The question is, in an amped-up, caffeine-fueled, texting/tweeting world of constant distractions, is there a place for silence in business? That is, can a more beautifully silent space lead to better writing?

Or is this a question whose answer varies by age, with time for silence or contemplation a concept that appeals more powerfully to people over 40?

Do people write better, think more clearly, if they have the luxury of doing so in an environment that screens out noise and distractions? Does focus lead to better writing, content that’s more likely to resonate with others? Can a blank canvas invoke more creativity?

It’s an interesting question, one that I think is best answered on an individual basis. It’s also possible that individual preferences are more situational, linked to time and place, or what you’re thinking or writing about. Or: who’s paying for your time and why…

A writer’s haven

If you’d like to experience the impact of distraction-free silence while writing, there’s a minimalist tool for Mac, PC and iPad users called “OmmWriter Dana.” It’s kind of a zen-like, Steve Jobs-inspired approach to the act of writing. Its Barcelona-based creators call it “a writer’s haven.”

OmmWriter Dana

The minimalist version can be downloaded for free to your Mac; a paid-version offers a broader selection of color schemes and audio themes designed to cultivate focus, contemplation and enhance creativity.

I’m using the basic version of OmmWriter to draft this blog post. OmmWriter enables me write the basic post, hiding the rest of my Macintosh environment (including turning off my secondary display where I normally scan incoming emails, tweets, etc.)

To turn this draft into a blog, I copy my draft, and then paste it into WordPress where I’ll add the appropriate HTML tags, category tags and so on. This separates the writing process from the markup process.

Whether this two-step approach enhances creativity is too soon to say definitively. What I do know is that the actual experience of writing with OmmWriter is more delightful than when writing a blog inside WordPress, LiveWriter, NotePad or any of the usual word processing tools.

Try it yourself, and see how it helps your writing.

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Dave was enchanted by a recent biography of Dylan, written by a historian and Dylan fan, resulting in a fascinating exploration of the political, social and cultural milieu that informed Dylan’s art. Somehow we kept returning to the “tangled up” phrase during our conversation.

Since then the phrase, snatches of the song and images of blue have been reverberating in my head. A pleasing form of blues obsession…

And now the concept has morphed into “tangled up in green,” sparked the visual explosion of spring green everywhere I look here in the Pacific Northwest.

After a long grey and insanely rainy winter, this verdant fire is a feast for warmth-starved eyes.

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Colorists, interior designers and other experts know how to influence moods and attitudinal state by the colors that surround people at work, at home or at play. I was reminded of the power of color at yesterday’s Anusara yoga class.

Before class, we were all buzzing about the energy we feel in Seattle Yoga Arts’ new venue (shown above).

The studio is vibrant, alive with heart-warming hues: reds, oranges, pinks, mustard yellows, and purple accents. The playful interior offers a huge (and welcome) contrast to the original studio a few blocks north. While this energizing palette may not be optimal for inspiring meditation or contemplation, it fires our asanas. An appropriate choice for Anusara’s heart-centered philosophy.

As one color expert writes,

…Red suggests the very ebb and flow of life. It is the most viscerally alive hue, the symbolic color of the heart, strong-willed and expressing strong emotions. It may command us to stop but at the same time encourages movement. Physiologically, red is a call to the adrenaline glands to get the body and senses activated.

—Leatrice Eiseman, Color: Messages and Meanings

Driving home, still pondering the impact of color, I recalled two starkly different office environments from earlier in my career, back in my Silicon Valley days.

Apple’s colorful, carefully designed office environments were a playful but energizing contrast to HP’s drab office spaces and linoleum floors. HP’s office always made me think of a house that was functional, but unloved. Although separated by only 2 miles, they were oceans apart in terms of corporate culture and design sensibilities. Apple’s environment stimulated my brain and inspired me to do my best; HP’s depressed me into a low-energy, dull and plodding state — one I couldn’t wait to leave.

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Why the Voice Matters in Yoga

The sound of a teacher’s voice is an important aspect of a class: what she says and how she says it. It’s a matter of personal taste, but some voices are — to my ear at least— more pleasing than others. In any given class I spend a lot of time listening with either eyes closed or attention focused elsewhere (the drishti gaze). When I’m not actively watching the teacher, the sound of her voice helps me focus my practice or identify where a micro-adjustment might be required. What she says and how she says it can make all the difference between yoga-as-gym-activity and yoga as something more meaningful or uplifting.

Does the teacher’s voice direct your attention to the key focal point(s) for your pose? Does it help you crystallize your intention or improve your ability to shift into your meditation space?

Yes, of course, the content of what the teacher says and how she delivers her instructions are hugely important. That’s the starting point, the sine qua non. If the teacher’s instructional style or her ability to guide you is out of whack with your needs and capabilities, nothing else matters: you need to find a teacher better suited to what you need to learn, or unlearn. Solve that problem first.

Once you’ve found a set of talented teachers whose instruction style and yoga tradition match your preferences, then you can start to pay attention to other factors, like class size, the nature of the invocations or readings, etc. The spiritual content (or lack thereof). The smell of the studio. Its decor. The props on offer.

Ideally, I prefer classes that are small enough to offer semi-individualized attention on how to improve your pose, alignment, action, drishti focal point — whatever. But it’s rare to find a high quality, uncrowded class. In this particular urban area crowded classes are the norm, unless you’ve found a new teacher, a new studio just developing its following, or can take classes at unpopular hours.

In large or crowded classes, it can be difficult to see the teacher when your mat is not up in the front, except for those moments when she stops the class to demonstrate a new or challenging pose. In classes like this the voice matters more than ever. It’s the carrier for good instruction.

Implications for Teachers

If you’re trying to attract more students, think about ways to offer a trial experience of your voice, the quality of your instruction. What about offering some sample podcasts or an online video clip to showcase how you teach and interact with students? Pick a pose or two, find a willing student or two, and get someone’s help to record/video the instructional moment.

Then look for appropriate places online where you can publish or offer your sample of how you teach your students. Facebook, YouTube, your studio’s website, iTunes, online yoga communities — you now have lots of relatively inexpensive opportunities to showcase what makes you such an inspiring teacher. And if this is all technically beyond your skillset, perhaps you can barter some free classes in exchange for technical or professional help with your podcast or sample video.

If you contribute to a blog, think about ways to offer a brief podcast or audio clip in which you share your voice, your values, or what you’re all about as a teacher and yoga practitioner.

Share your voice.

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Each of these big thinkers has offered up pearls of wisdom from their life’s experience or their professional adventures — and some of their notions will resonate for days after in your mind. It’s easy to consume: one big idea per page.

For example, consider this gem from Daniel Pink under the heading “Autonomy.”

Pink writes that “management isn’t natural” if you want people to engage their hearts, minds and creative passions at work. Management is great for ensuring compliance, but not for eliciting break-through ideas or world-changing products. I love Pink’s quote in What Matters Now:

If we want engagement, and the mediocrity-busting results it produces, we have to make sure people have autonomy over the four most important aspects of their work:

• Task — what they do
• Time — when they do it
• Technique — how they do it
• Team — whom they do it with

After a decade of truly spectacular underachievement, what we need now is less management and more freedom — fewer individual automatons and more autonomous individuals.

Daniel Pink’s musings on the sources of motivation help me to understand why I find life as an independent consultant vastly more rewarding than climbing the corporate ladder inside a traditional enterprise.

Pink’s insights also explain why my husbands and friends (all trapped within management-dominated enterprises) complain so often, and so bitterly, about their jobs. No doubt their frustration is caused by lack of control over 1 or more of the 4 items cited by Pink. I can offer advice on how to improve their situations, but if they’re tightly controlled by managers or constrained by their understanding of  “the system” — the way things work here — they can see no light at the end of their personal tunnels as long as they continue to work for those enterprises. And that’s a crying shame, because these are brilliant, talented, caring and experienced people at the height of their careers.

Unlike them I chose to exit the corporate job environment 15 years ago. As an independent consultant, I can control or influence all 4 of those aspects of my work, so what I do professionally is meaningful and intrinsically motivating; offers opportunities for out-of-the-box thinking and resourceful problem solving; and allows me to make lasting contributions to my clients in ways they find distinctive and memorable. Thanks to Daniel Pink, now I understand why.

And thanks to Seth Godin for sharing these contributions from such brilliant thinkers. What a gift to all would-be change agents for 2010!

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To prepare my plan for 2010 I’ve been reading a bunch of books, magazines and online resources.

The challenge, of course, is how to make sure you follow through on the New Year’s resolutions, once past the early enthusiasm and first few weeks of good intentions…

At the advice of friends, I’ve decided to experiment with a new online service that helps people plan and track progress on their life’s goals.

I’ve subscribed to the online service called Mindbloom, to see if its playful technology-assisted approach can help keep me on track… The UI is fun and very easy to learn. Each of the leaves in the tree illustrated here represents a goal, a source of inspiration, and a set of planned actions with target follow-through dates. The founders believe that you can accomplish big goals by breaking them down into smaller actions, things you can accomplish on a day-by-day basis.

So far the service looks promising, although I’ve encountered a number of bugs. The service is very new, so it’s clear the software is still in the shake-down phase, the functionality stripped to the core essentials.

My cats like the sound track, a bird tweeting in the background, but after the first few encounters, I find it cloying and annoying. It’s now turned off.

There’s a conflict between a number of the service’s assumptions and my desires; at present there’s no way to make my personal preferences override Mindbloom’s defaults, so I’m not yet convinced I’ll stick with the service.

But for now, I’m hopeful that the Mindbloom approach will be more fruitful than endless cascades of to-do lists and Post-It notes, followed by forgetfulness, distractions and then regrets. I’ll give it a shot, and see if my track record for completed New Year’s resolutions in 2010 improves as a result.

It will be interesting to see if Mindbloom can function as a virtual “personal coach” to keep me on track, and gently prompt me to make good on my intentions. If so, 2010 will prove to be a way better year than 2009 has been. And that will be great for me, my family, my friends and my business.

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What strikes me is the way the popularity of user-created content in online and social networking arenas may be subtly influencing how people prefer to communicate these days via holiday greeting cards.

Clearly, it takes more effort to produce personalized cards than simply buying and signing mass-market cards from Hallmark. Given how busy most people are during the holiday season, you have to assume the trend toward self-made cards and letters reflects fundamental human needs to connect on a deeper level, to find outlets for creative expression, share funny moments, and so on.

We’ve really enjoyed this outpouring of personalized greeting cards this year. And wish we had reciprocated in a similar fashion…

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This is the best resource I’ve seen to help clarify the dimensions of the debate and what’s at stake. Its clarity is due to Dan Roam’s mastery of visual thinking as a means to organize and focus the key aspects of complex topics and then communicate those insights in a simple and straightforward manner that is easily grasped. As I wrote a year ago, I loved Roam’s book on visual thinking, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. This slideshow is a great example of the power of visual thinking.

This debate matters to me because I own a small business and there are no good, affordable alternatives for small businesses. I hope that this slideshow helps to illuminate the issues, and help the government reach a consensus that serves the consumer and tax payer, without continuing to enrich the private insurers at the expense of the consumer (which is the status quo).

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On Becoming a Novelist

Sue Monk Kidd wrote the wildly popular The Secret Life of Bees, her first novel.  As we learn in Pomegranates, Kidd agonized over the decision to write a novel given her long career as a nonfiction author. She reveals how and where she made the decision to write a novel, The Secret Life of Bees, as well as what inspired many of Bees’ themes and imagery (such as the Black Madonna and bees). Traveling with Pomegranates and The Secret Life of Bees are connected on many levels, both literary and spiritual.

For aspiring novelists her descriptions of emotional upheavals, creative ferment, sources of inspiration, spiritual “moments of truth” and an ongoing battle with self-esteem offer a precious peek into the creative process.

The … surge of creativity I’ve felt…. Where does the improvisation, the freedom, the hint of new authority and potency come from? Images well up in me more spontaneously, trailing along a stream of ideas, memories, feelings, and symbols, and I feel connected to a sourcelike place in myself.

Pomegranates is a yummy book — I should have savored it instead of racing through so I could return it to the library. It’s definitely a book to recommend to friends and re-read someday at a more leisurely pace.

Life Passages

On the surface this is a travel memoir, a story told in alternating voices, as mother and daughter contrast their experiences of travel together in Greece and France. They visit key destinations for early Christian pilgrims, as well as ancient Goddess sites – a sort of feminists’ journey. I’ve visited some of those places, and enjoyed the opportunity to relive them through the authors’ experiences. And even more, to learn the inspirational sources of imagery in The Secret Life of Bees, such as the Black Madonna of Rocamadour, shown here.

But the book’s most profound moments occur when each author describes her feelings as they work through life passages, and redefine their relationship as they both transition into new life stages:

• On the threshold of turning 50, the mother is facing menopause, mortality (her own and her mother’s), and is thinking about unresolved relationship issues with her mother and her daughter.
• The daughter has just graduated from college, is still agonizing over her rejection from grad school, suffers from low self-esteem, and does not yet know who or what she wants to be.

For her fellow Baby Boomers, the most poignant moments occur when Sue Monk Kidd writes about the pain of leaving youth behind while not yet ready to embrace what she calls “The Old Woman.” And then she describes the joy and release of acceptance. Here’s a sample, written toward the end of the book when she begins to embrace “the final third of my life”:

By Christmas, the need to examine my face for lines and sags left me. I recognized the growing permutations as more than the effects of time. They became a poignant history – tracings of my experience and character, the passionate individuality of my soul, the story of lived life written in the tenderness of skin. I began to find a worn beauty in all of that. I could never cut it away.

Needless to say the title’s reference to pomegranates is laden with symbolism and references to Greek myths, fertility, and other imagery.

Happy reading!

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Instead I spent loads of time online with my family collaborating via Basecamp, a “closed community.” We shared memories, photos, laughs and tears as we got ready to help my mother and her twin brother celebrate their 80th birthday. It became addictive – each morning we rushed to our computer to see who had written what last night. We laughed and cried. We dragged our spouse and the kids into the mix.

Tweeting and blogging simply couldn’t compare to the appeal of our real-world social network. Time I might have invested there went into the family memories project.

A week after the big birthday party – the 50-person family reunion – we’re still collaborating via Basecamp. Everyday, we’re still talking.

As my brother Dana wrote so eloquently today, sharing is the secret to a thriving family community:

Recipe for Memories

1 part shared experience
2 parts (or more) of laughter
(optional) 1 part surprise/OMG’s!
Many parts LOVE
1 freedom to share
2 (or more) people to giggle/guffaw/pee pants about the memory later

Take experience and roll out onto life’s table using both hands. Shape with words of awe and laughter, surprise (or any other emotion handy). Mix in the love—-fold gently but don’t be afraid and be too gentle. Love can handle the rough stuff.
Now, this is the tricky part: take 2 or more people and have both of them put their fingerprints all over the experience. Really get into it and make it their own. Twist it, turn it, shake it up, turn it over, run towards it and then embrace it for all you got.

Next, allow it to sit for awhile to “percolate”.
Come back to it later-in some cases, YEARS later. Add the freedom to share.
Slice it, serve it up and allow others to enjoy with you with a dash more of laughter, some tears and lots of love.
Laughter, tears and love are the spices that make it a gourmet meal.

Bon Appetit. This is your life served up just the way you lived it. Eat well.

Thanks, Dana.

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