It’s cloudy and rainy in Texas today. I’ve been hunkered down working hard (which means wrapped up in a blanket reading and jotting down notes as beautiful ideas dance around).
Anywho…I’m a new business owner who’s been successful probably because of random luck.
So now that I want to share my message and method a bit broader the key leveraged skill I need is to hone in on story and empathy in order for it to work on the interwebs.
Reading the intro to this book [The Confidence Game…Why We Fall for it….Every Time By Maria Konnikova]
I came across this section that tells the story of the shift in my message I’m working to create…I couldn’t figure out how to post the picture so I’m re-typing this, because I love you even though it’s a pain in the arse to re-type. 
…page 6 and 7
There’s a likely apocryphal story about the French poet Jacques Prevert. One day he was walking past a blind man who held up a sign: “Blind man without a pension.” He stopped to chat. How was it going? Were people helpful? “Not great,” the man replies. “Some people give, but not a lot- and most just keep walking.”
“Could I borrow your sign?” Pervert asked. The blind man nodded.
The poet took the sign, flipped it over, and wrote a message.
The next day, he again walked past the blind man. “How is it going now?” he asked. “Incredible,” the man replied. “I’ve never received so much money in my life.”
On the sign, Prevert had written: “Spring is coming, but I won’t see it.”
Give us a compelling story, and we open up.
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So that was super cool. I want my message to be heard, understood and help others. That’s why I’m a Chief now. So I can learn to share my voice over the interwebs just as well as I would face to face, or at least pretty close.
So I’ll share a story with you. My guys get tortured with pycho babble and self help awareness stuff all the time. It’s who I am and what I do.
When they were growing up we used to celebrate Chinese New Year’s mostly because the American New Year tradition is a bit crazy (in my humble opinion). The energy didn’t and still doesn’t jive with me. I’m the Tia (Spanish for Aunt) that stays home to play games with the kids while the adults go party kind of thing.
Anywho, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about education. Mostly because I’m done with the formal kind. A terminal degree means I’ve gone all the way up a ladder (maybe it means it’s time to find a new ladder, too).
So the latin definition of education si to educare- to draw out that which lies within. I love that. Made me own the fact that I’m a teacher. My work starts when a person wants to turn inward and explore the life within and between, cuz how we relate to ourselves and with others is the juice of life. The reason for the season kinda thing.
I degress. Anyway.. The founding fathers (of America) are rumored to have said that they were Soldiers ( I have to capitalize that because of my Army days) so their children can be farmers (entrepeneurs, in today’s day and age) so their children can be poets.
In December I positioned that with the guys to say “do your thing” as we were going through our New Year, New You ceremony. I shared with them, “that’s why your Dad and I busted hump to make our way, so that you could have a choice in how you live your life.”
But today, I’m rethinking that.
Maybe the waiting doesn’t have to be a generation away.
We’ve got long lives these days. Living to the triple digits isn’t unheard of.
My new idea is that, maybe I can be a poet in this lifetime. I do really want to be a poet.
Maybe that’s the turn I’ve taken from my days conforming to society to now helping others create and design their life and community.
It was so cool and so significant I had to stop in my tracks and document it, and share it with you.
Buckminster Fuller wrote, “If you want to teach people a new way of thinking, don’t bother trying to teach them. Instead, give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.”
Happy to write alongside you guys and gals.
And by hapenstance the sunlight has broken through the clouds and that’s my que to get out of my PJ’s – hope the rambling doesn’t hurt your eyes. It’s the vomit draft, ok?
P.S.
I originally shared this within Copy Chief, a community of Copy Writers on Saturday March 12, 2016. I thought it was worthy of being shared with you, too.