Tag Archives: personal values

“Everything Must Go!”

Posted on March 4, 2013 | Leave a comment

Sometimes, life happens.  Then again, at all times, Life happens.  

This blog post was drafted way back in early January 2013 but, reading it today, I decided to post it anyway, and just add an update.  Here goes…

R1-03231-0003Did time end and kickstart again on December 21, 2012?  Hard to say, although many have said much on the topic.  Some events are at a scale too big or too small for we humans to intellectually grasp and interpret, and perhaps here, in these first few breaths of 2013, we might just surrender to that.

I’ve lived through so many pronouncements of end times (including being taught to hide under my desk on a pile of books in case of nuclear attack) that I don’t have a strong reaction to them anymore. Life goes on the day after.  What I do pay attention to is more subtle, and I sense, more powerful.  I notice and respond to what is shifting and emerging in me and the interconnected world I live in.

So, what was I up to from December 22 through January 1?  Well, I actually thought I was giving myself a writing retreat.  Housemates were traveling and paid work was done for the year so I delightedly anticipated a spacious, creative playdate with myself.  Little did I know that the one line entry in my journal stating “Clean up office and desk” would be the central focus of my retreat.

Some might wonder what the big deal about this was.  Why didn’t I spend a day, or even two, cleaning stuff out and then go on with the more creative aspects of my plans?  I too wondered this over the first few days, but this opinion clearly came from the energetic aspect of me that is always about “doing”.  (I firmly stand in the non-dualist perspective and I experience the complexity of Self.)  My intention of having a personal retreat empowered me into just “being”, and that changed everything.  While other people were holiday shopping, I was staging a very personal “Everything Must Go!” blowout.

From today’s perspective, some two months later, that de-cluttering made big space for what I want more of in life.  And while the above blog post was sitting here unpublished, that’s where I was – out having new experiences. And…I committed to the big project of writing a book (and some articles and book chapters) this year and getting published.

One of the insights that came clear to me just yesterday is that I yearn for more expression not based on written words. So, I’m letting this written blog go quiet, at least for awhile, while I launch into creating and publishing content on my YouTube channel. 

Be well and find your own ways of Making Up What Comes Next!

Nika

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Posted in Dealing with Change, Leadership, personal growth, Reinventing Self, Sustainable Living

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Making Space for Connections

Posted on April 23, 2012 | 2 Comments

Our social fabric is a most valuable asset, the invisible woven net in which we live, exert influence, find resources and collaborators, solve problems and make up what comes next.  I pay attention to people who foster ways of strengthening that fabric and want to share here a few recent experiences with people who are doing just that.

On Saturday April 14th, I gathered with about 40 other folks in my neighborhood, the Laurel district in east Oakland, CA to participate in the Laurel to Redwoods Walk led by Oakland Urban Paths.  OUP host Paul Rosenbloom and special guest, local historian Dennis Evanosky, led us on a meandering journey through our streets, introducing us to off-the-beaten-path public pathways that some of us knew nothing about, including passages between private property lines, pedestrian bridges and trails.  OUP’s mission is to raise awareness of these pathways to increase public usage and enjoyment of them and to get support for signage and maintenance that keep them accessible.  Dennis continually fed our interest with “here on this very spot” tales of Oakland’s early development by native peoples, Spanish settlers, gold miners seeking real estate, greedy lawyers, and more!

I enjoyed the exercise, the adventure and the history.  But what thrilled me most was the way connections formed during this hike.  I noticed this in several ways. A few times, as our serpentine group stretched along sidewalks, we inspired curiosity and connection. People came out on their porches calling out “Who are you?” and we replied “Come with us for a hike!”  In an improvisational moment, one man even ran inside to get his hat and joined us.  Gerald, owner of Scheberies Used Cars, paused to talk with the group as we followed the path next to his chain link fence.  His business has been there since before 580 was built! As we walkers warmed up to each other, making introductions and falling into stride with different companions, our conversations deepened.  I participated in problem-solving discussions about how to slow traffic on the 35th Avenue hill and how to get trails and bridges in the redwoods fixed after the winter’s rains.  I’m sure there were many other productive threads that I never witnessed.  It was heartening to sense how this random group of people on a hike was so naturally creative and willing to serve this place we love living in.  I want to celebrate Paul and Oakland Urban Paths who so obviously make space for connecting people to the land, to history, to each other and to our future.

A week later on April 21st I attended the business launch party for BASE Landscape Architecture, owned by my fun and talented clients, Patricia Algara and Andreas Stavropoulos.  Even after years of being a networker, I find it challenging to walk into a room packed with people I don’t know.  I explored their office digs, got a glass of wine, and discovered the Zome in their shared workspace where I settled in.  (Patricia and Rob Bell construct these beautiful, whimsical wood structures that are a regular feature in Burning Man’s desert landscape.)  Benches with pillows lined the inside making an inviting space for quietly taking in the visual and energetic aesthetic and/or connecting with the people next to me.  There just is something about sitting in a circular space that facilitates ease of connection.  I leaned on the cushions to take in the ceiling, was entertained by two lively musicians, and had an engaging conversation about economics, organizational behavior and the self-organizing system we call the Internet.  I also heard a story about how the Zomes at Burning Man “create a space in the middle of the desert and everyone inside is like at a cocktail party.”  Andreas, Patricia and Rob understand how to make space for connections through building the kinds of environments we humans need to relax and engage.

As a final thought…

I notice that making the space for connections means slowing down our pace, at least a bit.  If you want more and better relationships, teamwork, and community in your life, work, and neighborhood, take the time to make space for connections.

Happy Earth Day!  Nika

Nika Newcomb Quirk, MBA PhD
facilitating the emergence of systems savvy, resilient, artful, and collaborative leadership
NikaQuirk@mac.com
+1 510-381-5350
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Posted in Entrepreneur, Innovation, Leadership, Playful Practices, Sustainable Living

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What’s your evolutionary strategy?

Posted on February 20, 2011 | Leave a comment

“Realistic” people who pursue “practical” aims are rarely as realistic or practical in the long run of life as the dreamers who pursue their dreams. – Hans Selye

As it’s the beginning of the year, I find myself defining and discussing strategy in many aspects of my life and work.  Entrepreneur clients working with me as a business coach want to figure out how to make 2011 a better year.  My housemates and I regularly fall into co-imagining (and drooling over) what we’d like to produce in the garden this season.  Headed into the final production of my PhD dissertation, I’ve been assessing how I can bring an artful and practically successful approach to reviewing mounds of data and articulating what’s essential, meaningful, wonderful.  The non-profit board I lead works collectively to shape a sustainable path that supports the organization’s long-term benefit to human life and social change.

The word strategy tends to bring business and/or military contexts to mind.  But I’m attracted to this definition: an adaptation or complex of adaptations (as of behavior, metabolism, or structure) that serves or appears to serve an important function in achieving evolutionary success. Strategy is about learning and changing. It’s a process of reflecting on factual and experiential intelligence, evaluating success, imagining possibilities, and forging these combined insights into a plan of action that we sense has the potential for greater success.  Through strategy, we adapt consciously with an orientation to our values, desires and dreams.

Organizations make large investments in strategic planning.  But, in working with EveryDay Leaders, I find that strategy is overlooked or seen as a mystifying process for which people are unsure they have the time. “Who me? Have a strategy? That’s someone else’s job. I’m not big or important enough!”  So many of us live immersed in the streaming river of our experience, rarely mining the learning through which to shape ourselves, our endeavors, and our human future. And yet, right now, our adaptation to the ever-more-apparent-Big-Changes-on-the-planet is the main work at hand.

I hope you really grasp how important you are in the bigger picture of “making up what comes next”. I eagerly invite you to step into leadership, into active engagement with yourself, your life, and your environment. Know your fears but don’t sink to their level. I challenge you to create an evolutionary strategy. Yes! This is tough and worthy work! Take the time to honestly reflect, alone and with others, on a regular basis. Combine the factual and the imaginal to see yourself, your work, your family and community, your environment (both natural and human-made) – in 5, 10, 20 years. Believe in a satisfying and joyful future.  Take action on adaptations – what you can do now that contributes to both current and evolutionary success. I’m right there with you.

Namaste, Nika

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Posted in Dealing with Change, Entrepreneur, Leadership, Power, Reinventing Self, Strategy, Sustainable Living

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Weave and Mend – Worthy Work

Posted on April 26, 2010 | Leave a comment

Inspiration arises from all sources. Yesterday morning, I again came to the last few pages of a book I never tire of reading, Daughters of Copper Woman by Anne Cameron. Whenever I thin my library, it’s one of the books that’s been a keeper for 20+ years.  Once again, it brought me home to my core purpose, weaving and mending the society of women, the contribution of the feminine to the world, and what Cameron’s book calls our “soft power.”  Here’s a section of the book’s ending poem:

In golden light

I recognize the enemy faces
fear of our bodies
fear of our visions
fear of our healing
fear of our love
fear of sisterkind
fear of brotherkind
fear of fear

love is healing
healing is love

There are Women everywhere with fragments
gather fragments
weave and mend
When we learn to come together we are whole
When we learn to recognize the enemy
we will know what we need to know
to learn how to come together
to learn how to weave and mend

In this morning’s Wheeeee! We’re Alive free tele-fun call, we danced with what we are weaving and what we are mending in our lives.  Relationship to self, broken heartedness, connection to the divine, new ways of being -these and other patterns of human life all showed up as the shared stories unfolded.  As the poem says, “when we learn to come together we are whole.”  Women left the call having affirmed the one thing they would mend this week.
Facing our fears (those “enemy faces”) and doing our real work is, I believe, the core of human life and is accomplished in the company of others. When women take action, we make the lives and world we want.
What do you want to act on?
Six women have the opportunity to take action while being “fiercely loved and supported” in the new EveryDay Leaders tele-coaching group scheduled to start May 5. Click here for more information and the registration link.

Yours in the weaving,

Nika

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Posted in Dealing with Change, Leadership, personal growth, Reinventing Self, Women

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Wheeeee! We’re Alive! – Dancing in our fire

Posted on February 8, 2010 | Leave a comment

Whoah. Mmmmmm. This morning’s free weekly tele-fun call just ended. I’m a little awestruck by both the gathered power of 11 women crackling and blazing in the virtual realm and the experience of conducting that powerful connection. For me, it felt like twirling fire.

We forget our power. We abuse our power. We give our power away. Now it’s time for us to have and use our power with integrity and connectedness. Our power fuels our actions as we step into purpose and make the life, and the world, we want to live in. This morning, we performed a fire dance that ignited the glowing coals of individual liveliness. Here’s how:

  • Warm yourself up – breathe, stretch, shake, breathe noticing how big you are, move around the room
  • Get the fire going – breathe in and out 4-5 times forcefully through your pursed lips, pushing the breath with your abdomen
  • Fire breathe into your cupped hands, feeling the warmth of your power
  • Now do your fire dance for 2 or 3 minutes, exploring the full range of your powerful self from glowing coal to crackling bonfire.
  • Find an ending to your dance and fill the warmth pulsing in you.

Spend some time noticing, writing, drawing about this experience. You might also explore these questions:

  • What’s one important way for you to keep your power present within you?
  • What will you use your power to take action on today?
  • Who are you sharing power-with as you take action? How will that happen?

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    Posted in Leadership, Playful Practices, Reinventing Self

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    Wheeeee! We’re Alive: What’s Love got to do with it?

    Posted on January 4, 2010 | 2 Comments

    What’s Love got to do with it? Everything. Here’s 5 things I learned from the participants in this morning’s free Wheeeee! tele-fun call:

    1. Children spread love more than they spread sniffy noses and coughs.
    2. Simple signs, like breathing into our palms or hugging ourselves, are profound and necessary evidence of self-caring.
    3. To receive the love we are worthy of takes the courage to make eye contact.
    4. Love is everywhere and intangible; we have to notice and name it for ourselves.
    5. Slowing down makes the space for love.

    Love is the “fire in the belly” that fuels our human lives.  As we create our visions of a desired future, let’s make love the material from which we construct it, the adhesive that bonds it all together, and the energy that flows through it.  What would happen if we replaced fear and worry with openness, interested curiosity, caring and a desire to make a healthy and purposeful life possible for all?  What might be possible if we switch from finding problems to fix to passionately making together the future we really desire?

    Isn’t Love the real work of our time?

    How will love be present in your life this week?

    With loving kindness,

    Nika

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    Posted in personal growth, Playful Practices

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    Wheeeee! We’re Alive! connecting to Inner Authority

    Posted on December 7, 2009 | 2 Comments

    Such an honor to witness people showing up and doing deep work. Wow.  Every Monday morning at 8:30 when I leave the Wheeeee! tele-fun conference, I sit back for a moment and take it all in – the courage, laughter, willingness, shakiness, warmth.  This is what nurtures my love affair with human beings.

    Today we got curious about the question What helps me prioritize? Over the years, I’ve noticed that, as the complexity of the world and the uncertainty of life became more apparent, the difficulty of discerning, prioritizing and choosing has increased. How do we know what to do, what to choose when black-and-white is replaced by a rainbow of possibilities?  Is there some internal compass we can navigate by?   Here’s a playful way to explore this:

    • Take a deep, deep breath and let it out with a sigh. Repeat.
    • Stretch your body in all directions. Shake it out. Notice what’s tense – breathe into it and relax.
    • Close your eyes.
    • There’s a place in you that knows how to choose – put your hand there now.  Trust yourself.  Breathe and connect to this place of knowing within you.
    • Raise your hand in the air and begin to move it, dancing on behalf of your inner authority, your ability to discern what your priorities are.  If there’s a sound that accompanies your dancing hand, you can let it out.  Dance for at least 1 minute.
    • Find a place of stillness and silence.  Breathe in and blow your breath out slowly through your lips.
    • Open your eyes – notice, journal, doodle.
    • What affirmation will you use this week to support your trust in your inner knowing?

    [This activity powered by InterPlay]

    Joyfully yours, Nika

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    Posted in Dealing with Change, Leadership, personal growth, Playful Practices, Reinventing Self

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    Shopping for Social Change

    Posted on December 2, 2009 | Leave a comment

    How much stuff do you buy new these days? You know, I just really don’t believe in buying new anymore.  There are fabulous clothes and shoes in consignment stores.  There’s “it’ll do” stuff at thrift shops.  There’s anything you could imagine getting for free available at www.freecycle.org and often on the sidewalks of my city. I sometimes wonder: There’s so much stuff in the world already, why do we ever need to make or buy anything new again?

    On Cyber Monday, the Monday after Black Friday (who made that name up for the day after Thanksgiving and what does it mean anyway?), I made what felt like a very big decision. I was going to buy a new messenger bag to carry my laptop, my files and documents, iPhone and other electronic devices through a rainy winter of consulting engagements.  Enter Google, of course – the best way I know to start perusing the marketplace.

    What did I want?  Well, practically, the bag has to be big enough to carry my MacBook Pro 15.4 laptop in its protective sleeve.  No black. No 20-something real bike messenger styles. Something durable. But Quirky Auntie is a fun kinda gal and she immediately added criteria to my list – colorful, unusual, fun.  And the EveryDay Leader in me demanded that I make this purchase based on my strongly held values.

    “Mac 15.4 laptop bag, recycled materials” was my first Google search.  All right! It’s amazing what materials ingenious people around the world are using to make messenger bags – for example, recycled leather jackets, used bicycle tires and tubes, used rice sacks, auto upholstery from wrecked cars.  Changed “recycled materials” to eco-friendly and a whole new list of bags for purchase show up, mostly made of organic cotton, hemp and other materials.

    Off and on, for two days, I whipped the search engines to a frenzy looking for just the right bag with the right price.  On Cyber Monday (which I was not aware of as a premium day to make a tech-related purchase), I discovered an awesome bag at Urban Junket but couldn’t quite come up with the $121 price on sale.  The search continued.  I must have visited a dozen sites.  Finally, I found Gnana.  This was the place! This company merchandises laptop bags made by village women artisans in India using their local fabrics, embroidery and crystals. Each bag is very individual and has wonderful capacity to hold everything I want to put into it, plus handles and a reinforced shoulder strap.  And OMG the Cyber Monday price is $55 USD plus shipping!

    Ecologically sound bag?  OR Socially responsible bag that supports village women in India? Both are political purchases.  I like to vote with my dollars in the marketplace.  I vacillated.  Then I hit the “Purchase” button and ordered a wonderful handloomed striped green bag from Gnana.  I’ll come back to post a picture when it arrives next week.

    The BIG HOLIDAY SHOPPING SEASON (if you still buy into that) is upon us.  How will you Shop and still Do Good?

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    Posted in Reinventing Self

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    The Power of Alignment

    Posted on October 2, 2009 | Leave a comment

    “To attain inner peace you must actually give your life, not just your possessions. When you at last give your life – bringing into alignment your beliefs and the way you live then, and only then, can you begin to find inner peace.”  - Peace Pilgrim, 1908-1981

    This afternoon, I visited Dr. Dannielle Mutch, a healer with truly magical abilities, at Radiant Life Chiropractic. The work I do with her is all about alignment and again today, I am awed and grateful by the release and shift we co-facilitated in me. Over the years, I’ve learned that being in alignment is more complex than just adjusting bones and muscles and the flow of breath and neurological energy.  Like everything, there’s micro- and macro- levels of alignment that are deeply interconnected.  My body’s alignment so often reflects, not only my inner state, but the state of my alignment with what I’m engaged in and with in both the manifested world and realms unknown.  I have a belief, like Peace Pilgrim, that when I am practicing what I value and believe in, then I am creating alignment at all levels.  And I also notice from daily experience that being in and taking action from alignment brings about “the good” that I intend, with ease, grace and fun.

    I see this expressed in the most fascinating ways.  Yesterday, I was coaching a client by phone who had a very common misalignment that was blocking her from networking, connecting with customers, and making much needed sales.  She had not yet developed a way of speaking about her services that felt true to her and really expressed her passion and competence in her work.  So, she wasn’t speaking to anyone about her services.  I inquired about her work from several different angles, then we co-created new language for her to use in introducing herself and started to discuss how conversations with potential customers might go.  Suddenly, she said “Oh, this is so great. I’ve had this really tight spot in my chest whenever I thought about needing to talk to a client.  About 5 minutes ago, it just completely relaxed!”  There was the moment of alignment! I love witnessing that and I regularly do! I was so grateful that she experienced the physicality of that shift because I notice that those body-based realizations are powerful anchors for confident, sustained behavioral change.  From now on, she will have an embodied sense of knowing when she is authentically presenting herself in her work.

    orchidEvery day for weeks now, I have been lovingly watching an orchid in my kitchen window, first grow a curving stem, then unfold it’s blossoms, one by one, orienting each bud and flower to stem, sister blossoms and source of light.  All in all, a profound and beautiful lesson in alignment.  Namaste.

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    Posted in Entrepreneur, personal growth, Reinventing Self

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