My body is disgusting

I am sitting with a friend having coffee. There are children playing somewhere in the background, there is that kind of disconnected chatting that we parents seem to specialise in. Stopping mid-flow to kiss a wounded knee, quell a major sibling war or to pick up tired bodies.

I love your top, I say. Something I had been meaning to say since we arrived.

Oh thanks, shame about the body underneath. Says my friend.

What? Don’t be silly you have a lovely body. And I am telling the truth. She does.

No I don’t. My body is disgusting! She says. And I am shocked. I pause, I think, a little open mouthed.

No it’s not, you have a beautiful body. I reply. But my words are drowned out by something epic happening in the room above us. She brushes my comment away like I’ve said something mildly offensive, as we are being moved away and onto the next situation. The next experience.

Later at home I think about what she said and I feel epically epically sad. How can this lovely looking woman think her body is disgusting? I mean of course I know why. I am, after all, a woman. But her words were so blunt, so brutal, so honest, it dragged this vague awareness that most women I know have – intense distaste for their bodies – to the forefront of my mind.

I have at many many points in my life thought similar things. Like my body was some kind of enemy that I had to battle against. That my body was horrible, gross, fat and yes even disgusting.

The photo above was from the morning after my son was born, almost eleven years ago. I found it again recently and thought – how lovely do I look? Yet at the time I was convinced I was some kind of giant whale of a woman. Oh dear. And I realised that in ten years time I’ll look back at my 38 year old self and think, oh how lovely. Suddenly I was struck with a revolutionary thought – why not just skip all that not-liking-myself-now, and just skip straight to – I look lovely now!

It’s amazing how the older I get the more logic has been colliding into my life smashing up some of the stupid neurosis that I’ve been carrying around. Because actually so many fears that we have, I’m a horrible person, I am a terrible mother, I’m shit at my job – are actually illogical, and (almost) totally untrue 🙂

It occurred to me that if I think about the bottom line of why I want my body to be nice it’s this – does my husband still wants to have sex with me? And the answer is yes he does. Frequently. Then I actually started to suspect that if I was back on the open market other members of the male sex would also like to share intimate acts with me and my body. So I realised I can’t be that disgusting can I?

To test if this might be true I decided to start walking around like I was some kind of sex goddess. Pretending I was some kind of catwalk model or Beyonce. Can I report back that immediately, immediately, my body of confidence started attracting male eyes (and a few female ones too, whoop whoop :))

But perhaps a bigger thing for me is – beyond who may or may not want to enjoy my body with no clothes on, is that I just plain refuse to not like myself any more. Life is short, I don’t want to waste it being horrible to myself. I am not a serial killer. I haven’t caused the meltdown of the global economy. I am nice to my neighbours. I think I’m quite a nice person. I recycle. Fuck being hard on myself. There is cellulite. There is intense ‘plump-tiousness’. There is a deeply squidgy tummy that feels like the bread dough I knead when I make pizza for my children. So what?

And even though I know the blah blah blah thing about the ideal woman is a twenty year old with a flat stomach and wide hips, that show a lack of pregnancy, rather than signs of both aging and the signs of pregnancies. But you know my husband’s body doesn’t look like a twenty year old Anthony Kiedis anymore and I still like him!

So I make a choice. To love my body. This is a choice I continue to make every day. It’s a choice that everyone can make. It’s like your own personal revolution.

I am now on a new regime. It involves – eating whatever the fuck I want to eat and celebrating my body like it’s the life-giving, sumptuous, Rubenesques wonderfulness that it is. Yes I have moments where my old habit of saying horrid things about my body suck me into that dark, body-hating place. But I counter this by doing body-loving things that help me accept who I am and what I have, these are

• Spending a tad too long walking around naked in the changing room at the gym (like the ‘tad’ in Airplane, lol!)
• Enjoying the rolling sensation of my flesh when I walk around naked
• When appropriate (i.e. when my son is out) naked dancing at home
• Very tenderly and beautiful putting body oil on my body, slowly and relishing all the little spots of my body. Scars, wrinkles, dents – the whole 9 yards.

For what other reason would I give a shit about whether my body was nice or not? Certainly not for companies who want me to think I’m a pile of crap and buy there stuff. Certainly not for other women or any other group of people. There is literally no other reason as far as I could see that I would want to be attractive in my body. And it seems my body is doing totally fine in that department. I am disappointing no-one. 

And really, it may seem like a victimless crime to not liking my body, but it is in fact far from that if you have kids. The dislike of my body was threatening to transmute by osmosis to my daughter, because unfortunately our daughters feel about their bodies very similarly to how their mothers feel. Think you’re fat and disgusting, it’s likely that’s how your daughter will feel too. Love your body and all that it is, she’s way more likely to love her body too. Society at large will screw them up, but if we don’t start them off strong then they have much, much further to travel to self acceptance.

 

The crazy ways we can hurt ourselves

I’m sitting at the bottom of the stairs of my little house with a wildly angry child. Her arms and legs are flailing, the emotions are shooting out of her limbs like fireworks.

My child and I lock eyes. In an effort of desperation, because frankly I don’t know what else to do, I say – let’s take a deep breath. I feel sort of insane saying this. She’s never going to buy this hippy crap! I think. She looks at me, I wait cautiously for more screaming, before she too inhales and we both sort of melt. The end of her pain is coming.

It’s been a week of high emotion. Many things jumped into our lives – and I say to my husband that it’s like some kind of test in the form of a devilish assault course.

The children’s feelings seem often an expression of how the husband and I are feeling. When things are going wrong for them I look at us, and often I find that there is tension or stress or fear – some toxic emotions poisoning us.

As she is breathing, I start to breathe too. And it feels good. Like it is taking a little edge off this stirring undercurrent of discomfort that has come from all the jumping over the obstacles that we encountered (well, actually, I tripped over more than a couple. I still feel bruised).

And it feels so completely nice to just sit with in her and breathe, and then we hug and I feel her body totally relax, as I am holding her.I feel, too, a gratefulness in her that she is over that stress – to be free again. We sit for a while on the quiet of the stairs, in the sudden silence. And I realise that I need more of this. Some quiet air circulating around me, through me.

If I’m really honest, I also want someone to come to me and let me shout and scream and shout, and then wrap their body around me, and whisper, as I am whispering in her ear, everything is Ok sweetie, everything is OK.

Later I am getting into bed, as I have finished the long list of tasks and doings that come with living, thoughts from the day start to swirl. And suddenly that icy creep of fear appears. And I know why – because in times of crisis-like situations – which this week has been – I am not always that calm, understanding mother that I was on the stairs today.  I can be unpleasant, petty, hot-headed, and impetuous. I can be a righteous flame of anger (my husband’s helpful description). And it’s usually fear that lights this bonfire of ungraciousness.

It unnerves me.

But seeing as I am on this new trip of kindness, I can’t allow the torrent of judgment that wants to assault me. I can feel it building up, ready to explode like a dirty bomb. But I won’t let it go off. I seize hold of my mind before it does.

There is a concept in Buddhism called the second arrow. (Yes, I might be a Buddhist, I’m not entirely sure). The idea is that the first arrow is the event that causes you pain – a call from a client telling you they aren’t working with you anymore, a slight from a friend, an argument with your child. These are all things that might cause pain. They hit you like an arrow.

The logical way to process this pain, or this arrow, would be to just deal with it, right? Well, that’s really not how many humans operate. What we like to do is to shoot ourselves with a second arrow of pain, and that’s in the form of a big layer of judgement or guilt or shame about the event. Oh I knew that client was going to drop me because I am just not good enough. Or my friend did that because they just doesn’t like me! Have they ever liked me?!?

You get the idea. So not only does it really suck to have two goddam arrows stuck in you, the second arrow just causes confusion – and it becomes nigh on impossible to heal even the first arrow.

So with my brain captured in a vice-like grip, I lay down in bed. I listen to my favourite sound (aside from the soft purr of my children when they are asleep) and that’s the soft patter of rain on my window. Thinking about everything that has passed, the first thing that I see is shame. Shame about the million ways I didn’t get it right. But then I meet it with kindness. Because that’s my bag now, kindness.

I let it all wash over me, the pains of the day, of the week, of anything else that wants to show its face. And then I wash myself over with kindness. Sometimes I actually say, Poor Di. Or – that’s really tough. Like I’m some kind of deranged person. But you know what, it feels good.  And I would say something like this to my children when I am in good-mother mode, so  why can’t I be my own good care-taker?
And so this combination of accepting the pain and meeting it with kindness seems to shift something. I refuse to judge myself, I refuse to allow more pain into my body in the form of a second arrow. And gradually it starts to pass, like everything passes in life. Like clouds that drift across the sky only to disappear to who knows where. And then something new will drift into my world.

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All you need this year is one good idea

I slipped out of bed this morning, careful not to disturb the sleeping bodies so easily woken. I was eager for a few moments alone in the quiet of my house with my morning drink.  I walked around the corner to replenish our coffeepot; the streets were empty and the sky was covered in bands of pink clouds. It felt like an illicit pleasure – aloneness, beauty and eventually, a strong and deep cup of coffee.

I’ve been reading tonnes of blogs these past few days about planning and new year’s resolutions. I love a good plan, a strategy to pull all my thoughts and ideas together, something documented that makes it all real and possible (and so it seems does my son, who sat the family down last night for a presentation done in his giant notebook with a plan to become a more relaxed family. Boy genius.)

One blog stood out to me more than others – Penelope Trunk’s Resolution for 2016. In it she discusses how resolutions don’t work unless you can express them in a simple way. For her:

“So for 2016 I’m going to accept who I am:  Someone who struggles everyday to accept the realities of parenting in the context of a world that celebrates people who give up everything for work.”

And I love, love, love that instead of something like – get fit! get rich! be better! – it’s an idea. And so for me my overall desire for 2016 is actually a continuation from previous years, but I hope to get better and better at: being ridiculously, abundantly, wonderfully kind – to myself.

Possibly you might think I was going to say it to the world, my local community – hell, maybe even my kids. But myself, why? Because I know that really all of things I want to achieve this year – publish another photo book with the husband, launch an online photo course, be a great mum, a wonderful friend etc –  are only possible, really possible, if I feel good about myself.

And one thing I know very well about myself is – if I am not kind to myself I am at risk of mentally beating myself into a bloody pulp everytime I mess something up (and messing up is inevitable seeing as I am a human being). I have found that the first step in that process of feeling good about myself, is to treat myself with absolute kindness.

It’s so intensely easy to be hard on yourself in today’s culture. Always being reminded of what you are not, always falling short of a perception of perfection. But I have decided I don’t care what crimes I am committing against domesticity or slenderness or grown-upness. After all – I am not a serial killer. I am (mostly) quite a nice person. So in 2016 I will:

Appreciate everything about myself,  even the crap things, and treat myself with the gentle, loving kindness that I treat my most treasured gifts – my friends and family. I will accept my imperfections as a mother, a wife, a friend, a human, and treat myself with kindness and love all the same.

This idea of kindness to myself has been a theme for a number of years. Ever since at the age of 31 I found myself lost and broken by grief when I lost a baby girl late in pregnancy. I found a pathway back to life, and eventually to joy, when I decided to abandon my previous ways of being so insanely hard on myself and instead embrace myself with kindness.

So when my mind starts on that path of being hard on myself, on my many imperfections, instead of beating myself up I try to offer up the kind of kindness that I would offer a friend or my child when in pain. I try to imagine it not being my problem, but voiced in that wonderful voice of my best girl friend or my beautiful son. Sometimes even to my husband (well not that often. Maybe next year I’ll start a be-kind-to-my-husband-most-of-the-time resolution. But like the airplanes say, put your safety mask on first before you help others.)

By being gentle and kind to myself I have managed to transform my relationship with myself and with the people around me. I am a much better mother (most of the time), I am a better wife (the husband has testified to this and I’ve been with him for sixteen years).

I couldn’t have started a business without it or stopped myself from crumbling with guilt over my various parenting disasters without this attitude of kindness.

And so it’s this idea that I am completely committing to this year, my year of kindness.

 

The actual key to being an amazing mother

 

A photo of me by my beautiful friend Cara Solomon

Right now in London, it’s hard being a mother. Not because of the hard, continual work it entails – humans are good at labouring. And really the work we put in is not the same as that done by previous generations of mothers – hand washing clothes on rocks, waking men up from their naps so they can go and chase lions.

No – it’s tough in a totally mind-fucking way. Our generation of mothers are being constantly attacked by ideas on mothering. I wouldn’t mind if they weren’t all so sure of themselves and yet completely contradictory. Don’t let your children eat sugar! Let your children eat all the sugar they want so they learn natural balance! Don’t let your kids play computer games, they warp their brain! Let your kids play more computer games to prepare them for the new world of work!

There is probably truth and logic in every theory that comes out. But you know what – I am calling them all out as bullshit. They are all wrong. And you know why? Because they induce fear and anxiety and stress. They inflame many women’s natural tendencies to want to be perfect, to do it completely and utterly right. But you know what is worse than doing it all ‘wrong’ as a mother? Being stressed.

You know how I know this? My son told me. In fact he reminds me often.

Don’t use that stressed voice with me mum, I can’t bear it! He will shriek as little tears spring from his eyes when I have wound myself up into a lather of anxiety.

It’s terrifying when your children gets to an age when they can articulate everything you are doing wrong. And the child I birthed ten years ago is extremely articulate at identifying the intricacies of my inadequacies.

But really thank god he is because he is making me a better parent.  

I have realised that I have spent too long in the sway of the tyranny of ‘ideas about parenting’ (we need more wooden toys! ) and not enough time in the beauty and joy and wonder of it.

After much thinking and analysing the different ways of parenting – I truly believe that the most positive thing you can give you child as a parent is your joy. By being joyful you transmute by osmosis joy to them. How you feel about life deep inside is often how they end up feeling about life. (Proof: I’m scared of geese, guess what, both of my children are scared of geese)

And for me joy is the one skill that will take take them through life with the best possible chance of making great choices and being happy.

So – I am going to stop analysing my decisions about sugar, play, school, computers etc. based on some theory or other. And I am going to do whatever makes sense to me and feels joyful. I really believe that making a point of killing stress and awakening joy is more important than ANY choice you could make about if they should watch TV or not, if they should have a Barbie or not. Your inner feelings about life, your way of handling life, how you relate to life is way more impactful than these decisions.

I would encourage you to ignore what everyone else is doing (including me) and just listen to what your heart, your child and your intuition tell you. Because when your choices flow from a place of joy and happiness – rather than stress or fear that you’re doing it wrong or because there is only one way to do it right – they will create so much more positivity in your household.

There is no one right way. No-one has the key. Every way is valid when done with joy.

I no longer care what theories are prevailing in the current climate of parenting. My aim is to be a good-enough mother, not a perfect mother. When my son and daughter are adults and talking about their childhood, I want them to say – wow my mum was rather messy and disorganised, but boy was she happy. She really loved life.

So I am going to chase joy like it’s Ryan Gosling walking down my street in small shorts. I am reminding myself daily to infect my house with joy – and prioritise it over everything. Literally everything.

And it’s starting to work. Yesterday my son said:

Mum, you’re doing so much better! You are so much less crazy now. Well done!

High praise indeed.

 

A change is as good as?

Photo by the unbelievably awesome woman that is Cara Solomon.

One lovely late morning recently, I am at home making bread with several children running around the house playing a game they have created called ‘Terrorists and Fairies’ (the modern day version of Cowboys and Indians p’haps?) My friend is here, having stayed the night with her kids, and she has done a natural hair treatment for me. My locks are luxuriating in rosemary oil and we had just finished a bountiful breakfast of organic porridge and raw honey (can you see where this is going? If this was a film you’d know that this gorgeously, hippy idyl was moments away from shattering). Life is just lovely.

And then… I check my phone and I see an email from a client postponing a big job by several months. One that was going to bring in all of our income for March. Big picture says it’s fine because the work will come eventually…..but fuck, fuck, fuck I say to myself, how can we replace that cash? I need quick solutions. I need to act now. But here I am, being an organic mother at home. Not in the office where I can do something about this totally crap situation.

The cacophony of children’s noises that a few minutes ago sounded wonderfully fun and free spirited, suddenly starts to sound like a chainsaw slowly making its way towards my brain. I look at the homemade bread, lusciously plump as it lays on a board rising and want to devour it all, uncooked. The hair oil suddenly seems greasy and I start scratching at it manically. I spot the front door, and wonder if I could just make a run for it, and would anyone notice I was still wearing my nightie? This is the final straw in a selection of iron-rich straws falling on me over the past few months.

And so I say – I need a year out. I need to get totally obsessed by this business and build it up so that it has a stronger foundation and things like the odd job being postponed won’t kill us. For several weeks I feel insanely sick. I have love homeschooling for the past three years, I love this life we have created. I love that we have a great business that, though small, is putting food on the table. But I have also this nagging, itchy feeling that I want it to grow. We need it to grow, because right now it’s just not reliable enough for us. And once that begins to take root in my mind, I start to get excited. Really excited.

I feel incredibly blessed that I’ve had such a long time to spend with my kids, and really learnt how they learn, get involved in interesting projects with them. We will now enter a new phase; life is all about change isn’t it, and it seems like beginning a new rhythm of family life feels right at the moment. Homeschooling can return, a year from now or not at all. What’s important now is our family is happy, together and united.

Our business has done some great things, some stupid things and some incredible things. But it’s done everything in a very slow way. I should start a new genre of business building –  it’s not just food that can be slow, I’ve invented slow business. Or I shouldn’t because this is NOT the way to start a business – working on it a few days per week with the constant children-needs interrupting – if you want it to get anywhere fast.

Business building requires tremendous obsession. It’s a little like pushing a large rock up a mountain, and we are only mid-way (or maybe even lower than that, but I don’t want to be too realistic on how much work lies ahead, it may just put me off).  It requires that you start ignoring your friends’ requests to go out to the pub so that you can get up early and squeeze a few extra hours of work before the kids get up, to wake in the middle of the night with an amazing solution to a problem that has arisen and to make giant courageous leaps to capture new clients.

“The entrepreneurial journey starts with jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.” Reid Hoffman

And for the last three years most of my attention has lain with my kids, not my business. Unless I want this business to stay very small, I need to check out of being homeschool ‘immersive’ mum for a while (I am giving myself a year).

There are now too many opportunities that we are not taking advantage of, too many things we aren’t growing that I desperately, passionately want to grow. But I am also TERRIFIED. Because you know when you say things like – if I only had more time to do X,Y, Z it would be amazing and we could see all of these extra results. Or if only I was given this opportunity then…. Well, that opportunity has arisen. I have to bloody well step up to the plate. Shit.

One thing I don’t like about blogging is how it feels like you are presenting yourself and packaging your life up in this way that feels untruthful. Either you are making your life look much better than it is (most blogs), or worse (my favourite blogger, Penelope Trunk, who is so honest and raw I think she makes her life sound way more harsh than it actually is), when really our lives are just a messy jumble of everything.

There are some insanely beautiful things about my life that fill me with such searing joy I can’t believe I’m allowed to live this way.

It’s organising the start of our next project on Istanbul at dawn, and feeling that swelling of pride in my husband, knowing that his photos will be incredible and inspiring. That I am helping to bring something beautiful to this world in my own small way.

It’s coming into the living room yesterday to see my son laying on the floor drawing and listening to Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue that he put on himself because he thought the music matched the feeling of the rainy day. He’s nine.

It’s the amazing community of families we’ve met whilst homeschooling who make me feel like I am not a crazy weirdo in my approach to family life. It’s the little hands that grab my head in the morning and the whispers of: ‘I love you mummy, you’re so beautiful’.

But it’s also messy, and hard and complicated. It’s me crying in the bath because I’m so frightened by the courage I need to summon for this next phase of my life; the feeling of being stabbed in the heart when I see my son’s flickering, emotional eyes getting worried on his first day back at school; it’s my being so overwhelmed by everything I am out until 2am drinking wine and feeling like I just want to run away; it’s me wondering how I can possibly have a planning meeting with my husband now when I just want to smash plates over his headstrong ridiculous head.

It’s what Buddhists call the ‘10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows of life’.

Yesterday, in a fog of my hangover I listened to a beautiful talk on compassion by Jack Kornfield (something about the sonorous American accent makes Buddhist and spiritual ideas so much more appealing to me.) He asked the question:  what beauty will you bring to this world? And I loved that.

My life will continue to be messy and intense. That’s just me, that’s the type of life I create. But I am committing always to do as much good work as I can, to bring as much beauty in to the world as I can, through my business and through my friends, and still, most importantly, my family. And so again, a new adventure begins. Similar to the last adventure, just a little different in its weighing of priorities. A little shift in focus. But it throws everything up in the air again, and I will be remembering that it will take a little time to come back down again.

I can’t back out now…or can I? (8 things I’ve done to launch a Kickstarter campaign)

62-hours ago I pressed the ‘Go live’ on the Kickstarter campaign that will reveal if my husband and my past two years of hard graft will be met with applause – or rejection. Naturally I am nervous. Let’s also say that there is fear and intense excitement too. It’s strange to have such opposing emotions racing around my body.

This Kickstarter campaign that is causing the nerves that feel worse than those of a teenage first-date is for two books that my photographer husband and I have spent the past two years creating. OK let’s load even more pressure on – creating these two books is the reason I left my job whilst heavily pregnant and took off to Paris, with first child in tow. I say this not to make myself look desperate but to show how much I believe in this project. How much I wanted these books to be created and shown to the world.

I knew from the day that I got pregnant again that it was now or never. I had fallen in love with my husband for his ability to notice the beauty in one’s every-day surroundings: a bilious white cloud on an otherwise grey, miserable day; a shaft of intense light appearing momentarily turning a tree golden and magical; the deep green of the grass after rain. It’s because of his photographs that I notice what is special in my every day.

Fuck good jobs and regular pay cheques. This is art, the art of life.

So here we are two years down the line. A hundred (and fifty thousand) ‘creative arguments’ had; a baby-turned toddler; an ever growing boy who has become wild with knowledge and curiosity since we started homeschooling – and two breathtakingly beautiful books. I can say that because I did not take the photos. I am the woman supporting the man holding the camera. And I don’t care how old fashioned that sounds, it’s friggin’ awesome to know that it’s because of me that all this is happening.

So, after my digression I wanted to share with you the things I have done (on other very wise people’s advice) in preparation for my Kickstarter campaign, in the hope that it might inspire you to take the plunge to do something creative (and possibly nuts) yourself. In 30 days time I will probably look back at this list (see below) and roll my eyes – why didn’t I think of this, that and the other? Well – good news, the web can accommodate my love of list making, so I will republish this list as I go. I am so inspired by Kickstarter and the other crowdfunding platforms like it. It is an unbelievably amazing way for creative projects to get off the ground – and an opportunity to cut out the middle man and build your audience for your work.

I would SO SO SO welcome thoughts, comments, ideas and any other thinking things you can throw my way. This is super intense, and so I’d love to hear some words from you guys.

1. I am not going to think this will be easy

The best article I’ve read (and advice taken) was from Nathaniel Hansen. Some of his key advice is that you have to fundraise like it’s a full time job. Every day, getting the word out there and yes, losing sleep, lots of sleep.

I have done one previous crowdfunding campaign for £2000. It was to raise money for Anthony to go and photograph the Homeless World Cup and even though it was for 5 times less than what we are now asking for, it was CRAZY INTENSE. I was constantly emailing, facebooking etc. It was a real shock to realise that you may be super super passionate about what you do – but to get other people to feel even a tinsy, winsy bit passionate, requires a tremendous amount of hard work. There is a lot of stuff in this world competing for their support.

2. I need my campaign to be seen by 30,000 people

In this article on 99u they explain some of the things you need to work out to get your campaign funded:

“Ryan Koo of NoFilmSchool.com ran one of the highest grossing film campaigns in Kickstarter’s history at $125,000. He decided to set a big goal to make himself rise to the challenge, but he also made sure it was viable by calculating the number of people he had to reach at a 1% contribution rate for an average of $50. Don’t be afraid to dream big, but back it up with some math.”

If my average contribution is £30, and the contribution rate is 1% then 33,333 people need to see my campaign. That’s pretty wild.

3. I will be shameless (but polite)

If this is going to work I am going to have to turn on a giant ‘I love this and I hope you will too’ button and just tell everyone and any one about what we are doing. I am not going to spam, but this has to be my obsession (polite obsession) this month.

4. I have asked many of my more talented friends and family to help

When I told my husband that we would be a perfect team, one of the reasons I gave was that I would be awesome at writing about his work. I would tell his story beautifully, perfectly, amazingly. But you know what – I can’t. I have now grown too close, and I write like I have a proverbial stick up the proverbial place. I am so in love with what he’s done, I have paralysed myself. And so my film maker brother has stepped in, made a film about the project and told the story we wanted to tell, without knowing how. Telling your story in a compelling, real and interesting way is imperative to this process, so because I couldn’t I asked someone who could.

5. I have written lists, and more lists of people I can tell

I have done epic amounts of research – bloggers, journalists, tweeters. Anyone who might think ‘this is awesome’, I have on my list of people and I will tell. In my previous lives I’ve done lots of press work myself and I’ve also hired, at great expense, fancy PR firms. One thing I’ve learnt is that if you are really passionate about what you are doing, you don’t need a fancy PR firm. If you have the money and no time – a PR firm is brilliant. But I am in a lots-of-time – no-money situation so I am going it alone and that’s fine. My advice on this front is:

– Research your journalists, bloggers: Don’t just send a press release to every magazine you can think of, that will turn people off. Find out what writers are interested in your subject and carefully sculpt an email to that person. Don’t spam.

– Be yourself and be passionate: people respond to real people, real stories and interesting journeys.

A lot of people think that getting on the TV or radio, having  a piece written about you in print or online is going to be world changing. On rare occasions it is. But most of the time it’s another trickle in the bucket, of which you need hundreds of trickles to get the bucket to over flow. That’s not to say you shouldn’t do it, of course you should, but you need to lots of press, lots of promotion, all the time. It’s super rare that one piece will make your business. So reach out to lots of people. Again and again.

6. And I have templates for emails coming out of my ears

I know myself well enough to know that intense pressure and me are not great friends. So before we pressed go I wrote a bunch of emails for different situations and stored them. What I didn’t do was think of a subject line for said emails. Doesn’t sound like a big problem? Well, we spent an hour coming up with lame-ass subject lines yesterday. I should have done that when I had more head space. Here is an awesome article that has tonnes of templates for you to use and generally great tips for other crowdfunding tools.

7. I have looked at hundreds of other crowdfunding campaigns

I have modelled our campaign after two highly successful photography campaigns on Kickstarter. They chose to be short, let the photos do the talking, and have less than ten rewards. To the point. I’m sure it’s possible to innovate, but for me I find it easier to emulate what seems to have worked for others. Choose your path and stick to it.

8. I have chosen the crowdfunding platform that I think is right for me

There are tonnes of crowdfunding platforms that are out there and I have done extensive research as to which one is right for us. We have chosen Kickstarter because I thought we would get more contributions from people we don’t know and as we are a creative project I think the site looks better overall. Also there is lots of research to show that the all or nothing way is the most galvanising for your crowd and the most successful way. Look here and here

Ok, so that’s not everything, but it’s pretty much most of it. I’ll keep you posted! See our campaign here.

Hello fear

At one time or another I have been scared of almost everything. I am not sure you’d know to look at me; I am not a quiet, nervous, fluttery type. I am a big, loud nervous type. Anxiety has been wedded to my bones since I was a small child, burrowing into my being and sometimes making me scared just to exist, standing there, being me. When I started working I was scared of every job I had, being a waitress, an office assistant, a receptionist. I lived in fear. It probably though helped me because at some point I must have decided that if I was scared of everything I might as well do something I loved – and so I started a catering business when I was 24. In my time of working for myself I have been terrified of every aspect of what I do – doing the job right, talking to clients, having meetings – the whole shebang. Until I was about 32 I was TERRIFIED of talking to people on the phone. I would do anything to avoid it. I would look at ‘normal people’ in awe, how do they do what they do without having a total nervous breakdown?

But it seems bumping up against one’s fear on an everyday basis (something that was just unavoidable for me regardless of what I did) has numbed me to some of what has made me fearful. I am more confident now that I used to be for sure. I can talk on the phone (!) I can have meetings (!) I can communicate with my clients without wanting to throw up (victory!) But the fear didn’t disappear completely. The big stuff still got to me. So I decided a few years ago that I was just going to let it be, allow it to just exist because it seemed to want to hang around. I wasn’t going to try and kill it (or even maim it) nor try and drive it out of town. Because I’d tried that in the past and perhaps for 5 minutes the fear would go away before rushing back like a tsunami to paralyse me. And funnily enough it feels a lot less overwhelming now.

When I feel that familiar panic I try to stop and understand if fear has arrived again. And I say – hello fear. Seriously I do. As funny as it sounds I say it. And usually I seem to use a weird voice, a bit like King Julian in Madagascar for those of you who’ve seen it. Best cartoon character ever. Anyway I digress…. So then I try to figure out what I’m fearful about – because it’s not always obvious, it can strike seemingly at random. If I can, I sit down and allow the feeling of fear to wash over me without fighting it, and if I just accept it, the power of the fear fades quite quickly, maybe after 5 minutes, maybe after a few hours. I just get on with my life. It’s me plus fear.  It seems that just allowing it to be there, and not feeding it with more fearful thoughts and more anxiety, the fear can just run its course and then depart. **

So even though fear continues to be ever present in my life, I am not scared of it any more. I don’t want to feel it but I know there is nothing I can do to stop it – so why fight it? This was made amazingly clear to me last month when my father told me he had been fearful to go on Question Time. I was stunned by his admission. My father is not easily scared – and particularly by things like public speaking or press, he’s been doing it for years. He enjoys the attention and the chance to say his bit. But he never lets fear stop him. So it doesn’t matter how much we try, the fear is just part of us – it comes and it goes – it’s part of the human condition.

I am back in London and have a bunch of new projects to complete over the next few months. All ones that will bring fear into my life. I feel it will be OK because I know it’s just me + fear.

** Now this explanation of the technique I use for dealing with fear is a very short, badly described, version of a practice called RAIN that I learnt from the Buddhist teacher Tara Brach. It’s a technique that she recommends for dealing with any strong emotions. (RAIN stands for Recognise, Allow, Investigate, No judgement)  Tara is a huge inspiration to me and I love her free online talks. She is kind, wise and has a beautiful voice.  She has helped me understand how to deal with much of my anxiety, over-thinking and obsessive thinking self. I totally feel less nuts since finding her.