CircleThrice

I'm accepting additional personal consulting clients.

I've built a successful career as a project manager and have years of experience. Companies hire project managers because they know they need certain skills to reach their strategic objectives and business goals. Companies hire me because, well, I am really good at helping them do that.My strengths include project organization, tactical and strategic management, communication, planning, and motivating people and teams. And personal goals? I'm pretty good at those too. 

And ironically, my success isn't because I am naturally organized and motivated. I've actually struggled with procrastination all my life. I'm sympathetic how hard it can be to get busy and successfully reach your goals. My success came from overcoming those tendencies and figuring how how to trick myself into doing the things I need to do. I did that through a combination of leveraging my strengths and combining my mundane PM skills with magic…

I've gotten over my equinox cold. I'm nearly caught up on readings from being ill. The broken things are fixed and replaced. Even the -- and I hesitate to say, lest I jinx it -- laundry is getting dealt with.

And that means that I'm kicking off my personal development project (which I wrote about here). And in the spirit of practicing what I preach (AKA eating my own dog food), I'm using the Project Planning template that I created and shared last year with my early blog supporters. The parts match the project planning posts of my PMPM series (Index). The calendar section is nearly obsolete (2016), but the rest of it is still valid.

It's interesting seeing which pieces work best for this kind of project.

For example, since this is all about habit formation and regular practice, the Cyclical Schedule is proving a lot more useful than Activities by Milestone. I'm also doing some fun stuff, like coding various goals with elemental symbols. And my logo is the tarot…

Previous | Master | Next

I grew up in the US Desert Southwest. That means that I'm used to huge skies and really wide open desert vistas. Dramatic mountains and rock formations and few trees to block the view. As the song goes, I can see for miles and miles. However, when I moved near the coast, I found the ocean a lot less easy to deal with. It's as huge and wide, but it's not as familiar or comfortable. So for the first couple of years of visiting the ocean, I would find myself inevitably staring at my feet, looking at pebbles and sand and shells. I'd have to force myself to look up and out at the massive crazy sea. I'm better now, but I wonder if water to the horizon will ever feel as normal or natural as sand.


When you need to push your boundaries, expand your consciousness, think bigger, you need to look up and away -- to take the wide and long view. What you see might be familiar and comfortable or new and strange, but to look out to the edge of what you can …

I sometimes think I must have the most boring magic blog in all the Interwebs. There's no drama or exciting field reports and I don't get very personal here. A friend complimented CircleThrice by saying that it is "very technical." How exciting.
I do spend a lot of time here talking about being organized and reaching goals and making plans. And yes, I consider these things very important and very useful. Combined with magic, it's a powerhouse for making your life into the life you want. I believe that. But it's not good for everything.


There was a hint in my last post. A bit of a secret into how I actually operate. In fact, I rarely plan my actual spiritual practice.
That is to say, I plan the heck out of my mundane life, and incorporate magic extensively to keep the ship righted and moving in the direction I want. And I use habit tricks frequently to make sure I've got a routine for doing the things I need to do. But my personal religious and devotional…

One of the most persuasive arguments for the practice of magic is that magic is about change -- making change, directing change, adjusting the odds, etc. This makes sense because change is a continuous and constant state. So since change is happening in your life anyway, you may as well do everything you can to get it to go your way.



But that supposes you want change in your life.

What if you don't? 

This is something that I've been pondering the last few years. I'm in a position right now where I do not want a lot of change in my life. My family situation is stable, I love my job, and my primary goals are to get the budding psychonaut through high school with a minimum of both drama and harm and to support the spouse in rebooting post injury. My personal and family goals are, frankly, boring. Getting more exercise. Eating locally. Yawn. Seriously.

I hope you can see how dangerous this is. Particularly since (and I appreciate that this is not apparent from the content here)…

There are men with heavy equipment digging a hole in our yard. Two guys just came to do the final hookup on our new stove (which has been sitting in our kitchen, inoperable, for 15 days). With luck we should actually have indoor warm food by early this afternoon. Fortunately we were home to stop them DIGGING ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE HOUSE.

In other news our washing machine died an ignominious death on Monday. A messy death involving the explosion of a feather pillow inside the machine. In all fairness it was 16 years old (the machine, not the pillow) and had been slowly becoming more and more fussy and less and less efficient. A shiny new machine will be arriving this afternoon and all I can say is, thank goodness for Labor Day sales here in the US.

The kid just started the first week of being a freshman and has already had a major schedule change (with a lot of, frankly unnecessary, accompanying anxiety).

This morning when my husband went out to move our cars (for the aforementioned …