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It’s time to share my story. So much of blogging is about the personal within the community that I’ve decided to get a little more personal about who I am and why I’m here.

Whenever someone decides to devote a significant amount of time to one fairly narrow area of inquiry – say, personal and organizational change – you kind of have to ask why. What’s the motivation for me to spend so much time on this when I could be curled up with a good novel or watching Harry Potter movies?

For the last week I’ve been thinking about my life story. I’ve begun to realize that many of the events I’ve been through and many of the experiences that I’ve sought out have led me down this very path. Now, I’m not in to sensationalistic public confessions (and I haven’t done anything all that sensationalistic in my life, anyway), but it seems to me that it would provide a lot of context to my readers if I were to share some of this perspective.

A Child Apart
“If there is anything we wish to change in the child, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves.” Carl Jung

I was an only child for the first 3.5 years of my life. It was great. I had my parents’ undivided attention, a huge yard to play in, lots of presents, and the feeling of entitlement that many only children have.

Then my mother had twins.

I love my little sisters to death and I’m grateful every day that I have them in my life, now. At the time of their birth, however, I was unwillingly forced to learn my first hard lessons about change management. All of the sudden, everything in my world was different and I didn’t like it one bit. I’m quite sure that my lifelong interest in change was born on my sisters’ birthday.

The other interesting thing about having twin sisters is that my relationship with them will always be radically different from their relationship with each other. I’m not sure that anyone who isn’t a twin could possibly understand what it feels like to have an exact genetic copy of you running around in this world. From their first attempts at noise-making all the way up to now, they have their own way of communicating with each other. It’s a language I don’t speak, but I’ve always been curious about it.

Observing my sisters’ interactions was probably my first experience of research. I wasn’t a part of them, so the only thing I could do was stand apart and watch. This was a normal thing for me and it spilled over into lots of areas of my life. I was a curious kid and spent a lot of my childhood reading, looking at bugs and trees outside, and creating stories.

In a lot of ways, none of that has changed.

Music & Patterns
“Every Good Boy Does Fine” The Treble Clef

I was lucky enough to go to a school that hadn’t yet cut all music, gym, and art programs. My elementary school music teacher was a fantastic educator who truly loved music and teaching children. He taught us to read music, sing, keep time, and have fun with it all. Between those early classes and the gift of an incredibly cheap guitar from my aunt, I was soon asking for guitar lessons.

I took lessons on and off for a number of years until I got to be a pretty decent guitar player. After a while I began writing songs, which gave me the chance to work on combining words and music. A few years of this helped me notice that music is fundamentally a combination of patterns. Certain patterns of notes/sounds are pleasing to the human ear, while other patterns sound dissonant. This isn’t all that different from patterns of events. In the course of our lives, certain events are very comfortable and familiar, while those that deviate from those usual patterns are challenging and uncomfortable.

Like most people, I didn’t like the challenging and uncomfortable events that occurred in those days. I had a lot of anger problems as a kid and I was brutally hard on myself for even the most minor mistake. My family went through some challenging economic times and I took a lot of responsibility on myself for problems that I didn’t cause and couldn’t solve. Internalizing all of these negative emotions took a toll on my and I’ve had to deal with that ever since.

Fortunately, I never lost my curiosity and ability to step outside of myself and observe the world around me. This talent has served me well, as I’ll explain in future posts.

Ed. Note: If you can’t tear yourself away, continue on to Part 2.

Photo courtesy of cnw.

This time of year is always a challenge for me. The days are short and usually gray. My office is cold and work is piled up to the ceiling because of the year-end rush. All of these things combine to make me just a little cranky

If you ever struggle with a lot of feelings of negativity, I’m going to suggest an exercise that you’ve all heard of, but I’m guessing lots of people have never tried: Make a List of Things That You Are Grateful For. Like a lot of advice, this is completely unoriginal, but people keep doing it because it works. The U.S. has continued a holiday dedicated to being Thankful for over 400 years not because we’re crazy about Pilgrims and cornucopias, but because it makes us feel better.

Here are my 5 top things I’m grateful for right now:

1. My job, which gives me an opportunity to use my brain and help people.
2. The river behind my house. It just keeps flowing every day and reminds me to move forward.
3. The cool looking violet lights on the instrument panel of my car. They’re so much nicer than plain old white!
4. The Internet - best thing Al Gore ever did
5. Local food. I plan to eat and enjoy a lot of it tomorrow.

Ed. Note: I’m very grateful to learn about the 2007 Season of Gratitude just in time to participate. If you are interested in reading some very inspiring posts about gratitude, please visit the Balanced Life Center which has been posting on this theme for the last 30 days.

So I’m fighting I have a cold. Which I hate. I’m tired, my throat is sore and my eyeballs feel warm. I’m fairly sure I have a slight fever because it’s 72F in my office and I’m shivering. For my evening snack, I’ll be enjoying an Airborne cocktail.

But there is a positive lesson to be learned here.

Changing My View on Self-Care
Upon doing a little reflection last night, I realized that every time I have a mild illness, I treat myself better than when I’m healthy. For example, in a typical night I might try to: write a blog post, clean the house, get a hard workout in, and prepare meal from scratch all within the space of about four hours.

Clearly that wasn’t going to happen last night. I had to make a choice of fighting reality, or actually taking care of myself. I decided to take a few steps to recover faster. Here’s what I did:

• Walked hard on the treadmill with the goal of getting very warm, not exhausted.
• Ate a simple dinner of vegetables and protein – in my case a veggie burger.
• Took a hot shower, stretched out and went to bed early for about 9 hours of sleep.

What I realized is that I don’t have to wait for a cold or the flu to hit me before I take a night off. Just as I’ve given myself permission to take a weekend retreat occasionally, I need to learn to have a weeknight retreat every couple of weeks.

Ed. Note: This post is part of the Think Different Challenge, which was started by Peter at IWillChangeYourLife. I was delighted to be tagged by Tristan at the Synergy Institute. Be sure to check Tristan’s post for links back to posts written by other “tagees.” If you would like to participate in the Think Different Challenge here’s how.

The Think Different Challenge is all about finding something in your life you currently have negative thoughts or feelings towards (eg work or your mother-in-law), and deciding to look at it differently. It is about realizing that some things are just a part of life, so we may as well try to find the positives in them.

Who Can Participate?
This is an online writing project, so anyone who can publish text and active links on the internet can participate. Having your own website or blog is not a requirement, just write a post with links in your favorite social networking site.

The Rules
1. Write a new blog post in which you “think different”. Follow my suggestions above, or be a bit different and interpret the challenge the way you want .
2. State that the post is a part of the Think Different Challenge and include a link and/ or trackback to this post so that readers know the rules of the challenge. Feel free to use the above banner (inspired, of course, by Seth Godin).
3. Include a link and/ or trackback to the blogger who tagged you.
4. At the end of your post, go ahead and tag some fellow bloggers. Don’t forget to email them to let them know they have been tagged.
5. That’s it! Just sit back and enjoy reading peoples’ responses to the challenge.

Tag, You’re It
In keeping with the spirit of the Challenge, I’ve decided to tag several of my fellow bloggers. I’m currently participating in the Blog Mastermind program and I’m tagging other BMMers who write in similar niches.

Armannd at Project Armannd was the first person in my tag list to complete a post. The Benefits of Health Issues in Life describes how having a serious illness - maybe even a life-threatening one - can seriously motivate a person to focus and achieve more in his or her life.

Michelle Vandepas also had a cold and posted about it at Divine Purpose Unleashed. Her post, 7 Questions to Ask When You’re Sick challenges us to re-evaluate what an illness means and the signals that our body may be sending to us.

• Brooke at Plain Advice
• Brad Isaac at Achieve IT!
• Leigh at All for Women
• Adam at Life Goggles
• Sean at How to Manifest Your Dreams

Joanne at I’m Happy Fish has tagged me to reveal 8 completely random facts about me. Here goes:

1. I’m a Gemini and, boy do I feel it. I’m so good at seeing two sides to every situation that it can be paralyzing. That’s why Rock, Paper, Scissors is so important to me!
2. My father’s parents were born in Poland and survived World War II in labor camps in Germany. I like to think I’m made from tough stuff.
3. I broke my toe once just by stubbing it really hard on my bed frame.
4. I still own my Transformers and Masters of the Universe toys from my childhood. Anyone interested in purchasing a Battle Armor He-Man?
5. Kurt Vonnegut is my hero. I had the chance to hear him speak when I was an undergrad. He assigned us to all write a poem with rhyming couplets that very evening and said, “We don’t do art to make money. We do it to make our souls grow.”
6. I “won” NaNoWriMo last year. Still haven’t finished the story, though.
7. I’m always on the lookout for new lentil recipes.
8. I once got to pet a cheetah.

So, there you have it. Since it’s my obligation to pass the meme on, I’m tagging:

• Brooke at Plain Advice
• Leigh at All for Women
• Pamela Slim at Escape from Cubicle Nation
• Henrik at The Positivity Blog
• and, just to see what happens, Steve Pavlina

Today I was driving on the highway when I saw a billboard with the quote, “Life is a temporary assignment.” Have you ever had one of those moments, when your mind makes about 10,000 connections all at once? Yeah, that was me.

Life is a Temporary Assignment. Everything changes all the time. We live in constant flux at all levels of our existence. That is why I write this blog. Learning to deal with change is fundamental to our lives as individuals, as groups, as civilizations.

I’m not naive enough to think that I will ever understand the true essence of change. For one thing, I don’t know if there IS an essence to change. For another, I don’t really believe I’m smart enough to know all there is to know about the Universe (my sisters are snorting Coke through their noses right now!).

My goal at this point in time is find some practical ways of dealing with the ever-shifting nature of my reality. If in doing so I can help others, that is a Good Thing. If anyone out there has some help for me, I’m open to suggestions.

For those who need a little extra motivation to start exploring, here is another quote from the back of my brain:
YOU HAVE A LIMITED TIME TO LIVE.