All the experimenting has led me to decide I am starting an offline business as a teamempowerment coach.

Spellfinder, as I call my business, is taking off officially March, 1st, when the registration in the chamber of commerce will be activated. The beginnings of the website are up for you to explore! You are welcome to follow my professional endeavours and what not there.

Mostly because I am uncertain what else to do with it, I’ll leave this one up too. Have to admit I still like the motto. Won’t be posting here anymore, though!

If you have come here because you want the blogname, please contact me. I am sure we’ll work something out!

Thank you for reading,

Tess

I am taking a blogging break until february 14th – when I shall return with goodies.

I need some time to morph – break out of my cocoon, put more of a tender new, that I have growing me inside, out into the real world.

Thank you for your attention so far -

keep thinking good vibes while I morph

Tess

Check it out now, the funk soul brothers!!!

http://www.wikihow.com/Be-Adventurous

Take your boredom seriously like I try mine, … hope to relate some adventures, soon! : )

I am not even starting with the whys. OK, just the one: unsolicited “info”emails after registering – daily?! How annoying is that. I’ve chided friends for less.

Ktnxby.

First, I wish to give them kudos for putting that stuff into words. True to Chris’ URL, he sparked something in me, as did Rob.

Now, I’d like to add my own two cents – the time seems right. I am getting nervous for my husband‘s competing in the Dutch National Bouldering competition (link to dutch page) sat/sun. I Hope to send some – not needed, I’m sure – failureshouldering karma his way.  Straighten out my own feelings in the process.

I chose the pic (with a link to that brilliant Nike Mike Jordan commercial) because of the shame that the anon(!) athlete demonstrates so vividly (nice calves too, BTW). To me, shouldering failure is mainly about tolerating the shame – what others might think of you when seeing you fail.

Now wait a minute – why do we care so much what others think?

Somehow, when we see someone fail, we take a hit, too. We want the other person to succeed. It will make us feel proud – it will make us feel we can succeed, too. If they fail – we fail a little, too. Even if we don’t know them. Just seeing it happen, makes our stomachs cringe, our palms sweat, and our eyes turn away. We really do not want to know. We don’t want to hear about it. And if we do, we want to make it go away. We’ll tell them it really wasn’t that bad, offer alternative roads or solutions for, or try (in our minds) blaming it on their personal characteristics – they’re just stupid, right?

Let me share a recent failure with you, like brave Rob Haggart did. Show don’t tell, and all. Allow me to confide in you, too, that my mind had some difficulty producing this example. Usually buzzing with ideas to the degree of making me mad, it shared this failure only reluctantly – even with its own conscious part. Apparently it is some sort of expert at ostrich behavior. (Even now that I am about to publish this post, it is telling me off, how trivial this example is, how stupidly written, and how no one will care. I hear it, but ignore… Post published!)

It’s about a recent blog post I did here, that’s failed to render the traffic I was secretly expecting it to. After some real hard thinking work, I came up with a manifesto that details how I view the Internet (Meaning of My Comm Tools 1.0) . I was really proud and happy with the result – still am, as a matter of fact. As a side effect, I was hoping for it to get picked up by some of the blogs that have inspired me (not pointing the finger, you know who you are). But … nothing! Silence! No juice!

I wonder why (feel free, but in no way coerced, to share belatedly if you have any Beta). Even worse, I feel disappointed and somewhat ashamed. Ashamed for harbouring such secret hopes. Of me gloriously conquering the universe, if not the world, at the very least. I failed at both -

That time! But I did manage to:

a) get my ideas on the topic out of my head and onto paper, enabling me to act on my own vision;
b) react to the excellent Internet manifesto stuff that inspired me in the first place, in a personal and proactive way, exactly like I want to;
c) (if nothing else) tick having to write that post off my ToDo list;
d) (after reading back all of the above) remember how silly high my expectations and hopes can get;
e) compliment my silly self on having such faith in my potential, but also remember to aim for small victories. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and so on. Baby steps, like Oprah says.

To conclude; failing confirms to me I am on the right track. I am experimenting, pushing boundaries, living my own adventure. Taking boredom, fear and shame by their horns (god, how bored I have been the first three decades of my life! And fearing, shamefully, that I was depressed!). Now, better late than never, I am learning to fail – and learn by experience. The best cure for living in fear. Teaching me how this exact way to reach my goals might not work – but with a minor adjustment, it just might. My goals stay as valid as before (unless I change my mind, which being a girl I am allowed to! at least once every month without reason! all the time when pregnant!).

So here goes: this is me – and yes, I fail and I am proud!

Ooof, glad I got that out of my system. I’ll try to throw some more personal failures this way, as I go.

Moving on!

Blutsgeschwister uses my most personal mission/identity shorthand code thingy as its logo!!! 

I found out because of this dress my friend was wearing today. Surprise: I love their stuff! How cool is that poncho (if I had a baby girl, not boy, or was already certain he was gay, which am not).

Pity they don’t ship abroad. (or that coat would be mine!)

I am trying to make like Bjork here… am starting to feel a bit weird about not posting. Not that there’s no ideas – in abundance, as ever. But trying to hibernate, focus and make connections IRL (=In Real Life, feeling so Internet savvy, savvy?!).

Admittedly, I have done some hush hush stuff on my anon blog (shh!). Which was very good and helpful, especially in the hibernating and reflecting depts.

I have also been busy networking. Had a fascinating meeting with Antonio A Tjak @ fluid.eu on Friday.  Am also experimenting with my working week schedule to make me less grumpy on my mama day. Done some Xmas errands, obviously. Prepping for our trip out to Vienna.

And then, I started another blog – oh no! To allot room, time and space for the parent-kid things going on in our lives. To connect with our other newparent-friends in this way (for those of you who are not yet parents: coordinating moments to sit down and talk, grown up style, is virtually impossible with babes and tots. Enjoy it while you can). Just a few days after setting  up, I decided it needs a different tool than blogging to support the cooperation more. Still under construction, so be patient please. I will unveil now that wetpaint.com is the tool I am experimenting with. I’ll be pulling the plug on that one, once I got the wetpaint stuff setup. Aiming for mid January.

Thank god then, for one less blog – I really need to reconsider, the proliferation of blogs I’ve been doing. Oh, it’s been fun, for sure. And keeping me busy – as if that’s been a problem, recently. So, why o why do I bother? There’s an iron logic in the separation between my anon and my open blogs, so those two will remain. But otherwise – this proliferation of URL’s is confusing, both myself and you, my readers. Anyway, I can’t keep it up. What a mess! Have to clean it up.

I want to keep D4joy as a major platform for as long as I can. It has served me well and I like the focus. Also, I would like to offer you faithful visitors a stable URL. I guess I should develop tessdoucet to represent my personal actions, my work. Not so much the day to day stuff but more the enduring stuff (making that up right now, so may change). What the h*** (nice time of year for it, right?!) that should be… I’ll have to develop it. So quiet there, I guess.

Also, I will try to focus more on connections with real life in the coming year, to really get my business going. (Business of what!?! Right, right, that’s what I’ll experiment with to find out, OK, calm down). So I might publish less here than I did the last coupla months.

In case you get bored… or wish to annoy your coworkers…

Jack‘s all about getting things done. Clarence Ewing (“Gli”) about doing things right.

Loyal readers may have gathered, I am looking for ways to create value. What can I do, contribute, that will create value for both myself (because I enjoy doing it, because I feel I deliver quality, and because others appreciate it, too), and at least one other person?

You can follow the development of my personal answers here, but in this post I’d like to elaborate on what seems to be getting me there.

What I read in Jack’s post, as in most timemanagement help lit, is the notion that we need discipline to get things done. I blame this notion on our culture, more precisely, the school system, that made us sit down all those boring years and focus on stuff we did not like, but that people who mattered to us (parents) seemed to value. Whereas we’d much rather run around and play, or concentrate on building that model airplane (my brother) or sow clothes for my barbies (me) – the latter is harder than you might think, BTW.

Recently, I’ve been trying to embrace the idea that liking something, being attracted to it, is the best guide for deciding what to do – because that’s the hard part for me, in these stimulus and freedom rich times. How to know what to do?

Fun, enjoyment, to like something – that’s what I try to let guide me. If I feel like doing something, I will, if I don’t, I won’t. Hence the title of this blog. The hard part is a) knowing what that is, and b) trusting that. Here comes the guilt, here come feelings of “I’m grown up now, not allowed to play anymore”, hello fear - I am not worthy of fun, I must earn my playtime first (by doing my homework). From fear comes a desire to control, and be chastised – have someone else decide what’s right for you. Could you possibly do that yourself? But how?

I say, it’s about doing the right things – the fun things. School’s out – wanna play?

PS The pic search made me find this, wishing you many male serenades, too, Tina! And while I’m at it: a merry Xmas and happy NY! : )