Attuning to Uncertainty Like a Pirate
Six of Wands—minimize creative distractions to focus on your goals and your path to victoriously achieving them
“optimism produces the very success it desires and expects… it requires only a true belief in ourselves to find the energy to accomplish what we want. More, such belief will inspire others to follow us. Sixes deal with communication and gifts”—Rachel Pollack, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom
Updates from the Captain’s (b)Log
reflections on doing meaningful work with a rogueishly piratical refusal to accept the status quo
It’s funny that the tarot card I drew to spark this issue was the Six of Wands. It’s a card about achieving public acclaim and success for what you put out into the world after a moment of confusion. It’s about believing in yourself and communicating that belief well in order to inspire others.
Do I feel like I’m in a victorious period in my business? No. I don’t feel like this is a moment of public acclaim and success.
I’m offering my Wayfinder Uncertainty Coaching to folks I know in cultural organizations and following the threads of conversation that come from those offers. It feels like a strange combination of catching up with old friends and sales pitching. That’s not a comfortable combo, although much of that discomfort comes from the bog-standard fear of vulnerability and rejection since it’s such a personally meaningful project.
This is part of what doing business the way I’m doing it looks like. I’m not seeking the lowest hanging fruit of established practices. I’m taking the path into the adventurous unknown and creating this offering that responds to a need people have said they have. But it’s not always a need people have paid to address. So will they pay for it now? We’ll see.
What does feel good in a Six of Wands, clear-communication-of-my-vision kind of way, is that I’ve been doing the streamlining that my Year of Attunement is calling for.
I’ve stopped paying for AI-will-be-everywhere-whether-you-like-it-or-not-and-screw-your-privacy-to-boot Google Workspace to host my email and business file storage, and switched to Proton instead. Although it’s required a bunch of tech support and set-up, and it’s not as easy-flowing and fully-featured (I miss you, Google Drive folder colors), and it’s meant a different approach to collaborating with colleagues, I feel like this was a move that settled me in my business in a nebulous, deeper way.
The business I’m running isn’t about helping people do things the simplest, easiest, most convenient way that’s worked well enough up ‘til now.
It feels deeply good to have this basic foundational element of my business model the kind of pirate refusal to accept crappy systems that I espouse.
I’m practicing what I preach. It’s OK for that to come at the expense of some convenience.
I’ve got a fall line-up of professional conference presentations all around the kind of uncertainty and change work I do.
I’m being careful not to spend all my energy in creating new endeavors arbitrarily (though, oh boy, does the temptation still exist).
And I’m pushing forward through the discomfort of sharing Wayfinder Uncertainty Coaching, unsure how people will place a monetary value on it.
I suppose the Six of Wands is a good motivator to keep believing in the meaning of what I’m doing and to talk about that out loud, directly. It’s coming from a place of customer research and interdisciplinary synthesis. If, as Rachel Pollack says, tarot “sixes deal with communication and gifts”, then I’m right there talking about the special sauce that only I can offer.
Dispatches from the Helm
a recent concrete highlight from my work that can hopefully help you in yours
While all that work of feeling people out for a new offering is going on, of course, I’m also continuing to work with organizational clients on the projects they’ve already identified where they need a strategic thought partner to help.
As the Chrysler Museum has built up a strong and refreshed docent training program over the last couple years, I’ve been working with the ever-inspiring Stacey Shelnut-Hendrick, their Deputy Director of Public Engagement and Learning (that’s her with me in the default social sharing image for my website).
The current element of that project is helping her craft definitions for the half dozen key attributes to successful guiding in museums. We’re working toward a thorough guidebook that will give her team a clear ecosystem for success at the Chrysler Museum and beyond.
Each of these attributes has the same elements:
an inspirational quote
a definition
why it matters, with a citation of at least one key resource to back this up
what it looks like:
on a museum tour
in a community of docents
for people’s lifelong learning journeys
I’m loving the challenge and satisfaction of distilling the what and why of these foundational principles that make for meaningful group experiences. It’s reminded me of the key life skills that good museum educators wield: listening, facilitation across difference, responsiveness, encouraging people out of their comfort zones. Whether or not you’re a museum educator reading this, these are still things I’d argue you can use in your own life.
It’s intensely satisfying to codify these skills I’ve learned and built for decades, and to explain why they make such a difference.
Flotsam & Jetsam
one random bit of fun (could be pics of Lila the dog, a recent podcast fun fact, a bit from one of my many strange areas of nerdy interest, or something else)
Despite living in Metro-West Boston, Massachusetts for a big chunk of my life, I had never been to famed local oddity Ponyhenge. Until this past Father’s Day, that is. My Dad is—like me—a great lover of oddities and random, eclectic rabbit holes of interest. So we hopped in the car during a crushing heat wave and headed out to visit this circular array of rocking horses contributed by a bunch of random strangers.
We took Lila the dog with us, too, and she sort of blended into the ponies as she tried to examine what these strange creatures were. Here are a few photos of the visit (please note the apparent visit by some of the recent Scottish World Cup visitors to the Boston area who, one assumes, put the traffic cone on one pony’s head).
Small Treasures
a resource recommendation or creative prompt for you
I’m house and dogsitting for a family with three kids who’ve made Summer Bingo sheets for themselves, and when my cousin came to hang out, she made adult versions of them for the two of us. We populated them with a mix of aspirational and mundane things (we brainstormed the list together) and then illustrated them on our own.
Here’s mine.
Make yourself one (and if you do, I’d love to see it)!
Peer Pitch
space to recommend someone else’s thing—maybe yours
No one submitted anything to me this month, but you can submit something for the next issue (coming in September).
In the meantime, I’ll give a shout out to Carolyn Yoo’s upcoming Zine Lab, a live, four-week workshop designed to guide you from idea to publication, whether you’re a complete beginner or have made zines before.
I love zines, and I love that they’re having a comeback moment. I recently joined one of Carolyn’s workshops, and it was so much fun (stay tuned for that zine to come in a future issue of this newsletter). Join her if you want that fun for yourself this August.
On the Horizon
something coming up next for me that I’m excited to share with you
I’m excited to have another management training day on the books with my SEED Trio colleagues. We’re offering “Managing with Care: Management Training for Mid-Career Professionals” on October 6 at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers in New Brunswick, NJ. It’s an optional add-on to the Mid Atlantic Association of Museums conference, but we’re experimenting with also offering it as a stand-alone session. I hope you’ll consider joining us if you’re a mid-career manager looking for some support and tactics.
I’ll be taking August off from this newsletter as I’ll be up in Northern Maine on my annual 3-week reading vacation away from the internet. Share your book recs, please!
Let this also be your reminder that taking your own time off—and protecting that time—is a key practice to navigate the uncertain times we’re living through. Being a pirate, I like to use nautical metaphors, and the one here is that you need to maintain the energy to keep yourself stably paddling upright on the unknown seas.
For me, that means a chunk of time in the woods with
no reliable internet connection
a huge, eclectic pile of books
an out-of-office message turned on that clarifies I won’t be doing any business until I get home
a determination not to schedule any meetings, calls, or work projects at all
No “well, I can do a little work here and there”.
No “if there’s an important call, I’ll take it”.
No “I’ll just keep an eye on my inbox so I don’t get overwhelmed on my return”.
Time to fully unplug and turn off the work monitor in my head is essential to keeping myself energetically resourced to do the best work I can be doing.
There’s no such thing as an “uncertainty coaching emergency”, after all.
How to make this happen could look entirely different for you, but I’m still encouraging you to figure out what it is that lets you switch fully out of work mode.
Because if you take uncertainty coaching out of that bold sentence and insert your own work, chances are the sentence will still hold true.
I write these updates using Ellipsus, an online platform for collaborative writing. They’ve got a feature that lets you share the revision history of your writing, so I’ll be including that at the bottom here as a document of my non-AI writing process.
