On this episode of The Karen Kenney Show, I talk about what it really means to make a positive contribution in your life - especially when you’re feeling stuck, scared, or like you’re falling behind.

I share a little bit about working on my memoir and why author Ryan Holiday says that chasing word or page counts can backfire, and how shifting to small, doable daily actions can change everything.

We revisit Kaizen (continuous improvement through tiny steps), and I show you how to apply the concept in your writing, money, fitness, relationships, and spiritual practice. It can help even when you only have 5 or 10 minutes!

I also pull in some wisdom from the Bhagavad Gita, A Course in Miracles, and some of my favorite teachers to remind you that no sincere effort is ever wasted!

If you’re tired of your own (or others) “all-or-nothing” thinking and want a more compassionate, sustainable way to grow…

Then this episode will help you start making positive contributions today, from exactly where you are and with exactly what you’ve got to give. ❤️

KAREN KENNEY BIO:

Karen Kenney is a writer, speaker, podcaster, certified spiritual mentor, and coach.

She’s known for her dynamic storytelling, her sense of humor, her Boston accent, and her no-bullshit approach to spirituality, self​-development, and transformational work.

Karen helps people to navigate this whole “being human” experience using practical tools, universal principles and stories, and a variety of resources.

KK has been a yoga teacher for 25+ years, has been giving Thai Yoga Massage since 2008, and began teaching it in 2015.

She's also a Gateless Writing Instructor, the creator of WRITE CLUB, and host of The Karen Kenney Show podcast.

She coaches clients individually in her 1:1 program THE QUEST and via her HEART-TO-HEART DAYS using Voxer. She also leads a group program and community called THE NEST.

CONNECT WITH KAREN:

Website: http://karenkenney.com/

Podcast: https://www.karenkenney.com/podcast

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/karenkenneylive/

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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@KarenKenney

It's the Karen Kenney Show. Hey, you guys,

welcome to the Karen Kenney Show. I'm super duper excited to

be here with you today, and we're just gonna dive right into

this sucker. Okay, so if you're new here, hi, welcome. I'm so

happy to have you. If you've been around the block with me a

few times, you know you already know this about me, that I am a

writer, and even though I do a lot of different things for

work, I'm what's considered a multi-passionate person. Some

people call it a multi-potentialite, whatever.

How I most identify, probably, is as a writer, and as a

storyteller, and as a communicator, right? Like, hence

the podcast. I can, I can run my mouth, but I can also like write

some words down, you know, so when what, so being a writer,

what you may not know, if you're new here, and if you are new

here. Hello, welcome. Thank you for being here. But if you've

been around the block with me for a little bit, you know

already that I am a writer, that I am working on a memoir, I'm

working on a book, and when you set out onto this task of

writing a book, it can totally paralyze you with fear. Now, if

you're listening to this and you're like, "I'm not a writer,

why should I give a shit? Just trust me, hang in this, stick

with me. I'm going to share some things that are absolutely going

to apply to, like, universal life of being a human, right?

I'm just coming at it from this angle, but it can feel really

big and really scary. So you try to figure out, like, how am I

going to get this monstrosity of a thing done, because if you

really just think I have to write how many words, how many

pages, how many chapters, it's so easy to get paralyzed, to get

stuck in your tracks, to like self sabotage, and we're going

to get to that in a minute. So you try to find different ways

of kind of entering into the project without feeling

completely overwhelmed, you know. And so one of the things

you do is you start to look at like what the writers, the great

writers who have come before you, like what is their writing

practice, or what do they recommend, or what do they do,

and there's a lot of information out there, you know. Some

writers will tell you, hit a certain word count, or sit, hit

a certain page count, you got to write this many number of words,

right? And when you think about about a page of typed words, is

like 250 words is about right, equal to a page, you know. And

then you go, okay, I need to get this many words, which equals

this many pages, is all these things. Then sometimes people

will say, don't even worry about writing good pages, just write

crappy pages, right. And I've heard my mom, like other writers

that I follow, talk about this, everybody from Stephen King to

Andre Debus to Ryan Holiday, who I'm a big fan of. I read a lot

of his books. They've talked about this process, right? And,

and even those things, though, can start to feel overwhelming,

because you put these.. what's the word I'm looking for.. these

metrics, right? You put these.. these goals, like I got to hit

this many things, or otherwise it's just all shit, or I let

myself down, and it can be really easy to self-sabotage

yourself with disappointment in yourself. And so, in other

episodes of this podcast, and this is where these are going to

apply to you as well, right? I've done two different podcasts

that kind of talk about this concept in slightly different

ways, and I'll tell you what those are, but the first one

I'll refer to is episode 281 where I talked about breaking

things down, and I talked about a process called Kaizen, it's K

A I Z E N, I'm pretty sure they used Kaizen at Toyota when they

were starting to figure out how to make really good and reliable

cars. The goal of the company was to practice in this way,

which is this: Kaizen is continuous improvement through

small incremental steps to just do a little bit each day to get

better, and over time that stuff builds up. I think of it like

compound interest, right? First, you think, oh, I'm just putting

20 bucks a week, or whatever it is, 20 bucks a month, 20 bucks a

week, 100 bucks a month into my savings account. It might not

seem like a big deal, but every little bit that you put into

your savings account, not only do you make money, like make

interest on that money, then you start to make interest on the

money and the interest, right? And that's how things grow. It

might seem like teeny tiny small incremental steps, but those

things create continuous improvement and continuous

growth, and I know that Ryan Holiday has talked about this

before. He recently did a blog post where he was saying that

when he first started writing, he would be like, "I'm going to

try to write like 2000 words a day, and then he was like,

"Okay, no, now I'm going to try to write just two crappy pages

a. Not even good ones, just like two crappy ones, he said, and

then that metric even became like too much, and he said

everything was getting managed and measured, and he said, you

know, that that that metric of just writing a certain number of

pages, in his words, he says the problem with measuring output in

pages is that it implies that adding pages is what you should

be doing every day, and that's not what the goal is. He says

for him the goal is making a positive contribution every day,

and he says this is the one question he asks himself at the

end of every day: Did I make a positive contribution to my

writing today. I think this is such a fantastic question. This

idea of making a positive contribution. Now let's take it

away from writing for a moment. For you, it might apply in your

life like this. Did I make a positive contribution right to

my bank account today, right, or my savings account. Maybe you

have a goal to save a certain amount of money because you want

to have an emergency fund, or you want to take a vacation, or

you want to buy somebody a gift, or buy, treat yourself to

something, whatever it is. Did I make a positive contribution

today? Now, the positive contribution might be that you

actually put some pennies aside, right? You put some dollar bills

aside, and you put some bucks in the bank account, but the

positive contribution might be that you also didn't go and buy

that $8 friggin cafe latte and croissant, or whatever. You know

what I mean? Maybe the positive contribution to it was that you

saved money by not spending money, like you made your own

lunch at home, or whatever it is, right? So you break it down

into these little tiny steps, and we can apply this, like I

said, to everything. We can apply it to writing, we can

apply it to fitness, because one of the things that our brains

love to do, and as humans we love to do, is we think that if

the contribution, right, if our positive contribution wasn't

big, then it didn't matter, right. We do this all or nothing

thinking, and this is one of the biggest ways that we sabotage

ourselves, that if we didn't do a workout for 45 minutes, that

it doesn't count. So, we'll say, "Oh, I only had 10 minutes. What

was 10 minutes going to do? So I just didn't work out, or I

didn't take the walk around the block, or I didn't move my body

because I didn't have enough time. And we do this as writers

too. Sometimes we convince ourselves that the only way to

be productive is I need these big chunks of time where I'm

going to be completely uninterrupted, and I'm going to

go into my little writing studio, or my office, or my

space, and I just need all this time in order for it to matter,

and it's just not true, you know. One of my beloved friends,

in one of my beloved, and he's also a writing mentor of mine,

Andre Debus the Third, he talks about that, how he wrote one of

his books was, you know, he was, he was either doing construction

during the day, and like bartending at night, or

whatever. This is when his kids were really young. He's like,

they were broke, you know? He was married, he was broke. And I

don't know if he.. how many.. I don't know if he only had one

child at the time, but the point of the story is, is that he used

to write by pulling over and packing at this cemetery, and in

like 20 minute chunks he would just pull over, he would take

his car and his pencil, and he would write down in his

notebook, right, or whatever piece of paper he was writing

on, I think it was like a Mead notebook, like one of the

composition books, and he would scribble with his, you know,

carpenter's pencil after his shift, in between going to his

next job or going home, he'd pull over into the cemetery, and

with those 20 minutes, that's how he got the book done. It was

like, you know, bit by bit, bird by bird, as Annie Lamotte would

say, right? If you haven't read, if you're a writer and you

haven't read Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, I highly, highly,

highly recommend it, but we underestimate what those little

things built up over time can do for us, and when we go into all

or nothing thinking, right, then again we will find the brain

will find 1000 reasons why. So there might be a day, let's say,

and I'll do this for myself sometimes too, if I know I'm

going to have a really hard time squeezing in like a 45 minute

workout, or a long walk, or whatever the thing is. I'll be

like, man, so we have our driveway is like pretty steep,

like my sweetie today, he's gonna go out and he's gonna like

do the driveway, like training his legs, like coming uphill,

uphill, uphill. So maybe I can't go out and I can't do like, you

know, a 45 minute run or walk or whatever, but I can get my ass

outside and I can walk up and down that hill five times,

right? You know what I mean, or even sitting at my desk

throughout the day. Sometimes I'll like set a timer, and I'll

be like either on the half hour or the hour. I'll stand up,

right? I'll do five minutes of stretching, or I'll do, like,

you know, body weight squats, or like, whatever. It's like you

can find. Ways to work in and meet your goals in little

chunks, even if it doesn't feel ideal. I, you can ask yourself,

like Ryan Holiday does, am I making a positive contribution?

It's like, am I taking that money and putting a little bit

in the bank, and the bank can be your health, the bank can be

your well-being, the bank could be in fitness. It's like even if

you were saying, let's say you wanted to learn a new language,

and your ideal is like, I'm going to sit down an hour every

night and do it, and then all of a sudden life gets crazy, you're

wicked busy, like you can't make it happen. Like, do you just

give up on your dream, or maybe you just say, hey, and that five

minutes that I have, or in that 10 minutes that I have, I'm

still gonna listen, you know. I remember that I did an episode,

I think it was episode 212 and it was called Little Hinges

Swing Big Doors, and if you just take a look, right, walk around

your house, look at those tiny hinges on the edges of the

doors, and think about what that think about the heavy lifting

that those tiny little hinges are doing in opening those doors

up, so it can be really, really, really easy to self sabotage

ourselves and say that I can't get it done because I'm not

making a big enough, you know, contribution, and even though

I'm coming at it from the point of view of, you know, starting

with writing, this applies to our whole life, as I'm saying.

So I wrote down some, some places, right? So I said, okay,

so you can do it. You can apply this to writing, you can apply

it to fitness. Don't just throw up your hands and say, oh, I

didn't have time to go to the gym today, I don't know, stand

in your kitchen, do some jumping jacks, it's like, oh, I couldn't

get to yoga, that's okay, sit your ass down while you're

watching TV and stretch, you know what I mean, it's like, we

don't, it doesn't have to be ideal circumstances for it to to

create compound interest in your life, if you want to practice,

right, if you want to be more patient, let's say that you have

really low patience. Oh my god, devil, amen. Hands, do I get it?

How do we get more patient? We practice being patient by 1000

different opportunities throughout the day, sitting at a

red light, right, waiting for your kids to put their shoes on,

whatever, like letting your dog sniff when he's outside, not

just jerking them around and making them rush. I see so many

dog owners who make their dogs rush on their walks because they

don't know that sniffing is one of the best things for their

brains and their bodies, and it helps them in so many ways,

right? So, if you want to become more patient, we practice being

patient in these little micro movements. You want to become

more confident, we more confident you just take little

moments where you may be like challenge yourself to increase

your courage to do something maybe not huge and scary, but

maybe you take a little step, maybe you look somebody in the

eye, maybe you firm your handshake, I don't know, like

whatever it is for you, but this idea of making a positive

contribution in the direction of your dream, in the direction of

the person that you want to come, in the direction of your

goal, not insisting that it's these huge goals like two, you

know, 2000 words or two pages a day, or whatever the thing is,

is it's like, no, did I just move forward, right? When we

think about Kaizen again, continuous improvement through

small incremental steps, you know, I was thinking about in

the Bhagavad Gita. So, as a yoga teacher, right, pretty familiar

with the Bhagavad Gita, I have read it multiple times, like I

can't quote, like, you know, like past major passages or

anything, but I'm very familiar with the story, and so I love

this from the Bhagavad Gita, right? So it's in chapter two,

and it's verse 40, and I love this, and it says this. So we're

talking here, like, you know, as a spiritual mentor, people will

often say, like, how do I know I'm making progress on the

spiritual path, or I didn't get to, you know, do my DSP for like

30 minutes today, or whatever, today, like, is it just a waste?

It's just a waste of time. So they'll say they'll throw up

their hands and just say, "Well, I just didn't do it, so I didn't

do my meditation because I didn't have half an hour, I

didn't have 20 minutes, or I didn't have whatever. And so

they just either don't do it, or they feel like whatever they did

was a lame attempt, like it didn't count right, and so

listen to this, though the Bhagavad Gita, it says this on

this path, effort never goes to waste, and there is no failure,

even a little effort towards spiritual awareness will yield

protection from the greatest fear, you guys on the path, on

the spiritual path. No effort ever goes to waste. It all

counts. Even a little effort towards spiritual awareness will

yield protection, right? And it's so fantastic, and I'm. One

of my teachers, Aswaran, says that this is one of the most

memorable verses in the Gita for him, and he says it's applicable

to every aspect of human life, and it says when we meditate

within for even a short period of time every day, the effort is

not wasted, every little bit when you are allowing yourself

to bring your mind back to love, to bring your mind back to

peace, to bring your attention back to kindness, because that's

the work, is to be incrementally. You want to be

more kind and compassionate, then you practice small, teeny

steps of doing it. You're not all of a sudden going to turn

around, right, your personality like overnight, like that. It

rarely happens, you know what I mean, yeah. There's certain

things in life you do cold turkey, right? Some people,

though, have learned right to quit smoking by making a

positive contribution of smoking slowly one less cigarette a day

from their pack, and then they get down to one a day, and then

eventually they can let that fall away. The positive

contribution, you would think, like, well, smoking two

cigarettes is a positive contribution. I'm like, it's

better than a whole fucking pack, you know what I'm saying.

So it's like not ideal, yes, but slowly but surely we can make

positive, positive efforts in the direction that we are trying

to get to whether you're trying to create new habits, be

different, right? Like, maybe there's a personality, a

characteristic of your personality that doesn't win you

any, doesn't help you out, doesn't win you any awards,

right? Doesn't help you out in your relationship. So, these can

be really positive things, and even in A Course in Miracles,

right, Ken Wapnick, who's a, you know, a teacher who was, he's

dead now, but he was a teacher of Course in Miracles, and I

remember Ken one saying, you know, people often say to him,

like, how do I know I'm making progress on the spiritual path,

and he used to say, you know, you're making progress on the

spiritual path, not, not by never, because we think it has

to be all or nothing again. He says it's not that you never

take a detour into fear again. He goes, how you know you're

making progress is by how quickly you recognize that you

have taken a detour into fear. It's not that it never ever ever

happens again, and you can think of taking a detour into fear as

losing your peace, right, losing your ability to like choose who

and how you want to be, because when we take detours into fear,

we are usually trapped, we are really hugely hooked by our ego,

and we're about to do something that is not going to be a true

representation of who we really are, which is love. So, when we

take detours into fear, when we go out of our right mind, and we

go into the place that is not peaceful, that is not loving,

that is not compassionate, that is not kind, right. And I'm not,

we're not always going to be there all the time, but instead

of beating ourselves up, it's like when we recognize it's like

that. Pause, right? When we put a comment in our commentary,

when we put a comma, a pause in our, and our thinking, and we

realize, like, oh, I could make a different choice here. I don't

have to keep, you know, making a contribution in, in the

negative. I don't have to go into the red, right? I don't

have to go into the red, and and make some withdrawals that like

do and say some things that I am not going to be able to take

back, right. So this question of am I making a positive

contribution, you get to decide what that is for you, and

towards which thing, like I said, you can apply this to a

project like writing or fitness or learning, or your savings

account, or like I said, building patience, or making

better connections with your family, or maybe you're working

on forgiveness, or whatever the thing is. It's not, did I do

2000 words, or all these pages, or did I run five miles? It's

like, did I get my ass out of the chair and get outside? Did I

get some fresh air? Did I move my body? You know, because it

all adds up, and that's the thing - is we often don't, we

often don't. We have this way of saying it doesn't count, and

it's like, even like Americans with super sizing, right? We

like everything big and bold, and whatever, but magical things

can happen in small, like, as Linda Ty will say. You know,

I've had Linda on the show. If you haven't listened to those

episodes with Linda Ty, you know, go check them out. She's

fantastic. She's a, she's a lot of things, but she's a trauma

therapist, she's a storyteller, she's a teacher, she's a

brilliant human being, but she calls it sip, sip. So, rather

than like fire hosing ourselves or guzzling, thinking that

that's the only way to get better or to heal, we can sip

sip little tiny bits. Okay, and Zeno is often having said this.

He says, well-being is realized by small steps. Zena, one of

the, one of the Stoic teachers, right? Well, being is realized

by small steps, but is truly no small thing. So, even though

it's small steps, it's a small positive contribution, it's no

small thing. So take a few moments and take a look at your

life, and notice when you have blurted out those words. Right,

we can do it the other way too. Is like I already ate the

cookie, I might as well eat the whole package, the whole sleeve,

right? Or, oh, I already had the piece of cake, I might as well

eat the whole thing. It's like, no, you can make a positive

contribution by deciding to stop right now. You already said the

one mean thing, maybe you want to pause your big mouth, right?

And back it up, back it up, clock what you just did. You

took a detour into fear, you kind of went out of your right

mind, and you said some shit, you might want to stop while

you're ahead, right? So, making a positive contribution can look

like a lot of things, and if you're a fellow writer and a

fellow creative, and you're trying to get a project done,

this is such a great thing that you can do. Is yes, it's fine.

Some people love to track metrics, right, but for me it's

also like, do I just want to accumulate a bunch of two pages

that are shitty, or do I want to take and write maybe one really

good sentence or one really good paragraph and keep moving slowly

but incrementally improving, making a positive contribution,

and like I said, you can apply this to your health, to your to

your emotional well being, to your physical well being, to

your financial well being, to your spiritual well-being,

right, like all of it, mental, physical, spiritual, and mental,

physical, emotional, as well, right. So, if you've been

struggling with some things, your well-being can happen in

small steps. You don't have to wake up and say, today's the

day, I'm going to drink 96 ounces of water, and I'm only

going to eat this, and I'm all, I'm going to work, and I'm going

to do this every.. no, you're not. You're probably not. You're

probably not. You're probably not. And the one of the final

things I'll say, especially to write, is is that one of the

things we'll say is, well, I'm going to wait until I have a

chunk of time, and I'm going to wait until I can. And I've done

it myself too. I've said these words too. I had to clock what I

was doing. I had to recognize what I was doing, right? But

again, it can be applied to just about anything. I only have $5

so I'm not going to put it in my savings account. No, it all

counts. But for writers, one of the lies that we'll tell

ourselves is I'm going to wait. It's I always say, when I then

I, when I, then I, when I do, when I get this, I'll finally do

this. I did a whole podcast on this a wicked long time ago.

Maybe I'll do another one, because it's important. It's

important to clock when we're doing this. But here's the

thing, as a writer, if you are, if you are pulling that on

yourself and saying, well, I'll wait until I get a big chunk of

time. Let me tell you something. If you are not writing now, this

delusion, this illusion, this thing you tell yourself, of like

when I, when I get that time, then I'll know you won't. If

you're not writing now, you probably won't be writing then

as well. So I'd rather you just take a little bit of time, get

some words down on the page, stop moving in the direction of

your project, move it, because your book has its own soul,

right? Like you're writing your pieces, your poetry, your

whatever you are creating, right? It has its own desire,

and it has its own energy, it has its own spirit, and I always

it wants to come through, but you got to be open

and available, like you got to be open for business, you know

what I'm saying. So, I'd rather you just sit your ass down and

write a little something rather than nothing. Make a positive

contribution, whether it's in your writing, in your

relationships, in your bank account, in your fitness, your

health, your well-being, your mental and emotional well-being,

a little bit every day, move in that direction, because those

little hinges are going to swing open those big doors. Now, if

you're still here, oh, if you're still here, I feel like I've

been talking really fast. I probably have been. I get worked

up sometimes, I get really excited. But here's the other

thing I want to say before I forget, when you, when you make

those little incremental right steps, sometimes it helps you.

It's like you can slowly start to tiptoe past the inner critic.

You can start to tiptoe past the voices in your head that are

like, who are you to think that you can do this, or data that,

because when you're just taking those little things, right? I'm

not saying you don't swing big for the fences once in a while,

but I'm just saying if you do daily little steps, right, you

up your steps, maybe you start and you say, all right, I'm

making this up, I'm gonna get 1000 steps today, and then the

following week you're like, hey, I'm gonna bump this up to 1500

or 2000 steps, and before you know it, you guys, you're at

6000 you're at 10,000 whatever. Where the goal is, and that

little sleeping monster, right, the little snoring monster that

loves to wake up and stop you when you dream big. You can just

kind of like start to tiptoe past your fear and pass that

little, that little bastard that lives up in your brain. But if

you're listening, listen, if you're a writer and you're

listening and you're local, especially if you're local to

like Concord, New Hampshire. I am starting what's called Write

Club. I have been doing writing workshops since 2004 I've been

doing these for a wicked long time, but I'm starting a new

thing called Write Club, and I'm going to be doing one locally at

the end of May on Saturday, may 30, at the 11th Letter Writing

Gallery, and the goal is we already picked out the dates all

the way up until October, is to do it once a month in person.

There are three hour workshops. You can find out more by going

to Karen Kenney, k e n n e y, Karen kenney.com right back

slash write club, no dash, no space, just Karen

kenney.com/write Club, and you'll learn all about it, all

about the process that we use. This is really a love-centered

approach to writing. You get to spend time together, you get to

learn about craft, you get to write and read your work out

loud, so you get to hear your own voice, find out where your

own genius lies. This is such a fantastic gathering, and I love

doing these workshops. I'm a certified gateless writing

instructor, and it informs a lot of what I do, along with other

teachers that I've studied with over the years, and it's really

just so fantastic. And, of course, my own - my, I bring my

own full self, all of my years of experience in everything from

yoga to spiritual mentoring to whatever right to writing and

creativity, so all of these things kind of come together in

this beautiful three hour workshop. And then eventually

I'm also going to start maybe doing some online for folks who

are not local and can't make it in person, but if you have any

questions about that, just reach out to me. There's always a

contact form on my on my website, you can go there. You

can also shoot me an email, Karen at Karen kenney.com I'm

pretty easy to get in touch with. So, thank you so much for

listening. I hope this episode has been helpful to you in some

way. This is me doing my best to make a positive contribution

today to you, and hopefully you found it helpful in some way, so

wherever you go, may you leave the animals and yourself and the

people and the planet and the environment better than how you

found it. Wherever you go, may you and your energy and your

presence and your love and your positive contribution be a

blessing. Bye. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show.

I really love spending some time together. Now, if you dig the

show or know someone that could benefit from this episode,

please share it with them and help me to spread the good word

and the love. And if you want to be in the know about all of my

upcoming shenanigans, head on over to Karen kenney.com/sign up

and join my list. It'll be wicked fun to stay in touch. Bye

bye.