We are all maxed out on tension, confusion, excitement and chaos. But now it’s a good chaos. I personally think all chaos is good chaos, but even I have to agree that some breakthroughs are better than others.

For starters, I find it easier to know where I stand when it’s about ending racism, bigotry, police brutality and white privilege. Although I am not nearly as well informed as I thought I was, I know where to find the right kind of information on Black Lives Matter. It’s not in the mainstream news accounts and apps. It’s in the blogs, social media accounts and websites of a growing list of African Americans that are organizing the information and protests.

Here are some that I am following: @rachel.cargle, @shaunking, @taranajaneen, @fiyawata, @tamikadmallory. This is a time in which I feel that more than talking I need to be asking: Where do you need me? And listening to the answers.

The books I am reading: White Fragility by Robin Diangelo, So You Want To Talk About Race, by Ijeoma Oluo and How To Be An AntiRacist by Ibram X. Kendi. There’s more. These are the ones I’m reading right now.

What’s going on right now makes me feel that good change can happen. There are no lost causes. And justice is possible. No matter how long it takes.

Sometimes, it’s grounding to know where you stand. I mean, making the actual statement, on paper, with ink. And making the commitment to learn what we don’t know, actively fight for what we believe in, and making sure we leave everything better than we found it.

I know. Everything’s changed. But has it? You are still you. You have tools. You wanted a change. Procrastinated. Or not. And here we are. In a situation where we feel we have no power. If you were caught unprepared, please know nobody could have prepared for this pandemic. Unless you were part of the 1%ers, you were minding your own business, trying to live life in your own terms as much as possible and doing your best in every aspect of your life.

At the same time, we are all in survival mode now. And if you do what you carry in your DNA as a human being, you will ask for help, you will share your resources with others and perdido por perdido you will take advantage of the gap this pandemic has created to take a chance on yourself and start working on what you love to do. Most of us have very little to lose at this point. And maybe that is the beauty of this emergency. What scared you yesterday, like taking a chance on yourself, leaving your 9-5 to do your passion, losing what you already had (secure job, sure paycheck, etc) is already lost. So this could be your trampoline toward a bigger, wider, longer version of yourself.

Know that there is always help out there if you ask for it.

I have started an IG account with a friend (@emotional_first_aid_kit) where we share thoughts and practices that we do to manage our emotional wellbeing.

Yes, we all need to dedicate daily time to manage our emotional and mental state. Otherwise we succumb to whatever is going on outside of us. Or bad news. Or our inner demons.

If you need help, reach out. Stay safe. Unless staying safe means stay stuck to you. In that case, be prudent and take a chance on yourself.

Abrazón

This is the time where we all take score of our accomplishments during the soon-to-end year and prepare to receive the new one. The whole planet is doing it. If you pay attention, you might feel how the buzz and movement of normal business slows down as everyone prepares for the holidays.

Was your year how you planned it at the beginning? What happened to your New Year’s resolutions? Did you show more people, or the right people, what you can do? Did you make the money you wanted? Were you able to put your work out there to be appreciated?

It all starts in December, each year, and what makes part of the difference between success and failure to get things done, is taking note of how you feel about what actually happened during the year. And then, only then,  make plans for the brand new year.

It’s vital to write down what you want to accomplish during the next year. It’s the secret weapon of successful people. So take some time off to sit with yourself and bring up, from pure desire, what you want your new year to be like. Write it down. Put a deadline to each item.

The next step is to choose the strategy you will use to get the job done. And we’ll talk about that on the next post. Until then, have an inspired day!

Story is of the utmost importance to all communicators. Actually, we could go as far as saying it’s vital to all humans. Story is a way of organizing facts, feelings, events, people in our lives and more. It’s how we make sense of life and things.

It’s been used in communication ever since the caves were our choice of dwelling. And it will be our instrument until the very end.

So get your story straight. Choose consciously what, how and when you want to introduce each character and event. Be strategic. Practice with family and friends. Talk to the walls if you have nobody that will listen. The more you do it, the better you will become.

Use words, smells, photos and other props to get started. Improvise. Record. Listen. And then listen some more.

When the time comes to go public, you will be ready.

Every time we open our mouth to say something or pose our fingertips to the keyboard with the intention of writing a piece, a lot of stuff that we don’t want to say comes up. If we think about public speaking, we get nervous. Why? Many reasons. But one that nobody talks about is that we get a surge of things into our awareness that we don’t want to say. Inappropriate, tabu, out of place, inconvenient, random events or opinions that either have nothing to do with the subject about which we want to communicate, or are directly embarrassing to us or others.

When we get the impulse or make the decision to communicate our subconscious gets agitated. It is an opportunity for expression and our disowned selves rush to have their say. Imagine a prison. A journalist arrives and says she will film the prisoners’ testimony and bring it out to the world. All the prisoners would start banging their metallic mugs against the bars to catch the journalist’s attention. The prison is your subconscious; the prisoners are your disowned selves and you are the journalist willing to put the message out into the world.

But why do we have disowned selves in the first place? It sounds harsh to depict them as prisoners. Well, some of them are traits we were born with and were banned into oblivion because our culture and our family deemed them unsuitable and/or dangerous. Some examples of these selves could be The Outspoken if you are a woman, or The Sensitive if you are a man. Others are universally unfit and dangerous and were suppressed, but not eliminated, into our unconscious; these are archetypes such as the killer, the robber, the rapist.

And this is why every time we make a move to communicate some unwanted content comes up. If we are not aware of this process, we have a hard time following through with our message. The discomfort we feel wins over and we either desist or produce some content that sounds safe, boring and inauthentic.

One of the tricks to move through it and bring out the good stuff is to write freely for five minutes without even checking what the content is. At some point our subconscious calms down and we are able to focus on what we really want to say.

Bear in mind that those five minutes of nonsense could be worth 10 sessions of therapy. And form the basis of your next juicy project.

What do you stand for? Do you have a vision for the world? For your life? What makes you really angry? What makes you truly happy? What are you naturally good at?

When you answer these questions you start having a picture of where your passion might be. Combine the answers into different possibilities until you feel you have it.

Let me lead the way. I stand for freedom of choice and independence. I see a world where solidarity and good will eradicate hunger and poverty and a human being is just that, a human being, no matter color, gender, age, size. I envision my life as one of service and help to others. I am angered by abuse and privilege. I am happy when in nature, surrounded by those I love and also by myself. I am good at communicating both verbally and in writing. So that’s the service I give. I help people communicate who they are, what they do in a way that represents them in the clearest way possible to their natural public.

I know, it’s not always this easy and that’s why I love it. The quest for the right identity, the perfect way of expressing it, the ideal media, the organic public.

So who are you?