Spirited Woman Blogger Team

From Breakdown to Breakthrough

Recently a dear friend and colleague asked me to speak to an executive group she facilitates. Because she is so helpful to me, I was delighted to help Laura out for a change. Since Laura was the contact, she handled all the logistical details which, normally, would be no problem. Unfortunately, Laura was doing everything six states away while dealing with a parent in the hospital. She struggled to focus but did manage to pull the meeting off without a hitch.

Later, Laura sent a note to apologize for not being “present.” She said she went home after our meeting and had quite the meltdown – and immediately felt better!

Isn’t that so often the case? We are so scheduled, committed, crazed or hyper-focused that we forget how to release our anxieties and stresses. One day, we just can’t hold them in any longer and explode. Then, relieved of these pressures, we find release.

In his book, 7 Lessons for Leading in Crisis, author Bill George notes that “Crisis may be your defining moment” and it should never be wasted. Think about that – how can crisis help you breakthrough instead breakdown?

A crisis or breakdown can really help you identify top priorities.In Laura’s case, she and her brother were able to put aside their differences to help their father recuperate. And, after the meltdown, she hired part-time help to assist in running her business. Now she feels empowered to spend time on building her business and check on her father, instead of trying to do everything by herself.

Think about your last breakdown or crisis – what can that experience tell you if you listen objectively? Do you need to speak up to ask for what you want or need?  Do you need to say no without guilt? Do you need to focus on your on core values instead of comparing yourself to others?

The next time you feel a crisis coming on, take a moment to consider…”How can I make this a defining moment to breakthrough, not breakdown?”

- Allison Blankenship, http://www.allisonspeaks.com,  http://www.UpsideTheBook.com
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The Scientific Results Are In: Travelers Are More Creative People

It’s a no-brainer to ask if you think traveling enhances creativity. But a new book called Imagine* by Jonah Lehrer dedicates several pages to the brain research of it all.

Creative problem solving, it turns out, is best done from a distance. If you are immersed inside a situation too long, your ability to problem solve is diminished. To expand your creative capacities, you should expose yourself to new circumstances,  “leave behind your safety” and open yourself to ambiguity. This is what travel brings, and suddenly those old problems have new solutions.

Imagine cites some interesting research from a 2009 study at INSEAD and the Kellogg School of Management: “Students who lived abroad for an extended period were significantly more likely to solve a difficult creativity problem than students who never lived outside their birth country" (p. 128)

Last week I spent some time in Chicago with my young friend, Kelli. Throughout high school she heard  my travel stories and decided early on that she wanted to be an overseas teacher. After a semester abroad and student teaching in Heidelberg, she landed a teaching position in Taiwan. Kelli loves to relate the creative ways she travels Asia—not by air-conditioned tour bus, but by elephant or camel safari or zip line (a four-day trip). She has become a sponge. The more she learns about the world, the more she wants to know.

While in the US, Kelli continues to learn about others through the Couch Surfing Program. Before I arrived, she and her parents hosted a Korean college student. The day after I left, a French guy showed up.

Kelli was a breath of sweet air for me after breathing some pretty stale fumes the week before. I had come from a small town in another state, a town where people don’t travel. They said they didn’t like to go where they might not be comfortable.

But the research shows that comfort detracts from creativity.

Why did F. Scott Fitzgerald travel to Paris to write about New York City? Why did Charles Lindbergh become an avid environmentalist before it was cool? Why has outer space travel led to innovative products for earthly use: the ear thermometer, the Dustbuster, Speedo racing suits. Creating a physical distance from our usual haunts and comfort zones engenders creativity.

Imagine points out the ultimate irony about travel: “Your mind is most likely to solve your stubbornest problems while you’re sitting in a swank Left Bank café. . . You might have a breakthrough while on break” (p. 126).

*Disclaimer: Recently Jonah Lehrer was discredited for misquoting Bob Dylan in the beginning of Imagine. But the research on travel still stands.

- Nancy Adair  nancyadair2002@yahoo.com
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Third Culture Kids

We are driving to Germany to visit our son. He is a Third Culture Kid.

He was raised by parents of one culture whose job took them to live in a second culture. Such kids make friends like themselves and together form their own third culture. Life becomes perpetual tourism.

My son’s move to Europe does not surprise me. His biological clock is on Foreign Service time — he gets the urge to move every three to four years. Like almost 50% of TCKs, it took multiple universities to earn a degree, but the advanced degree came easier. And like a huge number of TCKs, he seeks employment overseas. His soul craves the extra stimulation of working in a foreign language and culture. Life is dull without a multi-stimuli existence.

The ability to manage this lifestyle was fostered by excellent international schools with outstanding teachers. Field trips equaled tourism Americans dream of: visiting Rhineland castles or the Pyramids, rafting the Ganges, and sailing the South China Sea. And yes, all you American kids, TCKs must also visit museums—the Louvre, the Prado.

One of the hardest questions for a TCK is: where are you from? This son is still deciding. Every time I look at his Facebook page, his hometown has changed. My younger son decided early on that he was from Chicago because Uncle Dave took him to a Cubs game once. That identity gave him a hometown as well as a team.

Travel for TCKs often involves touring the home country where the three cultures can clash. One summer in the US, we took the kids on an exotic adventure—to a public swimming pool. But I was horrified to see them cutting in front of people at the diving board. My kids didn’t understand lines.

Or money. In countries plagued by devaluation, a parent hands out allowance and says, “Spend this as fast as you can. It will be worthless by next month.” And the kid replies, “But, Mom, there’s nothing to buy.” And the Mom says, “I know your school sells candy.”

A TCK is inclusive and values all cultures. When we moved back to the US for short stints, my kids would seek out friends most unlike themselves. My son is still with his girlfriend from college—a foreign exchange student—and they are very happy in their third culture relationship.

International Book Fairs

I can’t fall asleep unless I’ve devoured at least one chapter of my latest read. I love books and I love authors. And when I’m traveling, there’s nothing that will steer me off course more quickly than news of a book fair.
 
One lucky tip detoured me to the National Book Fair. The last weekend of September, the Library of Congress sets up a pavilion on the National Mall. Huge tents shelter authors and audiences from either the heat or the rain - whatever Washington weather sends that day.

It's a great experience and FREE. I've visited the "book fair tents" or heard speeches by some of the most popular authors in the world: Mystery - John Grisham; Biography  - Ricky Minor (Conductor, American Idol and The Tonight Show); Politics - Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran); History - John Meacham (American Lion, Newsweek Editor); Children and Teens - Kate DiCamillo (The Magician’s Elephant) and Judy Blume (every title, a young reader’s B.F.F.).

The book signings are also fun. Standing in lines I've met people from all over. While I waited for Ken Burns to sign National Parks, two book vendors from Indiana insisted that I get a gander of Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook). They held my place in line while I checked him out. Naughty, I know, but worth it. As I returned, Paula Deane rolled by on a golf cart. She stopped to chat with her signature “Hi, y’all,” and everyone ran from the signing lines to mob her—except me. I crept closer to the front and had more time with Ken Burns. Nice guy.

Wonderful Lucca

Last night I was invited to a clothing-shop-at-home party that turned into an unexpected opportunity to reminisce about visiting the lovely town of Lucca, Italy.

Among the other women who attended the party was a most Spirited Woman, Maria Matson, who recently wrote a book -- The Lucchesi Story, A True Tale of Italian Immigrants -- about her grandfather, Caesar Lucchesi. The book is described on Maria's Web site -- www.TheLucchesiStory.com.

Her grandfather was from Lucca, Italy, and Maria visited Lucca twice in the past year, meeting other relatives she had never known and researching the town for the background of her book. She loves Lucca...and so doI!

As it turns out, I had the opportunity to visit the medieval walled city of Lucca for a week, in 1993, with my late husband. We stayed with his friends in their gorgeous apartment in an ancient building, right in the center of Lucca.

I remember hearing melodious church chimes every half-hour, and realizing that the nearby church was centuries old -- we could see it from our bedroom window. I remember a room downstairs that had a hand-painted mural of the Italian countryside, people, animals, blue skies and a watercolor landscape.
I remember their modern livingroom,so picture-perfect it actually had been the subject of a feature article in Architectural Digest.

The town made an indelible impression on me, particularly the ancient Piazza Anfiteatro, whose construction began in the 1st century A.D. Today the Piazza is at the heart of Lucca, with shops, apartments, and meeting places. Supposedly the residents who live within the walls of the Piazza speak their own dialect!

So a chance meeting with an author whose ancestors are from Lucca got me dreaming again, big-time, about visiting Italy with my husband Ed. It will happen!

Italy is a dream that keeps returning for the rest of your life. -- Poet Anna Akhmatov

Linda Jay Geldens, www.LindaJayGeldens.com
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Armchair Travel Around The World

Every once in a while I like to remind you (and myself) that you don't have to travel to be a spirited traveler. If you read my posts very often, you'll know that I'm referring to armchair travel. As a travel author, myself, I have a special love for travel literature. Reading is a good, cheap way to be whisked away to exotic lands--and all without having to get shots or deal with extra airline fees!

Sometimes I've listed my top three favorite books in a particular category, but today I'd like to show you how to find great reviews of travel literature so you can pick your next read based on your own interests and mood (give a girl a fish and she'll eat for a day, but teach her to fish and she'll read for a lifetime....or something like that).

Here are my most recent favorite online travel book review sites:

1. A Traveler's Library - This blogger, Vera Marie Badertscher, reads and reviews dozens of books a year! She covers novels, memoirs, adventure, and political stories. And she's prolific. Return every few days to find some new morsel.

2. The Travel Lady Magazine has a huge armchair travel list. I still haven't gotten through all of the reviews on this page, but I have found several books to put on order through my local independent bookseller!

3. Story Circle Book Reviews is a great site for readers in general, but their travel/adventure page is full of terrific suggestions. A team of reviewers takes on cooking, relationships, spirituality, misery---you name it. As long as it's related to travel, they'll review it. Read them all and see which of the reviewers' tastes you favor.

Happy traveling/reading!!!

- Cami Ostman, www.7marathons7continents.com, www.camiostman.net
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Spirited Author Christina Britton Conroy - Proves Determination Pays off

Christina Britton Conroy has a somewhat different background than other writers Her mother was the famous movie/TV actress Barbara Britton. As a child, she began her training in music, acting and dancing. Years later, in 2008, she published her first novel One Man’s Music - loosely based on her life. If you love music and a touching love story, this book will captivate you.

Q. Why did you want to tell this particular story?
A. As a professional musician, I wanted to give a Valentine to other musicians. This delicious fable is all about us. I also wanted non-musicians to enjoy a spicy love story and learn about the lives of working musicians.

Q. What is your musical background?
A. As a child, I studied music, drama, and dance at Juilliard Pre-College, and Interlochen Center for the Arts. Later, I earned a Music Bachelors from the University of Toronto, and still later, a Music Therapy M.A. from NYU. I spent 15 glorious years touring the globe singing operas, operettas, and musicals. I soloed at Radio City Music Hall, and folk venues, accompanying myself on the guitar and Irish Harp.

After years of classical singing, I was hired for the chorus of a Broadway musical, On The 20th Century. The stars were Rock Hudson, Imogene Coca, and Judy Kaye. My salary was three times what I was used to earning, and I was miserable. Sitting backstage, listening to movie stars sing their solos, and hoping the actress I understudied would catch cold, I thought about all the gifted singers, dancers, and musicians stuck in ensembles, earning a living, but never the respect and appreciation they deserve.

Q. Is the main character, Jenna Adams, modeled after you?
A. Absolutely! I lived the music business – that is exactly from life. My parents were too nice for interesting reading, so I made Jenna’s parents horrible. The characters of Eric and Josh are compellations a hundred real men.

Q. There’s a heartbreaking scene where young Jenna’s birthday party is postponed because her mother is getting an award. Was this pulled from life?
A. Fortunately, no. My mother was movie/TV star Barbara Britton. Her work was mostly in NYC, where we lived, so she was home most nights. I was dying to go on the stage, but she despised spoiled “child stars” and wanted to me to stay normal. I did some acting/modeling work and earned my first union card when I was eight.

Guest Blogger - Julia Ibbotson - It May Be Mid-Life But It's a New Beginning!

An English grandmother with a long academic career behind her, Dr Julia Ibbotson decided to return to her creative roots, both mentally and physically. When her husband retired they bought a Victorian rectory in the middle of the moors in central England, and without any previous experience set about renovating it. To be truthful they did not undertake the physical work themselves but closely project-managed it. As a result, Julia created two new careers for herself: as a writer when she determined to write about this period of her life, and as a “home cooking with love” advocate.

This is the first post in Julia's delightful three-part weekly series exclusively for Spirited Woman.

Hot flushes came and disappeared. Retirement beckoned. I was a grandmother, for goodness sake (although I still felt 30!). My long academic career was losing its excitement as the new young blood was no longer mine, but that of others needing to be mentored. Could I find a fresh impetus in my life before I took to my stair-lift and zimmer frame?

To me one of the essences of a Spirited Woman, of whatever age, is to be creative, to be proactive, and to be persistent against all odds. I needed to find a focus for my own creativity: to ground myself in place, history, the cycle of nature and human lives.

And so it was that in the cold English winter of 2008, my husband and I found a rather dilapidated Victorian rectory, dating from 1860, in the middle of the moors, with a couple of acres of land. We bought it! This stark statement perhaps reveals the amazement I felt at possibly the first ever spontaneous decision, entirely emotional, that my husband had made. He is normally a cautious man, so it was a surprise to me that he was as swept away as I was by this very unpromising building. Maybe later he came to regret his quick decision when he discovered how much renovation would be entailed, but I was delighted. To me, this would be not only a project to get my teeth into, but also a new style of life. 

We moved to the rectory and thus began three long years of renovation work. I became immersed in the history of the house and of the village a mile away. I imagined the previous occupants over the years since it was first built. I researched into the lives of those who inhabited these rooms during times of despair, danger, war, industrial change, exciting inventions and “progress." I made notes on my discoveries.

Travel Books for the Armchair Traveler

I like to travel any way I can. I'll go by boat, airplane, car or, just as happily, by book. I love to read about women (and men) finding their way through the unfamiliar, coming to terms with their own limitations or being awed by new and wonderful people and landscapes. Not surprisingly, I've got a pile of travel books next to my bed, a queue at the library and a virtual list of soon-to-come out books on Amazon. Here are a few I'm looking forward to reading, along with their publishers' description:

Wanderlust: A Love Affair with Five Continents by Elizabeth Eaves. - "Spanning 15 years of travel, beginning when she is a sophomore in college, Wanderlust documents Elisabeth Eaves’s insatiable hunger for the rush of the unfamiliar and the experience of encountering new people and cultures. Young and independent, she crisscrosses five continents and chases the exotic, both in culture and in romance. In the jungles of Papua New Guinea, she loses herself—literally—to an Australian tour guide; in Cairo, she reconnects with her high school sweetheart, only to discover the beginning of a pattern that will characterize her life over the long-term: while long-distance relationships work well for her, traditional relationships do not."

"Wanderlust, however, is more than a chronological conquest of men and countries: at its core, it’s a journey of self-discovery. In the course of her travels, Eaves finds herself and the sense of home she’s been lacking since childhood—and she sheds light on a growing culture of young women who have the freedom and inclination to define their own, increasingly global, lifestyles, unfettered by traditional roles and conventions of past generations of women." 

Full disclosure on the above: Seal Press published my book. And full disclosure number two: I'm a sucker for a book that takes place on several continents.

Men’s Other Alzheimer’s Disease

Recently sex scandals have filled newspapers’ front pages --  the French IMF head and the ex-governor of California. Earlier and then much earlier, we also learned that at least two other ex-governors, and an ex-presidential candidate were all frolicking in beds other than those they shared with their respective “old ladies.”  

To be blunt, men can control a state, complicated finance, the whole country, but cannot control the part under their belt. Or put it in another way, most men’s instruments suffer from Alzheimer’s Disease. In my new novel Song of the Silk Road, there is a paragraph of the protagonist Lily Lin’s monologue.

"In my opinion, men, young or old, handsome or plain, rich or poor, all have Alzheimer’s Disease. I didn’t mean the disease of their brains, but their penises. Even a snake will always slid back to the same hole. But a penis’ karma is to wander and forget which hole -- especially the most familiar one – it is supposed to return to."

This was because Lily’s then lover was a married man with a child.

There maybe cure for the brain’s Alzheimer's Disease, but I don’t believe there is any cure for the Alzheimer's of that other part.

However, there was a cure in traditional China: men who could afford it could have as many wives and concubines as they wanted. As near as my parents generations, polygamy was common and a way to keep all men’s sexual ADD within the confine of his own house. Personally I know three girlfriends whose father had more than one wife at the same time. You might think that these women would all be bitterly jealous and almost kill each other competing for the favor of their communal husband. Maybe and maybe not.

One of my girlfriend’s father had three wives and three families – they only saw each other during the two big occasions – weddings and funerals. Other than that, half-brothers and half-sisters were near-strangers. So one time my girlfriend jokingly said, “I pray that I won’t fall in love with someone and then he turns out to be my half-brother!”

Another girlfriend’s husband had two wives, but contrary to the first girlfriend’s situation, the two women became the best of friends, especially after their husband passed on to his heavenly reward. They lived together, helped each other, and went together to honor their husband on grave sweeping day.

A third girlfriend’s father had three wives and sixteen children. Because my girlfriend was the fourteenth child, and followed by twin girls, the father had finally lost count. So she told me that her father just called her “girl before the twins,” and her two younger sisters “Big Twin” and “Small Twin.”

All the result of men’s other Alzheimer's Disease.

- Mingmei Yip, http://www.mingmeiyip.com
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