Hello! It’s been quite a while since posting last. T’would seem that my transmission tower goes dead when in major transition. That I’m writing again must mean that the journey is a-settling.

The super-duper short, get-up-to-speed story is this: a year ago, I decided it was time for Major change. The rest of the year was spent learning to code: going to bootcamp, self-learning, and practicing.

Yup, I’m transitioning from Natural Professional mindful productivity coach to web developer. Why? Because it makes me happy, and that’s all I need. =)

Current status: I’m in the midst of the job hunt in the SaaS universe. For my lovely non-tech oriented readers, SaaS = Software as a Service which is pretty much every app you use these days. Yup, all those programs you use that live in the cloud, for ex. Gmail.

Yesterday I survived my first technical phone screening. This is where an engineer at the company you’re applying to gives you an algorithm challenge and then watches you sink or swim.

In my mind, I was ready to come busting out of the gate with brilliant ideas, clean code and insightful edge cases. I’d get to the passing green tests with a smile on my face, spirits high, and ready for the next thing.

Maybe next time.

He gave me the challenge. I set up the test environment (great!) and then took a moment to ponder my approach to the algorithm.

And another moment. Please?

And another. Really? Nothin’??

He suggested doing a smaller version of the problem, which I did. And…. Time up! Got passing green test on that. Not much consolation.

Brain will party in its own time

This morning, laying in bed, Bam! I start mentally whiteboarding.

Wait a sec… wait a sec! I think this could be it! I jumped up, ran for pen and blank paper, hopped back in bed.

Yes, there’s something here. Three loops nested. I don’t even know what I was trying yesterday.

Sketched out first loop,
sketched out the second loop within first,
and the third loop within the second.
So simple!

Dying to know, I popped open my laptop and transferred chicken scratch to screen. There were a few things for adjustment but the logic was sound.
Test passed.
Added edge test.
Passed.

Let it be easy, motto of the Century

That’s how the brain works.
Good: If a problem is within reach, Brain’ll figure it out on its own. It likes space.

Bad: Banging head against the wall. Pushing and pushing. Struggling and getting frustrated.

For those new to the blog, our motto here for the last gazillion years has been: Let it be easy.

This lesson has been a long time coming: When something’s hard, let it rest, it’ll be easier after a night’s sleep. Depending on the nature of the problem, it may need a few nights’ sleep.

Makes life soooo much easier in the problem-solving department!

Not sure how this jives with the interview process, LOL.

Look, I can’t make brain go faster.

What does make it go faster is doing more problems.
More reading.
More unrelated learning.

Each new experience firing neural pathways in the brain. This is growth.

In a year, you’ll throw me this challenge and I’ll whip it out in a flash. AND, there will be other challenges that will require overnight processing power.

What is there but to Accept?

Life lessons of late have everything to do with acceptance.

Acceptance is such an interesting dynamic to invite into the midst of life transition let alone when entering a new industry feeling at a total disadvantage.
Female (hello, implicit bias!).
Bootcamp grad (“must have CS degree”!).
Age…. (Let’s just say over the average age Silicon Valley employee age of 28.)

Honestly, I don’t know why I don’t feel more dejected. LOL.

All the meditation I’ve done over the last decade must be paying off.
Or I’m staying adequately amped on caffeine.
Or I’m trusting the Knowing that somehow, someway I’m on the right path.

Somehow, someway I’ll connect with the right company.

Somehow, someway I’ll connect with the peeps who appreciate my coding skills as well as the creative entrepreneurial mindset that I bring to the table.

Let’s close this out with a most curious observation:
Right now, in the midst of crazy huge life-transition and the bewilderment of entering a new industry, I have a stronger, deeper, more solid confidence in what I bring to the table than I did after 10 years as a freelancer coach.

If that doesn’t indicate Right Path, I don’t know what does.

Loves to you.

The staircase, the journey.

My friends, it has been soooo long since the last update. So much has happened, it’d take a mini-epic to fill in on all the details…

Last report was that I had enrolled in Coding Bootcamp seven months ago — months that feel like the blink of an eye.

There’s a deluge of adventures and experiences pent up behind a dam within me, desiring to flood forth.

Let’s tease out just one. One and only one. Looking back? Looking ahead? How about a thread woven through the fabric of Now, and thus linking what was with what will be.

Which invites the most important theme of them all. The very motivation of this blog, this work, this Life o’mine. I speak, of course, of Home.

The familiar space within.
The sacred temple whose cavernous spaciousness soothes the soul.
The place of refuge, healing and surrender.

Saying “Yes!” to the call of Coding provided a solid touchstone going into this unfamiliar territory. When completely unmoored by information overload, long hours and the incessant frustration at not knowing enough… that touchstone reminded me that I was on the Right road.

It was thanks to mindfulness that I soon learned that detaching from my perfectionist expectations would be the only way to sail on without crashing on the rocky shore day after day.

In one week alone, we dove into Javascript, jQuery, then ajax — Monday Tuesday Wednesday — leaving me gasping for air at the sheer quantity of new info.

And then seeing how, repeatedly practicing line after line of code, it began to formulate the key to solving problems that had seemed so difficult only one week before.

The Lesson Learned, that I share with you here — in hopes of being of use to you as it reminds and supports me every day now is this:
Learning something new is merely a question of exposure.

The first pass may leave you in a mental whirlwind of confusion.
The second pass may not leave you much clearer.
The third pass begins to reveal a pattern here and there.
The fourth pass graces you with some surprises of recognition — it’s becoming familiar!
The tenth pass finds you exploring nuances, testing limits, wondering how you might hack it… booya!

Right now I’m in the first or second pass of exposure in the new endeavor called: Job Search.

As with Code Camp, impatience and frustration have no place here. They only serve to narrow the ability to absorb what needs to be observed and learned.

As always, maintaining awareness of Home, or noticing the lack thereof, is The Work.

The Work during times of intense learning like at Code Camp,
The Work in the time of job search,
The Work in the future when considering job offers,
The Work in times of acclimating to a new position.

Let’s wrap up with a reminder of the three concurrent ways to support your Home space:

Rescue: the things you do in the moment when you realize you’re “off” such removing yourself from the situation to take a walk or breathing exercises.

Cultivation: daily routine, for example, my long standing morning routine is: yoga/sit/journal

Full reset: monthly? quarterly? invitations to let it all go, for example a day at the hot springs

That’s it for today. I will say that I’ve missed writing here — there’s just so much I want to share, and… well, that’s the beauty of life, yes? We always-always-always have the opportunity to begin each day anew.

Big news!

A part of me wants to jump in and tell you while another part is attempting to flee in fear… “What will you think?”

Ah, Fear. You are a compelling fiend, aren’t you?

The truth is, I’ve experienced such joy and excitement lately that I know my decision is right.

Here’s the lead in…

When I was in Belgium a year ago, I was called to the Bay Area — which just happens to be the center of the Tech Universe.

So there I am, on a recent Saturday night, sitting on a couch at a house party in the Bezerkely Hills with a bunch of kind and intelligent peeps.

A woman sits down next to me and opens my eyes to a possibility that I’d never considered: becoming a Junior Software Engineer (yes, even in my 40s!!)

She’d done it herself.
She shared her experience.
She answered my incredulous questions.

Ah, Synchronicity. You are a compelling angel, aren’t you?

I couldn’t think of anything else for a week. I researched. Read about others’ experiences. Took a tour where my new friend learned to code. Went to a “Beginning Javascript” class.

The next weekend, I did it. I enrolled in Coding Bootcamp.

It’s an intense 19-week program which will complete in early August. I’ll then get a job, presumably with a tech startup here in the Bay Area, preferably in Oakland or SF.

If you look at it through an archetypal lens, I’m an Explorer. I want to explore and then come back to you and report on the New Way: New ways of approaching challenges, obstacles to watch out for, models that are working and that you can learn from.

It’s time for a new adventure…

Trusting the Journey

Obviously, this is a big shift. It’s a full on Identity shift, really. From solopreneur to coder? Wow.

How to know that it’s the Right Decision? We’ve all had compelling ideas, but when the consequences mean turning your life upside down (like going location independent, LOL), we want some kind of reassurance that the motivation is pure (and not fear- or avoidance-based).

So I assigned my head the job of understanding. Here are some considerations that gave me peace of mind that this is the Right Decision.

Consideration #1

After producing the New WoW Summit at the end of last year, one thing was blatantly clear:

I want to collaborate.

I had a blast working with my Team and the Speakers for that event and I want more of that. The thing with the Summit, though, is that it wasn’t enough of a money maker to continue with that model. The resources just aren’t there for active and ongoing collaboration within my current situation.

Consideration #2

My long range Vision for myself is to be a spokesperson for the New Way of Working.

How I manifest this Vision is unclear — there are many possible roads. After the Summit, I saw that the next step toward spokesperson, indeed, wasn’t very clear. What was clear was that more and different perspectives would be most helpful. Perspective from within the working world? The tech world? Fascinating!!

Consideration #3

While I’ve loved so much about my journey with the Natural Professional, and I’ve done really awesome at parts of it, lately I haven’t been loving (and in fact have been avoiding) some of the hats required for Solopreneur success: I.e. marketing, sales, and launching.

For a while I’ve been buckling down and saying, this is part of the deal. Right now, I’m ‘fessing up to the fact that I’m trying to push a boulder up hill and I’m tired of it, not to mention, it’s a totally un-natural professional thing to do! When I considered the possibility that I could just be a problem-solver (what most coding it really about), a huge sigh of relief washed over my body.

There are more considerations but for now, three is enough.

So what does this mean for the vehicle of the Natural Professional as a business? This is as yet unclear.

Here’s what I do know:

— Code Camp is going to be intense. 9 weeks of virtual, part-time curriculum, then 9 weeks of 10-12 hour days, 6 days/week.

— I want to give this learning curve my full and undivided attention.

— I have a bunch of awesome tutorials for Walk Tall that I still want to share.

— I still want to support your journey in accomplishing your goals with calm, clarity and confidence.

If you are game for some uncertainty from me, then let’s play with this!! I.e.:

How can this new journey be helpful for you as well?

My dear friend and mastermind partner, Betsy at An Uncluttered Life, had the Brilliant Idea of “pulling back the curtain” to show what this looks like, quasi-realtime, in a way that you can follow along and apply in your own life.

Duh! You’ve had epic adventures, maybe you even have one coming up! And if you don’t have one coming up, you likely have a shift of some sort on the horizon (for ex. shift into summer schedule).

So I’ll share some posts, maybe some videos and screencasts, to share the journey and give ideas for your own implementation and to support you in being the awesome natural professional that you are.

You can see the first glimpse behind the curtain here.

So then, my friend, thank you for being on this journey. If you have questions about my decision and new course of action, feel free to ask.

Know that I’m following the light and joy in my heart. The weekend I enrolled, I literally felt like I was surfing a wave of light and energy — that kind of clarity is such a Gift.

For inspiration, ideas and more support on your journey…

At the end of 2015 I produced the New WoW Summit which was Fantastic. Didja miss it?

It consisted of 10 interviews with Creative Women Entrepreneurs leading their businesses differently — they are shining examples of the New Way of Working. From self-care, to decision-making, to biz models… the conversations contain a wealth of rich information.

There was also a kick-ass handbook with tools from the speakers, my thoughts on the New WoW, and a sweet graphic representation of the what the New WoW is about. Sound intriguing? It oughta! (& did I mention that it was Awesome?)

It’s now available as a DIY Retreat — you can get the benefit of the wisdom and experience of these inspiring women.

As for timing, signing up for the DIY New WoW Retreat now supports me in this time of transition. Get yours here.

Big hug o’love to you,
XO

If you jumped to the end and want to catch the first step o’prep toward Code Camp, it’s here.

Preface: This is the first of the get-a-glimpse-behind-the-curtain series in which I’ll share some posts, maybe some videos and screencasts, to share my journey of Code Camp from the POV of this Natural Professional. The intention is to give you ideas for your own implementation and to support you in being the awesome natural professional that you are.

The scenario

Roll the calendar back a couple of weeks. I just enrolled in Code Camp. I’ve done my research so have a pretty good sense of Just How Intense this is going to be.

The memory of producing the New WoW Summit is fresh in mind along with the awareness that THE reason it was such a great experience (despite working like a fiend throughout the holidays, LOL) was dedication to self-care. And the thing is: self-care takes forethought.

So as soon as I hit the “submit application” button, I do a silly jig in the living room in celebration and then….

Get practical

I created a note in Evernote called: Self care

For now it’s in my Notebook called: Coding Project. Since this Notebook is going to get large pretty quickly, I’m sure to add tags to the note.

Anticipated Issues

Then, I downloaded the issues I could anticipate:

Note that I didn’t research these things right then and there, I just threw in placeholders for future reference + created a parking place for additional ideas that were sure to pop up.

Snackage

The next list was the beginnings of a To Get list. Here’s what I know: I’ll be blazing through brain energy like it’s going out of style, thus, will want a regular stream of glucose for that big organ in the skull. I want foods that are high in fat and protein with low sugar (my personal preference) and that are easy to eat.

As you can see, most of these foods aren’t available at the common corner grocery which is what I’ll have access to during the intensive part of the program. A Snickers bar every once it a while is fine, but not every day.

Plus, you might remember what it’s like to be at your favorite grocery store, know that you want to pick up some healthy snacks, have no list, and then just get whatever default you’ve been getting for the last few weeks… hence, let’s think about it beforehand!

Routine

While this is last in this list, it’s at the top in importance. Routines support you while saving energy because you don’t have to think about what’s next.

You’ll see that I sketched out a morning and evening routine. It’s gonna be intense, any and all guidance/reminders will be appreciated.

Did you catch the Big Question at the beginning? — I.e. This morning routine means getting up at 5:40am(?!?!) Uh, that doesn’t sound realistic to me. I left it in for the time being because it’s an ideal template and I still have time to sit with it and for other ideas to pop up.

And in fact, looking at it now, a couple of weeks later, here’s what will likely happen: there’s a yoga space at Code Camp, so yoga can get pushed to later in the day, meditation will get shaved down to 30 min, and skimming (journaling) will get moved to the evening and will be combined with Gratitudes & Acknowledgements.

With those thoughts, here’s the revised morning routine:

This means up at 6:45am — much more realistic!

This whole process of setting up in Evernote and doing a quick think thru for these lists took maybe 20 minutes, i.e. Nothing, and yet the impact that anticipating these will pay off exponentially.

Sure there’s more to do, but that’ll be easy enough because I already have a list to work off of. I’ve started the process almost a month before I need it, so I won’t have to cram it in or mess with my schedule in a major way to get to it.

And thus concludes our first glimpse behind the curtain. =)

I’m feeling like I miss my Ex. And I don’t know if this is true — that I’m missing him.

While sitting this morning, I wondered “Do I miss him?” or is that I miss what he stirred up in me, this sweet feeling of love (that now has a twinge of bittersweet since the relationship is over?)

And then I wondered (because, obviously, my head had commandeered my meditation session), “can I extract the feeling of Love from my association with him? Can I enjoy the feeling of Love and then see him moving away from my most intimate garden? And then can I feel gratitude for him for contributing to my feeling Love?”

It behooves to note that when I ask within for what this new year’s intention is, the answer I’m hearing is: Love.

Calling in Love

And it isn’t necessarily romantic love, is it? Is it Divine love? Is it heart a-buzz? Or… what? Deep connection and feeling, I think.

Deeper feeling all the time, in fact. More of the delicious experience of what life could feel like if I were connected to my heart and body more.

So this is the capacity that I am cultivating. Embodying Love. The capacity to be present and aware and in touch with my heart and body all the time. Finally already!

Rejecting mental clutter

No more heady-head, mental masturbation, needless worry. I’m so over that. Those stress patterns that are totally and completely useless. That do Nothing except make life not-fun.

Really. In the context of bringing forth the work I want to bring forth, the experiences I want to enjoy, the gifts I have to share, the creativity I have to express — those patterns of anxiety and stress serve Zero purpose. None. Zilch. Nada.

Actually, it’s worse than that. Zero implies that those crappy patterns just don’t contribute to moving the Goods forward. But that’s not true.

When they are present, they have a negative effect. They drag down. Hinder. They get in the way. Make it harder to proceed. Hurl in the wrong direction.

The very definition of Clutter*.

* ”Clutter” of course meaning Anything that gets in the way of superbly and fabulously enjoying the beauty in life.

And because those patterns are deep, I shan’t expect them to change over night. I’ve got patience and patience is needed. I’ve got awareness that small practice every day has exponential effect over time.

The compounding power of dedication

I’m clear that a penny every day eventually adds up to 100 bucks. Takes a while, but you get there.

So instead of a penny, I’ll shoot for a minute ever day. A minute more of staying connected with my heart, body and the sweet feeling of Love.

A minute doesn’t sound like much… but + (plus) a minute every day… well, now. That’ll add up to something over time.

Let’s see, how many waking minutes in a day are there?
From 7am to 11pm are 16 hours.
16 hours x 60 min in an hour = 960 min/day.

So if I want to enjoy the yummy experience of Love all day long, and I add a minute every day, then that’s a little less than 3 years.

Since there are bound to be setbacks now and again maybe we’ll give it another 1/2 and say 5 years to play it safe.

But then again, once we get going, there will probably be some leaps and bounds of progress. Like exponential growth. Quantum leaps and what not. So with total dedication, I suppose, it could be as fast as a year.

Which is all to say, who knows how long it will take?

Committing to the Right Time

All I know is that Dedication raises the structure, lays the mosaic on the floor, paints the ceiling, and before you know it, you’ve got some sweet Sacred space to give thanks for.

AND… we’re not beginning from ground zero, I.e. I’m starting the year with more than 1 minute per day. Maybe like 10. On a good day. Thank goodness for that.

You might be wondering, “Are you really going to time this every day??” We are, after all, immersed in a culture obsessed with metrics, measuring, comparing, showing progress, proof in pudding and whatnot.

No, I’m not actually going to time it— that’d be a total Clutter*-inducing activity that would get me stuck in Chronos time when I’d rather be living in Kairos time.

* ”Clutter” still meaning Anything that gets in the way of superbly and fabulously enjoying the beauty in life.
“Chronos” referring to linear clock time.
“Kairos” referring to the experience of the moment.

Thus, let Love be my Anchor for this year: both the journey and the destination.
May I be my own best friend in supporting this adventure.
May the way be ever easier to travel.

Photo credits by Shawn Tuttle, all from wanderings in Antwerp, Belgium in winter 2015

Dispatch from the Land of Coding Job Hunt!

By Shawn Tuttle on March 1, 2017

Hello! It’s been quite a while since posting last. T’would seem that my transmission tower goes dead when in major transition. That I’m writing again must mean that the journey is a-settling. The super-duper short, get-up-to-speed story is this: a year ago, I decided it was time for Major change. The rest of the year […]

Learning something new — a journey from frustration to a-ha!

By Shawn Tuttle on November 1, 2016

My friends, it has been soooo long since the last update. So much has happened, it’d take a mini-epic to fill in on all the details… Last report was that I had enrolled in Coding Bootcamp seven months ago — months that feel like the blink of an eye. There’s a deluge of adventures and […]

An Epic Adventure Announcement

By Shawn Tuttle on April 6, 2016

Big news! A part of me wants to jump in and tell you while another part is attempting to flee in fear… “What will you think?” Ah, Fear. You are a compelling fiend, aren’t you? The truth is, I’ve experienced such joy and excitement lately that I know my decision is right. Here’s the lead […]

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