Karen Clark is a business dynamo who guides people to succeed in online businesses. She is also a wife, mother, motivational speaker and school volunteer. She does much more than this, with great enthusiasm and generosity. I have been impressed and grateful for the upbeat, helpful MeetUp meetings she sponsors for small business owners in her community.
One of the problems with high output is burnout. Motivated, energetic people have so much they want to do, and they know that ideas are easy, execution is hard. But it is all about execution. Trouble is, sometimes you execute yourself.
Karen recently asked her Facebook friends “What makes you feel nurtured?” Her friends posted lots of jokes along with useful answers like, “Fires. Rain. Reading for pleasure. Shopping really good music. Eating a little expensive fine food or wine. Travel. Baths with aroma therapy. I bet one of yours is walking.”
Fires and rain could be expanded to spending time in nature. Summer in California lends itself to walking along natural creeks and in county parks. But is this simply generating more things for the To Do List? What is the underlying question?
I, too, have been wrestling with this because I have spent the past seven years building my online business. It is a business school axiom that if you survive seven years, your business will be a success. I guess that means that, technically, I am over the hump and now it is time to throttle back, step back for a moment and take a deep breath.
I have been working so hard that my sense of humor has disappeared and my creativity needs refurbishing. What did I do? Travel to someplace that feeds my soul. What I really wanted was sunshine and warm ocean water, but I am too frugal to spend much so I snapped up a $149 flight to Ft. Lauderdale. Staying in the funky TropiRock where I have to ask at the front desk for shampoo (conditioner not available). I have to sign out a beach towel. This is economy!
Yet I sit on the beach at daybreak and wait for the sun to rise. Minor scratches from gardening in California are healing at twice the normal rate thanks to the sunshine and warm sea. Am I relaxing?
Well, the book I read during the first two days was “Drive,” a management book contending that what people really want is autonomy, mastery and purpose. Karen Clark has plenty of purpose. She has already created, made successful and sold a business. She is currently deeply involved with at least two businesses of her own. I can speak to her mastery of the technical side of what she does, her knowledge is impressive and she is a gifted teacher.
For me, the most valuable information in the book “Drive” was the experiment to see what it took to create symptoms of “generalized anxiety disorder” as defined by the DSM as three of the following symptoms.
- Restlessness or feeling keyed up or on edge
- Being easily fatigued
- Difficulty concentrating or mind going blank
- Irritability
- Muscle tension
- Sleep disturbance
Study participants were instructed to scrub their lives of noninstrumental activities. That is, small activities they undertook not out of obligation or to achieve a particular objective, but because they enjoyed them.
Researcher Csikszentmihalyi wrote, “After just two days of deprivation… the general deterioration in mood was so advanced that prolonging the experiment would have been inadvisable.”
That’s how I had eroded my creativity and energy — by disciplining myself to focus on productive work and to eliminate “noninstrumental activity.” I scrubbed the flow out of my life. And I became exhausted.
So this is the long answer to Karen’s short question. It is not specifically fires or rain or long walks. It is intentionally letting play into your life. Non-verbal play, best of all. Leverage that autonomy to choose play as a restorative. Nurture yourself with noninstrumental activity.
Like reading a fashion magazine, just for fun. No need to commit to a novel. Just break the focus, the intensity, for a few minutes to do something pleasurable. Rub your feet on that silly platform of spools that someone gave you. Accept the cat’s offer to play Mousie. Walk outside for a moment for no reason except that it is a beautiful day. Now that I’ve had a few days off, I see that nurturing myself does not have to be a big production. It is something that is created by a zillion small decisions.
Kinda like beauty or fitness or radiance. You actively choose to nurture yourself with beauty or stretching or music or dance. In the moment, and just for a minute or two. But enough to lift your heart and restore your spirit.
Safari froze on my new iPad2. Screen grayed out, nothing worked. Turns out, this is a common problem. Glad I found 
This suggests that a party-girl mother is likely to have a party girl daughter. People who are more sensitive to dopamine get a greater boost from dopamine-triggers like cocaine, nicotine, alcohol, money, sex, food, gambling… you know the list. Because they are more sensitive to the highs and lows, they are more likely to get hooked. And we all know that addiction runs in families, too.
Specifically, the research shows that people with conservative tendencies have a larger amygdala and a smaller anterior cingulate than other people. The amygdala — typically thought of as the “primitive brain” — is responsible for reflexive impulses, like fear. The anterior cingulate is thought to be responsible for courage and optimism. This one-two punch could be responsible for many of the anecdotal claims that conservatives “think differently” from others.
In the same episode, the interview at the end (about :20 in) is with physicist Brian Greene who wrote “The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes” said “Everything around us may be a hologram. You are a bag of particles governed by the laws of physics.” Short clip of the interview only:
