared for your clients to leave?