I  also knew that if could somehow stop scratching, it might scab over before my important meeting the following morning. If it did scab over, then I could put some makeup on it and cover up the redness.  That would help my face look relatively normal.  I put my hands in my lap and visualized a successful meeting.  I pictured myself shaking hands, smiling, receiving a tour of the office, and making an overall good first impression.  But while I was visualizing, my hand had quietly crept up the side of my face and I was scratching again.  Damn.

 The previous Sunday, my family and I had hiked through our friends’ farm, looking for a Christmas tree that we could cut down.  We found one that we all liked in record time.  Then we checked it for both bird’s nests and praying mantis egg pouches (you don’t want those hatching in your house on Christmas Eve!) both of which automatically disqualify a tree from being brought home with us.  We did NOT check it for poison ivy vines. Therefore, we could not have noticed the delicate one wrapping up its trunk.  My husband cut the tree down while I held it up by its infected trunk, and then we took turns dragging it back to our minivan.  We lifted it up onto the roof rack, tied it down, and drove off without realizing that my gloves were covered with crud.  And at some point during that ride home, I must have brushed my hair off the side of my face with my poison ivy-covered glove.   

As I sat on the carpet in one of the Sky Harbor Airport gate areas scratching, I realized how much my appearance had affected my self-confidence.  Normally I travel in my business attire and I feel pretty good about myself.  But on this day my hair was pulled back because it made my face itch when I wore it down.  It had seemed ridiculous to bother with makeup when the side of my face looked like I’d been kissed by a hot iron, so I had left it off.  And since it was a travel day and not a day of meetings, I had on jeans instead of a suit.  This combination of crud and casual look made me slink though the airport avoiding eye contact with everyone, and I sat on the floor rather than have a fellow traveler next to my oozing, throbbing face. 

Of course, I know that my attitude is completely in my own hands.  I may not be able to cure the poison ivy before my meeting, but I certainly have the power to control how I react to it.  I can sit on the floor and mope, or I can take my rightful place in one of the gate area chairs and start preparing for my meeting.  I stand up, brush off my bad attitude, and sit in the closest open chair.  There is a person seated next to the cruddy side of my face, so I make a bet with myself.  If he moves, next year the family buys an artificial Christmas tree from Wal-Mart.  If he stays, then we go back to the tree farm and add poison ivy to the list of things we check for before cutting a tree down. 

He stayed.

10.  Buy a travel set of toiletries.  You don’t want to waste time tracking them down every time you leave the house.

9.  Just because the lights in your own car turn off automatically when you take the keys out doesn’t mean that they do the same thing in your rental car.

8.  You’d be amazed at the amount of jewelery that doesn’t set off the metal detectors in the airport.  And at the amount of liquids that you can smuggle past security in your purse.  This last statement does not apply to half-drank bottles of Diet Coke, however…they’ll call you on those.

7.  Always build in more time to your travel than you’ll need.  Sure, it’s wasted 99% of the time, but you’ll be awfully glad you did when you hit that 1%.

6.  Never completely unpack your suitcase once you arrive home.  It just gives you the opportunity to forget things.

5.  Airport gift shops are a great place to pick up unique birthday and Christmas gifts for your friends and family.  It helps kill time, and it saves you the trouble of scrambling around for these items on your precious days off.

4.  Watching takeoffs, landings, and cloud formations from the window seat of a plane never gets old.

3.  Eating out in restaurants does.

2.  Our bodies all respond differently to the stresses of air travel.  Mine requires lots of water, eye drops, and ibuprofin.  And chocolate.

And my personal favorite lesson learned:

1.  There’s no place like home.

Sometimes Life goes along smoothly, and we are able to happily make progress towards our goals.  And sometimes it doesn’t.   Those bumps in the road slow us down.  And sometimes we slow down to the point where we don’t even know if it is worth the effort to get going again.  “Sure,” you say.  “Maybe Mother Teresa kept going, but I’m certainly no Mother Teresa.”  So I’ll give you a much more down-to-earth example: myself.

I’m committed to spending two hours a day working towards my personal goals.  When things are going well, I hit that goal with no problem.  But this summer it’s been one bump after another.  My mother-in-law with dementia has been living with us for eight weeks.  Bump.  Our house had a bat infestation and a bird mite infestation. Bump bump.  My career has been on hold for six weeks as I wait for information about a promotion I am supposed to be receiving.  Bump.  The basement flooded, my administrative employee quit, and the list goes on and on.  Bump, bump, bump.  I can tell you that these bumps have absolutely slowed me down.  So how do we keep making progress when things get bumpy?

• Adjust your expectations.  When you hit those bumpy patches in Life, give yourself permission to slow down. 
• Plan to accomplish goals weekly or monthly, instead of daily.  This gives you breathing room on those really tough days.
• Celebrate all of your progress.  If you are able to hit a milestone during a bumpy patch, take the time to pat yourself on the back.
• Remember that you are writing your life story.  The hero of a good book always has obstacles to overcome. When you look back over those tough periods, you’ll be so pleased with yourself that you kept going.  And you’ll realize that you cherish those itty bitty steps you took during the hard times more than the giant strides you took during the good times.

Keep going, despite the bumps.  Sure- the average person would stop.  But you aren’t average, are you?

Yes. I recommend “Doing Nothing.”

Christopher Robin explains how to Do Nothing in The World of Pooh by A.A. Milne. He is having a conversation with Winnie the Pooh about favorite things. When Pooh asks Christopher Robin what he likes to do best, he answers, “What I like doing best is Nothing.” “How do you do Nothing?” asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time. “Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it, ‘what are you going to do, Christopher Robin’, and you say, ‘Oh, Nothing.’ And then you go and do it.” “Oh, I see” said Pooh. (I don’t think he did see, really.) Christopher Robin then clarified it a bit. “It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”
If that explanation doesn’t help you, here are a few of my favorite ways of Doing Nothing:

* Throw rocks into the puddle in my driveway with my youngest daughter
* Crawl back into bed mid-morning on a Saturday for no reason other than it is warm and cozy
* Sit on a chair in the back yard while the kids play on the swings and let the sun warm my face
* Perch on the edge of a bed to watch one of my children sleep
* Wander around the yard and down my street after everyone goes to bed, watching the clouds race in front of the moon.

In other words, Doing Nothing.

Any of these activities put the breaks on the holiday roller coaster. They give you a chance to catch your breath, wipe your eyes, and fix your hair before the wild ride of Life continues.

 Once that door is shut, I can look forward to the journey. Sure, I’ll miss my daughter and the rest of my family like crazy. But the occasional business trip is good for the working mom. There are elegant meals that we don’t have to cook, pay for, or clean up after. There are king-sized beds with mountains of pillows that we can hog all to ourselves. And there are no small children or pets to disturb our slumber. Ahh- can’t you taste the hotel room coffee already? But before I can enjoy any of this, I have to fly to Phoenix.
     I never take the magic of flight for granted. You’ll always find me in the window seat with the shade open. Most of the people on board look like they are traveling on business. You could say that I do too, but I’m really still Mom, watching the unfolding scenery through the eyes of my children.   As the plane takes off, I am treated to a view of the fall foliage from the air. I’ve never flown in the fall before, and the colors and patterns are gorgeous. The trees are soon obstructed by thin, wispy clouds. “Cirrus clouds!” my son Cole would shout. He likes everything about weather, and I know he would love this view. The plane reaches its cruising altitude of 36,000 feet, where the clouds look like fluffy mountains. If Cole were with me, he’d be pointing at them saying, “Cumulonimbus! Wow!”
     The flight attendants serve breakfast. I save the tiny box of raisins for my daughter Sarah and the muffin for Shelby. I eat the Honey Chex cereal out of its little disposable bowl and think again of Cole. He would love this flavor. I’ll have to buy it for him when I get home.
     Outside, the clouds are now smooth and flat. They seem more like ground covered with snow than floating water vapor. A rainbow appears, looking as though it was spray painted on the clouds. The illusion continues as the plane heads west. I watch for a long time before I realize that I have absent-mindedly eaten all of the raisins. Oh well; Sarah has raisins at home. I eat the muffin too.
     I doze off with my head leaning against the window. Not for long, unfortunately – we hit turbulence. The infant a few seats away fusses, which makes me miss the kids again. I can see the reason for the bumping; we are flying over a mountain range. I decide that I would explain turbulence to the kids as being when the wind bounces off the mountains and into our plane. I have no idea if I’m right or not.
     The decent into Phoenix starts. The desert is broken up only by small lakes. They all have funny shapes; one looks like a lizard and another looks like a shark. Shelby, Cole and Sarah would have so much fun naming their shapes, like they do with clouds. The ground gets closer and soon I am watching cars travel on roads. I see a baseball field. A cactus. The wheels grab the tarmac and I imagine my children shouting “Hurray! We made it!”
     Now it is time to turn on the cell phone, grab the laptop, and put my family out of my mind for the next few hours. After all, I’m a grown-up on an important business trip. But before I do, I recall something I said to Shelby before I left.

     For all of us in leadership roles, it is critical that we carve time out of our days for thinking.  It affects our creativity, our ability to strategize, and it improves our overall performance in all aspects of our lives.  Dr. John Maxwell, famous author and expert on leadership, recommends that we spend 20% of our time engaged in deep thinking. 

   It isn’t that easy, though.  Both Life and technology do a pretty good job of distracting us from taking the time that we should.  The list of distrations is endless, but here are some of the worst offenders:

1. EMAIL.  Most of us are too tempted by the unopened letter icon on our computers to focus on our current tasks; we pull away our focus which causes even the simplest tasks to take longer.
2. KIDS.   Don’t get me wrong- I love spending time with my children- but between softball practice, breaking up fights, and picking Moon Sand out of the carpet, it’s pretty hard to have any quality thinking time when they are awake.
3. TELEVISION.  Sure, there is some great quality programming out there.  But most television just eats away at your time and at your life.  According to the latest Nielson rating, the average American watches 4.5 hours of television a day.  That’s a full two months of your life GONE every year.
4. COMPUTER/ VIDEO GAMES.  How many times have you intended to play for “just a few minutes” and looked up at a clock to see that an hour or more of time had elapsed?

Sure, there’s lots of distractions.  How do we put the thinking time back into our days?  Here are some suggestions:

1. PLAN YOUR DAYS AROUND THINKING TIME.  Put it on your calendar daily and build the rest of your schedule around it.  It can be your most productive, effective time; be protective of it.
2. GET UP EARLY.  Family life is distracting and most houses are quiet in the wee hours of the morning.  All the really successful people I’ve questioned are all early risers.
3. HAVE A SPOT DEDICATED TO THINKING.  It could be anywhere; a chair, a desk, or perhaps a special room that you go to when you are thinking.  If at all possible use that spot just for thinking.  Once you use it regularly your brain will immediately click into thinking mode as soon as you sit down. 
4. EXERCISE.  It brings more oxygen to the brain.  It also slows down your mental activity to a point where you can listen better to what your brain has to say.  I’m a jogger, and I’m absolutely amazed at the wonderful, deep thoughts that come to me when I’m out on the road.  When you exercise, try leaving the tv and the ipod off.  Let everything be quiet so that inspiration can come to you.
5. TAKE ADVANTAGE OF YOUR COMMUTE.  If you can keep the radio and the cell phone off, you’ll give your brain another opportunity to talk to you.  And if you keep a digital voice recorder in your car you can easily record your thoughts without driving off the road. 

When you make room in your life for thinking on a regular basis, it means that you’ll have to take that time from somewhere else.  We all only have 24 hours in a day.  Hopefully you can find room by cutting out some of the time-wasters above.  If not, I’d suggest that cleaning the house is a good place to start…after all, that Moon Sand will still be there waiting for you after you’ve had your thinking time, won’t it?

     I recently had the opportunity to have lunch with a man that meets my definition of “successful”.  He cares about and is very involved in his family.  He is charitable.  And he is constantly growing and developing personally.  And yes, he is wealthy. 

     We discussed the role that setting and executing goals plays on one’s success.  What follows are some of the many insights he gave me during our lunch together.

• LOOK AT LIFE TEN MINUTES AT A TIME.  I’ve tried this, and I can tell you that it’s really painful.  So much of our time leaks away from us ten minutes at a time.  Identify where those holes are and plug them up so that you don’t leak time out of them anymore.

This particular entrepreneur is up every day at 5am, even though he is technically retired at the moment.  That’s something I’ve noticed about successful people- they always get up early.

• NO EXCUSES.  We all have them and know how to use them.  Successful people understand that all aspects of their business and life are ultimately their personal responsibility.  When they look in a mirror they don’t see the reflection through a mist of excuses.  They see a raw image with all of its triumphs and imperfections.  Having a “no excuses” frame of mind leads nicely into the next point, which is…
• LEARN FROM YOUR CHALLENGS.  AT THE END OF THE DAY LEAVE IT BEHIND YOU AND PRESS ON.  Accept responsibility, yes, but forgive yourself, learn from the mistakes and keep moving forward.  Remeber that we learn more from our mix-ups than we do from our successes sometimes. 

That’s another thing about successful people.  They never stop trying.  They understand that you don’t fail until you give up.  They are this way because they believe the next point,  which is…

• I AM GOING TO DO IT.  Believe in yourself and your subconscious mind will find ways to make that belief come true.  It will help you plot your course to your goals. 

The next one is one of my favorite points.  It really surprised me that he talked about it, but it sums things up so nicely…

• YOU SHOULD BE SMILING EVERY DAY OF YOUR LIFE.  Huh?  Think about it.  If you are in control of all aspects of your life and you are working dilligently towards your life’s goals, then you should be happy, shouldn’t you?  So many people go through life dissatisfied or worse, downright miserable.  If you don’t like your life, you have the power to change it.

I have one more thing about this interview that I’d like to share with you.  My meeting with this gentleman was not an accident.  I realized that in order to continue my personal growth I needed to find people with the knowledge that I was seeking.  It was uncomfortable and akward to ask him, but I just told myself I AM GOING TO DO IT and sure enough, I did!

Photo of the Owl Nebula, taken from the SLOOH telescope