The Wild Wild West

Hellooooo road trip!

Cody, Wyoming

My family and I recently made a big ole sight seeing trip around the Mountain States of Colorado, Wyoming and Montana a few weeks ago.

And what a switch from Italy! We went from "ciao!" to "howdy!"


But, even in comparison to the beauty of The Amalfi Coast, the terrain out here was absolutely magnificent in its own right.

I can certainly see how the centuries-old romance of The American West lives on today.

View from the car

But here's the crazy part.  We could've flown straight into Billings, Montana for a cousin's wedding; however, we opted instead to fly into Denver and drive to Billings- an eight hour trip.

And then drive to Cody, Wyoming, through Yellowstone National Park, and on to Jackson, Wyoming.

Oh, and then back to Denver. Which totaled about 1700 miles in all.

Are we are nuts?

Yoooouuuuuu betcha!  (Just ask the kiddies, they'll tell you.)

But they'll also tell you we had a blast.

A colorful outdoor wedding reception

From the Grand Tetons of Jackson Hole to Cody Night Rodeos to Native American Festivals, we covered some major Wild West territory. We learned about Buffalo Bill (showman/entrepreneur/marketing genius), Annie Oakley (sharpshooter/fierce competitor) and fascinating Native Americans like Sitting Bull.

Talk about some intriguing career paths!

Our Own Rough Riders

I must say that at the start of the trip I was pretty nervous about so much road time with the kids. How can we prevent endless hours of whining, I worried. (Of course, it didn't help that members of our extended family were quite dubious about our travel choices.)

But all that worrying about whining made me go into "Whatever It Takes" mode. My husband and I strategized how many miles at a time we could reasonably ask the kids to go. We must have searched Distance Between Cities a thousand times. I also researched fun towns like Cheyenne, Wyoming to see along the way, found some cool festivals to attend, made up games to play (some were admittedly lamer than others) and made sure we made lots of stops for stretching.  We even made scrapbooks out of brochures, postcards and other memorabilia.

And you know what? All that creative planning actually worked! Yes, whining happened, but hardly at all.  Fortunately, I was still channeling my new travel mindset courtesy of Peter Jon Lindberg, who says we must make a great traveling experience happen for ourselves. So when things got rough, we switched gears, re-routed, and adjusted. (Not unlike managing your career, right?)

And when things got desperate, we stopped at Dairy Queen and had 

The Great American Blizzard.

Most importantly, the kids were really psyched about seeing and experiencing so many new things. And it was so freeing to know that we've reached a new stage in the life of our little family: one that involves more travel.

(For a wanderlust gal, that's very exciting news.)

Here are some more pictures from our adventures.
-Enjoy!

@ The Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, WY.

Really, really cool.

Okay now, where are the cup holders?

Cody Nite Rodeo

Rodeo food: I didn't dare ask for a salad.

@ The Rodeo

And On to Other Kinds of Wild Life...

Searching for signs of buffalo bison.

Well, hello! Here's one!

Chipmunk!

Same chipmunk, different view.

Scruffy, but cute.

Took this picture for my fisherman father.

Real or Statue? Tough call.

Yellowstone National Park: 

Open Range

... and unexpected colors and textures.

Thermal pool

Personal Transformations

From a baseball hat ... 

To Cowboy Gear!

(And a Cowgirl-in-the-Making)

                                               

Pristine Lakes and Streams

My daughter took these pictures of us.
Pretty good camera work, no?



Beautiful Mountain Ranges

Wildflowers Everywhere

Journeying to the top of the Grand Tetons

My Little Guy and Gal looked even littler!

Jackson Hole, Wyoming
(It should definitely be on your Bucket List of Places to See)

Git yer grub here!

How about dinner in a teepee?

Thanks for letting me share our Wild West Adventures. I'm certain we'll be returning again real soon.

-Katie

Introvert? Extrovert? Where Do YOU Fall on the Spectrum?

Interesting exploration of the "where do you get your energy?" question.

Enjoy!
-Katie

http://www.fastcompany.com/3016031/leadership-now/are-you-an-introvert-or-an-extrovert-and-what-it-means-for-your-career?partner=newsletter

Part III: "What to Do With MY Dreams" by Joseph Coram

I wanted to be a writer or a musician most of my life. My dream had a great deal of glory involved in it most of the time. I wanted to be a famous author who revolutionized the world of the written word; I wanted to be a famous musician who brought together the extremes of creativity and accessibility—I wanted to make music that the most artistic minds would respect and that the most unsophisticated sensibilities would really enjoy, whether or not they recognized how brilliant or creative it was. So what am I to do with those things?

That was the unspoken question with which I approached Katie, and in my time working with her, we came up with two solid answers—or, rather, two much better questions—and a lot of good ideas about how to bring them into reality. Briefly, when you have a dream: (1) find out what’s at its core; and (2) figure out what else you want. Dreams like mine are always both too much and too little to be of immediate use.

You have to really know yourself to know what you really dream for, and you have to know something about how the world works to see where a life following those dreams will land you, and that takes help from outside, from community, from ‘counselors’ in the broadest sense of the term.

What am I to do with those dreams?

Take the first one. What am I really after? I want to write, sure. That’s something I can do whether or not I make a living doing it. I want to change things with my writing. That’s doable, too. Revolutionizing anything may or may not happen—and, importantly, I have not given up that fantasy, and if you ask me on most days whether or not I think it’s going to happen, you will likely hear some form of a “yes”—but I can, with some effort, reasonably expect to change people, or at least encourage them to rethink some things, with my writing. Making an impact is a legitimate goal.

So then, what else do I want? When I say I want to write, what else am I after? Katie posed this question early, and with a series of pretty incisive conversations and diagnostics, we got somewhere with it. Well, I want to make my own schedule and have my own priorities; I want to be creatively engaged with things that interest me; I want people to respond to me and give me feedback, so I know how I’m doing and whether or not what I’m communicating makes sense. 

Those are clues. 

On a more nuts-and-bolts level, I want to spend at least some of every day writing and at least some of every day doing something tangible that helps people. I am naturally what they call a “maestro,” as opposed to what they call a “tribal” personality—I’d rather be an expert in something who gets called in for particular occasions than someone who’d prefer to work in a pack. 

Those are all clues, too. 

When Katie had me look through a deck of cards with a different photograph on each one—some with people, some of nature, some of old woodsheds, crowds, monuments, all sorts of things—and she asked me to pick out the ones that most grabbed my attention, we were both surprised and intrigued when the six I picked out all had pictures of people on them, most of them with people interacting. We had both had me pegged as more of a ‘thinker’ than a ‘feeler,’ but all the pictures I picked screamed that there was a ‘feeler’ in there to be acknowledged. Surprising, interesting, revealing—another clue. I also realized I want time to pursue music, too, even if writing is more important. While music may not be an actual part of my career—though music reviewing may be—I know it’s important, and I want a career that accommodates that.

You always know more than you think. And it takes someone who knows people and who knows the real world to bring that out and show you where you fit. That’s where Katie was indispensable.

I didn’t come away from career coaching knowing the next chapter of my story verbatim. I didn’t even come away knowing when this limbo period would be over and I’d actually feel like a grown-up, living in a coherent narrative again. But I did come away knowing with much greater clarity and realism that writing is in my future, as I’ve long hoped it would be, that people are in my future, as I was surprised to find I so badly wanted them to be, and that there is a place for me in the real world—namely, a small college somewhere where I can teach, write, engage with people, and have time to pursue my other interests. I now know some steps to take to find it. 

I don’t think progress is as simple or as automatic as I did when I was young, but I am pretty sure, now, that it didn’t end when I graduated, and it may have some more surprises in store for me in the future.

Part II: "The Dream" by Joseph Coram

At some point, the questions people have been asking you since you were young—particularly, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”—no longer get asked. Does that mean you’ve grown up? Not necessarily. But those questions begin to implicate the present; unless you are one of the few who are as certain of what you want to be as you were when you were six—and are equipped to make it happen—you realize, whether or not you have any dreams that have lasted, you are the only one that will make anything like a dream really happen.

But you also realize there is an objective, solid (or at least semi-solid) outside world within which your dream will or will not be realized. It may be that one’s twenties are spent trying to learn the rules of that world and how her or she fits in with it. Perhaps that’s why it’s a chapter in the story that tends to get skimmed or even skipped.

I am abundantly convinced that, however clichéd it may sound, it is critically important to keep your dreams alive. I think it is only slightly less important to realize they will almost certainly never happen in the way you dream they will. But a young adult who still knows how to dream is way better off than one who is too cynical and disillusioned to have any hope for the future.

Both of the perspectives I just mentioned—the dreamer and the realist—I think are necessary, and I think there is a way to keep both of them intact by figuring out how they relate to each other: the dreamer needs to be tempered by the realist, just as the cynic needs to be animated, and perhaps softened, by hope.

As I’ve thought about it, I’ve come to think the best way to look at this is to treat them both as dreams—that is, to realize that you always have at least two dreams in play. The first should be the easiest to recognize, but may not be, depending on how far away you are from your childhood: it is the astronaut, the rock star, the visionary author (or in my case, both of the latter two)—whatever you would have answered at age six when asked the familiar question of what you want to be when you grow up. The second dream is roughly the same for everyone, and it is rarely called into consciousness till you’re older. I think coming out of adolescence is in part a process of realizing how important it is: the dream to be real, to live grounded in reality, to have a life that is solid and reliable and that makes sense.

The loftier your Dream #1 is, the more Dream #2 tends to look like a mere negation. It will come to you couched in a sentence that starts with the word “But” and ends in dashing your hopes against the rocks. That, I want to suggest, is not the only way to approach the necessary task of relating these two dreams. They can be integrated. But it takes work and it takes help.

You have to realize that no matter how outlandish your first dream is, it is a huge “clue” (as Katie would say) to what you ought to do with your life. There is something valid and necessary at its core; there is something there that you are after; there is something in it that you really ought to pursue. 

We dream mostly in images, and only the most creative among us can dream in images we’ve never seen before. So someone says he wants to be an astronaut. He thinks that’s what he’s after because, out of everything that he’s seen, it is the role, the career, maybe the action figure that most embodies the much less tangible, the much more amorphous and elusive thing he really wants.

Depending on how old and “mature” he is, he has a greater or lesser sense of what it would actually take to make that dream happen, on the one hand, and a greater or lesser sense of the gritty reality of what that dream would demand of him were he actually able to realize it. No kid who dreams of being an astronaut is dreaming of the years of exhausting schooling and training, on the one hand, or the rote, monotonous drudgery that (I assume) fills up the vast expanses of time every astronaut spends not being in space.

But as the second dream grows in prominence—the dream to be real; the dream to have a real, adult life—it becomes a matter of letting the first dream, in all its particularity and naïveté, die, for a moment, and be reborn in a world governed by the laws of reality. 

I have come to believe, as I said, that at the core of every dream, even the most outlandish, there is something there worth saving and pursuing with everything you’ve got. The shell is what needs to go, and it’s not easy to let it go. It takes something like faith to know that when you let go of the particular form of the dream you’ve grown accustomed to, there will still be something there, something you really want, and something that you can pursue as a goal and finally get to.

To be continued...

Part I: "The Myth of Progress" by Joseph Coram

Twenty-five is not typically seen as a “difficult” year, and that’s part of what makes it so difficult. By the time you get there, you’re used to difficult years. It feels like being caught between phases of life, and it’s hard not to put yourself in drift and stay there. Both the resistance you’ve faced and the encouragement you’ve had as a young person back off at least a little, and without resistance or encouragement, it’s hard to find meaning.

From birth to age 18, or maybe age 22 if you go to college, life naturally has a sort of narrative character. Not everyone’s story is alike, but it seems like that span of time, for pretty much everyone, just feels like a story. While everyone’s story can be radically different—mine has been pretty unique—it’s largely the same structure for everyone. Each year means, developmentally, a particular set of challenges, and a particular vision for the near future.

Philosophers and theorists for the past several decades have focused a lot on how meaning is formed through narrative and many have concluded that stories—particularly our own stories and how we understand them—are where most of our sense of meaning comes from. In that sense, whether or not they realize it, young people have it pretty easy, at least for a while. Even if you don’t know where you’re heading, the fact that you have a trajectory—a built in direction, perhaps toward greater maturity—means you know reasonably well what to expect as the narrative progresses; and because it functions that way for most every young person, society has in part been structured around it. Your circumstances change; you change with them; and even with all the twists and turns and slip-ups and tragedies of growing up, you ultimately see, in your story, some form of progress. It is easy to believe you are heading somewhere definite, somewhere better than where you are now; it’s sort of programmed into you.

Another thing recent philosophers like to talk about is “the Enlightenment myth of progress”—the “Enlightenment” being the period after the Renaissance when modern science was developing, thinkers were turning toward reason as opposed to traditional religion, and democracy gained great prominence in Western society; and the “myth of progress” being this idea from that era that revolutionized our worldview in suggesting that society as a whole is improving and will continue to improve until we reach some sort of utopia in which all needs are met and dreams are realized and everyone gets along with everyone.

The reason philosophers like to talk about it is because they almost all agree that it’s not true. Further, they almost all agree that, however untrue the idea is, it’s still utterly pervasive among most people. I think technology has a lot to do with why many still find it plausible. To put it crudely, the man on the street thinks because the iPhone 5 is substantially better than the iPhone 4s, the whole world is moving in the right direction; whereas someone with some highlights of the twentieth century in mind—two world wars and a holocaust, for instance—is not so readily convinced things are improving. The Enlightenment’s “meta-narrative”—its grand, overarching story that says we’re getting better, is fiction.

But that fact has not made its way into the contexts that most significantly affect the worlds we grow up in. It’s still everywhere, and people still want to believe it, so it’s even harder to dislodge. The idea of progress makes particular sense to young people—even ones so young they can’t understand it—and it’s actually pretty reasonable for them to buy into it. Growing kids do see remarkable advances each year as they grow up and mature, physically, emotionally, psychologically, and so on. It’s easy to believe things are just supposed to get better.

My theory is, once you hit your mid-twenties, not only does progress become less obvious, but the whole idea of your life as a continuous story makes less and less sense, and you’re hard pressed to stay engaged and keep moving forward. As an adolescent you can be in drift and still move forward; the story itself carries you forward; but by the time you graduate, “in drift” no longer means “coasting”—something adults lament but ultimately condone in adolescents; it means something more like “stagnant.” From what I can tell, life does seem to pick up again once you’re in full-fledged adulthood, but that really doesn’t seem to begin until you’re about thirty—maybe until you have a spouse; maybe until you have kids. Mine certainly hasn’t started up again.

To be continued...

Beautiful Mind Alert!!

GollyGforce
"Result of an Amusing Memory"

My friend and former client, Joseph Coram, has many gifts.

But then, so do we all.

(How many times do I say that in this blog? Like, a million?!)

However, Joseph possesses one gift that I find particularly spectacular: his insight into the human experience.  After our conversations I always walk away with new ways of looking at age-old dilemmas. Fortunately, I discovered, he most beautifully expresses these thoughts through his writing.

Now, I like to fancy myself a fairly good writer on personal development issues, in that I can make random connections between my dog's goat-like tendencies and the challenges of career design. (It's a gift, I tell you!!)  Still, I consider writing just one of many tools I use to educate others on how to navigate the career world.

But Joseph?  He's the real deal. He writes circles around me, and if you ever have the opportunity to meet him you'd understand why: his nimble and luminous-yet humble- mind knows no bounds. And this mind, I decided, needed to be shared with Grow readers.

PRONTO.

Therefore I invited him to write an essay about his 25-year life experience from a millennial generation vantage point.  I asked him to explain to "The People Out There" (that would be you) how he is navigating his creative life as a twenty-something guy trying to make his way in the world. And, fortunately for all of us, he agreed.

His essay has three parts, so I'm therefore going to publish them as a three-part series (I took a HUGE leap on that choice,) starting with the next post.  I am sure you will appreciate his enlightening words as much as I do.

Enjoy!

-Katie

Create Your Spark: Elizabeth Gilbert

Ms. Gilbert tells us to: 

1. Keep showing up and 

2. Give our genius a talking to.

Enjoy! (And watch the whole thing- it's worth it!)

-Katie

Elizabeth Gilbert on Sustaining Creativity