Nancy Love’s Weblog

What are your tricks for keeping the resolutions, the promises you make to yourself?

For me it is about not sleeping until you have completed your list.  That is not always easy, especially when your day kind of gets away from you and the demands of other people take priority.  That is something I am working on this year – maintaining my own agenda.  When crisis is constant you can become numb to the emotional spikes and maintain a stable emotional environment but sometimes actually getting your STUFF done becomes pretty much impossible.  There are just not enough hours in the day, days in the week and weeks in the month.

This year is about committing to the STUFF for me.  I want to get things done, to know what needs done and to ensure it happens.  I want to set a calendar and meet the deadlines I set for myself, without being sidetracked and without feeling any guilt.  This is a serious goal and could be difficult to achieve but I’m on it.  Days like today make that kind of promise to self more difficult to keep.

I spent most of today working to print business cards for our St Albert Office. Tomorrow I am attending a Chamber of Commerce luncheon and wanted to be able to network with cards that featured the Office and not just the PULSE Institute.  First delays while the web provider sorted out their problems as I was trying to set the email that would be on the card and then the printer not quite responding and then me not knowing how to set up the business card printing, made for a long day spent fighting with our supposed friend – technology.

Writing is a big part of my goal this year.  I need to carve out the time to write this year like I did when I was writing my dissertation.  If anyone has ideas about how to guards that precious time alone that it takes to create the works that others can respond to and help to edit and rewrite.  Step one is lonely and necessarily so.  I’m okay with that.  Just need to force myself into isolation and I need to write to you everyday…

Hope everyone had a great Christmas. I’m writing this blog on my new iPhone. Santa brought me one and today is the first opportunity to sit and play. I can read my favorite books, watch my favorite tv shows, search the web, check the weather, use my newfy translator and so much more. I can even write my blogs, check email, edit documents on the cloud. Everything I can do on my iPad I can so on this little screen. I have 13,000 photos and 5,000 songs. It’s amazing. Last night four of my close family members were playing hang man with each other on their devices while sitting on the coaches in my tv room. Hmmm. Life is different and yet the same in many ways these days.

It is that time of year again when we consider the whole question of Peace on Earth and what it takes to get there.  We are still a planet at war and with each passing year we move in and out of war and peace along a continuum that doesn’t seem to have made much progress in the years that I have been here.. on the planet that is.  One step forward and two back might fit here.  I participated in Peace Week earlier this year by listening to a number of renowned speakers shared their thoughts on peace and what it takes.

I go back to what I learned years ago…”Think Globally and Act Locally.” In order for the world to be more peaceful I must start with me.  How can I contribute to a world with less conflict and more peace and harmony?  Where are the struggles and conflicts in my life that need my immediate attention and how will those small steps impact a world at war???   It seems tiny… minute even … but just as the flapping of a butterfuly’s wings changes the weather miles away … our small efforts to create peace in our corner of the world are felt far away.  Believe in the ripple effect of peaceful conversation and we can cocreate a peaceful world one conversation at a time… one conversation after another.

My invitation to you is to consider Gentle Honest Open Specific Talk with your friends and relatives this holiday seasons.  Speak so others can hear you and listen with HEART.  See how your world, your relationships can change just by raising these skills to a conscious level over the next few weeks and use that momentum to guide you inot a wonderully peaceful 2012.

This morning I received a message that this blog had a new follower… possibly from Ghana.  Welcome!  We at PULSE have many friends at Ghana and many PULSE practionners have put the Frame to use there with great success resolving differences even between warring tribes there.  I have been invited to Ghana many times but have not had the privilege of visiting there…yet.

One of my projects this winter is to write a novel.  One of the settings is Ghana as the hero of the story searches for the secret of peace among nations.  Ghana, Canada and Jordan are three countries were peaceful choices were made when their neighbours went to war.  The hero’s circumstances conspire to create an urgent curiousity about peaceful nations and the lessons to be learned there.  He begins a quest, an appreciative inquiry into peace.

It started as a serious academic look at the situation when Canada stayed out of Iraq.  I had our summer student put together documents outlining how all three countries had histories that were different from their neighbours and my own curiousity peeked. Like most writers the timeliness of the project got away with me as I was doing other things and so now that I do have some time to spend with the research I am not sure how relevant it will be.  Pair that with my recent experience as a member of a book club where I am forced to read novels and my mother’s very serious question “Why don’t you ever write stories??” and VOILA… the idea of using the research to write a story was born.

I am very lucky that I have friends in Ghana and in Jordan who can read the book for me and advise as to the accuracy of the facts of the situation that I describe in it.  I am also lucky that my brother is a geek.  I have set the novel in the future and I am having such fun playing with the technology.  All of the gadgets I have dreamed up are possible with today’s technology and I have put ones we now use to further use as technologies merge.  I am having so much fun inventing things that provide convenience and make life easier in some ways and restricted in others. My brother smiles alot when we talk about it.

My dilemma right now is how to find the time to actually sit and write.  It is a lot like the winter I wrote my dissertation.  I am torn by this desire to spend time with family and friends especially in December and my need to capture the thoughts on paper or on the screen.  I am working towards 8 hour days with coffee and lunch breaks.  With most of the creative work in place it is now time to settle in and write.  It is now my JOB to get the manuscript written and to find a publisher who might be interested in this future best seller.  Meanwhile I play with titles and ask friends and colleagues to listen to or read excerpts but not too many and only those who will provide positive feedback.  I am still vulnerable with the story, meaning that if anyone said…”who would be interested in a story like that?”  I would be devastated and have to put it aside.  It is my baby and it is beautiful to me.

The Ghana piece, although it has been well researched, lacks my own personal experience of that beautiful country and so I am considering when might be a good time in the process to make the journey.  I would like to have some sort of manuscript in hand before I go … one that I feel comfortable sharing with the people there.

I had an interesting experience this week.  someone contacted me through the Canadian Association of Professional speakers.  They indicated that they wanted me to come to London England to speak at a seminar on business at a school for the arts – Bird College.  I was flattered but a little confused and sceptical.  I continued a conversation through email on black berry for a few days while I was travelling.  they had sent documents like a letter of invitation and a contract but I was unable to open them until I got home.  the documents lacked the quality of a post secondary institution and some holes were appearing in the discussion as it proceeded.  The email address of the person who contacted me did not match the pattern of the ones on the website and when I followed the pattern for my contact, the email bounced.

I was instructed to first acquire a work permit and present it along with the signed contract so that travel arrangements could be made by the college.  The catch … the work permit money was to be paid to an individual with at least two names – one in the email and one in the return email address.  Over  $1000.00 dollars for a work visa for a one hour speech???  Hmmmm  I sent back an “I’m confused” email and got a phone call from the professor Davis Smith I had been corresponding with.  He had a Chinese accent?  Curiouser and curiouser….  he wanted to assure me that once I sent the money for the visa to this Dr. Lewis that the college would pay everything and I should send the money right away to avoid delays in the issuing of the visa.  I don’t think so…..

It was a pretty good attempt at a scam, complete with scheduled conference call with other presenters at the seminar and a representative at the Embassy.  These folks are getting pretty sophisticated.  We all need to be extra diligent and check and double-check everything I guess.  It is so not in my nature to be suspicious but I have learned a valuable lesson here that I hope others can benefit from.  It is sometime important to look at the world through the lens of the Security BEACH so as to protect yourself and others from the unscrupulous beaviour of others. “Shields Up!!”

Hello from St John in the Virgin Islands.  I have been here before but today was the first time I had spent a whole day on this beautiful island in the Caribbean. It is so warm and tropical and relaxing that it is hard to think about working although the people who live here do just as we do in the north… they get up and go to work each day.  The difference is that they go to work in paradise.

When I lived in the resort town of Grande Cache I felt that way.  People in town would say …”Just another day in Paradise.”  The tourist came and went and we stayed.  It was awesome.  And today I got a chance to go to work in paradise again.  Marjorie and I did a BEACHs webinar.  How appropriate ..with a BEACH right outside my window.  We talked about each of the nine perspectives and the significance of a sociological construct for understanding human interaction.  It was great…and I forgot to press record.  I hate that when it happens.  Brilliant seminar and no proof.

Well … what can you do?  You can go downtown and get the signature bracelet for the Island… the St John Hook.  It is a symbol of love and connection, beautiful in its simplicity and complex in its meaning … like other symbols I know.

Good Evening from the Islands….