Ageless Passions by Karen Putz

Tag: life lessons

  • Embrace Your Weirdness

    Lori Moreno of Ambassadors VIP posted a question:

    If you could go back and tell your young self something, what would it be?


    I was pondering this question during a 3:45 a.m. ride to the airport.

    My response was simple: Stand out. Embrace your weirdness. Share your gifts.

    Stand Out

    I grew up hard of hearing. Every single day I struggled in school to appear as “normal” as possible. As the only kid with a hearing aid, I measured myself against people with normal hearing and I couldn’t do the things that they could do (group conversations, music, talk in the dark) with ease. 

    As a result, I always felt “less than.”

    It wasn’t until I became deaf that I learned to step comfortably into my authentic self. I was no longer afraid to show my hearing aids (yes, I added a second one.) 

    In fact, they’re now beautiful pieces of art,


    Yeah, I wish my younger self knew that place of authenticity that says, “This is who I am.”

    There’s a line in the movie, What a Girl Wants, that says:

    “Why are you trying so hard to fit in when you were born to stand out?”

    The worse thing you can do is blend in with everyone else. When you do that, you squelch your own passion. You diminish your unique touch in the world.

    The world doesn’t need carbon copies. The world needs you. 

    Embrace Your Weirdness

    We all have habits, quirks, and unusual stuff that we are passionate about. In a world of mass conformity, this might seem…weird. 

    What if, instead of trying to stuff your square (or hexagon) self into a round hole, what if you embraced your weirdness instead? 

    When you conform to other people’s expectations or judgments of you, you’re swinging like an untethered sail in the wind. What’s more, a sailboat moves forward against the wind. So tether your weirdness and move forward. 

    My ultimate favorite shoes are Vibram Five Fingers. I wear them everyday. One morning I showed up at a breakfast meeting with a friend who is a business coach. The shoes clearly made her uncomfortable. 

    “Never wear those in public with me again,” she said. 

    At first, I felt ashamed. I silently berated myself for not appearing more businesslike in public. 

    Fortunately for me, the feeling didn’t last long. Those weird shoes have climbed to a peak in Colorado, perched the edge of a cliff in Nebraska, walked through a waterfall in Oregon, water skied on the Fox River, and endured a triathlon in Naperville. 

    Weird has brought me a wonderful life. 

    Share Your Gifts

    I wish my younger self would have recognized the unique talents, skills, and abilities within me. I would have tapped into them right away instead of putting them off for years. 

    You are as unique as your fingerprint. That means there’s no one in the whole wide world who can be you. 

    So stop hiding your talent. Don’t let fear cloud your growth. If you’ve become dull and stagnant from repetitive routine–shake things up. Dust off your creativity. Approach life with a whole new wonder and a beginner’s mind. Do the stuff that your younger self is screaming for. 

    Become a kid again

  • The Handstand Lesson

    Like a lot in life, we often see the end results of success instead of the struggle. 
    When my daughter and I came across this piece of rock on a beach in Florida, I wanted to do a handstand on it. 
    The first several tries resulted in a bunch of pictures with one foot or nothing. A couple of things were happening:
    The rock sloped downhill. I was afraid I would fall forward or backward into more jagged rock. 
    I had just started doing handstands a few months ago– more than 30 years after I did my last one. I didn’t trust my ability to do it. 
    So my daughter suggested trying the handstands uphill instead. 
    It worked. After a few practices, I had the confidence to try it downhill and that’s the picture you see here. 


    So in life, if at first you come up to a challenge, change the way you approach it. Try something different. Practice. Gain the skill. Above all, persist.

  • The Most Valuable Lesson I Learned From My Oldest Child

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    My oldest kiddo, David, was often on “hurricane cycle” when he was young. He would bounce from one activity to the next (like his Mom??) and leave a path of destruction in his wake. I once put the baby down for a nap and left David and Lauren parked in front of the TV so I could quickly go to the bathroom. When I came out, I found the two of them drawing wavy lines on the kitchen wall. In a matter of seconds, David had grabbed some crayons off the counter and coerced his sister into coloring the wall. The artwork stayed on the wall for over a year–because neither the hubby nor I could muster up enough energy to paint over the crayon.

    One evening, David was a Category Five on the hurricane scale and my patience was long gone. David and Lauren were fighting over toys and neither of them would sit on the couch long enough for me to breastfeed the baby. Steven was colicky and wouldn’t stop crying. I was tense, crabby, and just plain tired. I was just trying to survive long enough until the hubby arrived home so I could hand off the kid duties to him.

    Joe walked in with a smile that soon disappeared from his face as he surveyed the toys strewn everywhere, the lunch dishes still on the table, and the once-folded laundry now overturned on the floor.

    “Bad day?”

    I shot him a look.

    “Why don’t you go take a bath and relax,” he suggested. “I’ll watch the kids.”

    After a hurried dinner, I filled the bathtub up and went to grab towels from the other bathroom. As I walked back in, my eyes caught something floating in the bathtub and David standing near the tub.

    “Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!”

    I dropped the towel and scooped out the brand new book that I was so looking forward to reading. With a heavy sigh, I sat on the toilet and tried to dry off the book.

    I started to cry. It was all just too much. Mothering three kids just two years apart in age had finally taken its toll and everything came crashing down on me at that moment. The tears poured out. Just then, David came over, climbed in my lap and started hugging me. He gave me a kiss.

    “I love you Mommy.” He hugged me again.

    My eyes went back to the book and I saw the title more clearly.

    “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff.”

      
    I started to laugh.

    Alternating between tears and laughter, I smiled at the irony of the whole thing.

    It is now years later– the little boy has grown into a young man who graduated from college and is living on his own. I still have the book with the warped pages stuck together. It’s a reminder of that hectic time of three kids under the age of four–when I thought the day would never end and I’d never have a minute to myself. Today, two of the kids have moved out and the youngest one is about to graduate. How quickly the time flies.

    Don’t sweat the small stuff.

    Life goes by in an instant. The little stuff that you unintentionally blow up into big stuff will likely not matter years from now. Pick your battles carefully. Don’t sweat the small stuff.

    And remember to laugh in the process.

  • Even Champions Cry

    Karen Putz and Keith St. Onge

    Last year, I sat in the boat unloading my feelings of frustration on two young barefoot water skiers. I was struggling on the water trying to learn a new trick and it just wasn’t happening.  My first barefoot tournament was  a month away and I didn’t feel ready at all. I didn’t have a trick run put together.  Slaloming behind the boat was a hit or miss affair and I had no confidence in my skills.  It was like a domino effect: the lack of confidence translated to a poor performance on the water.  To top it off, Coach Swampy made me cry on the very first day of that week.  Nothing was working well for me.

    So when I unloaded on the two youngsters who were training me, I learned about their own struggles on the way to becoming experts in the sport.  I  learned they both also had moments when they, too, broke down in tears.  (And just for the record, both occasions occurred with Coach Swampy. Just saying.  Bahahahaha!)

    Not too long ago I received a message from a friend who said to me, “You make the barefooting look so easy.”  Then another message from a friend who said, “Wow, writing comes naturally for you.”  Yet another expressed surprise when I shared I was having a really down day. “You’re always so upbeat on your Facebook and Twitter page.”

    The thing is, I have my struggles.  We all do. They don’t call it a journey for nothing. And the other thing is, people often see the end results of success but are unaware of the hard stuff that comes before the outcome.

    Two and half years ago, I started writing a book with Keith St. Onge, the two-time World Barefoot Champion. When we started this book, we literally did not know each other at all. I had taken two half-day lessons from him at the World Barefoot Center in Florida. When we took on this project together it was a crazy gamble. I had no idea if his story was even worthy of a book. He had no clue if I could write.  I had not  published a book of my own.   Keith called his mother for advice; she was confident he should go ahead with the project.  Deep down, something propelled both of us to take a leap of faith and start writing together.

    We spent hours on the phone with an interpreter translating everything while I took notes.  We once spent nearly an entire day on the phone and my hands became numb from the typing. Many mornings, I woke up at five a.m. to write before beginning my sales job. There were evenings when Keith would come in from an eight-hour day of pulling students and we tackled the book.  We spent several hours at a time at the local Crispers restaurant where I once fell asleep on top of the laptop.  Our spouses began to grumble about the “other guy/other woman” who was taking so much time away.

    For two and half years, we wrote and we wrote until we ended up with a book that was nearly 400 pages long and had to cut it back. What unfolded was an incredible story of passion, goals, and dreams; and the ups and downs it took to succeed. And I learned, yes, even champions cry. In his book, Gliding Soles, Lessons from a Life on Water, Keith opens his soul and shares every lesson of triumph and failure.

    So after two and half years, Gliding Soles isnow a reality. Keith and I are thankful we had no idea what we were getting into  for had we known, we might have given up before we even began.   The long hours and toil were well worth it as Dave Ramsey, Dan Miller, Tom Ziglar and Glen Plake are some of the folks who’ve endorsed the book.

    While glancing through my notes recently, I came across a few paragraphs which we didn’t include in the book but the topic fits this blog post so well I had to share:

    “Passion can burn deep down inside. I remember falling while I was training on the water as a teen. I began to cry. I tried to stop myself from crying before the boat crew came back to pick me up but they asked why I was crying. I could not answer. I just knew the passion deep down inside of me was like a ball of fire. I had failed to do the trick and paid the price in a fall, but I would not give up until I mastered it.

    Passion is when you cry from failure and have no idea why, but you will do anything to figure it out and succeed. “

     

    Yes, even champions cry.

     

    Keith St. Onge

    .

  • What Barefooting Taught Me About Life

    A year and half ago– March, 2010 — when I put my feet down on the water for the first time at the World Barefoot Center, I had no clue how much my life was going to change from that moment. That morning, I almost wanted to chicken out. I was nervous about being in a boat with people I didn’t know, I didn’t want to be seen in a bathing suit, and deep down, I was afraid to try– and fail. So when I woke up to a rainstorm that morning, I was secretly relieved. Maybe the whole thing would be canceled, I thought. I don’t know who answered the phone at the World Barefoot Center, but they reassured me that they could ski in all kinds of weather and that it was supposed to clear up.

    Sure enough, the weather cleared up and I found myself in the boat with two-time World Barefoot Champion Keith St. Onge,  the world’s oldest female barefoot competitor Judy Myers and several others.  As I watched skier after skier do trick after trick on the water, I wanted to crawl out of the boat and head back home.  The flip-flop of nerves came up over and over again that afternoon at every step of the process.  I alternated between “I can do this!” and “I can’t do this!” Half of me was excited; the other half of me was wondering what the heck I was doing down in Florida with a bunch of people with talent way over my head.

    Had I given into the nerves, I would have missed out on the most incredible life transformation that unfolded.  In a  year and half, I went from not being able to do a deep water start– to competing in four tournaments, complete with sponsors.

    How many of us have missed opportunities in life because we give in to doubts, nerves or fear?

    Last week, Judy said to me, “You have to pay your dues.” This remark came after I experienced some frustration at the lack of progress on the water after trying the same simple trick over and over (left one foot)– ending in crash after crash. If you want to accomplish something in life, you have to put in the time, effort, practice, work, sweat and toil, — and sometimes the only progress comes after years of experience– and putting in your dues over and over, until you reach that place of success. The key is to not give up in the process.

    Last summer, I spent the entire summer trying to conquer a deep water start. I achieved one successful start in June and I triumphantly texted Judy about my accomplishment. “Backwards, here we come!” Judy texted back. (Backwards? Are you crazy?)

    I thought I’d breeze through the rest of the summer. Instead, I was met with one failed start after another, the entire summer long. I became pretty skilled at riding on my butt, though.

    Dave, my oldest son, pulled me through start after start, over and over. He consoled me when I dissolved in tears one night. “I can’t do this,” I told him. But he reassured me that tomorrow was another day and we’d try again. And sure enough, I accomplished it. But then I went right back to square one and rode my butt for weeks after that. One step forward, twenty steps back.

    Yup, barefooting is a lot like life.

    I sent my brother a picture of my first back toe hold. My brother is a former barefooter– he’s off the water now due to a cracked vertebrae (like me, he also lost some hearing in a footin fall). “Wow!” he wrote. “I could never do that!”

    Here’s the thing: I said the exact same thing when I watched other people doing toe holds on the water.  I remember watching Judy do a toe hold and thinking, Gosh that looks so hard. I could never do that!

    And how much do we hold ourselves back in life by thinking in limits?

    How many of us have looked at someone who is successful and wished for that same success… without understanding the journey that came before success? Before I could get that snapshot of a back toe hold, Keith stripped me back to basics. Backward on one foot. Backward with my foot in the air. Backward with my foot touching the rope. Backward with the foot on the rope and one hand in the air. And then I had to work on the dreaded left foot backwards. The result? Crash after crash into the water.  Then little by little, I worked my way toward  success.

    Crashes are not failures… and stumbles in life are not failures… you learn from them. You learn what causes them– then you take a different course of action. And like Judy says, you pay your dues. You put the effort and time in to gain experience and little by little, you accomplish your goals and achieve success.

    And speaking of crashes: A Whack on the Head.

  • The Ups and Downs of Barefooting

    At the moment, I’m in a cranky mood.  I’ve just gotten off the boat at the World Barefoot Center, hung up my wetsuit and sat down to stew a bit.  Just a few hours earlier, I was pumped up, looking forward to some backward barefooting– wanting that feeling of skimming backward on the water on my feet– like I did several weeks ago.

    But this is how I spent my afternoon:

    Did I mention that I was a bit cranky?

    I’m juggling the feelings of frustration that resulted from an afternoon of trying, trying, trying to accomplish the backward deep water start to no avail.  Swampy finally pulled me off the water– there would be no more barefooting until we did some dry land practice.   I grumbled, but I knew he was right– insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.  It was time to go back to the basics and learn again from the beginning.

    “I’ve had days like that,” said Ben Groen, a skier from New Zealand.  “One day I can do my turns– and then I’ll go out there and I can’t do them.”

    I’m learning some lessons on the water, and they’re not just about barefoot water skiing, they’re about life.   No matter where you are with your skills, you’re going to have some days where everything lines up– and days when nothing seems to work.  The gals–Kim, Judy and Claudia– remind me to have patience, that the learning curve is a steep one.   Two steps forward, and sometimes twenty steps back.   “You have to remember where you are in the process,” said Kim.  “You can’t compare yourself to someone who is far ahead and expect the same results.  It’s a process to get there.”

    Tomorrow is another day– another day to apply new lessons and develop new skills.  I’ve already shifted my attitude as I ponder the day and put it in the proper perspective– because a bad day on the water– surrounded by friends on a beautiful, sunny Florida day– is a good day indeed.

  • What I Learned from Laughter: Laughing at the Small Stuff

    Every now and then, I like to participate in Robert Hruzek’s group writing projects–they’re always a fun read!  This month’s subject focuses on:

    What I Learned from Laughter.

    At first, I thought I would just share the blog post I wrote over at Chicago Moms Blog:

    When Your Only Option is a Thong.

    When I wrote that one, several friends emailed me and told me they couldn’t stop laughing.  I wasn’t laughing too much when I wrote it, because I was overwhelmed at the laundry piles around my house.  But hey, I learned a valuable lesson from that episode: do your laundry on a regular basis and you won’t have to resort to thongs.  Or worse, commando, as Vicky once teased on Twitter.

    When I think about what I’ve learned from laughter, there’s one episode in my life that stands out.  When the three kids were younger, I often had days when I counted the minutes until the hubby would arrive home and provide an extra pair of eyes and hands in my quest to keep three kids in one place.

    My oldest kiddo, David, was often on hurricane cycle.  He would bounce from one activity to the next (like his Mom??) and leave a path of destruction in his wake.  I once put the baby down for a nap and left David and Lauren parked in front of the TV so I could quickly go to the bathroom.   I walked into the kitchen to find the two of them drawing wavy lines on the kitchen wall.  In a matter of seconds, David had grabbed some crayons off the counter and coerced his sister into drawing artwork on the flat white builder’s paint.  The artwork stayed on the wall for over a year– because neither the hubby nor I could muster up enough energy to paint over the crayon.

    One evening, David was a category five and my patience was long gone.  I was just trying to survive long enough until the hubby arrived home so I could hand off the kid duties to him.  The hubby arrived home and surveyed the toys strewn about, the lunch dishes on the table and me with the harried look on my face.  He could tell it was “one of those days.”

    After a hurried dinner, I filled the bathtub up and went to grab towels from the other bathroom.  As I walked back in, my eyes caught something floating in the bathtub.

    I screamed.

    It was a brand new book:  Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff.

    I fished it out of the water, wiped as much of the wet stuff off as I could and started to cry.  I sat on the toilet and the tears kept coming.  Mothering three kids just two years apart had taken its toll and came crashing down on me at that moment.  Just then, David came over, climbed in my lap and started hugging me.

    “I love you Mommy.”  He hugged me again.

    My eyes went back to the book and I saw the title more clearly.  “Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff.”

    I started to laugh.

    Alternating between tears and laughter, I smiled at the irony of the whole thing.

    It is now years later– the little boy has grown into a young man– but I still have the book with the warped pages stuck together.  It’s a reminder of that hectic time of three kids under the age of four–when I thought the day would never end and I’d never have a minute to myself.  Today, the kids amuse themselves and there’s a little more time for me.  How quickly the time flies, how valuable that lesson of laughter is.

    Don’t sweat the small stuff.  And remember to laugh in the process.

  • Lessons from a Sea Doo

     

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    It was one of those idyllic summer weekends– good food on the grill, time with the family and fun on the water.  David and I took turns pulling each other on the jet ski, attempting to skim along the water on our bare feet.  I hadn’t gone barefooting in years, but I tried getting up on the board and planting my feet in the water.  I couldn’t do it.  David tried a couple of times, both on the board and on the ski.  He was pretty determined to try over and over.  I liked the fire that I saw in his eyes as he attempted the new skill.

    The kids wakeboarded behind the Sea Doo and then we did some tubing the next day with another deaf family.

    Yesterday, the sky was grey and a storm had passed through.  The sun lightened up the clouds and David decided to pull Steven on the wakeboard behind the Sea Doo. Steven did a dock start on the wakeboard and went halfway around the lake before he fell and the two of them headed back for another round.  As David tossed out the rope, the Sea Doo was still circling.

    Whoooosh.

    The rope went right up the intake.  With the intake piston revolving over 1,000 RPMs, it wasn’t long before the rope got stuck.

    I was in the house when I heard the news.  Let’s just say that I wouldn’t win any Mommy-of-the-Year awards with my response.  I’m sure the neighbor’s eyes popped watching my animated signing.  “What-were-you-thinking-this-was-totally-avoidable-how-could-you-not-watch-the-freaking-rope…”

    I’ll spare you the rest.

    David and Joe went under the lift to assess the damage.  “It’s wound up so tight, totally impossible to get this off,” Joe said.  “I think we need to bring it to the marine place and have them take it apart.”

    “Try to get it off,” I growled at them.

    After a half an hour of hacking at it and cutting loose some of the rope, the guys weren’t getting very far. I finally jumped in the water to take a look.

    It wasn’t pretty.

    The rope was wound so tight and it had been shoved deep into the shaft.  My first instinct was to agree with Joe– this was a job for someone else to do.  I took another look.

    Hmmm, if I could just loosen one end, we might be able to get it out.

    “Can you get me a long screwdriver and a needle-nose pliers?”

    Little by little, we each took turns under the lift and loosening the rope bit by bit.  David had a big grin on his face when he pulled out the last of the rope from the shaft.  He had relieved grin on his face when I started up the Sea Doo and took off with it.  It worked fine.

    So what did we learn from this?  For starters, David learned how powerful the intake was on a jet ski– I’m betting that he’ll never make this mistake again.  I also was reminded of the time that I ran over a ski rope myself around the same age–my Dad had to take the prop off the boat to get all of the rope out.  I do remember him hollering at me to be more careful after that.

    But the biggest lesson of all was this: Something that at first looks impossible can be accomplished by working at it little by little and not giving up.

    More lessons from a Sea Doo–What I Learned About Stress.