Day 150: Colleen Wainwright

February 27, 2010 at 12:01 am, Category: Inspiration

“What I have found personally is that, for me, the inspiration does not come from the thing but from the way I look at the things.  … the inspiration comes in ‘Okay, well how do I get myself out of this way I’m looking at something right now into another way that allows me to find inspiration in just having given myself a paper cut?’  … Or whatever it is, it’s a way of sort of flipping a situation around and that’s much more about me changing my vision, the way I look at something.”

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Toni Reece: Thank you so much, Colleen, for being part of the Project.  Before we begin, can you please introduce yourself?

Colleen Wainwright: Absolutely.  My name is Colleen Wainwright, and some people know me as the Communicatrix, and I was introduced to you by the fabulous Dyana Valentine, which should be introduction enough for me, I think.

Toni: Well thank you so much, and Colleen, when you think about that word inspiration, who do you inspire and how do you do that?

Colleen: Okay, I just have to start by saying I get skeeved out when I even think about myself inspiring people, and I’m sure that means I have all kinds of issues – don’t worry, I’m working on them with a trained professional – but, what I would say is that I think the people who are attracted to what I have to say or what I might think or what I’m talking about or working on or whatever, I would characterize them as fellow travelers.  And the fellow travelers, my fellow travelers, are people for whom traditional kinds of inspiration don’t seem to work very well, including self-help.

Not that there aren’t wonderful, wonderful books out there full of information that is very helpful for selves, but a lot of it I find … like I’ve read a ton of literature, a ton of self-help books, and what I find is they are usually missing something, and sometimes it’s something as simple as humor.  Sometimes they’re missing something that’s a little bit more of an edge.

I think that self-help is expanding quite a bit in that way.  I think there’s a lot more room for different voices now, and so I think that that’s helping a lot of the people who didn’t like self-help before.  But those are the people that I would say I resonate with, if you want to use sort of a self-helpy term.

Toni: Okay, go ahead.

Colleen: No, no, you go ahead.

Toni: So the fellow travelers are who you inspire.

Colleen: Yes.

Toni: And how you do that is by doing what?  By going outside of that industry, or facing that industry head on, or what is it?

Colleen: Oh, I wouldn’t face an industry head on – that’s like a fool’s errand.  What I try to do is look at perplexing stuff, of which there’s plenty in my life through the lens of my own experience.   I mean that … I swear I spent, Toni, like I don’t know … I’m kind of coming out of the tail end of three years of trying to figure it out what exactly it is that I do.  So at the beginning of this search, I mean I was, you know, working and poking and searching and writing and doing all that crazy stuff, but I wasn’t understanding what it is that’s actually working for people.  Why do you like to read this blog or why do you like talking to me or any of this sort of stuff?

I think that what it was, was me explicating my experience in a way that other people – and illuminating it where I could – in a way that a lot of other people to look at their own experiences and they feel less alone because hey, especially for those of us, you know, who don’t have a place to go – we may not have a church or may not have a whatever to go to — you can feel really alone sometimes.  And the other thing is that it did allow people, I think, permission, or give some people permission to start looking at their own lives and saying “Well hey, what about this with me” or “Hey, how might this be working in my life or not working?”

Toni: Now by you putting that out there, do you do that by blog or is it coaching?  How do you do that?

Colleen: Primarily I write.  That’s my main mode of communication.  I love it.  I love that you can do it in your underwear, I love that you can do it anywhere with any kind of implement.  You can even “write” into a tape recorder if you want, although who uses that anymore?  I guess it’s more like a MP3 recorder or whatever.  I love writing because you can do it anywhere.

I also really love talking as you might be able to tell.  I love talking, and it’s funny because I kind of danced around it.  I never really thought of myself as a speaker, a talker, or whatever, but I realized when I started to look back at my life and began that whole thing of “Well, let’s look for clues, like why is this?”  And I realized “Oh, all those years I was writing ads, hating myself, I was learning how to present them to people.”  I was learning how to present ideas to people, you know, ideas of things that didn’t exist yet like commercials that didn’t exist that we were trying to say “Here’s how it’s going to be.”

So I was learning how to do that even back then.  And then through all these years … you know, I was an actor for a long time, so you learned a lot about presentation that way, but I finally got really serious about it, I would say, like four years ago or so.  I went into Toastmasters, which I highly recommend to anyone who’s interested in that sort of thing and in any other kind of avenue of self-help where you don’t really feel like you have people to be around, because it’s a very welcoming group of people.  It really is about, I think, everybody learning to self-actualize, everybody figuring out what it is that they’re … what sets them on fire or what makes them feel alive, what helps keep them going, what connects them to other people.

Toni: So by going through that yourself and that journey and now what you do for others through your writing and so forth,  how do you think that that might help someone explore their own potential?

Colleen: That’s a great question.  I think from what I can tell from the feedback I’ve gotten from watching how things ripple out there, you know, in the blogosphere … that’s the nice thing about having this kind of connectivity now that you can actually start seeking to come back to you, even if they only come back to you through a Google alert or some sort of link in your statistics.

But what I see is that people will take ideas and build on them, or there’ll be a line that I write that somehow, you know, they enjoy it, ha ha, they laugh at the essay or whatever, but there’s something in it that sticks, and it’s like a little thread.  It’s like … you know how you have a loose thread on something and you kind of worry the thread until you find your way back to the nub?  That’s kind of what I think it is, and that process for everybody is different.

For each person it’s going to be a different sort of a series of events.  For some people it might lead to more writing.  For some people it might lead them to go find someone to talk about with some things.  For some people it might lead them to explore, I don’t know, other hobbies or interests that they have that they didn’t realize they had, or is there a new way to kind of plunge themselves back into their current interest that brings more of themselves to it and allows them to find more in that thing?

Like for example – this is like a really mundane example, and I know nothing about knitting – but if you were a knitter you might be “Ah, I knit, I knit, I knit” or whatever but you kind of lost the eye of the tiger for knitting, but then you read something about someone’s process of like washing the dishes and what they discovered and you’re like “Oh, I wonder if I went back to my knitting with this thought …,” and you discover something else in the knitting, or whatever.  Like I said, a very mundane example but …

Toni: No, it’s a great example, and I love the phrase “the eye of the tiger of knitting.”  Do you know, there are people out there that have that for that, so that’s okay.

Colleen: Absolutely, yes!

Toni: So what inspires you, Colleen?

Colleen: I think it really depends.  If you’re looking for external things, there’s not a one thing … I’ve always envied people who would be like “I just have to stand on a mountaintop.  I just have to go to the ocean.”  I will say that if all else fails and if I can remember to drag my carcass to the ocean, it really does tend to work, and there’s a few other sort of magical, you know, beautiful spots in nature that will work, but they’re not always convenient to get to.

What I have found personally is that, for me, the inspiration does not come from the thing but from the way I look at the things.  So the way … the inspiration comes in “Okay, well how do I get myself out of this way I’m looking at something right now into another way that allows me to find inspiration in just having given myself a paper cut?”  Or the inspiration in “Oh my God, I have this huge stack of work and how’s that gonna … how am I going to get through this?”  Or whatever it is, it’s a way of sort of flipping a situation around and that’s much more about me changing my vision, the way I look at something.

I think the way I’ve learned … I’m learning to do that.  I wouldn’t say I’ve learned it because, you know, boy do I get stuck all the time.  But what I’m finding now is giving myself room … first of all permission, I have to give permission to like “Oh, let’s change my perspective” or “Let’s just take a moment.”  But the other thing is to give myself room to do that, to give myself a little bit of space, a little breathing room so I don’t have to immediately respond to something.

I can kind of take a step back.  I don’t have to … if someone pushes a button, you know, one of my buttons, I don’t immediately have to jump right on it and respond, I can take a moment and say “Hmm, you know, I’m having a reaction.  Is this a reaction that’s going to be helpful to have, you know?  Can I maybe move two reactions along and we could actually get a conversation going?”

Toni: I think that’s fantastic advice, too, and I’ve had that said to me years ago whenever that happens to you just move away from the keyboard.  Move away from the phone.

So let me ask you, have you always been in this positive mindset and know that you were searching for your fellow travelers and knew that what you needed … to know that you needed to do a mind shift?  That’s the words that I wrote down when you were describing what you do to look at a situation and flip it.  I wrote down mind shift.  That’s what I heard you say.  Have you always been that way, or was it a process that you went through to go “You know what?  This is what I need to do, this is where I need to go?”

Colleen: No, no, I was a hot mess.

Toni: A hot mess?

Colleen: Absolutely.  Yes, I was.  I would say that people in my past like family members from way back would have said “No, no she always had a sunny, buoyant, optimistic outlook.”  And I would say they’re right, sometimes I did.  But I found as I got older and the world got more complex that that wasn’t my default thing was to look at things with optimism and to be inspired and so on and so forth.  So for me, there actually was one bit of a moment.  I mean, there were a series of moments leading up to it, a lot of little mini-crises, but then I had an epiphany in the hospital, of all places.

I had been hospitalized with a severe onset of Crohn’s disease about … I guess it was five years ago, eight years ago, and I was a wreck.  I mean, I weighed nothing.  I was near skeletal.  I couldn’t really do anything for myself.  I was bleeding profusely out of one area you really don’t want to bleed out of; it was just really bad.  And in this moment, I remember, in this moment of like things really being about as bad as they could be, something just like flipped, and I just looked around and I said “But look, I’m alive,” and “Look, all these people helping me and I’m in a hospital, and there’s food and there’s air conditioning” and it was miraculous.  It was just amazing.

Somehow or other, that grace, that whatever it was, did turn it around.  I couldn’t stay in that moment of grace forever, but it really was significant in that when I was pretty much at my physical nadir and things were not looking good, for me all of a sudden to feel that fantastic and that hopeful was significant, I would say.  And so that was a moment.  But then it was up to me to like … and a lot of people helping me to learn to move forward and keep coming … you know, figure out “How do I get back to that moment?  How do I get back to that outlook?”

Toni: What a powerful thing that you’ve just shared to the people that listen and read this interview because, not only does it sound like it was miraculous that it happened to you at that moment, however, what is even as powerful is that you were aware of it.

Colleen: Yes.  Well, I will tell you this – when the room fills with white light and, you know, you all but hear a chorus of angelic voices signing in harmony, it’s hard to ignore.

Toni: Wow.

Colleen: But it was really crazy stuff, so yeah, it definitely grabbed my attention.  You’d have to be pretty much of a moron to not notice it.  But hurray, I wasn’t that much of a moron; I noticed it!

Toni: You noticed it but you didn’t ignore it.  Maybe that’s the key.

Colleen: There you go.

Toni: You know, maybe that’s the key.  So how do you take all of this, my gosh, your journey and your writing and what you do and who you seek out and how you’re inspired, and how do you roll that into your own potential to keep exploring and moving and growing so that you can have such an impact on others and yourself?  What is it that you’re doing to keep that momentum going?

Colleen: Another really good question.  I would say two things.  One is I try never to get comfortable where I am, which is not to say I try and create discomfort.  But I used to think there was a thing about oh, I’d get somewhere and that would be great and then I would have arrived somewhere.

And that place that I arrived at would have great things like, I don’t know, people bringing me lunch on silver trays and accepting awards, you know, at the Kodak Theater and so on and so forth.  It’s not like that.  In my experience, as soon as I get somewhere it’s more like “Oh yeah, this is just … this is a really nice spot, but it’s just one of many spots on whatever path I’m on.”  So that’s one thing is to keep moving forward.

The other thing though for me – this has been a really fascinating few months.  Back in December, I sort of had like a mini freak-out because I was just overextended and I felt super-stuck.  And I was working harder and harder and felt like less and less forward motion was possible, so I just put the brakes on and I said “I’m giving myself a happy holiday break.”  And the happy holiday break was two weeks, and then I reassessed at the beginning of the year.  I’m like “Well, that wasn’t enough, so now I’m on a three-month hiatus, and I’m calling it my “not-doing” period because I’m very much a doer.  So for me, literally it has been to do less and to rest more.

My theme for this year, for 2010, is MORE ROOM, and that’s really what I’m looking at is how do I start to give myself the room to do this and how do I take time and how do I, you know, create that bumper between me reacting and me responding and all those kinds of things that normal people kind of have a handle on that.  For whatever reason I didn’t, because I move too quickly.  That’s what I’m doing right now. 

Toni: Again, being aware of it and not ignoring it and keep moving forward.  What great advice and lessons that are through this interview with you, and I cannot thank you enough for showing up to this Project and being as honest and as frank as you were in this interview.  I know that there’s a lot of value that people are going to be taking away from this interview.  Thank you so much for joining us.

Colleen: Well, thank you.  I appreciate it, and I had a great time.

Toni: Thanks, Colleen.  Take care of yourself and good luck.

Colleen: You too, Toni.

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For more information about Colleen Wainwright:  www.communicatrix.com

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