Day 6: Barbara Winter

October 6, 2009 at 12:01 am, Category: Inspiration

” …  inspiration is so fascinating to me … I think it’s a very contagious thing.  When we’re in the presence of people who are living from a place of inspiration, we catch it.”

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Toni Reece: We are officially recording for the Get Inspired! Project.  Thank you so much, Barbara, for taking your time today to be part of this project, and before we jump into the questions, can you please take a couple minutes to introduce yourself?

Barbara Winter: I’m Barbara Winter, and I’m an entrepreneur and a writer, and my passion is really to help other people become joyfully jobless like I am.  I have been self-employed for 35 years, and the main part of my business is writing and doing seminars, so I have kind of two parts that are very different; one I do in isolation, and one I do in rooms full of people, and I love both parts of it.

Toni: Why, thank you.  So Barbara, with the work that you do and the people that you are in front of, who do you inspire and how do you do that?

Barbara: That is a really interesting question, because I think the people who I see in my seminars or who read my book or subscribe to my newsletter are people who are really serious about wanting to create a better life for themselves.  So, I think of myself as kind of running a hardware store for personal growth tools, and so I really explored that whole arena.  But the whole business of inspiration is so fascinating to me because, when I started out 35 years ago, I thought of myself as a motivational speaker, and it wasn’t very long before I kind of grew out of that, and now I think motivation and inspiration are two very different things.

And so, I would say the first person that I seek to inspire at all times is myself, and I really have come to realize that my thinking has changed so much about this.  I used to think that inspiration was something that was very rare and very kind of noisy — that kind of loud, ah-ha, I’ve got it idea thing — and now I realize it’s possible to live in almost a permanent state of inspiration, and it requires participation on your own part in order to do that.  It’s not an accidental thing; it’s really a conscious choice that I make.  So I know the things that inspire me and the things that nurture that in me, and really make a serious attempt every day to put myself in the kind of company of those things that inspire me.

Then, out of that, I think it’s a very contagious thing.  When we’re in the presence of people who are living from a place of inspiration, we catch it.  And so, that is really my goal, is to spread it wherever I can, so even though it might obviously be the people who read my writing or come to my seminars, it’s also just as true that I want to be it all the time, whether I’m shopping at Trader Joe’s or standing in line at the post office, or going about my normal business.  I never want to fall out of that place, because I have no idea when what I have to offer by my attitude and kind of being in this place of inspiration — which is a place that kind of triggers in perpetual creative thinking — how that might help somebody else solve a problem or just make their day better in some way.  I’m ultra aware of this when I travel — and the fact that there are a lot of people who aren’t having a really good time when they’re traveling — so I really kind of appoint myself the inspiration master and try to make it better for everyone around me.

Toni: Well to stay in that place of inspiration, to be in that place not only for yourself but for others, what a gift that you’re giving on a daily basis.  And that leads me into the second question, which is what do you do to help explore the potential in others?  So, the inspiration is happening because that’s where you try to be all the time, and then how does that translate into the exploration of people’s potential?

Barbara: Well sometimes, it’s just by writing something where I might ask questions.  I’ve really become very conscious of this over the last probably five years, about how important it is to ask the right question, and how often people ask questions that don’t inspire a good answer.  And so part of what I do, really, is to ask people questions that kind of open up the creative thinking in themselves; and my favorite place to do this is when I do a seminar that takes place over several days’ time, so kind of in a retreat setting — where I can really get to work with people on a one-on-one — and we have time to really get to know each other and know what people are working on and what they care about, and where they’re stuck and how we can help them move forward out of that.  And so, you know, that certainly is one place where it’s very obvious to me how I work with it and how it happens.

Toni: So your method — at least one method — for exploring potential in others is very important questions that you ask and knowing how important those questions can be; because if they are not the right questions, you’re not getting the right answers; and then also opening up that creative thinking during your retreats.  Now, when you’re seeking inspiration, Barbara, where do you go?

Barbara: To the well.

Toni: And where is that well?

Barbara: You know, it’s so fascinating to me because different people really respond to different things.  So over the years, for instance, I’ve heard a lot of people say, oh, they like to go to the mountains or they like to go to the ocean, and I realize that I have lived by the ocean and in the mountains both and wasn’t particularly moved by either place.  I mean, I liked it, but you know, I didn’t feel a huge connection to it.  And one day I thought I think that I’m inspired by concrete.  I really love cities, and I really have always said my life up for the last probably 25 years so that I lived in kind of a quiet place but was very close to a city so I could tap into that when I wanted to but didn’t have to live in the midst of the hustle and bustle.

So sometimes, for me, if I feel like I need a boost, there are a couple places that I can go that are just absolutely foolproof for me, and that would be a library or a bookstore; just browsing in a place like that can just lift my spirit really quickly.  And so it’s also probably not a surprise that if I just need a quick infusion, I go to my own library; and I have books that I just know if I’m feeling stuck or uninspired that I only need to read a few pages and I will be back on track.  And that’s the other thing that’s really fascinating to me — and I see it as a sign of my own growth — is that I get through down times so  much more quickly than I would have at another time in  my life.  I know how to turn things around.  It’s sort of amazing to me, and I also feel incredibly grateful that I’ve learned how to do this for myself.

Toni: That almost, from my perspective, would lead into the question of what you need to explore your potential, and possibly putting that with understanding how you turn around the down time quicker;  How does that happen?  When did you realize that you do that?

Barbara: Well, I’ll tell you when I really saw it was only a couple of years ago; and I woke up one morning and I had an email telling me that a project I thought was going to happen wasn’t going to happen, and I was feeling incredibly sad about that.  And I had to go to Denver to do some seminars that day, and a friend picked me up from the airport — and I hadn’t talked to anyone about this until she and I were having lunch — and I told her what had happened, and she listened and then said “Did you cry?”  I said yes.  And she said, you know, deep mourning for an entrepreneur is about 48 hours.  And it was like, you know, you’re right … and I have so many wonderful things going on in my life that when something doesn’t work out, I just turn my attention to a different project.

So that’s part of it, is that I have enormous amounts of sources of pleasure in my life, and so if one thing isn’t working at the moment, something else is there to fill in the blank.  I don’t have all my eggs in one basket, I guess, is kind of part of that.  But I think it’s also just a matter of getting stronger and having greater self-awareness and greater affection for myself that I don’t beat myself up.  I’m very, very gentle and kind with myself when things don’t work out, and that just moves me on through a lot more quickly, I think.

Toni: Is that part of what the learning that you’ve been through in your lifetime — to allow you to get to the place of self-awareness and to not be so hard on yourself and to look at not only the professional gifts that you have that maybe sometimes there are some disappointments there, but then you turn to the personal gifts that are still there — that help you get through that downtime.  Are those incidences and experiences what you draw from when you help others in the work that you do?

Barbara: Absolutely, because everything that I do is really focused on, you know, what are the resources we have to work with right now?  It’s never … even though I talk about goal-setting and we talk about planning and moving towards a vision, that is drawing us forward.  At the same time, in order to make that happen, you have to have deep appreciation, not only for what exists right now, but also to be able to see how you can use what you’ve got right now; and I just encounter so many people who spend their whole life wishing for what isn’t, and never notice what is.  And so, I’m certainly no Buddhist monk, but I think I live a lot more fully in the present, and that has a lot to do with it.

Toni: It’s interesting, the way that you just said that you have to understand that you have to know how to use what you have, but you also have to understand what you need; and to me, that goes right back to what you said earlier in how you inspire.  And you called it almost that you have a hardware store for personal growth, and that hardware store will not only have what you need at that time, but also you help them use what they have, and that’s a value-added service for a store, isn’t it?

Barbara: Well, yeah, and you know that’s really the purpose of a tool.  You know, a tool in and of itself is kind of worthless; it has to be applied to something else.  And so even though the tools that I work with are kind of intangible in many ways, they have to be applied in real life, real-time situations.  And that’s a thing that when I started my own personal growth journey — which preceded my starting a business — was so stunning to me, was that I had spent all these years in formal education and had never, for instance, had a class on goal-setting.  I had never heard anyone talk about self-esteem.  I thought, like inspiration, you either had it or you didn’t.  I had no idea that there were ways to nurture and enhance these positive aspects of being a human being.

Toni: Well, I’ll tell you, just in this short snapshot of time that you have given to the Get Inspired! Project — for you to give away this information so that people can learn and benefit by it; for you to be present in that state of inspiration all the time so others can benefit from it; and also have that hardware store, so to speak, of the personal growth that you provide to others — people are so going to be incredibly grateful when they listen to this interview and what you’ve offered to them, and for that, I thank you so very much for being part of this project and giving up your time.

Barbara: Well, I thank you for doing this project.  I think that inspiration has been an incredibly neglected child, and I am just so delighted that somebody is talking about it and exploring all the different aspects of it, so I am going to keep raving about you.

Toni: Well thank you so very much.  A lot of people have fantastic things to say, and I am so grateful that you are one of them.  So thank you so much for your time today, Barbara, and we will talk soon.

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For more information about Barbara Winter:  www.joyfullyjobless.com

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