A Brave, Evolving Launch Season
Q4 is upon us, and fall is truly in the air!
Fall tends to be a reflective season for me, and the words I've set for myself to guide my Q4 of 2024 are brave evolving leader. Since my guiding question for My Rippling Year is What is my center and what am I spreading?, I've also given myself a thing to center and a thing to spread for each quarter of the year. This last quarter is for centering self awareness and spreading directing my own sails.
As I sit down to write this blog, I'm faced with the stultifying inertia of a blank document and the remains of a stuffy head cold. I talk a lot about the helpfulness I find with creative constraints, so I'm going to give myself an arbitrary set of them to motivate me through this blog post.
I'm turning to one of my favorite techniques for getting unstuck: card decks.
I've picked a random Oblique Strategy and a random card from Adam JK's "IT'S A SIGN" intuitive card deck.
I've got REACH OUT with the branches of a vibrant leaf and blossom laden tree. And Look at the order in which you do things.
Hmm… I'm thinking about what outreach looks like very actively right now, since I'm in the launch phase of several of my fall offerings.
The order I was thinking of talking about things in this post was in calendar order by soonest date.
In response to my random chance interventions here, I'm going to change the order and mix some talk about the spirit of my fall offerings first with some scary, vulnerable "Reach Out Real Talk", because reaching out is actually pretty scary to me.
Pirate Practices for Clever Rogues
I've had the idea bouncing around in my head for the better part of a year to try out teaching some short courses online. Mostly this has come from people repeatedly telling me that they love the idea of [fill in the blank with one of my offerings of your choice], but for one logistical reason or another, it doesn't make sense for them to join.
I get it. A 4-month community is too long. An in-person retreat is limited by location. Most creative collaborations are specific to certain fields or job roles.
So here's a Goldilocks response, which I shared with my mailing list in a (very fun, if I dare say so) special email on International Talk Like a Pirate Day on September 19.
I'm stepping into the waters of teaching short courses. Catalyst Courses, as I'm calling them, where I hopefully inspire you onto a path of change over a few sequential sessions.
The first one is Pirate Practices for Clever Rogues. It's set up be a bit of a mini master class in what we can learn from historical pirates. No matter how much you know or don't about pirates, no matter what your associations are with them, the doors to this 3-session virtual course are open to you.
We'll mainly be focusing on pirates' articles (aka their codes of conduct). Over three 90-minute sessions (Oct 13, Oct 20, Oct 27 from 2:30-4pm EDT), I'll share historical sources and information, we'll talk about how the articles can inform our modern day practices, and you'll come away from the course with your own set of individual pirate articles to apply to your own life.
If you're a creative thinker who appreciates seeing things from a new point of view, this crew's for you!
If you're deluged by people pushing you into certain behaviors (here's looking at you, political spam texts 👀 and tipping screens on everything 👀), and you want some space to set your own moral compass, this crew's for you!
If you want to bring a clever rogue-ishness to your life and think about what really matters and how to make it happen for yourself, this crew's for you!
The deadline to register for that one is October 10, so heave ho to the registration page to join the crew!
CARE Cohort 3
If you saw that bit up earlier about a 4-month community being too long, and thought, "Wait, I'm totally up for that!", then you're in luck! Because the doors are also open for the 2024-25 cohort of CARE, the Consortium of Arts Related Entrepreneurs. This will be the 3rd cohort of this community that past participants have referred to as "nurturing", "tender and thoughtful", and "really supportive".
It's always a place where I come away amazed at the variety of what people do and the ways they approach their work. The structure of it looks like this:
1 x monthly facilitated session on a topics of common interest in the group
1 x monthly salon discussion where we have a more freewheeling conversation and get to know each other
2 x monthly coworking sessions to silently get individual work done in community (I swear, these always make me smile and are great for focus)
an asynchronous platform to share resources and ask each other questions
I also send everyone a little welcome gift at the start, because postal mail is nice!
CARE is very much set up so you can participate as you like: all time zones welcome, cameras on or cameras off, join in live or check in on your own schedule, it's all good.
If you're looking for some community in your entrepreneurial pursuits and to learn from and share with others in a spirit of abundance and generosity, then I do hope you'll come on in.
It's an especially tricky November in the USA, with the presidential election fast approaching. Come join CARE if you want a group of folks who are united around mutual aid and support, rather than antipathy and division.
Registration for this round of CARE closes on November 1, and the first gathering of the cohort will be on November 13.
REACH OUT REAL TALK
I love sharing my thoughts with you here, and I love that I regularly hear back from you about how much you appreciate reading what I write. It's a labor of love, truly, and I don't write my thoughts down to be paid for them (hence my resistance to moving toward Substack).
Of course, my blogging and newsletter sending is also part of my business practice, and I'm a one-woman show running this business. A one-woman show who's never been a marketing professional, at that.
I'm also a Projector, if you're into Human Design, which means I'm great at insightful guidance and intuitively synthesizing ideas in the world around me. It also comes with the reminder that I do best when I'm invited to share.
So I'm here to vulnerably say in a slightly shaky voice that I'm open to your invitations to participate in other forums you may have. Podcasts, virtual or live events, speaking, workshops, newsletters, telegrams, circuses… hell, I'm usually game to try things.
I'll share about pirates or adventure or facilitation or museums or being many kinds of nerd or the switch to an independent portfolio career in the middle of that career.
I'm open to it, and I'm working on connecting with people beyond my existing networks.
Honestly, typing all of that and looking back at it, part of me wants to delete it all and put on a smooth face of "I've got this" confidence. But the REACH OUT spirit and my intention to make this blog a place of honest transparency is reminding me to keep it all here.
A Speculative Leap into the Future of Museum Workplace Wellbeing
I'm also cooking up some of the best kind of fun with Isabella Bruno in a couple of sessions we're presenting at upcoming conferences. First in person at the Museum Computer Network conference in Lawrence, KS, and then virtually at AAM's Future of Museums Summit, we'll be taking people through A Speculative Leap into the Future of Museum Workplace Wellbeing.
I'm not going to spoil this one, but it involves trips to the future and using digital tools for human-to-human connection. We're getting our design hats out, and also our surprise and delight attitudes. There may be lab coats involved.
And if you'll be at MCN, come find me. I'll have swag. 😉
REACH OUT REAL TALK
It's funny. When I started out writing this blog post, I thought it would be much more of an update on what I've got going on this fall (sort of like my mid-year check in).
Instead, it's made me much more reflective about how I'm feeling about being in a season of launch on multiple projects all at once here.
Throughout the earlier segments of this year, I've been doing a lot of very satisfying work with external clients. Q4 is where I'm indeed directing my own sails, as my guiding words have it.
That means I'm faced with an amount of blended anxiety and pride in what I'm doing this quarter that feels concentrated beyond how I've felt about my work in 2024 thus far.
These are the projects that feel connected to me at my core. They're what I'm truly about, and what I most want to be doing.
I've developed all these offerings out of interests that I've heard from people in my networks (there's that Projector energy again):
CARE started out of my desire to create the place I was missing: a place where people working on their own don't have to work alone.
Pirate Practices for Clever Rogues (and the idea of offering Catalyst Courses, in general) came out of people asking me for a more bite-sized way to participate in my work, as well as the recurring excited curiosity about my use of the title Pirate.
A Speculative Leap into the Future of Museum Workplace Wellbeing is going to be my favorite kind of Experience Session to present, but it's a reach outside many people's comfort zone
I've heard enough interest and excitement from enough people that I believe in the fundamental potential and promise of all of these offerings, and I know I'm good at planning and delivering all of them.
But finding myself in a season where all my opportunities (and, let's face it, my income) depends on these ideas finding their right audiences, well that's a scary place to be.
I can collaborate and lift up others and be part of all the collectives and supportive groups I can find (and that is very much part of what's on my plate, believe me), but when it's my own offerings out there, all bravely sailing out into the internet marketing seas, then I'm scared for them, and I want them to thrive and succeed.
So, I guess I'll end in the spirit of the card that started this off, and I'll REACH OUT.
Do you know someone who might be interested in these offerings? Pass the info on to them.
Do you know a platform where I can share them with like-minded free thinkers? Drop me a line and let me know what platform that is.
Do you have an idea about how we might cross-promote our offerings? Let’s talk about it.
I'm leaning into my Q4 spirit as a brave, evolving leader.
I'm spreading the spirit of directing my own sails.
I'm reaching out and asking for your help to spread the word, and in the meantime sharing with you that it feels frightfully unguarded to do that asking in the first place.
Creative Prompt Coda: Pick one color to focus on throughout a day. Write a list of places where you see it. Take pictures of it on your phone and make an album out of them. See if you can find a food of that color.
