A sword isn’t any good as a dull lump of metal. It’s the process of sword-making that makes a good sword – and that process is hardcore.

You take a piece of metal and put it into the fire.

You take it out of the fire and hit it with a huge, heavy hammer – multiple times.

You dunk it in water.

And repeat the process until that dull lump becomes a strong, shiny, sharp sword.

It’s not easy to become a sword. Spending all that time being scalded, dunked, and beaten makes you want to wall off, to disappear, even to break – anything to make it stop. But if you survive, when you make it through, you become something beautiful, useful, balanced.

As a lump of metal, you’re not doing much. But as you become a sword, you manifest.

Hardship makes us who we are. It shapes us. The difficult times give us strength, help us make and deepen connections. It brings us together, gives us something to bond over. It gives an individual the means to become part of a community. Broken hearts mend, and the scars – eventually – enrich our beings.

Without being laid on the forge, we will never become what we are most capable of being.

I used to be neurotic about my glasses. I had to know where they were at all times. They were the very last thing I would remove at night – usually after I was already in bed – and the very first thing I’d put on in the mornings, and usually before I even got out of bed. Even if I lingered in bed to read or cuddle, I’d put them on.

But I realized a few days ago – I’m not neurotic about them anymore. I’ve started taking them off in the bathroom when I ablute and not bothering to put them back on. I’ve even spent hours in the mornings without them, while Pace and I sit around and cuddle before we exercise.

It boils down to comfort.

I used to be in a manipulative relationship with a controlling abuser. In that situation, I felt uncomfortable. I felt out of control, helpless, a victim. My glasses gave me security and comfort that I couldn’t find elsewhere – and she couldn’t touch them without me flipping out, so she never tried.

But my neurosis over my glasses was a red flag; a warning sign of things not right in our relationship. Much like my obsession over ansty goth rock (that also went away with that relationship) – I was using my glasses as an anchor, as something I could control in a situation in which I felt helpless.

(The goth rock was considerably more emo: I felt I had a hole in my soul, and goth rock sings about hole-filled souls a lot, so it gave me something to which I could relate. I got better.)

Now that I’m in a healthy relationship, I no longer need to desperately cling to control over little things because I no longer feel helpless – and I can look back and see things as red flags. The things I see when I look back will fill a book, but this is one of them.

Call it an early warning sign. So I give it to you as something to mull over and consider. If you find yourself clinging to the little things, desperate for comfort… what are you really feeling?

Ana Ottman of Red Dress Studios interviewed us just after we launched the World-Changing Writing Workshop – and Give it a listen and say hi to Ana while you’re there – she’s super cool. With a tagline like, “I dare women to change the world, business by business,” you know we’re gonna get along smashingly!

Tomorrow, I have an appointment with a surgeon.

This was supposed to be a post about triumph over fear and regaining hope.

But I’m not there.

I keep hoping I’ll get there. But it’s not happening – not yet. I’m so angry and sad about my situation, and I can’t get past it to get better.

All of it. The pain, the fear, the lack of hope and faith. Having to pee so frequently that I don’t even want to watch a movie or go to parties or go to the store. Waking up a zillion times every single night because I can’t go more than an hour without peeing. I need to pee immediately, as soon as the urge hits, or it starts to hurt really badly – and sometimes, it hurts even then. If I cough or sneeze, it hurts – and makes me feel like my uterus is going to be forcibly ejected, and makes me immediately need to rush to the bathroom to pee. Even if I just fucking did, five minutes ago.

And that’s in addition to the constant hormonal wackiness, the mood swings, and the mild-to-hardcore cramping. And the random cravings for meat and other weird foods, and the raw hunger if I don’t eat every few hours – and not being able to eat even half of what I used to at a time, but still not losing any weight. And being tired all the time, and needing lots of extra sleep. And having little energy for anything.

Emotionally, I’m all over the place. I managed to isolate myself from my friends, because half of them are pregnant and it breaks my heart to hear them talk about baby stuff all the time – and I know I’m a total drag to be around because half the time I’m depressed and the other half I’m stressed. Or in the bathroom.

And then there’s the spiritual side. I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with my broken heart and disconnected spirituality for months now. I want to trust, I want to fall – I want to say, “Here I am! I can’t do this anymore! Help!” I want to surrender.

As I said to Mark Silver, I feel like a tiny wooden boat, lost at sea on a stormy night, and the waves are beating me and tossing me about – and I know the answer. I know I need to sink the boat, and let the waves take me, and immerse myself in the great sea.

But I’m so incredibly fucking terrified.

I’ve been there before, when I was raped by my then-partner and wound up pregnant. I felt that the baby was Spirit’s way of saying, “I’m so sorry for your pain. Here is some hope. Have faith.” I even named her Faith.

And then I miscarried. And I spent months – over a year, in fact – in this same dark place of hopelessness and faithlessness and despair. The night I was losing the baby, I laid on the floor of our sanctuary – our holiest of holy places in our home – and begged Spirit not to take her, to no avail. But then, over years of work and finding the Reclaiming community in Chicago, becoming a core member/leader there, and years of self-work, I found my faith again. It’s never been the same, though, to be honest. There’s always been this sense of… “I wish I was more spiritual… but ((insert various reasons here)).”

And now this.

Now, I find myself frantic and desperate for a spiritual connection, to know that there is love and not just an endless series of horrible things that will break me until I fall completely apart… and at the same time, I’m filled with fear just at the thought of reaching out again. Or drilling the hole, as it were.

I don’t even know where to begin to get better.

Maybe tomorrow, maybe making progress toward healing the physical will help the rest of it fall into place. Maybe all I need is time.

I don’t know.

Here are some interesting and inspiring things we’ve come across lately.

Hildy Gottlieb reviews The Usual Error

Our friend Hildy interviewed us about The Usual Error. She talks about how she applies it when talking with boards and also in her personal life. There’s a blog post and an audio interview right here.

A short story about ladders, boxes, and possibility

This story is beautiful and inspiring. It’s kind of like Cath Duncan‘s version of the Freak Revolution Manifesto.

Kyeli’s heretical thoughts on productivity

Kyeli and 35 other productive heretics share their advice in this post, 36 Secrets the Productivity Gurus Won’t Tell You (But Our Heretics Will), by Ali Hale and Thursday Bram.

Real life is broken; it’s up to game designers to fix it

We can learn a lot from successful games. Let’s figure out what makes people enjoy games so much, then apply it to the real world. Jane McGonigal: Gaming can make a better world.
Fascinating and inspiring.

How great leaders inspire action

This TEDx talk by Simon Sinek was fodder for some great conversation between me and Kyeli about why we’re so passionate about the Freak Revolution, and why people resonate with what we have to say. It explains what Apple, the Wright Brothers, and Martin Luther King all have in common.

…and you?

What’s new with you? Anything you’d like to share with us?

On a gorgeous April Tuesday, we got to spend the entire day with one of our oldest, dearest friends, Kelan. (He lives far away, so this was a special treat!) We talked and talked; it was like a pub crawl, only with talking instead of drinking. We talked about life, spirituality, philosophy, our kids, everything. It was one of the best days ever, in my not-very-humble opinion.

Kelan has two adorable little girls. Recently, they’ve begun potty training Anya (she’s the older sister; she recently “turned into three”). This, as anyone who’s ever potty trained, leads to a lot of talk about poop.

On one such occasion, Kelan was telling Anya where different animals poop. She asked about foxes, and he said, “Well, foxes poop pretty much anywhere.”

She looked up at him and asked, in all seriousness, “In the sky?”

Spoken in honesty and innocence and curiosity.

As young children, we don’t assume we know everything. We take delight in learning. We come into the world as inquisitive, investigative beings with an insatiable curious streak. Children learn, they seek, they ask, they taste and test and poke and prod, take apart, and question. They question the rules, they question the norm, they question everything.

Anya, ready to tackle her day.

Their fashion sense is incredible, too. They mix stripes and polka dots, layer colors in combinations that make their parents cringe, wear their pajamas in public, don swimsuits in December with a casuality that boggles the adult mind. As they get a little older, they often style their own hair (and occasionally give themselves haircuts) with wild abandon. And then, with crooked ponytails, bright pink tu-tu, red cape from a Halloween costume six months ago, and mismatched socks, they emerge fully prepared to face the world. It’s not til after years of being scolded, ignored, snapped at, reprimanded, and conditioned that we gradually stop being so inquisitive, so bold, so freespirited. It takes conditioning to put us in the box so many of us spend the rest of our lives trying to get out of, because we’re inherently rule-breakers at heart.

We can learn a lot from children.

If we stop boxing them in, we can learn how to stop being boxed.

Most people have trouble sleeping – especially geeks and freaks and entrepreneurs (oh, my!).

We keep such odd schedules that our bodies and brains often don’t slow down even when they’re supposed to, and who has time to relax anymore? Often, even after we fall, our sleep is restless or interrupted, and falling back to sleep is even harder the second time.

But sleep is our most precious function: it refuels us, heals us, and rejuvenates us. A good night’s sleep will empower us to have a better day, every time – and without it, we get increasingly moody, quick to anger, and far more prone to illness.

I know that Pace and I particularly had troubles over the past month, gearing up to the launch of the Writing Workshop, which is unsurprising, given the sheer excitement and anxiety that comes with a big project.

Here are nine tricks I’ve found to make sleep come easier and stay longer – and they work, even when you’re feeling lots of pressure. I’ve been putting them to the test quite a lot, lately. (;

1. Don’t do anything brainy.

Stop reading that engrossing non-fiction book, stop watching the news, stop doing anything that makes you think at least an hour before bed. If you’re thinking right up til bedtime, your brain won’t stop when you lay down, and you’ll wind up tossing and turning for a long while instead of sleeping.

Instead, do down-time activities. Read a fiction novel. Watch something calming or funny, but not violent or gritty. Meditate, take a bubble bath, or play a mindless calm video game (first person shooters are right out). Anything to wind your brain down. This gives your mind time to process the day behind the scenes so that when you’re ready for sleep, so is your brain.

2. Close your open loops.

If you find yourself laying in bed trying to remember if you fed the cats, get up and feed the cats. If you’re making a list of what to buy at the grocery store, write it down. Is the door locked? Go check. Is your alarm set? Take a quick look.

Assuaging these little nagglers will close your open thought loops, which will quiet your brain and allow you to sleep. Keep a little notebook by your bed for night-time list scribbling, make a nightly routine of locking the doors and checking on the kids/cats/dogs/fish. I even say things out loud like, “Yep, the front door is locked. The cats have food and water. I can hear the kiddo singing, so I know he’s okay.” Saying them out loud reinforces their completion and helps me remember better when I’m shutting down my loops before I sleep.

3. Don’t leave the lights on.

Make your bedroom as dark as possible. With all our technology, we’re inundated with lights – and it completely messes with our cycles. Even that digital clock is enough light to keep you from deep sleep. If you need a light, find a soft nightlight – but it’s best for as much dark as possible.

This is true for the rest of your house, too. Get a couple of soft nightlights to illuminate your path to the bathroom and put another in your bathroom, and leave the lights off. If you switch them on for your midnight pee, you’re flooding your brain with signals to wake up and start the day, which will make returning to sleep far more difficult.

4. Forget about the time.

Ever wake up in the middle of the night, unable to immediately return to sleep, and find yourself with a burning desire to look at the clock?

Ditch it.

Looking at the clock is another one of those signals that we’re ready to be up and rolling, so doing it when you would really prefer to be snoozing is counter-productive. If you’re able, don’t put a clock in your bedroom. If you really need one, put it out of reach and angle it so you can’t read it from your bed. (I use my iPhone for an alarm, so I can put it face down – and I trained myself not to touch it when I wake up.)

Knowing what time you’re awake isn’t going to help you sleep better, anyway; train yourself to let it go, and you won’t wake yourself up too much.

5. Don’t look at screens.

Again with light flooding our brains and telling us it’s time to wake up: if you look at a computer screen, TV screen, or even your phone screen, you’re risking waking up too far to easily drop back to sleep.

It’s ideal to stop looking at screens about 30 minutes before you go to bed, but if you can’t manage that, prevent yourself from looking at them in the middle of the night. Even set on the lowest light level, they’re still so bright that our brains think it’s morning.

So in general, if you wake up before you want to, avoid bright lights and screens and you’ll have an easier time of returning to sleep.

6. Don’t be caffeinated.

Don’t get caffeinated too late in the day. This one’s a bit tricky; you have to test and find your limits. For me, it’s 4pm; if I have any kind of caffeine after 4pm, I’m too caffeinated to sleep well.

Figure out how late caffeine affects you, and make sure you don’t have any after that. Having caffeine coursing through you will prevent you from falling asleep – and can prevent you from sleeping well even after you do fall.

7. Exercise early, not late.

Exercising first thing in the morning really helps you sleep better, but the later it gets, the more that adrenaline will stick in your system, giving you trouble relaxing and sleeping. Get it done early, or skip it for the day.

8. Ablute.

Our monkey brains love ritual. If you have a nighttime ritual that you can do right before sleep, you tell your brain and your body that it’s time for resting.

For example, I brush my teeth, wash my face, brush my hair, and pee right before I climb into bed – and I mean, immediately before – not an hour, not ten minutes. On my way to bed, I veer into the bathroom and ablute, then go get in bed. Once I’m in bed, I cuddle with Pace for about 10 minutes, then roll over and assuming the sleeping position, and I’m out.

This sends the message to my body that it’s time to get ready for sleep, and by the time I get to bed, I’m already yawning. Find something simple, relaxing, and repetitive, and get your groove on – this will increase your chances of an easy slumber.

9. Bed is for sleeping.

This is the most important one.

Don’t do anything in bed except sleep. (And your partner; sex in bed is fine.)

We are creatures of habit. If you lay in bed and read for two hours every night, you’re training your body to lay awake for hours before sleep. Then, when you don’t want to read, you’re going to lay there anyway because that’s what you’re trained to do.

I’ve gotten this one down to an art form. As soon as I get in bed and get comfy, I get sleepy. This is because, for years, all I’ve done in bed is sleep. I don’t read there more than once a month (and usually not even that much), I don’t lay there when I’m talking on the phone, nada. I get in bed to sleep, and sleep I do.

In fact, this is so important that it’s important to adhere to it even if you’re trying to sleep and can’t. Don’t lay in bed for more than an hour if you’re having trouble sleeping; get up and go do something relaxing for a bit, then try again. If insomnia persists, repeat. Laying in bed not sleeping reinforces to the body that bed is for other things, and you’ll have more trouble later on.

Good luck, and sweet dreams!

If you’re thinking of registering for the World-Changing Writing Workshop, today’s the day to think.  Registration for the workshop is $197 today only, and goes up to $297 at midnight tonight (Central time).

Do you feel called to this work?

There’s a money-back guarantee, so how would it feel to try out the workshop, and get a refund if it doesn’t meet your expectations?

We hope we can help you, but we totally trust your judgment on whether this is right for you.

Here’s what you get.

Today, we’re giving you a peek behind the curtains of the WCWW stage, to get an insider’s look at why we did it, how we did it, and what we did.

Why do a World-Changing Writing Workshop?

We chose to do the World-Changing Writing Workshop based on some very good advice from our internet mentors: ask your people what they want. We did several polls on the Freak Revolution Coffee House, on the newsletter, and here on the blog – and listened to the voices of our people.

A surprisingly large amount of freaks are also writers – and our freaky writers are, unsurprisingly, interested in changing the world with their writing.

Voilà!

The Speakers

We have an all-star lineup of speakers: Chris Guillebeau, Jonathan Fields, Danielle LaPorte, Colleen Wainwright, Jennifer Louden, Johnny B. Truant, and, of course, me and Pace.

I still get starstruck, myself.

We chose our speakers the same way we chose our project: asking our people. We did another poll, asking who you would want to hear from on writing, and then we invited every single one of the top ten requested people. A couple of them politely declined, the rest accepted – and here we are!

We also asked you to send us your questions – what do you want to know about world-changing writing? Then we put those same questions to our speakers – and we made sure we had people to cover all the bases.

The Bonus Peeps

Our bonus peeps are insanely awesome: Daniel Quinn, Deb Ng, Nathalie Lussier, Becky Blanton, Elizabeth Potts Weinstein, Kelly Kingman, and Ali Hale.

After we lined up our speakers, we started thinking about who else we could ask to join in. We met Deb, Kelly, and Ali at SXSW and totally loved them, Nathalie is a long-time darling, Becky rocks our socks, and we were hysterically excited about Elizabeth after hearing her interview with Johnny and Lee in their program, Question the Rules.

We went over what the speakers would be covering and looked for anything not touched on – adding anything Pace and I felt was being left out – and then made a list of people who could hit those topics.

Approaching the Speakers and Bonus Peeps

Once we’d decided on who to invite, we stepped out of our comfort zone. We knew most of the people requested – but not all of them – and we’d never done anything like this before. We also knew how very busy all these people are, and we wanted to be sure not to be spammy or irritating.

We wanted the entire experience to be pleasant and happy-making for all of our people, speakers and bonus peeps alike.

We, therefore, spent about sixteen hours planning and discussing, then another four composing our offer email.

The email told each person our plans for the workshop. We gave great detail on the structure, the pricing, the launch plans. We told them exactly what we wanted from them, including how much time we would need from them and how much responsibility they would have. We offered each speaker an honorarium (a lovely word Pace learned from Havi), and we made sure all of our speakers and bonus peeps were Ambassadors, so they would get a share of the profits.

We were unambiguous, concise, and precise; these people are all very busy, and a wishy-washy offer that was unclear would be disrespectful. We were open and honest. On a few occasions, (when it was relevant and true), we told the person that we knew they don’t normally do such things, and explained our intrusion carefully and clearly.

Most importantly, we wrote it all from our hearts, from a place of deep gratitude and respect for each person we contacted.

And when we did get rejected (and we did, a few times), we remained respectful, grateful, and understanding.

Why Q&A – and why not live?

We discussed Q&A for what felt like endless hours. (Given that we’re not still discussing it, obviously it wasn’t quite endless. But wow.) Q&A is complicated, but we were fierce about answering every question, so we needed a way to make sure people (that’s you!) could ask questions during the calls – because that’s likely where questions will come up.

So, eventually, we decided to do Q&A to make sure all the questions got heard.

But we were equally fierce against on-call live Q&A. It’s additionally complicated and throws off the flow of a call. Often, the speaker winds up sitting for two minutes of silence while the audience works up the courage to speak up – and then ten people all speak up at once and no one gets heard. And there’s also the danger of a listener being somewhere loud, having barking dogs or crying kids in the background, and the volume of the call can be wildly thrown off. Since we’re providing recordings, this is a big issue.

So, we compromised. We settled on doing real-time Q&A – but not on-call live. Listeners can email me (Kyeli) or tweet at me, and I’ll keep a running list of questions received. Then, during the last 15 minutes of the calls, I’ll ask the speaker as many questions as we have time for.

Any questions asked that we don’t get to with particular speakers will get answered in the Workbook.

Why a Workbook?

We asked each speaker for one warm-up and one wrap-up exercise and compiled them into a workbook. We want our audience to be engaged – not just consuming, but actively participating with the workshop, with the speakers, and with their own writing.

After all, the best way to learn anything is to practice, and we feel that having exercises on hand to give you a point from which to start will encourage you to do just that.

The Titillating Transcription Trials

We had a huge curfluffle with our transcription for the bonuses. We hired someone who did a fair job on the first call, but an abysmal job on the second and third.

For example, in Kelly’s call, we said the name of her eBook (The Sticky eBook Formula) no less than four times. Having actually gotten it correct the first time, the transcriptionist failed to get it right every successive time – and in fact, got it more and more wrong as she went. The final time we said it, she typed, “Sticky Evil Fuck Book.” Which, admittedly, is hilarious – but not quite accurate.

Pace sent her an email letting her know that there’d been a lot of errors and asking her to please do a more careful job. We thought we were being reasonable, but apparently she disagreed – because, with 48 hours to go before we launched, she quit. She very quit.

We blinked a lot, then started the frantic search for a replacement.

Chris jumped in first and really saved our butts. This dood has it down – he can really rock the transcription, people. We were both floored by the awesomeness of his work. (Honestly, by that point, we figured monkeys would do a better job – but Chris is far sweeter and easier to work with than monkeys would be.) The only thing I had to do to the ones he did were minor tweaks that boiled down to my fussiness – which was a wonderful thing.

We paid him double his invoice as “Hazard Pay”. (;

The Awesome Logo

Sparky Firepants, (aka Mr. Pants or Señor Pantalones), created our incredibly gorgeous logo. We’re beyond thrilled with it! He was a total joy to work with; we showed him the super-secret sales page and told him to create something awesome, and he totally did – in a ridiculously short amount of time with a ridiculously small amount of fuss.

¡Muchas gracias, Señor Pantalones! ¡Es muy bueno!

Taking the weekend off in the middle of launch.

Launching a product is like having a baby. You spend weeks – sometimes months – preparing, getting everything ready, cleaning up, writing things out, discussing, building excitement, making sure everyone knows something big and important is about to happen – and then, in the few days before birth, you frantically run around like a crazy person making sure nothing got missed.

Well.

We’re big fans of not running around like crazy people. We like to call ourselves “comfortable entrepreneurs,” so the idea of getting more and more frantic til our hearts burst and we weren’t sleeping at all sounded like a pretty bad idea.

So we didn’t.

We spent months planning the workshop. We prepared, got everything ready, cleaned up, wrote things out, discussed, built excitement, made sure everyone knew something big and important was about to happen – and then we took the weekend off. We accounted for it, too – we set up a schedule, built structure around our launch, and then carefully maintained it, tweaking and adjusting when needed.

When Friday night came along, we worked until we were spent. We went to bed and slept well, knowing we had everything ready for Monday – and then we didn’t work for the rest of the weekend. (Except for about half an hour of transcriptionist drama, which we didn’t flip out about – we just took care of it, and then it was done.)

This break rejuvenated us enough to work until the wee hours the day before launch – by choice, and interspersed with playing video games and leisurely breaks for meals and coffees.

And then we launched Tuesday morning, happy and excited for the world to meet our baby.

Into Every Launch a Little Rain Must Fall

In addition to our Transcriptionist Trials, we had a few hiccups. Pace uploaded the entire bonus package (which is huge and takes over an hour to upload), only to discover errors that needed fixing.

(We wouldn’t want everyone to know that we’d included an über-dorky picture of Johnny in our workbook, after all.)

So we fixed all the errors, replaced the picture, and re-uploaded it.

The key to a perfect launch doesn’t exist. Launches, like births, are messy and stressful and scary. Launching is exhilarating, exasperating, and exciting all at once. There will be hiccups – probably a range of them, from minor to major. There’ll be people who think you charge too much and people who can’t believe it’s so cheap – no matter what you charge.

There will be people who hate your stuff – and people who love it more than anything ever.

In the end, the only person you have to please is yourself. Do your best. Put your heart into your work, launch it, then release it to the universe – because it’s out of your hands at that point, anyway.

Take a deep breath, and go.

Several years ago, Pace read a book called Ishmael by some guy I’d never heard of – Daniel Quinn.

She immediately thrust it upon me, proclaiming it to be the best book she’d ever read. I, somewhat dubiously, read it.

And my world was changed.

A few months later, I read The Story of B – sobbing, nearly hysterical. Never in all my life had I felt so understood by a total stranger. Profoundly touched, this has been without equal in world-changing life-shaking books in my life.

So again, my world was changed.

A revolution began that year, deep in Pace’s heart and in mine. Though it took us nearly four years to figure it out and get it right, those two books implanted the seeds that would eventually blossom into the Freak Revolution.

It is with this profound joy (and more than a little fangirlish squee) that we were able to include a five-question text interview with Daniel as part of the World-Changing Writing Workshop.

We’ve been featured on the Ishmael.org site more than once, and each time has been an honor and a delight.

We are so proud of the Freak Revolution – and were it not for Daniel’s own world-changing writing, we wouldn’t be here today.

In addition to Daniel Quinn’s interview, we’ve got a host of bonus material – and a surprise 6th guest speaker!

Pre-register here – this week!