Blog | The Natural Professional

May you be immersed in good cheer, love and gratitude in this unique time of year!

I know things can get a little edgy from your routines being disrupted, emotions that get stirred up, and the possibly unacknowledged pressures around jumping into the new year.

Here are Natural Professional Headquarters, add to the mix that we’re wrapping up prep for the biggest thing I’ve done all year: producing a virtual Summit.

The Old Way: stress out. The New Way: get grounded.

There are a couple of scenarios for how this could play out, both of which are entirely possible. Call the first one symptomatic of the OLD way and, the second one of the NEW way.

Get stressed out about how much there is to do. Feel heavy and resentful about how this is all going down. Get pissy with my family because I’ve got so much to do and it sucks not being able to be hang out and reconnect.
Stay grounded and centered. Feel gratitude for the opportunity to do this project and for all the support I’ve received. Be happy with my family and clear on my work/non-work sessions so that I’m still spending daily quality time with them.

The “inputs” are the same. The situation is the same. The project and tasks to be done are the same.

What’s different? Perspective. Mindset. Attitude.

One reflects the way I want to experience life. The other does not.

You might challenge: “Sure, but: HOW do I do that? It’s not that easy to just say, I’m going to be all grounded and grateful. When stress comes on, I’m stressed. Period. What do I do differently than what I do now?”

I totally get that. Stress has a sneaky way of creeping in, grabbing your hand, and dragging you downward. And I assure you, anxiety has been nipping at my heels for the last two months. Sometimes it succeeds in invading my space — I’m certainly not immune.

The difference, however, is that when it does weasel its way in, does it drag me five miles down the road of What-a-sucky-day?

Or, do I call on my tools and supports to stop that downward spiral a mere five blocks from home, and get back on track without too much hassle?

Let’s zoom in here and get even more practical: how exactly do you stop the downward spiral?

A 3-fold approach to shifting out of stress.

This morning, for example, found me feeling heavy and dejected at how much there was still to do. And… this was stopped “5 blocks” from home and was transformed into calm and confidence by 10am.

How? Three things:

support structure (weekly call with a fellow entrepreneur who is a huge moral supporter)
a strong sense of what Home feels like (which becomes a reference state to return to)
self-care practices (which left me with enough energy to stay in a good space)

This is what the New Way of Working is all about — a revolutionary shift from accepting stress and self-denial to shining awareness on your well-being. It’s so contrary to everything we’ve learned!!!

Think profound paradigm shift + simple practices that lead to:

Supporting your ability to be resilient.
Expanding your capacity for handling challenging situations.
Making decisions with clarity and ease, and
Bringing forth what you truly want

The New Way is about cultivating your ability to stay in your happy place.

For the more technically-oriented: it’s about cultivating your capacity to act in alignment with the identity you envision for yourself in life and biz, which presumably, is something akin to your happy place.

It’s not rocket science, and the shift is really pretty simple to understand. Practicing it is a bit more challenging because we’ve been entrenched for so long in thinking that work is, by necessity, hard.

Be supported in making the shift yourself.

The really good news is that you’re not on your own in figuring this out. Already, there is a whole league of creative entrepreneurs applying the New Way principles to build kick-ass businesses and cultivate the lives they actually want to be living.

Rather than tell you about them, I have invited ten of them to the New Wow Summit – and now I’d love to invite you.
It’s completely free to join.

This is truly the most important project I’ve brought forth this year. It’s big. It’s life changing.

The interviews are AWEsome. These 10 successful women share deep, honest insights into their own experiences, along with the specific tools, processes, and practices that enable them to stay on track and on purpose. Inspiration? Oh yes! Fluff? Zero.

There’s also a handbook that will help you create your own, personalized guide for New WoW living for the new year.

It runs from Dec 28th – Jan 1st, and I especially designed it to fit into your end-of-year schedule.

If you’ve already signed up, thank you!
And won’t you share it with someone you think would appreciate it as well? The interviews will provide great fodder for conversation…

I promise that you will be happy that you shared the love and I can’t wait to see what you’ll bring forth in 2016!

I’ve got much heart-bursting excitement to share with you!

I’ve been putting together a (free) virtual summit for the end of this year which I offer as a Big, Beautiful gift for you: an inspiring collection of interviews + practical tools to cultivate your capacity to act in alignment who you want to be in your biz and life.

I hope you know that the natural professional is so much more than a biz for me. It’s my vehicle to bring more love, awareness and joy into the world by supporting your Becoming of who you’re here to be.

Several years ago, aligned with that mission, I named my newsletter the New Way of Working. Even though I was still exploring what that meant, I knew it was real. Majorly significant. Paradigm shifting. But how?!?
The New WoW Summit
So I kept exploring and the Natural Professional was as big as my solo-capacity could handle.

Sometimes we talked practical organization.
Sometimes we talked scheduling strategy.
Sometimes we talked about how you want to feel in your biz.

And these are all important threads in the New Way of Working.

Now we’re talking about bringing them all together in a deep integration of your doing with your being. About cultivating inner guidance that empowers you to make decisions with clarity and ease, leverage your own energy / creativity cycles, and bring forth what you truly want.

Yes. That big.

And I know you’re ready for it. You already have elements of this figured out, and there’s something in you that drew you to the natural professional community in the first place!

The difficult part is that working with calm, confidence and clarity is challenged by the old paradigm of stress, fear, and lack every day. Surmountable? Of course.

You’ve seen women out there in the world doing amazing, impactful work with ease and grace and marveled, How does she do it?

So…

Venturing beyond my comfort zone,
Standing up to my own fears of rejection,
Challenging my beliefs of what I should do…
I’m leveling up the Natural Professional (simultaneous joy + freak out — LOL).

This last month and a half has surfaced more fears and self-limiting beliefs than you could possibly believe, mamma mia!

Along with those, however, have been the beauty and grace of blessings that arise from dedication to my passion-project. A warrior stance of such strength and conviction that moving through discomforts that would have in the past held me back, became fleeting feelings to acknowledge as signposts that This Is Right.

To support you and to grow your toolbox for staying in your place of true power: the New WoW Summit.

I identified 10 successful creative women entrepreneurs who are living, breathing and working in the New WoW. I interviewed them. I put together a handbook of their tools + my own methodology. And am making all this available in a free, virtual summit.

And thanks to a core Team of beautiful souls, it looks awesome!

Having had experience with me and the Natural Professional in some way, I’d be ever so grateful if you’d sign up and help spread the word. Forward/share this link: http://thenewwowsummit.com/

On this lovely Sunday morning.
In an inspired writing session.
A road-block was come upon.
An obstacle that did not want me to pass.

Being a lover of freedom.
Resenting being told what to do.
I asked. Nay, I demanded.
“What’s in the way?”

The voice of Reason declared:
“You cannot talk about Resonance in the context of Business.”

I’m afraid to talk about “resonance”.
It’s SOOOO freaking woo-woo.
What the hell does it mean?
AND when I’m in biz mode, that’s that last thing I’m going to think about.

No one will go for it.
It’s stupid.
It’s ridiculous.
You’ll be discredited.
People will think you are nuts.

Oh.
I see.
Right.
They don’t seem to go together…
Hunh. Stumped.

But, wait a minute.
They DO go together.
And if they do go together,
then there must be a way to talk about them.

So then. Let’s explore, shall we?
And with that,
I walked around the obstacle
As if it were merely a rock in the road.

The conversation is not complete.
But it is begun.
Right here.
Right now.
In this post.
A public place.

What do I know?
Your Soul’s blueprint and Touchstone Anchor
They’re a combo of qualities, feelings, becomings, desires
They make up a RESONANCE.

It is your guide.
Your place of healing.
The pool of clarity.
It makes up your Home.

We are going there.
We are there.
Home.

It’s my birthday and I’ve got a heart full o’Love!

My desire is to connect with you in the sweet space beyond time and place, in the timeless knowing that we’re on this big, beautiful earth together, and every other hippy-dippy goodness that comes to mind. Cheesy? Sure! Why not? Let loose the melty mozzarella, people. We’ve got nothing to lose…

And then I thought of you reading this. Wondering what space you’d be in. Amused and accepting of my dairy-silliness? Dispassionate and critical? Impatient and busy?

I thought, “what a bummer if she’s too busy to read this.” Because when we get excessively-busy, we lose touch of our experience of life. We lose touch of our sense of meaningfulness for what we’re doing. We lose the space for joy. We get burnt out or bored.

How awesome would a birthday wish be that helped you detach from the mindset of time-lack and brought you back to the spontaneity in the moment!

Hmmmm…
Oh Oh Oh!
I Got it!
Yes.

Sitting at the table after breakfast the other day with two of my housemates, one told us about an article he’d been reading about Kronos vs Kairos.

Kronos

Kronos is made up of the seconds, minutes, hours, days that march along relentlessly. The nature of it is quantitative. It’s the somewhat arbitrary structure onto which we’ve hung our society.

It keeps us meeting on time, agreeing on expectations via deadlines, containing our work sessions for productivity-sake. It’s what we lament when we cry out: Where has the time gone?!?! There. Is. Never. Enough.

Kairos

Kairos refers to experiencing a deeper awareness of the moment and acting accordingly. The nature of it is qualitative. It’s reflects our experience of life.

It’s the space in which we meet as humans, listen for which expectations are right and appropriate for a given situation. It’s when we get lost in a satisfying creativity session. While it refers to a form of time, it might better be understood as a space — It’s Where the yummy things are!

(This was the theme of my post-Burningman podcast episode last year. I didn’t have the term Kairos at that point, but that’s basically what it is.)

When the going gets Busy, you know which one gets left by the wayside. Ack!! But I don’t want to be a slave to Kronos!

Obviously they both have their place, but let’s face it, Kairos is definitely getting short shrifted. Being on-time — no matter what — has become more important than doing the Right thing at the Right time.

Especially as women, we’ve come to deny our cycles, our rhythms, our moods, our desires. We’ve been inculturated to believe that they are not to be a part of business. Hells No!

I want joy, flow and a sense of Right to be my experience of work!
2 issues here:

To participate in the world, we need to play the Kronos game.
Like the majority of us, I’m habituated to look at the calendar or the clock before checking in.

Can’t I have it all?!?

What to do? Let’s take this approach: we want to honor both Kairos and Kronos. We’ve already got Kronos down, so let’s give Kairos some extra TLC so that we can be in a better position to choose what’s appropriate in the moment. Instead of defaulting to following arbitrary timelines, we’ll come from a place of power and choice.

So how do we get back to Kairos? One way is to unplug. To wrench yourself away from that marching, relentless time structure that we’ve come to mistake for life.

Right there at the breakfast table with my housemates the wheels started spinning in my brain. I knew what I was going to ask for my birthday from my housemates: a day of Digital Sabbath.

Smart phones Off
Laptops: Closed
Clocks: Covered
The theme of the day: Listen in and go with what feels right

They loved the idea. What a fun way to spend a weekend day together (though, there’s entirely the possibility that what will feel right for some at various times is to spend time on their own — anything non-digital goes!)

And then I thought, Oooh! I want this for all natural professionals!!

And… It’s not as easy as just saying, “Hey, yo. You know all your obsessive and addictive digital tendencies? your beliefs that you don’t have time for this? your fears of losing connection with people so you just have to check in on Facebook? Yah, those. Just ignore them and get back into Experiential time.

It can be really hard to unplug. Habits are strong.

The Concept of the Digital Sabbath is for it to be a FUN day, not a day of fighting your addictive tendencies! With that in mind, support and P&P is where it’s at. (By the way, I just made up “P&P” — it’s Planning and Prep.)

So my gift to you, is a P&P guide. Then, as a bday gift back to me, you can tell me how it went! (The day after of course!)

Get yours here.

Go now. Prep. Plan. Play.

And have a fantastic day — I already am just creating this for you!
XO

A Digital Sabbath may sound like a quirky experiment or maybe even a weird way to spend a day, but there’s more going on.

What you’re really doing is training your mind.

Instead of letting impulse dictate your actions, you’re consciously deciding where to place your attention. The ramifications of this skill building is huge in the departments of focus, resisting distraction, and staying on-track with what’s important.

So… ready to disrupt some obsessive and addictive patterns? Sweet!

Let’s push back the pervasive force of Kronos and invite Kairos back on the scene!
(To understand what this Kronos and Kairos thing is about, check out the last post.)

What sets the stage for a successful Digital Sabbath is P&P.

Definitions

Digital Sabbath = a digital-free day. I didn’t make it up. I heard about it in a talk a while ago by some folks who have banded together and set forth 10 guiding principles at Sabbath Manifesto. Plus, my friends Warren and Betsy just did a full digi-free week! And my friend Megan offers a Digital Detox. So you see, it’s a thing. Go with it.

P&P = Plan and Prep
P&P makes sure you always have olive oil and chocolate in the kitchen when you want them, gets you to the party before the good appetizers are gone, and ensures that your favorite dress is clean on your birthday.

The reason I put this little guide together is to

call your attention to some of the challenges you may face,
provide ideas for how to approach your digital sabbath, and
to remove some of the obstacles that may attempt to persuade you that it’s not a good idea for you right now.

Considerations

Provide Yourself Some Light Scheduling

Scheduling is rather paradoxical for a digital sabbath, right? To be totally in Kairos mode, you’d go with how you were feeling each moment, i.e. No scheduling.

And… my experience is that I’m so habituated to doing and following my schedule, that when I have a full day of non-scheduled R&R, I don’t know what to do with myself. From traveling, I’ve observed that it takes at least a few days to detach from Kronos time.

Thus, my preference is “light” scheduling that is flexible and that I commit to not being attached to. If at any point, something comes up that feels more engaging, the rule is: go for it. No times, just ideas for things that I’d enjoy doing that are aligned with the intention of personal R&R.

I had an awesome experience of this at Burningman one year and talk about it on this podcast episode.

It’s also helpful to brainstorm ahead of time so you don’t have to come up with ideas on the spot (this is a big challenge for me).

For ex. (this goes along with a solo-retreat intention)

Morning routine (a combo of yoga, meditation/quiet, journaling).
Inspirational reading.
Make delish breakfast.
Go for walk or hike.
Make yummy food, enjoy with friends.

Set an Intention

In case you’re thinking that this is a taking (your digital toys) away activity, set intention for what you’d like to invite in. Remember that Kairos is an experience of the moment, an invitation to sync your inner world with the situation at hand.

Maybe it’s to give more attention to listening to communications from your body. Maybe it’s to invite activities that support your well-being. Maybe it’s to spend quality time with friends and family. Maybe it’s to give some extra TLC to your spiritual life. Maybe it’s to let yourself be in Big Picture envisioning mode. Maybe it’s to just do nothing at all.

Prep for discomfort

Be willing to hang with the possible discomfort of not being constantly distracted. That’s real. Acting contrary to addictive behavior can be kinda like David going after Goliath. How will you handle this should it arise?

Maybe have pen and paper with you to jot down the feelings and thoughts going through your head (noting these thoughts can be quite informative re: what kind of unconscious beliefs are propelling you through your day).

Your mind will likely have all kinds of Very Important Reasons for why you should break your Sabbath immediately. Things like:
“It’s dumb.”
“It won’t change anything.”
“You’re not addicted in the first place.”
“That one little email won’t affect the whole intention of the day.”
“Sending that one photo to your friend Jenny would just make her day, and that’s more important than you taking a digi-free day.”
Etc etc etc.

Afraid to break it to ya, but those justifications are all bullshit.

Accept that it might be hard and remove temptation to make it easier on yourself.

Leave the house and put physical distance between you and your gadgets.
Power your phone down and leave it at home.
Commit to observing the sensations in your body when feeling the urge to check-in with your phone.
Get friends/family on board so that you can support each other.

Your Digital Sabbath Game Plan

It’s pretty simple. The prompts suggest a bit of forethought, to help your dedicated day go more smoothly.

Download
Print out
Fill in
Enjoy!

Moral of the story: have FUN with it (dang it!)

And then I invite you to share your experience on our FB Page.

Enjoy!
XO

P.S. If this is something you get really passionate about, you can hook up with the National Day of Unplugging which is coming up on March 4-5, 2016.

Just think, your doing it now puts you WAY ahead of the curve!

A Revolutionary Shift to make for 2016

By Shawn Tuttle on December 21, 2015

May you be immersed in good cheer, love and gratitude in this unique time of year! I know things can get a little edgy from your routines being disrupted, emotions that get stirred up, and the possibly unacknowledged pressures around jumping into the new year. Here are Natural Professional Headquarters, add to the mix that […]

The New WoW Announcement of the year!

By Shawn Tuttle on December 18, 2015

I’ve got much heart-bursting excitement to share with you! I’ve been putting together a (free) virtual summit for the end of this year which I offer as a for you: an inspiring collection of interviews + practical tools to cultivate your capacity to act in alignment who you want to be in your biz and […]

Your Resonance + Business… can we go there??

By Shawn Tuttle on November 12, 2015

On this lovely Sunday morning. In an inspired writing session. A road-block was come upon. An obstacle that did not want me to pass. Being a lover of freedom. Resenting being told what to do. I asked. Nay, I demanded. “What’s in the way?” The voice of Reason declared: “You cannot talk about Resonance in […]

Detaching from the time that deadens us

By Shawn Tuttle on November 5, 2015

It’s my birthday and I’ve got a heart full o’Love! My desire is to connect with you in the sweet space beyond time and place, in the timeless knowing that we’re on this big, beautiful earth together, and every other hippy-dippy goodness that comes to mind. Cheesy? Sure! Why not? Let loose the melty mozzarella, […]

Digital Sabbath P&P Guide