Listen with Intent – Week 4

We’re still continuing with the monthly intention of Listening Calmly. As I thought about what it means to listen calmly, I knew that one of the things I can try is the opposite of what I mentioned two weeks ago. Instead of taking a walk, I can try to be still. I can try not to move, talk, react. I can try to not even make an effort to breathe. Instead, I can just be still. I can get really quiet and be in this moment. I can listen to what my body is feeling, what thoughts are coming up, what feelings are trying to take over. I can pay attention to what’s going on and I can be curious about my “reaction.”

With being still and paying attention, I will also allow my higher thinking to kick back in and instead of judging myself for feeling a certain way, I will just be with it and, hopefully, I might be able to watch it disappear.

Being still, like with calmness in general, has never been my forte. But I know it has tremendous value. I am hoping that setting it as an intent this week will help me intentionally choose to be still more.

Let’s see how it works.

The lettering I used on this page is here somewhere and I chose to use candles because somehow I always associate being still with candlelight. I love going to other people’s houses and seeing lit candles but I never really use them in my house. Maybe it’s something else I can try this week.

Listen with Intent is a project for 2014. You can read more about it here.

January 27, 2014 | Lettering, Listen With Intent, Sketching, Watercolor | Leave a comment

Listen with Intent – Week 3

Still continuing on the monthly intention of Listening Calmly, I decided to choose the most basic and useful of intents this week: Breathe.

If only I could learn to breathe.

Like taking a walk, taking a moment to breathe is a simple trick to get your body to pause long enough for your prefrontal cortex to come back online. And breathing is much less conspicuous. It can be done in a meeting. It can be done while on the phone or at a restaurant. It’s hard to walk away when you’re sitting at a coffee shop but it’s easy to take a moment and breathe.

I feel like if I could get better at breathing and choosing to breathe, the words that I say would be much kinder. The actions I take would be much less rushed and the mistakes I make would be much fewer.

All in all, seems like a plus-plus to me.

Like most new habits, breathing will also take time and practice (it seems silly to say that we need practice to learn to breathe since it’s something we do all the time anyway but this is more about deep breathing, or breathing at a particular time. Almost synonymous with pausing.)

So that’s the intent for this week.

I couldn’t find the lettering I used here, I will come back and link to it when I have. The sketch I used is from here. I used the image of a dandelion because it reminds me of letting out your breath to blow on it. Breathing out.

Listen with Intent is a project for 2014. You can read more about it here.

January 20, 2014 | Lettering, Listen With Intent, Sketching, Watercolor | 2 comments

Listen with Intent – Week 2

As it worked out with the title page, this month will only have three more weeks. So this week is the monthly intent for January: Listen Calmly.

January is going to be a tough month for work, so I decided that calm would be a good way to start the year, especially since serene is one of my core desires. So this month’s intent is to listen calmly.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what calm means to me. What I’ve learned from a lot of reading and listening to talks is that when we stress, our fight or flight response kicks in and our prefrontal cortex (where we do higher level thinking) shuts down. If I can manage to find a way to calm myself down, it gives my brain some time to come back online and for me to be able to think again.

This means that I am now acting and not reacting. This is where I would like to be.

When I was discussing a situation where I often find myself reacting with my coach last year, one trick I thought of was to walk away (in this case from the computer) and take ten minutes to myself. Go outside if I can, but if not, just walk around the living room, or do whatever it takes to spend the time. Ten minutes can be long when you’re doing nothing. Long enough to have the influx of emotion pass and long enough for my body to stop reacting and for my ability to think to come back.

And while ten minutes is long enough for all that to happen, it’s short enough that the “disaster” can wait. It will not get much worse. I can afford the ten minutes.

So that’s my plan for this week. If I find myself experiencing anxiety, stress, worry, fear, I will take a ten minute break and walk around. Wait for the immediate reaction to pass and for the calmness to come back.

Here’s a before shot of the above page. I used the picture of a tree because trees make me feel calm. The lettering is Octave and the tree is inspired by the wonderful Pam Carriker.

I then colored with watercolor pencils to complete my page.

Listen with Intent is a project for 2014. You can read more about it here.

January 13, 2014 | Lettering, Listen With Intent, Sketching, Watercolor | Leave a comment

2014 – Listen with Intent Intro and Week 1

I talked about how I had different types of goals for my projects this year. Here’s what I had in mind for this one:

Skill to learn/expand: Lettering (and Sketching)
Topic to explore: Create specific intentions around listening for each week
Format: Landscape 5×8.25
Paper: Moleskine Watercolor Journal
Media: Watercolors

I’ve wanted to do lettering for quite a few years now. I’ve taken a few classes but nothing did the trick, so I decided I wanted to make it a major focus for 2014 and see what happens. As with each year, I am not sure how it will turn out, but I am looking forward to finding out.

As for the topic, I’ve become a huge fan of setting intentions thanks to last year’s January OLW prompt
and the Life Organizer book. As we approached 2014, I knew I wanted to continue this wonderful concept.

So I’ve set monthly intentions for listening for all of 2014 and then I will set weekly intentions within those monthly ones. For each week, I will set an intention, use a new alpha to write the title and then couple it with a small sketch. At least that’s my intention for this project.

I’ve created a Pinterest board full of alphas I can use. I would like to make another one with sketching ideas (to match the phrases/sentiment) but I haven’t done that, yet.

Here are the intentions I’ve written down:

  • listen kindly: look for the positive, be gentle, look them in the eye.
  • listen patiently: slow down, be present. take your time.
  • listen joyfully: hear the good. celebrate the sounds.
  • listen deliberately: choose what to listen to.
  • listen calmly: breathe. be present. relax.
  • listen carefully: what are you missing? be attentive.
  • listen gratefully: what’s amazing in this moment? You’re lucky.
  • listen bravely: pay attention to the whispers. What are they telling you?
  • listen creatively: what else could it be? is there another perspective here?
  • listen publicly: go out there, listen in a group. 
  • listen deeply: what more in there? can you go deeper?
  • listen actively: be engaged. look for what’s not being said. listen to your body. 

I’m not attached to these. I might stick to them, I might not. I just know that doing preliminary work makes the project more possible and exciting to me.

Here’s a before look at the page above:

This page uses the avanth typeface. I first drew in pencil, then I went over it using my Pitt pen and then I colored it with Watercolor pencils.

And here we are. Project #1 for 2014.

January 6, 2014 | Lettering, Listen With Intent, Watercolor | 3 comments

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