Successful Blog

What Do You Do When People Say You’re Inspiring?

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(Updated in 2020)

I’ve been thinking about how inspiring you are.

I heard someone say that you’re inspiring. I saw you value the words and the person who said them. You were so taken by the compliment that you didn’t know what to do.

I think you’re inspiring too.

So I’m writing this for you and all of you who inspire me. Would you listen to what I mean by that?

Inspire means to breathe.

I don’t know your struggles well, but I know you’ve faced them down, and you’re still breathing. That alone is inspiring. Add that you’re fun and easy and it’s meta-inspirational. You motivate me to think I can blast through my own struggles and come out smiling.

In other words, you make my breathing easier.

Isn’t that what inspiration means?

So please know . . .

When I say, “You’re inspiring,” I’m saying . . .

“You motivate me to keep going, doing the next thing, to keep breathing, to keep knowing that I’ll get there.”

What do you do when people say you’re inspiring?

Smile, breathe it in, and say ‘thank you,” with gusto to reinforce a positive change in the world. Glow more each time someone says you’re inspiring. So that more folks wonder who you are.

Smile. Breathe. Glow. Then . . .

Inspire everyone you can to inspire someone else down the line.

Get the whole world breathing again, right along with you.

What do you do to keep inspired? Who inspires you?

Liz

P.S. If you’re thinking this is about you, it is.

Do You See Your Wallflower Self Wrong?

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Ever Seen One?

Yesterday at Brogan’s blog, Mark Hayward wrote a great post about being shy when attending conferences and other social situations. He called it Wallflower Syndrome.

Perhaps you’ve had some experience with that condition?
I have and still have moments when it returns. Truth is if I don’t plan well, a room filled with new people easily can shake my thinking.

I read what Mark wrote with interest and found a lot of what I do in his suggestions, but what surprised me what the photo that he chose to illustrate the feelings of wallflower-edness. He picked a sweet kitten in the grass.

Maybe that’s been part of the problem . . . I’ve been seeing the wallflower me all wrong.

Somehow I had this picture in my head that wallflowers were scraggly. dark green, barely surviving plant-like things. In my fish-eye imagination, a wallflower was a limp spinach mess with small wilted purple petals in a brown granny dress sitting in front of yellowing wallpaper.

How did I get that picture in my head?

Awkward and ugly was what wallflower always meant to me.

From junior high school school dances to certain networking events since,
that image of a spinach thing in a granny dress defined me the first second I felt shy or self-conscious in a group of more than three.

If I made the unfortunate mistake of walking near a wall, the game would soon before I could miss the thought of a wallflower and the image would make me feel even smaller.

Wallflower_from_sxc.hu

Then this morning, I saw this picture of a wallflower.

I’m feeling sort of duped and wondering . . .

I’m thinking that I’ve been seeing my wallflower self all wrong. I wonder whether you’ve been doing that?

What if I had seen myself as Mark’s kitten or known a wallflower could look like this one? Would shyness have been a different experience?

Do you suppose that could make a difference?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

What Determines a Creative Life? What Determines Success?

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Determination

“Square peg in a round hole.” That’s what people used to call it.

Even as a kid I knew it was a silly waste of time to put a square peg in a round hole. That was just plain common sense To make the peg fit, it wouldn’t be a square peg anymore. It would hurt the peg, and the hole wouldn’t like it.

What makes some people grow up to live highly creative lives? Is it in their genes — “the way the tree was bent”? Is a creative life determined by their experience?

Yet, what is astonishing is the great variety of paths that led to eminence. Csikszentmihalyi

Though the 91 creative people in the study that became the book, Creativity, had unique characteristics and traits that made them stand out. The life paths that led to their creative contribution were not particularly different from what you might find any group of 91 citizens.

  • Some were precocious. Some were prodigies. Some didn’t seem to stand out as children.
  • Some had serious hardship growing up. Some suffered the death of parents. Others had happy childhoods without incident.
  • Some were ignored. Some had guides and teachers who helped their development. Some had devastating experiences with mentors.
  • Some seemed to always know their calling. Some searched for years to find their path.
  • Some were noticed early. Some struggled for years to gain recognition.

Those same circumstances describe the people I call my friends, none of whom yet have changed the world through Creativity with a capital C.

 

It seems that the men and women we studied were not shaped once and for all, either by their genes or by the events of early life. . . . Instead of being shaped by events, they shaped events to suit their purposes. . . .

According to this view, a creative life is still determined, but what determines it is a will moving across time — the fierce determination to succeed, to make sense of the world, to use whatever means to unravel some of the mysteries of the universe. Csikszentmihalyi

 

Fierce determination to succeed.

Success doesn’t happen without giving ourselves over fully to what we’re pursuing. It’s not the barriers that stop us, it’s the way we respond to them.

If we’re determined, we maneuver over, under, around, or through them. It doesn’t matter how difficult the problem we stick with it until we innovate, create, or cobble together a solution that solves it.

ladder_over_wall_from_sxchu

Determination removes options other than success: We refuse to define our outcomes as:

  • the fault of our parents.
  • an imperfection in our environment.
  • the result of bad timing.
  • bad luck or bad karma.
  • something outside of us.

As determination to succeed is key to world-changing creativity, it seems to follow that determination and creativity are key to success.

How have determination and creativity contributed in your past success? What are you determined to accomplish now?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Get Enough Sand

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Through an Hourglass

hourglass

People once used sand to mark time in an hourglass.

Marking time doesn’t seem to be living.
An hourglass hardly seems joyful.

Where I grew up the sand is rich, white, and unique. Its rounded grains of clear colorless quartz, diamond-like in hardness, are pure silica (silicon dioxide) uncontaminated by clay, loam, iron compounds, or other foreign substances.

White silica is sand for windows and marbles. As kids, it was cool to see the local factory logo on every car window in the nation. It was also cool to grab rejects behind the marble factory — flat disks of colored glass are fascinating to any kid not yet age 10.

Sometimes we wondered how tiny salt-like grains could become clear windows and colorful marbles. Most times we never thought about it at all.

The local dairy built a recreational lake on their property. They floored and bordered it with the pure white, clean, clean sand . . . Swimming lessons, dates, beach parties, even weddings took place there. Famous rock bands played there while we danced by the lake.

We had more than our share of sand in our shoes and our hair. That fact was pointed out nearly every time we walked within 20 feet of an adult.

Sand, grit, guts, gumption, moxie . . . We found those vibrant synonyms in a book in high school — the one with the metaphors. The same words might describe a well-lived life.

Where I come from the sand is unique.
I bet it’s unique where you come from too.
What if we take the sand out of the hourglass this weekend?

Get enough sand and we’ve got a beach.

Ever built a castle?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

What Parts of Your History Are You?

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We Are Who We Were

Missing_brick_by_sxc.hu

When I first came to blogging, I had decided to write my way into a new career. I was lucky enough to have a background that such things might be possible. So I set off with the metaphorical wind in my sails. It was working well for quite some while.

I was sure. I was certain. I put myself out there. I brought my “beginner’s mind” to the situation. I brought my best thinking to the new problems that I eagerly came to conquer and solve. It was refreshing, invigorating. I was in the game again. At least I thought so.

Then I woke up.

I realized something was missing, more than something — whole parts of my skillset, my experience, and my history. I wasn’t talking about or using what had taken me a career to acquire. When I left my old situation, I left behind useful parts of me.

Twice in the last week, I’ve had a conversation with people who’ve done the same thing I did — walked away from talents or skills when they walked away from a situation that no longer gave them room to grow.

An intelligent someone said last night, “All of this time I’ve been totally missing what I love to do.”

Sometimes life is so much about learning and building that we totally miss the hole in the wall. We forget that we build our future on what we’ve learned and accomplished before. Our skills and talents become part of who we’ve always been and who we are.

Our experience is the mortar that holds us together. Our history is the glue that connects us to each other. Fashion and buzz words fade away. Memories and learning are what remain.

I’m a teacher. I’m a writer. Try as I might to do other, in some way, those are what I’ll always be.

What parts of your history are you?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

The Humanity in Unnatural Spaces

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Not People Places

McCormackPlace_South_by_Liz_Strauss

Yesterday while people were meeting. I went walking to find something worth a photograph. I thought maybe I’d find something inspiring, something motivating. I was hoping for soft lines and curves set there by nature. Instead what I found were the hard lines and curves of concrete.

Nature had no hand these spaces. People hands had done the making.

As I walked through them, long before the cars, buses, and foot traffic, I recognized that, in their own way, the lines and curves came to gether with the light to make something not unpleasant, almost cheerful and oddly elegant. A thoughtful designer saw to it that the frontmost walls let in the natural light while blocking the street scene and its noises. I was grateful that the committee who approved the work had kept the touch of deep blue relief that was the ceiling.

As I waited, I imagined the space filled with people. The simplicity of the scene became chaotic and stressful with the movement, noise, and echoes.

Try as we might, humans don’t seem to make peaceful spaces for people outside the high ceilings of a place of worship, a library, or a space filled with a loving fmaily.

Have you found humanity in other places not made by nature?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!