“There are days when I think I don’t believe anymore. When I think I’ve grown too old for miracles. And that’s right when another seems to happen.”

Dana Reinhardt, The Summer I Learned to Fly

February wore me down. The lower maisonette of the house I live in is being demolished  as far as possible and the new owners overlooked that someone (me) lives upstairs, so my home has filled with dust and the sound of destruction over the last two months… giving me blurred vision and crippling headaches.

My G.P.  said I’d had developed an allergy and gave me tablets and a steroid spray which smells of hyacinths. Is this a smack in the teeth to you hay-fever sufferers?

Anyway –  there is a point to all this complaining. In desperate need of rest and recuperation, I also needed to get back on track with my projects for 2012 and was falling ever further behind. Tearful and at my wit’s end, I escaped to Kingston, which you may know has heart-chakra energies.

And there, at the offices of Community-upon-Thames, I met a girl who asked if I would like to hear her BUTTERFLY STORY. Of course I did – the very thought of a butterfly story lifted my droopy inner wings!

My storyteller’s name is VITA which means “life.” “As in dolce vita” she told me, then said

“This is a true story:

A beautiful story of a Butterfly called “May”

It was spring in the beginning of May. It happened 5 years ago. I remember that time, so well because I had a Home-Butterfly that year.

The Butterfly Fair was held in Riga for 2 weeks. It was in a huge tent, (near a shopping center) which was decorated as a tropical forest inside, so people could walk around and choose their favourite butterflies. At the fair, they told us that Butterflies are not simply “cute” little things, but they are way more than just “cuties”. Each butterfly has a character, which can only be seen if we take a good care of our Butterfly.

I wanted to have a Butterfly, which would take my breath away, so I had to look for a special one.

We called it May because we bought our Butterfly in May, so “her” name was May. Besides she has such colours on “her” wings so I was sure that I have chosen the right name. May reminded me of a warm and sunny time in May.  May had red stripes ( which reminded me of a fire flames ), a few yellow spots ( which looked like a sun ) and orange colour, which was the dominant colour. We do have different Butterflies flying around, especially in summer around our summerhouse, but May was a bigger size than a usual Butterfly and also her coloured-wings were absolutely amazing and I have never seen such a butterfly ever again.

Our Butterfly lived with at our home with my family. May could easily fly to any room. We had to regularly feed May ( once a day every day ). We also left a special lamp on every night ( for the right and warm temperature ), so May wouldn’t get cold at nights and in the morning we could see her near that warm lamp. May also had her favourite flower in my room where “she” spent most of the time during the day. I believe that it remind her of her tropical home.

We did not open our windows too wide for a while, so May wouldn’t fly away. However, I believe that she wouldn’t anyway because she know how loved she was in my family.

She was with us for nearly 4 months which is a long time for a Butterfly to live. May was so special to us. We were all sad when she had gone and “she” will always stay in my heart.

Sometimes I see May in my dreams. I believe that she comes into my dreams because she still remains in my heart and I remember each day of her life so well. At times when I have to make an important decision and I am in doubts, May come to me in my dreams and it felt as she helped me to figure out the right way. Next morning I have a good feeling about making the right choice”.

Story, as told by Vita Tocilovska 2012

I asked Vita for details of the fair, thinking it would be amazing to see for myself.

She told me that the fair had never been seen again.

And who knows if it ever really existed beyond that moment in time when it purveyed its extraordinary pet butterflies to this young woman called Vita who gave me this gift of Butterfly Fare, a reminder that magic is all around us and sometimes, you don’t even need to look to find it, just be willing to see it when it appears.

Love

Lubna

With thanks to Vita

Vita Tocilovska is currently studying Media & Culture at Roehampton University. She loves reading, painting and meeting new people and is involved with several Animal Protection Societies. She says ” I am always ready to face new challenges and I listen to my heart carefully because, even though the heart is on the left, it is still always right!”

How can you make your contracts work for you?

Please come and find out at a workshop with me, Lubna Gem Arielle either on:

Thursday March 15^th from 6 to 9pm, or

Tuesday March 27^th from 10 to 1pm.

I like to think of contracts as being like a Swiss army penknife – with the right blades you can do all sorts of things that might otherwise be cumbersome, like taking stones out of a horse’s hoof (one for the Londoners among us!).

You can use a contract to manage a specific project and key business processes.

In this workshop, you will learn how to use your contract:

1. As an effective project management tool,

2. To maximise cash flow, and

3. To control and manage disagreements.

The workshop includes a practical exercise on writing key terms of a basic contract and a guided tour of simple “boilerplate”, the technical, legal provisions that a lay person might omit. 

Both workshops are at the O2 Business Centre on Tottenham Court Road. Please book in advance – at least a week in advance to take advantage of the Early Bird Price.

I look forward to welcoming you at one of the workshops.

Best wishes

Lubna

Sam Goldwyn

A contract does not need to be a written document. In the U.K, contracts can be and often are formed verbally. You may hear lawyers mention the technical ingredients of “offer, acceptance and consideration.” What this means in practice is that many business transactions take place without a formal written contract being in place, but there is often a contract anyway.

In this short programme, you can find out:

How having a written contract can benefit your business.

Steps you can take if you don’t have the resources to use a lawyer.

Programme transcript (headings added)

1. Why have a Written Contract

You may have heard about a gentleman’s agreement, where, in the beginning everyone’s probably getting on really well and is excited about working together.  Why bother with a contract?  Everyone’s friends. Just shake on it.

Well, when things go wrong, you’ll find that there are no gentlemen and there’s no agreement.

Advantage of a written contract – opportunity to set out key terms

The beauty of having a written contract is both parties have a signed record of what’s been agreed.  For example, most businesses aim to succeed financially – so it’s good to know when and how payments will be made.  A good contract will deal with most of the key terms and other issues that might crop up. 

The perils of unwritten contracts

Contracts don’t have to be in writing. They can be made verbally. The problem is that the terms will be uncertain and the contract will probably be incomplete.  Everyone who got on so well at the beginning,  may now disagree as to what was agreed, and this can be for all sorts of reasons ranging from flawed memories to being intentionally underhand. 

Value of written records

Where this happens, e-mails or letters can be helpful as evidence of what had been agreed.

Options where you and the other side disagree

At the end of the day though, where a disagreement crops up, the parties have three options:

Option One

The best is for them to try and reach an amicable solution; perhaps with the help of a professional mediator.

Option Two

Or they can let a court decide. This route can be expensive, time-consuming  and stressful without certainty of the outcome. 

Option Three

Or, finally, one party may decide to walk away  and learn for the future.

2. Simple Steps you can take

Always have a written record

It is always advisable to have a clear written record of what’s been agreed, 

A professionally drawn-up, tailored contract is best

In an ideal world, of course it makes sense to have a contract professionally drawn up by a lawyer.

If you cannot afford professional advice, try a DIY contract

That’s  (ie a professionally drawn up contract) not always practical or possible – not everyone has the resources to hand. The next best thing is what I call a DIY contract and this can be simpler than you think. 

It won’t be perfect because there are some technical legal points that a lawyer would include. 

What you can do though is record how you have agreed to do business together.

It can help to think of the contract as a project management tool,  set out each parties roles and responsibilities (who is doing what and by when) and make sure that everything that has been agreed or highlighted as a concern is recorded in writing. Brainstorm and agree this with the other side and ensure that it is signed off, even if this is by an exchange of e-mails. 

This should help you move forward smoothly and avoid any unnecessary disputes and it is a relatively simple step you can take yourself. 

#LittleGem

There’s no such thing as a gentleman’s agreement – put it down in writing!

Programme Ends

If you are interested in learning how to write you own contracts, I am holding a workshop “DIY Contracts – Simple Steps you can take to write your own Basic Contracts” on Thursday March 15th (evening) and Tuesday March 27th (morning) in Central London.

I hope that you found this useful. Please share it on Twitter or Facebook if you have!

Love,

Lubna

Please Note

I am a former lawyer using my legal knowledge and skills to make programmes and deliver workshops with the aim of transferring this knowledge in a user-friendly and accessible way. Neither the programme nor the accompanying notes are a substitute for applied legal advice.  

]]> http://thebutterflystories.com/417/feed/ 0 http://thebutterflystories.com/399/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=a-demonstration-to-autocue-or-not-to-autocue http://thebutterflystories.com/399/#comments Sun, 19 Feb 2012 13:20:09 +0000 Lubna Gem Arielle http://thebutterflystories.com/?p=399  

My friend Donald of Best Bits Media and I made this short demo on using the autocue: 

Last night, another friend took me to see Patrick Stewart as William Shakespeare. Making a play about one of the world’s greatest playwrights was always going to be a tall order. The first half of the first act was a gentle illustration of Elizabethan times through the slow revealing of the legal and financial quandaries facing a landowner and the problem of being a wench without ID papers – more showing then telling, but it then switched into a completely different play – way way way too wordy.

We didn’t stay for the Second Act, tired of sentences so long that the beginning is forgotten by the end. What does this have to do with an Autocue demo? Our TIP in the demo is:

“Though it may sound obvious, remember that there is a difference between the written word and spoken word and do try reading your script out loud!”

Best Bits Media run an Autocue Filming Day where you can film a short promotional or informational film using the autocue. The next one is on March 15^th 2012.

You can use the promotional code LGA to get 30% off all currently listed events (limited places available) The next event is the Video Party on Friday February 24^th. I’ll be there so maybe see you then!

Best wishes

Lubna

“Understand that the right to choose your own path is a sacred privilege. Use it. Dwell in possibility.”

Oprah Winfrey

What can you do when the path is far from clear?

Mathy Lisika-Minsende set up Whatthejobisthis to“inspire career transitioners seeking more than just another job” through the sharing of personal stories.

I spoke at one of her events along with accountant turned comedian Special P and recruitment consultant turned independent careers adviser Shamila, founder of Brighter Mondays.

My talk was called “How I left my job for a livelihood.”

A transcript of sorts:

“Livelihood” means a couple of things to me. First of all, I love the way it sounds: “lively-hood” – much nicer than job! Also, in old English, it just means a way of living, which is something that I’ve aspired to for years. I’ve finally ended up in a position where what I actually do reflects who I am. That wasn’t always the case.

I started off my career as a city solicitor. From the outside it probably looked great. The building itself was a huge marble building, there was an atrium indoors with trees and fountains. I strutted around like everybody else, probably appearing very successful, but I knew the real cost of my Prada shoes. I was absolutely dying inside, because this was the last place that I wanted to be. For one thing, I liked my trees outdoors.

Why had I ended up there? Well, probably because I didn’t have enough courage when I was growing up. I come from the sort of background where my parents expected me to be a lawyer, which I was, or a doctor or a dentist or that sort of thing. So I ended up there, in this office, absolutely hating it. I used to cry in the toilets, and I used to have this bizarre recurrent dream where I’d turn up to a meeting where everyone was there in their grey suits and in my dream I would come in with a plate of cakes. It was just not right for me.

One evening, I was looking through the Evening Standard. You may remember the Far Side cartoons. There was a cartoon which had a wolf at a desk, and he was just sitting there in the middle of the forest, and all these tiny little animals were bounding in front of him, and the wolf just says “I envy those critters their freedom”. And I realised that it was probably just as simple as that. It was my choice to be sitting there in this place that I hated, and I could just actually stand up and I would be in the real forest.

So I handed in my notice the next day. I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do next, but what I did know was that I didn’t want to be there. And I thought about some of the things that were worse, and the only thing I could think about that I wanted to do less was be one of those people in Oxford Street with a sign saying “Golf Sale This Way”.

So I left. I obviously had to work to pay my bills, so I went to work in a restaurant, basically taking people’s coats and taking them to tables. That was a real eye-opener for me in what people were really like, and I learnt a lot about human beings at that time. I was exactly the same person, but people treated me very, very differently. I left that after a while and went and qualified as an aerobics instructor and personal trainer; and I helped some people who worked in film production with some of their legal issues. And I just got really, really tired.

So after a while, I did go back to law and I thought I’ll try something different. I wrote, not thousands, but it felt like thousands of letters. I eventually got a job in a music law firm. I did that for a while. I didn’t like it that much more. I tried working in-house for a company, PriceWaterhouseCoopers and advising in a different way.

And then I had what I think is probably my big breakthrough. I was out eating mussels. So, you know, miracles happen in very unusual places.  I wasn’t bored with my companion, but I was thinking “… Oh, gosh, you know, these shells are so iridescent … they look like butterflies! Oh … chrysalises … what else comes out of chrysalises? What if human beings could come out of chrysalises?”

I woke up two weeks later and wrote a story, it just came out, about a little girl who’s not very well. She gets visited by a butterfly and all this amazing transformation takes place, and at the end of it she flies over the rainbow. I illustrated it as well, and the illustrations were pretty awful. I hadn’t drawn since I was about 14. My parents were very insistent that I only did academic subjects, so I just didn’t really have those skills. I went looking for an illustration class, and when I was doing that I found out about something called Access, which is a course you can do that then enables you to apply to go to university. So I did a two year Access in to Art course in the evenings, and then I applied to go to St. Martins and got a place on their five year part-time BA.

I then left my job at PwC and went to work part-time at another law firm, which was kind of quite unusual at the time – but there was a condition, which was that I always had to have my mobile phone and if I had to go to a client meeting on my art day I would do it. The result was that three years into the part-time degree it just wasn’t working, law was still taking over. And I sort of gave up. I gave up the degree and I also left my job. I was even beyond thinking because actually to give up St. Martins was a big, big deal for me.

And in that space I suddenly realised that I had to appreciate and accept all of myself. So I’d spent all these years going “I hate law, I don’t want to be a lawyer”, and I suddenly realised “well, hold on, yes, I don’t like being a lawyer, but I’ve learnt all these other things. I can facilitate people, I’m used to processing very complex material”, and I thought about all of the other things that I could do.

One of the things that I had done when I was lawyer is I had been a contributor on a programme for Christian TV. They’d made a programme on the Ten Commandments, and asked me to speak about the rights that Jesus has in his name, because I used to advise on trade marks, company names, domain names. So I got that material and I sent it off to an organisation called Legal Network Television who make programme for lawyers, and I pestered them every week for nine months. And they eventually said to me “we need a freelancer”. And so I made a freelance programme for them, and I carried on working for them as a freelancer really until last year. Well, I’m technically still on their books, but they’re really not using freelancers any more. So I started to make programmes for other organisations.

I also decided that I would like to do an online advisory service for artists, where they could send in their copyright and contract queries and I would answer them. And I made an Arts Council application. I got so much discouragement around it from everybody I interviewed in support to my application. Rather than being put off by it, I let the application go through. I didn’t get the funding. Everyone had kept saying it’s been done before, it’s been done before, and I found out why. I investigated, spent a lot of time finding out why, and tracked down the “man who everyone mentioned” (Henry Lydiate) who had set up a very similar service in the ‘70s, and he and I ended up approaching another organisation called Artquest, who now have that service, which still runs today. It’s called Q&A. And he also invited me to assist him as a lecturer on various postgraduate courses, which I still do.  Once I was a bit more stable, I also re-embraced my art and started to take my children’s story to schools as part of a combined arts workshop with art and dance.

So where am I now? Well, it’s 2012 and all of that’s still on-going, but I have a blend that I’m very happy with, of kind of different things that I feel feed these different parts of myself. Nothing’s really a huge compromise. So, what are the things that I learnt along the way that meant a lot to me and kept me going?

I would say that the biggest thing is just to keep going, and if someone says “no”, don’t think about it as being a “no”, look at what’s underneath it, because it might be a no to what you were asking for or expecting, but it could be a yes to something that’s actually much bigger and much better, and something much more wonderful than you imagined. 

Mathy runs a regular storytelling evening “Tell it like it is” connecting those who have changed career and those undergoing any sort of transition. 

I would love to hear how you’ve found the path that is true for you or if you are still discovering it.  Please leave your comments in the box below and I will read every one.

Love

Lubna

“Come out of the circle of time and into the circle of love”

Rumi

This exercise was introduced to me by Tracy Smith of acreativespace

You will need:

A couple of sheets of notepaper

A plain piece of paper (A4 or larger)

A plate

A pen

Colouring pencils

A sense of adventure (optional)

Time: approximately half an hour

The exercise can be used to help solve a problem or to make a decision. I found the process helped sift through feeling overwhelmed by the never-ending to-do lists and circular mind-chatter as to how to prioritise the actions I need to take for the new projects I have started this year.

The process as I understood it is:

Step One: Write down where you are now.

Step Two: Write down everything you want to create, including your state of mind. 

The next two steps take us from the language of the left brain and into the right brain, the part that is connected to the universe and all that is.

Step Three: Randomly choose a six-digit number. Although there are many ways of interpreting numbers, there isn’t a particular significance within this process.

Step Four: Make a circle using the plate, then draw and colour in any way that  represents your vision as though you already know it to be. Without thinking or judgement of good or bad. I suggest wild abandon. 

That’s it. At art school we learnt how the real purpose of drawing is learning to see and I believe this is about inside as well as the outside.

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did – please let me have your feedback!

Love,

Lubna