Let's Not Forget, I am on This Journey Too

I have my own process.  I have my own lessons.  I have my own fears.  I have my own successes.

Part of the process I have been working on (as my business shifts and grows, as my life shifts and grows) is my ability to communicate WHO my audience is and WHAT I have to offer to that audience.

This is a great exercise for someone who runs their own business to do at least twice a year.  But it is really useful also if you are an employee or even as a family/community member.  You just take the questions and phrase them a little differently.

Who do I provide services to?   Who are my ideal clients? What is my market? Who do I serve?

What are the services I can best provide?  What can I help people with?  What are my strengths? How can I help?

---

Here is what I came up with:

WHO MY CLIENTS ARE:

• People who are interested in being fulfilled, having the "good life."
• People who want to live in accordance with what they value.
• People who are willing to work hard, but don't want to work all the time.
• People seeking balance  (between work and pleasure, between giving and taking, between passion and income).
• People who want to discuss, clarify and create goals for business and personal advancement.

WHAT I CAN HELP WITH:

• Helping you to figure out your goals, short/ long term, business/personal.
• Helping you create a schedule that works for you, that encourages you to thrive.
• Helping you organize your life, your priorities and your time.
• Mapping out and achieving your financial goals, both business and personal.
• Helping you to understand and honor your strengths and adapt to and work with your weaknesses.
• Helping you to realize that you are full of skills and amazing qualities that need to shine.
• Listening and processing along side you.

You can see the culmination of this little process on my website HERE.

Also, I am now offering these QUICKIE GOAL SESSIONS - sign up for one today and let's get to work!

---

---

Dig this?  You might also like these: 

BLOG

Measuring Success:: How Good Am I?

about 3 days ago

You Bright-Eyed-Bushy-Tailed Business Fledgling

about a week ago

Plan Your Tomorrow, Do It Today

about a month ago

The Hustle. (I'm a Hustler, Baby. I Just Want You to Know)

On occasion people give me shit about NOT HAVING A JOB.  

In case you are new here: I run my own consulting business (for self employed peeps), I am co-president of Wear Your Music (guitar string bracelets made from strings of famous people with profits to charity), I make and sell jewelry on the side, I run the backend of my husbands photography business , I manage a 5 unit rental property, I am building an eco-friendly kit house in the woods, I have a two and a half year old, I am 35 weeks pregnant and I have to deal with my crazy family and friends and make a living and pay bills and eat and sleep and shit and shower. . . just like everyone else.

My whole family hustles, its really the only life I know.  Above are my "little" cousins who handcraft and sell cutting boards in the shape of fish and Block Island.  One is a recent Brown graduate, watch out for what he does next.  This weekend you can find me on Block Island, selling my jewelry alongside them at two art fairs.  

So the next time it is Monday morning and I am taking a nap or picking flowers or sitting on the beach I dare you to tell me I don't have a job. 

I Want to Sit My Ass in a Chair

I want help, I want company, I want to sit my ass in a chair.  Simultaneously, I want to move, I want to dig a sand castle, I want to walk really, really, really far into the fog, I want to have a mudslide and then a nap.  My friend's dad used to always sing to her, "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need." Is it true?  Do you get what you need?  I think, sometimes, we want something so badly, that it's the wanting that causes the distress. I'm not capable at bending the world to my will, it's a shame.  I can set my intentions, but I can't always get what I want.  So, what's the plan?   

This comes up for me, yes, of course.  But, I also see it come up for so many of my clients.  An unmet want can be an opportunity to clear up a lot of stuff and reorient ourselves.  If you find something you want and can't have (or at least don't know how to get there) here is a quick cheat sheet to make some progress out of it:

1) Identifying what it is that you want.  Sometimes it is not very simple.  Dig below the surface.  

Today I want to be taken care of.  I want to be nurtured. 

2) Try to figure out what is missing. What is the unmet need beneath your want?

What's missing is me taking care of myself.

3) Gift yourself something (mine idea here) that meets your unmet need.  Then check back in with your want and see how it is doing. 

I am making iced tea.  And scheduling a pedicure. 

Facebook: The New Achievement Calibrator

I wrote this years ago when Facebook was first catching on.  As I delve into curriculum for an e-course on social media I have been thinking a lot about this type of  networked sharing.  It's also great fun to see where I was coming from then and how I have changed.  But that's a story for a different day...

---

Who’s fat and who’s hot, who’s married and who’s not?

I first joined Facebook about a month ago.  Yeah, I hadMy Space and Linked In already. To be honest, I didn’t even open the account—my assistant did.  However, I was doing a little Google research on the current owners of an 1879 building I’m trying to buy (speakeasy and bank vault in the basement!), and one of them showed up on Facebook.  Without being logged in, I couldn’t access her information.  So I got the login info, wrote a stalker-esq E-note to the seller, and then got suckered into the friend search. I now have 101 friends on Facebook.

Since my impromptu login, I have spent the better part of multiple conference calls finding and adding friends from my elementary, camp, high school, college and business years.  I’ve been escaping from the adulthood of property purchase by judging their photos and their college diplomas, seeing who’s fat and who’s hot, who’s married and who’s not and what they have been doing for the last (fill-in-the-blank) years. 

    I spent the better part of one morning recently on the phone with a childhood friend.  Yes, she is my friend on Facebook, but the rest of our relationship exists in the real world, where she caught the bouquet at my wedding and then dumped the guy she brought. Today, though, worlds collided.  I gave her my password so that she could see my “friends” who are our mutual past.  Our heartthrob at ten is now fat, the geek is hot and successful. The story’s the same as it was at in-person reunions of a prior era.  But now, in lieu of semi-annual dinners scheduled by board members, we just go to Facebook during business hours and click around to see who’s had kids, who really became a lesbian, and how much more successful than ourselves everyone else has become.  It is the ultimate vain test of own identities.  A virtual life-progress measuring board.  From Apgar to IQ to SAT scores, Facebook’s the new achievement calibrator.

      “I should have been married by now,” she whines.  “Or gone to Nicaragua and lived with villagers like you did.” 

It was Mexico, not Nicaragua, but I feel the same way—depressed about my own life when compared to the happy Facebook lives of people I used to know.  At the beginning, Facebook is confusing, then addictive, then depressing.  It’s the status updates and the mini-bios and the heavily edited photos.  Maya now lives in New Zealand with her boyfriend and they seem to travel all the time, and smile.  There is Nora, with three kids, married eight years, and still finds time for grad school.  My ex-boyfriend is teaching in Taiwan with his girlfriend after traveling around South America.  Law school for some, med school for more, swimming with dolphins, playing music, green building certifications, parties, adventures, etc.

I look at all these people with whom I’ve shared moments at different times of my life and I wonder, are they better, smarter, prettier, more accomplished?  I question my life and my choices.  Have they hit more milestones? Did I travel to enough countries?   Should I have gone to med school?

 It really comes down to happiness.  I want to know if they are happier than me.  And Facebook messes with that.  It makes me a happiness voyeur.  Spying openly and even commenting on the things that they feel compelled to share.  In real life, in true interaction, we can see worry lines on peoples faces and the circles under their eyes. Facebook deletes this and leaves us with a resume —updated daily—of accomplishments.  So we compare. Now, I am questioning my own life, my happiness and my identity because of what I see on Facebook.  And I am not alone.

On my profile I am wearing a bikini and standing on the Emerald coast, I am a summa cum laude graduate of Columbia University, I am the CEO of two companies and married to an amazing photographer.  But on the inside, I’m just a kid looking to measure up.  And a kid who’s glad she didn’t have to grow up with Facebook.

---

Think about this: 

*how do you appear on social media? 

*how do you want to appear? 

I Love THIS About My Schedule

Some weekday mornings I get to do this.

And it is AWESOME.  Awe inspiring.  Awwww.  Awwww Yeah. 

 (I am not mentioning, right now, the nights I spend cranking away or the holidays I've given up for work's demands.)

Because I make my own schedule I get to do a lot of things that I want to do.  This includes going for beach walks with my family, mid-morning, on a weekday.  Also, going to the bank during bank hours, yes!  And shopping when no one else is in the store, alright!

Sometimes in the grind, beneath the wheels that churn, I lose sight of this incredible scheduling ability.  In a word, FREEDOM.  It's one of the reason I love my consulting business.  Because I adore helping people craft a life that supports them AND simultaneously allows them to shape their dreams, daily.   I ask my clients when I first speak with them, "What do you want to do when you get up in the morning?"

So TODAY, here is what I want you to do.  Be you self-employed, 9-5, overnighter, stay at home mom, student, ALL OF YOU.  Take one minute and reflect on one point of FREEDOM that your schedule allows.  

 Now nudge some other stuff out of the way and create more space for it.  Make wiggle room.  Stretch the boundaries.  This is it folks, today's the day.

Personal Honesty in Business, Part II

Negotiation is one of my particular strengths.  My skills have increased over time, but negotiation always something I found enjoyable and was good at.  Now that I have a toddler I am getting a whole different kind of practice, which makes me a bit introspective. My ultimate goal (and the reason I enjoy negotiation ) is:

I like when both parties get what they want. 

To me, a successful negotiation is when both parties "win. "  Many tactical negotiation strategies have to do with NOT being honest going into a negotiation.  I think differently. I think that if you actually ask for what you want, then you are more likely to end up with it.  My brother, an attorney, recommended a great book to me.  It is extraordinarily simple, which makes it a pleasure to nod to as you are reading.  It's called Getting to Yes, by Robert Fisher and the basic premises are these:

1. There doesn't have to be a trade off between getting along with someone and getting what you want from someone.  It's not an either or situation.  
2. Negotiation is for MUTUAL GAIN.  You wouldn't be negotiating if there weren't something at stake that benefited both of you.   Remember that. 
3. If the other party stoops to a lower level and tries to manipulate or take advantage of you, don't meet them there.  Hold your truth.   
4. Don't attempt a strategy.  BE HONEST and do business with honest people whenever possible. 

Related posts that you might dig: 

BLOG

Measuring Success:: How Good Am I?

about 3 days ago

You Bright-Eyed-Bushy-Tailed Business Fledgling

about a week ago

Plan Your Tomorrow, Do It Today

about a month ago

Personal Honesty in Business, Part I

Honesty in business, for me, is being first and foremost honest about who I am.  When I started getting into business and leaving the nine-to-five word, I was very guarded about sharing any parts of myself.  I thought that to be a professional meant very certain things and I lived and worked under these assumptions. 

As I grew, both as a businesswoman and an individual, I realized that keep this harsh "professional" separateness was NOT serving me.  It made me feel inauthentic and secretive, which are not qualities I wanted to bring to my work.  As I started sharing more of myself, my work became more EFFECTIVE.  

At the end of the day, that's what I want, to be effective at what I do.  I've learned that letting a little bit of myself through that professional wall allows me to maximize my efficiency and improve my business relationships.

Three ways you can begin to share more:

1. Tell the truth when someone asks you how you are.  Let them in, not for an hour, but just for a couple of minutes.  Even if you are on a conference call, this honest check-in lets them know where you are really coming from.
2. Be willing to listen to what someone else is feeling.  Being a good listener is a big part of honesty.  We have to be confident and open enough to sit in silence and listen, thoughtfully.   
3. If a client or co-worker is having a difficult time, share with them a personal anecdote.  You don't have to go into great detail,  but it is always comforting for them to know they aren't experiencing something in a vacuum.

Related posts that you might dig: 

When You Just Don't Wanna:: Tips On How To Start, or not.

about 6 days ago

My First Post of the New Year

about a month ago

Sugar Overload (stuuupid cookies)

about a month ago