Out with the old, in with the new.

That’s my motto right now. I reserve the right to change it, if/when it suits me, but that seems to be the flavor of my thinking lately.

Ever have the feeling your business could use an emema? I did/do, and I’ve been laying down on that table for quite some time now.

To help steer me away from expanding on that metaphor, and to give you some context, let me give you some background. This will be especially helpful for those of you who haven’t known me all that long, all that well, or just are curious about the path I’ve come to tread and where this blog is going. I’ll try to be succinct…

Tra-la-la-ing down memory lane…

When I was 24, I went to a school for energetic healing, which soon became spiritual/energetic healing, and after graduating, I taught for them. But, since it was part-time, I had a private practice on the side, and started teaching groups, too. One thing morphed into another, and I was a healer/intuitive/teacher/thingy, and needed a platform. That platform became Monk at Work.

When my long-time buddy Dawud Miracle got me into blogging (so now you know who to thank/blame), the only way I thought to write was the same way I’d been doing for my email newsletters and for my classes, which was the Authority model. As in, “I’m the authority, and here’s what you need to know.” Which is great, if that’s what you think you need. But, as you’ll soon see, that set me up for some rough times…

Time passed. I kept writing, learning, and teaching. My subscribers grew, and life was good. Until the bottom fell out.

About two years ago, the school I was teaching with underwent both a metamorphosis and a financial crunch, and I found myself jobless. Not a huge deal, I thought; I saw it coming for a long time. I figured I’d be fine with my own classes, clients, and products, and life would continue on pretty much as it had before.

And it was good. I enjoyed my work, I kept on writing, and, free of the organization that had shaped so much of my development for so many years, and all the expectations that came along with it, I was free to explore my spiritual path without anyone “looking over my shoulder”, so to speak. I was accountable to no one but myself.

But then, doubts that I had long been suppressing arose. Rumors that had been circulating were examined. Curtains were lifted, and I peered behind them. And—long story carefully sidestepped—I didn’t like what I found.

This led to a lot of soul searching. And a lot of research. And a lot of raging. And a few pity parties (I was the only one who attended, though, thank god). And I came to a few inescapable conclusions:

• I didn’t like how exclusionary my beliefs had become.
• I didn’t feel the same kind of joy with my spiritual path as I once did.
• I didn’t like having my spiritual well-being and my financial well-being merged into one vehicle.
• I had lost my spiritual direction, and going back to it was not an option.

Now, if you think this is easy for me to write about, you’re dead wrong. I’m practically crapping in my pants writing this right now, because I’ve never said this publicly before. Imagine: the financial well-being of your wife and kids, who count on you for the roof over their heads and the food on their plates, is on your shoulders. You have clients, students, and people in your community who look to you for direction, and you no longer have answers for them. All of your so-called status is wrapped up in something that just evaporated like a fart in the wind. And now, you’re talking about it with the world.

What do you do?

Well, I have no idea what you’d do, but here’s what I did: I quit teaching. I completed with all my clients and handed them to someone else. I collapsed my website and tried going in a different direction (Viverati, I’m looking at you). I plunged headlong into a long-time hobby of mine—webdesign—and beefed up my skills to the point where I could go professional with it. I learned more about WordPress that I knew there was to know, and I keep learning more all the time. In short, I took a side passion and ran with it, because my old roads had been demolished.

But still, Monk at Work remains.

This blog remains. You remain, reading this. And even though I haven’t felt very Monkish in quite some time, I realize that this is my home, and I want to be here. I want to have you here. But not as your Authority.

When I announced Monk at Work’s Grand Re-Opening, I thought I could just waltz back in and start writing again. But with all that got washed away in my great flood, the Authority model got washed away with it.

Every week I think, “I really need to write a blog post”, but I haven’t been able to. My habits turn to the Authority model, but my heart is somewhere else. I’m not the Authority anymore, if I ever even was. I’m just me, in a monk’s clothing (speaking of, if anyone knows where I can get some saffron monk’s robes, I’d love to know).

It took some time, some conversations with my wife, and a few good examples to see that I have a voice without the Authority, and it’s worth sharing.

Besides, I don’t think being teachy-preachy really helps all that much. What I think helps is having friends to share the journey with, hearing the real story from what people go through, and learning from the experiences of others. The people I like to read the most aren’t proselytizing, they’re just being themselves. The funnier, the crazier, the more unique, the more honest and authentic, the better. I don’t expect them to be “the world’s best”; I expect them to be themselves.

Whether people show up at their finest, or fall flat on their face, makes no difference. I feel closer to them when they’re being honest, and I learn either way. So why, on God’s Green Earth, am I expecting something else from myself, and from you?

So, here’s the wake-up call.

If you’ve been reading me because you want a perfect model of how to be/do/have something, it’s time to unsubscribe, and search for your own personal guru somewhere else. There are plenty of people out there who would love to take your fawning admiration and inflate themselves with it, but I’m no longer one of them. It disgusts me that I used to be in that fraternity, even if it wasn’t a conscious intention of mine to be there. It happened, and I’m putting it behind me.

If you’re wanting to hear the personal journey of a man trying to live consciously, do good things, learn fun stuff, get in damn good shape, and unleash his triple-Virgo self all over what it takes to operate a successful website, then stick around. I’m planning to share my insights on all the stuff I’m interested in, from productivity to WordPress to macs, from CrossFit to personal development to social media, and try to do it all as genuinely and authentically as I can. No promises of brilliance, no claims to perfection, no one-up/one-down teacher/student relationships. Just me. Just you.

Image by pixelfahrenheit20.
Just friends.

© Adam for Adam Kayce, 2008. | Permalink | 30 comments

Whereas I am but a small drop in a large ocean, Merlin is a pretty good-sized pebble, to put it mildly. Owner of 43folders, Merlin’s humor and helpful wisdom have spared many thousands of people from the bowels of a boring, monotonous, unproductive worklife, not to mention the all-too-common attempts of the “I’m the new productivity guru on the block!”, please-let-this-blogging-thing-make-me-money crowd.

So, if you haven’t seen what Merlin has been writing lately, and if you’re wondering why I haven’t posted in so long, you really have to go take a look. Seriously.

Now, I’m not about to pawn the explanation of my silence off on Merlin’s shoulders, but he so eloquently puts into words a whole bunch of my feelings about blogging, attention, and the social-media-crack that’s running rampant these days, that it just wouldn’t make sense for me to try to do it any better than he has.

Read it? Good.

Now, on to my side of the story.

When I stopped writing over at Viverati (my old, old site) in June `08, it wasn’t really a planned hiatus. I just woke up one day and realized I didn’t have anything else to say. At least, for the time being.

As faithful readers know, I transitioned from Monk at Work to Viverati with the intention of expanding my scope, to include all kinds of stuff about all kinds of stuff, and not just about spirituality and personal development, and how they interface with our work life.

But, as it turns out, expanding my scope meant losing my focus. And that exposed an underlying issue that needed to be dealt with.

Namely, that I was blogging for the wrong reasons.

When I got into blogging, it seemed like a great marketing idea. I thought, “I’ll write about healing, personal development, and spirituality, and people will like it so much, they’ll hire me as a healer, take one of my workshops, or buy one of my products. Yeah, that’s the ticket!”

Did it work? A little. Not as much as I’d hoped, and it turned out that feeding the blogging-and-social-media-beast took more out of me than I wanted to admit. Arbitrary (and sometimes grueling) publishing schedules, and the pressure to post!post!post! took precedence over listening to the inner voice than wanted to speak. It ended up taking more than it gave, at least on the outside.

But what did come out of it was priceless; the realization that community is really important to me. That people come first, and everything else second. And that I no longer wanted to hawk my spirituality for money.

Sound harsh? Maybe it is. But the deeper I got into realizing what worked for me on a heart-level, the more I saw that I wanted to separate my income from my searching. And, since I had been deriving my family’s income from being a healer for over ten years, there was a lot to unravel and rework.

Hence, the hiatus. I couldn’t put words to what I was going through, and I still don’t know if I can. But what ensued was a complete re-tooling of my business, my spirituality, my interests, and my writing here.

On the other side…

As you can see, I’m now putting a many-year hobby into use and doing web work full-time. But, once a teacher, forever a teacher… the focus of my work as a webdesigner is less about designing, and more about teaching people how to use their sites to do whatever they want to do (which, from what I hear, is a far more precious commodity than webdesign).

And the blogging? Yep, I’m back to blogging, but no longer am I blogging to feed the beast, and no longer will I hold myself to someone else’s standards of what I should be writing, or how often, or the number of links per post needed to get to the front page of whatsawhoosit. Screw all that.

If I can’t write authentically, in every way, then I can’t write.

If I’m writing by rules that aren’t my own, then I can’t write.

And if I’m not writing something that matters to me, then I doubt it’s going to matter much to you, either.

So thank you, Merlin, for once again paving the way, for helping me open the door that I’d closed and held shut for so long.

So, what now?

We’ll see, really. I’m not pretending to know how this is going to go, nor am I promising that everything is about to go back to how it was. Quite the opposite, really, in case you couldn’t guess.

What I do know is this: I’m committed to writing about what I care about. It’s going to be from my perspective, as all writing is, if the writer is being honest. Some of you will stay, and some will go, and that’s fine. Community is a fluid thing, and I get that.

And, as Vitor helped me to see, it’s about the person, not the URL. Monk at Work, Viverati, whatever… the door has opened again, and I’m walking through it.

Image by mrhayata.

© Adam for Adam Kayce, 2008. | Permalink | 22 comments

If the beacon had no signal — no light, no sound, nothing to announce its presence — it would have no usefulness. A hidden beacon does no one any good.

You’ve been given light. You’ve been given a voice. Are you doing the most with it, or trying to hide the fact that you’re here?

Of course, the logical answer is that you want to shine your light for all to see. And yet, I’ve seen plenty of people (myself included) shy away from standing clearly in who they are, because of stories in their past.

If you’ve been given the message in your life that you don’t count, or that you should just be quiet (the old “seen, not heard” dogma), or that people don’t want to know what you have to say, then you’ve most likely got old stories playing in your psyche that tell you it’s best if you don’t take up space.

But taking up space is what you’re here to do; in fact, you can’t be of much use to others if you don’t.

Let’s take a trip down memory lane…

Here’s a word you probably haven’t heard since high school: sovereignty. To be sovereign can mean two things: “autonomous”, like a country is when it sets its own borders (thank you Mr. Kaplan, my high school geography teacher), and “ruler”, as in a nation’s head of state, the one with the highest power or status within the country.

To be successful— purposeful, peaceful, and working at your potential—you’ve got to have both angles of sovereignty covered.

• When you’re autonomous, it means you make your own decisions. Naturally, you’d like to think you make your own decisions already. On the most basic level, you do. And then again… how often are you set to do something, and then a comment by a friend, colleague, or so-called expert has you throwing away your choice in favor of their idea?
• When you’re the sovereign, or ruler, it means you’re in charge, and you call the shots. As someone in charge of your own business, you have that by default… but, do you really? How willing are you to concede control to someone you think knows better? Do you trust your sense of where you should steer your business more than you listen to criticisms and popular trends?

Sovereignty is a process, not a concept that you grasp and then the conversation ends. Living with sovereignty means growing beyond the voices of your past that tell you it’s best not to be noticed, to be in charge, or to speak up for yourself.

Whether it’s running a business with sovereignty, owning your half of a relationship, or being taken seriously as a parent, sovereignty happens when you recognize that you deserve to occupy the space you occupy. That you have just as much a right to be heard as anyone else does. And that independent of anything else, your work, your contribution, your voice, has value.

Can you say that about your message? Your business? Yourself?

When you can, not only will you have much more peace in your heart as you work, but you’ll also be much more attractive to the patrons out there who need your work. Because deep down, we all want to feel sovereign in our own way. When you stand as a beacon of sovereignty in your life, it provides a strength of conviction that’s attractive to others, and people will come to you to learn your secret.

Image by wetsun.

© Adam for Adam Kayce, 2008. | Permalink | 2 comments

With all these gazillions of blogs out there, it sure can seem like a lot of noise.

So, does the world need your blog?

If it’s a spam blog, the answer is clearly no.
If it’s a blog about your cat, well, good for you — but sharing with it anyone but your cat isn’t really necessary.
But if you write because of something that you have a passion about, then I’d say yes — the world needs your blog. Very much.

Why?

Because you are a shining star in the firmament of the universe.
You are a jewel like none other.
You are a rose in bloom, honeyed and resplendent.

Let me ask you something, honestly: Did you read that last bit, or did you skip over it? Did you really take it in, as if I was writing to you (yes, you), or did you brush it off as banality?

As Horton said, “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant; an elephant (ahem, monk) is faithful one hundred percent.” I really do mean it when I say that you are special, precious, and unique.

How can I say that, when I don’t even know who’s reading this?

Because I believe — not as an airy-fairy dream, but because I’ve seen it in everyone I’ve ever met — that you have a special purpose inside of you. You have a light burning inside you to share with the world. It’s your contribution, your precious gift, your offering to the world.

And the world needs that. We need your gift. We need your voice. When you share your passion and your purpose, letting yourself be moved by the stirrings of your deepest yearnings for life, joy, connectedness, and expression, then the world benefits from your contribution.

Just as a symphony wouldn’t be complete without the contribution of the violins, the world around you hasn’t experienced fullness until you’ve given what you have to give.

So, does the world need your blog?

If you’re just adding to the noise, then no, probably not.
But if you’re sharing the music inside you, then yes. A resounding, full, and overwhelming yes.

Image by MyklR.

And thanks to all those who commented on the two previous posts so far: Pixelhead, Wendy Piersall, Joanna Young, Dawud Miracle, EM Sky

© Adam for Adam Kayce, 2007. | Permalink | 31 comments