Most of every writer’s day will be spent alone. Writing must be the most solitary sport, an internal Olympic competition featuring cognitive Greco-Roman wrestling, conceptual Winter Biathlon, and solitary synchronized swimming. The games always involve dredging up to translate, rediscovery more than invention, rearranging the same old notes into new-sounding tunes. Like with all games, the boundaries deeply influence play and the rules, originally arbitrary, seem inexorable now.

The trick, once mastering bald aloneness, lies in daily re-mastering it, for solitude serves as no more than soil within which unlikely seeds might sprout, where the completely cognitive and conceptual push beyond the leaf litter into space where anyone might experience them. What blooms seems so very different from the parent seed or rhizome that even the solitary gardener might mistake them for volunteers, accidents of potential, nutrients, and time. Slip over here for more ...

Tags: Working, Writing, Living, Manifesting, Consulting BriefConsulting

Ever since roosters started crowing in threes, denial has been the first stage of acceptance. Each adventure worthy of the label begins with a good, old-fashioned denial of the call, for without rejecting the premise, no real adventure could ever ensue. Willing volunteers need not apply. Conscripts must go AWOL. True adventure requires denial.

The premise always proves faulty; there are no true pretenses, only false ones. Questioning any premise makes logical sense even if it renders the questioner into a huge pain in the butt. Small misconceptions explode adventure. Questioning premise produces the preconditions necessary for relationship, and adventuring is always a relational experience, even if it seems like it’s just a transaction involving nobody but me, myself, and I. Slip over here for more ...

Tags: Working, Writing, Living, Manifesting

A BriefConsultant walks into a bar. That’s a premise. What’s the punchline?

It’s one thing to pose a premise and quite another to bring down the house with a punchy punchline. Too late, once I’ve posed the premise, to change it to match the punch line. Punchline follows premise, so perhaps I’d better write the punchline first.

My favorite punchline: I would have but I needed the wool. What premise works with that?

A Client walks into a bar, announcing that he’s thought he was a sheep for thirty years. “Why didn’t you mention this before?” the bartender asks.

”I would have, but the consultant I hired to help needed the wool.” (Insert rim shot here.) Slip over here for more ...

Tags: Working, Writing, Living, Manifesting

It hurts my eyes to think about it, my mind casts around for shadows to hide behind. My own brilliance blinds me sometimes and blindsides me the rest of the time. I have no control over it. No will or volition, no intention guides it. It gooshes around the gaskets, often unnoticed in the moment it appears. Later, when I’m cleaning up some crusty mess, I might glimpse its presence, its past presence, for it’s never present for me, just past. Like light finally washing across a familiar landscape, light that left its source light-millenia ago; far, far from home by the time it finally arrives.

It feels used up, pull-dated, expired, never inspiring. I shove through disbelief into ragged acceptance of mere possibilities. It’s never enough to suspend my unwavering disbelief, I must rough my way deep into it and struggle slime-covered back out again before any magic seems possible, let alone manifesting. Nobody’s in control of anything, really, except for some intermittent illusion almost resembling control. Slip over here for more ...

Tags: Working, Writing, Living, Manifesting

I suppose every language contains poison words, ones best avoided. These words twist back on themselves, biting their own butt, flipping their intended meaning; poisoning.

My poison word list remains gratefully short, though I constantly catch myself teetering on the edge of invoking every one of them. My list?
Should
Must
Do
Can
Is

You must read what follows because it should help you do all you can. It is the truth. Slip over here for more ...

Tags: Living, Working, Writing, Manifesting

It always starts with a phone call. Not the sort of call prompted by any email barrage advertisement because ads don’t apply to this sort of work. Nobody consults the yellow pages or any of the multitude of social media equivalents to find a BriefConsultant, either. Nobody would ever believe the claims such an ad would have to make to accurately represent the proposed service. This Brief Consultant could never really describe what he might do, anyway.

It follows, then, that there will be no response drafted to any Request For Proposal. This work doesn’t work that way, either. This limits the domains within which I might operate, but gratefully so. This is no retail trade. Slip over here for more ...

Tags: Working, Writing, Living, Manifesting

I love listening to the radio because it projects better pictures than television or movies. I rarely feel a part of television or a movie because the roles are too finely cast—I can never escape being merely an observer. Books are better, but they demand my active participation as translator. Radio seems the perfect medium to fuzz the separation between here and there. Piped directly into my head, I simply close my eyes to close the distance between the story and me. I can inhabit a radio drama’s story almost as if it were my own.

When I hear you telling your story, I sometimes experience a taste of story envy. I want to inhabit your story. Your adventure might have been mine, if only I’d been there at the time. Slip over here for more ...

Tags: Living, Working, Writing, Manifesting

As a veteran presenter of The Changing Change Management Conference, I could be mistaken for a master change agent. I’m not. I’m more of a skilled foot-dragger, quite sensitive to even minor disruptions in my routine. I do not warmly embrace difference. I am not hankering to champion any kind of improvement, more prepared to cope with what seems to be than sculpt something different.

I recently read a book written a little over a hundred years ago. The author complained about the mind-numbing pace of change in these modern times. We, today, feel ourselves especially vulnerable to shifting perspectives. I suspect this sense has always been a feature of modern life, modern being defined as any moment any human has been present and alive. Slip over here for more ...

Tags: Working, Writing, Living, Manifesting

Push comes to shove before achieving stasis; an anticipated pushover stalls. No bully in the world ever expects anything but dominion. No schlemiel ever expected to stem any tide, but here we are, head-to-head, stalemated. Your will subtracted from my will equals equilibrium. My zero sum game combines with your zero sum game to yield exactly zero.

Few, head to head, reconsider the game. The strategy’s failed, the tactics moot, yet the sticky residue of win and lose holds those opposing foreheads in place. Neither can see any alternative space from there: eyes locked, imagination seized up, too. We still believe we might bull through. Relenting can’t even qualify as unthinkable because it’s unimaginable from there. Slip over here for more ...

Tags: Working, Writing, Living, Manifesting

I innocently downloaded the iOS 7 upgrade. I claim innocence because I had no idea that I was undermining my mobile experience. Like every upgrade in the history of the world so far, this one degraded pretty much everything. I suppose some user experience expert had determined just what I needed. Like always, their expertise translated into cluelessness.

I make it a policy to always stay as far behind current as possible with everything. I have a hundred year-old lawnmower. I use a ten year old version of Adobe Acrobat^®. I used a 1992 version of MS Word until I could no longer find a machine it ran on, then did not purchase the snazzy unusable more modern version. Looking at the more modern Word was enough for me to decide to be forever MicroSoft-free. Slip over here for more ...

Tags: Working, Writing, Living, Manifesting