NUGGETS
There are so many wonderful ideas, metaphors, images and stories that I've had the privilege of discovering over the years. I want to share a few of them with you.
Please feel free to add any that seem useful to your own toolbox and to share them with others as well (although I do request that if there is an author or credit cited, you share that, too).
On getting started. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. (Lao Tzu)
Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get. (Forrest Gump)
Solutions are like recipes. They have multiple ingredients. (Ellen)
Practice guilt. This is for accepting the universal phenomenon that you can't do it all at the same time. A wise harp teacher, Melissa Morgan, shared that concept about practice time. If you're learning a new tune, you aren’t practicing your old ones or your arpeggios. If you're practicing your scales, you're not learning to improvise. All of those are good things to do. It’s just that when you're doing one, you aren’t doing the other. Accept the universality of that.
This isn’t just for music. There are so many good, valuable things you want to do these days. And there is only so much time. So experiment with reflecting, maybe with some humor, about the universality of that predicament. Let’s leave the one you're not doing in the backpack for now. Embrace and savor the one you are doing.
Steering back to center: For getting back on track after a slip. You know how when you're driving a car, you just naturally correct the steering? You drift a little this way, and you come back to center. You go a little that way; you come back to center. You do that all the time. It’s just like that in your life. When you're slightly too far in one direction, you just come back to center. (Ellen)
On collecting nuggets. “I am like a magpie. I collect shiny objects.” I learned this one from a Canadian colleague, Heather Fiske. I often have to explain it to Californians, many of whom don’t know what a magpie is: It is a bird, more common on the east coast and in northern Europe, that will find anything shiny—a button, a piece of aluminum foil, an old candy wrapper—and add it to her nest along with the natural twigs and leaves. It means that I will use any tool, image, story, metaphor, analogy that I can find, and some of my clients like to collect as many as they can, too.