Why I never write unless I am smiling

When I began blogging on Tuesday May 5, 2008, I created some guidelines:
1.  Have something to say that is compelling and that may help others.
2.  Be sensitive to the various audiences who may be reading.
3.  Smile.

My first post was about business planning, titled Riding the Business Planning Cycle, on my Lynear Thinking. At the time, I was a business planner helping executives, boards and employees climb the proverbial hill of vision.  I wrote the post in such a way that if the CEO of my company read it, he would be OK with it.  That post has received 14 page views to date.

On May 14, 2010, two years later, I wrote “How to be a Pink Flamingo in a Brown Duck Pond” which as of today, has had 7,739 page views.

My first post was informative, yes, but not entertaining.  It was sensitive to audiences and potential readers, but not compelling.  Was I smiling when I wrote it?  Not likely. In fact, business planning is not / was not a laughing matter in my world at the time. It was and is serious business.  The challenge to business planning was always how to bring the human element into the process so that people would not dread it every year.

How to be a Pink Flamingo in a Brown Duck Pond is informative.  It is entertaining. It is sensitive to audiences (hence the ducks and flamingos) and I distinctly remember smiling when I wrote it.  How to be a Pink Flamingo in a Brown Duck Pond is essentially my way of saying, I don’t fit in to corporate culture, and I am OK with that.  It was my own quiet revolution.

I am a flamingo. I can wear all the tweed in the world, and I will never, ever, ever be a duck.  Of course, my tweed suit would have crystal buttons, perhaps sequined pumps and maybe a splash of pink.

Truthfully, I used to be concerned about fitting in and being accepted.  I used to try really hard to be one of them - one of the ducks. I learned to quack and waddle, but they never learned to dance.  The language of  the brown duck is very specific, and coded specifically not to offend, entertain, or enlighten.

There are buzz words that project managers and accountants use like “stage gates” and “activated” and “targets”, as you see in the opening paragraph of my first blog on business planning:

Business Planning is a management process that is fundamental to the success of any organization. It is the means through which direction is set, strategies are formed, targets are established, and initiatives are activated to achieve the desired change. These are the typical stage gates of an enterprise planning process. There is another very important element to the business planning cycle and this is implementation and reporting.

  

If I had it my way, it would have been more like this.

We would create a company where each person is the CEO of his or her own life, where CEO stands for creative, entrepreneurial and optimistic, where there would be no “no”, just how. Where vision comes from the inspired, not necessarily the promoted. Where inspiration is the breath that brings new ideas, and passion becomes the wings that brings it to life. Where the community comes together to create something with purpose, on purpose. 

I did propose the flamingo rendition of business planning at a blue sky meeting under the title “Lynear Thinking" in 1996 in front of group of executives, wearing black leather pants, with the song “It’s my life” by Bon Jovi blasting. I was entertaining, informative, and I was smiling when I presented my vision. They could have fired me that day (for fear that anarchy would break out should I unleash my creativity upon the flock), but they did not fire me to their credit. They did eventually promote me though, but then again, my VP was a flamingo too.



On June 15, 2011, I broke away from the corporate brown duck world creating Lynear Thinking Strategy and Communications Ltd. to bring my vision to life, which is a something that will take the rest of my life, as all good visions should.  I was smiling that day too, but stormy days did come as I realized that I had become practiced as a waddling brown duck but I had no idea how to fly on my own.

On March 5, 2012, I created the Flamingo Project to bring balance back into my life, to locate my voice, and to learn to fly. I re-published the post that started this quiet revolution of the flamingo, ‘How to be a Pink Flamingo in a Brown Duck Pond’.

Since then, I have written three books. “Died of A . . .” is a collection of poetry that was rejected in the most unceremonious way by a local publisher.  I wrote two books under the title, “How to be Pink Flamingo in a Brown Duck Pond”. Book one is subtitled ‘Learning to Fly’ and Book two is subtitled ‘Painting the sky’.  I have decided not to publish ‘Learning to Fly’ at this time because quite honestly, I do not want to live that story into perpetuity as it was a very painful time in the grounding of this flamingo.  I was not smiling when I wrote it.

Publisher photo, The White Issue,
SKY Magazine December 2012

When I wrote book two, I merged “Died of A” into the story as it was part of the journey that brought me to this place. Poetry and imagery (ducks and flamingos) creates a safe distance between the acceptable truth and the painful truth.  It makes the truth palatable. It made it possible to embrace what I had learned along the way, and live in my own vision.

On October 18, 2012, I found what I had been looking for all along.  I found my sky for sale quite serendipitously on Kijiji.   The original owner was ready to move on to new things, and I was ready to take on the sky, and so, December 2012, I launched my first issue - the White Issue.  The publisher photo in my first issue is the photo that I chose for the book, because this was the true moment of my taking flight. I am now about to publish my eight issue of SKY Magazine, two years later.

Some people stand and look at the sky, others reach out and touch it.  I created Lynear Thinking to help people find their vision and live it.  I did not expect that it would lead me to mine. Now I not only help people touch the sky, I change the colour of the sky in my world and in the worlds of my readers, and that, I believe is my fate, and I know that that every day that I am living in my own vision, fate is smiling upon me.

I believe that intention leads us to our destiny.  My intention in writing Book two was to share a journey that hopefully others may relate to and know that they are not alone.  My intention is to help, not hurt.  My intention is to engage and entertain, not just inform. My intention is to let readers know that it’s OK to fall and get back up again, and that we are each travellers in our own journeys, and we have the power to live in vision and passion.

And that is why I never write unless I am smiling.